Skull Throne Event Low Level Guide

[zenstrata]

After working on this event starting with a level 1 character and playing for 88 hours (and just finishing it). Here is what I learned.

This is the final reward for the Implant.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2125501121
==============================================
+++First, READ THE EVENT RULES CAREFULLY!!!
The event pretty clearly lays out what you need to do. Go into any missions from the following factions to potentially find skull enemies.
- wordbearer
- black legion
- alpha legion
- plague vanguard
- nurgle deamons
- khorn

The enemies you are looking for will have a very large skull floating above their heads.
(they will not always show up on the map! you will have to actually Look for them.)

==============================================
+++Second, avoid missions that are labeled "Demonic Incursion". Those will almost Never have any skull enemies in them, and are simply about running around and closing warp gates with very few bosses.

==============================================
+++Third, pick missions types where you don't have to kill everything in the mission. I.e. do "Purge" style missions LAST. Because the other mission types you will be able to just run past most of the enemies, hunt down skull enemies, and do the mission objectives and get out fast.

==============================================
+++Fourth, don't be afraid to go into missions that are much lower level than you are especially once you gain some levels. The goal here is to get the implant leveled, not to necessarily level up yourself.

Sure at the start you will be leveling, but once you hit level 30 or 40 or so, you will have access to the 'random mission' menu in your ship by pressing "M" on your keyboard. The problem is, the 'random mission' menu doesn't show you missions that won't give you XP, but you don't care about XP, you only care about getting the implant done - so if you are just trying to rush, go to the starmap console in your ship, and manually hunt around for the right mission types to hunt skulls.

==============================================
+++Fifth, This will be slow going, Don't get discouraged! You will likely only get 1 skull per mission, and sometimes you won't find any even through you picked the right enemy type. Sure there will be a few missions where you find 2 or even 3 skull enemies per map, but those will be few and far between, so keep on plugging and you will eventually get it.

==============================================
+++Sixth, Toward the end of the quest, you will have to find enemies called "MACHINE DEAMON" to progress, those are specialized enemies that (for me) only appeared in the Nurgle, Khorn, and WordBearer enemy type missions.

So if you get stuck, that may be something that helps you get past that part. This happened for me once I had my implant leveled up to around 65 or 70 skulls, and I got stuck for several hours until I finally found someone who said that on the forums somewhere, and it helped me out Tremendously.

==============================================
+++Seventh, Good luck!~ Seriously, doing this event mission starting from level 1 is quite a chore, I have been working on it since I bought this game, (like I said at the start, it took me 88 hours of gameplay to finish!). Likely you can get it done in about half the time or less, because for the first 40'ish hours I was just randomly wandering around and doing missions.

==============================================
+++MSG FOR THE DEVS
This mission took a very very long time... perhaps consider upping the spawn rate of these skull enemies next time you run this sort of event.

[Vrakos Anthrakir]

88 hours? jeez, took me about 12 and I wasn't trying to farm for it most of the time

@sixth,
"machine deamon"? never heard of such a thing, and you can still get event progress from any marked enemy no matter where you are out of 100. doesn't have to be a "machine deamon"

[phenir]

Originally posted by zenstrata:

+++MSG FOR THE DEVS
This mission took a very very long time... perhaps consider upping the spawn rate of these skull enemies next time you run this sort of event.

Well they did extend the duration of the event a week.
Some other advice would be, if you have the time, level multiple characters. Each character has their own missions so you can quickly swap between them and do missions that have a high number of valid targets like hunt missions. This is all I did to finish the event. I swapped between 3 characters each day doing all their hunt missions and was getting 10+ skulls a day.

[zenstrata]

Originally posted by Vrakos Anthrakir:

88 hours? jeez, took me about 12 and I wasn't trying to farm for it most of the time

@sixth,
"machine deamon"? never heard of such a thing, and you can still get event progress from any marked enemy no matter where you are out of 100. doesn't have to be a "machine deamon"

As you level the implant, it calls for different types of skull enemies as you progress, (this can be seen if you click on the implant itself as you rank it up) and if you kill the wrong things, they won't count. The machine deamon requirement only appeared between skull count 65-80 (I believe).

Perhaps you didn't notice because you just happened across the right enemies as you were normally doing missions for that part of the implant leveling.

For me though, I spent about 3 or 4 hours just doing missions around skull count 65 and wondering why it wasn't counting skulls toward the implant, then I read the implant itself and realized it was calling for a very specific type of enemy named 'Machine Deamons', which are only found in certain faction missions.

[phenir]

Originally posted by zenstrata:

As you level the implant, it calls for different types of skull enemies as you progress, (this can be seen if you click on the implant itself as you rank it up) and if you kill the wrong things, they won't count. The machine deamon requirement only appeared between skull count 65-80 (I believe).

Does anyone have an image of an incomplete implant that shows this? I'd check myself but I already finished mine.

[Metalacil]

every elite has a 20% to be a skull guy. they said on a stream.