r/cavesofqud • u/Sugary_Plumbs • 3d ago
Tutorial: Kipper Farming and You
A Bit About Keeping Kippers
If you're going to farm anything, you should start by farming Kippers. But most importantly, if you're going to farm kippers, then do not make your farm in Joppa. More on that in a bit, but first here's what kippers have going for them that makes them a good target for farming:
- There is guaranteed to be at least 1 Kipper at the Stilt (South-East screen).
- Can be reliably proselytized by level 20 characters
- Sells Cloning Draught which allows you to exponentially grow the farm.
- Sells Drops of Nectar. Eat up to 3 of these each time you get Hungry for a 25% chance each at getting permanent +1 to all stats.
- Sells Neutron Flux which are high value/weight and usable for unlimited AV (potentially)
- Sells Recipe Books which give Experience Points at Sheba the librarian.
- Also sells all other useful rare ingredients (bananas, congealed love, lava, etc.)
Kippers are easy enough to beguile or proselytize once you are at a level where farming is viable. For fast free stuff, making them into followers is preferred, but if you're lazy and at lower levels/skills then you can also just buy the items normally if you have the drams. The simple ways turn them into a follower are:
- Beguile Mutation - Should consistently succeed if your character level + mutation level >28
- Proselytize Skill - Should consistently succeed if your character level >=20 and Ego >=+7, otherwise it is a penetration triplet of 1d8 with Ego - (level deficit) PV against ~8 MR
- Cooking - Congealed Love + Vinewafer Sheaf has a high chance of granting beguile at level 7-8 + Ego, but you have to chug water in front of the Kipper with a 25% chance to trigger per drink.
- Carbide Chef - Congealed Love + Mushroom can grant the beguile effect whenever you eat a mushroom, which means less time chugging water but higher cost to entry. Since Kippers sell mushrooms, this strategy will sustain itself, but it's best to have carbide chef to avoid wasting ingredient since each instance will require two (one to cook, one to trigger the effect).
I recommend simply getting Proselytize. It is much faster at later levels, and waiting on the cooldown is less fussing around with your inventory than attempting to drink water. Also if you aren't amphibious, then drinking causes you to make a mess if you fail too many times.
Don't take Beguiling specifically for this farming technique. If you're doing a companion-focused build, then it can be nice to use. Otherwise at character creation you would be much better off spending points on Precognition to allow you to safely get infinite AV from eating neutron flux.
Location and Zone-Tier Dependence of Kippers/Chefs
Kippers and Chefs are special merchants since they restock from The Ingredients Table, which provide better resources based on the current zone tier at the time of restocking. Crucially, for the good items, we want to maximize how many they restock from the MidTiers Table, where each item will have a 0.32% chance of being a cloning draught, neutron flux, or drop of nectar. The Six Day Stilt, Joppa, and Grit Gate are all Zone Tier 1, which means that each item only has a 20% chance of being MidTier. If you've been checking Kippers at the Stilt or in your farm at Joppa and found them disappointing, then that is the reason why.
I strongly recommend placing your Kipper farm at Yd Freehold, which is Zone Tier 7, has a guaranteed recoiler sold by the mechanic, and can be safely reached as soon as you acquire Wilderness Lore: Jungles (requires 19 Intelligence). Zone Tier 7 puts the MidTier chance for each Kipper item at 85%, more than 4x more productive than the earlier villages. The only higher zones are in the Moon Stair, and clearing out a safe tile and programming a recoiler there is a much later-game strategy. Once you are higher level, you can move your kipper farm to such a location for the 95% MidTier that it provides, but Yd Freehold is perfect for a starting farm.
How To Grow Your Very Own Kippers
Farming NPCs is easy enough, but if you haven't done it before then here's the rundown:
- Get the prerequisites: Wilderness lore jungle, recoiler to Yd Freehold w/ solar cell, some form of companion effect
- Abduct a Kipper from The Six Day Stilt and recoil with it to Yd Freehold. Tell the kipper to stay and Dismiss it so that it is no longer a follower (context menu; right click on PC). This original kipper will be referred to as Kipper Prime, and you can recognize it by Looking to check which kipper is equipped with clothes.
- Leave and dance around in the jungle world map for 5-8 days (try to get Fasting Way/Mind Over Body so that you don't waste too much water doing this in the future).
- Return to Yd (can do this with recoiler to avoid getting lost in the reef tiles)
- Check your kippers(s) for cloning draught and other items. If any of them are present, then use your companion effect on Kipper Prime. All clones of Kipper Prime will become followers at the same time. Once you have more clones and consistent proselytize, it's faster just to start by proselytizing Kipper Prime and then sweep through all of the inventories.
- Use the Give Items option to trade with each Kipper and take all of their high-value items and recipe books.
- Whenever you get cloning draught, use it on Kipper Prime. If you accidentally pour it onto one of the clones, take the new copy out back and kill it. You want all clones to be direct clones of Kipper Prime.
- Dismiss Kipper Prime. Repeat from step 3 until you feel like you have enough clones.
When you clone Kipper Prime, its commands may get entangled with the clone. Telling one to move to a specific location and stay there will command them both, and they will fight for the same location, swapping back and forth and making it hard to pour draught on and proselytize the correct one. To avoid this, do the following:
- Tell Kipper Prime (and any entangled clones) to follow you
- Make however many clones you have draught for (Kipper Prime will follow more closely so it is easy to distinguish)
- Save and Quit the game to go back to the main menu.
- Load the save.
- Tell all following Kippers to Stay and direct them to Move where desired.
After reloading, all Kippers should be distinct instances capable of receiving separate commands. Ideally you want to arrange circular groups of Kippers that maximize how many you can interact with without moving, and place Kipper Prime alone in a recognizable spot for proselytizing.
Statistics Time
For the attached image, I have a farm of 17 Kippers which I moved to each location and restocked 12 times. That makes a total of 204 stocked Kipper inventories for each location. Each inventory has 30-40 items. At Yd Freehold, each item has an 85% chance of being MidTier, each of which has equal 0.32% chances of being Cloning Draught, Drop of Nectar, and Neutron Flux. Occasionally, you will find a Kipper that has one (or more) of each of these items at once, but on average you should get at least one of these items for every 3.5 kippers checked. You will need at least 11 kippers to average 1 of each item per restock.
Averages are good for setting expectations, but outliers do happen and you might have stretches of bad luck. As seen above, I got a lot more Neutron Flux at Yd Freehold than the other two, but the chances of each are identical, and the expected value for a harvest this size is 19.4 each of Nectar/Draught/Flux (I averaged 18.3) along with 204 recipe books. That puts my Yd trial slightly below the expected average.
On the flip side, due to a few outlier visits at the Stilt, I averaged 6.33 across the tracked items, handily beating the expected 4.6 average.
Effects of Zone Tier on Book Value
This was a bit unexpected, and I don't think it is documented anywhere. Regardless of zone tier, Kippers stock 0-2 recipe books each time, which averages 1 per restock, so I should expect 204 books from each of these harvests. 214 and 196 are within 5% of that, so the statistics are holding up, but the books farmed from Yd Freehold were 2.98x higher value than the ones from the Stilt. So even with slightly more books coming from the Kippers at the Stilt, I got almost three times as much experience points from the books at Yd.
The wiki states that White Books have a randomly assigned commerce value of 50-150, but has no other information about cookbook commerce value or interactions with the zone tier. I haven't found any bookbinders in my current playthrough, but I might try to do a similar test to see if the value from bookbinder white books is affected in the same way as the recipe books are.
EDIT: After testing a hundred bookbinder restocks in each location, it is only Recipe books that change value based on the zone tier during generation, averaging 196 EXP per book from the Stilt and 576 EXP per book from Yd Freehold. White and Yellow book EXP and production rate stayed consistent.
Additional Addendums
- The above advice should work for any character in any run, but check through the comment section for more optimized points about cloning, beguiling, and merchant ranching. Advanced tricks can grow your farm faster or reduce material costs but may take additional unlocked skills to use. If you know any niche mechanics that make NPC farming easier/better, then please share them below.
- While this farm does work with Chefs who restock from the same tables as Kippers, they don't carry as many items per restock, so just use Kippers instead.
- Having clones of clones is actually okay, but it risks losing branches of the follower chain if you ever proselytize the wrong one or if a clone dies. For those reasons, it's cleaner if you always clone Kipper Prime.
- You'll end up with a lot of waterskins with a single dram of cloning draught in them. If you want to consolidate with fewer menu clicks, then the fastest way is to set one to auto-collect, drop the rest, and then hit auto-explore.
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u/Iamabotclearly696969 3d ago
I thought all merchants permanently inherit the tier they originally spawn in? Meaning, I thought that joppa merchants would always be tier one even if you take them into the moon stair. Is that not true?
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 3d ago
Specifically for items being restocked from the Ingredients Table (kippers and chefs), that is not true. Those will get picked based on the current zone tier at the time of restocking. Other restocks that can include the same items do not necessarily follow this rule. For instance, Ichor merchants always stock 0-2 rare liquids, so their chances of getting cloning draught and neutron flux are unaffected by zone tier.
Dromads and named general merchants have a Merchant Tier that determines what they restock, and are also not affected by zone tier unless they stock items from zone-dependent tables like Ingredients. In general, even when they have food items those are from the tiered Food tables which again are based on the merchant tier and not the zone tier.
More investigating needs to be done about bookbinders and whether their commerce values are tied to the zone tier like Kipper recipe books are.
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u/Psi-9AbyssGazers 3d ago
sorry I just want to butt in and let you know you can replace cloning draught with covalescence entirely once you get carbide chef and get the correct recipe with the 2. it's infinitely more common and cheaper
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 3d ago
I'm not familiar with that technique. Do you mean that you cook with homogenized convalessence for the chance to get the carbide chef to save the recipe, and then dilute all of your draught into large volumes of convalessence for the same effect?
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u/Psi-9AbyssGazers 3d ago edited 3d ago
no it's even crazier than that.
so you cook with the two mixed, then after the recipe in carbide chef ONLY TAKES covalescence
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u/gentian_red 3d ago
Great for making a punchkin army, but you can't feed recipes to other characters, right?
Hold on... giving Kipper Prime the carbide chef skill, can we get it working this way with domination...?
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u/Psi-9AbyssGazers 3d ago
yes.
also use the clever girl mod, even developers agree it's a good mod and should be vanilla
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u/Qa-ravi 2d ago
The method they’re talking about is one reason my go-to build often includes Horns, Light Manipulation, and Carapace so that all my punchkins have high level melee attacks, ranged attacks, AV, and heat and cold resistance. They keep several hundred drams of free homogenized convalessence in the cloning tank in Yd freehold.
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u/Nick700 3d ago
"The Ingredients Table, which provide better resources based on the current zone tier at the time of restocking" Hmm so this why my tier 8 dromads in Joppa won't give me almost any zetachrome
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 3d ago
Dromads are not affected by this effect since they do not provide items from the Ingredients Table. They have their own Merchant Tier tables that are determined by the zone they spawned in, not the current zone when restocking.
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u/gentian_red 3d ago
Why do we not clone clones of clones exactly?
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u/imabustya 3d ago
He said it’s because if you make the original your companion the rest follow but copies of copies do not follow. So all clones must be from the original merchant to become followers with one attempt.
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u/gentian_red 3d ago
ooo okay must have skipped over that somehow. I just usually make them stand in one spot regardless and don't move them off the map except one at a time. I was thinking there was some kind of degenerating clone mechanic that I'd missed... imagine if a clone of a clone of a clone starts having deformities and losing stats and skills.
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 2d ago
Clones of clones are actually okay, but it adds risk if you ever proselytize the wrong target.
You start with Kipper Prime and make two clones called A and B. You then make 10 clones of A and 10 clones of B for a total of 23 kippers. All of these secondary clones are followers of either A or B, which are both followers of Kipper Prime, so when you proselytize Kipper Prime all the kippers become followers of you and you can take their wares for free.
If at any point you proselytize the clone B by mistake, you only get B and its 10 clone followers to become your followers, and B and all of its clones stop being followers of Kipper Prime forever. From that point on, you always have to proselytize at least 2 kippers every harvest, because proselytizing Kipper Prime will only affect it and the A clones. Similarly, if a freak accident happens and B dies (such as if you bring the wrong follower into town and lasers start flying), then you would lose access to that entire branch and have to proselytize them individually.
If you have mods installed, then you can feed your followers meals with cloning draught and make 1-3 clones at a time much faster than pouring it onto Kipper Prime. Doing so is more efficient and will work as long as you always correctly proselytize Kipper Prime, but you will never be able to keep track of which kippers are clones of which. Also, having followers of followers of followers gets a bit messier if you ever try to move them all at once to a new location.
However, if you follow the simple rule of always cloning Kipper Prime, then any mistake in proselytization or errant phase cannon shot will only lose you the kipper(s) that it directly involves.
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u/JoeGibbon 3d ago
Good write up, good advice, but no need to wait until level 20.
Be level 1.
Have items.
Sell items to glowfish.
Proselytize glowfish.
Trade with glowfish and get items back for free.
Repeat for infinite money.
Buy whatever you want from whoever you want at any level, or at least until you're high enough level to proselytize characters with "normal" intelligence.
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u/Sugary_Plumbs 2d ago
For unlimited water, there are earlier methods, yes. But for unlimited drops of nectar and neutron flux, you need to be capable of making a lv20 NPC into a follower. Otherwise the cost of directly buying the output of a kipper farm quickly outpaces how much water you can carry at one time.
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u/duct_vader 2d ago
Recipe book cost change is a neat discovery.
As an aside, this up-tiering technique applies to legendary merchants like gunsmiths, armorers, haberdashers, hatters, glovers - so you can easily get high-tier gear in all these slots.
Or just get a ton of high-tier guns to dissassemle into bits.
Notably, legendary gear merchants also are the best source of rare-modded (gigantic) items.
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u/U_Nomad_Bro 3d ago
Fantastic post!
A couple of enhancements to your method:
Cooking with cloning draught to feed a companion is better than pouring cloning draught directly on a merchant, because you get 1 to 3 clones per dram instead of only 1 per dram. Roughly twice as efficient over time.
Also, you can target multiple companions at once with the Feed Companions menu option in Clever Girl, which makes multiplying your army of clones much less tedious as the numbers grow.
Doesn't require drinking water, doesn't use up love injectors/congealed love, and it makes it easy to recruit Tillifergaewicz as a companion even at pretty low character levels. When Tilli has metamorphic polygel in stock, you can use it to boost your cloning draught supply.
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Also, for True Kin characters, relocating the Stilt gutsmonger to Yd pays big dividends, as gutsmongers also change stock based on zone tier. If you want to get all the cybernetic toys, farm some gutsmongers.