LOL. Yeah you can beat him naked and unarmed, but that's not going to work for most of us. If I had to compromise and really wanted to save my resources, I'd still get iron armour and use an upgraded wooden club to beat him to death. It causes more bonus blunt damage than unarmed and consumes way less stamina than the mace so you can keep pummelling bonemass for much longer before needing to recover. And it only costs you wood and bone.

Originally posted by ec928:

btw: I agree you can do it with fully upgraded bronze armor as well, but it's a bit less efficient and uses up lots of bronze. If you hate mining, going from troll to iron armour is faster. And bronze is weaker than iron, so just be a bit more careful.

Aye bronze is not as good as iron, but it can be more plentiful and easier to come by than iron. IMO, and because 'reasons', skipping iron is ultimately more efficient. At swamp level, just use iron to make (and upgrade) a pick, forge upgrades and some nails for comfort items.

Originally posted by Megahurts:

Originally posted by ec928:

btw: I agree you can do it with fully upgraded bronze armor as well, but it's a bit less efficient and uses up lots of bronze. If you hate mining, going from troll to iron armour is faster. And bronze is weaker than iron, so just be a bit more careful.

Aye bronze is not as good as iron, but it can be more plentiful and easier to come by than iron. IMO, and because 'reasons', skipping iron is ultimately more efficient. At swamp level, just use iron to make (and upgrade) a pick, forge upgrades and some nails for comfort items.

I think skipping bronze is considered far more normal. As it's much quicker to get large quantities of iron than large quantities of bronze which takes a long time to dig out.

Fully upgraded bronze is about the same as regular iron IIRC.

Originally posted by Megahurts:

Originally posted by ec928:

btw: I agree you can do it with fully upgraded bronze armor as well, but it's a bit less efficient and uses up lots of bronze. If you hate mining, going from troll to iron armour is faster. And bronze is weaker than iron, so just be a bit more careful.

Aye bronze is not as good as iron, but it can be more plentiful and easier to come by than iron. IMO, and because 'reasons', skipping iron is ultimately more efficient. At swamp level, just use iron to make (and upgrade) a pick, forge upgrades and some nails for comfort items.

Yes, I can understand that perspective, especially as the forge upgrades need quite a bit of iron. It depends on play style but I always had plenty of iron from exploring the crypts, but struggled on bronze because it felt you needed to mine 3 times as much (i.e. 2 copper + 1 tin = 1 bronze) and I hated mining... So yes some of this depends on your approach and personal preferences. My view is that as long as you're having fun playing the game and progressing, it's a valid approach.

Troll armor ftw

Upgraded Bronze is fine if you can use a shield. His biggest threat is the poison and no armour helps with that.
Save your iron, eat well and run bronze even into the mountains. Once you find your first silver vein you're all good.

Nothing is necessary, but it is "highly recommended". Iron armour is the single biggest survival upgrade you can get at this stage of the game, especially if you skipped bronze armour.

If you're playing single player with average non-1337 reflexes like most of us, one of the most efficient way to kill him with minimum frustration is to melee him up close with a blunt weapon equipped with armour that let's you survive multiple hits.

Iron armour, perhaps upgraded once or twice, with (2) poison resist lets you do this, along with (3) fighting during the day, and the (4) usual buffs like fully rested, (5) 3 foods, and (6) medium healing potions. And (7) clear out all nearby enemy spawns and (8) optionally clear the immediate area of obstacles that can trap you before summoning bonemass so you can run around easily and safely when your health gets low.

btw: I agree you can do it with fully upgraded bronze armor as well, but it's a bit less efficient and uses up lots of bronze. If you hate mining, going from troll to iron armour is faster. And bronze is weaker than iron, so just be a bit more careful.

Yup, you can literally beat bonemass naked using your fists without abusing any bugs (there are videos off it), but it's all on a scale of how good you are and how much you enjoy the process of upgrading itself.

Depends on your playstyle, if you're going melee on him then yeah go full iron, if you feel confident and using a bow you could stick with troll, just make sure you have plenty of food and poison resist potions, it boils down to whatever play style suits you best, hell go butt naked if you want a real challenge, personally i went full iron because i'm terrible at parrying and i'd rather not die

I thought it was a bad idea to go at him with a bow unless you had frost arrows.

Yeah bonemass is resistant to pierce, but you can fall back and chip away at his hp while yours regenerates

Yeah frost arrows and a good bow if you want to take the ranged approach. I did it with 5 other people, and whittled him down to nothing really fast. We killed him a second time with 3 people shooting him from the roof of the house I built, and me & one other guy went in with the blunt weapons, worked just as well, if not better. As long as you have heaps of food & poison mead to go around, you should be fine.

Even if you don't have it, why would you want to go into the mountains with less? Wolves hit harder than he does and they aren't the biggest bad in the mountains.

Originally posted by Promethian:

Even if you don't have it, why would you want to go into the mountains with less? Wolves hit harder than he does and they aren't the biggest bad in the mountains.

I suppose since you go into the mountains with iron gear anyway it could be worth it, each to their own. Also depending on which mountain you go to, you could kite drakes into BF/meadows without going too deep into the mountain, however that feels like too much effort just for frost arrows imo

There's no point whatsoever clinging to troll armour once iron or anything beyond it is available IMO. The mobility vs protection tradeoff is already heavily skewed in favour of just tanking stuff at iron armour and it only gets more skewed from there.