Dark Souls Dissected #19 - Firelink Chest & Loot Reloading

hello and welcome back to another episode of Dark Souls dissected today I've got a quicker episode topic for you but it's one that I think is long overdue for some clarification we're going to take a look at two different ways to retrieve lost items in Dark Souls 1 which are the Firelink Shrine lost and found chest and the quit and reload [Music] method these are two unrelated mechanics meant to help retrieve lost or missing items but they have their limitations and don't always work as expected let's start with the chest the community never really settled on any specific name for it I like calling at the lost and found chest but in the data it looks like this which translates to something like game progress relief treasure box it's a chest that you normally find open and empty by default and most players will never find anything in it as is obvious by what I've said so far its purpose is to replace key items and some other special items if they've gone missing as a safeguard against losing anything critical for progress you can think of it as the anti soft lock chest and while they were at it they also included a few things that while not totally necessary would just be really annoying to lose while a lot of players have a vague understanding of what this chest does I do want to take a second to explain my framing of this topic as Dark Souls most misunderstood mechanic while that's impossible to truly nail down it's the best candidate I can think of and here's why I realized there are plenty of obtuse mechanics that the average player hasn't interacted with so it might seem funny to single this one thing out but the difference with this chest is that when it is brought up in conversation it's usually being recommended incorrectly anytime someone talks about losing out on a drop they wanted like maybe an item Dropped Out Of Reach or an NPC died and their item isn't showing up after reloading people will recommend checking the lost and found chest in all sorts of situations where the chest can't possibly have the missing item you'll have thread after thread after thread where someone advises checking it to this day it persists as an extremely common bit of misadvice and I think that's without parallel in a way that qualifies it as the game's most misunderstood mechanic I hope I shouldn't have to clarify that I'm not trying to belittle or make fun of these replies these are people who are just trying to help it's not their fault that the game handles the chest in an unintuitive way it's both a reasonable guess and an extremely easy low stakes action telling someone to go take a look at the chest just in case it makes sense but it is interesting to me how predictable these responses have become which means it could use some better clarification so let's finally get into it what's the deal with this chest if you're wondering when it'll replace an item for you we can make a flowchart that answers this question and it's this very first step that should clear up any confusion did you obtain the item previously with this character if the answer is no the chest does not have it so for everyone ever mentioning that they missed out on a certain drop it should be clear that the chest definitely didn't replace it for them the player missed the it item they never got it in the first place so the chest is not capable of replacing it we'll dig a bit deeper but that's really the one main thing to take away from this video if you didn't already know that you might be wondering what even is the point of the chest if it can't replace items you missed seems like a pretty big oversight if it only replaces the items you've gotten because if you have an item then you already have it and yeah I definitely agree this seems a bit silly but it does make some sense when we try to understand what problem it was attempting to solve the the developers were worried about what would happen if a player managed to dispose of important items from their inventory either through glitch or design oversight while key items aren't typically able to be dropped they at least had enough foresight to predict that with all the different kind of items in the game and the different types of interactions available that the player might still find ways to get rid of important items so this chest was never meant to replace that weapon you might have missed here they were more worried about key items somehow being discarded and trying to safeguard against that so maybe another name for it could be the important items you threw away by accident chest I'll have more to say about the quirks of abandoning important items and how the chest can be exploited even but what comes next in understanding how it works is knowing what items are actually capable of being replaced thinking of it as a key items chest is pretty good because that's the next question in our flowchart if you did previously have the item and lost it in a weird way and it is a key item the chest will replace it and what I mean by this is that literally everything that shows up in the key items tab works so not only the items that are actual keys but things like Lord Souls all of the bonfire items like the repair box and right of kindling and even all the upgrade ERS however if the item in question isn't a key item not all hope is lost because it covers a few of those so the next step in our flowchart is a reusable multiplayer item all multiplayer items that aren't single- use consumables are covered by the chest as well so all of the different soap Stones The Invasion orbs cat Covenant and dark wien Rings the Black separation Crystal even things like the book of the guilty and the servant roster are included in here so we're talking any reusable items related to multiplayer in any capacity not just for direct matchmaking just a quick tangent here but indictments aren't included I consider this additional evidence that making them reusable was a last minute change if you weren't already aware indictments are permanent use for some reason you can buy multiples of them like other consumables and they can be dropped unlike most permanent use items and the screen when using one really makes it look like they're in limited supply all of these things already strongly indicated that the indictments were originally meant to be consumables and given how other reusable multiplayer items work with the chest their Omission here supports that idea even further from here there's just a few more items that don't fit into key item or multiplayer item categories but they're all clearly important we have the Covenant of artorius and the orange chard ring these are basically key items that happen to be rings so you can see why they included them despite not technically belonging in the keys category and lastly we have the dark sign Estus flask and dragon transformation Stones the dark sign makes perfect sense that's already a soft locking protection device in its own right so including that was a given and while you could beat the game without the Estus flask I don't think their decision to include that really needs to be examined as for the dragon Stones I guess there aren't really other reusable Covenant items quite like that so even though they're not truly multiplayer items I'm sure they were roped in under the same logic you can pause the screen or you can grab the links to these images from the video description but here's the flowchart and just a direct list of everything the chest can actually replace no need to guess or speculate anymore the majority of these items were properly safeguarded by simply taking the drop option away from the player can't lose an item if you can't drop it so for most of them the chest was implemented as an extra bit of safety that was never really needed but there are a few items they didn't protect which means we can see some funny behavior from the chest without invoking any glitches at all we can drop any of the four rings and also the dragon stones for some reason it's funny because they did go out of their way to make the Covenant of artorius and orange Charter ring unobtainable to others in multiplayer meaning you can't drop them to gift them this means they already had that sort of gamebreaking progression in mind as something to avoid but for some reason they didn't think to cut things off at the point of being droppable so you can stand next to the chest drop one of the Rings and just quit and reload repeatedly to keep seeing the chest do its thing over and over I mean do this at your own risk if you haven't fought the Four Kings yet I don't want anyone getting mad at me if some freakish bug prevents the chest from working but I've done this repeatedly on multiple platforms and I trust it the dragon Stone's also being dropable is just weird I can kind of understand this happening to the Rings because Rings overall were intended to be droppable all rings are capable of spatting good vagrant when abandoned so the developer overlooking a few specific Rings is silly but not hard to understand but letting the dragon Stones also be dropped is a strange oversight to me because those really just don't seem like things that should be allowed to drop speaking of silly oversights let's talk about feeding framp while you can't feed him any of the stuff in Dark Souls remastered in the original version of the game you can feed him two of these Rings The Dark Moon blade Covenant ring and the cat Covenant ring each for 1,000 a [Applause] pop you know exactly where this is going you can Farm an easy 2,000 Souls just by retrieving them repeatedly it was a really obscure thing to fix and remove for Dark Souls remastered but this is something I pointed out in a now outdated tumblr post of mine and I've heard through reputable sources that KCK was reading my blog when making the remaster in a very conscious effort to consider changes so I might be the reason you can no longer feed these to fra ah hello was it you who took away my num Noms still we have a vagrant seating exploit one that works fine in both versions of the game a moment ago I mentioned that abandoned rings are capable of spawning good vagrants and we can abuse the chest for that here I'm dropping the cat Covenant ring and then using the dark sign to send it off in the debug menu this item here is the resulting drift item bag it would normally be sent off to another player immediately and you wouldn't see it listed for more than a split second but it's stuck in my outbox because I'm playing prepared to Die Edition on PC and I'm not connected to anyone I can reobtain the ring go somewhere else do the same thing and you can see that it creates another unique drift item bag so you can just do this over and over to try and spawn as many good vagrants for other players as you can is this the best method probably not I would advise buying 99 transient curses and just dropping one before every time you warp that way you don't have to stop by the chest every time but if you don't have the souls to spare and don't want to mess with dupe glitches the Firelink chest is the next best thing available making the chest only work with items you previously had means it's not as robust as some imagine it to be there's an unfortunate glitch where players will sometimes manage to escape the Asylum without getting the Estus flask and the chest fails for that even though the Estus flask is set to work with the chest again it's because the player didn't get it in the first place so things fail at step one of our flowchart thankfully that's an issue right at the start of the game so players can always restart or if they feel like they've gotten far enough without it and want to continue you can still get it by going back to the Asylum thankfully all the major key items for progression are without common bugs so gamebreaking glitches are extremely rare however there used to be a problem with ingward which really exposed this flaw in the chest's design he's supposed to drop the key to the seal if you kill him it's a way to get the key from him earlier in your playthrough instead of waiting for him to give it to you but sometimes he would just not drop it you can find older discussions on this with once again lots of people saying that the Firelink chest should have had it but of course it didn't we can't forget step one thankfully this seemed to be a problem primarily in the prepared to Die Edition on PC so at least people had easier cheating options to fix it it's not like there was nothing you could do but without outside tools ingward failing to drop the key is the one real world example we have of a key item failing in a major way one that actually blocked progression the chest not being able to help with that really went against the community's expectations but depending on what system you think should have covered this we could actually blame something other than the chest quitting and reloading it's widely understood that if an NPC falls off of a cliff and their loot winds up in an unreachable location that you can quit and reload to get it back the most popular exploit surrounding this is kicking lotrek to his death he has a very desirable ring that a lot of players want and he also happens to be positioned right next to a cliff so rather than fighting him legitimately to steal his ring people will just kick him a couple times to kill him with gravity and then reload as I'm sure many of you are already aware this doesn't always work and the system has its own quirks and shortcomings as well it is consistent at least for the specific enemies and drops at works with so you don't have to worry about this ever failing for lotrek but why doesn't it work with other certain enemies the game treats items dropped by NPCs as the sorts of special events with their own unique event Flags the game is aware if the enemy has died or not and if you've actually obtained their loot yet this is the entire basis for the quit and reload mechanic the game isn't actually doing anything fancy in terms of figuring out how to reposition the loot for you at this moment the game has no idea that this is even out of bounds it's not cognizant in any way that there's a problem for the player or that anything needs fixing but when we reload the area it goes through a process where it checks which NPCs should be here it'll realize La Trek is dead and it'll also realize we never picked up his stuff so it simply redops it and even though he's not currently here for us to see the game is aware of his normal location and it's just dropping it where it thinks he is while there's a few different checks here the one event in particular that ensures the item drop itself is called Force character treasure when combined with the Firelink chest Force character treasure should cover most things of important value so what doesn't it work with there's three categories we can identify as things excluded from this number one normal enemies with random drops it's not going to work with any responding enemies with randomized drops it only works for law Trek and other NPCs because of how they made events out of them that the game can check like I guess you could do that but it'd be a lot of effort for an enemy that respawns and that you have unlimited attempts at trying for that drop again so to me it's really obvious why they wouldn't bother on a fundamental level these aren't the kinds of items that need to kind of protection annoying as it may be to lose some of them that could be a Baler Sid sword number two any non-npc mobs even non- respawning ones so unfortunately quitting and reloading also doesn't work for mostly anything that isn't an NPC I realized this is a redundant category I could have just said this in the first place and that would also cover all the previous enemies I just mentioned but the reason I'm singling this out is that the previous defense goes out the window and this is where the lack of this mechanic can be a little more problematic some enemies don't respond and sometimes they do have unique items for example there are non-responding enemies who are guaranteed to drop a special item after you kill all of them like the necromancers with the skull Lantern or The Butchers with the sack so if you die at the same time as the second butcher you're going to miss that sack this is also a problem with certain bosses most bosses do have most items autocollect directly into your inventory to prevent any issues in fact a lot of drops including things like tail weapons were patched to work this way they didn't always autocollect but they realized that dying to a boss right after its tail weapon dropped was annoying and quitting and reloading didn't fix that so autocollect was the way to go but they missed a few things that really should have been autoc collects as well orene will drop the Leo ring if you defeat him second the demon fire Sage drops the Demon's Catalyst and the stray demon drops a titanite slab these all drop to the ground meaning they can be missed and you're out of luck if that happens there's no second chance at least not until new game plus there are some other bosses with these kinds of drops too like pin wheel with the masks or the Taurus demon with a chance for the Demon's crate ax but there are respawning versions of these enemies with the same drops elsewhere so it's not as big of a deal here you already know how this is going so I probably shouldn't have to mention it but this also means that the unique miracles from the Paka aren't covered by quitting and reloading either so those are something else that can be botched however at the start of this category I said that quitting and reloading doesn't work with most non- NPC enemies keyword being most we have just three enemies that break this rule the red-eyed chaos bug the mimics from the DLC and the non-hostile encourged zombie with the red-eyed chaos bug they did think to include Force character treasure for the sunlight maggot so quitting and reloading protects it just fine so if you want to do the cheese to help with sar's Quest by killing the enemy through the door you can always collect it later from the other side no worries about that next we have the mimics from the DLC quitting and reloading works for their unique drops too considering how one of them drops a key item I can see why I got special treatment and while they were at it they also did it for the other mimic that drops the very good carving very good lastly we have the engorged zombie that drops the fire surge pyromancy Force character treasure wasn't actually set for this but fire surge is still protected on a technicality a simple quit and reload load won't get it back it will disappear initially but this enemy does respawn so if you somehow miss the item you can just rest at the bonfire and it'll keep dropping fire surge over and over until you finally pick it up and for the final category of things that quitting and reloading doesn't help with we have number three certain NPCs Force character treasure was set for almost all NPCs so you can expect this mechanic to usually work it even works for NPCs whose drops work differently superficially like instead of dropping a golden shiny on the ground you have some NPCs that drop a ragd doll corpse with the item attached but you needn't worry about this minor difference those ragd doll corpses respawn along with the attached item the most popular exception is that quitting and reloading doesn't work with Paladin Leroy this is a problem because he drops cool stuff and you'll also need them if you're trophy hunting and he spawns near a cliff so players experience this very frequently I wondered if it had something to do with him being an Invader and yes this is a problem with all invading NPCs quitting and reloading fails for all of them however it's not for the reason I expected I thought that maybe due to the way they invade that it's because they're not in the map initially with retrieved items being responded at the NPC's location I wondered if their initial location was somewhere out of bounds but that's not what's going wrong they just didn't set Force character treasure for any of the invading NPCs at all so the game isn't making any attempt to recover these items in the first place this isn't much of a problem with Kirk Because unless you die simultaneously in another location you're really only at risk for losing his items in the demon ruins if he falls off the cliff here but like the engorged zombie of the painted world he does respawn not infinitely of course but he can spawn again in lost isth if his weapons drop early into the pit here they'll just drop again for you in isth and they're guaranteed drop by that point if you've killed them in all three locations so apart from invading NPCs you might be wondering if there are any other NPCs this doesn't work with and yes once again we have a couple exceptions this doesn't work with havl and this doesn't work with Ricard so yeah just be ready to all F4 or dashboard quit the game rapidly if you die at the same time H's ring is an awful item to lose this also doesn't work with Solair in one specific location his bad ending in the Lost isth shortcut considering it works just fine for him everywhere else this is clearly an oversight as well ingward doesn't fit into this discussion in quite the same way because he doesn't have any items he drops on the ground as mentioned earlier he does drop the very important key to the seal but that's an item that Auto Collects so that's not the same kind of drop that can be covered by this you think that auto collecting would be the safer solution but for all those players on PC back in the day who failed to get this key that was part of the problem because ingward does have Forest character treasure turned on if he dropped other items on the ground those would respawn and if the key to the seal was like that it would also respawn so even though autoc collecting should have been the safer option whatever bug that caused it to fail could have been avoid it entirely if it just dropped like most normal items so to recap which NPCs this does and doesn't work with asides from all invading NPCs havl Ricard and Solair and lost isth you can expect the Quint and reload method to work for every other NPC who drop stuff on the ground but there is one last Quirk you should be aware of spooky location [Music] Shenanigans remember how I said that the item just drops wherever the NPC normally is well that's not always a consistent thing this is not an issue across entirely different Maps mind you so we're not broadly talking about NPCs who travel if you kill patches in the catacombs his loot will respawn in the catacombs if you kill him in Firelink Shrine it'll be in Firelink Shrine Etc so the problem is more specific than that it's what can happen when you have multiple locations for an NPC within a single map because in that case their location in the map data does change dynamically depending on where they are in their quest line let's start by taking a look for Grigg's incense Fortress in the safe file he's still in the Lower Undead Berg he's not here right now but despite that this is the only place he can spawn in sense Fortress and the map data is aware of that I can cycle through all of the NPCs and when he's selected I'll see this empty cylinder mark his future location however if I try doing this for sigm over by the boulder ramp it doesn't work we can't find that empty cylinder because they didn't create multiple slots for him that can coexist his location is outside the entrance right now it turn out that killing an NPC in this sort of situation messes up their quest line in such a way where it doesn't remember their most recent location this is all to say that if sigm falls to his death by the boulder pit his loot will respond by the entrance if Solair dies by the sunlight alter his loot will respond way back at the beginning and if Big Hat Logan dies at his shop in the Duke's archives his loot winds up back down in the prison okay so before I close out this video I wanted to quickly mention a couple more things Seco has done something similar to the Firelink chest in the form of the offering box I haven't taken a closer look at that yet but the one major difference I've spotted is that it does seem to help retrieve certain items that the player never got at all which means that it has to be set up a bit differently if you can recall what items you've retrieved from there and if you think you know what allowed it to spawn there please leave a comment or also let me know if you never found anything in there at all I think that's a common outcome I find it funny that these games managed without these since Dark Souls 1 but not only did it come back to kudo it got a more proper introduction there as well there are in-game text prompts explaining it Loosely and earlier in the video you might have spotted a few Clips where I retrieved multiple items from the chest at once if you're missing more than one item it'll replace them in bulk so I thought it'd be funny to try and get it to replace as many items as possible at once we could push the chest to its limits and have it do something it's probably never done before here's what that looks like if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing liking or leaving a comment if you ever wondered why someone YouTubers go through the motions of asking for that it's because it really genuinely does help a lot I'd like to thank Hot Pocket remix and King bore for helping answer questions about event flags and Keith Ballard for voice acting and an extra special thanks to all my backers at the evil vagrant tier basileus Europa Gary Marshall hug sized inor ad Jack Kart karuma Carl germ Kiko Abad Chris lazy tangent nashwan aari Nate Hines ronax the magala duo and zether thanks for watching and have a great day all

Channel: illusory wall

Views: 202,861

Keywords: dark souls, dark souls dissected, from software, fromsoftware, elden ring, bloodborne, soulslike, soulsborne

Id: UGmFA3zHhaY

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024