Crater Seed Finder

Two marks that split the 50 records

Start by working out the scope. This map holds 40 base game records and 10 DLC records, and Blacksmith Village and Marsh are DLC buildings: they appear in all 10 of the DLC records and in none of the base game ones. Seeing either building takes you straight to a set of ten, which is the strongest single observation available here. Playing base game content only makes this step unnecessary, since neither building can appear at all.

Township is the follow up. Half the records on this map contain one, 25 of 50, which is the cleanest even split available and makes it a good second mark when the Blacksmith Village check has left you in the group of 40. Churches and Sorcerer's Rises appear in all 50 records and carry no information on their own, so mark them only once you are down to a handful of candidates and need to separate them by position.

Fixed structures not in the seed data

The Crater comes with one structure that never varies and therefore is not part of the seed data at all.

• An additional Church, fixed in place. It is drawn directly into the map image, so it is visible even on an empty builder, and there is nothing to mark or compare because it is identical in every Crater run. It still counts: the Churches figure on a Crater result page includes it, so that number is how many churches are standing on the map rather than how many churches the record itself holds. The flask charge is the same either way.

Running the Crater

The Crater is the most self-contained Shifting Earth. Three major bosses sit close together, two of them almost adjacent, with the third deeper inside the pit. Two smaller bosses sit near the edge of the area and are usually reachable before the storm closes, so the whole sequence fits into a single trip.

Clearing the event is what makes the detour worth it: it lets you turn any item you are carrying into a Legendary. That is the strongest weapon outcome available from a Shifting Earth, because you choose what gets upgraded rather than hoping for a drop.

There is a second reason to get here early, and it is easy to miss. A weapon you find on the ground carries a level requirement before it performs: level 3 for a blue, 7 for a purple, 10 for a legendary, against a maximum of 15. Anything you upgraded yourself is exempt. So a legendary that came off this table works the moment you have it, at level 1 if that is where you are, while a legendary you picked up somewhere is dead weight until you have paid for ten levels.

One exception is worth knowing before you plan around it. Red rarity items, which become obtainable during Deep of Night, cannot be converted to Legendary. They sit modestly above purple in base damage and still below legendary, and they always carry a third effect that is a penalty, so a purple weapon is usually the better thing to feed the table anyway.

The pit also changes what else is worth doing that day. Every map has a Tunnel, and running one guarantees a +2 smithing stone, which is as far as a weapon goes on any other run. Here it is not the ceiling, so Crater squads normally skip the Tunnel and put the time into the descent instead.

One rule holds across every Shifting Earth: the bosses are static. Same bosses, same places, same rewards, every run. Plain Limveld does not work like that, so this is the part of a map you can plan before you land.

The five bosses and the Legendary Smithing Table

Fallingstar Beast, Demi-Human Queen and Valiant Gargoyle patrol the rim. Fire Prelates hold a fog gate that has to be opened before anyone can descend, and the Magma Wyrm guards the Legendary Smithing Table at the bottom. The Demi-Human Queen pays 15,000 runes and is the easy one, the Fire Prelates pay 23,600 and sit in the middle, Valiant Gargoyle and Magma Wyrm pay 45,000 each, and the Fallingstar Beast pays 50,000. The last three are all hard fights. There is also more than one way in, so any guide publishing the route down is describing a preference rather than a rule.

The table raises one armament to Legendary whatever you hand it, and it does not ask you to upgrade the weapon first: a common one goes straight there at no extra cost, which is three levels of gain against the single level a rare weapon has left to give. It does not attach a legendary passive, so the upgrade level is all you get. Every player in the party can use it, which is the part that turns the pit from a detour into a day. Four Evergaols survive alongside it, against seven on plain Limveld, but with a pit this large asking for your time the missing three are rarely three you were going to run. If you do run them, that is four Stonesword Keys, and half these records put a Township on the map, whose merchant is the only one in the game who sells a key, one to each player.