Guide to an early MacGuffin strategy (WIP)

[pac230]

Note: This is an in-development guide that is spoileriffic throughout, naming Titans, etc. YMMV, and your contribution is welcomed.

You just killed Walderp, probably the most annoying Titan you've faced so far. He's dropped some decent gear but ... where's the new tab every Titan so far has opened up? Where's the new feature?

I am sure many players have been through that experience. Sure enough, Walderp does open up a new feature, but it is buried away inside the Inventory: MacGuffins. However, just because it doesn't have a tab of its own, does that mean it has less impact on the game than earlier features?


When looking online, I have been surprised to find little well-developed guidance on getting the best out of MacGuffins. The piece of advice I saw most frequently is that MacGuffins do not matter until the first Titans of Evil difficulty, so forget about it. This might be true, but there must still be ways of making the most of them between now and then (the first defeat of Walderp is really only around the middle of Normal. Early middle, if anything, so there is loads of time to make a solid start on them).

After all, when we first unlock NGUs, even the cheapest ones take hours, others days or even years -- they've come a long way since. When we unlocked the Tree, we only had a single seed. When we unlocked Diggers, we barely had the GPS to run a single one. Even if the starting point for MacGuffins looks bleak, we know from experience that it will be possible to progress it to make major contributions. The aim of this guide is to figure out how to do that sooner, so that MacGuffins are making a significant impact before the end of Normal difficulty, to reduce its late grind, and providing more value still by the start of Evil difficulty, easing the switch-over to it.


Step One -- Review the tools at our disposal

The promise of MacGuffins is that they will enable you to stack up large and permanent bonuses to almost every stat in the game.

The reality of early MacGuffins is that you start out with one MacGuffin slot and nothing to put in it. When you do get one, it is Level 0, and the tooltip will tell you what a meagre boost it will give you upon rebirth. At least it is a free, permanent passive bonus, but getting something worthwhile out of this feature is going to take some work.

Initially, all we can do to gain MacGuffins is grind through zones. We need 1000 uninterrupted kills in a zone to get a Lvl 0 fragment.

This may sound like a lot, but by now a good number of sources of Respawn bonuses are available. These can be checked on the Stats page and at this stage come from: (i) the Clock set; (ii) NGU Respawn (Energy); and (iii) the Stapler (Jake); Ring of Greed & Ring of Might (UUG); and the Trible Flubber (built from a secret Tutorial zone drop). You may already have been using them to boost your effective PP output in the ITOPOD, or to grind for gold when you can't use the Time Machine.

Combined, these bonuses can bring monster respawn time in Adventure under 2 seconds. In zones where you can one-shot the enemies (which should be every zone up to and including Mega Lands), this means that you can get 1000 kills in a little over 30 mins (I am going to round to 30 mins for simplicity).

To get the best MacGuffin output per rebirth per slot, we want fragments of at least level 100. (They can exceed Lvl 100 and do continue to improve after that, but more slowly.) Exchanging 30 minutes of ITOPOD time for 1 fragment (at Level 0) seems fine. Sacrificing 50 hours (3000 minutes) of ITOPOD time (or time in the highest zones we can farm effectively) to level one to 100 is another matter. Besides, in time we will want a lot more than a single Lvl 100 fragment.


So the next step is to review the tools we have available for improving our MacGuffin drops and fragments.

First there are some perks (including only Normal difficulty ones here):

* (65) Improved MacGuffin Drops I -- Improve the base level of all Macguffin drops by 1! (150 PP)
-- This is pretty expensive, and while it would do a lot to cut down our farming time, 25 hours for a Lvl 100 fragment is still too slow. Effective once it's affordable though, in combination with other perks, and it makes fragment drops susceptible to the Gaudy Set and Loot Goblin effects.

* (66) A MacGuffin Slot! (250 PP)
-- Costly, but if we had two Lvl 100 fragments, this would be a very reasonable price. However, we don't, so for now this is no use.

* (68) MacGuffin ITOPOD Drops! -- MacGuffin drops in the ITOPOD: every 5000 kills, a random Macguffin. (50 PP)
-- This is a more affordable price, and allows us to maintain a MacGuffin income while still ITOPODing. However, the problem is that the MacGuffin drops are a random selection. Because we have limited MacGuffin slots, one high-level MacGuffin fragment is worth far more than ten low-level ones. This perk is a good long-term economical measure for MacGuffin growth, but it doesn't offer us much immediate return.

* (72) Blood Macguffin α Spell! -- Unlocks the Blood MacGuffin α Spell, which can raise the level of a random equipped MacGuffin! (100 PP)
-- Now we are talking! In this case, we don't need to worry about the word 'random': for now, we can only equip one MacGuffin anyway and, because which MacGuffins are equipped only matters when you rebirth, when we have more we can unequip all MacGuffins except the one we want to hit before casting the spell.

Checking the spell's details on the wiki, we can see that it requires a minimum of 1 billion blood, and works on a log10 scale. This means that every time we put 10x as much blood in, we get +1 level to the fragment. 1 billion = +1 level. 10 billion = +2 levels. 100 billion = +3 levels. It can be cast once a day. This makes it quite easy to calculate how much it could contribute towards our MacGuffin growth.

At the moment, with some effort, I can certainly produce Blood in the tens of billions. With some grinding that could be 100. Even more once I have the Blood Digger -- and we should experience plenty of general growth before we saved up that many Perk Points. However, that still only converts to 3 or so MacGuffin levels. In the immediate term, this spell isn't going to provide that many levels, and can only be used once per day anyway.

Even so, for targeted MacGuffin growth, the Blood spell looks like our best perk option. However, all these perks share the problem of competing with powerful perks that can strongly impact features that we've already unlocked, including: Generic Energy/Magic; Boosted Boosts; Double Training; 5 O'Clock Shadow; gold boosts; seed boosts; first harvest ... You get the idea.

Besides, Perk Point income is still very low: in my file, just after the first Walderp kill I had earned a total of 127 PP to date. NGU PP is still unaffordable, and I haven't quite unlocked the PP Digger yet. Pushing up to new record-high zones is still the main source of PP income (69 of the 127 so far). So none of the PP options are 100% convincing to me, and I have no way of affording them yet anyway.


So let's look around for other ways of improving the early MacGuffin situation without expending Perk Points.

Under the EXP menu, we can buy more MacGuffin slots, but we already went over why those won't be useful yet. And besides, those prices ... My all-time EXP is just over 300,000 at the moment. I don't have millions. Nothing else here benefits MacGuffins directly.

In the Sellout Shop, we have more MacGuffin slots (see above, but note that the first two are discounted to 100K, after that going up to 225K for the rest). There is the Purple Heart -- once maxed out, this reduces the number of kills required for MacGuffin drops by 20%, applying to both zones and the ITOPOD (if you have the perk for the latter). This is a solid bonus, so consider getting this if you have the AP and space in Daycare. Then we have the MacGuffin Muffin consumables, but these help to increase the boost-on-rebirth from MacGuffins once you have some good ones, so they are no use to us yet.


All of this brings us to Yggdrasil and Fruit of MacGuffin α. This has the major advantage that it does not cost any premium currency like PP or AP. As long as we can raise the seeds and Magic Cap, this is already freely available.

Notably, its formula is not affected by the NGU-Ygg bonus, and if there are few other bonuses it may have problems with its output not increasing at low tiers (i.e. eating the T1 Fruit gives +1 level, but eating the T2 Fruit still also only gives +1 level, so you would have been better off eating the T1 Fruit twice). This means that, when we go for it, we will want to save up seeds to level it up a few tiers promptly, and make good use of the bonuses that do apply to it (like First Harvest) once we've got it.

(As a side-benefit, while the Fruit is expensive to unlock, it has a base seed output of 6. This is even better than Pomegranate's (5), so once unlocked it will give an excellent seed output in addition to its MacGuffin boosts.)

With those disclaimers, even the T1 Fruit offers better results than any of the other options we reviewed above. Assuming that we have to sleep and have other things to do with our time and ate, say, 10 T1 Alpha Fruits per day, that would be +10 levels to a MacGuffin. This is much more significant than the Blood spell, which would need to save up Quintillions of Blood for its once-a-day casting to get similar results.


Step Two -- The Plan

Having considered our options, pushing to unlock the first MacGuffin fruit looks like our best option. We will put the Blood spell on our to-buy list somewhere, but its output does not look that amazing in view of the very powerful other perks available for a similar price. Instead we will spend our PP on First Harvest (and perhaps seed bonuses, but these are much more expensive) in order to help produce enough seeds to unlock and upgrade the fruit and to boost its effect once we have it.

However, the elephant in the room is the Magic Cap problem. To activate the MacGuffin fruit we will need 500 Million Magic. I don't know about you, but I don't have that right now ... My base Magic Cap is 2.25 M, and with equipment I can stretch that up to about 10 M. That's a long way short. I need a cap 50x higher!

However, this is where the plan comes together.

In The Sky, we can now find the Magic Cap MacGuffin fragment. This is the first fragment we are going to put in our first MacGuffin slot, using it to build up Magic Cap so that we can afford to plant the MacGuffin Fruit. MacGuffins themselves will help to develop their own sustainability.

Fortunately, The Sky is far from the worst zone to farm. Its boosts are weak, but thanks to its rare drops, it is much better than some zones above it. While farming here, we can also get Looties and copies of Wandoos (if the 98 bonus isn't maxed out yet for you). Icarus will occasionally drop Poop. And if you have the patience for it, there are Forest Pendants too, of course. On top of that, you should see all these rare drops that much more often than the last time you were farming The Sky, with all the Drop Chance bonuses you've acquired since.

I would probably still rather be farming the ITOPOD (or Mega Lands or Beardverse for their rare drops and stronger boosts), but The Sky is far from the worst early zone to be stuck farming.

Once we've built up our Magic Cap in these ways, we won't need to keep farming zones for fragments, as we will be able to get just one and then boost it up with the Fruit.

In addition, we should not neglect other methods of boosting Magic Cap: if we haven't done so already, we should max out the Dragon Wings (a rare accessory from the Ancient Battlefield with a Magic Cap effect) and not throw away any other bits of gear that say Magic Cap. We can also spend PP and EXP on Magic Cap, of course. Walderp drops some good Magic Cap gear, so killing him often will also help.

In the mean time, we won't let this project disrupt our usual plans: we will go to other places in Adventure when we have reason to, except that we will check the kill counter in The Sky and try to avoid spoiling its progress; we will stick to our regular rebirth plan (whatever it may be for you lately), except again to check that we aren't interrupting our fragment farming near the 1000th kill.


Step Three??

The above is all theory-crafting so far. I've just taken out Walderp in my current file, so I will be looking to implement the plan and see how it goes! I have a lot of seeds and Magic Cap to build up to get the Fruit ASAP, but there are certainly also other aspects of the game that I don't want to neglect in the mean time.

Wish me luck!

[DRIFTER]

The reason guides tell you to ignore guffs early has to do with efficiency. If you enjoy doing this work, great, but in the long run they won't matter until you reach a sufficiently high level, have enough slots, and can regularly tap into bonuses to boost important ones. Such as adventure guff ... which you can't access until the evil mode titan. There's easier ways to progress right now so no need to devote too much energy to this if you want to get further, faster.

[pac230]

Originally posted by Hunting Achievements:

The reason guides tell you to ignore guffs early has to do with efficiency. If you enjoy doing this work, great, but in the long run they won't matter until you reach a sufficiently high level, have enough slots, and can regularly tap into bonuses to boost important ones. Such as adventure guff ... which you can't access until the evil mode titan. There's easier ways to progress right now so no need to devote too much energy to this if you want to get further, faster.

I already know that this appears to be the general consensus. I note that in the introduction. But is it correct? I don't think so, as MacGuffins are around for a very long time before that.

The purpose of the plan, as stated, is to get MacGuffins to a productive point sooner. I know all about the Adventure MacGuffin, but there are a lot of stats that can be boosted long before it comes on the scene, and it will be good to be ready to boost it up into full effect soon after it's reached. Once the MacGuffin boosting engine is up and running, we'll be able to do that with every new one we meet, in fact.

The plan of action doesn't involve devoting that much to it at all. Just mostly farming The Sky rather than Beardverse, Mega Lands or the ITOPOD at a time when The Sky (Looty, Wandoos, Poop) is still not that bad to grind, I can't one-shot the Beardverse, and I still have very few bonuses to PP gain.

[pac230]

Update: All is going well so far. The Magic Cap Fragment is at Level 31. My total multiplier is almost *gasp* half of 1%!

Farming The Sky at this stage has not been a major hardship. The Poop drops are actually really valuable at this stage (and I need to build up my seed production as well as my Magic Cap). I still don't have the PP Digger, and NGU-PP is now at 15 mins per level, so the ITOPOD is not that attractive (especially when it is not yet upgraded to drop Poop, McGuffins, etc). If I wasn't farming The Sky, I would probably be farming the Mega Lands/Beardverse for stronger boosts and the Beardverse's rare drops. Something I am missing out on from there is Ascended Forest Pendant drops, building towards the A3FP. However, I am still developing my loot accessories a little by building up Sir Looty. (I didn't have the patience for Forest Pendant spam.)

This is still a long project with quite a way to go. I am still investing seeds and haven't begun to save them up yet. I am currently putting XP into Energy in order to unlock the No-NGU Challenges, and I may also do the first Laser Sword Challenge ahead of my next regular Challenge dive. By the time I do that, the Fragment should be over Level 40, and may actually begin to stack up a noticeable Magic Cap bonus over the Challenge rebirths.

[pac230]

Update: Coming back up after doing some Challenges, and the Magic Cap Fragment is now at Lvl 64 and has already provided over 4% bonus. Magic Cap itself is around 30M and can be pushed a bit higher with gear.

I am saving up seeds and, after a few more purchases (Beard Slot), EXP and PP will start to be turned towards Magic Cap now.


Edit: At this point (Magic Cap Fragment Lvl 74), I am splitting my Adventure time during rebirths between The Sky, ITOPOD, Mega Lands (for boost drops for Candy Cane) and Beardverse, doing The Sky at the start when I don't yet have Titan base gold for GPS and BEARd hasn't built up yet.

For MacGuffins, Lvl 100 is a very arbitrary place to stop, as growth does still continue at a reasonable (for a while) rate afterwards, so I'd be content to stop here and focus on Beardverse, if it weren't for the fact that farming that effectively would mean giving up the Candy Cane's special bonuses. It is very nice to know that I'll never need to farm another MacGuffin fragment to such a high level again!

[pac230]

Update: Bought a 2nd MacGuffin slot for the Drop Chance MacGuffin (Lvl 10). I hadn't been deliberately farming it, just picking it up while grinding Beardverse anyway. Magic Cap fragment is at Level 86, but I'm not farming it any more as I've maxed out Wandoos '98, reducing the attraction of farming The Sky, and I've also unlocked the PP Digger (and can one/two-shot the Beardverse).

The Alpha MacGuffin Fruit is still a way off -- I have 50 M Magic Cap without trying now, so the main problem is certainly seeds. Also, Fruit of Numbers (once unlocked) and Fruit of Rage are so much cheaper in seed terms that it makes no sense to skip them. So I need a lot of seeds -- First Harvest bonuses and rebirth times that line up with my fruit are the most efficient option here, I think.

[pac230]

On my way to kill The Beast at the moment ...

Magic Cap Fragment is now giving 21%+, and there are small bonuses developing for Drop and Gold too. The Magic Cap target (500 M) is well within striking distance now, and there's a cheap early Quirk that will help. Seeds are still the bigger problem, as I am still working on getting my Fruit of Rage (now T3) up to the level of most of my other fruit (T5) before starting on the MacGuffin Fruit. But I have 3 First Harvest bonuses that are helping with that.

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by pac230:

On my way to kill The Beast at the moment ...

Magic Cap Fragment is now giving 21%+, and there are small bonuses developing for Drop and Gold too. The Magic Cap target (500 M) is well within striking distance now, and there's a cheap early Quirk that will help. Seeds are still the bigger problem, as I am still working on getting my Fruit of Rage (now T3) up to the level of most of my other fruit (T5) before starting on the MacGuffin Fruit. But I have 3 First Harvest bonuses that are helping with that.

Just curious have you been doing a lot of rebirths to get your macguffin bonuses? 21% from magic magguffins is a huge bonus for where you're at. For comparison I'm midway through Evil and my magic cap bonus is +61%.

[pac230]

Originally posted by quaixor:

Just curious have you been doing a lot of rebirths to get your macguffin bonuses? 21% from magic magguffins is a huge bonus for where you're at. For comparison I'm midway through Evil and my magic cap bonus is +61%.

No, not at all.

I still only have 3 MacGuffin slots, and none of the MacGuffins in them are even at Level 100 yet (86, 45 and 16), so it wouldn't make any sense at all to change my rebirth system to boost MacGuffin effects.

My rebirths are usually 5 hours (most of my fruit are T5, with Fruit of Rage up to T4 now), with rebirths of up to 24 hours when I'm stretching to get a first new Titan kill and, of course, much shorter ones when I'm doing Challenges and rebuilding from them. Before and during doing a series of Challenges, I've also done some 3 minute rebirths to burn Number for EXP. My total number of rebirths is 648.

The Magic Cap bonus is quite large now, yes -- but that's because of deliberate farming of The Sky as detailed in the posts. My other bonuses are only 5% Drop Chance, 4% Gold and 1% Energy Cap.

[pac230]

I've already reached one conclusion, which is that the whole process of getting the Magic Cap Fragment going ... was not necessary. The main barrier to getting MacGuffin Alpha Fruit up and running is very much more seeds than Magic Cap. As I'm now acquiring v1 Beast items, Magic Cap is becoming much easier to raise, and it would not be difficult to get it to 500M even without the 25% bonus I've got from the fragment.

In retrospect, it would have been better to spend more time in ITOPOD and in Beardverse for the better boosts and the Drop Chance fragment.


(Edit: Still, at least maybe it will get me Watermelon sooner.)

[pac230]

I've now got Fruit of Rage to T5 and have almost enough seeds to unlock Fruit of MacGuffin Alpha! I am comfortably over 500,000 Magic Cap all the time now.

However, I am not sure if I want the hassle of a T1 fruit, so I may wait until I have saved up for T2 before getting it.


I have much better PP income now, enough that the Blood MacGuffin spell is looking feasible. By now, I can easily make 10 Trillion Blood for it (+6 levels) and with a bit of saving up 100 Trillion (+7). (In addition, having the spell would create incentive to get more gold bonuses, as gold has lost a lot of priority now that all Diggers are unlocked and the global digger bonus is soft-capped.)

I am going to finish getting all the Generic E/M Perks first, as well as one or two other purchases, but then I will start saving up.


After another round of challenges (including plenty of 30-minute rebirths), MacGuffin Magic Cap bonus is at 34%, Drop Chance 10%, Gold Drop 16%.

[pac230]

Who was I kidding? I love micro. T1 MacGuffin Alpha is actually really good, because its effect rounds up to a minimum of 1 Level, even when its calculation would be below that. 1 MacGuffin level per hour (when you're online) can't be matched any other way at this point (without major sacrifices in terms of where you're farming, that is). Plus, my Magic Cap is so high that I don't have to fiddle with item sets to make the activation cost.

I am using the fruit to boost the Drop Chance MacGuffin, which is already up to 66. After it gets to 100, I will start work on the basic Cap/Power/Bars MacGuffins, starting with Energy Cap, I think. At this point, it will be a matter of swapping out MacGuffins, but buying the first PP slot is not out of reach now.

After some Challenges: Magic Cap 40%, Drop Chance 15%, Gold Drop 26%.

[pac230]

Now with T2 MacGuffin Alpha Fruit, I am no longer at the mercy of the game in terms of which zone happens to drop which MacGuffin. Up to this point I have been equipping Magic Cap, Drop Chance and Gold Drop MacGuffins, because those were the ones that happened to be dropped by the zones worth farming.

But now I can generate about 1 MacGuffin Level per hour, increasing as I tier up the Fruit, and assign them wherever I want by only having one MacGuffin equipped. (Always make sure to re-equip all your MacGuffins before rebirthing!!)

Drop Chance MacGuffin is surely the most important one available at this point, and mine is now Level 99. Most of those levels came from Beardverse drops, but the last 20 or so came from fruit.

Gold Drop MacGuffin is also very good, but I think I have already built its bonus up to a reasonable level, so I am willing to swap it out for now.

(Augment Speed MacGuffin is bad, as it only affects Augment work, which you should be spending only a very small fraction of your time on. Not worth developing until you are doing Evil Laser Sword Challenges, perhaps. Even so, I have ended up with a fairly high level fragment because it drops in a zone you want to farm, but I don't see much reason to equip it for a long time.)

This leaves the basic stat MacGuffins, most of which I have a low level fragment to build from, having farmed their zones during Quests or similar. I'm starting with Energy Cap, as I think Cap remains the most interesting stat while there are still Fruit to unlock. So far, it is still only Level 10, so I am only equipping it *during* a rebirth, so that the Fruit bonus will hit it, but swapping it out for Drop/MagicCap/Gold when I actually rebirth.


The question of MacGuffin slots actually becomes relevant now. For me, having bought the discounted AP slots earlier, only the first PP slot is within an affordable range -- and 250 PP is still a lot to save up. This means that if I level up a new MacGuffin fragment, I can only benefit from it by swapping out an older high-level one.

I'm prepared to do this with the Gold fragment (only Level 27 anyway), but I don't think I will ever want to swap out the Drop Chance fragment. At this point, I am not sure whether (after the Energy Cap fragment is levelled up) I will want to swap out the Magic Cap fragment for, say, an Energy Power/Bars fragment, or whether I will just increase its level to 100 too and save up for that 4th slot.

[pac230]

All Normal Challenges now done except for the last 24 Hour Challenge and the last 2 No-TM Challenges. Since I am probably going to do those after my first visit to Evil, it will now be all long (6-hour+) rebirths until the end of Normal.

After all those 30-minute rebirths, MacGuffin bonuses are:

50% Magic Cap
25% Drop Chance
5% Energy Cap
30% Gold Drop*

(*This one isn't going up atm as I still only have 3 slots and Gold fragment is out of favour.)

Energy Cap fragment has now been boosted up to Level 71.

Blood MacGuffin Alpha is getting close to the top of my Perk to-buy list. It's now a matter of boosting up fragments and getting (at least) one more slot to take into Evil difficulty, which will certainly see a *huge* number of short rebirths while doing it's easier early Challenges.

[pac230]

Now done with Normal and doing the Basic Challenges in Evil.

I now have these levelled fragments:

Drop Chance (101)
Energy Cap (100)
Energy Bars (102)
Magic Cap (87)
Augs (29)
Gold (27)
Magic Bars (6)* <- currently working on

However, I still only have 3 slots, so Magic Cap has been taking a break. Getting more MacGuffin slots has risen a lot in importance, and I may make one my next AP purchase. The idea of getting Blood MacGuffin Alpha has dropped off the radar, as it is impossible to generate significant quantities of Blood for now in Evil.

Short rebirths from doing the last Normal Challenges and the first Evil ones have helped build the bonuses:

Drop Chance: 40%
Magic Cap: 53%
Energy Cap: 20%
Energy Bars: 10%
Gold: 30%

For primary E/M stats, my plan is to get them to ~50% before swapping them out (assuming a new fragment is ready at a good level). Anything that awards new slots is a high priority now!

[Ibn Battuta]

Having gone an ITOPOD+Blood Magic route...

ITOPOD is worth about 6 Guffins per day, or about 3 levels per week per MacGuffin. The spell is easily worth 3 levels per day with the same selectivity as the fruit, and I've hit as high as +5. Assuming +6 is possible, you could get up to 42 levels a week that way (28 is more likely). I'm not selecting, but probably a third of my equipped Guffin levels are from the spell, and I've had it 4 or 5 days.

I don't think this method can keep up with your approach, at least on the Guffin front, but I'm a bit curious what would happen if someone really went for it.