I finally beat my insane personal challenge

So many months ago I posted about my attempt at a crazy personal challenge I had come up with.

The TLDR is that I decided to start a new solo game where I would try to defeat Yagluth without ever fighting any of the other bosses first, nor using any portals, nor using any "cheese tactics" against Yagluth, nor taming any animals (so that I couldn't just send dozens of wolves at Yagluth to kill him).

As you can read in my original post, I was doing pretty well. I was surviving trips to the plains and had even found a few totems. I was making plans for the endgame, but real life dragged me away for a while and it wasn't until recently (after the release of H&H) that I got back into my game.

The addition of H&H made things a little more difficult. I could no longer go toe-to-toe with a Lox using my maxed out bronze armor, buckler and spear. I had to resort to killing them with my bow.

Additionally, I could no longer cook lox meat or serpent meat easily.

I very nearly died the first I found a tar pit. I saw a few bouncing growths in the distance and not knowing what they were or how deadly they were, I decided to try sniping them with my bow from afar. The next thing I knew, two of them were bounding at me and I was dying…. QUICKLY. I tried to run but could barely move. I chugged a healing potion and continued to try to get away but they were on me in a second. My health dropped to single digits and I knew that the next hit was going to kill me. I thought for sure that I was a goner, and then something amazing happened… A nearby Lox had gotten aggroed by the tars and charged into battle and gave me a chance to escape. I ran for my life and never looked back. Never again did I go near a tar pit.

Anywho, all new H&H stuff aside, I did manage to find enough totems to summon Yagluth but realized bronze armor just wasn't going to cut it in a toe-to-toe fight with him, so I began to actively farm oozers for the rare chance of a scrap iron drop. I decided that I needed 20 iron total so that I could make an iron pick and go mine silver. Since I wasn't allowing myself any "cheesy hacks" (like using chairs to get into crypts rather than the crypt key), I knew that shy of luckily finding a random scrap mud pile in the swamp (and believe me, I tried), the only way for me to get iron was from oozers.

Farming oozers is a PAIN and by far the worst part of this entire challenge.

Oozers are rare. On top of that they only drop scrap iron 1/3 of the time. Additionally, they also only appear at night. Night lasts 9 minutes compared to Day which lasts 18 minutes. You can skip past the night by sleeping but can't skip past the day.

So yeah… getting 20 iron together sucked.

On the plus side, while I was collecting that iron, I could use some of it for things like building a stonecutting table or large metal food rack, or forge upgrades. So long as I didn't make a weapon or iron nails, I could always dismantle whatever I'd used the iron to make and get my iron back. So I made sure to cook up more serpent meat (for serpent stew) until I finally had 20 iron and could make a pick.

Once I had a pick, I took my trusty Stagbreaker up into the mountains to find silver. I was really lucking in that when I first found silver, I actually found two other deposits extremely close by.

Silver gave me access to Wolf armor, a lox cape, a silver shield and a fang spear.

I have to say, the fang spear is SOOOOOOOOOOO good for what it costs. It only costs 5 silver to make and get up to level 3 (compared to many of the other silver-tier weapons which cost 75+… hell some of them require iron too).

Somehow I forgot that I had access to crafting Frostner.

In any case, now that I had maxed out (or as maxed out as I could get) silver-tier armor and weapons, I got myself fully loaded up with good food (Serpent Stew, Eyescream and Sausages), health potions, fire-resistant potions, and stamina potions and set sail for the nearby continent where I'd found Yagluth's alter.

I summoned Yagluth and discovered almost immediately that my one bludgeoning weapon (my trusty bronze mace) was NEVER going to get the job done vs. Yagluth. Yes, my armor and resistances allowed me to go toe-to-toe with him, but only for about 20-30 seconds before I'd have to retreat for a minute (or more) to heal up, and it turns out that a maxed out bronze mace just doesn't do enough damage to him to offset how much he regenerates in that time.

I did the only sensible thing and fled… Only to discover that Yagluth was more than happy to chase me half-way around the continent.

Eventually I got out of his chase range, made it back to my boat and sailed home to re-evaluate my options.

Once home, I realized that I actually had access to Frostner but didn't have any Ymir flesh…nor any more silver.

Regardless, I knew what I had to do.

I set sail for the merchant to obtain the Ymir flesh. Once I'd got it, I stopped off on another continent that had a large mountain and found myself a couple veins of silver. A couple days later I returned to my base camp with 120 silver ore.

Once I had Frostner made and upgraded to level 3 (highest I could get without going back and farming a LOT more iron) I packed up all my necessary supplies and sailed back to where I'd last seen Yagluth.

The fight with Yagluth was brutal.

It lasted 2 days and spanned a good chuck of the continent he was on. Deathsquitos were constantly harassing me while I was trying to deal with Yagluth. At one point, I stupidly got too close to a small fuling village and had to deal with 9 or 10 fulings swarming me WHILE dodging Yagluth's attacks. Ironically, he ended up destroying half of the village in the process. We also ended up near a mountain at one point and two wolves briefly joined the epic battle. Luckily no lox ever got involved.

I even died once during the battle when a rock got in the way of me dodging a Yagluth meteor. This was a particularly interesting setback as I had to reacquire my gear armed with only the backup gear I'd brought to the continent and left at my "nearby" (on the other side of a mountain) respawn point – 1 health potion, 1 fire resistant potion, food, troll armor and a level 1 club. Did you know it takes 3 whacks to kill a deathsquito with a level 1 club? – I found this out the hard way and it nearly killed me. Don't try this at home.

I got my stuff back and continued the fight. I realized that his summoning altar was actually fairly void of enemy spawn points nearby and arguably the best place I could fight him, so I dragged him back there to finish the fight. I got into a groove and took him down. I wasn't easy and my gear was pretty beat up afterward. Frostner ended up at about 10% durability. All of my wolf armor pieces were at about half durability.

In the end, I completed my challenge. I only died 4 or 5 times total during the entire challenge which lasted over 200 days. I sailed a LOT of the world in my Karve, never having built a portal.

With the exception of farming the oozers, I really enjoyed this challenge – especially after H&H released and I had to adjust my tactics and strategies.