Finally 100%ed it!

[rioreia]

I've finally unlocked all achievements! The game shows a final time counter when you hit 100%, and my stats clocked in at 2,044 hours of online playtime, with 2,512 hours in total. So yeah, that's roughly how long it takes to truly beat the game.

While the game is an awesome experience, it's a bit of a bummer that it severely lacks meaningful endgame content. Right now, there is zero incentive or system to spend your hoarded resources. For instance, I finished the game with over 1.1k Fabrication points and 1.15M Dirt just sitting in my inventory with absolutely nowhere to use them. This is mostly because the in-game economy feels completely broken; money is pretty much useless from the get-go and becomes a totally dead currency by the endgame. I never had to sell a single item—even the Braymen's Letter from the early game is still just chilling in my bag.

Overall, the game desperately needs more endgame activities. Building a brand-new progression system centered around Fabrication points would be an awesome and effective solution.

[Tupish]

On endgame I sold some valuables to buy Stones to craft Chronicle Rune faster. But yes, agree, after summoning all the pets and level 99 on Workstations and Gathering, all pets Awakened and level 120, there is literally nothing else to do.

[piglets222]

On endgame I sold some valuables to buy Stones to craft Chronicle Rune faster.

Chronicle runes are currently my choke on progression... I need (I counted) 18,000 chronicle runes. After 8 hours offline I can craft almost 300. It will take me two months, at my current rate to have enough for my current summons. 13 summons currently. That seems excessive for the one material, and I would ask the Devs to add alittle more rotation to their materials needed for summons.

edit: it is now 58 days later and I too, 100% it. My last three weeks was just log in, get achievement *select different production* logout.

[rioreia]

Originally posted by piglets222:

On endgame I sold some valuables to buy Stones to craft Chronicle Rune faster.

Chronicle runes are currently my choke on progression... I need (I counted) 18,000 chronicle runes. After 8 hours offline I can craft almost 300. It will take me two months, at my current rate to have enough for my current summons. 13 summons currently. That seems excessive for the one material, and I would ask the Devs to add alittle more rotation to their materials needed for summons.

Here is the tip from my other post:
Dungeons: Send one T6 creature to run T4 dungeons. This is the most efficient way to save armor materials and perfectly matches your summoning progression. Anything beyond this isn't worth it right now.

Crafting them is definitely a bottleneck for materials. Dungeons are the way to go!

[Leogrim]

My biggest bottleneck is...meat. Less having it raw but cooking and than shredding it.
Those tier 6 monsters just cost a lot of it given how long it takes to make them.

[rioreia]

Originally posted by Leogrim:

My biggest bottleneck is...meat. Less having it raw but cooking and than shredding it.
Those tier 6 monsters just cost a lot of it given how long it takes to make them.

Once your Awaken Tree hits +30% speed and tools are maxed, meat really shouldn't be a bottleneck. Personally, I even choose +50% XP for my tools because I already have way too much meat, and past level 99, I just want XP to make my profile look good. You can also just use the cooker to prep cooked meat ahead of time.

[MasterCylinder]

Cooked meat is the bottleneck for meat stew because it takes the longest to make, but it's relatively minor overall. For reference, I've got 12 T6s to go and will be done making stews (the last cooking item left for me) in about 5 days. Between gathering dungeons, helpers, and manual gathering, all gathering materials will be done by then if not sooner. All gathering skills will be at 99 in about 15 days. The real bottleneck is raw essence which is going to take about 30 days.

I've liked the game but the endgame is really rough. Progression is pretty much over once you can field S rank teams in T5 dungeons and that only takes 2 T6 mons with some T5s. And once you do that you're spending about 1/3 of the total game time waiting on the garden... which is one of the first things you do in the game.

[rioreia]

Originally posted by MasterCylinder:

Cooked meat is the bottleneck for meat stew because it takes the longest to make, but it's relatively minor overall. For reference, I've got 12 T6s to go and will be done making stews (the last cooking item left for me) in about 5 days. Between gathering dungeons, helpers, and manual gathering, all gathering materials will be done by then if not sooner. All gathering skills will be at 99 in about 15 days. The real bottleneck is raw essence which is going to take about 30 days.

I've liked the game but the endgame is really rough. Progression is pretty much over once you can field S rank teams in T5 dungeons and that only takes 2 T6 mons with some T5s. And once you do that you're spending about 1/3 of the total game time waiting on the garden... which is one of the first things you do in the game.

After the XP buff patch, hitting level 99 is way too easy. If you want to min-max efficiency, putting 3 creatures in a dungeon feels like a waste because you end up burning through too many metal bars. Since this game revolves around creatures and rebirth, my main goal now is grinding fabrication points. It's the only system that fits this playstyle and allows for an infinite loop.

Unfortunately, there isn't a fully fleshed-out system to spend those points on yet, but I think it has huge potential. Yeah, the garden is a bit slow, but you shouldn't run out of raw essence if you optimize your build order. The endgame is definitely lacking content right now. I guess we just have to wait and see what the devs have planned for future updates.

[Leogrim]

Raw essence is looking good on my side. I might be fine until the end. Haven't crunched the numbers yet. Chronicle runes I have enough armor to get multiple times what I need and just run it cause armor has little other value. Meat stew is where I'm stuck. Might need a few more days to produce more but after that I'm clear.

My path was: get settled > max mining/Tools/machines and forge> Clear out up to tier 4 > Clear T5 > clear T6

If I was a bit smarter I could have prepped more meat up front as I made a little to much cheese and such but it won't delay me long.

[MasterCylinder]

I did some napkin math for fun and raw essence is the absolute bottleneck on efficiency when getting to 100% mons. Assuming an even split of level 6 essence plants in the garden from minute 1, it's about 1775 hours to produce enough raw essence to make everything you need for every summon. No idea what the minimum time needed to get there would be, but it's probably a least a few days.

My playthrough hasn't been especially optimized, mostly focusing on mining after getting everything to 60, and at 1530 hours all gathering materials are done and all foods besides stew, and that will be done in a few days. So even with a perfectly optimized garden alongside a decently optimized build order, the garden is the bottleneck by about 200 hours.

Fabrication isn't quite maxed because it hasn't been a focus for a week or 2, but I could prestige everything now and get there, so even if you consider that part of the 100% it's a non-factor. Awakenings are obviously gated by your ability to summon and therefore raw essence from the garden.

So yeah, the race for the final bottleneck is between garden time (plus infinity stone crafting time and awakening the final mon) and grinding gathering skills to 99. Based on my playthrough that would be about 1860 hours, but could be lower in a truly optimized run. At this point in the game, the only gameplay consideration to that grind is shuffling sanctuary mons every few days and waiting, so I don't think it would benefit the game for it to take longer lol.

Very long way of saying that spending some helper and crafting time to field 3 dungeon creatures isn't going to affect efficiency in any real way unless you can use that time to upgrade a relevant tool instead.

[rioreia]

You are absolutely right.
However, due to recent patch changes, the actual gameplay experience varies a bit. Generally speaking, in previous versions, resources would overflow while you were waiting for skills to hit level 99. But with the current XP buff, resources have actually become the bottleneck. If someone started playing much earlier, their total playtime would be much higher, so resource collection speed wouldn't be an issue for them.

Since I’ve already unlocked all achievements, my current goal is continuous prestige and optimizing my save file data. For my Sanctuary setup, I chose a 2x T5 and 4x T3 distribution (though you could also go with a 6x T4 setup if you prefer) to maximize both resources and XP. Almost all of my Expeditions are set up for min-maxed prestige (keeping the 20% bonus active without interruption while prestiging constantly) with 6x T6 helpers.

Because of this, putting 3 creatures into the dungeon would directly hurt my sheet XP and prestige efficiency. My min-maxed setup simply doesn't have 3 spare creatures to take out. (If you actually found a way to pull 3 creatures out while maintaining this setup, please let me know! I’d love to hear it.) Right now, I'm sitting on 1.4k Fabrication points, which is just what I've been working on while waiting for the next update.

That said, if your primary goal is just creature collection, you can definitely take it easy and play casually without stressing over the optimization part.

[MasterCylinder]

It sounds like we're finding the fun in different ways in the game, which is cool. I'll probably mess around with where mons get assigned once I have them all, but I doubt I'll play much once I hit 100%. I'm a little unclear on what your goals are besides get the most prestiges possible, but that seems to be a question of filling every slot where a mon can go at the highest XP gain rate.

That means you're missing out on free XP by not running 3 dungeon mons. The only thing that affects dungeon XP is the dungeon tier, so throwing anyone you have laying around doing nothing gets the full benefit. That's 2.5 XP per second per slot, so 5 XP per second wasted. You would need to devote some mining helper time to copper instead of arcanum to maintain the armor kits and that would decrease that helper's XP per second, but the net XP gain is higher, and it's across 3 mons instead of 1.

For reference, you're losing 1.9 XP per second by having a T6 mining helper mine copper while gaining 5 for the 2 currently empty dungeon slots, and that's only while running copper. Even if you run tier 4 dungeons with 1 120 creature to increase your grade, you're doubling the net XP you're gaining, and that's just while grinding copper a small portion of the time.

You get enough copper for 1 day's worth of armor kits in 3.5 hours, which, in addition to fabrication copper, adds up to at least a week's worth of kits with one day of copper grinding. You can reduce that time even further by buying armor chests with your otherwise useless gold. In any case, you gain XP rate while going positive in copper.

Are you getting all the sanctuary bonuses to level 4 or 5 with your setup? I haven't messed around with those loadouts to see how possible or restrictive it would be, but everything at 4 would be optimal for helper XP as they do benefit from the XP and duration boosts. Not much else you can do to juice them if they're already T6 mons gathering the last material.

[rioreia]

There’s a crucial point here that many people might overlook: the XP per second when crafting items—especially armor—varies drastically depending on the tier. Crafting with copper yields very little XP, and the XP helpers get from gathering copper is equally low. By sticking to copper, you are losing out on at least 10+ XP per second. As I mentioned in my previous reply, my build focuses on a comprehensive balance between XP and materials, and even gold. I won't sacrifice crafting XP just to boost creature XP; it’s a fully optimized, all-around maximization build.

Regarding the sanctuary layout, I won’t go into deep detail here. As stated above, I use a 2xT5 and 4xT3 configuration, but I'll keep the specific reasoning under wraps for now. Judging from your response, it seems you haven't unlocked all the creatures yet. If you're still interested after getting all creatures, we can definitely circle back and discuss the absolute optimal setup.

[MasterCylinder]

No, I'm done discussing optimal setups with someone that doesn't know what they're talking about. Thank you for the offer though.

[rioreia]

It is always interesting to see a theory completely unravel when faced with actual game mechanics, especially when the calculations lack a comprehensive judgment—omitting essential variables such as sanctuary loadouts, Awaken Tree progression, and tool optimization. When it was pointed out that someone's numbers overlooked high-tier crafting XP, resulting in a massive deficit that was left unresolved, they chose to end the conversation with a personal insult. Evading a discussion when the logic doesn't favor one's hypothesis is certainly a choice, but it does not make them correct. I wish them the best of luck with their game.

[Leogrim]

Having the last few stew in the stove and finishing the last 99 skill (Fishing 91-99).
Been a bit slower than the optimum. Having had the achievement for the first mon on april 7th. So roughly 3 months. Which lined up relatively nicely to have just enough elemental dust like a couple days ago.
I think the two times I choked was early game coal as there is a lot of stuff that needs coal and while you can make more it takes away from other crafting. The other was late game stew which has just a pretty steep rate at 4 meat making 1 meat chunk and 4 meat chunk making one meat stew.

I think my biggest blunder might have been using the crafting awakening upgrades way too late. As there is an argument to be made for focusing on the skill awakening traits before the crafting ones and the complete reverse. I focused on skilltress as I saw it as the biggest timesink and most in need of time reduction. But I never crunched the numbers.