10,000 Kill Achievement Guide - How to hire robots to do the dirty work.

I show you how to use simple macros to have your computer fight those ridiculous 10k creatures for your final FF8 Steam Achievement.

The Ethics of Exploiting Robots

In a perfect world, achievements would be about actually achieving something in the game. But that doesn't apply to 10k achievements. By the time you reach even 2k kills, you can easily have all of your GF abilities learned, all characters and GFs at level 100, and have your fill of loot drops. So 8,000 extra kills is a bit of a waste of time.

No. Let me rephrase that. It's an immense and ridiculous waste of time.

Let's say you get those 2k kills to max out all your characters, and then you start plunging into fights for your 10k kill achievement. The average "time per monster killed," according to my test runs, is 36 seconds.

8,000 kills * 36 seconds = 288,000 seconds = 4,800 minutes = 80 hours.

That's 80 hours of useless grinding. Whoever came up with this achievement was either an idiot or a sadist. So while I totally understand any mixed feelings about leaving the "achievement" to a macro, I'm totally comfortable automating the "work" for an 80-hour grind session. And in this guide, I'll show you how to do exactly that.

The Concept

Here's what we're doing:

I'm sending you to a region where you can fight enemies that you'll one-hit kill, who can't status you into a game over, and who will heal you with their elemental attacks. We're preparing you in ways that will make your team invincible, then having a macro do an incredibly simple command:

Pushing up, down, and mashing the X button.

There's some slight nuance to it, but that's basically it. This will walk up and down, push X to confirm attacks, confirm targets, and go through the end-of-battle messages. That's what you would be doing yourself. For 80+ hours. So we're going to have a robot do it for you instead.

Preparation

There are countless ways to get the 10k achievement. I'm not going to walk you through these alternatives. Instead, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did.

Do Your Own Killing

Do all the killing you're going to do anyway. Get all your other achievements. Otherwise, there will be "wasted kills," which means wasted time.

Go to the Right Area

You're going to fight in the plains of the Balamb Area (not the beach, not the forest). Using this macro, your character will remain basically in place, but every so often they will go a bit further up than they were when you started. To ensure this doesn't cause problems, head to the small "corner" north-east of the cave where you fought Ifrit. This will be the place you start the macro from. If your character goes further north, they will simply get jammed in this corner---which won't cause any disadvantages or issues for this process.

You will fight an average of two enemies at a time, and they will almost always fall to one-hit kills. The rest of the reason for fighting here will become apparent as you read the rest of this guide.

Prepare Against Status Effects

You will face Glacial Eyes and Bite Bugs. That means you will need to defend against Petrify and Poison. Use Status Defense junctions on all characters or equip the Ribbon ability.

Prepare for Elemental Healing

Rather than healing yourself, you're going to let the enemy heal you with elemental attacks. In the Balamb Region, Glacial Eyes use Blizzard-Blizzarra-Blizzagga attacks. Put enough Blizzarra and Blizzagga into each character's Elemental Defense that they fully absorb the ice attacks.

Resistance to magic will also reduce how much you're healed by each Blizzagga, so don't equip anything to spirit, don't use Auto-Shell, and don't use Auto-Reflect.

Get Accelerating Abilities

This process will go faster if you have the following abilities:

• Alert on one character: Prevents "back attack" (and thus possibilities for unnecessary enemy attack animations).
  
• Initiative on all characters: Prevents unnecessary enemy attack animations.
  
• Powerful magic junctioned to Speed, and Speed +40%, +20% if you have space for it. This will also improve your defense.

For the simplest Speed-J on all, have Cerberus, Pandamoneum, and Eden equipped to three separate characters.

You can get Initiative on your full team by equipping Tonberry, Cactuar, and Pandemona to separate characters.

Get Defensive Abilities

To ensure that you stay alive for this process, you'll want to pump up your vitality and evasion. The point is to ensure characters get healed by more from the Blizzaga than they get damaged by the physical attacks that happen between each casting of Blizzaga.

Useful abilities include (in order of value):

• Auto-Protect.
  
• Powerful magic junctioned to Vitality.
  
• Vitality +20%, +40%, +60%
  
• Powerful magic junctioned to Evasion.
  
• Evasion +30%.
  
• Powerful magic junctioned to Luck (influences chance to evade).
  
• Luck +50%.

For the simplest Vit-J on all, have Quezacotl, Shiva, and Carbuncle equipped to three separate characters.

For the simplest Eva-J on all, have Cactuar and Eden equipped to two separate characters. Use the Aegis Amulet dropped from the UFO during the PuPu quest to teach Eva-J to a third GF.

You can use Adamantine to teach three GFs the Vit +60% ability.

Spread your defensive abilities evenly. Once the character resists enough damage that Blizzaga heals more than the average physical damage received between Blizzagas, they won't be at risk.

Get Offensive Abilities

Use the following offensive abilities to ensure one-hit kills.

• High strength and hit junction: Ideally Ultima in strength and Triple in hit. Remember that Squall automatically hits anyway, so don't worry about pumping his hit score.
  
• Status attack junction: Death. Equipping 100 death to each character's attack will serve as a backup for one-hit kills.
  
• Set Squall to "Gunblade Auto On" to increase his damage during this process.
  
• Str +60%, +40%, +20% if you have room after your defensive abilities are equipped.

Note on Odin: Having or not having Odin is of questionable value in speeding up this process. Odin's animated sequence takes about 22 seconds, but it also pre-empts any enemy attack animations. If you don't have initiative on all your characters and alert on at least one, Odin may speed up the process. Otherwise, he may slow it down---but only slightly. So don't worry too much about your Odin status.

Unequip Non-Attack Abilities

All you'll be doing is attacking. Since the up/down commands are used in this macro, having any command ability equipped besides attack will be counter-productive. Be sure to eliminate these from each character before beginning.

Now you're ready to run the macro.

The Macro

I use a programmable keyboard that has an incredibly simple interface. Want to use that method? Here's the setup I use[www.amazon.com]. Don't want to spend $50? You can get a free macro program here:

Auto Hotkey[www.autohotkey.com]

I'm not going to teach you how to use Auto Hotkey. I'm not an expert, and they've already put together plenty of pages for exactly that purpose. Instead, I'm going to give you the Auto Hotkey macro I designed and tested:

The Auto-Fighting Macro[drive.google.com]

To use this macro, install Auto Hotkey and run the script you downloaded at the link above. When you go into FF8, you can push CTRL + K to start the process, P to pause or unpause the process, and Escape when you want the script to end.

Note that you are using this program and script at your own risk. If you don't trust it, program your own: It's really not too tough. You just need to set a macro to go up for two seconds, down for two seconds, and push X repeatedly. (The macro above has some more fine-tuned components, but up-down-X-X-X-X-X-X-X will get the job done.)

I recommend leaving the system on overnight while the macro runs. After all, it will require 80 or so hours to get those 10k kills.

Best of luck, and let me know if you encounter any issues.

[dschepler]

In fact, I set up my script to run on Cactuar Island, and every once in a while it opens up the menu and tries to refine a Hundred Needles item. I figured as long as I'm grinding, I may as well do some farming for speed boosts at the same time (and up to 4 kills per encounter works out just fine for the grinding part anyway).

[dschepler]

For the healing setup, it seems like it would be a lot easier just to junction Drain to Status Atk for the whole party.

[WhiteFenix]

That's why it's call an achievement. It's not something you get just from playing the game like normal, you have to earn it.

[Shterben]

Carrionjr thanks

[Carrionjr]

@Ren

use something like this

^j::
Loop {
Send, {Up down} ; Press down the up-arrow key.
Sleep, 1000 ; Keep it down for one second.
Send, {Up up} ; Release the up-arrow key.
Send, {Down down} ; Press down the up-arrow key.
Sleep, 1000 ; Keep it down for one second.
Send, {Down up} ; Release the up-arrow key.
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
SendInput, {x down}
Sleep, 250
SendInput, {x up}
}
return

this worked fine for me in the caves where you fight ifirit

[Shterben]

where is the link to the script?

[Greshapa]

the link to your script no longer works. :(

[quantumness]

I understand this guide is an amazing feat. on your behalf.
I plan to play this game for the rest of my life.
So eventually I will get there.
I don't need the achievement today.

[Ass_on_fire_man]

I wrote the same script fo FF3 achievment, but I found out that script doesn't press any key which is binded for "select" option in the game. But still the script works and presses this key if you go to another window. Do you know how to solve it?

[ladynadiad]

Also want to say thanks for the idea of a macro. With some editing I may be able to get this to work for FF3's Jack of All Trades achievement. Pretty much I swapped up and down, removed one up and one down and edited the delay for the up/down movement to 500 instead of 1000. Jack of All Trades is far worse than 10k kills, trust me, so this is much appreciated!