Ocean Survival in DST: The Abigail Meta

[Rinkusan]

This is a brief supplemental thread to the "Ocean Survival in DST: A Fisherman's Unnecessarily Detailed Guide to Staying Alive at Sea" thread which I thought should be its own topic.

In this thread, I'll show you guys the ridiculous things you can do with Abigail to make survival at sea insanely easier. I don't think many people realize that thanks to the ability to command Abigail's aggressiveness, out at sea, she's essentially a powerful, infinite-durability ranged weapon. Here are some applications of that ranged utility.

To start off, you can kill the Malbatross without the traditional use of a boomerang or ANY ranged weapon. This method is a bit tricky and takes practice to get down because unlike a boomerang, Abigail is a person, so the Malbatross will target her initially instead of you. What you have to do is bring Abigail back onto the boat by calming her down as the Malbatross goes after her, and then when the Malbatross is on the boat, de-summon Abigail and whack the malbatross as soon as you can to start the fight; otherwise, it will return back to its original spot. 

Essentially, you're "fishing" for the Malbatross using Abigail as a lure. 
 

Another use of Abigail is to shield you from cookie cutters while you're going after salt. Cookie cutters are a wonderful source of monster meat out at sea and drop valuable shells that you need to upgrade the crabby hermit's home. But unless you're specifically farming them as fast as you can, there's little reason to risk them drilling a hole in your boat. You can kill them using Abigail without lifting a finger while you're mining salt. 

  

Finally, you can use Abigail to kill narwhales and squids, also without lifting a finger and jeopardizing your health and your boat.





Note: "Ocean Survival in DST: A Fisherman's Unnecessarily Detailed Guide to Staying Alive at Sea" thread still in progress.

EDIT: "Ocean Survival in DST: A Fisherman's Unnecessarily Detailed Guide to Staying Alive at Sea" thread is completed and can be found here:

 

[MagicalSkies]

Amazing tips and guide, very helpful, especially for me as I’m a Wendy main and new to sailing.

[bagherthegamer]

Interesting way to use abi. I learned something new today. 

[Rinkusan]

On 5/24/2020 at 8:23 PM, MagicalSkies said:

I’m a Wendy main and new to sailing.

As a non-Wendy main, I have more fun living out at sea with her than I do surviving on the mainland as my actual main, so you are definitely in for a treat. The first several voyages are always the most fun, especially with a partner who does all the cooking and mans the anchor for you. 

[Guest]

Everything what wendy does in these clips can maxwell do the same, maybe even better. fighting the malbatross is the same and you have a normal damage modifier meaning you can kill her faster. ranged weapons are not expensive to craft aswell. as for salt you basically get 1 shadow miner/2 shadow fighters or 2 shadow miners and 1 shadow fighter. you only have to row and fake attack the cookie cutters, saves pickaxes but you have to fake attack cookie cutters. still better then mining by your own. gnarwails are also too much time wasting. the only worth loot drop is the horn. i'd fish faster then killing something to drop food items worth 100 hunger. 

[Rinkusan]

7 hours ago, emin61 said:

Everything what wendy does in these clips can maxwell do the same, maybe even better. fighting the malbatross is the same and you have a normal damage modifier meaning you can kill her faster. ranged weapons are not expensive to craft aswell. as for salt you basically get 1 shadow miner/2 shadow fighters or 2 shadow miners and 1 shadow fighter. you only have to row and fake attack the cookie cutters, saves pickaxes but you have to fake attack cookie cutters. still better then mining by your own. gnarwails are also too much time wasting. the only worth loot drop is the horn. i'd fish faster then killing something to drop food items worth 100 hunger. 

Thanks for the input. I went ahead and tested this; unfortunately, from what I've seen, Maxwell can't do any of this to the degree Wendy can, and he can't even do a few of them AT ALL.

You can't control the aggressiveness of Maxwell's shadow duelists; they'll only attack if you attack, and they'll only pacify when you run away. As a result, the Malbatross "fishing" trick can't be done with Maxwell, and if anything, you're better off not using shadow duelists for Malbatross at all.

Maxwell also can't keep cookie cutters off the boat. His shadow duelists do speed up the kills while they're on the boat, but that's about it. Secondly, if you decide to go with 2 shadow duelists and a miner, shadows can spawn on you.



Killing gnarwhales straight-up does not work at all with Maxwell's shadow duelist. Also, the point of killing gnarwhales isn't to get its meat or its horn; the point is to stop it from hunting your fish in the water. The 4 fish meat and horn from killing it is just icing on the cake. 



Finally, you can kill squids with shadow duelists, but it's inefficient and requires you to get close enough to fake-attack one of the squids unlike Abigail who can attack them out in the water on command. 

So basically because you have no control over Maxwell's shadows apart from up-close fake-attacks, you can't use them as ranged weapons the same way you can use Abigail out at sea. 

[Guest]

Good to see you pointing out the issues you have. but the issues i see you handle makes me think you havent master'd maxwell in my eyes.

1. you can use a ranged weapon to attack the malbatross with shadow duelist and /dance for the shadow duelists to stay near you. you probably will get hit and your shadows too but malbatross might be enough near you to land a hit on her.

2. you arent using a ranged fake attack once again meaning you waste 35% sanity,spears and nightmarefuel.

3. i dont really experience any gnarwails and if i do i try to do the "give" action against them. that makes them come to me again if they happen to be very far away from me. so you might have a upperhand i guess.

4. The only enemies that are worth it.

it seems you really dont use any range weapons to command the shadow duelists. that way you cant make the most out of it. but i understand you, if you got problems playing as maxwell.

[Yuuko]

4 hours ago, Rinkusan said:

Maxwell also can't keep cookie cutters off the boat. His shadow duelists do speed up the kills while they're on the boat, but that's about it. Secondly, if you decide to go with 2 shadow duelists and a miner, shadows can spawn on you.


 

I believe shadows don't spawn when you are on the boat unless you are close enough to land for them to spawn on land and walk to you.  Also when you're on a boat and you attack them, the way they appear will force them to be within range of another attack immediately making shadows very easy to deal with (if you ever get one on you.)

That said - I think that Wendy and Maxwell are both great characters to bring into the ocean.  Maxwell is great because he can keep miners up allowing him to clear out the rock formations to clear better boating paths.  He can also clear the cookie cutter fishes quickly with a normal spear with shadow duelists.  There aren't many opportunities to farm shadowfuel on the seas, or to produce hambats, so its good if you can use the same set of puppets (1 spear and 2 miners) and a normal spear.

Wendy is really great though - not just for the reasons you mentioned but also because she can help farm a lot of spider silk quickly to get 2x sails, and 1-2 fishing rods for the journey.  Maxwell also helps with this by clearcutting trees to produce the large amounts of wood needed to craft it all as well.  A very good teamup !!

I played both Maxwell and Wendy when I first started ocean exploring, and they both helped a lot.  Now that I've gained some experience with it I'm back to my main girl Willow though.

[Rinkusan]

17 minutes ago, emin61 said:

Good to see you pointing out the issues you have. but the issues i see you handle makes me think you havent master'd maxwell in my eyes.

1. you can use a ranged weapon to make the shadow duelist and /dance for the shadow duelists to stay near you. you probably will get hit and your shadows too but malbatross might be enough near you to land a hit on her.

2. you arent using a ranged fake attack once again meaning you waste 35% sanity,spears and nightmarefuel.

3. i dont really experience any gnarwails and if i do i try to do the "give" action against them. that makes them come to me again if they happen to be very far away from me. so you might have a upperhand i guess.

4. The only enemies that are worth it.

it seems you really dont use any range weapons to command the shadow duelists. that way you cant make the most out of it. but i understand you, if you got problems playing as maxwell.

Thanks for letting me know about the ranged fake attack; I didn't know it was a thing. That being said, from playing around with it, I still think it's either inefficient or not viable at all in the situations I've presented.

1. The entire point of the Malbatross fishing method is that you DON'T need a ranged weapon in the first place thanks to Abigail. Bringing a boomerang to the Malbatross fight just so you can aggro her using your shadow duelist via fake-ranged-attack already defeats the point of having the shadow duelist there in the first place. Why fake-attack with a boomerang when you can just use the boomerang? On top of that, unlike Abigail, you waste an entire spear and nightmare fuel every time you use the duelist to aggro this boss since that shadow duelist WILL die within the first several seconds no matter what you do because the Malbatross's AOE swipe will kill it in one hit. 


2. You can absolutely keep the cookie cutters away by using a ranged fake attack on said cookie cutters. Unfortunately, the fact that you have to manually command your duelist to attack each cookie cutter is wasted time you could've been using to row; the amount of time you save with the pickaxe shadow isn't worth the time you waste manually attacking the cookie cutters compared to having Abigail deal with every single cookie cutter without any input from you. Inefficiency aside, you also put yourself at risk of a situation where you can get overwhelmed just like the following. With Abigail, being overwhelmed is never an issue no matter how careless you are.



3. The point of killing gnarwhales with a follower from a distance is so that they don't drill a hole in your boat and make you waste a repair patch. I tried killing a gnarwhale a few times with the fake ranged attack, and while successful - albeit slow - on multiple occasions, there was one situation that was completely unsuccessful because of the shadow duelist kiting pattern.



4. Sorry; I'm not sure what you're trying to say here :/

Once again, the point is that you don't have to rely on ANY ranged weapon to do any of this because Abigail is an insane, infinite-durability, on-command, AOE ranged weapon with high DPS at sea. You absolutely can save ranged weapon durability by using the duelist out in the ocean, but you don't prevent the need for a ranged weapon in the first place, not to mention the slow DPS and specific situations where the duelist can fail you. 

23 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

I believe shadows don't spawn when you are on the boat unless you are close enough to land for them to spawn on land and walk to you.  Also when you're on a boat and you attack them, the way they appear will force them to be within range of another attack immediately making shadows very easy to deal with (if you ever get one on you.)

That said - I think that Wendy and Maxwell are both great characters to bring into the ocean.  Maxwell is great because he can keep miners up allowing him to clear out the rock formations to clear better boating paths.  He can also clear the cookie cutter fishes quickly with a normal spear with shadow duelists.  There aren't many opportunities to farm shadowfuel on the seas, or to produce hambats, so its good if you can use the same set of puppets (1 spear and 2 miners) and a normal spear.

Wendy is really great though - not just for the reasons you mentioned but also because she can help farm a lot of spider silk quickly to get 2x sails, and 1-2 fishing rods for the journey.  Maxwell also helps with this by clearcutting trees to produce the large amounts of wood needed to craft it all as well.  A very good teamup !!

I played both Maxwell and Wendy when I first started ocean exploring, and they both helped a lot.  Now that I've gained some experience with it I'm back to my main girl Willow though.

That's interesting; so as long as you're in swell or deeper ocean, shadows will never spawn no matter how insane you are?

Oh definitely; I'm well aware of how insane the two of them are when it comes to gathering resources for the boat, and I left it out of the main guide because I felt like it was fairly intuitive. My argument was simply that when it comes to the many situations out at sea, there not a single character that can come close to competing with Wendy/Abigail in terms of efficiency, ranged utility, and overall convenience, hence the "Abigail meta". 

Willow's pretty nice for saving fuel. I mentioned in the main guide that the limiting factor to the length of your voyage is going to be fuel, so having a character that increases the amount of fuel per log is pretty nice. That being said, it's a shame Bernie doesn't have as much use out at sea since shadow creatures don't spawn. I guess you could turn him into BERNIE to help fight the cookie cutters that make it on the boat or something, but that should never happen if your boat partner is a Wendy :/

 

[Yuuko]

24 minutes ago, Rinkusan said:

Willow's pretty nice for saving fuel. I mentioned in the main guide that the limiting factor to the length of your voyage is going to be fuel, so having a character that increases the amount of fuel per log is pretty nice. That being said, it's a shame Bernie doesn't have as much use out at sea since shadow creatures don't spawn. I guess you could turn him into BERNIE to help fight the cookie cutters that make it on the boat or something, but that should never happen if your boat partner is a Wendy :/

 

Where Bernie helps with boat life is that eventually I'm going to land somewhere... and at that point I'm going to get a hound attack, and probably some shadow creatures too.  Bernie is great for getting me through both situations.  I do like the fuel benefit if I rush a boat in first autumn since the pinecones I saved from harvesting to build my boat will carry me through the season with moderate winter gear (I prefer winter clothes to heatstone when boating).  However once I've caught some sea breams and sun fish that advantage fades away.

I think I always gravitate back towards Wes and Willow because of their lack of advantages.  Wes has none, which makes me feel super honest about any feat I accomplish with him.  Willow has a mild advantage with Bernie, but its nothing compared to the advantage of having friends () so I don't feel bad about it.  Sorry Wendy, Abi's way too good now lol  I feel carried too hard when I play her.

[Rinkusan]

2 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Where Bernie helps with boat life is that eventually I'm going to land somewhere... and at that point I'm going to get a hound attack, and probably some shadow creatures too.  Bernie is great for getting me through both situations.  I do like the fuel benefit if I rush a boat in first autumn since the pinecones I saved from harvesting to build my boat will carry me through the season with moderate winter gear (I prefer winter clothes to heatstone when boating).  However once I've caught some sea breams and sun fish that advantage fades away.

I think I always gravitate back towards Wes and Willow because of their lack of advantages.  Wes has none, which makes me feel super honest about any feat I accomplish with him.  Willow has a mild advantage with Bernie, but its nothing compared to the advantage of having friends () so I don't feel bad about it.  Sorry Wendy, Abi's way too good now lol  I feel carried too hard when I play her.

That's fair; if you want a challenge, Wendy will give you the complete opposite. For me though, I'm not looking for a challenge out at sea; I'm just looking for a chill time.