The Way of the Snurtle!

[lakhnish]

   

You see this adorable little thing?

This mob with the round shell is called a Snurtle, and has a 10% chance of spawning from a Slurtle Mound found in the caves. Upon death, it has a 75% chance of dropping a Snurtle Shell. The Shell has 735 durability, has a 60% armor protection when worn normally, and 100% armor protection when you hide in the shell.

Now, that 100% armor protection may sound interesting, but it sounds difficult to acquire given such low spawn rates, right? Don't they only come out after earthquakes or when you the player punch the mound, increasing the risk of you thus accidentally killing the mound eventually?

Well, no! With a Fire and Ice Staff, all you'd need to do is light the mound with the Fire Staff and then dowse it with Ice Staff. Keep repeating that, and eventually you'll get a Snurtle! Just make sure that the mound doesn't stay on fire too long, else it'll blow up (like 30+ seconds). It also doesn't take any fire damage when it's lit, so no worries about destroying the mound via HP loss!

A basic chest with materials for staves can maybe net you 5-7 shells every day or two, depending on how many Slurtle Mounds are in your world, where they are placed, and your RNG for the Snurtle Shell drop. A better setup with ideal Slurtle Mound placement, roads, easy stave production, unlimited food, and decent RNG can probably net you 6-10+ shells a day. Make sure you're not carrying any rocks or gems, else this won't work as the Slurtles will attack you instead of going back into their mound. But what to do with all these Snurtle Shells you've collected?

Allow me to enlighten you on the Way of the Snurtle (in the spoilers).

Spoiler

Killing bosses of course! 

Killing Antlion!

Spoiler

3-5 Snurtle Shells are needed. Hold F and right click on the shell when she's about to attack to take no damage. You could probably use less shells if you kited her!

Killing Ancient Guardian!

Spoiler

You'll need to be close to the Guardian or else he'll do a double horn attack. The ice staff is used to get into position.

3 hits and shell is a safe pattern. My pattern is that I go for 4 hits, but if the shell breaks or if he does a little taunting animation, then it's 3 hits before you have to shell. It'll depend on how comfortable you are with the pattern.

I think it's an alright method if you're struggling to get your first Ancient Guardian kill, though I have learned of better methods lately.

Killing Bee Queen! (with about 4 Perogies)

Spoiler

Resources used:
~2 Beekeeper Hats, ~ 4-5 Snurtle Shells, ~4 Perogies and a Fire Staff.

The Beekeeper Hats are used to increase the durability of the Snurtle Shells and to reduce the damage taken if you don't Shell Tank in time.

Bone Armor was only used until I got the minions down to one bee for phase one. That was so I did not waste the durability of the Snurtle Shells on just setting up phase one.

The cobblestone arena is a 15 wide by 5 high area on each side of the Bee Hive.

Bee Queen Strategy:
Phase 1: Leave one grumble alive, drag Bee Queen so you don't waste the Shell's durability when being attacked by both the Grumble Bee and BQ. Use the Fire Staff for DPS when leading her and Shell Tank when attacking her.

Phase 2: Bee Queen is faster than the Grumble Bees. Light her as you drag her to the other side of the arena and then Shell Tank till the bees catch up.

Phase 3: The Grumble Bees get a speed buff when she screeches. Upon her screech, the bees will chase you. During the chase, count to 6 or 7 and go back to Bee Queen when you hit 6 or 7. Get as much damage as you can, but don't use the Fire Staff since you risk burning her loot. Shell Tank just like in phase 1 and 2.

And most importantly of all:

Killing Ancient Fuelweaver!

Spoiler

Eight minute fight, only 1 full Weather Pain and the proper amount of Dark Swords were used. About 7 Snurtle Shells were used, which is like a day or two of farming them. 

I'm right clicking on the shell whenever I can, including his bone cage attacks when possible since they also do damage.

I used a Garland cause I needed a head slot item that wouldn't break so that I could easily keep reequipping the Bone Helm. Had it been armor, it would have kept breaking, meaning I'd need to rebind the Bone Helm and the new head armor. You can use a 0% Miner's hat (which is what I currently use) or a Bush Hat, but the Garland was the only item I could think of that wouldn't break during the fight at the time.

Spoiler

And if you're an Overcharged WX and kill the hands as soon as they're up, you can kill him in about five minutes.

 

Double bone armor just doesn't suit some bosses just because they attack too fast for double bone armor to take effect. I'd say Snurtle Shells are a great and viable alternative! 

I really recommend using the Snurtle Shells for Ancient Fuelweaver, especially for Bee Queen (4 perogies is insane), and Antlion if you even kill it in the first place.

General Tips:

• If you hide in a 1% shell, it will take all the damage done to a player when it breaks, meaning that no damage gets pushed to the player. 
• The animation where the player is pulling on the Shell to hide is the same as if you're hiding in the shell. You can use that to your advantage as an animation skip, ie, hide in the shell at the last second.
• The Snurtle Mounds take zero damage from both Earthquakes and when lit on fire (aka fire damage)! Just don't let the mound burn for too long, else it will blow up.
• For some reason, the Slurtle Mound is considered to be a hostile entity, meaning you may accidentally attack it with your weapon via regular attack. Thankfully for me, eXiGe's client-side mod Advanced Controls added the feature of making Slurtle Mounds to be considered neutral, requiring a click-to-attack rather than a regular attack. Thanks!

Snurtle Mound Spawning Mechanics and Farming Technique:

• There are two types of Snurtle Mounds: some mounds are only capable of housing one mob, while other mounds are capable of housing two mobs (ie. Mound A can only spawn one mob, while Mound B has the ability to spawn two mobs). This seems to be randomly selected.
• This is important for efficiency reasons. Suppose two Mounds: Mound A (which has only one chance of spawning a Snurtle) and Mound B (which has two chances of spawning a Snurtle). 
• Farming Mound B is more efficient since for that same Fire and Ice Staff, you're getting two chances of spawning a Snurtle rather than the one.
• This means you're going to have to mark which Mounds are bad (ie. only gives one mob), as that would reduce the efficiency of the system.
• That logic is also why I stop farming a Mound when it starts giving only one mob and simply move on to another one. 
• The mounds themselves repopulate a mob rather quickly too (about 120 seconds a mob if I read the lua correctly)

Snurtle Mound Max-Mob-Cap-Reloading Issue

Every time the server is reloaded, a new mob cap is reassigned to every Snurtle Mound . That means a Snurtle Mound that had two mobs when you farmed it the first time may now only give one mob the next time (similar to how you could change the Gem in an Ancient Statue in DS). 

Not only does this make planning my routes for the Mounds very annoying, it also means that a world where you thought you had good Snurtle spawning RNG now has the potential to become a world with bad Snurtle spawning RNG.

It's particularly painful on worlds where the server will be constantly relaunched when playing with friends, since its would be very annoying to ask them to restart the server (if at all) just for good/decent Snurtle spawning RNG. I'd rather have that value be fixed to reduce this annoyance that I learned about, but nothing I can really do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Snurtle Farming Example

This is an twitch highlight of me farming Snurtles using essentially everything I've learned about Snurtles to farm them, in case you're interested in how it looks like.

Thanks for reading and thanks to whoever came up with the concept of the Snurtle Shell in the first place at Klei!

[ButterStuffed]

Couldn't you also use a flingomatic and a torch to remove the need for staves?

I think a starcaller's staff would work as well.

[lakhnish]

54 minutes ago, Mikro said:

Couldn't you also use a flingomatic and a torch to remove the need for staves?

I think a starcaller's staff would work as well.

That method is way too slow for my tastes, as demonstrated by DST ST. The star would burn the mound, the ice flingo will then dowse the mound as well as freeze the Slurtles and maybe Snurtle that comes out of it, and then I have to wait for them to defrost. 

With the staves, it goes by so much faster since I can light it and then dowse it and simply repeat without having to wait. Most people are also essentially drowning in Red and Blue Gems after clearing the ruins a few times, but the gems never get put to use or people just leave them on the ground to break b/c they have no use for them.

I would also have to use a star or two for every mound, and possibly multiple flingos cause I will be farming multiple Slurtle Holes in typically two different locations. I typically farm one side till its just one mob coming out of the mound, and then go to the other set while waiting for the first set to repopulate.

What I also just remembered is that flingos don't put stuff out if you leave the area, so if you leave something to burn next to a star, it will go up in flames.

[minespatch]

[Well-met]

I wish slurtle hats were just as easy to get. What a pain.

[fimmatek]

That's a really nice idea with the bosses, I'll try them, especially with the guardian. I think with some headslot armor (a helm or thulecite crown) the durability of the snurtle shell armor could be "extended", so less of them would be needed.

Thanks for sharing!

[Sinister_Fang]

And I thought these were impractical to use due to how rare snurtles were. Guess I was wrong. It also gives me something to do with all those extra red and blue gems that build up in long running worlds.

16 minutes ago, fimmatek said:

I think with some headslot armor (a helm or thulecite crown) the durability of the snurtle shell armor could be "extended", so less of them would be needed.

I was thinking the exact same thing. In the bee queen video the bee keeper hat was taking damage, so it should work. I'm guessing the damage splitting is taking into account the shell armor's natural 60% reduction instead of it's 100% when hiding. If that is the case, a helmet made of easier to farm materials should take more damage then the shell. So you'll get more use out of the shell armor overall when pairing it with a helmet.

[fimmatek]

8 minutes ago, Sinister_Fang said:

I'm guessing the damage splitting is taking into account the shell armor's natural 60% reduction instead of it's 100% when hiding. If that is the case, a helmet made of easier to farm materials should take more damage then the shell.

I remember reading that both armors (chest and head slot, if equipped) loses the same durability, using the higher protection rate. But I'm unsure how that actually works, so some clarification from someone who understands the code would be welcomed. 

[lakhnish]

8 hours ago, Hell-met said:

I wish slurtle hats were just as easy to get. What a pain.

There's an ingenious method to farming Slurtle Hats via Depth Worms, as demonstrated by HugyDST.

Spoiler

 

 

3 hours ago, Sinister_Fang said:

I was thinking the exact same thing. In the bee queen video the bee keeper hat was taking damage, so it should work. I'm guessing the damage splitting is taking into account the shell armor's natural 60% reduction instead of it's 100% when hiding. If that is the case, a helmet made of easier to farm materials should take more damage then the shell. So you'll get more use out of the shell armor overall when pairing it with a helmet.

 

3 hours ago, fimmatek said:

remember reading that both armors (chest and head slot, if equipped) loses the same durability, using the higher protection rate. But I'm unsure how that actually works, so some clarification from someone who understands the code would be welcomed. 

This is my understanding of how armor protection and durability works in DST (wish I had a better non-wiki based explanation, but recezib's explanation will do for now).

If you are wearing two slots of armor, the highest armor protection is applied and the durability damage is split between the two pieces of armor.

There are three reasons why I used Beekeeper Hats + Snurtle Shells against Bee Queen. The first was to extend the durability of the Snurtle Shells so that I wouldn't have to use as many. Secondly, in the event that I messed up and didn't Shell Tank in time, I would at least have an 80% armor protection from the Beekeeper Hat rather than the 60% armor protection from the Snurtle Shell.

Thirdly, as you saw, I find straight up fighting Bee Queen to be fun, but the amount of healing that I would normally use (30-40+ Perogies via Magi + Beekeeper Hats) to be very annoying. With the shells, I only ended up using ~4 Perogies, and since I can easily reacquire the Snurtle Shells and Beekeeper Hats, I can easily keep re-fighting Bee Queen when I want to.

I made an exception to head armor for Ancient Fuelweaver cause inventory management became a nightmare and made the fight much harder for me for no real tangible benefits, as explained a bit more below.

11 hours ago, lakhnish said:

I used a Garland cause I needed a head slot item that wouldn't break so that I could easily keep reequipping the Bone Helm. Had it been armor, it would have kept breaking, meaning I'd need to rebind the Bone Helm and the new head armor. You can use a 0% Miner's hat (which is what I currently use) or a Bush Hat, but the Garland was the only item I could think of that wouldn't break during the fight at the time.

 

[MrDeepDarkmind]

hold up why would someone use the shell if like beekeeper hats are better 

also yes I live by the code of the snurtle/slurtle i farm them for life in my old world which is glitched because klei won't fix the event for me :c 

I used to make a pen for them and I'll go there just so I can kill every single slurtle that comes out of EQ, out of 9 dens I usually always have a chance of getting 1-3 slurtle hats and for snurtles I see them like almost every day since they just force to come out when I do this ice/fire staff treatment.

I love the hat and body armor, wish it had the same HP as DS

[lakhnish]

21 minutes ago, MrDeepDarkmind said:

hold up why would someone use the shell if like beekeeper hats are better

The shell is a 100% armor protection when you hide in it, while the Beekeeper Hat is only 80% protection. By following the kiting/tanking pattern listed in the spoiler for Bee Queen, I can take very little damage against a normally healing-intensive solo Bee Queen fight. With the Shells 100% protection, which I can easily farm, I can significantly reduce the healing used (the amount of healing I used was very annoying to me).

Again, the Beekeeper Hats are used to extend the durability of the Shells and to offer me the 80% protection in the event I make a mistake and don't hide in the shell in time. Without the Beekeeper Hats (ie. the Shell only) I would only have had a 60% armor protection when I messed up and would have also used more shells in general. This is the fight itself showing what I mean in case that wasn't clear.

[Majestix]

In the overcharged WX video, how were you deploying the weather pain so quickly? I believe the default behaviour is that if you press f while the pain is equipped, you just use it as a melee weapon, right? You seemed to be starting the tornado without moving your mouse. Is that also a functionality of the Advanced Controls mod?

[lakhnish]

4 hours ago, Majestix said:

In the overcharged WX video, how were you deploying the weather pain so quickly? I believe the default behaviour is that if you press f while the pain is equipped, you just use it as a melee weapon, right? You seemed to be starting the tornado without moving your mouse. Is that also a functionality of the Advanced Controls mod?

Nope, not a function of the Advanced Controls Mod. 

You are correct in saying that holding F with the Weather Pain makes it act like a melee weapon.

What I'm doing is I quickly swap to the Weather Pain via the keyboard hotkey (for me its the number 2 on the top), quickly moving my mouse off my shell to right click on FW to activate the tornado, and then quickly moving my mouse back to the shell to continue Shell Tanking. 

It's also why I'm sometimes briefly attacking FW with the Weather Pain; I was in the middle of swapping and moving my mouse towards FW to activate the tornado. I'm not the best at quickly swapping unfortunately, but I get the job done somehow.

It's a bit hard to see given that there's so much going on in the fight and the fact that it was a LQ segment from my stream but at the 2min and 20 second mark, my mouse is visible and moving. (Currently can't link on mobile, will do so later on PC). Here we go.

[Majestix]

45 minutes ago, lakhnish said:

I'm not the best at quickly swapping unfortunately, but I get the job done somehow.

Damn right you get the job done! It was pretty cool to watch!

[BeeClops]

I never used snurtle schells that much as it's really hard for me to manage inventory without a backpack, so i usually stick to helmets xd, atleast until i reach the no grass-twigs-logs-flint needed and just go w magluminesence.

But your post is awesome and imma try using them more  quite handy

[Maxposting]

don't ya worry about earthquakes eventually destoying all mounds?

[lakhnish]

2 hours ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

don't ya worry about earthquakes eventually destoying all mounds?

In DST, the stuff from earthquakes does not damage structures (like walls, fences, and in this case, Snurtle Mounds), so no worries there.

I also double checked by forcing earthquakes via the telelocator staff in the caves (the stuff drops directly on top of you, making this much easier), and the stuff from the earthquakes do indeed just bounce off the Mounds. I used the Simple Health Bar mod to verify if it took damage as well, and it didn't.

[Maxposting]

5 hours ago, lakhnish said:

In DST, the stuff from earthquakes does not damage structures (like walls, fences, and in this case, Snurtle Mounds), so no worries there.

I also double checked by forcing earthquakes via the telelocator staff in the caves (the stuff drops directly on top of you, making this much easier), and the stuff from the earthquakes do indeed just bounce off the Mounds. I used the Simple Health Bar mod to verify if it took damage as well, and it didn't.

Then still there could be a wes noob player and accidentally one hit kill the mound

[Instant-Noodles]

On 28/01/2019 at 1:38 AM, fimmatek said:

I remember reading that both armors (chest and head slot, if equipped) loses the same durability, using the higher protection rate. But I'm unsure how that actually works, so some clarification from someone who understands the code would be welcomed. 

 

On 28/01/2019 at 4:39 AM, lakhnish said:

This is my understanding of how armor protection and durability works in DST (wish I had a better non-wiki based explanation, but recezib's explanation will do for now).

If you are wearing two slots of armor, the highest armor protection is applied and the durability damage is split between the two pieces of armor.

Just to add on to @lakhnish's response, yes, the highest absorption percentage of the 2 armors is used and the damage is split between the armor pieces, but said damage is split proportionally (not evenly) based on each armor's absorption rate.

Taking the beekeeper hat (80% absorption, 1050 durability) & the snurtle shell armor (60% normal / 100% hiding, 735 durability) example:

If an enemy did 100 damage to you while you were wearing the snurtle shell (80% absoprtion of beekeeper hat is used):

20 damage done to player and 80 damage absorbed by armor
The beekeeper hat would lose 80 damage x (80 absorption / (80+60 absorption)) = 45.71 durability (45.71/1050 = ~4.4% lost)
The snurtle shell would lose 80 damage x (60 absorption / (80+60 absorption)) = 34.29 durability (34.29/735 = ~4.7% lost)

And if you were hiding inside the snurtle shell (100% absorption of the snurtle shell is used):

0 damage done to player and 100 damage absorbed by armor
The beekeeper hat would lose 100 damage x (80 absorption / (80+100 absorption)) = 44.44 durability (44.44/1050 = ~4.2% lost)
The snurtle shell would lose 100 damage x (100 absoprtion / (80+100 absorption)) = 55.55 durability (55.55/735 = ~7.6% lost)

But, if you only used a snurtle shell armor and took the same 100 damage, then:

Wearing (60% absoprtion)
40 damage done to player and 60 damage abosrbed by armor
The snurtle shell would lose 60 durability (60/735 = ~8.2% lost)

Hiding (100% absorption)
0 damage done to player and 100 damage absorbed by armor
The snurtle shell would lose 100 durability (100/735 = ~13.6% lost)

As mentioned by others in this thread, this is why it's always a good idea to pair valuable armor with an easier to obtain armor in the other slot.  By doing so, you can prolong the number of attacks the valuable armor can take before it breaks.

If you want to compare the number of hits you can take with different head and body armor combos, I actually made a tool a while back (when ANR was being released) to calculate armor breakages.  You can access that tool here: https://dst-skins-checklist.firebaseapp.com/armor

[lakhnish]

@Instant-Noodles Thanks!

As a side note, I recently learned another thing about the Snurtle Mounds. Apparently, Snurtle Mounds can come in two different "types." Some mounds are only capable of housing one mob, while other mounds seem to be capable of housing two mobs (ie. Mound A can only spawn one mob, while Mound B has the ability to spawn two mobs). This seems to be randomly selected.

The reason this is important is this affects efficiency. With one fire & ice staff, you could be farming a Mound A, who will only have one chance of spawning a Snurtle, or you could farm Mound B, who would give you two chances of spawning a Snurtle (or in the rare event, two Snurtles spawning from one mound). Farming Mound B is more efficient since for that same Fire and Ice Staff, you're getting two chances of spawning a Snurtle rather than the one.

This means you're going to have to mark which Mounds are bad (ie. only gives one mob), as that would reduce the efficiency of the system. That logic is also why I stop farming a mound when it starts giving only one mob and simply move on to another one.

*As well as the fact that a Mound repopulates a single mob every 120 seconds, which is pretty fast in of itself.

I'll also be adding this into the original post in case someone on the future stumbles upon this.

Feb.12: Well, I learned another thing rather recently. It seems that every time the server is reloaded, every Snurtle Mound is reassigned a new mob cap. That means a Snurtle Mound that had two mobs when you farmed it the first time may now only give one mob the next time (similar to how you could change the Gem in an Ancient Statue in DS). 

Not only does this make planning my routes for the Mounds very annoying, it also means that a world where I thought I had good Snurtle spawning RNG now has the potential to become a world with bad Snurtle spawning RNG. It's particularly painful on worlds where the server will be constantly relaunched when playing with friends, since its would be very annoying to ask them to restart the server (if at all) just for good/decent Snurtle spawning RNG. I'd rather have that value be fixed to reduce this annoyance that I learned about, but nothing I can really do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

[JJburner]

Bone armor 4x Kappa

[Parusoid]

On 28.01.2019 at 2:13 AM, lakhnish said:

when you the player punch the mound, increasing the risk of you thus accidentally killing the mound eventually

The mounds can be healed with healing items like honey poultice and healing salve