Tips and Strategies for "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor III"

[Abolish the Penny]

If, like me, you 100% completed all the other achievements and beat the game, you probably soon realized that you had maybe 1,500-2,000 kills... which is fine, except for this stupid achievement that requires 10,000 kills. And if, like me, you didn't want to have 84/85 achievements, but also didn't want to cheat by using an achievement unlocker, you probably needed to develop a strategy.

Here's what I did:

Party Preparation

You'll need a late game party with good equipment (I used Steiner, Zidane, Freya, and Amarant) with Auto-Haste and Auto-Regen. Counter is also useful. I personally also turned on Long Reach (and put characters in the back row), Auto-Life, Bug Killer, Undead Killer, and Counter. But the idea is that you want a team that is going to top up its own HP and quickly shred the enemies. As long as you finish the rest of the game first you're more than ready.

Where to Go

Enter Gizamaluke's Grotto and make a save at the Mogutta save room (this is the room with anywhere from two to five Moogles depending on if you've given the Moogles Kupo Nuts). The room looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/gRRpaTP.png
Thanks to Jegged.com which I took these images from

From here, move South-west, entering the main room with the bell:

https://i.imgur.com/A2Miif2.png

Why here? About 1/3rd of the time you'll get a battle with 2 or 3 enemies, the rest of the time 1. No enemies are really deadly, and they can all easily be one-hit killed by end-game characters. You can access it on Disc 4. The best place in the game for enemy density is an area on the Northern Continent that sometimes spawns 5 enemies, but it's harder to automate than here.

Boosters

Turn on 5x Speed (I believe the default keybinding is F1) and Auto-Attack (I believe the default keybinding is J). I personally set up these two to the rear buttons on my Steam Controller. You'll probably want to make it easy to turn these off to navigate back to the save room periodically.

If you run to the left (running into the wall of the area with the bell) you'll notice that your party member can get "stuck" in one spot but keep running in place. This makes it possible to continually get into random battles. Auto-Attack and 5x Speed means the battles will end very quickly. Our next step is to automate this running in place and mashing through the experience/item screen.

Automating The Process
First, download and install Autohotkey[autohotkey.com].

Next, open Notepad and paste the code from this section into a blank file.

SendMode Input
SetBatchLines, -1

F9::
	toggle := 1
	SendInput {Left down}
	while toggle {
		Send {Enter down}
		Sleep 10
		Send {Enter up}
		Sleep 10
	}
	SendInput {Left up}
	return
	
F8::
	toggle := 0

Now press File -> Save As, and name the file "grind.ahk" -- you must include the quotation marks to ensure Windows saves the file as grind.ahk instead of grind.ahk.txt. Now, double click the grind.ahk file wherever you saved it to open Autohotkey. In your Windows System Tray you should see a little green icon indicating it is turned on.

Open FF9, load your save, and get in position. Press F9 on your keyboard to begin auto-grinding. Press F8 when you are ready to stop. It may take a second or so to stop after you press F8. Do not try to open any menus or do anything while it is turned on. Make sure to press F8 before you are ready to stop and save.

Note and Warning
The game occasionally gets stuck loading a battle. I would say this happened to me once in my two legitimate playthroughs of the game and three times while I was grinding this achievement. To avoid losing progress, every hour or so, stop grinding, turn off the automated script, and go to the save room. Changing rooms creates an auto-save (you can load by pressing Continue on the title screen) but you should also manually save with the Moogle to be sure.

How long will this take?
My 100% save file had 37 hours on it before I began grinding and 72 hours when I hit 10,000 kills. So, uh, it'll take a while. My overall playtime counting deaths, lost progress, and the Excalibur 2 playthrough was 92 hours.

Q: Why did you do this? Isn't this cheating? Are you trying to force me to do this?
I don't care what you do or don't do. I got more fun out of rigging the game up to grind itself than I would have out of grinding it. My estimation is that to do this as a human without the boosters or the automation would take 150-200 hours of just fighting one-hit kill enemies by hand. If you think doing that is worth it, do it. You might be able to do it a little faster in the area on the northern continent that sometimes spawns 5 enemies. You do you.


Hope this helps. I can't provide any real support for this, but it worked for me. Only 0.5% of players have this achievement and I suspect many of them simply used an achievement unlocker program.

[Z3n]

You can post this as a guide.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/377840/guides/

[DSpecht]

Most of these abilities are completely pointless and over the top. Undead Killer, Bug Killer, Long Reach? Upon reaching disc 4 all these enemies die to a single hit from Eiko. Auto Haste and Auto Regen is all that is required, potentially Accuracy+ to avoid those occasional misses to save a tiny amount of time and Distract to avoid melee attacks and therefore less Trance. Not that enemies will get much chances to attack anyway. Investing into status resist is useless aswell, since the only status that can be inflicted is Berserk, and it cannot be blocked (and isn't even harmful).
A tip I'd recommend is to occasionally leave the area and reenter it. It happened two or three times to me that the game froze. Regular autosaving prevents a potential waste of many hours.

[Abolish the Penny]

Originally posted by DSpecht:

Most of these abilities are completely pointless and over the top. Undead Killer, Bug Killer, Long Reach? Upon reaching disc 4 all these enemies die to a single hit from Eiko. Auto Haste and Auto Regen is all that is required, potentially Accuracy+ to avoid those occasional misses to save a tiny amount of time and Distract to avoid melee attacks and therefore less Trance. Not that enemies will get much chances to attack anyway. Investing into status resist is useless aswell, since the only status that can be inflicted is Berserk, and it cannot be blocked (and isn't even harmful).

Fair point -- I suspect that very few of these abilities are needed, if any. I edited to emphasize this.

A tip I'd recommend is to occasionally leave the area and reenter it. It happened two or three times to me that the game froze. Regular autosaving prevents a potential waste of many hours.

Yeah, that's why I put the note and warning. It happened to me once while doing my two playthroughs of the game and three times while doing this grind. Pretty annoying. The auto-save is super handy though.

[DSpecht]

Originally posted by Abolish the Penny:

Yeah, that's why I put the note and warning. It happened to me once while doing my two playthroughs of the game and three times while doing this grind. Pretty annoying. The auto-save is super handy though.

Fair enough, after reaching the auto-script I pretty much skipped most of the remaining text. My bad there.

[Khajar]

If you have a macro software for your keyboard, like Synapse for Razer, you can easily automate the process. Simply create a macro to make your character walk in a circle and another macro to spam the "Confirm" buttom. Get to the bell room in Gizamaluke's Grotto and turn on the macros.
If you have two monitors you can do this while watching netflix or whatever. Just remember to save your game every hour or so, in case you get the freeze bug.

[Alice]

Hi. I have a razer Ornata chroma but i dont understand nothing about the macro or how to configure it. Can you help me with that?

[Grimlord XVII]

Hey bud, this mostly works like a dream, except for one issue that I'm having.

The script doesn't appear to work during the post-battle results. Any tips on how to rectify this?

[Abolish the Penny]

"Enter" should be clearing the post battle results -- is it possible this is a key binding issue? I know Square Enix has patched FF9 since I posted this, so I guess it's possible they changed the binding.

In that case, what I would recommend is either modify the script so that where you see Enter, you instead send the appropriate keyboard key; or else use Steam's controller settings to rebind that key's function to Enter.

Hope this helps.

[Cyan]

Just bumping to note that the script and thread were super helpful!

I had a single crash while going for the achievement, but had been routinely saving per the warning in the OP so it wasn't a huge setback.

For the slaughtering grounds, I used a setup in the room below the bell room. There's a little cubby on the left attached to the bridge in that room: https://i.imgur.com/kjJ4jHL.png I think this ends up having slightly more enemies on average than the bell room. While I'm not sure about the relative rarities, there's a 1 enemy group, a 2 enemy group, two separate 3 enemy groups, and a 4 enemy group. It ends up being pretty decent per battle, and just as safe as the bell room, no real damage and no status effects other than berserk.

I messed around a bit with a few places on the overworld, but on disc 4 tough fights can show up just about anywhere, with enough possible dangerous status effects that it's not really safe to leave things running. I went back to a disc 3 save out of curiosity, to see if you could do this on the ice continent, where you'll sometimes get a big group of feather circles. Turns out some of the enemies there have an instakill attack. You'd probably be ok with auto-life, but still a bit dangerous. I'm curious if anyone else has attempted automating this on an overworld spot and how it worked. It seems like encounters happen more quickly when running in a circle on the overworld than running in place in Gizamaluke's, so it's possible an overworld method could end up faster.

As a last note, for anyone using Moguri Mod remember you can kick up the speed booster even more, up to 12x. I was able to crank out close to 1k kills an hour.

[BigMonD]

SO this wasnt working for me, it wasnt running left after leaving a fight, I dont know if its something to do with an update, or moguri mod or just my control setup but changing it to add and extra SendInput {Left down} to the while loop does the trick.

SendMode Input
SetBatchLines, -1

F9::
	toggle := 1
	SendInput {Left down}
	while toggle {
		Send {Enter down}
		Sleep 10
		Send {Enter up}
		Sleep 10
		SendInput {Left down}
		Sleep 10
	}
	SendInput {Left up}
	return
	
F8::
	toggle := 0

[Abolish the Penny]

Great to hear -- they have patched the game a few times since this and Moguri mod likely also alters stuff. I'm glad you were able to make the adjustment and I think it'll be hugely useful to anyone else reading! :)

[y0LAs]

This should be a Steam Guide, not a simple discussion. It's harder to keep track of these.
Thanks anyway!

[Winche94]

You're awesome man

[Abolish the Penny]

Appreciate it, glad I could help!

[DameNinGen]

Sadlly its not working anymore, running latest Memoria Mod with Meguri
Not sure I am doing sth wrong