Tips for Dealing With Ancient Fuelweaver

[lakhnish]

This is my response for people who are currently struggling with AFW.

I'm guessing most people have zero problems with phase 1 of AFW.

The best tips I can think of are this:

Wear Thulecite Suits + Thulecite Crowns.

Amazing armor protection and they have a lot of durability to boot w/o any real drawbacks. The shield is an added bonus to your HP.

Eat Creamy Potato Puree.

It's a super food item for AFW since it covers sanity and HP in one slot (33 sanity and 20 hp).

Because it's a veggie, it has the fast eating animation and HP is going to be the issue more so than sanity with this food item. 

You can also grow this recipe w/ an auto-crop combo in every season except Summer.

Autumn/Winter: 2 Potato +  2 Pumpkin/Carrots + Garlic

Spring: 2 Potato +  2 Carrots + Garlic

Before breaking each Shadow Hand, use a weather pain against AFW. 

It's phase 2, shield is up and minions are spawning.

Every time you want to break a Shadow Hand, prioritize using a Weather Pain against FW, NOT teleporting.

Got trapped in a bone cage? Use a Weather Pain against AFW, then teleport if need be.

In fact, try holding onto your Weather Pain for the most part when doing this part since you’re constantly weather paining. That way you only have to think about teleporting when you need to rather than thinking about when to Weather Pain.

Even better, if you don’t even want to think about teleporting, then just don’t! You will stay trapped in the cage, but because you are constantly throwing Weather Pains, he can almost never heal himself via the minions, which is a common complaint I’m seeing.

You do have to be fast about breaking shadow hands though, so don't just sit there and stare at FW! The hands spawn in an equal distance apart from each other in a circle, so run around in a circle while breaking those hands.

So in essence, WP FW, break a shadow hand, move on to the next one and prioritize Weather Paining over teleporting, or don’t even teleport at all. This is the hard part but if you do this right, FW will die.

Just hold F.

Shields + minions are down and you have a limited amount of time to deal damage.

The best strategy is to just hold F and eat Potato Puree to recover your stats as needed. 

You don't have to think about inventory management w/ the Lazy Explorer or teleporting out of the bone cage during this segment, you just hold F and deal damage.

You just repeat until dead.

Assign Slots To Certain Items

This is part of the inventory management. If you get this to be automatic in your head, you don't have to worry about inventory management.

Getting to that point is about properly assigning slots to items and having patterns to it. This is how I've managed my inventory for this post:

Spoiler

 

Hand Slot (in red):

The only items that will ever go in your hand slots are your Lazy Explorer, weapon, and Weather Pain. (You weapons should be anything stronger than a Hambat, like Glass Cutters).

Body Slot (in blue):

The only item you have to worry about here is swapping between your Nightmare Amulet and your Thulecite Suit. The only time you are swapping b/w these two is when you’re breaking the shadow hands or dragging a thulecite suit from the far right when yours break.

Food Item Slot (in yellow):

This is where you munch on food.

Extra Tool Storage (in green):

Where you will drag and drop tools to your hand slot when they break or are low on durability.

Extra Armor Storage (at the end):

This just holds all your armor that will auto-equip. You don’t have to think about the Thulecite Crowns, just keep in mind that when a Thulecite Suit breaks, it will have to be repositioned to be aligned with the Nightmare Amulet.

 

Drag and drop broken tools and armor, DON'T right click.

When your armor or a tool breaks, DON'T right click to swap to an item in another slot in your inventory.

Oftentimes I see people right click to swap items in a different inventory slot, then they start to struggle with where their items are. 

Instead, drag and drop the tool or armor into the right slot.

Visual Demonstration of what I've said above, no Lazy Explorer phase 2:

The main complaints I’m seeing are about Woven Shadows healing too much and having to deal with inventory management.

In this demonstration, I show how to deal with both issues by throwing a weather pain at FW constantly and getting rid of the Lazy Explorer so I don’t even have to think about having to manage teleporting.

 

[Well-met]

good guide but you forgot to mention fight him in autumn/summer only and also you imply a warly exists which isn't always going to be the case 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

great guide. Inventory management and not messing the cool downs from his abilities are the most important things

i would add that healing should only be done when the shield is active to dont lose dps when is down. You dont need to be at 100% hp, if you can survive until the shield is regenerate is better to heal and recover sanity then so you can deal as much damage as you can

4 minutes ago, Well-met said:

good guide but you forgot to mention fight him in autumn/summer only and also you imply a warly exists which isn't always going to be the case 

why? is actually better to fight him in spring or winter if the player is learning the fight so you can use morning star with the bonus damage

[lakhnish]

24 minutes ago, Well-met said:

good guide but you forgot to mention fight him in autumn/summer only and also you imply a warly exists which isn't always going to be the case

This season part is true. But most people kill FW during the Summer so they can clear ruins (and I didn't mean to take Warly into account for that reason, since his dishes aren't needed for Spring or Winter if you either wait for it to stop raining or have a hot thermal).

[Falkenpelz]

I feel called out

[Evelo]

The main issue I have with AFW is the Weather Pain management. I feel like I over use them or I accidentally smack a hand with one instead of the explorer wasting a use. Since I almost exclusively play Wormwood, food is out of the question but sanity and healing was never my problem. It has always been the number of Weather Pains I bring.
When constructing them is it worth using a Construction Amulet to halve the Feather cost?

[HowlVoid]

The fact this fight needs so much micromanaging, that you need a guide for the items.

Funny thing is I bet Klei didn't make the fight with weather pains in mind being so necessary in this fight. 

Idk if a fight were you have to practice item placement, like it's an MMO or something, I'd consider fun. Heck, Im not sure I have the time to practice such a convoluted fight were 90% of it is juggling my inventory.

Seems kind of gimmicky.

[dzzydzzy]

12 hours ago, lakhnish said:

Amazing armor protection and they have a lot of durability to boot

Sending me Beard tutorial-War flashbacks

[Kur0u]

Maybe you should do a tutorial defeating AF with a controller, that way you make everyone happy and not just the PC percentage who's got little problems with it.

[Frashaw27]

3 hours ago, Evelo said:

I accidentally smack a hand with one instead of the explorer wasting a use

that doesn't happen, you can smack any many hands as you want with that thing and it won't break

3 hours ago, Evelo said:

When constructing them is it worth using a Construction Amulet to halve the Feather cost?

I think so, but that maybe because I only go goose hunting every so often instead of every spring. 

[lakhnish]

2 hours ago, Kur0u said:

Maybe you should do a tutorial defeating AF with a controller,

I would if my controller didn't have a controller drift to it (and I'd have to learn the game on controller too).

5 hours ago, Evelo said:

When constructing them is it worth using a Construction Amulet to halve the Feather cost?

If you don't have enough feathers, then yes, definetely. You get about 50-60 feathers if you kill every Moose/Goose the first Spring, so you can go from 5-6 Weather Pains to 10-12 with the construction amulets.

[Mencken]

This is the only boss I can't solo, tried a dozen times.    Something about the hands, circle and being stuck in a cage makes it really difficult to me.  

[Pig Princess]

And one of the most important things wasn't mentioned: positioning of both player and Fuelweaver, which is key to not only defeat him, but defeat him without weather pains and further "withouts". 

It's beneficial to lead FW at the corner of arena, outside of gateway circle, so wooven shadows won't spawn right under FW at the start of each round. Even if that means wasting 1-2 seconds for FW to get to the desired location. It's also beneficial to move FW away from shadows through outer part of arena instead of inner circle, and it's very doable since FW is much faster than them. Even if he starts walking to the arena center after player's teleportation (very annoying bug btw), this will give player time to reaggro FW. 

It also helps to teleport outside of bone cage while FW tries to hit player with his head, it seems to reduce rate at which previously mentioned bug occurs (but I might be wrong about that one).

If one uses weather pains, one should keep in mind that tornadoes get stuck on gateway structure, so one should pick position without obstacles on tornado's path to FW.

FW also prioritises mind control over bone cage whenever possible, so generally being insane longer reduces lazy explorer uses a bit, but comes with danger of spawning shadows (especially terrorbeaks can mess things). However, shadows disappear should player have high enough sanity (85% I believe), and going between 0 and 85+ is very possible with nightmare amulet. 

Mind control attack only starts if player is actually insane, i. e. when shadows are normally aggressive (<15% sanity for going from sane to insane and <17.5% for going from insane to sane), which means one can stay at >15% sanity perfectly fine without being targeted by mind control (bonus: under 50% sanity shadow hands are clearly visible, which might help, even though not targetable). That may influence priority action from player: cast weather pain, lead FW away from shadows or killing manually wooven shadow before raising sanity might be beneficial depending on circumstances. 

Mind control attack once started can be cancelled as long as player raises sanity quickly enough. I didn't see code myself, but from my testing treshold seems to be sanity % gain rate rather than flat sanity %. That means that to cancell mind control it's both important to start raising sanity as soon as possible and to raise more % of sanity. So ice cream gives more leevay in terms of time than +33 sanity food, and +33 sanity non-meat food gives by miles more leevay than +15 sanity non-meat food for equal amount of maximum sanity. So pick your dishes wisely. 

And using weather pain in any situation is actually bad idea: when player is trapped in bonecage and FW is in shield repell range, it's better to bait his melee attack while teleporting, and only then weather pain him. Otherwise player would stunlock oneself with FW shield and loose control over character.