Location of Tonberry's in Cavern of Stolen Fayth/Sunken Cave

[Martinos]

Since there seems to be no good mention of this in any guides/discussions, I figure I should share with everyone the location of all the tonberry's for monster farming purpsoses. You can find them all at a very very high appearance rate (like 25 to 50% of all battles) in the room on the main path right before the level 2 sphere fork in the road, just after passing by the megalixir. It's basically the second room you will hit along the path to Yojimbo. With turbo x 4 and auto-battle and frequent encouters all turned on I was able to farm all 10 tonberry's in about 10 - 15 min. Good luck!

[Hinnyuu]

Pretty sure that it's just random, but if someone has more info to corroborate this it sure would help people farm what is arguably the most frustrating arena monster to complete.

[Martinos]

Maybe Tonberry's will only spawn randomly in one of a few certain areas and this is one of them then? I wandered the cave for about an hour checking multiple sites people have cited and found no tonberry's then when I went to this area is was a tonberry every 3 or 4 fights, and twice I had two or more tonberry's back to back!

[09 F9 11 02]

I'm pretty sure they only spawn in certain parts of the map deeper into the dungeon, yeah.

[Natzor]

Originally posted by Martinos:

Since there seems to be no good mention of this in any guides/discussions, I figure I should share with everyone the location of all the tonberry's for monster farming purpsoses. You can find them all at a very very high appearance rate (like 25 to 50% of all battles) in the room on the main path right before the level 2 sphere fork in the road, just after passing by the megalixir. It's basically the second room you will hit along the path to Yojimbo. With turbo x 4 and auto-battle and frequent encouters all turned on I was able to farm all 10 tonberry's in about 10 - 15 min. Good luck!

Under the Cavern of the stolen fayth section at Finalfantasywikia's page, Tonberries are noted under "green Areas" although not with encounter rate.

[Hinnyuu]

During my current playthrough, I decided to investigate this matter a bit further. Of course, all findings are anecdotal evidence only, and most conclusions are in fact conjecture - however, there do seem to at least be indicators of a pattern.

First off, let me say that I could not replicate results as they are reported by the OP here. The room specified did not yield a marked increase in Tonberry encounters, and indeed barely had any in it at all even after 45 minutes of continuous fighting. However, some more testing did yield some interesting results.

What seems virtually certain is that the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth (and many other areas as well, for that matter) is divided into several hidden subsections, which come with their own encounter pools. A rough estimate would be a division between "Front" and "Back", with certain monsters never appearing in the Front areas (Tonberry, Ghost, Defender X) while others may vary in frequency.

After some reasonably extensive (but certainly not exhaustive) testing, I have furthermore found indicators that there is also a division into "Rooms" and "Corridors", with certain encounters only occurring in one or the other, or, at the very least, with greatly different encounter frequencies. For example, it seemed very much like Tonberry only appears in Rooms, while Ghost only appears in Corridors (and, of course, neither will appear in the Front areas). Similarly, the constellation of Epaaj/Machina/Imp never occurred in Rooms but only in Corridors.

Using this knowledge it was indeed quite easy to catch 10 Tonberries, as simply staying in the final room (before the Chamber of the Fayth) would yield a regular rate of encounters with them. Indeed, I had 10 Tonberries well before I had 10 Ghosts, and Ghosts turned out to be the most difficult ones to catch.

While this may be some interesting information, I urge anyone to take it with a grain of salt. As mentioned, I have not done exhaustive, systematic testing, only 2.5-3 hours or so of grinding with the encounter boost on. Given the numbers involved, that is not enough for statistical evidence, and furthermore is still subject to a lot of bias effects that could skew the data significantly (if you can even call this data). Most specifically, there has always been a suspicion among people that encounters are distributed based upon certain seed variables that can be changed with a seed reset, meaning different encounter rates between loads. Whether or not that is really true or just a myth I cannot say, and did not set out to test (no reload/reset happened during my grind).

If anyone has more data and/or reports of systematic testing, that could perhaps be useful to people.

[Gilbertify]

It's random but "more" seem to appear in the furthest area.

[infinityfinder]

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

During my current playthrough, I decided to investigate this matter a bit further. Of course, all findings are anecdotal evidence only, and most conclusions are in fact conjecture - however, there do seem to at least be indicators of a pattern.

First off, let me say that I could not replicate results as they are reported by the OP here. The room specified did not yield a marked increase in Tonberry encounters, and indeed barely had any in it at all even after 45 minutes of continuous fighting. However, some more testing did yield some interesting results.

What seems virtually certain is that the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth (and many other areas as well, for that matter) is divided into several hidden subsections, which come with their own encounter pools. A rough estimate would be a division between "Front" and "Back", with certain monsters never appearing in the Front areas (Tonberry, Ghost, Defender X) while others may vary in frequency.

After some reasonably extensive (but certainly not exhaustive) testing, I have furthermore found indicators that there is also a division into "Rooms" and "Corridors", with certain encounters only occurring in one or the other, or, at the very least, with greatly different encounter frequencies. For example, it seemed very much like Tonberry only appears in Rooms, while Ghost only appears in Corridors (and, of course, neither will appear in the Front areas). Similarly, the constellation of Epaaj/Machina/Imp never occurred in Rooms but only in Corridors.

Using this knowledge it was indeed quite easy to catch 10 Tonberries, as simply staying in the final room (before the Chamber of the Fayth) would yield a regular rate of encounters with them. Indeed, I had 10 Tonberries well before I had 10 Ghosts, and Ghosts turned out to be the most difficult ones to catch.

While this may be some interesting information, I urge anyone to take it with a grain of salt. As mentioned, I have not done exhaustive, systematic testing, only 2.5-3 hours or so of grinding with the encounter boost on. Given the numbers involved, that is not enough for statistical evidence, and furthermore is still subject to a lot of bias effects that could skew the data significantly (if you can even call this data). Most specifically, there has always been a suspicion among people that encounters are distributed based upon certain seed variables that can be changed with a seed reset, meaning different encounter rates between loads. Whether or not that is really true or just a myth I cannot say, and did not set out to test (no reload/reset happened during my grind).

If anyone has more data and/or reports of systematic testing, that could perhaps be useful to people.

This was borne out in my experience, as well, and not just in the Cavern. This seemed true basically in all random encounter locations.

[FioraJade]

Originally posted by Hinnyuu:

During my current playthrough, I decided to investigate this matter a bit further. Of course, all findings are anecdotal evidence only, and most conclusions are in fact conjecture - however, there do seem to at least be indicators of a pattern.

First off, let me say that I could not replicate results as they are reported by the OP here. The room specified did not yield a marked increase in Tonberry encounters, and indeed barely had any in it at all even after 45 minutes of continuous fighting. However, some more testing did yield some interesting results.

What seems virtually certain is that the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth (and many other areas as well, for that matter) is divided into several hidden subsections, which come with their own encounter pools. A rough estimate would be a division between "Front" and "Back", with certain monsters never appearing in the Front areas (Tonberry, Ghost, Defender X) while others may vary in frequency.

After some reasonably extensive (but certainly not exhaustive) testing, I have furthermore found indicators that there is also a division into "Rooms" and "Corridors", with certain encounters only occurring in one or the other, or, at the very least, with greatly different encounter frequencies. For example, it seemed very much like Tonberry only appears in Rooms, while Ghost only appears in Corridors (and, of course, neither will appear in the Front areas). Similarly, the constellation of Epaaj/Machina/Imp never occurred in Rooms but only in Corridors.

Using this knowledge it was indeed quite easy to catch 10 Tonberries, as simply staying in the final room (before the Chamber of the Fayth) would yield a regular rate of encounters with them. Indeed, I had 10 Tonberries well before I had 10 Ghosts, and Ghosts turned out to be the most difficult ones to catch.

While this may be some interesting information, I urge anyone to take it with a grain of salt. As mentioned, I have not done exhaustive, systematic testing, only 2.5-3 hours or so of grinding with the encounter boost on. Given the numbers involved, that is not enough for statistical evidence, and furthermore is still subject to a lot of bias effects that could skew the data significantly (if you can even call this data). Most specifically, there has always been a suspicion among people that encounters are distributed based upon certain seed variables that can be changed with a seed reset, meaning different encounter rates between loads. Whether or not that is really true or just a myth I cannot say, and did not set out to test (no reload/reset happened during my grind).

If anyone has more data and/or reports of systematic testing, that could perhaps be useful to people.

Stumbled across this while hunting the infamous Tonberries, someone else cited them in an area "off the map" right on the first fork. Ghosts do seem to spawn there infrequently, on my way to check the final room theory now.

[(-71)]

I got 8/10 in this corridor leading to the green room. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1089225727. Took only 2 hours to complete Cavern...really not bad at all. Plus your heroes get super strong at the end of it.