Early game I was mostly following Admiralty orders while grabbing Port Reports and doing all right. You explore all over, doing that! Oh, and also doing the Bruiser’s ferrying.
The Lifebergs drop all sorts of neat things (including the very valuable Captivating Treasures) while not being super-hard to kill as of Corsair’s Gold. Also you get to enact THE REVENGE OF SHIPS AGAINST THEIR ICEBERG ENEMY which personally amuses me.
Hmm, maybe I might risk a lifeburg again. I haven’t been near one since it turned my ship into confetti, maybe they aren’t quite as punishing now?
Captivating Treasures ARE awfully shiny… lured towards glistening icecaps
The trick with lifebergs is that they have to be within 40m to attack you. You can effectively ignore illumination and just focus on your distance. This is huge, since they can only use the 8 second "seek" to close the gap, while you can use the 5 second "flee" to retreat the same distance. When you get comfortable with this, you can constantly interrupt their instant-kill crashes within a fraction of a second (have flee finish at 40m right before they finish crash… you wind up at 50m and the crash cancels). Thus you can constantly get the iceberg to waste time. If you are feeling more cautious, you can just spam flee until you get to 100m, and keep yourself over 50 after that (fleex2, shoot, flee x2, shoot).
You always get one box of curios AND a zee story for killing them (if nothing else can sell to the Alarming Scholar for 10 echos/Antiquarian points). On top of this, they are worth 15 fragments to observe. Even with the 1000 echo harpoon gun, you can still gain terror/loose the occasional sailor farming things like the big red crabs/angler eels. On the other hand, you can easily observe and nuke an iceberg without ever risking hull damage OR terror, while gaining a decent amount of fragments (for an observation you can get, no risk, without upgrades).
This is excellent information to know! I had no idea the distance actually DID anything :D Thanks!
Is the box of curios worth anything? Lifebergs are nicely positioned since they are just north of the Corpse Colonies, and you can get to their nesting grounds without picking up any Terror from sailing, but that’s also a substantial amount of fuel to burn. Unless boxes of curios sell for at least 50 echos apiece I’m dubious that there’d be any profit off it.
Lifebergs drop treasures worth anywhere between 10 and 1000 echoes, depending on your luck. They’re pretty lucrative to hunt, but their attacks are strong enough to crush a frigate in one hit if you ever slip up.
Bear in mind that you can actually get that 1000 echo item from Bound Sharks and Angler Crabs, probably the Albino Morays as well but I haven’t got one from them yet - maybe not as frequently as from Lifebergs but once I got lucky and got two in a row from Angler Crabs. It is all down to the RNG :)
The Box is worth 100 echoes to the right person. The bigger reason they’re important is they build up a quality with this person…that opens a lot of storylet options where they’re located.
Edit: Disregard. I thought you were talking about the "Other" box.
Also I have found Observation ultimately to not be worth it. I’ve not gotten more than 15 Fragments off of anything, and against things like ships that extra delay can and will get you killed. There are plenty of storylet options in ports that can net you between 10 and 50 fragments, so sticking your neck out there for an extra 15 just seems like more work than it’s worth.
edited by Nenjin on 7/5/2014