How to Get 10 Titanite Slabs from The Great Hollow

The Great Hollow contains 10 crystal lizards, each with a 10% drop rate of a titanite slab. The problem is, they don't respawn, but there is a way around that. Here's how to make sure you get all 10 slabs.

Titanite Slabs

In Dark Souls Remastered, titanite slabs are an extremely rare upgrade material that is essential to maxing out certain weapons and armours. The problem is that each New Game only offers 3 guaranteed titanite slabs, with a theoretically infinite number of slabs you can farm from Darkwraith Knights and a maximum of 10 slabs you can obtain from crystal lizards.



To see more information on this, you can head over to the Titanite Slab Wiki [darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com].

Since Darkwraith Knight's titanite slab drop rate is atrocious, we'll be looking at gaining all 10 slabs from the crystal lizards, and hopefully that will be plenty to last you your entire game.

Great Hollow Crystal Lizards

Within The Great Hollow, 10 crystal lizards can be found, each dropping twinkling titanite as well as a random variety of shards, chunks and a slab.



You can head over to The Wiki [darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com] for more information on their drops and rates.

The location of each crystal lizard is hard coded, however their spawn chance (upon sitting at a bonfire or quitting and reloading) is random so you may have to reload the area multiple times to have them spawn. I recommend following a youtube guide to find the crystal lizards.

I'm fond of Kond Video's (2016) DARK SOULS - Crystal Lizard Guide

The Great Hollow section begins at 3:10 into the video

Save Scum Warning

Now, if you kill the crystal lizards as is, you'll roll for the 10% drop rate and that's that. Since they don't respawn, we don't want to risk our only shot at a titanite slab disappearing for good, and to do that, we'll be utilizing SAVE SCUMMING.

If you prefer not to save-scum, You can click off because this isn't for you, but I should warn you that your fate is in the hands of a 0.21% drop rate on titanite slabs from the Darkwraith Knights [darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com]



That is an abysmal drop rate, which is why if you're someone who likes to experiment or simply can't decide what weapon to use, this guide is for you.

How to Save Scum Crystal Lizards

The technique of save scumming is done by copying your save file to a different location and, when needed, moving/pasting it back into your save file location to replace it. This is useful because if you kill a non-respawning enemy and it doesn't drop what you desire, you can simply revert back to before you killed it to roll for the drop again.

Now, to ensure your titanite slab from the crystal lizards in The Great Hollow (slabs only drop from here) you'll need to find your save file location. Usually this is located at

C:\Users\[yournamehere]\Documents\NBGI\DARK SOULS REMASTERED\[numbers]

*[yournamehere] is whatever your computer user's name is
*[numbers] will usually be a long string of numbers that are different for each user.

Inside this folder you will see a file called DRAKS0005.sl2. This is your save file, and I highly recommend backing this file up somewhere before continuing in case anything happens.

VIDEO EXAMPLE FURTHER BELOW
Now before copy pasting your save file, you should follow the crystal lizard guide video to find a crystal lizard and stand right next to its spawn point. Now close the game (I recommend setting launch to offline so that you don't have to log in each time you start the game) and copy paste your save file in an easily accessible location. Launch the game and load in and if the crystal lizard doesn't spawn, quit to main menu and press continue to reload the spawn. Repeat until the crystal lizard spawns and then kill it. If a titanite slab doesn't drop, quit out either through the menu or by ALT+F4'ing, and then copy paste your save-scum file into the save file location. Re-open the game and kill the crystal lizard. Repeat until your titanite slab drops.

Here's an example video I've made that shows the process. Feel free to ignore the mods I have installed as they're purely cosmetic and won't affect the slab process. I was too lazy to remove them for the video.

Mods shown in the video:
DARK BANDAI NAMCO INTRO LOGO [www.nexusmods.com]
DARK SOULS RESHADED [www.nexusmods.com]
SOME MINECRAFT TOOLS FOR DSR [www.nexusmods.com]
IMPROVED STATUS ICONS [www.nexusmods.com]

Extras

Maxing out your Item Discovery [darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com] (410 is the max, you can see more on the wiki) only increases the chance of the Titanite Slab by 1~%. The reason for this is that a drop table's total cumulative rate cannot exceed 100%, and since the crystal lizard's drop table is already very high with only a 10% rate of not dropping anything, that empty 10% is allotted to the various chunks and shards the lizard can drop, resulting in a negligible increase in drop rate for the slab. It's still worth doing if you have the means, but don't go out of your way for it. You can find a better explanation here on reddit from the user 'illusorywall'.

I've noticed that if you copy paste your file one reload before the crystal lizard spawns, it will always spawn when you load in each time you save scum. Of course there is no way to know if the crystal lizard will spawn on the next reload so you'd have to close your game and copy paste your file each time you reload, but I find this to be worth it as the time wasted closing out and copy pasting each reload saves far more time than having to reload multiple times per save scum because you will likely have to kill the crystal lizard around 10 times per slab, which means reloading multiple times, 10 times.

Also if preferable, you can just alt+f4 if you don't get the slab to save time. I personally use this method.

I hope this helps any fellow indecisive people out there, as I personally am always flitting between various weapons, and it never feels quite right to test a weapon when my current weapon is +15 and the weapon that interests me is +14, or alternatively, this might be enough excess slabs for any armour-enjoyers to finally bother upgrading their armour!

Thanks for reading, and feel free to point out any mistakes I've made in this guide and I'll do my best to fix them post-haste.