Where do I find spongestone for the Dark Water quest?

Steps

1. Find Bog in the tavern, the building shaped like a skull. The walkthrough says he spends most of his time there, and that if he is not inside he will be near the well.
2. Follow him to the well if he leaves. He announces it himself: one more drink, then he will fetch some water from the well.
3. Drink when the well offers. It speaks to you, and drinking is what gives you the curse the quest turns on — recorded here as Dark Water Taint.
4. Go back to Bog and tell him you need the curse removed. He sends you on with one line: “Please, speak to my friend Bronwyn. She will know what to do.”
5. Reach the alchemist. From the main road at the tavern, head north a short distance, then turn left. Her house is right there.
6. Hear her answer and note the direction: a madman bought her last spongestone and ran west towards the tower some time ago.
7. Walk to the northern end of town, then set your compass due west.
8. Head for the large rock visible to the west, going around it rather than over it, and keep facing west the whole way.
9. Pass a second rock, then three smaller ones standing together.
10. Descend into the canyon beyond them, by an old tree.
11. At the large pipe-like entrance at the bottom, turn left. The spongestones are on the ground there. Take all of them.
12. Return to the well. Talking to Bog there does nothing; he only drinks again.
13. Open your inventory, find a spongestone, and drop it to the ground by holding F.
14. Hold E on the dropped stone without releasing, carry it to the well, and release E over the well.
15. Drink once more to confirm the well has gone quiet, then return to Bog.

What the alchemist actually says

Her answer is the only routing information the quest gives, and it is deliberately vague: “A well without water is just a hole, and there are many ways to accomplish that. A madman purchased my last spongestone and ran west towards the tower sometime ago. I do not know his purpose, nor do I think he did either. Find the stone on his corpse, should it still exist. Then drop the stone into the well.”

Two things in that are worth separating. “Drop the stone into the well” is a literal instruction, not a figure of speech — the walkthrough has to perform a two-key carry to do it. And “should it still exist” turns out to be doing real work: the walkthrough reaches the area, finds no corpse, and says plainly that he does not expect the viewer to find one either. The spongestones are lying loose nearby regardless.

The reward, and what the well was doing

The well speaks in the same voice each time: you look thirsty, traveller, how about a drink, drink deep and let the water wash away your troubles. After the stone goes in, it stops.

Bog’s closing lines confirm what the curse was: the voice is gone, whatever you did worked, and he hopes whoever else drank from that well is free too. He then says he was this close to ending it all, and gives you a dagger he says he will not need any more.

The dagger is not described further in the recording and no stats are published here.

The cure is written on the curse

This is the strongest thing found on 24 August 2026, and it did not come from anyone playing the quest. A player going through his inventory to sell junk reads the cursed item aloud: “Dark Water Taint. The heaviness that settled in when you drink from the talking well, it clings like a dead — only the death of the well can wash it out.” Then he says what any reader would say: “The death of the well. What does that even mean?”

The alchemist’s line and the item’s line are the same instruction from two directions. She says a well without water is just a hole and there are many ways to accomplish that; the item says only the death of the well can wash the curse out. Before this reading, the solution rested entirely on one creator relaying one NPC. It now also rests on the game’s own item text, read off the screen by an unrelated channel that never met the alchemist.

A fourth channel gets there independently without quoting anything. In a co-op session a player opens the same item, says “read the description, you need to kill the well”, and moves on. He never does it. He is simply the second person to understand the instruction from the item alone.

The well, on four channels

The talking well is now the best-corroborated thing on this page. Its opening line — “You look thirsty, traveller” — appears on three unrelated channels. So does the invitation that follows: one player is offered “drink deep and let the water wash away your troubles” in the same words the walkthrough gets, and a third simply hears “drink deep” and answers “thanks”.

One of those players is offered a second, softer version after hesitating: why not dip your hands in a drop, it won’t hurt — and then, when he still hesitates, “if you insist.” A co-op session recorded on another channel gets the same treatment in different words — “it’s free of charge, why not dip your hands in?”, then “I know you’re just being polite, I’ll be here when you’re ready” — so the well pressing a refusal is on two channels now, though no two renderings of it match. It reads like a well that does not take no for an answer, which is consistent with what the quest-giver says about his own thirst, and the page prints it as one recording of one exchange rather than as a mechanic.

What he reports immediately afterwards does not fit the rest of the page and is printed anyway: “Dark water? I drank from the well and felt empowered.” Every other account treats this as a curse. Whether he is reading a journal line, an effect name, or improvising is not established, and no second recording says anything like it.

One player notices something nobody explains: the well is dry. “Why is the well like dried up though? There’s nothing down there.” A well without water is what the alchemist says the cure produces — so either he is looking at one somebody has already cured, or the well was never full to begin with, and the recording does not settle it.

The quest-giver’s own account, and a name this site cannot spell

A second channel records the quest-giver describing the compulsion in his own words, which the walkthrough never captures: it talks to him every day, it asks him to drink, it begs him — and each time he falls for it, his thirst comes back stronger. He then gives the same referral, in the same words: “Please speak to my friend Bronwin. She will know what to do.” That line is now on two unrelated channels, which is what moves this page off single-source.

That same recording used to carry a line this page could not place: “you’ve brought him back to me — he finally quenched his thirst”, said by somebody unidentified, after which the player asks his own audience whether he should not have done that. On 24 August 2026 a co-op session was read that has the whole scene. The speaker is the well, the man it is thanking the player for is the quest-giver, and the branch that gets you there is described in its own section below.

The quest-giver’s name has now been transcribed four ways across three channels, and no two agree past the first letter. This site does not establish spellings from machine captions, so the name on this page is the one the walkthrough’s captions use, marked as a caption spelling, and a reader searching for it should expect to find it written differently elsewhere.

The branch where you tell him to drink

There is a second way through this quest and it is not the one this page was originally written about. Read out from one player’s screen, at the stage where he has just spoken to the well himself, the objective is: “Talk to [Bog] in the skull. Tell him to drink from the well.”

Take that literally and the conversation forks. Instead of asking about the curse and being sent to the alchemist, you can tell him to go and drink, and he agrees at once: “Yes, that’s an excellent idea. I think I shall.” His co-op partner, watching, says what a reader would: “No, don’t do it. You’re just going to get thirsty again.”

He walks to the well and goes in. Both players describe the animation as broken rather than deliberate — one says the game seems to be skipping frames of a jump — so what it is meant to look like is not established. What happens next is not ambiguous at all. The well speaks: “You’ve brought [Bog] back to me. He finally quenched his thirst. Now, how about you, Traveler?” — and then offers the player the same drink it offered him.

His body is lootable. In that session it holds a shirt, trousers, boots, a knife and some food, and the two players divide it between them. It is also where the one co-op oddity on this page shows up: for the player who told him to drink, the corpse is at the bottom of the well; for his partner, it is lying on the ground beside it.

A second, unrelated recording has the well’s thank-you line in the same words, which is what lifts this off one channel. That player’s reaction is the honest one: “I did bring him back to him. Should I have not done that?” Nothing in either recording answers him, and this page does not answer him either — nobody has been recorded finishing the quest by the spongestone route after taking this branch, so whether the man can be saved afterwards, or whether the quest simply continues without him, is unknown.

What can be said plainly is that following the objective as written kills an NPC, and that the referral to the alchemist — the route the rest of this page documents — is available in the same conversation instead.

The journal, and one bug

One recording shows what the quest looks like in the journal rather than in dialogue, and the wording is not the wording anyone else uses. The objective reads “investigate the talking well”. The creator who walks the quest calls it Dark Water throughout; whether that is the journal title, the curse name, or the creator’s own shorthand is not settled by any recording here.

The one bug report on this page comes from a co-op session. The Dark Water Taint item duplicates when put into a container — the player says so twice, once while it is happening and once later with a stack of them, and guesses aloud that a quest-item flag is misbehaving. He notes the copies are worthless, so the duplication buys nothing. One session, two players, one build, and no second channel has seen it.

Requirements / limits

• The route to the spongestone and the drop-and-carry step are still one creator, one recording, uploaded 19 August 2026 — two days before Update 7. The corroboration added on 24 August 2026 covers the well, the curse, the referral and the cure, and none of it covers the location.
• None of the four corroborating players does this quest. They drink from the well, carry the curse, read its description, and go and do something else. Nobody except the original walkthrough has been recorded curing it.
• Update 7 states that quests now mark areas on your map in a TES3-style way and that directions to many quests were improved. Everything on this page was recorded before that, so a current build may signpost the canyon in a way this walkthrough had to substitute compass headings for.
• The landmarks are the player’s own words, not the game’s. “Three rocks I call small dragon teeth” is his phrase, said as his phrase. Nothing on this page is an in-game place name except the tower.
• The absence of the madman’s corpse is one player’s observation on one run. It may be a spawn that failed, a body he walked past, or the intended state of the quest.
• The name Bronwyn is a caption spelling. The same NPC is transcribed Bronwin, Brunwin, Ronwin and Bronnin across other recordings on this site.
• The quest-giver’s name is a caption spelling too, and a worse one: four different transcriptions across three channels, agreeing on nothing after the first letter. Where he is named inside a quotation on this page the spelling is bracketed, because the caption there disagrees with the caption two lines above it.
• The objective that tells you to send him to the well has been read off screen once, by one player, at one point in the quest. Whether it is the first objective, an alternative, or a stage that only appears after you drink is not established.
• The item description quoted here is a machine transcription of a player reading a tooltip aloud. One phrase in it — “it clings like a dead” — is almost certainly a mishearing and is printed as heard rather than repaired.
• One player reports feeling empowered by the well rather than cursed. It is a single line on a single channel and contradicts everything else here.
• The alchemist’s location here is close to the tavern, north then left. The tavern-directory line that several other recordings transcribe places her “in the southern swamp” instead. The two are recorded as they were heard, and this site does not know whether the swamp is a district near the tavern or a separate place.
• The drop-and-carry step is exactly as described because it is unusual. This page does not claim it is the only way to get a stone into the well, only the way that worked on camera.

Common mistakes

• Hunting for the madman’s corpse. The only recorded run finds none, and the stones are lying loose regardless.
• Waiting at the tavern when Bog has already left. He announces the well before he goes.
• Trying to give the stone to the well through dialogue or the inventory. The walkthrough drops it, picks it up with a held key, and releases it over the well.
• Taking only one spongestone. There is more than one on the ground, and the walkthrough takes them all.
• Talking to Bog at the well and expecting progress. He takes another sip and says nothing useful.
• Reading the player’s landmark names as place names. The dragon teeth are his description of three rocks.
• Assuming an Early Access update cannot move the stones. Two updates have shipped since this recording.
• Reading “kill the well” as figurative. The cursed item says it, the alchemist says it, and the solution is literally to put a stone into the well.
• Doing what the objective says without hearing him out. Telling him to drink is an available answer and it kills him; asking about the curse instead is what produces the referral to the alchemist and the cure.
• Selling or dropping the Dark Water Taint to be rid of it. It is the curse, not an item you are carrying by choice, and one co-op session shows copies of it multiplying rather than going away.

Still unverified

• Is the madman’s corpse supposed to be there?Not verifiedThe quest text hedges with “should it still exist”. One recording finds nothing, and no changelog cited here mentions the body.
• What is the dagger Bog gives you?Not verifiedHe hands it over on camera and the recording does not open the tooltip.
• Does drinking from the well before taking the quest still apply the curse?Not verifiedThe walkthrough drinks after taking the quest, in the order the quest expects.
• Is the alchemist’s house in the southern swamp the tavern directory names?Not verifiedThis recording walks there from the tavern in seconds. Other recordings transcribe an NPC placing her in the southern swamp.
• Why is the well dry in one recording?Single unconfirmed reportOne player looks down it and says there is nothing there. A well without water is what the alchemist says the cure produces, so this may be a cured well, or wells may simply look like that.
• Can the quest still be finished after the quest-giver drinks?Not verifiedTwo channels record the well thanking the player for sending him. Neither goes on to cure the well afterwards, and the walkthrough that does cure it never takes this branch.
• Does the quest-giver die at the well on his own if left alone?Not verifiedHis idle line says he will go and fetch water himself, and one walkthrough says he can be found at the well rather than the tavern. Both recorded deaths follow a player telling him to drink.
• Is the journal objective the quest name?Not verifiedOne recording shows “investigate the talking well” in the journal. The walkthrough calls the quest Dark Water throughout. Neither source shows both.
• Does the Dark Water Taint duplication survive Update 7?Single unconfirmed reportOne co-op session on a pre-Update-7 build. The changelog cited here does not mention it.