Five of Five: The Overlooked Part of the Organ Grinder (Patreon)

It's time we talked about Melvin. And by that, it's time we discussed in detail the Monster-Tooth Necklace and how important it is to a smooth and potent game experience.

The Organ Grinder is pretty widely known to be one of the move overpowered and essential locations in the current Kingdom Death Meta. It comes with these pieces of gear:

I've been through just how powerful most of these items are in a great deal of detail. Monster Grease is essential early game and remains at a minimum a one of for every hunt party in the game. The Fecal Salve is one of the most reliable ways to make your support survivor durable and safe, Dried Acanthus helps settlements with low +X Departing Survival and also provides protection against death, severe injuries (you choose when to activate Dried Acanthus btw - that's from Poots) and also is very powerful in events like See the Truth which inflict a severe injury on you as part of their text. The Lucky Charm is pretty much the #1 item for early game resource farming and it's also something that remains at least a one of for most hunt parties because of how important breaking for resources remains at every level of the game.

This time though we're going to go into the Monster-Tooth Necklace, which is criminally underrated and as a part of this Patreon I like to challenge established thinking and try to open up development space for people who are playing. It's why I've stated so clearly that Dragon Armor (which works well with the necklace btw) is very strong, because many players get hung up on familiar pathways and that's fine to a certain point. However, I've played enough that I consider it important for me to push out into other things.

One of those things was this continued, nagging, knowledge that the Monster-Tooth Necklace was better than people gave it credit. This gear card often gets overlooked because it requires Heat to get it online (along with 1x bone and 1x scrap) and all it gives is +1 strength (+2 with 2 red affinities). That's a tiny amount, surely? Right?

Well, let me trot off a few numbers for you.

• 6, 8, 10, 14. 
• 10, 12, 16.
• 14, 16, 21.
• 13, 15, 17.
• 12, 14, 18.
• 8, 10, 12.

Do you recognise those? Without looking below this line did you immediately realise what they are and what they mean? If so, well done, you're internalising key parts of Kingdom Death and that's going to make your playstyle deeper and more intuitive.

If not, don't sweat it, they are just numbers with almost no context.  You'll notice that the increases between them are generally +2 when you move from the first number to the second, and then between +2 and +5 on the third number.

Well, they're toughness levels of various monsters in the game, and this is a key part of why the Monster-Tooth Necklace (MTN) is stronger than it looks.

Monster Toughness Plateaus.

Monsters in this game have a distinct, plateau like design to them. They increase in power in a step-like fashion with a large spike at each level and outside of that the only changes are the terrain and which AI cards they've been dealt (plus chance).  A while ago I coined a basic rule of when to move to a new monster, which is 'when you can wound the higher level about half the time' you're ready to go.

That's not accurate in every single situation, but it is a good primer for learning and it covers most of the early game monsters.  We're going to drill that apart now by looking at the White Lion in order to provide an example. Be prepared for charts!

The White Lion's toughness progresses up in 3 steps*, and it looks like this:

As you can see from the way that I've structured the lines in this one, it's kind of a step function. The monster's toughness doesn't get higher gradually, it rises up when you move to the next point.

In contrast survivors power has smaller steps. If you take into account that the average wounding roll on a d10 is 5.5 then you can work out how likely you are to wound a monster on average. For our comparison here, this is the wounding roll progression of the early game Bone Smith and White Lion weapons - all things that you'll typically consider when fighting your first few White Lions.

This represents pretty typical growth in survivor offensive power, it's a lot of steps, shared out amongst the settlement and is less stark than the way that the monster progression works (also I've laid out the graph differently to illustrate my point, there's no steps here).

If we put both sets of data together and turn the monster's toughness into flat 'threshold' lines you end up with this.

So, what do we have here?

First of all the three coloured lines represent the following:

• Yellow - Level 1 White Lion
• Green - Level 2 White Lion
• Burgundy - Level 3 White Lion and an argument about what colour it is.

The two bars represent the average wounding roll from a given weapon.

• Blue is the natural weapon in the hands of a 0 strength survivor
• Orange is the weapon with +2 strength, aka an active Monster-Tooth Necklace.

We can see immediately why certain weapons are meta and others are ignored.  The Bone Dagger and Bone Sword for example represent insufficient to wound a level 1 White Lion without additional survivor strength from other sources (Bone Sword is close and makes it with Survival of the Fittest), while all the White Lion weapons apart from the Cat Fang Knife are sufficient to reach a chance of wounding on an average roll (3+5.5 = 8.5!). However only the Bone Club and the Claw Head Arrow (or Zanbato, it's the same strength) reach a sufficiently high number to threaten the L2 unaided.

If we look at the orange bar! Something interesting happens! When you consider the Monster-Tooth Necklace into the equation, on a survivor with 0 strength, all of a sudden the Bone Axe, King Spear, Cat-Gut Bow, Lion Beast Katar and Bone Darts all climb enough to wound the L2 on an average roll (A 5+ to be precise, which is 60% of the time they'll wound).

How about that? No need to upgrade weapons, we've moved up an entire weight class of lion with just the addition of a single gear item that gives +2 strength (Or +1 if it's not active and an additional +1 from survival of the fittest).

We've also pushed the Bone Club/Zanbato/Claw Head Arrow's strength up enough that it is almost enough to threaten the L3. That's pretty crazy.

 *Excluding Prologue and Legendary versions of the White Lion, cause I can't be bothered to plot them at the moment. 

This pattern repeats elsewhere on other monsters to differing degrees (it's never as clean as with the White Lion and Screaming Antelope). For example here's the Gorm:

Apart from demonstrating how ridiculously overpowered the Black Sword is, this chart shows how the Gorm weapons (apart from the Knuckle Shield and Acid-Tooth Dagger) all reach the L2 when they get a monster-tooth necklace added to their loadout.

In fact, when you look at some of the monsters with less than optimal weapons, the Monster-Tooth Necklace does wonders at fixing them. 

Here's the Phoenix vs. the Weapon Crafter and Plumery weapons.

You can see clearly here how relatively weak a lot of the weapon crafter and Plumery weapons are. Most of them don't even threaten the L1 Phoenix without help from the necklace/survivor. Which I find to be unacceptable on the design front. 

Typically, you would expect that the weapons you make from the L1 version of the monster would allow you to move onto the L2 version - or a different, more difficult monster. This is a great part of why the Zanbato is so beloved. It's technically a White Lion weapon and as you can see, it's the only weapon on the list that can on average harm the Phoenix unaided without the need to kill a phoenix in the first place. 5 or 6 strength is the bare minimum you want to take in order to try and enter the Phoenix club, going in with a less than 50% chance of wounding is asking for the showdown to result in, on average, failure. As we have an 'all or nothing' design to how showdowns work, you don't even get to keep what you break, then progression is linked to getting those weapons that let you increase your chances of success.

Once you add in the Phoenix Specific weapons after your first Phoenix kill, you're in no better a position. Only the Arc Bow and the Finger of God cut the mustard (both weapons I've been praising for a long time). The rest (apart from the one shot hollowpoint arrow) need help.

Why is this? Well I believe it's because the Phoenix Weapons were designed around the Charge ability. If we take a look at what Charge does to the Phoenix and weapon crafter weapons you'll see exactly what I mean.

Now the blue bar is representing a 5 square charge and activation of a melee weapon. (Charge can be 5, 7, 8 or 10 squares typically). You can see here that suddenly the weapons are all enough to threaten the L1, L2 and sometimes the L3 Phoenix. Which is why I believe that this is how the armor was balanced. They built them around charging in every turn, which is a hugely survival intensive form of fighting and not easy to do. It's certainly not the route of least resistance.

I think this is the case because when you look at the Dragon King, a similar pattern emerges.

Dragon Armor with leap represents +5 strength, and we can see clearly that you're "supposed" to use these weapons with leap to harm the L2 and then use the Red Core to reach high enough levels to threaten the L3 and get that Blue Core for deadly.

Same applies to the Sunstalker Weapons interaction with Cycloid Scale

(The flat points you see are because those weapons already have Sharp).

That, design of armor + weapons in combination to move onto the L2 seems to be the theory behind the design. However in practice what happens is the strongest weapons are chosen and the rest are ignored. People will take the path of least resistance.

Full Circle, like a Necklace

That brings us back to the MTN, that simple +2 strength, which seems like a small amount, is actually huge in the mid game, it allows you to save your resources for armor by increasing the lifespan of your early game weapons - 1x scrap and 1x bone (plus a slot) is a very low cost when compared to making a new weapon.

A grid like this is not expensive to make:

And you don't even need to take the bone darts if you have Survival of the Fittest, +1 +1 = +2 after all!

I have more of these articles coming in the future, stuff that will supplement the assessment of the weapons (Which we're moving into in strength shortly) and the design of mixed sets.

Until then, instead of chasing that shiny new weapon, maybe just upgrading your old one at the cost of a slot and 2 resources is a better option?