Seed 148: Crater, Maris

Record details

Special event

Gnoster Plague — Day 1Attacks obtain a great amount of runes from enemies on rare occasions.

Churches

4/

Stonesword Keys

4 to open every EvergaolThis map holds 4 Evergaols, and opening one is the only thing a Stonesword Key does in the game. What is sealed behind each one stays hidden until the key goes in, which is the part the seed settles ahead of time. There is no Township in this seed, so every key has to be found on the map.

Gnoster Plague — Day 1

The day is fixed by the seed and it is written above. The minute is not: the same seed can fire the same event at different times, so treat this as something to be ready for rather than something to set a clock against.

A locust swarm arrives as a dark cloud and anyone it hits loses a level. Each cloudy burst throws the swarm in a direction, and following it leads to the Sentient Pest. Killing it pays out enough runes for everyone to buy the lost levels back.

The rune chance the buff grants is flat per hit. It does not scale with combo count, so it is strong for normal-attack melee and weak for magic builds, purely because of how many hits each one lands.

Only one event can happen per expedition, and which ones are possible depends on the Nightlord. So this is the event for this run, with nothing else queued behind it.

Bosses in this seed

The castle, the night bosses and the bosses placed around the map are fixed for seed 148: open it again and the same bosses are waiting in the same places. A field boss marker points at the ground it holds rather than the exact step it stands on, so expect to find it moving around nearby. Knowing which ones you are walking into decides what damage type to build and which detours are worth the time.

Castle, held by Banished Knights

This is the Limveld Castle, the fixed structure near the centre of the map, and the pattern behind it never changes: a guard faction, one chest, one boss in the basement and one boss on the rooftop. What the seed decides is which of the three factions is holding it and which bosses are inside. Noklateo is the one Shifting Earth that removes it. The Great Hollow has castles of its own, but they are built to a different plan and hold a different spread of enemies, so nothing described here applies to them.

Banished Knights are the middle option. They are not much of a wall, and both the runes and the rarity of what they leave behind are modest. If the castle is on the route, this is the version that costs the least time and the least skill to clear.

The chest holds a talisman, and the path to it does not open until the basement boss is dead. That there is a talisman in it is fixed. Which talisman is not: it is rolled when the chest opens, so the same seed can hand you any talisman in the game, which is why nothing on this page names it. It pays out as a Dormant Power, so in a trio all three players get one.

Neither castle boss is unique to the castle. Both are stronger versions of bosses that also appear as field bosses, with more health, more damage and bigger rewards. Killing the basement one opens the path to the chest, and with it a shortcut that lets you cross the castle from the inside. The rooftop one is the reason to make the climb: every boss carries a small chance of dropping a legendary, and this one carries a higher chance than normal. It is a chance and not a guarantee. The only guaranteed legendary comes from the Crater event, which converts an item you are already carrying rather than leaving it to a drop.

• Leonine Misbegotten

  Basement

  A greatsword swung with more strength than technique, fast and heavy, but the bigger attacks leave openings wide enough that patience beats trading. Watch the stomp, which rolls straight into a spin and a half with the blade out. Slash and fire both work.

• Bell Bearing Hunter

  Rooftop

  Pierce roughly doubles on it and lightning lands well, while standard, slash and strike are all resisted. It is aggressive at close and mid range but the attacks are slow, and it can be parried, though a stance break costs two parries rather than one.

Field bosses (5)

• Golden Hippopotamus

  Field boss

  It pauses after each attack, and those pauses are where the fight is won. The jaws-open charge is the dangerous one: it grabs you and slams you repeatedly, and the lunging bite reaches further than the animation suggests. Fire and lightning both do double.

• Ulcerated Tree Spirit

  Field boss

  The whole fight is learning which of its movements actually have a hitbox. It flops and twists constantly and most of that is harmless, which makes the real attacks easy to miss.

• Black Knife Assassin

  Field boss

  The feint is what gets people: she leaps in with a counterclockwise slash that is not real, then follows with the clockwise one that is. Most physical damage lands, pierce least of all. Let her come to you rather than chasing.

• Black Blade Kindred

  Field boss

  Most of what it does is slow and well signposted. The exception is Fury of the Kindred, a five-hit combo with awkward gaps between the slashes; when the sword comes up to the left of its face, sprint out rather than roll.

• Ancient Hero of Zamor

  Field boss

  Around 60% health it drops to its knees and channels frost into the sword, and from then on its strikes build frostbite. Before that it is a fast swordfighter with repeating windups, so the speed is the problem rather than the reading. Fire and lightning both work well.