The Golem

The plan to the Spindle has gone slightly awry and now instead of the lifter, the plan is to ascend in the interior of a Golem of overwhelming power. In order to complete the construction of the behemoth, a strange variety of materials must be assembled. Live and drink, mevyn.

Let's start out by explaining what exactly it is we're trying to do. We've got a checklist of stuff to get and we'll tackle each one in turn:

All items must be present at the time of the Golem's construction, so if you don't want to carry around the items after acquiring what you want, drop it next to Pax Klanq at Grit Gate.

Primordial Soup

This is pretty self-explanatory, go back to the Rainbow Wood and collect 20 drams of primordial soup. Drop the waterskin/canteen off and continue to the next items.

Body

This is one of the most important decisions that you make about your Golem. This is going to decide the baseline stats of the Golem as well as its body type. Currently, it is extremely hard to get gigantic gear; even with the vendor at the bottom of the Asphalt Mines you're not guaranteed anything good at all. Therefore, instead of worrying too much about the body type to maximize the types of equipment your Golem can use, you should consider which body will give you the starting stats that you want.

Since there exist as many bodies as creature types, you are seriously spoiled for choice here. This current wisdom can easily become outdated quickly as more information comes in, but after looking at the easy choices around my conclusion is that some of the best bodies are ooze, jelly, and robot bodies as they not only give massive amounts of Strength, but they also provide your Golem with a mental shield. Ooze bodies have higher Strength, but jelly bodies start with all Multiweapon Fighting skills. Robot bodies have very well-rounded stats. The easiest high-level ooze to get are either soupy sludges that have been fed a large amount of liquids or the zero-jell from the Moon Stair. Jelly bodies are sourced from the Palladium Reef's plasma jelly, and the easiest robot body to get is from Warden 1-FF from Ezra.

All of these creatures not only supply extremely powerful bodies, but they also are very easy to find and recruit. The oozes and plasma jelly have very low MA, meaning they are extremely easy to Proselytize. Warden 1-FF is very easy to recruit from reputation during the water ritual.

The cragmensch body is also very powerful at base, but requires you to heavily focus in on increases to quickness as it starts with a base 40 quickness; a fairly debilitating weakness. It also does not come with the mental shield of the others mentioned above. Also strong is the troll body, but you'll have a rough time getting it as it will take leveling up one of the legendary trolls from Bethesda Susa; and you won't get a mental shield. You could technically use one of the troll foal, but if you have access to that you probably have access to one of the legendary trolls. Finally, the tortoise body will start with level 20 Carapace, but also has the struggle of having 60 quickness that must be remedied as well as no mental shield.

Catalyst

3 drams of any liquid are pretty easy to get, especially because most of the liquids do not have great effects. With a powerful body, your Golem will have such overwhelming damage and HP that everything in the game will quickly be turned into paste. Therefore, going further into offense or utility is the best option here. Of particular interest here is ink, gel and brain brine.

Ink will give immunity to slipping, which isn't super interesting, but it will also give 500 skill points which allows you to get powerful melee skills like Charge more easily. Brain brine gives 6 mutation points, which can boost your mutation if you get a good one from your atzmus. If you want survivability, then gel is the most well-rounded giving 50 to all resists and 3 AV as well. Whichever catalyst you choose, it's not extremely significant.

Atzmus

The atzmus is a severed body part from a random creature around Qud. If that creature has a mutation, supplying the atzmus will give one of their mutations that they had at the time the limb was Dismembered at the level it was. For example, if you have level 5 Wings and level 5 Regeneration and you have a limb Dismembered, supplying the limb as the atzmus will be locked to giving level 5 Wings or level 5 Regeneration even if you gain more mutations or levels after the limb is Dismembered.

One of the best atzmus was as I just mentioned: one of your own limbs. This is certainly the easiest and most reliable atzmus to get, however the problem is that the mutation you get is random and if you are a true kin, this is likely not a viable option for you for obvious reasons. Curiously enough, there are actually not many powerful atzmus available, so I'll list out some of the more interesting options:

• Wings 10 from Giant Dragonfly, White Esh or Adiyy
• Spiral Horn 15 from Unimax
• Regeneration 20 from Star Kraken
• Carapace 15 or Space-Time Vortex from N-Dimensional Starshell
• Temporal Fugue 7 or Electrical Generation 10 from Quatravolt Glider
• Temporal Fugue 14 or Teleportation 1 from Cyclopean Gibbon
• Random 4 level 9-12 physical mutations from Glow-wight Apotheote
• Two-Headed from Two-headed Boars and Two-headed Slugsnouts

To me, Carapace in particular is quite interesting as the AV increase makes our overwhelming death machine even harder to damage, but we unfortunately don't get high level Carapace guaranteed from any creature. The highest level guaranteed Carapace is found from the Great Saltback, and that's only level 5 Carapace. Two-Headed is also one that should be heavily considered; it's a fantastic mutation to combat Qon specifically so if you don't have a good way of killing her it may be a good idea to take that mutation for your Golem just in case. Do note that a mental shield does not help against Qon's confusion ability.

If you do not possess a way to Dismember limbs, then you'll need to draw the creature you want a limb from to a creature that Dismembers. The most obvious choice here are madpoles, so recruit the creature you want a limb from and send it into a pool of hungry madpoles. It should go without saying, but you should probably recruit your follower you want the atzmus from before recruiting the creature you want as a body.

Armament

There isn't much to say about this option, you'll have to crawl around searching for a zetachrome weapon. I'm not picky about the choice here at all, but I have to say that I like Axes the least out of all the options. With Short Blades, if you can get sufficient skill points you can get all Multiweapon Fighting skills and wreak havoc with your offhand strikes; bonus points for having a jelly body and already having all Multiweapon Fighting skills and multiple weapons to strike with. With Cudgels, the few creature capable of withstanding your insane power will likely find themselves stunned and vulnerable to follow-up attacks. And finally with Long Blades, you can use Aggressive Stance and increase your PV even further and make use of the fantastic utility of the Long Blade skills.

Axes by contrast have a lot of their benefit reduced due to the raw damage output of the Golem. When you kill most enemies in 1 or 2 hits, Dismembering them or cleaving them just doesn't really do anything. To be clear, the difference is rather marginal between the weapon here, but I put Axes on the lowest rung here.

Incantation

Chances are fairly high that you already have most if not all the incantations possible from simply playing the game. There are some clear options for me to choose from that I'll point out here.

• +6 Levels: falling in/out of love or witnessing a pentasludge or stronger
• 4 random pieces of gigantic armor: reading a white or relic book
• +15 paired quickness: Most quest completions
• Legendary kill: +10% critical hit chance

Even though I list multiple here as interesting, the +6 levels is pretty clearly the winner in my eyes. Not only do you get 6 levels of increased HP, but also 6 mutations points, a rapid advancement, +1 to all attributes and 6 levels worth of skill points. Pretty tough to beat for sure.

Hamsa

Again, chances are you have the hamsa already that you'd want to use, but you've got a fairly overwhelming wealth of options here. I'll list off some of my favorites.

• Beaded Bracelet/Armor: +6 AV
• Melee Weapon: 15% lower melee action cost
• Fix-it Foam or Book: 800 skill points

Yeah, not too much super interesting to me here. I like the survivability of the AV since more often than not I don't have much (if any) armor on my Golem. You shouldn't have to go searching for anything here.

Power Source

We've got two options here: either we get Chavvah, the Tree of Life to power our Golem or we run it on neutron flux. We'll need 3 drams of neutron flux, which is actually a very easy task. The Alchemist in Bethesda Susa always sells one and always has one equipped, and since he runs away at 99% hitpoints, if you can start off combat with a bit of damage then you can easily kill him and get 2 drams of neutron flux. From there, you can use the metamorphic polygel you get from Barathrum at the completion of of the prior quest to get the third dram; power source settled!

For those of you that want the neutron flux for cooking, had the Alchemist explode, or don't want to use the metamorphic polygel for this, unless you want to grind merchants for more neutron flux you'll be stuck with getting Chavvah as your power source. Technically, this requires the completion of a side quest but since it's unlikely you'd ever actually do this quest outside of this requirement for a power source, I'll detail how to complete the quest here.

Chavvah, the Tree of Life

Our goal here is to get to Chavvah and convince it to be used as a power source for our Golem. This is not a trivial task, as Chavvah resides in the most dangerous overworld section of the map: the Moon Stair. Normally, you should have no reason to go here and certainly you should avoid it under normal conditions. However, here we are required to traverse this threatening region to achieve our goal.

Eyn Roj

The first thing you need to do is to get to the base of Chavvah. Chavvah is actually a roaming tree with its base located at Eyn Roj, visible from the world map. Normal traversal of the world map breaks down at the Moon Stair, as it is impossible to travel on the overworld in this region similar to Mountain tiles.

Because of the difficulty of simply getting to Eyn Roj, I recommend taking the path of least resistance that causes you to have to traverse the fewest screens possible. The shortest path through Moon Stair tiles has us starting in the river to the north of the region, past the mountains. By traveling diagonally through 2 parsangs, we will reach the northwest zone of the parsang 2 parsangs north of Eyn Roj. From here, the recommended way through is to immediately go to the world map again, and then re-enter the parsang you are at but choose to go to the center zone instead of your current location. From here, you can go directly south until you hit Eyn Roj as it resides in a center zone.

Dangers of the Moon Stair

There are a large amount of creatures here that offer significant threat to us while we move throughout the Moon Stair to our objectives. You'll want to make sure that you have something to get past each one, as they can have consequences ranging from very annoying to run-ending.

N-Dimensional Starshell

This guy is not a very significant threat, especially because the player begins with neutrality to the Tortoises faction so unless you've lost reputation here, these will be neutral to you. If they are, for whatever reason, not neutral to you, then boy you better have some normality effects. These have level 20 Space-Time Vortex, making them extremely annoying as they spam vortices at you. Despite your best efforts, a vortex will just sometimes land right on your head and you'll have to make your way all the way back. Not only does this mean getting back to the Moon Stair region from wherever you ended up, but it also means traversing all those parsangs on foot all over again. Save yourself the trouble, and just equip an ontological anchor or a piece of nulling gear. You're guaranteed to get an ontological anchor from one of the templar from the assault at Grit Gate, so make sure you've still got it.

The Terrain Itself

That's right, even the terrain of this place is out to get you. The hexagonal crystals, when broken, have a chance to create 1-8 evil twin copies of yourself. The worst part of that is that these crystals are both easy to break and literally everywhere, so often times you will have to break one or two to get to where you need to go. Since you can't travel on the world map, you're stuck with dealing with these. Nothing can prevent the evil twins from spawning, so you'll want to come equipped with Phasing or some form of Teleportation. Of course, you can't use these with an ontological anchor equipped, so if you need that for n-dimensional starshells you'll be stuck toggling it when you need to bypass the hexagonal crystals or just risk the chance at some twins.

Dreamcrungle

The dreamcrungle is honestly not a very threatening creature, but can be quite annoying. They have pretty much just one attack, which is to gaze at you in a similar way to the lithofex and decarbonizer, showing a red line where their attack will reach and gives you some time to move out of the way. There should be no real reason why you should actually be hit by this, but if you do, here's what you can expect to happen.

Firstly, there is a chance that it just doesn't do anything. If it does do something, you will start dreaming and be sent into a random body somewhere in the world of Qud. You'll take on all the stats, equipment and faction reputation of that random creature. This means you can even be sent 20 strata down in the body of a cave spider, or even underground as a issachari raider who has no light or darkvision and you just stumble around in pitch black darkness.

Your goal in this body is to gain a single level. If you die, you return to your body with -1 Willpower permanently. If you succeed, you return to your normal body and gain a bunch of EXP. You can get into some extremely difficult scenarios here, so it's generally recommended to just avoid the gaze.

Leering Stalker

This is one of the most dangerous robots in the game, and while they aren't the most common find in the Moon Stair, it's fairly likely that you will find at least one during your travels here. Each one comes equipped with a blast cannon, which it will spam at you every possible chance it has. If you are capable of getting rid of this, you will then have to deal with its monstrous 25 AV and high damage melee attack. These robots are particularly weak to DV builds as it has low Agility and allows you to dodge the blast cannon shots should they hit you directly. You'll ideally want both a way to disarm the robot or EMP it and then use a vibro weapon or method of damage that bypasses AV such as electric damage mods and Corrosive Gas Generation.

Zero Jell

The zero jells are not extremely threatining in terms of their combat abilities, but that's not why they are dangerous. Instead, the on-hit effect of the zero jell bestows a random effect on you. And I don't mean a random effect picked out of a kindly selected subset of possible effects, I mean literally any effect in the game. This can be extremely irritating and downright dangerous if you get the wrong set of effects in addition to the other creatures found here. Avoid these, even with very high DV builds there's a chance you still get hit and killing one of these in melee has the chance for its liquid to get on you, which brings us to the next hazard.

Dilute Warm Static

Not only do pools of this liquid appear after the death of a zero jell, there are also just random pools of it littered on floor in some zones of the Moon Stair. This is classified as a dangerous liquid like acid and lava and you will not be automatically pathed into it, but you can be pushed in by creatures like the dawning ape, leering stalker and chrome pyramid. Being coated in this liquid bestows the same effect as a zero jell hitting you; namely literally any effect. Therefore, it's recommended you have a form of flight so that even if you happen to get knocked into this liquid, you will not be coated in it.

Chrome Pyramid

Our final threat, and easily the most dangerous: the infamous chrome pyramid. If you are somehow unacquainted, here is what you can look forward to:

• Quickly regenerating Force Bubble that is always on
• A swarm rack, which is a missile launcher shotgun
• Ability to assemble missiles when out
• 4,000 HP
• 35 AV
• A high accuracy, extremely deadly melee attack with an unavoidable damage type
• The ability to teleport, just in case you thought you could run

There is a lot that I could say here in regards to how you should kill one, but in all honesty you shouldn't really try and kill these unless it becomes a matter of pride. Instead, you should focus on escaping as quickly as possible. This is easier said than done as the chrome pyramid is capable of Teleportation, but luckily for us it is still a robot and suffers from the universal weakness of all robots: EMP. Make sure you have a few EMP MK III grenades in reserve for your escape, as the first may only be enough to get it to burn its Teleportation cooldown. Additionally, if you must endure a turn or two where it can fire on you, make sure you are not next to any terrain and you stand as far as possible from it so the spray of missiles hits you as little as possible. Alternatively, having 25 DV and the Swift Reflexes skill makes it so the missiles will never contact you, allowing you to move in safety as long as they don't explode on nearby terrain.

These robots can easily kill even the most powerful of builds, so do not underestimate them. While they are not very common, an unprepared encounter can mean death in very short order, so make sure you have a plan when you do meet one.

The Roaming Tree

Once you make it to Eyn Roj, you must cross the moat of dilute warm static in order to reach the trunk which contains a tuning chime. Chavvah is a wandering tree, so much to our chagrin it is not found here because nothing can be simple in this part of the map. Attune yourself to the chime, and you will then be given the location of where Chavvah's interactible parts are, which are random and will change from time to time. A Moon Stair tile will be marked in green on your map to indicate where it is.

While you have considerable time to reach Chavvah, it's recommended that you don't waste it by going off to do something completely different. Chavvah will move and if you fail to reach it and complete the quest in that time, you will have to re-attune to it all over again. Save yourself the trouble.

🗒️ Note: The location of Chavvah is not guaranteed to be at the center, so it is advised that once you reach the parsang containing it, you exit to the world map and re-enter as it will allow you to be taken right to the zone that has Chavvah in it.

We still cannot traverse the world map here, so once again you are stuck walking manually to wherever Chavvah is located. Its location can range wildly; anywhere from right next to Eyn Roj to the furthest tile possible. Take a close look at the world map and determine what the best approach to get to Chavvah is, as it won't always be through the Moon Stair. For example, in the screenshot there is a deep jungle tile 2 parsangs west of Chavvah, so the recommended approach is to recoil to the Yd Freehold, walk on the world map to the deep jungle, and traverse the 2 parsangs of Moon Stair until we arrive at Chavvah.

Once you've found it, in the center of the zone that it resides in will be a staircase leading upwards to the interactable... chimes? that make up Chavvah's sentient constituents. You can water ritual each one to gain small amounts of reputation with Chavvah, with 2 of the chimes giving a skill (Tomorrowful from _) and a cooking recipe (Crystal Delight from Thicksalt). Also found in Chavvah is the highest tier general merchant, Santalalotze of the Consortium of Phyta; easy to mistake as another chime of Chavvah. In order to progress towards our goal, you'll want to speak to Dyvvrach.

The -elsing

Dyvvrach, the representative of Chavvah, is a little distraught at the moment and wants us to complete the ritual of -elsing Tau, one of the chimes that has decided she no longer wants to be a part of Chavvah. It agrees to dedicate Chavvah as a Golem power source if we complete this task. Our first step is to go to the top of Chavvah and pick up the still crystal chime, the pink chime on the lower right side of the tree. We then have to go back to Eyn Roj and down 40 stratum to the leylines below Chavvah in order to complete this task, a location called the Taproot. Somehow, Tau will be there waiting for us alongside whatever convinced her to become -else.

To get back to Eyn Roj, take the path you took to get there in the first place or retrace your steps from Chavvah back to Eyn Roj. Dyvvrach gives you a crystal key which is used to unlock the previously locked staircase next to the tuning chime at Eyn Roj. Once you go in, prepare yourself for a long trip to the depths of Qud.

To the Taproot

Curiously enough, the 40 stratum between us and the Taproot are actually not very dangerous. These floors seem to have a bizairre scaling creature difficulty similar to that of the normal underground in say a tier 0 area like the salt marshes with an occassional mix of Moon Stair enemies. This means that you will start with very weak creatures like giant centipedes and giant ameoba, eventually scaling all the way up to proper Moon Stair tier opponents in the final 10 or so stratum. Not only does it seem like the creatures scale in this way, but also the treasure found in this area. Don't skip through these areas too much, as they give a very soft introduction to the gimmick of this particular parsang.

Most of the creatures found here will all share 1 mutation. Which mutation this is will be random and will change every few stratum. For most of the trip downwards, this will not be very threatening as by this point you should be far stronger than all the creatures you will encounter. You'll get a hint as to which mutation this is by the name of the stratum. For example, if my stratum is named "crystalline roots and flame meadow", that means that the creatures here will have Pyrokinesis. If it just says "crystalline roots", it means there are no mutations on this stratum.

The floor in every stratum is not made out of strictly solid ground like you might be used to. Instead, it is made out of the tree itself, meaning that the floor is actually destructable. Certain effects like explosives, acid and lava will destroy the floor, so you need to watch your footing very carefully, especially around creatures that produce one of these effects as you can find yourself falling a considerable distance and taking a lot of damage. The only way to get from one floor to another will be to actually fall down to the next floor, so you also need to take care when doing this so you don't fall down multiple floors as you will again take a considerable amount of falling damage. Every 5 stratum will be a totally solid floor where the only way down is a set of stairs so you will at most fall 5 stratum down.

There is not much extra strategy here; ensure you either have strong combat capabilities (which you should by this point) or are willing to just run all the way down to the bottom. Since this is still a tier 8 zone, while chests will often spawn with loot that is better suited to a lower area, it will not always spawn with low-tier loot so it's still worth it to search every floor for goodies as you can often find at least one zetachrome weapon somewhere along the path to the bottom for your Golem armament.

Once you're at the bottom, you'll discover Tau as well as a high-level member from the Seekers of the Sightless Way, Aoyg-no-Longer. Aoyg will not attack you, and you can even water ritual them for some Seeker reputation. Bring the still chime to Tau and you'll have completed the ritual of -elseing, allowing Tau to become a member of the Seeker cult. You can kill Aoyg for a hit to your Seeker rep and his equipment, although he is very dangerous and it's generally not recommended. If you kill Aoyg then Tau will be rather upset but it doesn't matter for your success of the quest. Return to Dyvvrach at Chavvah and you'll be able to secure this power source for your Golem.