Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about curios, with a lot of misinformation regarding how they’re obtained, what they hold, and at what rates. Here we’ll clarify everything we know based on datamines from both Korean and other communities, as well as my own testing and analysis.

What are Curios?

Curios are a box shaped item that can be appraised at Zathba in Seedhollow. The majority of the endgame loop revolves around farming curios.

Basic properties of Curios

There are important things to note about curios. Some of these are obvious and others less so, but going forward in this writeup, the assumption is you’ll know everything in this section.

1. Curios drop at a max of one per mission. It does not matter if it’s a triple boss mission, or not even a boss mission, the max is one.
2. There are 4 types of curios (more on that later) which determine the drop table.
3. You cannot directly see which type of curio you receive, the game only displays the total number of curios across all 4 types.
4. Curios contain a multitude of items, including but not limited to sigils, materials, mirage munitions, wrightstones, etc.
5. Some sigils can only be obtained from curios (see below).
6. Curios can not be save scum. That is to say, as soon as you have a curio in your inventory, the result from the curio is fixed. So unlike transmarvel which you can save scum, you cannot do so with curio. The only way to roll something different is to get another curio.
7. Curios are not account seeded. Every time you enter a mission, a new RNG seed is generated. This RNG seed determines what curio is dropped, along with what is contained inside. This means that your 500th curio on your save file can change if you reload and run a new mission BEFORE the curio drops. This is not particularly relevant to anyone, but is a point of discussion for some reason (usually cheaters justifying their generated items).
8. Curio drop tables change as you progress through story.

Unique Sigils From Curios

Name	Type	+?	Max TLvl	Description
Berserker	Offense	Y	30	Significant ATK boost, but disables standard block and dodge.1
Glass Cannon	Offense	Y	15	Damage and Damage Cap Increases, become dizzy anytime you are hit. 2
Head Start	Offense	Y	30	Significant ATK boost for the first 3 minutes of a mission.
Less is More	Offense	Y	30	ATK boost per skill slot left empty.
Power Hungry	Offense	Y	30	ATK boost, but lose HP at the beginning of mission.
Supplementary Damage	Offense	Y	45	Adds chance for an additional 20% damage to be dealt as a separate damage instance. 3
Roll of the Die	Offense	Y	15	Chance to hit 1, or 2x / 3x / 4x on normal attacks. Applies a new damage cap of 999,999. 4
War Elemental	Offense	N	15	Causes your character to always hit for elemental advantage. 5
Flight over Flight	Defense	Y	15	Halves your attack, all dodges through attacks are counted as perfect.
Stronghold	Defense	Y	30	Raise defense proportional to current HP % (opposite of Garrison).
Untouchable	Defense	Y	15	Increase dodge distance.
Potent Greens	Support	N	30	Dispels debuffs when a green potion is consumed. At T30, gain a buff for debuff immunity on green potion use.
Path to Mastery	Special	N	45	Increase MSP gain (similar to Rupee Tycoon and Fast Learner).

Some ramblings about some notes for these sigils:

1. Berserker still allows you to access skills that allow you to block, parry, or dodge.
2. You cannot reduce/avoid this with dizzy resist. You CAN remove this with potent greens. You should never run this combo as it defeats the purpose of optimizing using glass cannon.
3. Additional hits count towards combo booster, cascade, and have their own damage cap separate from the damage cap of the main hit they’re supplementing. This means this effectively improves your damage by 20%, stacks with skills that add supplementary damage. Does not work with Burn, Poison, or Rosetta’s Roses.
4. This sigil mathematically sucks unless you cheat. Side by side tests show basically no improvement considering you’re dedicating an entire slot to it (and most likely won’t have a + version for sub slot). The 999,999 damage cap only applies on 4x rolls, which is a 1% chance. It’s terrible.
5. War elemental applies the bonus damage multiplier on Plain-element enemies like Sir Barrold. You may not see the golden damage numbers that normally indicate elemental weakness, but the damage bonus still applies.

So Why Are We Farming Curios?

Most characters in the endgame have very similar builds, primarily consisting of Stamina, Tyranny, Damage Cap x4, War Elemental, and Supplementary Damage x3. Some unique builds such as Rackam Shotgun, Vaseraga, and AI Zeta, use sigils such as Less is More. With the current length of fights being so short, Head Start can also be effective.

So yes, that means almost universally, characters will just about all be running four curio specific sigils with three of them being Supplementary Damage. For players that want to play solo and optimize their teams, this means you want at least 12 Supplementary Damage sigils. But wait! There’s more! Since Supplementary Damage (and some of the other useful ones like LiM / Head Start) can drop as +, it means that you ideally want these sigils in their + forms to maximize stats. If your character runs 3 Supp Dmg, that’s potentially 3 full stats that you’re missing. This could be the difference between Quick Cooldown 0 and Quick Cooldown 45 (20% CDR). This isn’t a discussion on whether you should try and optimize. I’m only here to say that there are people that like and enjoy optimizing, and what their end result will look like.

So What’s The Problem?

Rates are terrible. That’s simply it. A few days ago, I accomplished my goal of reaching 10,000 quests cleared in game. Most of those after a certain point were completely AFK farmed because I had already finished everything in the game I could work towards, and all that was left was to just sit around waiting for quests to clear so I could get the curios.

A very conservative estimate of how many curios opened:

Take quests cleared, subtract 100, and then multiply the result by 0.8 (which is the maniac drop rate).

So conservatively, I opened around 8000 curios in the span of around 600 hours of playtime. At the time of accomplishing this, we didn’t know the extent of how bad the rates were in this game, but that just goes to show that in a human amount of time, you won’t even come close to perfectly outfitting one character, much less a full team.

The Vulcan Bolla Problem

People unfamiliar in the majestic embodiment of our numerical discourse, a venerable tradition that has withstood the test of epochs, gracefully weaving the very fabric of our numeric expressions in its time-honored and resplendent form, the hallowed convention known as standard arithmatic, seem to believe that a single person opening 20 curios and receiving a desired result is confirmed and undeniable proof of a drop table. Unfortunately, this just led to constant recommendations of running Maniac Vulcan Bolla for the past week or so, a mission that is incredibly long for farming. Our basic testing was tracking Vulcan at 5 minutes, with Nazar being 1 minute 15 seconds. For every 1 curio you farm in Vulcan, I’m getting 4 in the same period of time. You would have to sincerely trust that the drop table for Vulcan is at least 4 times better if you were to take this trade, something that absolutely no data indicated.

Korean News Drops

Around 48 hours ago, this post was dropped and widely shared among GBFR communities. To summarize the post:

1. There are 4 types of curios which we’ll refer to as A, B, C, D
2. Different curios have different max drop quality
3. Type A, B, C can’t drop Curio Legendary+ sigils
4. Only Type D can drop Curio Legendary+ sigils, and will drop ONLY Legendary+ sigils (both normal and curio). Note that materials and other still drop, it’s just all sigils are the + variants.
   • The poster opened 5000 curios of Type D and got 19 Supp V+ giving us a rate of 0.38%

These are the only implications / statements made about curios in this post. For some reason, a bunch of people started spreading misinformation without even reading the post, or spreading it intentionally as clickbait garbage on Youtube with standard room temperature IQ viewers refusing to read the source or bothering to realize it’s clickbait garbage. After seeing The Vulcan Bolla Problem, I can’t even blame these trashy content creators given how much people eat this shit up. There was an edit to the Korean post saying they got a Type D from Maniac Managarmr in 5 runs, but there was no data collection or data mining done to determine best missions to farm by this point.

So… What Does This Mean?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Or at least for the average player. We had already confirmed that Curio+ sigils dropped from even the earliest missions in Maniac difficulty. After all, I opened 999 curios obtained from Maniac Nazarbonju (Icy Eye on the Holy Prize) and obtained a Glass Cannon V+ over in this video which has been live for over 2 weeks. This means that Type D curios (what you want) are confirmed to drop even in Maniac. Some of the rumors circulating were already suggesting that it was impossible to get Type D in Maniac difficulty, something that was deeply concerning. At this point, I had long held (and still held) that Icy Eye on the Holy Prize was the best curio farm. The only potential implication for players is if different missions or difficulty levels dropped Type D curios at better / worse rates. But no datamining or large scale (>1k clears per mission) had been done.

The Datamines

After the Korean post dropped, the modding discord for GBFR was fired up and working on deep dives into the different mechanics of drops, tables, and more. Bless the community!

There are two main posts to understand when discussing Curios

1. Quest Drop Rates
2. Curio Loot Rates

The quest drop rates show that there is no difference between quests or difficulties. Effectively, all curios have a 3% chance to drop as Type D, regardless of where they’re obtained. This means that, yes, the fastest curio farms will still be the best options for obtaining rare Curio Sigils.

Difficulty	Curio Drop Rate	Type D Drop Rate
Hard	50%	1.5%
Very Hard	60%	1.8%
Extreme	70%	2.1%
Maniac	80%	2.4%
Proud	100%	3.0%

The curio drop rates show that there are 5 different drop tables for curios based on how progressed you are with the highest level being unlocked once Proud difficulty is unlocked. However, sigils such as War Elemental (important) can drop as early as Maniac difficulty, though, rates are far worse prior to the final drop table. One quick note: Your rate to obtain War Elemental is 0.4922% per curio, or around 1 per 203 curios once you hit Proud. This is not exceptionally rare considering the level of farm you’re expected to complete in this game. The true rate for Supp V+ is actually 0.3% but ONLY from Type D. That means on any given curio drop, you have a 0.009% chance of a Supp Dmg V+ or in another way, 1 per 11,111 curio drops.

All this to say… continue farming the best curios per hour.

This table provides the generalized rate of these results when receiving any given curio.

Farming Curios Effectively

And here we are. All this to say… farm what you need to farm while passively obtaining curios, and afterwards farm the fastest throughput. You’ll be stuck farming many, many things if you plan to make multiple Terminus Weapons and full teams. For that reason, you’ll want to primarily farm in Maniac difficulty. Why? Because the runs (both AFK and manual) are significantly faster than proud, while still offering the chance of Exceptional Refinium and Silver Centrums, both of which are some of the gates to Terminus Awakenings. Extreme difficulty and lower will not drop these two resources.

The big thing that people forget is this game has A LOT of overhead for cutscenes, chest opening, results screen.

• For a manual player, an average of 60 seconds should be added to clear times.
  • 20 seconds for cutscenes, 13 seconds for chests, 19 seconds for results, 8 seconds for reload.
• For an AFK player, an average of 138 seconds should be added to clear times.
  • 20 seconds for cutscenes, 30 seconds for chests, 80 seconds for results, 8 seconds for reload.

N.B. Different fights have different cutscene lengths and different distances to chests.

The Best Farm

Icy Eye for the Holy Prize is a Maniac level quest that features a single Nazarbonju. It is incredibly easy, in a small arena. Nazarbonju opens up with a dash, smacking onto the wall and falling over. This gives AI great up time early into the fight. The AI team crafters were able to get this quest down to consistently 15 seconds with no input from leader. You can get down to around 8 seconds with manual play. At 15 seconds, you’re completing your entire loop in 1:15, allowing you to complete 48 quests per hour, or 38.4 curios per hour. At fully AFK, that’s 18.8 curios per hour (see above for AFK overhead). This mission presents the perfect balance of being extremely fast, consistent, but also in Maniac difficulty or the silver centrum + exceptional drops. There’s also an added benefit the Eye Drop. You can combine these with Griffin Beaks at Siero for more Silver Centrums! Double Griffin (Roost and Reign) being the best Fortification Crystal L farm. However, note that Nazarbonju requires you to consistently clear before Nazarbonju begins his overdrive attack to get the most effective farm. Units like Lancelot and Eugen are good for delaying this attack.

You should also consider reading the AI tier list, of which the AI Super Soldier Project on the unofficial maincord has done a great job working on. This will help elevate your solo / AFK farm times!

Comparing to hard difficulty Quakadile (a common recommendation from the less informed), even at 3 seconds to clear, you’ll be completing around 57 missions an hour with a throughput of 28.6 curios per hour. This makes Nazarbonju 34.4% better for pure curios, on top of the improved resource drops. The difference gets drastic because of the significant overhead, despite the fact that actual clear times seem to go hand-in-hand with drop rates.

Comparing to very hard difficulty Quakadile (standard youtube misinformation), even at 6 seconds to clear, you’ll be completing around 54 missions an hour with a throughput of 32.7 curios per hour. 

Comparing to extreme difficulty Gallanza (standard youtube misinformation), even at 10 seconds to clear, you’ll be completing around 51 missions an hour with a throughput of 36 curios per hour.

Comparing to proud difficulty Firewyrm (the best proud difficulty recommendation), runs using only AI can easily extend into the 180 second range. Even at an optimistic 120 second average (which is faster than any of my AI only runs) you’re at 180 seconds with overhead, or only 20 curios per hour. In a full AFK scenario, you’re at 13.95 curios per hour. I’ve had people tell me their AI only runs are in the range of 69 (nice) seconds which brings your overall rate up to the range of 28 per hour. This is still significantly worse than Nazarbonju, but has the benefit of dropping Damage Cap V+ (if you still need these, which at the point of 60 second AI only runs, you probably don’t). On the flip side, if you want to fully manual run the quests (such as in coop), you can get over 40 curios an hour given you clear in 30 seconds or less. This is the fastest farm for curios, but unrealistic outside of coop which means you have overhead for finding teams and have to all be active and farming manually. I don’t really recommend this (see: Some Depressing Math)

Some other considerations if you can’t farm Nazarbonju and clear before overdrive: Gerasene. He’s a slow moving fight with minimal AOE (useful for AI pathing) and short OD. This is a good option for players without as deep investment in AI and who still need silver centrums and other. You can switch out with his brother, Scarmiglione, and then combine both of their drops at Siero for more Silver Centrum.

Some Depressing Math

So we’ve covered the rates, drop tables, the time per curio, so now we have everything we need to calculate how much time it would take, on average, for a single Supp Dmg V+

Rate for Supp V+ per curio is 0.009% & Optimal Curio per hour at 38.4

This gives us a rate of 1 Supp V+ per 289.35 hours, or 1 Supp V+ per 12 days of non-stop farming. I truly don’t understand how Cygames devs thought this was a good idea. This also doesn’t include managing inventory which is terribly inefficient (up to 3 hours a day).

Constant Misinformation

Youtube and Reddit are FILLED with misinformation even after the datamines were released. As always, be careful about karma / click farmers.

Received this reply, almost 2 days after the datamines were released with all the drop tables.

Tons and tons of fake videos all for clickbait. The top 3 videos are terrible examples, not to mention Naz talgic was caught using cheat engine in his videos.

And again, so many clickbaiters getting on the bandwagon of claiming they know where to abuse drop table. At 10 second clears (which is what he has in his own video) with a conservative 60 seconds of overhead, you’re getting 51.4 clears an hour with a rate of 70% drop per clear. That’s 36 curios an hour. Wouldn’t be the first time someone claimed they were larger…

N.B even if you shaved off 5 seconds from this clear time you wouldn’t be reaching 40 curios per hour. It would be ON PAR to Nazarbonju.

Rerolling Curios

On March 5th, Reddit was hyping up a revolutionary way to reroll curios. One that would allow you to take 10 minutes of your time and turn it into the value of 1 minute. I’ll explain the whole thing and how it may still be useful to consider but right off the bat, the entire process being discussed is a huge waste of time being done by players struggling to clear maniac quests, so let that be your presumption of why anyone would bother going through the whole process.

Part 1 – Rerolling For Curios

This involves going around Seedhollow and saving in front of every blue item pickup location, then opening it to see if it contains a curio. If not, reload save and wait a bit then try again. You can somewhat reroll the drops in this fashion. It’s not guaranteed (to my knowledge) that every blue drop will give a curio no matter how many times you reroll it.

This process is a huge massive waste of time. By the time you look for and reroll a single blue item drop you could easily have farmed 2+ curios naturally.

Part 2 – Rerolling Curio Sigil Substats

This part is good to keep in mind but not worth obsessing over. This part allows you to reroll the substat of a curio that you picked up. When a curio is spawned in the world, the result is set. Whether it’s a material, sigil, etc. However, sigils that have substats don’t determine their substats until picked up. The game advances the sub-stat every 10 seconds. So you save in front of a blue ball that you know is a curio, you go appraise it, and if it’s a curio+ sigil then you can reload the save and change the substat of the sigil.

“But GL1TCH3D! Then we can guarantee our Supplementary Damage V+ with Quick Cooldown!!!”

Yes and no.

I did say that this part was worth keeping in mind, but to do it in the way redditors suggest would be so time consuming that you should never bother. The main issue is that getting Supp V+, assuming the spawn rate of Type D curios is still 3% for any curio picked up, will remain at 1/11111.

At most I save now when I go to Zathba’s bar and, if it’s a blue item pickup, I’ll grab it. If I hit the 1/11111 lottery then amazing! I get to reroll my substat. Otherwise, don’t hold your breath.

TOO LONG DIDN’T READ

I can’t blame you if you skipped straight here. What you need to know: STOP POSTING ABOUT MANAGARMR / VULCAN BOLLA. Farm the highest throughput per hour (Icy Eye for the Holy Prize for most developed players). If you’re still in the process of completing terminus weapons and other, you should view curios as primarily a passive aspect. The game does not respect your time, and farming curios is a huge waste of time.