Where to Get and How to Make Advanced Familiars for the Kingdom of Loathing MMO
Which familiar is the best one to use? Advanced Familiars for the Kingdom of Loathing MMO
That’s a question a lot of players ask, and unfortunately there is no one right answer. It all depends on what you’re trying to do with your character. The basic familiar skills are:
- increasing item drops
- increasing meat drops
- restoring MP and/or HP
- blocking enemy attacks
- delevelling monsters
- increasing stat gains from fighting
- damaging monsters
There are many other abilities, including familiar-specific item drops, draining MP from your character, and giving extra adventures, but the ones listed above are the main familiar attributes. The rarest and most expensive in-game familiar is the emo squid or emo roe, which was available in the Mr. Store for exactly one day - April 1st, 2005. Its crappy abilities, as well as a general disdain for emo kids among players meant a lot of people held off from purchasing the familiar hatchling, which helped to increase its rarity.
Mr. Store Familiars and You
Eventually you’ll want to have either a volleychaun or a fairychaun in your terrarium. Volleychauns have the properties of both a blood-faced volleyball and a leprechaun, and fairychauns have the abilities of both the gravy fairy and a leprechaun. That means you get both stat gains and meat gains with the volleychaun or item drops plus meat drops with a fairychaun. These familiars change every year in the Mr. Store, but they always have the same abilities, so there’s no point in paying the extra meat for the previous years’ versions unless you’re a completist or a crazy person. The current volleychaun is the Piano Cat, and the fairychaun is the Dramatic Hedgehog. They each cost two Mr. Accessories to redeem.
The monthly Mr. Store familiars can be bought for one Mr. Accessory and often have abilities you can’t find in the regular game familiars. If you can’t cough up $10 to buy a Mr. A, you can always farm the meat for one (or two) in game if you don’t mind burning your turns meat farming for a while. Unlike most free MMORPGs, in the Kingdom of Loathing you don’t have to pay to get the best stuff. It is better to pick up the monthly familiars or items from the Mr. Store while they’re current. If the item’s any good the price can skyrocket after it’s no longer available in the store. Fear not, if you miss out on an awesome familiar, keep checking back. Sometimes new Mr. Store familiars will have similar abilities to old ones, like the Comma Chameleon and the Doppleshifter. Both change into other familiars and are almost useless, but you get the idea. Often a new Mr. Store familiar will come along and make an old one obsolete.
The Jumpsuited Hounddog
This one is pretty straightforward, the Hounddog is basically a Gravy Fairy with a 25% bonus to the item drop rate. It also slightly
increases combat frequency, which is the rate at which you get to fight monsters versus getting other types of adventures. This is beneficial for bounty hunting and when you need to farm monsters for a particular item drop. To get the Jumpsuited Hounddog what you have to do is complete the Bounty Hunter Hunter’s quest 100 times, then you’ll have enough filthy lucre to trade for the Pompadour’d Puppy hatchling at the Bounty Hunter Hunter’s Shack.
The Slimeling
This one is going to be difficult, but it’s worth it. The Slimeling has a Gravy Fairy base (+ item drops), restores MP and HP at a better rate than the Star Starfish when fed equipment, and improves equipment drops slightly. It can also drop slime stacks if you feed it a piece of equipment made with a meat stack. Its hatchling, the Squirming Slime Larva has a chance of dropping if you defeat the Mother Slime boss in the Slime Tube. The hatchling will only drop if you can beat the Slime Tube dungeon in under 370 turns. This can be difficult. In order to reduce the turns needed you have to increase monster level, which makes fighting in the dungeon harder unless your character has a high level and a ton of skills. The Slime Tube is a basement dungeon, and if you’re in a smaller clan or you’re a new player you can skip all that hard stuff and buy a Slimeling from a clan offering to do slime runs. Basically they will want you to pay for the cost of the run, usually around a few million meat. This may be one of the hardest familiars to get in the Kingdom of Loathing, but if you enjoy a challenge you should definitely try hunting one down yourself.
The Exotic Parrot
After the Slimeling, why not settle for a nice, easy familiar? The Exotic Parrot can be bought from the Black Market in the woods for 500,000 meat. The parrot gives you elemental resistance, so you can get through the Daily Dungeon and the Trapz0r’s tests with ease. There’s no reason to bother leveling the parrot unless Lord Spookyraven is giving you trouble in the Seaside Mansion, just equipping your parrot should be enough, especially if you have the Amphibian Sympathy skill, which gives a constant +5 levels to your familiar.
The Hobo Monkey
This is a familiar you get from the other clan dungeon, Hobopolis. It’s a Leprechaun type familiar with a 25% bonus to meat drops. It can
also steal meat from your opponents. This familiar is not quite as difficult to get as the Slimeling, you just need to have a few things ready ahead of time. Have your Hobo Binder equipped and full of glyphs and hunt down enough hobos to get 1000 hobo nickels to trade for the monkey. If you hunt the hobos in the areas around the Town Square you’ll have an easier time collecting nickels, as you won’t have to worry about the amount of damage you’re doing. If you do over a certain amount of damage to hobos in the Hobopolis Town Square you’ll get a hobo part, which can be used to make scare hobos. Getting hobo parts means you don’t get regular drops, so you can either painstakingly calculate the amount of damage you’re doing or go hunting for nickels in the other areas around the Town Square. When you have your 1000 nickels, get your hobo binder equipped, head back to the Town Square and keep adventuring until you get into the market. To buy the monkey choose the Entertainment option, then choose Pets. On the next screen you’ll be given three options that all say Pets. Pick the one at the top and buy your monkey.
This post is part of the series: Kingdom of Loathing Familiars
Kingdom of Loathing is an expansive browser-based MMO that’s always adding new content. Currently there are over 130 familiars in-game. These guide will discuss those familiars you will need for quests, as well as some of the better in-game familiars and some items to avoid.
