Skugg
| Skugg | |
|---|---|
 | |
| A bone ballista bolted to the fortress wall, and it saw you first. | |
| Biome | Ashlands |
| Alignment | Aggressive |
| Faction | - |
| Health | 400 |
| Damage |
Shoot: Pierce 120 |
| Weak To | - |
| Resistant To | Pierce, Fire, Lightning, Pickaxe |
| Immune To | Poison |
| Stagger | - |
| Tameable | No |
| Trophy | - |
| Spawn ID | spawn piece_Charred_Balista
|
The Skugg is less a creature than a fixed gun. Four of them are mounted at the corners of every Charred Fortress in the Ashlands: skeletal ballistae of bone and sinew that throw a bolt heavy enough to knock you off a ladder mid climb. It cannot follow you, cannot be distracted and ignores whatever else is happening in the courtyard. That is exactly what makes a fortress assault so unpleasant, because you are shot at from above the whole time you are dealing with the things that can chase you.
Behaviour
It never moves and never sleeps. A Skugg watches a seventy five degree cone, horizontally and vertically, out to forty metres, and it locks on to tamed creatures as readily as to players. Once it has a target there is a one second wind up. Then a Bone Bolt leaves the frame at forty metres a second, flies for up to twelve seconds and hits whatever it meets for 120 pierce. After that it needs two seconds before it can fire again. That is the whole repertoire: no melee, no secondary attack, no calling for help and no retreat, just a metronome. The danger is all about position. Four of them cover a fortress between them, and the corners are arranged so that crossing open ground always puts you in at least one cone. Anything outside the arc is invisible to it, and it cannot rotate to follow a target that walks around the tower, so a Skugg that was shooting at you a moment ago simply stops.
Where to Find It
Skuggs spawn only in the Ashlands, and only as part of a Charred Fortress: four to a fortress, one at each corner of the outer wall. They are placed when the structure generates rather than spawned on a timer, so they never respawn once destroyed, and each world holds a fixed supply of roughly twenty fortresses and eighty Skuggs. The fortresses sit inland, away from the coast and between the lava fields, usually on the central landmasses of the biome. They are easy to find, because each one throws a column of green light into the sky. Every Skugg has the same four hundred health, with no star variants. The only gate is the Ashlands itself, which in practice means a ship that survives the crossing and gear well past the Mistlands.
| Where and When | At Once | How Often | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corners of Charred Fortress | 4 | One time | No |
Strengths and Weaknesses
Approach from outside its arc. It cannot turn, so if you hug the wall directly beneath it or come in at the corner from the flank, it never gets a shot, and that is worth more than any weapon choice. When you do have to shoot back, bows, fire staves and lightning staves all have their damage halved against it, so a quiver of arrows is a slow and expensive way through four hundred health. Blunt and slash weapons land in full, so climbing up and hitting it with a mace or a sword is far quicker than sniping. Do not reach for an axe or a pick: it is built like a structure, ignores chop entirely and shrugs off pickaxe damage, and poison is wasted on bone. If you would rather not go up the wall at all, a catapult parked outside the cone flattens them from safety. Watch for the one second wind up and step sideways, because a bolt that misses costs it three seconds.
Drops
The Charred Cogwheel is the reason to bother, since you cannot build a catapult without them.
| Item | Image | Base | 1 Star | 2 Star |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bone fragments | 
|
3 | - | - |
| Charred cogwheel | 
|
1 | - | - |
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