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A Visual Guide to Monster Resource Farming
🕑 Added 2023-04-07 09:00:01 +0000 UTCFarming in Kingdom Death: Monster (KDM) is a play style where the goal is to squeeze the maximum amount of resources out of a monster as possible. This style is used against quarry monsters; not nemesis ones, and is most commonly employed against the early game monsters of the White Lion, the Screaming Antelope and the Flower Knight in their level 1 forms.
While one can approach every single showdown with this goal in mind, it is more common for players to use this a max of two or three times in order to build a good base of gear and resources or when recovering from a spat of bad luck. This is because KDM is a snowball based game; where good early momentum will carry you to the end of the campaign and bad breaks can cause a settlement to crash to the ground – so building a solid foundation can help make a game more engaging and interesting as it allows you to experiment with funky builds and sub-optimal choices such as Whips. When you've got a good strong basic backbone to your settlement you can be the hipster you've always dreamed of and run that thrown weapon survivor every hunt.
The foundation to this strategy is to slow the showdown to a crawl; this is achieved through a high level of control. Once the showdown is in the hands of the players, the second half is a measured, methodical grinding down of the monster via critical wounds. Part of the reason why the above mentioned monsters are so popular for this strategy is because they have a high number of resource drop in their hit location deck and a low threat level. In addition the White Lion, Antelope and Flower Knight all feature self healing cards, which provides more opportunity to grind out even more resources. It is possible to empty the resource deck entirely when fighting those three monsters. The Gorm doesn't have self healing, but it does offer an infinite insanity reward via looping Hiccup, so that's a nice extra bonus.
We'll look at this strategy through the lens of those two halves. Starting with the Control elements as they provide the set up and then we'll discuss the Generation portion afterwards.
Control
Control of the showdown is achieved through two elements; the first of which is attack denial and the second is deck manipulation. Attack Denial comes in two main forms, evasion and blocking. Evasion is the primary tool we employ here because Rawhide Armor, Survival of the Fittest and Tall Grass all offer extra evasion which reduces the amount of attacks that can hit. This reduces the amount of damage that survivors will take, but in addition Rawhide refunds survival half the time when you Dodge, which helps even more. Block is a bit harder to get online early because only the Gorm has a shield; but an early rush for the Leather Shield or a fortunate encounter with the Gigachad that is the Cyclops Knight.
This is married with deck manipulation; AI manipulation allows you to both ensure that you know exactly what and where the monster is going on its turn and also “prune” the AI deck so that undesirable cards are removed as wounds while desirable ones are left (desirable is usually weak attacks, intimidates and healing cards). HL manipulation on the other hand is the 'set up' for the Resource Generation half, it allows players to line up favourable resource generating hit locations with deadly attacks and know when the trap card is going to be drawn.
The trick with the trap card is to have a Spear Specialist in the party; they will usually control the monster during the fight, but when it is required they step in and attack into the trap, either refreshing the HL deck completely for no cost or taking a hit and soaking damage that doesn't go onto your tank or farming survivors.
The Gear Shopping List for the Control portion:
- 1+ Rawhide Armors
- 1+ Monster Grease
- 1+ Cat Eye Circlet
- 1x Wisdom Potion
- 1+ of Knuckle Shield / Steel Shield / Leather Shield
- 1x King's Spear
- 1x Screaming Armor (optional)
You can fill out the rest with whatever extra pieces you like, you'll essentially be building two survivors to do this job. One in Rawhide + Grease + Shield (+ Circlet) and the other with Spear + Screaming Armor + Circlet and optionally a Luck Charm (because Screaming Armor has so many blue affinities it's basically “free”). You can forgo the Screaming Armor and take a Cat Gut Bow/Rawhide/Circlet build instead.
Generation
Generation of the resources revolves entirely around Deadly and Luck; the goal is to stack as much Deadly and Luck together onto two Damage Per Swing (DPS) survivors; they will be equipped with Rawhide Armor so they can also help out with controlling the monster when required; but most of the time they aim to hit locations that have desirable critical wounds while cycling through the other hit locations without wounding.
It's a very straightforward job and incredibly Fist & Tooth is a more than ample tool for the job, but you will often see the Lion Beast Katar or Rib Blade employed instead because they provide a good safety margin in case the showdown unexpectedly takes a turn for the worse.
The Shopping list for this portion is
- 2x Rawhide Armor
- 0-2x Deadly Weapons (Lion Beast Katar, Rib Blade)
- 2x Lucky Charm
- Something that provides a left or right blue affinity to attach to the Charm
You then have room to cover redundancy with stuff like Monster Grease and have some utility items (like Bandages or Fecal Salve). Two free flex slots are always great for a build.
How it Works
So, we've set up, how are we going to achieve this? It depends on the monster; the Flower Knight for example doesn't even need weapons for the DPS survivors because the L1 version's toughness is so low and the Parry mechanic means Luck is highly rewarded. The White Lion and Gorm offer Tall Grass to utilise and the Screaming Antelope can heal itself with not just two AI cards but also via its instinct.
How About Against Higher Level Monsters?
Higher level and higher node monsters make this kind of playstyle harder because they have more attacks and more damage. That means the margins between success and failure are far thinner; so it's not impossible, but because farming isn't really the most engaging way of playing it's more typical to see players attacking with Deadly weapons and being more opportunistic rather than methodical. Monsters like the Dung Beetle Knight, Sunstalker, Dragon King and Phoenix all also have reliable ways of applying pressure to survivors that cut past evasion and block – something that our early game monsters are not very good at (the Gorm has some tools, but they can be managed).
However, these strategies and play patterns are still useful for fighting against any type of monster because monsters do need to attack in order to deliver kills and they have hit locations and AI decks and there are abusive ways of hobbling the higher level monsters (Hollowpoint Arrow spam anyone?)
But more importantly, unless you are the kind of person who takes pleasure from the Farming play pattern it's a case of fun vs. time. We're all only here for a finite amount of time, spend your free time doing what you love with people you care about. If you love slicing up a plastic lion with hand feet; go wild.
You'll find attached to this the full file for the Resource Farming image, plus the supplementary repost of the early game hunt teams that utilise this kind of playstyle.
Note: As always these visual guides are released publicly for all to use; feel free to share them with others, I just ask you point them in the direction of this patreon if they find them useful. I can only keep doing this with the support of you kind patrons.
Comments
Ophir Gonen
Great idea for a post, thank you! Can't wait for more analysis on AT:O
a warm, awful feeling
thanks as always!!
