Hardcore Location Analysis

From TheKolWiki

Information or advice on this page may be out-of-date due to NS13. Some NS13 zones need to be added. Also, this page needs to be updated with the new "safe" Moxie numbers, like the Safe Adventuring page.

While this article is written with Hardcore players in mind, much, if not all, of it is also applicable to Softcore ascenders.

Introduction

This listing identifies locations in which your Hardcore run should occur when you have the option of adventuring in several places.

The strategy here is aimed at players with the majority of the Tier I and II Skills who are trying to speed their runs to acquire skills faster. Players who don't yet have Madrigal in particular may find the suggestions for early play too difficult; a beginner section below addresses how things change with fewer skills than expected. Those with enough skills to do very fast hardcore runs will find some of these suggestions too leisurely to be helpful.

Because of this focus, it's assumed that most play will be back-to-back no-path ascensions with access to food and drink, because that is the fastest way to accumulate hardcore skills.

Locations with very limited lifetimes (like the boss areas) are left out of here because the number of adventures spent there will obviously be low. Sign-specific locations and generally useless areas (the The Limerick Dungeon comes to mind) are also absent to make this already unwieldy guide slightly more compact. Comments about the relative meat drop rate are based on the data at Subjunctive KoL's Area Difficulty.

Location by Level Chart

Unlike the Safe Adventuring article, which is sorted by Moxie, this listing groups all the zones by the level at which you can adventure there. The idea you should work toward is always adventuring at the area with the greatest stat gains that you have unlocked, and this order highlights that.

Rather than focusing on the maximum Moxie to be completely safe, which is very conservative, here we try to grade locations based on their average difficulty. The "Moxie Average / +Peak" pair listed here gives two numbers to quantify both the typical adventure at a location, as well as how much harder the hardest enemy in that location is relative to the typical ones. A location like The Penultimate Fantasy Airship works well as an example of these concepts. There are six enemies at that location, whose safe Moxie levels are 101, 105, 110, 110, 114, and 130. That means the average safe Moxie of enemies you'll encounter is 111, but the hardest monster you'll encounter needs a safe moxie 19 higher than that. This location would be rated 111/+19. Since most adventurers have mechanisms to hit some enemies much harder than others at some cost (anything from Lunging Thrust-Smack to Saucegeyser), following this Moxie value gives a better match to how likely it is you can survive a location than just knowing the peak value, which is often thrown off by just one enemy. Also, it points out areas where the average adventure doesn't give nearly as many stat points as would be suggested just by the peak number, which makes some locations (The Misspelled Cemetary sticks out here) much less desirable than you might think.

(Monster evade values taken from Kittiwake's Monster Survival Guide, updated 1 Oct 2006.)

Chow mein caveats

In order to make chow mein dishes, you must be a Mysticality class for access to The Wok of Ages, have Pastamastery and Transcendental Noodlecraft skills, and have an extra 1000 meat to purchase MSG. All of the notes above about adventuring in areas for chow mein ingredients are largely moot if you have don't meet all these qualifications. The exception is if you don't have the ability to make Reagent dishes because you're missing either the Advanced Saucecrafting or Pastamastery skills; in that case, food made with the basic chow ingredients may be your best bet.

Beginner modifications

The outline above presumes you have a reasonable set of permanent skills. This section lists some major deviations in strategy if you're missing key skills, and suggests one possible order in which to acquire skills. You may want to vary this order to take advantage of upcoming Stat Days and the Stainless Steel or Plexiglass item you'll earn with your current ascension.

• Advanced Saucecrafting (Sauceror): Without this skill, surviving at the upper levels of the game (Castle, Hole) is extremely difficult and resource- (HP, MP, meat) intensive. It's likely you'll have to interleave your time at these locations with falling back to easier areas to replenish supplies. It will greatly speed your runs (and make them less stressful) if you acquire this as one of your first, if not the first, permanent skill. Note that ascending as a Sauceror without any skills has its own twists, the worst of which is that the top damage spells available to you (Wave of Sauce and Saucegeyser) have a 50/50 chance of doing Hot or Cold damage. As a result, fully half your attacks at The Icy Peak will barely do damage. You'll need to purchase a Codex of Capsaicin Conjuration or get Chronic Indigestion in unskilled Sauceror runs if you want to finish at a reasonable pace.
• Pastamastery (Pastamancer): There is no easily obtainable food in the game with the same effectiveness as the Reagent dishes you can prepare with this skill. Until you have it, you will either have to spend significantly more time looking for food items, or choose a Mysticality sign so you can eat at Chez Snootée. If you don't have Pastamastery, you may have to adventure in areas like the Kitchens to find food ingredients considerably past the point where someone with cooking skills would move on, because it's even more painful to have to return to the low levels if you run out of food later.
• The Moxious Madrigal (Accordion Thief): Without this skill, you will find it considerably more difficult to advance to the level 2 through 4 areas than is suggested here. If your Moxie is too low even with hair spray to survive, try to find a lower-level area to adventure at that has item drops you may find useful later in your run. For example, if The Typical Tavern is kicking your butt even though you're third level because you're a Mysticality sign, you should instead spend time at The Spooky Forest where you can find both spices and spooky mushrooms handy for later cooking.
• Mad Looting Skillz (Disco Bandit): The above comments about the relative ease of getting items to drop presume you at least have this basic skill. Until you do, you're more likely to end up stuck in areas waiting for drops long after you should have moved on. Locations that are particularly painful without extra drop skills include trying to get both parts of the Filthy Hippy Disguise and The Goatlet. Consider spending more early time in the Treasury to get an Elite Guard Uniform, which lets you purchase Eyedrops to improve your drop rates (at the expense of stats and meat); this is particularly helpful for the resource-intensive The Hole in the Sky. The miner's helmet is one of the few items you'll come across every game that increases item drop percentages, and when you don't have any permanent skills in this area its 5% increase is really a help.
• Impetuous Sauciness (Sauceror): With this skill, the number of scrumptious reagents you produce by playing the game normally should be enough to survive the harder parts of Level 10. Without it, you're not going to have enough, especially if you're eating some of them via Reagent dishes; plan to spend quite a bit of time at the Laboratory to accumulate extra reagents. It's better to stay there for much more of levels 6 and 7 than a normal player would to avoid constantly getting Beaten Up during the later parts of the game.

Again, this is just one possible order. Experienced hardcore players often prioritize other skills above the ones listed here. For example, some suggest getting Amphibian Sympathy (which would be the next skill to get after the above) much earlier than some of these skills. Others put far lower priority on the acquisition of extra scrumptious reagents with the Impetuous Sauciness skill, believing that reagent potions are not necessarily needed to survive high-level areas, even for characters with few permanent skills.

Advanced strategies

• After obtaining a large set of permanent hardcore skills, one goal to move toward is to increase initiative and be able to kill enemies quickly with combat skills. This greatly eases the need to buff one's Moxie during the game, and as such will re-order several areas here because increasing stat gains in an area will supersede survival concerns. Effective combat strategies include boosting melee damage or employing Spellslinging.

Suggested reading

• The level page gives more information about the order in which areas are unlocked.
• Safe Adventuring gives an alternate view of this data, sorted by monster level rather than player level.
• The Well-Tempered Epicure and KoL Diet summarize adventure and stat gains for most foods. Notice the dramatic increase in adventures-per-fullness permitted by Pastamastery, Saucecrafting and other ingredient-generating skills.
• Mack's Hardcore booze guide gives suggestions on reorganizing your adventure locations to optimally obtain booze ingredients.
• This document was inspired by Chrono Mage's Hardcore Ascension Guide