Monster Hunts & Bestiary

The regulars at the tavern’s corner table hunt monsters for coin. Pay their fee and they’ll scout a region for a named monster — then the kill is yours.

Sending the crew

• Pick a region you’ve explored (at least one cleared combat tile) and the Resonance level to scout at — anything from Off up to that region’s purchased level. The fee is 2,500 gold per mark level, and the mark’s level is the lair tile’s rank at the chosen Resonance level (its base rank when Off, the shared Resonance ladder from I on). The form remembers your last region and Resonance pick per character. The crew pre-rolls the lair it would find, so the dispatch form shows one exact fee before you send; reopening the panel, switching regions or a dispatch you cannot afford never re-rolls it into a cheaper one. A new offer is drawn only after a successful dispatch.
• Scouting takes 8 hours of real time — 6 hours in a region whose bestiary page you have completed (see below) — and keeps counting while you’re offline. The duration is fixed when the crew leaves. The crew takes one job at a time.
• Call the crew back while they’re still out: you get half the fee back (HUNT_CANCEL_REFUND_FRACTION) and whatever they were tracking is lost; the next offer is a new lair. A mark already standing is untouched, and tracking the Brood Matriarch can’t be called off.

The report and the fight

• The report names a monster from the region’s bestiary and marks its lair tile on the world map (red ring with the mark’s portrait).
• The hunt is bound to the Resonance level it was scouted at — set the region’s applied level there or the trail goes cold. Off level the portrait is withheld and the lair tile keeps a dashed red ring instead; selecting it tells you which Resonance level the mark lairs at and offers a Set Resonance button to dial there in one click.
• Face it: travel to the marked tile and start combat — the mark is the first and only enemy, and the fight ends by itself once it falls (start again for the usual grind). A mark is the boss of the endgame enemy formula: the tile’s special enemy with ×6.6 HP and ×0.525 damage (see Echo Ascension), its own traits on top — a long fight with soft hits. It only ever shows itself while you’re actually playing — never during offline progress; if the game is closed mid-fight, the fight is dropped and the mark waits for a fresh start.
• Only one mark can stand at a time. It never expires, and you may send the crew out again while it stands — but the next report replaces it, and the old fee stays spent.
• If the mark kills you — or you break off the fight (stop combat, travel away) — it flees. The hunt and the fee are lost.

The bounty

Killing a mark pays, on top of its normal kill rewards:

• Gold: 1.5× the fee you paid.
• Materials: a satchel of echo shards and cores scaled to the mark’s level: round(level × 0.5 × 1.75) shards (at least 1) and round(level × 0.1 × 1.75) cores.
• A guaranteed rare or unique item, rolled like a normal gear drop from an enemy of the mark’s level: item level = mark level ±5, the same tier cap and base weighting as world drops (a level-9 mark only gives T1 gear). The roll uses your Magic Find +200%; normal and magic results are rerolled until the item is rare or unique, so Magic Find only moves the rare→unique step. A unique roll on a base with no unique at that level becomes a rare, as with normal drops. The loot filter and auto-sell are skipped; with a full bag the item is discarded. A unique drops unrevealed like every other unique (see Loot & Drops).

The bestiary

Each region hosts 6 named monsters with their own traits — some fast, some armored, some wreathed in the region’s element. The crew’s find is random, and some entries are genuinely rare: completing a region’s page is a long chase. After four reports in a row from a region that name monsters you have already slain, the next report from there names one you haven’t.

The Bestiary window opens from the Hunting Crew panel and from the in-game menu (alongside the Armory and Achievements). It has three tabs, all grouped by region and all showing a blacked-out silhouette with a ”???” name until you have killed that entry at least once:

• Marks — the hunting crew’s log: the 6 named monsters per region, with their story once slain.
• Monsters — every regular species that roams the regions, tagged Common / Rare / Special.
• Bosses — the dungeon bosses and their echoed versions.

Every unlocked card lists your kill count and the highest level you’ve slain it at. Achievements await the first mark, each completed region, and the full book.

A completed region page pays off in the hunt itself: once all 6 marks of a region have been slain at least once, the crew scouts that region 25% faster — 6 hours instead of 8 (HUNT_SCOUT_BESTIARY_COMPLETE_REDUCTION = 0.25). The Marks tab shows the perk under each region header, and the dispatch form shows the shortened time for that region.

The Brood Matriarch

A complete bestiary wakes something at the top of the Dark Citadel.

• Unlock: every mark of the bestiary slain at least once and the Dark Citadel’s Resonance X bought. From then on the Hunting Crew panel shows her four signs.
• Signs: every mark you slay in one of the four farm regions has a 10% chance to leave that region’s sign — Parched Grasslands lightning, Cursed Swamp poison, Scorched Foothills fire, Shattered Mountains cold (each region’s own element). A region leaves its sign only while you don’t hold it yet; Dark Citadel marks leave none. A found sign leads the bounty window.
• Track the Brood Matriarch: with all four signs the crew offers a new job for 437,500 gold (2,500 × her level 175) and 24 hours. The signs are spent on it. While she waits at her nest, the crew takes no other job.
• Her nest is a cave above the end of the Dark Citadel’s western path; the crew can only track her once that path is cleared to its last tile. While her nest stands it shows on the world map (a red ring with her portrait) — select it and Enter the nest.
• The nest is one attempt: eight of her brood first, eight different creatures — Brood Hatchling, Brood Wyrmling, Ember Whelp, Venom Broodling and Rime Crawler, then the rares Shell Warden, Nest Stalker and Brood Guardian, each fighting with the element its look shows (every one of her four elements twice) — and then her, all at level 175, whatever Resonance the Citadel is set to. In the nest every resistance carries −75%. Her brood and she follow the endgame enemy formula (see Echo Ascension). The combat label reads Brood Matriarch’s Nest (175) and fills one segment per brood and one for her.
• The fight: a four-headed hydra with no physical damage. Every swing lands as the element of her active head, through your matching resistance only — armor, physical reduction and block don’t touch it (your defense rating still decides whether she hits). A head falls at 75%, 50% and 25% of her HP: lightning first, then poison, then fire; the cold head fights to the end. Each head gets its own HP bar that starts full, four orbs next to her name count the heads still standing, and the active head’s eyes glow. Each element brings its usual effect: stun (lightning), damage over time (poison), ignite (fire), freeze (cold).
• Reward: her ring, a unique found nowhere else, dropped unrevealed like every unique. Nothing else — no bounty, no gold, no other drops. Every kill is a new roll; duplicates go to salvage.
• If you die in her nest — to her or to her brood — or leave it (stop combat, travel away), she escapes and the signs are gone. You step back out onto the western path. Tracking her again takes four new signs.
• Her card sits on the Bestiary’s Marks tab after the thirty marks. It doesn’t count toward the book.