Ice Rod

Ice Rod

Type	Trinket
Location	Monsters; Crates and Barrels; Skull Cavern Treasure Rooms
Sell Price	1000g

The Ice Rod fights by holding monsters still. Every few seconds it sends an orb of ice at whatever is nearest, and anything the orb passes through freezes on the spot for a moment. No damage is dealt, so the rod never finishes a fight on its own; what it does is buy time, and in a crowded Skull Cavern room time is the thing in shortest supply. It becomes available once Combat Mastery has been claimed, then drops underground from kills, from smashed crates and barrels, and from chests in Skull Cavern treasure rooms. Two numbers are rolled when it is found, the gap between shots and the length of the freeze, and both can be rolled again at an Anvil, which makes the rod one of the trinkets players tinker with longest.

Location

As with every trinket, the slot has to be unlocked first. The Mastery Cave lies in Cindersap Forest just under Leah's cottage, its door opens only once all five skills have reached level ten, and the Combat pillar inside is claimed with Mastery Points.

After that, the rod turns up on kills, with the chance tilted towards monsters that have more health. Containers are the other reliable route, and the chance from a crate or barrel rises the deeper the floor, with the Quarry Mine treated as deeper than anywhere. Skull Cavern treasure rooms offer a small chance in each chest, and those rooms grow more common the further the dive goes.

The day's luck and any luck buff raise all of these, so a farming trip is best begun after a favourable forecast and a lucky meal.

Effect

The rod fires by itself at the nearest monster once something comes within about nine or ten tiles, so it reaches well beyond sword range. The orb travels in a straight line and passes through rocks, weeds and ore nodes without stopping, which means a monster behind cover is still a target. Every monster the orb touches on the way freezes, not only the first, so a line of slimes shuffling down a corridor can be stopped together.

Freezing is not stunning in the usual sense. A frozen monster cannot move or attack for the duration, which gives the farmer a clean window to swing, to walk past, or to drop a bomb and step back. Against the serpents of the Skull Cavern, which are fast and relentless, that window is often the whole difference.

The two stats work against each other in an obvious way. A short gap between shots and a long freeze is the dream, because the next orb lands before the last freeze wears off and the monster never gets a turn. Players chasing that effect talk about the gap closing to almost nothing, at which point the rod holds a single enemy more or less permanently. A long gap with a brief freeze gives the opposite: an occasional stutter that changes very little.

Notes

The Anvil is where most of an Ice Rod's story happens. Built from fifty iron bars with the recipe Combat Mastery provides, it rerolls both stats together for three iridium bars and takes a short while to work. Because the two stats are rolled independently and every value inside their ranges is equally likely, a good rod takes a great many bars to find. There is also a small chance on any roll of landing the "Perfect Ice Rod", a renamed version locked to the best values, which is the thing most farmers are actually feeding iridium into the Anvil to chase.

Because the displayed figures are rounded, an ordinary rod can show the same numbers as a perfect one without matching it underneath. The name on the tooltip is the only reliable sign.

As a present the rod goes down badly almost everywhere. The Wizard likes it, as he likes every trinket, and nobody else in town is pleased. A spare is better taken to the Adventurer's Guild, where Marlon pays a round thousand.

All Trinkets

Every entry in this group, with its key details.

Name	Image	Price
Basilisk Paw		1000g
Fairy Box		1000g
Frog Egg		1000g
Golden Spur		1000g
Ice Rod		1000g
Magic Hair Gel		1000g
Magic Quiver		1000g
Parrot Egg		1000g