Guides/Infinite Hildebrant's Cellar

How to achieve an infinite Hildebrant’s Cellar

Hildebrant’s Cellar is a never ending dungeon which challenges the adventurer to delve as deep as they can before succumbing to death. Ever wonder if it was possible to go on infinitely? Well… in this guide, we detail how to cheat death and dive infinitely into the depths of the Cellar.

The strategy to go on forever is to make sure you can’t be touched by enemies room after room after room. If you cannot be hit, you won’t spend Godsbeards for healing and thus can go on forever into the depths of the Cellar.

How is this accomplished? Well, we make use of one or both of the uber strategies detailed in the FTK Master Difficulty Guide. That is, we either Reset the enemy team over and over, or, we Party Rush our adventurers over and over so that the enemy never gets a chance to attack.

I personally achieved this by using a team consisting of a Scholar, a Monk (using Strength weapons initially and switching to Intelligence late), and a Minstrel.

To make this work, it’s all about the weapons! We need the uber weapons that provide enemy team Reset or Party Rush. These are the needed weapons:

Enemy Team Reset:
 * Volcanic Tome - Intelligence based
 * Royal Lute - Talent based.

Party Rush:
 * Tome of Wonder - Intelligence based
 * Golden Lute - Talent based
 * Goblin Staff - Intelligence based.

With these weapons, you can prevent the enemy from attacking you. However, there are a couple of problems. One, we need to survive long enough to get these weapons. That in and of itself can be a challenge. Two, we will need Focus to use these weapons, which means we’ll run out of Focus very fast. If you’re out of Focus, then the weapons fail and you die eventually.

Surviving long enough to have these weapons either drop to you or are available for purchase at a Goblin Shop is the biggest obstacle. As we cannot control when that happens, we’ll have to just hope you can survive long enough for that to happen. We can try lesser variants though to help us get that far! Those lesser variants we’ll discuss down below.

For the second problem; running out of Focus; we need a solution for restoring Focus without relying on consumables. In order to handle this problem we once again need some very important weapons to drop for us. There are two in particular we need. Either the Starfish Staff or the Great Water Tome. The Starfish Staff is more likely to be made available to the team first. The Great Water Tome won’t be available until you dive very deep into the Cellar. So once again you’ll be at the mercy of the RNG to get these weapons. But… if you can survive long enough to get them, you can set up for an infinite Cellar.

The Desired Infinite Cellar Setup: What we want to achieve is a team decked out with these weapons:
 * Scholar - Tome of Wonder
 * Monk - Great Water Tome
 * Minstrel - Golden Lute

Or


 * Scholar - Tome of Wonder or Goblin Staff
 * Monk - Tome of Wonder or Goblin Staff
 * Minstrel - Great Water Tome

The way this works, is we start with the Scholar rushing the Monk and Minstrel with the Tome of Wonder or Goblin Staff. The Minstrel will then rush the team again with the Golden Lute placing the Monk and Scholar at the front of the timeline. From there… that pattern can be repeated. The important part of this process is the Monk using the Great Water Tome getting two free actions. With one of those actions we attack an enemy putting two focus into that attack to make sure it hits and does decent damage. The second action the Monk puts one focus into a Party Focus Restore and restores 3 focus for each character including the Monk themselves. This process allows both the Scholar and the Minstrel to put up to 3 focus into their respective Party Rush actions because that focus will be restored by the Great Water Tome. Thus, we always get one free attack from the Great Water Tome and restore all characters back to full focus, allowing the entire process to be repeated. It’s a bit slow because you’re only getting one attack in per three character actions, but that one action is always free. So you can slowly destroy the enemy team one Great Water Tome attack at a time. The enemy will never get their chance to attack because the rushing of the party is essentially stopping time.

So the strategy above is the desired setup. However, until we can get that combination of weapons, we’ll settle for lesser variants.

Lesser Varient #1: Goblin Staff and some other weapon that has Single Target Rush ability.

With this combination, the Goblin Staff will be used to Party Rush. Then some other weapon with a Single Target Rush like an Ornate Lute or a Knotted Staff will be used to rush the character with the Goblin Staff. Repeat that for as long you have focus. There are two problems you’ll need to overcome. One, you’ll need to restore focus somehow or else this engine will stop functioning. Two, you’ll need very high Intelligence and/or Talent to make sure they don’t fail. The Party Rush capability of the Goblin Staff requires four roll checks. If you spend more than 2 focus to ensure the staff works, you’ll run out of focus and the engine will stop working. So to make this work, you must be able to get the Goblin Staff to succeed with the Party Rush roll checks with just 1 focus spent or none at all. That means having an Intelligence stat on the character using it over 90. Ideally maxed out at 95. You won’t succeed in getting the Party Rush to go off every time, but you’ll probably get it to work 80 to 90 percent of the time. The times it fails you’ll have to tank that damage or hope you dodge. Ideally the limited number of Godsbeards you get at each Goblin Shop every 10 rooms will be enough to heal you through the failed times when you take damage. You can help yourself by equipping regeneration items like an Amber Heart when moving into rooms that are empty.

To help survive this early variant phase, there are two character passive abilities that can help. One is the ability Encourage, which can help cover the potential failed rolls of the Goblin Staff once in a while. The other is Discipline, which can restore focus to characters that are fully out of focus if the character with the Discipline ability either kills an enemy or achieves a critical success. Only the Monk character comes with the Discipline ability, so this character is a nice to have on your team! The Minstrel comes with Encourage built in, so this is also another good choice for the team.

Lesser Variant #2: Volcanic Tome and Starfish Staff with Single Target Reset weapon. In this variant, the character with the highest intelligence stat, (the Scholar) will use the Volcanic Tome to reset the enemy team using Fire Wall. Fire Wall is a 5 roll check support move that comes with a -15% penalty per roll, but it resets the entire enemy team! So to compensate for that -15% penalty, it requires that two focus be put into each use of Fire Wall so that the remaining 3 roll checks are done at the Scholar’s intelligence stat. That should be 95% if you can max out that intelligence stat. Supported by the Minstrel’s Encourage ability, this allows the Volcanic Tome to succeed around 95% of the time. The Scholar will only be able to use this Fire Wall ability probably 3 times before the Scholar is totally out of Focus. So once the Scholar runs out of Focus to keep the Volcanic Tome going, they must switch into the Starfish Staff to restore 4 Focus per use of the Starfish Staff. Hopefully by the time you need to make this switch, the Monk and Minstrel have killed one if not two of the enemies. If you only have one enemy left, the Minstrel or Monk can use a weapon that comes with a Single Target Reset ability. Continue to Single Target Reset the last enemy while the Scholar slowly restores every team member’s focus pool, 4 focus at a time. I usually make use of weapons like the Hooked Sword, Gladius, Archlute, Theorbo or Fancy Theorbo to get in the Single Target Resets. I prefer that both the Monk and Minstrel have a weapon with Single Target Reset so you can handle occasional fails by one or the other. This variant isn’t perfect. You will take damage from occasional failures as well as really fast enemies that are faster than the Scholar. However, the damage you do take is far less than if you weren’t using this strategy. With good use of Regeneration items and the limited number of Godsbeards you get, this should be enough to get you through 10 rooms. Then you repeat the same process for the next 10 rooms, healing at the end with Godsbeards or Tinder Pouches and keep going.

Eventually, if you’re able to acquire the full setup, you’ll take less damage than the Godsbeard resources you pick up at each Goblin Shop every 10 rooms. So you’ll start to build a stockpile of Godsbeards as well as a stockpile of money. Every new Goblin Shop will then potentially give you more gear that can help maximize the process. So perhaps your Scholar only had 93 intelligence instead of 95. If you keep going you’ll eventually find the gear needed to max out all three character’s respective stats.

Well… hope you liked the ideas presented here! Good luck with your Hildebrant’s Cellar dives!

Author: SirImperialMike