Getting Antique Mysteries the Monster hunter way

Fallen London
1

I recently went looking for methods of getting antique mysteries in order to aquire a room number at the royal bethlehem.

What I saw was a bunch of either dated, or somewhat inconclusive methods of achieving this, punctuated, consistantly with the recommendation of &quotthefts of a particular character&quot as now, the conversion route from jade had become borderline useless due to the sheer amount of favours needed.

Now, seeings as I am, for better or worse, not a terrifically stealthy gentleman, this didn’t really help me too much.

But looking at the sources I couldn’t help but notice the plated seal, if caught by a monster hunter (which I had funnily enough spent my entire fallen london career up until very recently attempting to aquire), gives the hunter an antique mystery.

Now, I considered this, and, while it was nice, surely it wasn’t worth farming through the zee, then dragging that damned seal back to shore, grinding it into cash and then heading back to zee again for one antique mystery at a time?

Action wise, it seemed flawed, and I was about to resign myself to grinding shadowy. (An idea I was not looking forward to because despite everything attribute grinding makes me feel like I’m not achieving anything)

What caught me by surprise however, was the discovery that, with just using the &quottame your beast&quot tree of breeding the plated seal, you can trade it in for, interestingly, 15 Presbyterate Passphrases, which are just one step away from the Antique mysteries.

Now I understand that the zee is unpredictable at best, but assuming average conditions, I have to wonder if this might actually be as fast, if not maybe even faster in terms of getting those 50 mysteries?

Going for the first flat number, 5 trips in this manner will ganer 75 passphrases (translated into 15 antiques) and 5 antiques straight.

I suppose, the biggest downside I have seen so far is going to be getting the few favours I am still going to need…or well, maybe not so few, it’s going to be somewhere around 9 of the things, which goes well beyond mrs. plenties carnival, which I’ve already used to sell collections…

Anyways, back onto the matter at hand, does anyone know how this method would square up against other methods of getting the room number, and hell, does anyone have any idea how one would go about getting favours from the tomb colonies anywhere near reliably?
edited by Neonir on 6/19/2016

2

If you want a reliable source of favors: tomb-colonies, none of those are exactly common. the best route is to get sent to the tomb-colonies, as the favors are on one-card-in-10, or better if you hold non-favor cards in your hand. on top of that, you get one favor just for being sent, so with the fastest routes in-and-out you could get 1 favor every 16 actions with no card-dependence at all.

3

If you’re a POSI, you don’t actually need Shadowy for stealing Antique Misteries: there’s an action under “Preparing a big score” that makes you grind an awful lot of chasing for 5 actions. Then you’ll have to chose “theft of a particular character”: if you fail the Shadowy check you still acquire the items, but you drop a bit more chasing.

4

You cant actually acess those thefts unless you have enough shadowy, unless I’m missing something terrifically obvious, I’ve looked for it in the past while having 10 casing (gained through the method you just suggested).

5

You can minimize favors needed for Elder conversions by stockpiling Relics in multiples of 500. If you don’t mind taking a bit more time, it can considerably minimize favors needed. That way, you only need favors to convert to Passphrases, and from Passphrases to Mysteries.

6

Sure, but let us consider the fact that to make 10 passphrases costs 1 favour.

in order to get 50 antique mysteries, that means 250 passphrases.

That means 25 favours just for that, and, in addition, 1 for every 5 antique mysteries as well. So now it’s 35.

Now, I dunnno about you, but 35 favours ain’t exactly the easiest/fastest thing to get.

Also no one in their right mind would convert less than 500 relics at a time when farming for this thing, it’d just be wasteful on actions.

At least through bypassing transferring from MotEC to passphrases, we can bring it down to a maximum of 10 favours.

7

What’s your Name Whispered in Darkness quality? At 4, it should unlock &quotThe Big Score: choose a target&quot storylets. What do you currently see in the Flit?

[Edit: not to say I don’t think your method isn’t a good one, or at least a good change up. I happen to enjoy a good monster hunt myself. But as you mention, the Favours situation is…undesirable.]
edited by Parelle on 6/20/2016

8

[quote=Parelle]What’s your Name Whispered in Darkness quality? At 4, it should unlock &quotThe Big Score: choose a target&quot storylets. What do you currently see in the Flit?

[Edit: not to say I don’t think your method isn’t a good one, or at least a good change up. I happen to enjoy a good monster hunt myself. But as you mention, the Favours situation is…undesirable.]
edited by Parelle on 6/20/2016[/quote]

I currently have a name whisphered in darkness 6. The flit shows me a great many things, varying from a war of assassins to the heights of chicanery, but no thefts of a particular character are avaliable.

9

It isn’t a storylet on its own; it’s located in the Storylet Parelle mentioned - The Big Score: Choose a Target.

10

Well despite the fact that I had already checked there, I did not want to continue saying &quotI checked and didn’t see it&quot and so put 5 actions into casing and went to check.

Sure enough, it WAS there, and I had in fact missed something incredibly obvious somehow.

Either way, without a gang of hoodlums and with only 50 shadowy, I feel like this method is not exactly ideal. It takes 20 actions to garner the right amount of casing to get 1 mystery, and then, considering my relatively low shadowy, sets me almost all the way back to the start again.

In comparrison, the taming of the beast takes 8 actions, and grants (the equivalent of) 3 antique mysteries, as for the zailing, well, I’d probably wanna try doing it the most efficient way befoe I start to put numbers on that, but feels like it averages out as less than 20 either way.

11

You could try both to see how quick each one feels to you. The most important thing is that you don’t get burned out during the grind, so even if one way is technically slower it might be preferable if you find it more fun or less tedious than the alternative. Either way will get you there in the end.

12

Turning in Room Numbers from the fidgeting writer line is actually a rather fast way to gain antique mysteries, though the steps do cost you more than just actions, and of course the RNG can bite you (or shine upon you).

13

You also get 5 x Antique Mysteries from each Trade Secret (plus a Searing Enigmas). So you can passively get 5 such Mysteries every four weeks (if you don’t waste your Professional Perks).

14

There’s also The Carnelian Coast. I haven’t done the math on it, but it pays out a substantial number of Mysteries and Passphrases; I feel like it would be end up being more efficient than hunting zeals. Certainly it’s more interesting.[li]
edited by Gilphon on 6/20/2016

15

The zee voyages might not be too bad. The cards that give high +Troubled Waters also give you Approaching Journey’s End, so you’re killing two birds with one stone. Suspicion 5 makes the corvette card much better for your purposes, but also causes a suspicion increase so you’d have to factor in time spent dealing with that. And each journey raises Zee-Voyager of Note, which unlocks better options on its card (+8 AJE +4 TW at final level).

Also note maximizing zee voyages can do funky things to your Heartless, Ruthless, and Magnanimous, so be warned if you’re stockpiling those.

16

[quote=TheThirdPolice]The zee voyages might not be too bad. The cards that give high +Troubled Waters also give you Approaching Journey’s End, so you’re killing two birds with one stone. Suspicion 5 makes the corvette card much better for your purposes, but also causes a suspicion increase so you’d have to factor in time spent dealing with that. And each journey raises Zee-Voyager of Note, which unlocks better options on its card (+8 AJE +4 TW at final level).

Also note maximizing zee voyages can do funky things to your Heartless, Ruthless, and Magnanimous, so be warned if you’re stockpiling those.[/quote]

Maximizing speed in the zee is actually kinda interesting, cause if you get above 9 in AJE, the hunt will bring it back down to 9, which results in being at 10 TW and needing to get 10cp of AJE. This can be somewhat luck reliant.

17

He can’t reach Port Carmelian with Shadowy 50 - you need 110 just to unlock The Foregin Office and I think the skill checks there would be too difficult for someone with less than 150 stats.

18

This is also true.

My persuasive isn’t that huge either.

I’ve got 136 dangerous, 105 Watchful and 87 persuasive, modifiers included.

Really dangerous is the only thing I’ve got going for me, and the fact that I am a monster hunter is no small part of that…I did however make the mistake of buying an infernal sharpshooter rifle just before I became one, which is now sitting in my inventory uselessly…

19

So! Since this thread started, I have farmed up all the antique mysteries I needed for the Royal bethlehem.

I’d say 3 days of grinding isn’t bad all things considered! I did have to stop at one point due to wounds becoming a problem, BUT all things considered, I got the stuff, and made a decent amount of money besides because of all the random loot found at zee!

Overall, a resounding success!