Regarding Scrive Spinsters

[Nanako =^.^=]

for those not aware, the scrive spinster is a rare sky beast that can crop up in a few areas. I've seen them in the L&S nature reserve, and around polmear & Plenty's circus

They are really, really rare. More rare than anything in sunless sea. I spent ages in that game farming rare monsters, especially the Eater of Names. that thing was darned rare, but it still appeared more commonly than a scrive spinster does in this game. I think even the Tree of Ages was more common than spinsters, i remember fighting that thing several times.

Right now i have...66 hours playtime in sunless skies. I'm sure a fair portion of that was leaving it paused while i did other stuff, but its still a lot! In that time, i've found scrive spinsters a grand total of twice, ever. The first one killed me, fair enough. the second one however, just ran away. vanished into thin air. This second one was found after the procgen update which also boosted agent spawn rates, i've played a lot since then

All of this could be incidental, it's rare monster, so what?
The problem is, this monster is needed. During the circus revival questline, there's a quest where the magician sends you to port avon to repair his equipment, and the carpenter there asks for a monster corpse to use as parts. This is randomly selected from a cantankeri, chorister bees, or - you guessed it - a scrive spinster.

For a quest that's part of a chain, and rewards a mere 100g on completion, asking us to kill a scrive spinster is crazy. that's not so much a difficulty curve as a sheer vertical wall. With my current captain this questline is essentially broken, i simply can't find a spinster to satisfy it, and i'm locked out of the circus content as a result ;-;

I have some suggestions for resolving this

The first and simplest would be to just increase their spawn rate specifically. Maybe to about the same as chorister bees. Shouldnt be a problem since they have different spawning areas

A second and much more complicated idea;
There was a system added late in sunless sea where you could expend a rare item in order to summon a specific monster, with the idea presumably being to have a way to consistently find such things
In practise, i disliked this system and never used it, because the prices were set far too high. The items required were exceedingly rare and worth a lot of money, it was far more profitable to sell them, than to summon the monster and fight it (an element of dawn, really?)

that issue aside, the fundamental concept - of being able to summon/lure/bait in specific monsters - is pretty sound, and it'd be nice to see it make a return. This time hopefully with a cost that's less than the reward for fighting said monster, so it can actually be profitable. Maybe burning a pile of old books to attract a scrive spinster, drawn by the scent of smoldering knowledge.

A third solution would be to just remove the scrive spinster from the circus quest, since it is, really, too much to ask for the nature of the quest

[brian7772]

I have a slight modification to this. I never liked the instant summon option because it let you choose when and where a fight happened.

Maybe instead of that have it as an item that is crafted and attached to a spot like a figurehead lure. And it gains a hidden % to lure until the beast spawns. This could literally have one for each beast, like smearing the figurehead with pollen for bees ect. So you know eventually it would come but not sure when.

[Gunsmoke]

Yeah the figurehead lure idea is a great one for sure, as it would prevent the type of gimpy combat that you ended up with in sunless sea when you could lure the creatures in favourable areas.

[Nanako =^.^=]

eh, i think being able to stage the fight in a favourable place is part of the fun. it was kind of a problem in sunless sea because we had autoaim, and monster movement could be glitched by exploiting obstacles. i think thats less of an issue here since many things - certainly spinsters, have a ranged attack. they also have pretty advanced AI for maneuvring around

[Nanako =^.^=]

oh thank christ i finally found one and killed it
https://i.imgur.com/mc0PW2r.jpg

Located in empty space between carillon and lustrum, i wouldn't have stood a chance if the thing hadn't glitched out. It got stuck against the walls of carillon, unable to move or turn, forcing it to fire in one direction

Couldn't have won mainly because of lag, this thing kept dropping the framerate down to 3 fps. Looks like it has some bugginess that's gone unnoticed due to rarity

Mouse pointer indicates where i found it, in the east side https://i.imgur.com/d0mbBAU.png
(ignore the actual position of my train, the mouse pointer is where to look)