crafting

Last Epoch Crafting Primer

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I had a request from one of my friends over on Mastodon to at some point do an explanation of the crafting system for Last Epoch. Apparently at one point I did one of these for Path of Exile… and here is proof that I do not remember half the things that I write here because my mind blanks on what I even said. That said I am going to do my best to fulfill this request but I feel like I need to start off with a few caveats. I am by no means a master crafter nor am I some god of Last Epoch information. This is going to be a rough explanation of the crafting system as I have used it, because in truth it is pretty straightforward and I have done a heck of a lot of “fixing” gear by tweaking one or two things on it. If you have any specific questions about how an individual item works, I suggest consulting Last Epoch Tools because it seems to be the trove of knowledge on the game.

The Forge Screen

Let’s start off with the most basic elements of crafting. At any point in the game, you can hit the F key to pop up your forge interface, or optionally you can click on any of the anvil devices scattered throughout the social hubs of the game. This will bring up the crafting interface allowing you to place an item into the window and modify the elements of it. The most basic component of an item is its Forging potential, which is a number that indicates how many actions you can take against an item in an attempt to change its elements. Each action that you take usually will remove some amount of this number, and these will be indicated by a range with the highest success being that it removes zero points, and the worst possible interaction removing the full cost usually somewhere around 10. Below the item is the Glyph slot which will allow you to slot in an item that will modify the way a current crafting attempt works. Below that is the Rune slot which will impact the item as a whole rather than an individual craft.

Item Rarity

Every piece of gear can have two prefixes and two suffixes. You cannot craft on Unique or Set pieces by default and I am not going to talk about the process of creating a Legendary item… so for now we are only going to focus on the four rarities of normal items: Normal (white), Magic (blue), Rare (yellow), and Exalted (purple). The primary difference between Normal, Magic, and Rare is how many affixes are filled on the item. A Normal Item will have none of its affixes filled, a Magic will have at least one, and a Rare item will have at least three. Exalted denotes something specific in that one of the affixes on an item is Tier 6 or Tier 7. The highest that you can craft on an item is a Tier 5 affix, as a result some of the most sought out items in the game have one or more exalted affixes on them.

I specifically chose the same base item for this visual to illustrate a point. There is another element of an item that I have not talked about and that is the Implicits, which are inherited from the item you are crafting on. For example, this is an Augury Plate which will always have 475 Armor and some amount of Increase Mana Regen with the range being a random roll between 18% and 35%. Before we leave the discussion of Item Rarity, I feel like it is important to note that when an item drops… its Forging Potential is determined by the rarity of the item. An exalted item will by default have more forging potential than a normal item. Forging Potential is a range of possible values, but it is something to note that the better quality item you start the crafting process with, the more wiggle room you have for modifying it.

Item Bases

Expanding upon this further, here is a selection of Sentinel Body Armors, aka items that will have what is considered to be a large amount of armor on them. Iron Cuirass is a body armor with 100 Armor and a range of Cold Resistance. Solarium Plate is a body armor with 420 Armor, a range of endurance values, and a range of increased fire damage values. Augury Plate which was used in the previous example has 475 armor and a range of Increase Man Regen. Finally we have the Apocalypse Plate which was newly added in with the 1.0 patch and features 513 Armor, a range of Stun Avoidance, and a Void Knight specific implicit that increases Echo Damage when a Skill is Echoed. Each one of these items is going to lean towards a specific type of build and use case. I’ve been working on an ignite Forge Guard and in theory I am probably going to want to be watching for Solarium Plate’s with the correct stat combination because that implicit would greatly increase the amount of fire damage I would be capable of stacking.

Affix Shards

From a very early level, you will be used to seeing explosions of brown text on your screen that you rapidly hoover up into your inventory. Eventually you hit the transfer materials button, at which point they are whisked away to your crafting inventory never to be thought of again. The thing is every single one of these crafting materials is an item with its own stats and text explaining their use. I decided to pull out four different Affix shards so we could talk about them a bit. Health is probably one of the first affixes that you will encounter in the game and it is pretty much universally sought. If you read the text it denotes that this specific variant gives you X% Increased Health and can be applied to Body Armor, Helmets, or Belts. Armor is another very early affix and this one gives you X% increased armor and can be applied to Helmets, Body Armor, Boots, and Shields. Chance to Slow on Hit specifically is something that can go on a weapon or a quiver which is the same for a lot of the “on hit” mechanics.

Lastly we have a very specific type of shard that can only be found on items that increase the level of the Sentinel skill Warpath, allowing you to allocate additional points in the skill specialization tree. This opens the door to another aspect of crafting which is looking for items that you might want to harvest affixes from. There are a few specific ways to do this which I will dive into in the next subject, but essentially you can break down items with Runes in order to reclaim affix shards that you can then use to craft on another item. A lot of the loot that I pick up in a dungeon or monolith, is specifically things that I am snagging for harvesting purposes. When crafting on affixes there is the possibility to “crit” your craft reducing the amount of forging potential that it takes or giving you free levels of either the same affix or one of the other affixes.

Runes

Runes are a type of crafting material that applies to the entire item, not a specific prefix or suffix craft. These can have some pretty sweeping changes to your item and override whatever you have configured in your glyph or affixes. Make sure you remove runes before finalizing your craft if you do not intend to use them as they will stay slotted in the forge window after a crafting attempt. Let’s talk a bit about each of the types of runes and what it is used for.

  • Rune of Shattering
    • This is ultimately going to be your most commonly used rune. This is essentially the same as salvaging an item in other games. It will destroy the current item and return a random number of affix shards from the item. It could be all of the affixes slotted into an item, or it could be just one. When an affix shard is returned it also gives you a random number of them, which could be the full face value of the craft on the item or just a single shard. This is the most commonly used because it does not require any forging potential so you can use this to destroy items that have been “zeroed out”.
  • Rune of Removal
    • This is similar to Shattering but it requires forging potential and will consume between 1 and 25 per craft. The difference is this will remove a random single affix and return all of the shards on an item. So for example if you remove an exalted T7 affix, it will remove seven copies of that affix. Remember though that which one is removed is completely random so you need to have plenty of forging potential if you are trying to target a specific affix.
  • Rune of Discovery
    • This rune costs no forging potential and will fill any empty affix on an item with a random Tier 1 affix. So if you were to use this on a Normal item, you would end up with a Rare containing four random Tier 1 affixes. For me at least these have two uses, firstly in the very early game before I have access to rare gear I can throw a Rune of Discovery on something and my alt has at least some power quickly. The other time I would use one is if I have an item with otherwise good stats but zero forging potential left, and hitting it with a Discovery just fills up the affixes regardless of what the final result ends up being.
  • Rune of Shaping
    • This rune will reroll the random implicit values on a piece of gear. Remember above I said that each of the base types came with a certain number of implicit and some of those had random ranges. This would be used on an item that has otherwise great stats but really low rolls on those implicits. Unfortunately it has a high potential cost consuming between 1 and 25 forging potential so this is something you really need to do early in the crafting process.
  • Rune of Refinement
    • This does something similar to Shaping, but will reroll ALL of the affixes on your item giving you a new random value within the range of possible values for each affix. This will consume between 1 and 15 forging potential, but honestly feels like a pretty risky move because you could of course get nothing but top-tier rolls… or you could end up with an item with baseline stats. This is essentially the same as the Divine Orb from Path of Exile with the difference being that you are eating up Forging Potential each time you use one.
  • Rune of Ascendance
    • This is quite possibly my favorite crafting item. Essentially this is the Chance Orb from Path of Exile but one that works every time. This will take an item and upgrade it into a random Unique for that type. This will not respect item bases, but it will respect broad categories of items. For example if you use this on a Two-Handed Sword, you are going to end up with a Unique Two-Handed Sword as a result. I mostly use these to target specific slots that I need a specific unique for, but it is an absolute gamble. They are just fun and you never quite know what you are going to get from them. I do not believe you can get anything that drops in a specific location or has specific corruption level requirements in order for an item to drop. This is just based on my own experience and I do not know this for certain however.
  • Rune of Creation
    • This item is similar to the Mirror of Kalandra from Path of Exile for those who might be familiar with that. Essentially it will allow you to duplicate any item with crafting potential so as such cannot be used on Uniques or Set items which cannot be crafted on at all, it also cannot be used on items that have been zeroed out. This item will consume all of the forging potential of both the original and the duplicate so nothing further can be done with either save for using one of the runes that requires no forging potential. Essentially this prevents the nonsense that happens in Path of Exile where folks have “mirror shops” and keep duping the same items over and over. I’ve personally used this to create multiple copies of an Exalted item before attempting to make a Legendary, but again not going to dive into that process today.

Glyphs

Glyphs are the other part of crafting and I decided to cover them after runes since they impact specific affixes not broad change to the entire item. There are a few edge cases but largely in order to use a Glyph you will need Forging Potential, Available Affix Shards of a given type, and an Affix that is less than T5 aka the maximum level that you can craft on. Let’s talk through the various options.

  • Glyph of Hope
    • Let’s start off with the best glyph, aka the one you are probably going to want to use every single time you do any crafting. Using a Glyph of Hope while upgrading an affix gives you a 25% chance to use zero forging potential. The more upgrades that you can get for free, the more wiggle room you have on an item to perfect it. If I am just grinding a stat up to T5 I am going to be using one of these and the 25% roll is independent of the normal “critical” crafting process allowing you to both get it for free and get a bonus stat level at the same time.
  • Glyph of Chaos
    • While there is no true equivalent to the Chaos Orb from Path of Exile, this is probably the closest that exists. The Glyph of Chaos essentially allows you to replace any affix on an item with a random affix that is possible to roll on that item. It will also raise the Tier of that affix slot by one, therefore placing a limit on the number of times you can attempt to reroll an affix. This is really a yolo move for an item that has three great affixes, but one that is meaningless to your build. Sometimes you luck out and get something good… worst case is you just get a different stat that is meaningless. Unlike POE, I don’t really know of any times when a single stat line can brick your build.
  • Glyph of Order
    • Okay, this is probably the most complicated to explain. When you apply an affix, it gives you a value within a range so for example if that range is 1 to 10… you could get any of those values. When you raise the tier of an affix, it rolls again giving you another random value within a range. Glyph of Order allows you to preserve the location in the range while bumping it up to a higher tier. If you have an item with the maximum stat for a given tier, then it is worthwhile to use a Glyph of Order to keep making sure you are pegging out the top of that range each time you move up in tier.
  • Glyph of Despair
    • Glyph of Despair does something weird with an item, and in theory allows you to have more than four affixes. Essentially when you use this on an item there is a chance to “seal” the affix and empty the slot that it previously occupied allowing you to craft something new in its place. This is chance-based and the lower the tier of the affix that you are trying to seal, the higher the chance it will succeed. When the craft “fails” it simply upgrades that affix to the next highest tier.

Experimental Gear

Up until this point, I have been covering “normal” crafting. As with any game that gets new content over time, there begin to be a few edge cases. In 0.9.2 Rune Prisons were introduced to the game, and with them Experimental gear. When you open a Rune Prison in a map an Exiled Mage spawns and if you manage to kill it, it drops an experiment type of gear. These contain prefixes that cannot be gained through any other way and that cannot be extracted in shard form. These can do some really interesting things like for example there is one that summons X zombies to fight on your side whenever you use a potion. Some of these are very powerful, but the majority are sort of interesting edge cases. With these items however introduced a few other crafting options that I left off the table as not to confuse you too early.

Experimental Crafting

With 0.9.2 there was a new rune and a new glyph added to the game that interacted with these experimental affixes. Runes of Research can only drop from Exiled Mages, and Glyph’s of Insight supposedly can only drop once you have used a Rune of Research. I cannot confirm nor deny this… but I can confirm that I did not see a single Glyph of Insight drop until after I had used a Rune of Research and then I found it within a few Exiled Mage kills. Could be a coincidence but I am not certain. Let’s talk about how each is used.

  • Rune of Research
    • This item allows you to take an Experimental Item and seal that affix so that you can craft another prefix onto the item. Unlike Glyph of Despair, this is 100% chance and will always seal the prefix taking somewhere between 1 and 20 forging potential to do so. Really I cannot think of a downside to doing this as it allows you to make an Experimental item better.
  • Glyph of Insight
    • This Glyph on the other hand allows you to take an existing item with a filled prefix and replace it with a randomly chosen Experimental Affix that is capable of rolling on that item type. Folks have apparently mathed out what the chances are and what affixes are available in a bunch of different scenarios so you can check out this calculator to determine what you might get. So this is an option if you have an item with a useless prefix that might be improved by an experimental one.

The Wrap Up

Well, folks, that is the crafting system. Like I said going into this I am by no means an expert, but have been crafting items regularly since I started playing this game in 2018. What I dig about the system is that it is really powerful while still being relatively deterministic. Path of Exile crafting potentially is more powerful, but it is also way the hell more random… and you need a whole slew of community-supported tools to really understand it. Last Epoch thankfully is simple enough that I could cover almost everything in a single blog post. While it might seem complicated, I promise it is pretty easy to get the hang of. I hope my post helped some of you who might have had cold feet about diving in. I’ve likely missed some elements and I am sure someone will respond in the comments to fill in those details.

Nightingale Initial Thoughts

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Good Morning Folks! Since the Last Epoch servers were down last night in preparations for the 1.0 launch today, and Nightingale opened up for early access I decided to give the game a spin. Right now the game is on an introductory price of $26.99 and I figured since I knew I was going to pick it up eventually, I might as well get in at the cheapest price. I feel like I need to set the stage for this discussion. I’ve played a lot of survival games over the years and most recently have been playing a heck of a lot of Enshrouded. This is going to greatly color my opinion of this game. After spending around 5 hours last night playing Nightingale I can state without a doubt that it isn’t an awful game, but so far at this stage in development it isn’t a great one either.

Let’s scroll back a few years and take a look at the original trailer that announced the game during the 2021 Game Awards. I realize this is setting us up for failure because early trailers are more akin to a “mood board” than anything related to what the final product is going to look like. What I got from that trailer is that we would be Cthulhu-style Victorian-era adventurers in cool costumes tromping through the fae multiverse looking for treasure and building settlements. I personally imagined something with a combat system akin to New World, with big chunky good feeling attacks and interesting combatants to fight and a bunch of gorgeous realms to explore. I imagined a building system something akin to Valheim where you recruit people and bring them back to your base to build up to some epic battles as the baddies attack you. I admit I have not followed the development of this game terribly closely, but these trailers and the ones that followed at Summer Game Fest recently set the expectations.

Nightingale has a bunch of really interesting ideas. It has one of the more creative character generators I have seen to date, where not only do you set the looks of your character but you also can define your background and lineage. For example, if you so choose… you can creat the appearance of every person in your direct line for three generations… and then choose to inherit traits in your appearance rather than set them yourself. This is some utter nonsense, but you can tell this is something that one person on the team was super passionate about. My only complaint was with the beard options where I could not have a nice full bushy beard and essentially had to choose between a svelt goatee and a lovely set of muttonchops.

What they nailed was the world. There were several moments where I just had to stop and enjoy the vistas. It has a very Myst like quality to it, as you explore these areas that were once inhabited by the Fae with impossible constructions, floating towers, and such. The world maybe doesn’t feel quite as atmospheric as the trailers would indicate. During tutorial quests you end up crossing through a Forest, a Desert, and a Swamp… the three biomes that exist in the game currently, and all of them very much felt like what you would expect from a procedural generator. While there were some cool set pieces, none of them felt terribly atmospheric. Each of these three tutorial realms had a very limited scope and served to teach you how the tech tree works.

This starts us down the problem I am having with this game. If I compare it against other survival titles… it is ploddingly slow. In this sort of game, I am used to hitting the beach… because it always seems to be a beach… gathering some twigs and rocks and outfitting myself in my first tools and weapons within the first fifteen minutes. Everything feels extremely drawn out as you have to wait for the game to give you permission to craft anything… which doesn’t really take place until you reach the second of the three tutorial realms. This sluggish quality seems to carry forward into all aspects of crafting. It takes forever for you to be able to craft your own clothing because in order to get to that point you have to have crafted three different sorts of machines to assemble some slapdash leather.

When you can assemble your first gear set… it looks like this. We were drawn in from the trailer and visuals of romping around the wilds in spats and petticoats… and instead, you look like every murder hobo in every survival game. I look like I am about to defend my steakwrap by shivving you. I get that this is the starter “tattered” gear, but in order to get started and run through the first major objective you have to upgrade out of what looked like much better gear. Essentially we are a few hours into the game and the anachronistic aesthetic from all of the trailers is already shot. I am sure that eventually, we will probably have access to get that looks like the trailers, but at the rate of progression through the game, it seems like it will be months down the line.

One of the biggest problems that I am having with the crafting system is “bag bloat”. Essentially recipes will request a type of ingredient, for example “t1 Bones” and that can come from any Tier 1 animal that can drop bones. However in your bag… the items are kept in separate stacks as to whether or not they came from a predator or a prey animal, or later when you learn fishing… each TYPE of fish is stored separately. This trickles through to the final produced material so the game can see that I have “16 Meat” on my hotbar, but in my actual bags this is a combination of grilled prey meat, grilled predator meat, and each individual type of fish that I have caught and cooked. The types of ingredients you put into a meal impact the stats of the meal slightly, but so far this has seemed to be negligible, and all I really care about how is healing myself and not dying to the hunger mechanic that slowly kills you. This isn’t so much a problem for your character’s backpack, but it rapidly becomes a problem in trying to store this nonsense in baskets. There really needs to be a way to convert up materials to a generic form that stacks cleanly.

The other problem that I am starting to get into is that every craft seems to require refinement of a bunch of different materials in order to craft it. This mostly just serves to slow down the gameplay as you have to wait on a bunch of machines to craft up enough of the refined resources in order to do the final combine. I’m more used to survival games using something like a tiering system… which the game seems to have… but isn’t utilizing in the manner I am used to. I would expect a Tier 2 machine would require Tier 2 metal and Tier 2 wood… not just refined versions of the T1 materials or the secondary byproducts of refining the items. For example, if you want to make a Candle you need a wick, and if you want to make a wick you need two twines, and if you want to make twine you need “fibers” either through gathering plant fibers or refining meat into animal fibers. It rapidly feels a bit tedious to actually make anything.

The building system feels similarly cumbersome. I would expect to be able to create a wooden shanty quickly by chopping down some trees and using the wood that I gained from said trees. That is not the case and all of the “wooden” block types require you to gather three resources… plant fiber, sticks, and proper wood. Stone however just requires stone… so I have been crafting everything out of that. Stone however is a limited resource and I am slowly running out of stone piles on the island to harvest because Nightingale is not a voxel game with destructable terrain, which means that I can’t just start excavating the side of a mountain to get resources. I have to harvest specific nodes that yield a specific type of material and then deliver it back to the build side and apply it to the designed form. On one hand, it is really cool that you can essentially plan out the entire building in blueprint form, but when you apply resources… it applies them to the entire blueprint at once and then chooses to “finish” seemingly random blocks.

One of the particularly cumbersome elements comes from when you want to remove an item and place it somewhere else. There is no easy way to remove a segment of the wall or pick back up a crafting machine to place it somewhere else. You can toggle on build mode with “X” key… which I had to find by sifting through the keybindings, and in theory, you can deconstruct an item. This will cause a pile of materials to drop to the ground. However, it does not seem to be ALL of the materials that went into crafting the item initially. The other option is just to break an item… at which point you lose ALL resources that went into building it. Sure it is probably more realistic that if you knock down a wall, you can’t just stand it back up again but we are already dealing with magical floating blueprints so I feel like quality of life is a more important trait here.

You can recruit other survivors but they are honestly… kind of idiots. Here is my companion Agnes lighting herself on fire by walking through the cook stove. I legitimately was tabbed out last night typing a message and heard the clear sound of something catching on fire, only to flip over to this scene. I guess the positive is that Agnes appears to be immortal. She has very simple AI and that AI is to harvest every tree she sees… and gives zero fucks about whether or not that tree is going to fall on top of you and deal damage. You can be in the middle of combat and she is going to walk over and immediately start felling a fucking tree while you are skinning the corpse. She is as good at combat as she is at standing in fires.

This takes us to what I feel is the critical flaw in the game for me. Skyrim is a game that we all love and it did some groundbreaking things for open-world gaming… but even for 2010, it had what I would consider to be pretty shitty combat. Combat in Nightingale feels like Skyrim where mobs just sort of blindly rush at you the second they spot you… flailing wildly… and you sort of just have to swing blindly at them until you connect enough times to kill them hoping that your hitpoints outlast their ability to reduce them. There is no real strategy here. I found that I could just jump backwards in order to avoid most attacks and this became my strategy for ranged attacking them down until they died. Attacking with a melee weapon felt awful. Generally speaking, when you enter combat you have three to six things trying to attack you at the same time and your combat is mostly useless.

I completed the first dungeon and took on the first boss… and it was also similarly bad. It just sort of charged at you and you would need to duck out of the way and plink it down as it was ramping up for the next attack. I mostly used the pillars as a way of skirting around the boss because attacking head-on seemed like an awful idea. Its mechanics consisted on a dash attack and a big point-blank AOE, but otherwise, it just seemed to keep locking on my location and I needed to stop being there for a while. A lot of the selling point of this game is to go off on adventures fighting baddies and looking for cool treasure, and honestly… I am not sure I want any more of this combat. If this is representative of what the game has to offer, and based on some reviews I watched this morning before sitting down to write this… it seems like it is.

There is also the problem of loot. If I am going to go delving into dungeons I feel like there should be some reward at the end of my troubles. What Nightingale has for loot is what I could call “Minecraft Loot” aka some random resources. You might find a single ignot… or a wick… or maybe even some leather straps, but nothing resembling anything special and unique to that dungeon. If the reward for doing dungeons is the same bullshit that I can get anywhere else on the island… then why am I doing the dungeons? The answer is that you have to do the dungeons in order to unlock new cards… which then allow you to open new realms… where you can gather more resources and have more crappy combat. For me at least that mechanical loop is flawed because if everything is just more of the same… “we have Skyrim at home”.

The problem that I see with Nightingale, is it is trying to be a bunch of different games and not really succeeding at any of them. It isn’t what I would consider a good crafting for survival game, because everything feels way too tedious, especially at the beginning. It isn’t a good adventure and exploration game, because combat feels awful. It isn’t a good dungeon delving game, because there is zero loot chase. Nightingale is not a bad game by any means… but it isn’t a particularly good one either. It is launching into a crowd that is thick with really good games that are hitting all of these buttons. Enshrouded for example launched similarly in early access but landed with a game that felt pretty damned close to finished. Valheim a few years ago did what Nightingale is trying to do but just better in spite of being woefully unpolished and having its own stack of problems. The major selling point of Nightingale is adventuring in weird period outfits… and that goes out the window the moment you have to craft something for yourself.

I get that Nightingale is an early-access game, and there is a little warning at the launch to make sure you understand that. However generally speaking in spite of the flaws that a game might have in early access, I can often see a core of the game that is good and just needs as lot of polish and bug fixing. With Nightingale, I am just not seeing a fun mechanical game loop that warrants me spending much more time with it. I put five hours in last night and I would have expected in that time for the game to have set the hook. It is a perfectly reasonable game… it just isn’t better than anything else in the survival and exploration genre. When you are launching in the same year as PalWorld and Enshrouded… you sorta have to do something really good in order to stand out from the pack and I am not seeing it. Sure the world is gorgeous… but a gorgeous world only gets you so far.

South Central Ruins Chest Farm

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Good Morning Folks! I have to be perfectly honest… I thought I was done documenting camps. Yesterday I crafted my final level of flame altar and was going to spend the evening poking around the previously deadly shroud areas. However, before sitting down to do this, I saw this video over on YouTube reporting to have the “fastest legendary farm ever”. I am a sucker for this nonsense and given that I documented two other really good farms, I thought I would at least check this one out. Turns out that this is maybe the single best farming spot I have experienced.

The video title was not hyperbole in the least. The farm originally comes from this video by 04AM, but since Glitchiz is the video I first saw and it covers ONLY this one farm I figured that would be the one that I embed. I am uncertain what level of shroud you need to have, but you likely need to have at least found the Kindlewastes spire and have the ability updraft to make it straight forward. During the video, he covers the entire setup of the farm and some tips, like things I did not even think about such as using a grappling point to make getting to the chest a bit faster. I’m legitimately hoping that this is going to be the last time I feel compelled to document one of these chest farms, but in truth pending you want max-level gear, this is the only one you are going to need.

Essentially you are going to fly West South West of the Kindlewastes Ancient Spire, which I have highlighted on my map to show in reference where the spot is. The red bag icon marks where the location of the chest actually is. The only gotchas with this camp is that it isn’t necessarily entirely safe. There are the “giant pterodactyl bird” things roaming around this area, and on very rare occasions one will get close enough to this area to aggro. So either you need to build yourself a safe “hidey hole” that you can duck into around the flame altar, or you need to be able to safely kill one of these. You can see in the first screenshot of this post, that the chest will be sticking half out of the sand by a dead tree on the edge of a set of desert ruins that have no spawns in them.

The above screenshot of my chest represents an hour of farming at this location. I did not keep anything below legendary quality and skipped over most of the duplicates. Additionally, I ignored all of the set gear because I already had two full sets of everything. In truth had I kept everything it would have easily filled up two of the max-size chests, and I got more than a full set of each of the types of armor. What was interesting about this location is that the legendary drop rate chance was so much higher than either of the two camps that I had spent time farming. More than that I saw a lot of items that I only ever saw in epic rarity from the other camps. I am pretty sure this chest is capable of dropping every single legendary weapon in the game. At none of the camps have I seen any legendary shields or rings, and the only thing of the sort I have seen is a magical shield bracelet thingy from the first camp.

What was awesome though is that the camp allowed me to pretty much swap out all of the gear that I was using for an upgrade. The White Wolf Sword has a very bright blue glow, but more important than that is all of the +Shroud Damage it is capable of doing. Similarly, the Ritual Tempest Wand is awesome for all of the +Shock Damage it can deal. Then we have Wolf’s Snarl Longbow, which I had only ever seen a purple version of… and has the highest damage of any bow I have seen in the game so far. That said there were so many drops that you could pretty much find a weapon to suit whatever playstyle you are going for at this one camp. The Iron Cave is still probably easier to get to early on, but after seeing the output of this camp I would completely skip the Cliffside camp that I talked about yesterday.

I have some thoughts about where I would love to see Enshrouded go as a game, but I will probably save those for another day. I hope to try out grouping with some friends over the weekend where I will very likely start a brand new character. I legitimately hope this is the last one of these camps that I feel like I need to document, as spinning the loot table over and over is getting a bit boring.

Southeast Cliffside Chest Farm

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Good Morning Folks! After having some luck with the chest farm that I showed off yesterday, I decided to try another one that I have seen in literally every YouTube video talking about Level 25 Golden Chests. This one is located in the very Southeastern corner of the map down by Scatterbone and one of the Sun Temples. Of note… this is the Sun Temple which has the legendary glider that I talked about yesterday. It is going to require you to have Flame Level 5 and you are also going to have to take a bit of a leap of faith. There is a ledge just above the deadly shroud where the chest is located, and the easiest way to get there is to run along the cliffside to the west of Scatterbone and then drop down and glide into place.

When you get there the chest is going to be exposed on a pile of rubble, and there is plenty of land for you to be able to set up a Flame Altar just outside of the range of the chest. I am guessing that the original intent for this chest was to be buried down inside of the rubble and that you would have to bomb or dig to expose it. Unlike the chest I showed off yesterday, this one does not require any lockpicks. However that said it seems to have significantly worse drop rates than the Iron Cave chest. The majority of the time you are likely going to get white and blue items, the occasional purple, and very rarely legendary orange items. What is interesting about this farm however is that it has a completely different batch of armor sets, this time the level 25 versions.

Elder Armor Set

I thought I would take a moment this morning to go over the three new armor sets that I found, and photoshop together a little image that shows all of the items as well as the appearance. First up we have the Elder set, and this seems to be the set that I see most of the YouTubers wearing. This is primarily designed for the wand and stave wielders and buffs mana regen and magical damage. It also offers high magical resistance but low physical resistance.

Eagle Eye Armor Set

Next up is the Eagle Eye set which is very clearly designed for ranged combat and specifically folks going down the path of the bow. Most of these armor sets have a bit of a natural glow to them that helps illuminate dark areas, but this one unfortunately has the least amount of glowy bits. I dig the design but I am likely never going to main a bow, and mostly just use mine for pulling. This set has balanced resistance with the same numbers for both physical and magical.

Radiant Paladin Armor Set

This set however is entirely my jam, The Radiant Paladin is a health regen, melee set, offering high physical resistance and decent enough magical resistance. It also has a lot of glowy bits which really helps to illuminate your surroundings. This is going to be the set that I wear from this point forward, or at least until there is an even better set that I find.

Between the two camps, I have spent quite a bit of time opening chests and doing the logout reset game. However, I think for the time being I am mostly done with chest farming. I was specifically seeking the legendary version of the Nova sword and I picked that up last night. I also got a bow that I like quite a bit and have swapped it out for my purple one. Mostly several of the bosses are weak to shroud damage and this will give me a way of plinking them from a distance. You can also see the assortment of legendary weapons that I have picked up in my travels in a shot of my storage chest on the right side of the above image. There is a shield that I got early on in the game that had a lot of glow to it, and I would really like to find a level 25 legendary version of it. So I might do some research to see if such a thing exists. It seems like every item in the game can be found in all four rarities and at most item levels, so I am guessing it is out there somewhere.

I’ve come very close to “beating” the game in its current state. Now that I have finished gearing up, I will likely gather the rest of the bits needed to unlock the final rank of the Flame Altar so that I can explore the remaining deadly shroud areas. Past that, I think the only real things that I have left on my radar is doing some more build projects. I would like to take over a town at some point and try refurbishing it. I also need to finish up the remaining few tradesfolk quests requesting different items from the shrouded areas. All in all, it is a heck of a game. However, it has made me realize how much I would love to see something akin to Enshrouded but with an ARPG build and randomized loot system. Having some chase rare items would make farming content in this game feel a bit more enjoyable, especially if the drops were more focused on individual monster kills rather than finding golden chests. As it stands killing random encounters is a way to farm resources, not actually find anything cool.

At this point, I have gotten over 50 hours of joy from this game so I would definitely say it is worth the purchase and then some. I will also keep returning over time, but it is making me realize that at some point I really need to make my way back to Valheim and give it another go. A few years have passed and I am sure the game is a bit more fleshed out now.