The major part of this guide is written by @Username#7620 and @mazunki [they/them]#3247 on the Discord community. If you got any questions, or anything is wrong make sure to shout out to either one of us. Feel free to edit the guide, or add stuff to it too.

Thanks to everyone in #hardcore-mode-chat for making this possible. :)

Preface

Food is vital to a HCCO account and your first food source (and one that you will be relying on for quite a while) is plants. Starting out, you should fight plants for the potatoes they drop and to increase your combat levels.

Note about

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ATK vs

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STR vs

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DEF: All three combat skills are very useful to level in their own ways. ATK increases your chance to hit and unlocks new weapons to use, STR increases your maximum hit, and DEF increases your chance to not get hit (which saves you food). In general, they should all be leveled equally.

DEF should be your first combat skill that you level, as it greatly reduces the amount of damage that you will take from plants (roughly by half). ATK should be second and STR should be last (since you have a low chance to hit, it’s more important to level ATK rather than STR). Weapons in this game have different attack speeds depending on their type. Daggers attack quickly, with an attack speed of 2.2 seconds, and Battleaxes attack slowly, with an attack speed of 3.1 seconds, for instance. Weapons that attack more slowly also deal more damage per hit and weapons that hit quickly usually do less damage per hit.

There are different styles in the game, depending on the weapon you’re wielding. Melee weapons, which will be our main focus for the first part, have Stab, Slash and Block. Each style gets a bonus to the accuracy rating depending on the specific weapon. Swords usually have a better stabbing accuracy, while scimitars are better at slashing, for instance. The style you choose will also give you experience towards the combat skill in question: Stabbing gives Attack experience, Slashing gives Strength experience, while Blocking is used to train Defence. During the beginning of HCCO, you’ll have to eat manually to ensure that you won’t die. Later on, you’ll be able to automatically eat food so eating will be less of a worry.

Chapter 0: Your first gear

   Start: Naked
   End: 4 steel pieces

You should get to about 10 in all melee combat skills (usually expressed as 10/10/10) by fighting plants and then it’s time to start getting your first gear.

Chapter 0—I: Starting naked

After you have a decent stack of food, it’s time to get your first pieces of gear from the Golbin. You should have some levels in all skills (10/10/10 or so) and about a hundred potatoes or so. You’re looking for a Bronze Battleaxe (1 in 27 chance) and a Bronze Shield (1 in 27 chance). If you get unlucky, don’t worry. Just kill plants for food until you’re able to get both. Plants have very low HP, so having a faster weapon allows you to kill them faster, as you don’t need more than 20 damage to kill a plant. So, your next goal after your Bronze Battleaxe is an Iron Dagger. You should have about 15/15/15 stats and a few hundred potatoes. The Iron Dagger has a 1/33 drop rate from the Goo Monster. Your next gear upgrades will come from Zombie Hand. You’re looking for the Iron Platebody (1 in 4 chance) and Iron Platelegs (1 in 4 chance). Some people might go for the Steel Knight first, but since the Zombie Hand has a better chance for gear, it’s recommended to do it first. You should have about 20/20/20 stats for this and, once again, a large stack of taters. After you kill the Zombie Hand, you should then move on to the regular Zombie for the Steel Platebody (1 in 5 chance). It also drops Steel Boots (1 in 5 chance), but you shouldn’t grind for them since Steel Knights are easier to get them from the Steel Knight. (20/20/20 stats recommended) You’ll end the first part of your HCCO journey with Steel Knights. They drop the Steel Helmet (15 in 67 chance), Steel Shield (10 in 67 chance), Steel Sword (10 in 67 chance), and Steel Scimitar (4 in 67 chance). You should be using the Steel Sword on ATK and DEF and the Scimitar on STR when killing most monsters, but again, daggers should be used on plants due to the fast attack rate.

Chapter II: Mithril armor

   Start: 5x Steel Armour, 10/10/10,  Steel Scimitar
   End: Amulet of Looting, AE1, 5x Mithril Armor, 40/40/40, Ice Sword, Adamant Dagger

The next Knight after Steel is Black, but should skip it, as the drop chances are very low, and the next tier is not much harder anyway.

Your next step, therefore, is Mithril Knights. Because they only drop gear a quarter of the time when killed (on average), it can take quite a while to get a full mithril set. You will probably get boots (25 in 268) and helmets (15 in 268) quite often, and the eventual platelegs (5 in 268). The platebody has quite a low drop-chance (1 in 568). This is quite the trend on these knights. Before getting the platebody you will probably get both a scimitar (1 in 67) and a shield (5/134), too, so equip these once dropped, for a decent upgrade. You may equip the sword, too, but I’d stick with the Scimitar for now, to efficiently level up your

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Strength skill before practically perma-equipping the Ice Sword for a long while. As mentioned, you will want to get the Ice Sword after getting full Mithril armor, or even before getting the platebody, as it is a really good upgrade at this point. It is practically a cold Rune Sword, in stats, except it is slightly better defensively than offensively. The drop rate is 10% at the Ice Monster over at the

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Icy Hills. Huge. If you’re around level 30, you will use around 80 tarters per monster. Because of variance, you might get it on your first kill or your 20th, but don’t be discouraged. Also, the Ice Sword is better at grinding

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Strength than all weapons from a lower tier, meaning that the next best strength weapon after.

Now, before you go away from the computer, or to sleep, it’s time to upgrade your dagger. At the Purple Goo Monster you can get a cheap Adamant Dagger. Going from 429 to 444 Potatoes/hour? Good business.

Feeling sad because your neck and fingers are naked? Go on a date with the mummy in

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Penumbra for some gifts! The Amulet of Strength and the Gold Emerald Ring are shiny, and will give you free gains! For only 3 potatoes per kill you have the same ~10% chance to get both these items.

Chapter II—A: Looting Amulet

The Looting Amulet is a special amulet which automatically loots gear acquired from Combat Areas and Slayer Areas. You may get it from the Spider Chest, with a 1/22 chance. Due to the nature of HCCO, you will spend a lot of potatoes in the early game (and beyond, too), so you might want to rush this item in order to ease the grind for food as soon as possible.

By using Mithril Armor, and having around 40 melee stats, it will take you around 500 taters per run of the

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Spider Forest. Before you start running the dungeon, you should have a buffer of at least a thousand potatoes, just because RNG might be on your bad side.

It is quite possible to beat the zone without having any form of Auto Eat, and just make sure you time your manual eating right, since the damage of the spiders in the area is not too high.

Don’t do this, please

Otherwise, if you really don’t want to manual the dungeon, you should know the base max damage of the zone is 142, requiring 710 hp for AE1, 480 hp for AE2. This requires 6 million gold, which would require around 30 hours of active gameplay at Master Farmer, since you still don’t have auto looting. Bad idea.

Chapter II—B: Auto Eat 1

As soon as you have your hands on an Amulet of Looting, you can start to make money. A relevant point to make here, is that money making at this stage is a compromise between risk and reward. Consider the time it takes to farm up the food you need, and the time it takes to farm the gold you want.

Safe path

The safest way to make money, for now, is to kill Cows, collecting their leather, and upgrading it into Green Leather through the shop. The selling price for Leather is 50 GP, while the selling price for Green Leather is 200 GP. By upgrading it, you effectively get 100 GP per piece of Leather.

Assuming you’ve got the Ice Sword, the average gold yield per cow is 203 GP.

This chapter ends when you’re 40/40/40. Use Adamant Dagger for idling plants, and Ice Sword for tougher enemies.

Chapter III: Mithril to adamant (g) + rune boots (g) + rune gloves

   Start: Amulet of Looting, AE1, 5x Mithril Armor, 40/40/40, Ice Sword, Adamant Dagger
   End: 4x (G) Adamant Armor, 1x (G) Rune Boots, 1x Rune Gloves, 70/40/70

How does it feel to be able to get FREE FOOD overnight?

While your next target is necessarily Adamant Knights, you should know that leveling attack and defense up to 50 from your 40 stats will effectively reduce your (raw, without AE efficiency loss) potato per knight count from 170 to 120.

Important note: DO NOT IDLE KNIGHTS. Make sure to always have more

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HP than the max hit of the enemy, and try to eat food right after your attack timer ends, so you don’t reset an attack in progress. Eat until full HP, or at least until you have enough HP to survive any attack. The 2.6s interval of the Adamant Knight is not really a danger provided you’re PAYING ATTENTION and have enough food. Your Ice Sword is great for leveling

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Attack, and your dagger is fine for leveling defense. You may do this at Statue, in preparation to gear upgrades, and thus your first Damage Reduction points!!

Each Adamant piece has a 1/48 chance of dropping, which, mind you, is much better than the drop chances of Rune Knight. Good luck on that! While you don’t really care about the Green Boots nor the Obsidian Cape, you may as well equip them once you get them. It will be a while until you replace the Cape for anything else, but there’s no point wasting Silver/ Gold bars on the Boots. You will get Rune Boots quickly anyway.

Upgrade the Equipment you get to (G) Adamant as soon as you get them, since each piece gives you 4% damage reduction.

Now, grind up enough Slayer Coins for the Desert Hat, and 50

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Slayer levels, so you can gain access to the

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Arid Plains. You may as well kill Master Farmers, for Gold Coins; or hit some Statues for some Gold and Silver Bars, which are both Easy Slayer Tasks, meaning they’re free to reroll.

Now, why would you want to unlock Arid Plains? Well, there’s a few reasons:

Sand Treaders at Turkul Riders — -0.1s to all attacks? Great for plants.
Rune Boots at Turkul Riders — Excellent upgrade, easier to get than from Rune Knights.
Desert Wrappings at Turkul Archers — 2% dr gloves, best until Paladin Gloves.

Also, you don’t even need to manual these two enemies! After getting these upgrades, you should keep on to your hat (literally!), because your next weapon upgrade comes from the Turkul Giant at the same area. You could also sell the hat, and rebuy it a bit later. The Slayer Coin cost is not too huge.

Farm up enough Gold to upgrade your Auto Eat to Tier II at Master Farmer. With Auto-Eat II you can idle Turkul Giants, provided you have 23% dr and level

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50 HP. With this, upgrade your weapon into the Dragon Scimitar or, even better, the Desert Sabre.

Farming at Master Farmer

The Master Farmer gives a total of 14 unique items. You want to prioritize your bank slots for the most rewarding items, taking the price and drop rate into account. This mainly comprises the Tree Seeds, requiring 5 slots. By reserving five slots for the Master Farmer grind, you get a total of 84% of the gold drops. That’s around 809 gp per kill.

Oak Tree Seeds > Willow Tree Seeds > Maple Tree Seeds > Yew Tree Seeds > Magic Tree Seeds > Compost > Sweetcorn Seeds > Tomato Seeds > Strawberry Seeds.

And it was done.

Chapter IV: Adamant to full rune (g)

   Start: 4x (G) Adamant Armour, 1x (G) Rune Boots, 1x Rune Gloves, 70/40/70
   End: 5x (G) Rune Armour, 1x Paladin Gloves, Elite Amulet of Strength. 70/80/80, Sunset Rapier / Ancient Claw, AE3

The first thing you should do in this part of the story is to upgrade your Amulet of Strength into an Elite one, simply by farming more Mummies. On average you need to kill around a thousand of them. You may wait to get the Paladin Gloves until after getting Rune Armor, or you may get it already. At this point you will use around 65 potatoes per Paladin kill, and the chance to get them is 1/171. Not too hard.

The next step is to farm the feared shiny Rune Knights, and upgrade your four armor pieces into (G) Rune pieces, for a total of 29% damage reduction with the Paladin Gloves. You will need a bunch of Gold and Silver pieces, farmed at Statue. You may get Auto Eat III now, or after the 2nd loadout slot, and consider getting the 3rd and last loadout slot while at it too.

Assuming you already have 60

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Slayer (and if you don't, then go get it; Giant Crab tasks are your friend here), the last thing to get before moving onto the next section is a better weapon.

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Deep Sea Ship is your next stop for a Sunset Rapier to speed up killing Pegasus. You'll be killing around 3300 of them to get 100 Ancient Claw Fragment which can be upgraded into the Ancient Claw. This will be a great weapon until you upgrade it to the Infernal Claw, which is still well off. Don't bother getting any Dragon Claw Fragment from Griffin yet, as they will just take up space. If you're lucky enough to get an Ancient Sword before the Sunset Rapier, then feel free to use it until you get to

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Volcanic Cave, as it will drastically reduce your food consumption and the associated food farming time. After that, you'll probably only want to use it outside dungeons due to the high monster damage reducing the benefits of the lifesteal.

Chapter V: Rune (g) to ancient (g)

Ancient storyline

   Start: 5x (G) Rune Armour, 1x Paladin Gloves, Elite Amulet of Strength. 70/80/80, Sunset Rapier / Ancient Claw, AE3
   End: 5x (G) Ancient Armour, 1x Paladin Gloves, Elite Amulet of Defence, 90/99/90

TBD

Ranged intro

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Ranged is quite straightforward, but we’ve been pushing it forward for mainly two reasons: It doesn’t provide any real benefit until you start fighting wizards, or other magic monsters, and getting its gear without having the space in your bank or loadouts for the gear and weapon(s) will be annoying. Get your first two bows (level 5 lets you use Oak Shortbow) from the Ranged Golbin over at the

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Golbin Village, and use the Ice Arrows from the Frozen Archer over at the

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Icy Hills. These are almost as strong as Rune Arrows, which you can start to use at level

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40, but are much easier and cheaper to farm, and can be equipped from the very beginning. Literally all your next upgrades, except if you go out of your way to get the Yew Longbow from the Holy Archer at level

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40, will come from the Bandit Chest. At level

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30 you can upgrade to the Maple Longbow, at level 50 you can use the Magic Longbow, and finally you will get to use the Redwood Longbow and the Ancient Longbow at levels 60 and 70. Once you get into higher levels you may consider using the Adamant (worse than Ice), Rune and Dragon Arrows you’ve collected from the Bandit Chest. If you’re farming Raging Horned Elite for food you may also use Ancient Arrows in

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ranged combat.

Magic Intro

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Magic in this gamemode will mainly consist of casting air spells, since you can remove one colour from the rune costs. All spells cost air runes, but water, earth and fire runes additionally cost their respective runes.

This is a bad thing, for us, since we have no real way to farm a lot of runes yet, but we can get started by farming some catalyst runes at the Vampire and the Master Wizard. The Vampire is probably best for now, since it is a ranged monster, meaning we can strike it with melee, even considering the drop chance and drop rates are lower than from the master wizard.

Catalyst Runes are the runes you use to power up your spells, while Elemental runes select which element you’re using. You can remove the cost for Elemental runes with staves, which we will abuse to completely nullify the air cost, and thus only use air spells.

The Staff of Air reduces the cost by 1, allowing you to cast up to Wind Strike for free (20 dmg), the Battlestaff reduces it by 3, allowing you to cast up to Wind Blast for free (130 dmg), while the Mystic Air Staff reduces it by 5, allowing you to cast up to Wind Wave for free (170 dmg).

Keep in mind you will also need the Catalyst runes for each tier. Once you get to level

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30 magic you can start wielding battlestaves, and should therefore also cast Wind Bolts. No need for Mind Runes anymore, so sell them all. After you can cast Death spells, you might want to go back and forth between Chaos Runes and Death Runes, since they both deal decent damage, and are both farmed decently at the Master Wizard for a while. Eventually, as you get more magic evasion through leveling

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magic, you will only use Death runes, as the Necromancer stops hurting too much.

Ancient (g) to God gear and beyond (everything maxed, current end game)

Pre-Gods

TBD

Aeris

TBD

Glacia

TBD

Terran

TBD

Ragnar

TBD

ITM

TBD

Ocean stuff

TBD

HCCO/Guide

Contents

Preface

Chapter 0: Your first gear

Chapter 0—I: Starting naked

Chapter II: Mithril armor

Chapter II—A: Looting Amulet

Don’t do this, please

Chapter II—B: Auto Eat 1

Safe path

Chapter III: Mithril to adamant (g) + rune boots (g) + rune gloves

Farming at Master Farmer

Chapter IV: Adamant to full rune (g)

Chapter V: Rune (g) to ancient (g)

Ancient storyline

Ranged intro

Magic Intro

Ancient (g) to God gear and beyond (everything maxed, current end game)

Pre-Gods

Aeris

Glacia

Terran

Ragnar

ITM

Ocean stuff