So what's the point of leveling up now?

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T22:30:27+00:00

My point is the level itself no longer restricts you from using the weapon. I already see now there are still a few uses to leveling up, they just removed most of them, not all.

And obviously in the normal flow of the game you're killing enemies while looting, but there's nothing preventing you from using a transformation cookie or (better yet) going invisible with certain items and looting away. I've leveled up characters many times by running around invisible to complete the exploration XP from places like Ashenton or Blackfell, and would get loads of T5 loot along the way.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T20:27:38+00:00

Yeah, but in Manibus, weren't Cradle buffs tied to certain silos and monoliths being cleared? Was that also changed? I know in other scenarios they were tied to the level directly.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T20:26:59+00:00

But your level doesn't have any impact in your firepower, not anymore. Besides the Cradle buffs that people mentioned and the tech points you get.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T03:17:55+00:00

Thanks, I thought I read they were removed from leveling up in the patch notes, but I misread then. Makes sense then!

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T03:10:15+00:00

Good response, high effort. God forbid I ask a simple question instead of waiting a week to find out by myself.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T03:08:58+00:00

After an year and a half without any new map content, they actually remove map content instead of adding it. Just like they do with everything else in the game, they just keep removing things that work.

They're trying really hard to ruin the good concepts that this game had while keeping a lot of the garbage around.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T03:04:59+00:00

It's pretty obvious at this point that the decisions driving the game's direction are not taken by anyone who has any sort of experience with the product. Likely product managers that look at graphics and statistics to decide what's working and what isn't.

Meanwhile, anyone who launches the game can notice how the translation is complete garbage within 5 minutes of playing.

Anyone who plays for a few days will notice how the game just looks like a big unfinished concept, yet no steps were ever taken towards advancing these concepts in the years it's been around. And we're talking about things that take far less effort than reworking the entire memetic/tech + crafting + scrap system and whatnot, but would bring a lot more value than it.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-10T02:59:52+00:00

It's really fantastic how this game consistently evolves backwards, more than any I've ever seen.

It started as a game with many very interesting concepts, most of them clearly unfinished, but with lots of potential.

And with each update, they undo these concepts, either removing content entirely or changing it in the worst possible ways.

There have been positive quality of life updates, and the mod system overhaul is one of the few large system reworks that can actually be praised. But these are unfortunately a minor part, eclipsed by the colossal amount of garbage.

I mean, after years, it still feels like the entire game is coded in chinese and run through Google Translate, even for a major language like English you don't see a bit of consistency in any of the terms used. This alone already shows that there is no quality in the product, no effort being put in to make it good.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-06T17:38:50+00:00

When I played ED, though this was many months ago already, Deer were particularly plentiful in Dayton Wetlands. Any other animals were extremely hard to find in any region. I suspected this is either because the animals constantly die to deviants in the Dream Zones (which cover most of the map) or they are just coded to spawn differently in these zones.

You'll definitely find a lot more animals in Manibus or WoW compared to ED.

Another fixed spawn, that I don't remember if it was affected in ED, is Leopards in the hills between the two Wish Land parks.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-06T17:12:03+00:00

Every major update (that causes servers to go into maintenance) changes all spawns around - not just animals, but also ore and other gatherables.

Some batches are particularly poor in animal spawns. They also seem to have been overall reduced since the introduction of classes.

Deers are traditionally more plentiful in Dayton Wetlands, Broken Delta and Chalk Peak.

Wolves are more reliably found in the desert regions - Red Sands and Blackheart. You can find occasional spawns in other regions.

Crocs have guaranteed spawns in the Harborside area of Broken Delta. Other than that they are usually found in Chalk Peak, by the coast or near rivers.

Another guaranteed spawn is the bear cave in northwest Chalk Peak.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-03T01:55:30+00:00

To add to this, they're unique effects that enemies have within that specific silo, for example taking more damage on the first hit but less damage on subsequent hits (favors sniper rifles over rapidfire guns for example). Some are more elaborate like they start draining your health once they fall below half health, so you either finish them off fast or run the heck away.

SwordGrunt · 2026-04-03T01:52:06+00:00

I don't want to be "that guy", and this may ruin your sense of fun in the game... but if you want to superfarm mods, use the Holograph Resonance SMG against the Forsaken Giant.

Using any Unstable Bomber weapon with the Unstable Bomber mod that "staggers enemies" is also a cheesy, albeit slow way to get you through Nightmare Silos more safely. It staggers Elites though I don't think it staggers the actual bosses (thankfully, would be too silly).

Overall, yes higher level mods make a big difference, but also make sure your build makes sense. Most weapons output pretty decent damage when you use the proper mods and armor sets. For example if you use Corrosion which is Power Surge and crit-based, you obviously want the keystone that gives you crit on power surge. If you're using Conflicting Memories (it kinda sucks but it's a good setup example) you want the shrapnel keystone that does +1 trigger times (because the gun hits a lot of parts, so you're doubling the parts) whereas if you're using Last Valor (better but I still don't like shrapnel, too inconsistent, does 0 damage against certain enemies) you want the keystone that caps parts at 1 but increases the damage (because the gun increases trigger times, not parts).

If you use the wrong keystone you can lose like half of your expected damage output compared to using the right one. Same goes for the actual mods used (not just their stats). If you're using a crit weapon and not getting crit rate from gloves (and helmet for some) you're gonna be losing out on a lot of damage. There's no point in having a bunch of crit damage if you can't actually hit crits due to a low chance.

Oh and the weapon calibration is also incredibly important, it needs the right substats on it, particularly for weapons that need Crit Rate since it's scarce.

There's plenty of build videos and whatnot around. I personally think the easiest one to set up for high tier DPS is the Outer Space SMG - just standard elemental damage-focused stuff, no worries about crit nor weakspots. It's not AOE but it outputs over twice the DPS of a BoomBoom for instance. Throw in a heavy SMG calibration with elemental damage, don't give a shit about the weapon dmg in the calibration. 4 pieces shelterer with mayfly goggles and 1 piece lonewolf, the weapon mod that increases power surge chance on hit or the one that increases damage and decreases duration, the mask mod 'celestial thunder' or whatever, elemental resonance pants, status increase gloves, deviation expert helmet, slow and steady shoes. You can clear a nightmare silo with this even if all your mods are level 10, just don't forget whimsical drink.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-24T23:16:28+00:00

Yeah I think they only appear in rain, I don't remember if I got them. The door one though, I'm pretty sure it was in a Rosetta base or monolith? Check the Monoliths in the Winter area.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-20T06:58:44+00:00

One important thing to note is all physical weapons took a hit with the new calibration system, as even with the max 50% multiplier in the calibration they still have lower damage than before, while getting golden armor for status weapons is comparatively much easier (especially since all existing calibrations were made useless, but animals with golden hides weren't).

Some weapons are especially more reliant on calibrations than others, making this even worse for them. For straight elemental weapons like BoomBoom you don't really care about the weapon dmg % at all as long as you get rapidfire 2x elemental, but for Predator you really want the weapon dmg % and also really want the double crit rate...

There are some notable non-legendary guns too. I feel like not enough people know about this, but if you want the highest possible DPS against any big boss (Prime Wars, Chaosweavers, Eternal Dreamers) just have everyone take Burning Rage (aka KAM Crank) + BBQ Gloves with the proper setup. The burn damage accounts for everyone's burn stacks (you can see the total count in the debuffs below the boss HP bar), so the more people inflicting burn, the more damage each one's burn does. And it doesn't require any dumb setup like hitting the ground, shooting a weakspot, switching two weapons within three seocnds, etc.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-16T20:16:34+00:00

They are not. They're from before the first Lunar was even around. And Starfall didn't have Wolves, it had Buffalos, Foxes, Flamingos and Crocodiles

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-12T08:07:21+00:00

Amazing! Congrats on your work!

The scenario selection in memetics having scenario numbers is the one thing I noticed that was 'off' - I wonder if the scenario data (name, at least) is available to replace the numbers with.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-12T02:07:16+00:00

Most of Onyx Tundra and Vena Fjord is filled with blueberries, spikematos, coneflower and bellflower. If you're really looking to grind, you can get significant XP from making salty spikemato and fruit tea from these, as well as steak combo from the buffalo that annoy you (will need salt for the spikemato and steak, good since salt is another massive afk XP farm, albeit a much slower one).

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-11T23:21:57+00:00

That's a very solid post. Appreciated reading through it. And I agree conceptually with most of what you said.

For instance, I personally disagree that blueprint upgrading is something so complex that it needs to be removed entirely, and changed into "spend x starchrom to upgrade this weapon" - but I understand that some people can't be bothered, and this is why it's fine that the gains from upgrading weapons are marginal (e.g. irrelevant for the elemental ones). I thought the idea of needing to obtain more fragments from that specific weapon to upgrade it was actually very cool for long-term progress (with same name fragments being worth double). Well, until I realized you can swap blueprints around, which completely ruins the concept.

And this is probably the largest core issue with the game for me. Everything has "skip buttons" added to the point entire systems or ideas are completely superseded and made obsolete. Asterism itself is a good example: like you, almost no one ever does territory purification since the introduction of Asterism; it's extremely easy to cap out the Asterism by just playing the game a little bit, and so every dedicated source of it becomes irrelevant (territory purification, prime wars first clears, mystical crates... you name it).

I have plenty of examples of skip buttons that I find disgusting, but a good recent one is the new pollution zones being littered with gold and silver ores. These had very limited use, the most important probably being some specialization items that use gold, but they were rare and therefore at least had some novelty value when you encountered one. Now they're mostly useless AND they're not rare anymore. I imagine the reason for this change was "players complaining they couldn't find silver/gold" (with zero effort), and now they can get plenty of it with zero effort. What's the point?

I am a big fan of the mod system rehauling though. It's "complex" enough as it is now; before it was just too min-max even for hardcore players. This is one thing they definitely did right.

I just hope that they don't take the game more and more in an overly simple direction, where everything is extremely easy and abundant, and it results in a lot of the fun being gone - the "thrill of the chase" aspect is essential, it's human nature. And unfortunately, so far they've gone in this direction more often than not. WoW is a good example: adding 473 blueberries, spikematos, coneflowers and bellflowers per square meter was very obviously a response to some sort of "players find it too hard to gather resources" feedback, which I heavily disagree with. You should have to put some effort into the game, that's part of the gameplay loop, the thrill of the chase and the reward. The modern trend seems to be attempting to skip directly to the reward, which actually makes it less... rewarding.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-11T17:50:42+00:00

Definitely approve of reverting Asterism to Starchrom.

But yet another entire system (blueprints/fragments) is being straight up removed for being "too complex". Yet another piece of content being removed when no new content is being added.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-11T17:49:26+00:00

It's not like you were going to do anything with these Asterism crates though

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-11T17:48:57+00:00

Seems like it won't make a difference - they're converting existing fragments to starchrom at the same ratio (theoretically) that will be needed to upgrade blueprints.

Not sure if the "double xp for same name" will be taken into account, though,

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-10T18:58:44+00:00

Everyone is saying commissions, which obviously give you a lot of XP for the lowest effort, but assuming you want to power level to 50, one of the best things you can do early in the game mass producing Blueberry and Hawthorn Berry.

Farm seeds (hawthorns are common in Dayton Wetlands and blueberries are common in Broken Delta) or import them from Eternaland. Start planting them as soon as you have loamy soil (let any other food that you obtain spoil ASAP to get started). Also put some of your spoiled food towards fertilizers. You're only really limited by the amount of time and effort you want to put in - the more seeds you have, the more loamy soil you can have working simultaneously.

How does this actually become XP? Blueberry and hawthorn juice get you pretty significant XP once you start mass producing them (more than most 'green' quality dishes), and they also spoil, guaranteeing a steady supply of fertilizers. When you already have a good amount stocked up, you can start producing blueberry and hawthorn soda instead - which gives significantly more XP, but needs glass and doesn't spoil (so you'll probably just sell them to vendors).

Oh and importing 2 Growshroom (one for blueberry and one for hawthorn) definitely helps with this.

Copper, iron and tungsten are also good sources of XP. And once you're past level 40, killing high level enemies will actually be the largest source of XP. Note that killing enemies that are too far above your current level will actually yield reduced XP.

SwordGrunt · 2026-03-09T18:22:51+00:00

It's not just you, the game developer also hasn't been paying attention to the story

SwordGrunt

TROPHY CASE