Best Way to gather Nightmare Fuel

[Skelewar]

I've heard a bunch of different methods, I wondering which are your favorites or I've missed any

1. Shadow Clockwork Cheese

Spawn knights on a boat and cheese them from land. Practically no limit to how many statues you can build and farm at once, plus each one drops Dark Sword plus Night Armor in addition to nightmare fuel if you kill a single rook and bishop beforehand, so it could be a great investment. Cons: annoying gunpowder crafting, statue hauling, and huge stockpile of useless shadow atriums

2. Shadow Splumonkey Farm

Set up some way to kill shadow splumonkeys, be it tooth traps, houndius shootius, rock lobsters, beefalo herd, damaged rook, On Tentacles, cave spiders, etc, and lead them into it. Cons: killing methods are either resource intensive, unreliable, or require you to play Wickerbottom or Webber. Also monkeys only drop nightmare fuel 50% of the time and need to be killed during nightmare phase (wiki says that normal splumonkeys drop nightmare fuel too but I don't think that's true..?) Also, monkeys are innately pretty dangerous.

3.  Active Archives

Activate your Ancient Archives and chill at the lunar grotto border, letting the Greater Gestalts do all the work for you. Cons: Requires an iridescent gem, and is very dangerous without a bone helm meaning you can only do this after killing AFW.

4. Classic Insanity

Just go insane and fight them yourself doofus. Cons: pretty slow and there is some potential danger if something else happens to you while you're purposefully insane. Also, staying insane for long enough to gather enough fuel can be annoying, ESPECIALLY for Maxwell and Wigfrid because of their extra sanity gain. This can be countered with bone helm or nightmare amulet but still. 

What do you guys think?

[Capybara007]

The first one is the best for mass farming, considering you can just use catas instead of gunpowder

[Dr. Safety]

Does number 3 work? I thought that nightmares didn't drop fuel if they are killed be Gestalts

[ALCRD]

43 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

Cons: annoying gunpowder crafting, statue hauling, and huge stockpile of useless shadow atriums

Also another con : waiting for new moon for your nightmare fuel delivery.

[Skelewar]

29 minutes ago, Dr. Safety said:

Does number 3 work? I thought that nightmares didn't drop fuel if they are killed be Gestalts

Can't find anything on the wiki about that, I don't know 100% but I'm pretty sure they do drop

[-Variant]

52 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

3.  Active Archives

Activate your Ancient Archives and chill at the lunar grotto border, letting the Greater Gestalts do all the work for you. Cons: Requires an iridescent gem, and is very dangerous without a bone helm meaning you can only do this after killing AFW.

A Shadow killed by a Greater Gestalt will not drop fuel.
The player has to have the final blow!

This was a relatively early change.

[LEX-7O2]

Multiple people with bone helms, a lot more nightmares spawn, good action and good farming

[Erineyes7]

43 minutes ago, Dr. Safety said:

Does number 3 work? I thought that nightmares didn't drop fuel if they are killed be Gestalts

If I remember correctly they don't drop any at all, doesn't matter if you kill them or not

[HumanBean150]

Only character specific ones I can think of are Winona's slight change to the first one, Wanda's bone helm + whip on boat, and Willow being able to either use Bernie, or kill the shadow monkeys very easily.

[Dollmaker]

14 minutes ago, HumanBean150 said:

Only character specific ones I can think of are Winona's slight change to the first one, Wanda's bone helm + whip on boat, and Willow being able to either use Bernie, or kill the shadow monkeys very easily.

 

1 hour ago, Skelewar said:

ESPECIALLY for Maxwell and Wigfrid because of their extra sanity gain.

With Maxwell, if you craft two duelist and one farmer you become permanently insane, allowing you to farm Nightmare Fuel for as long as you want.

[Cassielu]

1 hour ago, Skelewar said:

Cons: annoying gunpowder crafting

Shadow knight will die from sinking, and all you need to do is lay down grass so that you can set the ship on fire from within their range.

[Skelewar]

14 minutes ago, Dollmaker said:

 

With Maxwell, if you craft two duelist and one farmer you become permanently insane, allowing you to farm Nightmare Fuel for as long as you want.

I'm pretty sure that since insanity works based on the percentage of your total sanity, you can have the 20 remaining sanity but since it's your new maximum it will still be considered "100% full" although you'd only need to lose like 18 sanity before nightmares start spawning...

4 minutes ago, Cassielu said:

Shadow knight will die from sinking, and all you need to do is lay down grass so that you can set the ship on fire from within their range.

From what I've seen shadow knights can walk over the tops of water, they just can't cross the border between water and land. I don't think breaking the boat would kill them.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

gestals dont drop NF but they do a lot of damage and distract the shadows so you end having a lot of NF for few swings of your weapon

i like to do it if im farming other materials nearby

[Crestwave]

4 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

I'm pretty sure that since insanity works based on the percentage of your total sanity, you can have the 20 remaining sanity but since it's your new maximum it will still be considered "100% full" although you'd only need to lose like 18 sanity before nightmares start spawning...

No. Lunacy works this way, not insanity.

4 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

From what I've seen shadow knights can walk over the tops of water, they just can't cross the border between water and land. I don't think breaking the boat would kill them.

Boats can kill them if they're on it.

57 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

Can't find anything on the wiki about that, I don't know 100% but I'm pretty sure they do drop

They don't drop if gestalts do the killing blow, similar to how they only drop 1 nightmare fuel if bernie gets the last hit.

47 minutes ago, LEX-7O2 said:

Multiple people with bone helms, a lot more nightmares spawn, good action and good farming

I second this, probably the best-scaling method. Bonus for Wandas or goat jelly + wet world, really fun just tearing through an endless horde of nightmares.

One interesting method that wasn't mentioned is repeatedly building reanimated skeletons in caves. It doesn't seem the most efficient but people do use it.

[Dollmaker]

16 minutes ago, Skelewar said:

I'm pretty sure that since insanity works based on the percentage of your total sanity, you can have the 20 remaining sanity but since it's your new maximum it will still be considered "100% full" although you'd only need to lose like 18 sanity before nightmares start spawning...

 

No, the game treats it like youre low on sanity, so even at "full" 20 sanity, you will be insane. 

[Skelewar]

16 minutes ago, Crestwave said:

Boats can kill them if they're on it.

Okay, so how could you lock them onto the boat?

[dip935]

 

[Cassielu]

1 hour ago, Skelewar said:

Okay, so how could you lock them onto the boat?

they chase the player to the boat.

[Pikapikap]

15 minutes ago, Cassielu said:

they chase the player to the boat.

LULU POG

[Maxposting]

For mid-game (before killing AF) I use the nightmare amulets, they are very useful to regain sanity to maximum while doing the fuel task.

Or alternatively I go to the sacred chest area during nightmare phase.

[ShadowDuelist]

If you swap the bone helm with any other helmet when the shadow creatures attack you, and put it back on to hit the shadow creature, you can prevent multiple shadows from spawning and keep one shadow creature on you at all times.

This also reduces a lot the risk of damaging the helmet if you get hit. I’ve realizad this summons creatures faster than being on a boat and it’s overall a good way to restore sanity too.

It’s even safer (and any character can do it) while on a beefalo.

[BeeClops]

I find bonearmor+smash (ideally w Wanda/wolf/jelly) the fastest method tbh. I think I remember getting ~80-100nmf/day doing this, might be a bit off. Personally, I made a habbit of putting on the bonehelm after boss fights if I used goat jelly and smash some shadows until the effect dries off.  

Shadow pieces on boat takes a lot of time to set up, carrying stuff around and picking it up, from both land and water(not even gonna mention doing this thing during hollowed nights/winters feast), even if killing them is free after initial setup. I still think it's more time consuming than the first method overall. 

Archieves war I think is just a side thing, as it mentioned they only drop nmfuel if you deliver killing blow, and from my experience you kills get stolen by gestalts a lot. I also enjoy farming fuel with !BERNIE a lot but that's char specific. 

Regular ruins clearing is the organic method I guess, tho it gets boring after a while. 

[Captain_Rage]

Does anybody use the Lazy Deserter for farming? I don't know how the different methods compare to each other since I never put much emphasis on farming nightmare fuel but that is usually how I go about with it (using a Lazy Deserter + Bernie + a tamed Beefalo for attacking the shadow creatures).