3 Ways to Beat the Skull Cavern - Stardew Valley

the mines in stardew valley are simple enough there's a slow and constant difficulty curve and your progress is saved every five floors so eventually you'll be able to power through it the skull cavern on the other hand is an entirely different beast the enemies are much stronger than you've ever encountered before and progress resets completely every time you leave the cave you can't just bang your head against the wall and expect to be successful you need a plan luckily i've got a few to spare we'll be going over three different strategies a quick setup run a completely decked out run and then a pacifist run for people who don't care for combat generally the goal of these runs is to hit the 100th floor to finish your challenge but also since so many upgrades and buildings are locked behind iridium the secondary goal is to get as much iridium as possible before we go over these methods i want to give a few tips that can apply to any run first your weapon this isn't as important if you plan on doing the pacifist run but you'll still want a way to get really annoying enemies out of your way we could talk about enchanting and all that but since the skull cavern comes before ginger island i'm going to assume that you don't have access to it and the same will apply to the rest of the video if it comes after skull cavern i'm not going to recommend it the best weapon you can possibly have is one of the galaxy weapons to obtain these you need to bring a prismatic shard to the middle of the three pillars in the desert there's a variety of ways to find a prismatic shard but it's really rare no matter what some of these ways include a 25 chance to pop out of one of these rocks on floors 100 to 120 of the mines a 0.4 percent chance from any omni geode or once you reach the bottom of the mines every monster now has a .05 chance to drop one if you get the galaxy sword from the desert you'll also have the opportunity to buy the galaxy dagger and the galaxy hammer from the adventure guild personally i wouldn't recommend this because the sword works just as well and if you're tight on money there's other things that you can spend your money on but if you like the hammer that works as well it has a great special attack that can get enemies off you in a pinch the dagger is a little bit more niche since you have to get a lot closer to enemies it's more risky i personally wouldn't recommend it like i said though these are rare so the next best thing is the lava katana this will cost you 25 000 gold in the adventurers guild but it'll always be there once you finish the mine so there's no need for a random drop it also comes with a plus three to defense and weight which increases the amount of damage you can take and increases the distance enemies are knocked back when you attack them making it a great defensive option if you're looking at that price and thinking that's a bit too much don't worry i have a third recommendation the steel falchion it only costs 9 000 gold it's a bit weaker than the lava katana but it also has a sizeable speed buff of four the attacking speed of a weapon is really important in the skull cavern where it's not uncommon to have five enemies all coming towards you at the same time and if you can keep attacking you're good so here's all the weapons that i would recommend from best to worst my second tip is on the day of your spelunking use that teleport to the desert if you can get it if you use the bus you're gonna have to wait until 10 10 am for pam to get to the bus and while you can speed her up by standing in the way you'd still be wasting the first three hours or so of your day you can buy a desert warp totem from the desert trader for three omni dudes and the entire recipe can be bought for 10 iridium bars but since this is a guide for the skull cavern you probably won't have any iridium yet so just go with the omni geodes on that same note i would also recommend bringing a farm warp totem so that you can stay in the cavern as late as you want without having to leave two or three hours early to get to bed and my final tip staircases there's two ways you can obtain these either through crafting with 99 stone or trading with the desert trader for one jade on sundays only i'd always have at least 10 of these on a serious run sometimes you'll enter a room that has a bunch of enemies and you just don't want to deal with it get out of there with that out of the way let's talk about our first two methods the reason i'm talking about them at the same time is while they will have a different inventory set up you still will be doing the same thing once you enter the cavern so first we'll talk about the quick setup i designed this to be able to be done with supplies that you should have sitting around where you won't have to grind for a while to set up and as a quick disclaimer this isn't going to be as effective as the other two methods just by design there simply isn't as much setup involved so here's the inventory we're gonna have the only tools you need to bring are your pickaxe and weapon anything else is just taking up space for quick access i keep my main food right next to these this food item can be literally anything as long as it doesn't have a buff in some of my early runs i tend to have a huge stack of salmon berries or blackberries from foraging bushes other good plentiful options are cheese eggs or bread time stops when you eat so the amount it heals isn't important just make sure that you have a lot to sustain you throughout the entire trip then you're going to have two buffs if you're not aware you're able to stack buffs from one drink and one food if i were to make a tier list of which buffs you should bring with you it'd look like this speed and luck are king attack and defense will help you with combat mining will at most reduce the amount of energy you use and everything else is pointless the main reason luck and speed are on top is because your biggest enemy is time faster movement speed is self-explanatory but luck increases your chances of finding a ladder among many other smaller effects such as geodrop chance treasure room chance and much more here's a list of all of the food items that can provide these buffs of the drinks i'd recommend either coffee or triple shot espressos for the drink buff as they're easy to get a lot of and for food i can really only recommend one thing pumpkin soup the materials are easy to get a hold of just a pumpkin and milk and not only does it give you a plus two luck buff which if you don't know is great it also gives you a plus two to defense which will help with longevity when fighting monsters the unlocked condition for the recipe for pumpkin soup is getting seven hearts with robin and if you want enough buffs to last you the entire trip you'll need three pumpkin soups because each one lasts 7 minutes and 41 seconds let's hear it for pumpkin soup i guarantee every single one of you have been sleeping on it the last thing i'd consider a must-have for this expedition are bombs swinging your pickaxe can be slow and clunky and not only that you probably don't have an iridium pickaxe yet because you might not have gone into the skull caverns with bombs you'll be able to knock out a ton of rocks all at once cherry bombs and regular bombs can still be useful but obviously mega bombs are the best i don't want to put an exact number on these since you'll pretty much want as many as you can stand to buy from the dwarf we'll say 20 megabombs minimum if you really can't afford that then regular bombs will work fine as well and while this won't be part of your inventory i do want to briefly talk about rings this is more subjective since there's such a wide variety of ring effects that can all be beneficial personally my starting go-to would be a glowstone ring which is craftable at level 4 mining and the ruby ring which is viable from the adventures guild this will give you the glow effect the magnet effect and a 10 damage boost there's a couple of other rings that can be good that are much more rare such as the crab shell ring for defense the ring of yoba to prevent you from dying maybe or if you're actually insane the lucky ring which can be obtained by panning is absolutely the best in-slot item additionally if you have a little bit of iridium lying around you can also make the iridium band which combines the effects of the glowstone ring and the ruby ring so this is what i would call the bare minimum yes it's still a lot and that's because floor 100 isn't meant to be a pushover if looking at this inventory makes you sick the pacifist route may be for you but that's for later now if you want the ideal inventory and don't care about the money required there's a few things i'll add first is the master slingshot with explosive ammo these are practically shootable cherry bombs that are great for blowing up a group of rocks if you can pull it off a magic rock candy from the desert trader is absolutely divine it is very unlikely you'll be able to get one because you need three prismatic shards to trade in if you do though you can enjoy a plus five to luck defense and attack and a plus one to speed and i also guess there's a plus two to mining but that's an insane buff to have we'll also slap in those two warps and 10 to 20 staircases and you're good to go not much more you can do than this alright our inventory is ready for when we wake up tomorrow let's head to bed alright it's the big day first thing you want to do is check the luck and uh oh all right today's the big day first thing you want to do is check the luck of the day and make sure it's either good or great indicated by either a pyramid or ideally a star drop on the tv similar to the lux that you're buffing this will also give you a higher chance for finding ladders since you went to sleep with your inventory already ready i'd attend to any chores on your farm that you absolutely need and then immediately pop the desert warp totem [Music] we're gonna head straight to the cave pop your drink and food buff before going in and start now as we start here's a few facts about the skull cavern that you should know before going in to descend to another floor there's ladders just like the mines but you'll also find holes these holes can send you down anywhere from 3 to 15 floors at once at the cost of some hp and the hp that you lose will be equal to three times the amount of floor skip giving a max of 45 hp lost jumping down a hole will always leave you with at least one hp so don't worry about dying from it as for getting iridium don't worry about looking for it in the early floors as the farther you get into the cavern the more common they are if there like happens to be one right next to you yeah sure go for it but don't walk all the way across a floor to get one like i said time is your biggest enemy as you go through each floor your priority is going to be number one blow up any large groups of rocks number two knock out enemies each has a 15 chance to drop a ladder or a hole then number three blow up smaller groups of rocks with cherry bombs or explosive ammo and then finally if you're out of options number four start mining the rocks individually now of course there's an infinite number of situations that can be thrown at you as you enter each floor so the priority may change i'm not gonna tell you to ignore the five enemies coming straight for you speaking of enemies let's go over the ones you'll encounter serpents i wouldn't be surprised if these are the things that made you feel the need to look up a guide in the first place they're fast they deal stupid damage and they can easily swarm these are always a high priority kill since not only are they a nuisance but they also have a chance to drop spicy eels which is a great food for luck and speed buffs and extra bombs their hitbox extends a little bit farther than the front of their sprite so you can swing a little earlier than it would appear you could purple slimes similar to all the other slimes they have the exact same movement except now with a wild amount of health i tend to go after these as well since they can drop both iridium ore and iridium bars be careful about getting hit because the slimed debuff which slows you down can make you very vulnerable to attacks from faster enemies big slimes these move similar to other slimes just a bit slower when they're destroyed they have a 75 chance to produce smaller purple slimes and each small slime will have a chance to drop a ladder and will be clumped up for easy slaying armored bugs these are essentially just an obstacle they can't be killed but they just go back and forth on the same path there's an enchantment that you can get from the forge that allows you to kill them but it's not even remotely worth it their drop table is disappointingly boring mummies these work on zelda stalfos rules they need to be knocked out and then bombed they're not a huge threat because they move really slowly i find it effective to knock them out near rocks and then use the slingshot to finish them off clearing out the rocks and the mummy at the same time they do have a special drop called the curiosity lure which increases the chance to catch rare fish in any given area lava bats these only appear from floors 1 through 50. they act pretty much the exact same as any other bat and there's nothing too special about them iridium bats on the other hand replaced them on floors 51 and beyond in addition to dealing twice as much damage as their lava bat counterparts they now have a nearly 100 drop rate for iridium ore carbon ghosts are one of the rarer enemies they move exactly like previous ghosts and have a 99 drop for omni geodes if they hit you they'll teleport a way to avoid retaliation so avoid that last but not least pepper rexes these will spawn almost exclusively on prehistoric floors they take a lot of hits to take down and the general strategy is to bait them into breathing fire then quickly getting to their side and hit them while they're locked into attacking they have a 10 of dropping dinosaur eggs which can be incubated into your coop to give you your own little dinosaur so other than those few exceptions use your best judgment as you go down these floors try to keep busy as you wait for your bombs to explode so as to not waste time keep an eye on your health and i cannot stress this enough if you hit half hp it's time to take a second to heal enemies can bring you down quick and use enemy drops to your advantage solar essences can be used to make more bombs and dropped food can save your life so on and so forth once i hit floor 40 to 50 that's when i start trying to find iridium it should be much more common there than it is at the beginning of the cavern and just to show you an example run with the minimum inventory i did a run and this is how far i got now for the easy way out the pacifist run i'll be honest this method is simple but it'll take a long time to set up i think i can sum it up in one word staircases now i'll use a few more words as i've mentioned before jades can be traded for staircases at the desert trader on sundays luckily for us we have a way to get a steady unending supply of jade crystallarians known for just sitting there and earning new passive money with diamonds little did you know they have other uses each gemstone that can be put in takes a different amount of time to duplicate for jade this only takes one day and 16 hours and we can go ahead and round that to one every two days unless you plan on watching it constantly it doesn't sound like much and to be honest crystallariums aren't cheap but if you have a line of say just five that's around 75 staircases passively in a month which is essentially a free trip to floor 100. in my honest opinion the ease of use of this makes the weight completely worth it and think about it you get these staircases to get deep in the skull cavern and you'll get more iridium to make more crystallariums and you'll get your staircases even faster to go down and get even more iridium for more crystallariums it's a never-ending cycle of the easy life of course i wouldn't recommend going in with only staircases you'll still want a weapon pickaxe emergency food and bombs to collect iridium but that's about it just descend as deep as you want i usually don't even pay attention to my surroundings until i hit floor 70. if you see some easy to grab iridium get it and continue staircasing down avoid any combat with the staircase skip those nasty layouts this floor just feels racist who cares thank you for watching all the way through i hope this helped you let me know if it did and if you have any extra tips that you think are also important please say it down in the comments all information is useful thank you for watching i'll see you in the next one [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Salmence

Views: 750,097

Keywords: Let's, Play, salmence100, nintendo, stardew valley, stardew valley skull cavern, skull cavern guide, how to beat the skull cavern, stardew valley skull cavern guide, how to beat the skull cavern without fighting, skull cavern no fighting, skull cavern no combat, skull cavern strategy, best skull cavern strategy, how to get galaxy sword, inventory for skull cavern, stardew valley guide, stardew valley walkthrough, salmence stardew valley, stardew valley mines guide

Id: ufABBYy8J5Q

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022