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Table of Contents

Editing dungeons and their limitations, Gem pools of different chalices

Editing Dungeons, what is possible?

Gem Pools

Editing Gem Pools

Bloodtinge gem farming

Ending note

Editing dungeons and their limitations, Gem pools of different chalices and Bloodtinge gem farm analysis [by DrAnger90]

The Tomb Prospector community has been very busy understanding the deeper mechanics of Chalice Dungeons and I thought about sharing this with everyone. I want to talk about it in detail since we were able to get so much information in such little time thanks to save editing, so this post will be on the long side. It will contain:

general information on what is possible editing dungeons and the limitations that it brings

research on how gem pools are built in dungeons and comparisons with real farmed gems

research on editing gem pools that was possible because we knew how gem pools function

a new view on Bloodtinge gem farming with comparisons of old farms and new farms that were made possible by editing dungeons.

Editing Dungeons, what is possible?

For about a year now we’re able to look through Bloodbornes save files and OpenBornes param files, trying to understand how the game works. Very soon we knew we were able to edit dungeons, which kind of split the Bloodborne community apart. Therefore I also want to use this post to explain to everyone what we’re doing and what the limitations are, to hopefully explain that we’re not “evil hackers”. To understand what are the limitations for dungeon editing, you need to understand how the dungeons are coded within the save files. As we know now, the dungeons are not fully procedurally generated, but instead the game selects a dungeon from a premade pool for each Chalice each time the player makes a dungeon on one of the altars. How this dungeon generation process works has been described by u/XTrinX recently. In total there are 2300 root dungeons where Rites and other hidden effects are used to make tiny variations in enemies and items to make it look like there are way more than 2300 of them. Bloodborne uses a string of 128 bytes in hexadecimal code to write down all the information about dungeons like layout seed, area, depth and all these dungeon effects that cause variations between the same layouts. Each dungeon effect is described by a single byte, and only these bytes can be used to edit dungeons with. We can NOT change the function of each byte, those are fixed, therefore we can only use what the game considers legitimate dungeon bytes. There are also only 9 slots in this hex code to put effects on, which also limits what we can do. At this point we pretty much know exactly what each byte does and how we can use this knowledge to understand what is possible. I’d like to emphasize that we can only edit enemies in the dungeons that are tied to one of the dungeon effects. The only 2 effects that do this are the Special enemy/shop effect and the Rotted Rite. All other enemies are a fixed part of the layout and can’t be changed like bosses, wandering bosses and rare enemies like Labyrinth Moles or Giant Nightmare Apostles. Other things we can do are: ► select a layout seed we want (this also grants us the possibility to check out developer dungeons) ► open 4th layers in chalices where it is possible (normally the game gives the player a 20% chance for a dungeon to have a 4th layer) ► make a dungeon poisonous (normally only Pthumeru has a 20% chance to be poisonous, Hintertomb is always poisonous)

► spawn a single Bath Messenger or Patches the Spider throughout the dungeon ► make Bath Messengers sell Sinister Chalices (used to shorten the tedious Story Dungeon progression during build making) ► make dungeons false depth (this changes what Chalice you need to enter the dungeon, also used to shorten build making) ► apply all rites whenever we want, like adding the Sinister rite to FRC dungeons or mix them up to have multiple rites of the same type ► edit gem pools of dungeons. Edited dungeons are generally speaking safe. The only problem that can occur is when a dungeon uses multiple Fetid rites. This sometimes breaks enemy attack parameters and crashes the game as a result. Developer dungeons are also not completely stable and sometimes lack means to go back to the Hunter’s Dream. Always make a backup of your save file before visiting these kinds of dungeons just to be sure. The game can also corrupt the file by normal play, so I would suggest to regularly make back-ups anyway. Because some edited/developer dungeons are unsafe, we decided to keep our edited dungeons "closed" so that they wont show up in SRRC quick search and only people with the glyph can enter them. Sometimes these dungeons have error messages like ?MenuText?, ?PlaceName? or ones where it says your inventory is full when you're rewarded a gem. These messages are harmless and are a side effect of bytes that are on different places in the code than they are supposed to. Dungeons with multiple rites of the same type are very interesting. You can for instance apply multiple Rotted or Curse rites at the same time to spawn in more enemies and drop your HP even more to provide a greater challenge. There are some Rotted and Curse rite bytes that are unused but still functional. They were intended to be used for cut depth 6 and 7 chalices. The unused Rotted bytes contain Micolash’s Puppets, enemies that once were possible to generate, as can be seen in this 3 year old Japanese glyph, in the third layer of 8nyezcys. These were probably added to the game with a patch as a mistake and removed again shortly thereafter. The unused Curse bytes, named “terrible curses”, will bring your character down to 25% or 12.5% HP. No gems will drop in a dungeon using multiple Curse rites though. The most important discovery is that we can edit gem pools within the dungeons. This will be the main focus of this post going forward.

Gem Pools

To start things off, if you’re not that familiar with how gems work, I’d suggest this guide from u/altairnaruhodou which has all the basic gem info. A couple of months ago, we managed to identify gem categories in Bloodbornes param files, which are basically various groups of gem effects, like the Physical ATK UP % primary and Add Physical ATK (flat) secondary effect. Each dungeon effect byte has a specific function and sometimes it is tied to a gem category. This means that the byte adds a group of gem effects into the dungeons common or “Native” gem pool, with a rate tied to each gem effect to denote their rarity. The three Chalices that players farm for gems - Pthumeru, Loran and Isz (all depth 5 and cursed) - use multiple bytes that are tied to different gem categories. The gem categories that remain unused for each Chalice contain gem effects that are considered “OOE” - out-of-effect. Not a lot was known about how exactly OOE worked, until now. After we identified these groups of gem effects and knowing all the bytes that are used by the popular Chalices, it was possible to build the gem pools of each Chalice and compare them to farmed data. Our Japanese hunters shared many farmed gems on Twitter and that data was perfect to compare our research with. The gem farms can be seen here. A huge shoutout to Tapechi15 for collecting all this data and giving us the opportunity to do this! I combined all this data and compared it to my gem pool formula, which was the hardest to figure out. I had to build it from the ground up without the help of datamined information and had to go through different versions of the formula until it showed to be very accurate, even for edited dungeons with edited gem pools. The results Each Chalice has its own common “Native” and a rare “OOE” gem pool. These two combined are all the possible gem effects in the game. Whenever a gem drops from an enemy, the game checks what the non-fixed gem effect slots are on the gem, and then assigns a gem effect to each of them according to the gem pool of the dungeon it dropped from. Since a certain patch it is impossible for gems to roll the same gem effect multiple times. From gem farms in our edited dungeons with a high chance of getting the same primary and secondary, we can see that the game rolls primaries first on gems, then secondaries and then curses. Therefore, if a gem effect type is already on the gem while it is being generated, it will not choose it again, including curses that are the negative version of a gem effect that can be a primary/secondary stat on a gem. This means that - for example - Amygdala gems that have a fixed Nourishing primary can't roll a Nourishing curse (ATK DOWN). This also explains why certain gems with fixed secondaries (Evil Labyrinth Spirit gems) can drop the same primary gem effect, because that is rolled first on the gem. Below are the gem pools for the 3 major depth 5 Chalices, with the Native effects at the top and the OOE at the bottom. Remember that the secondaries listed ignore the fact that gems can't roll the same primary and secondary effect. Once a primary is Striking for example, it is impossible for the gem to have a Striking secondary unless it is fixed on that type of gem. Pthumeru gem pool Loran gem pool Isz gem pool I made a calculator which you can use to see what the exact gempool is in the dungeon you're in for any type of gem. For example, if you're in a Hintertomb depth 3 dungeon, you need to enter "22" and "23" in the green boxes and leave the rest empty. On our Hex Research Sheet, you can see the comparison of this calculation with thousands of gems farmed, it is definitely worth checking out. It also contains general info about our Chalice dungeon research, and how these gem pools were built. From all this data we can conclude a couple of things: ► Our understanding about OOE and how it works with primary and secondary effects was wrong. Some gem effects are so rare even though they are Native effects that people thought they were OOE. It’s just depends how you look at it, Native or OOE, common or rare. At least we know now what OOE drops technically are now.

► Droplet gems can NOT drop from enemies in Chalice dungeons. There are only 2 instances where you can get a Droplet gem from dungeons, and that is in Central Pthumeru Root Chalice (depth 2) as Physical and in Hintertomb Root Chalice (depth 2) as Heavy, both looted from coffins as part of the unique item list for both Chalices. ► OOS - out-of-shape chance is NOT fixed, but depends on the enemy you're farming the gem from. OOS means that a gem drops as a shape that is different from what is "supposed" to drop. Enemies in Pthumeru drop radial gems, in Loran they drop waning and in Isz/Hintertomb they drop triangular gems (some enemies have their own shape independent on the Chalice you find them in). Generally speaking, enemies that can drop 2 different OOS shapes (almost all enemies/bosses in the chalices, basically all enemies that can't drop circle gems) have a ~2% OOS chance, and enemies that can drop 3 different OOS shapes (Shotgun Watchers / sleeping Beast-Possessed Souls / NPC hunters most noteworthy) have a ~3% OOS chance. This is observed by farms done by our Japanese hunters and datamined as well. Datamined info suggests a 100:1:1 ratio of shapes for enemies that can only drop 3 different shapes and a 100:1:1:1 ratio of shapes for enemies that can drop 4. So the OOS chance according to that is either 2/102 or 3/103 depending on the enemy you're farming. ► OOE - out-of-effect chance is NOT fixed, but depends on the Chalice. OOE means that a gem drops a primary or secondary gem effect that isn’t Native to the Chalice you got it from, like Arcane ATK UP % primary in Pthumeru. The OOE chance completely depends on what gem effects are in the Native and OOE gem pool, which requires some math to figure out. OOE can refer to primary (OOEp) and secondary (OOEs) gem effects. ► It is impossible for gems to drop the same primary and secondary gem effect if both slots are non-fixed. The only way you can get a gem like this is when one slot on the gem is fixed, like gems from Evil Labyrinth Spirits that drop a fixed Poorman Physical secondary effect. ► All ratings on gems seem to be equally likely in Chalice Dungeons. Datamined info suggests that each possible rating has the same rarity. There's also no farming evidence or studies that suggest other distributions are at work here. For now it is safe to say each rating is as likely to occur when farming gems in Chalice Dungeons. ► Gems that are any combination of OOEp, OOEs and OOS are possible. ► The rarest useful gem effect to get is the Blood ATK UP % primary. This one is OOE in every Chalice and even if we edit dungeons to make it more common, it is still very rare to get at ~0.25% where normally it varies between 0.0096% and 0.0026% between the different Chalices. ► The rarest overall gem to get in non-edited dungeons is a OOEp OOEs OOS gem from Isz, with the Blood ATK UP % primary and Add Blood ATK (flat) secondary. The chance to get a gem like this is ~1/12.75 billion. Let me know when you managed to get this one! ► The Isz Native gem pool is very varied with a lot of different effects that are very rare to get despite it being in the Native gem pool. Example: the Add Arcane ATK (flat) secondary in Isz is strangely a very rare drop at ~1.5%. Because of this varied Native gem pool, the OOE chances are extremely small, 0.031% for OOEp and 0.14% for OOEs. Because of these small chances, the Japanese farms yielded no OOEp drops. To prove an OOEp gem can drop in Isz as well, we decided to farm small celestials. They spawn in groups of 5-10 very often, and have a good enough chance to drop a gem. After 4500 gems from them, an OOEp gem dropped, to finally prove how rare it actually is in Isz. Since we have a limited dataset of several thousand gems, we will always keep an uncertainty for each gem effect when we compare it to the formula. It is impossible to notice a 0,5% chance difference for a gem effect that is pretty common to begin with, let alone an even smaller chance. We need a dataset that is so much bigger but probably impossible to get to notice these small deviations from the calculation. But I think we can trust the calculation for the uncommon effects if the more common gem effects align with what was farmed. The Isz calculation predicted that getting an OOEp gem is very hard, and it took us and the Japanese hunters indeed more than 8000 gems to get just one! Whenever you can predict things, it is a sign you're in the right direction.

Editing Gem Pools

With all the knowledge we have on editing the dungeons and knowing what each byte does, we’re able to edit gem pools in the dungeons as well. But again, we’re tied to what the game gives us - only certain bytes are tied to gem categories, and only these can be used to edit gem pools with. The gem categories themselves can’t be edited and are fixed. There are 11 gem categories, 2 of them are not used by bytes - a category that contains the “Blood” gem effects and a category containing the curses. That leaves 9 gem categories to be used by the dungeon effect bytes. The right of this sheet shows how the gem categories look like and explains how the gem pools are built for each Chalice. Go back to the left and then down and you will see edited gem pools by using a single byte from a certain gem category. This enables us to make “Static” or “Dual” dungeons, where a single or couple gem effects are almost guaranteed to get independent on the area you’re farming the gem from. This way we can farm Arcane gems from Madmen much easier, or farm Merciless Watchers that are almost guaranteed to drop a Striking gem. The gem effects noted in blue are the ones that have the highest chance of occuring compared to all the other possible gem pools, so these gem effects are the ones you’re looking for when farming that particular edited dungeon. As an example, Nourishing gems are most likely to drop in a dungeon that only has a gem category byte 27 or 62. Since the gem categories are fixed, we can’t simply make a dungeon that drops only Nourishing gems, we’re stuck with these fixed groups of gem effects. You can check this sheet which has all the edited dungeons if you want to farm these exotic gems.

When we didn’t understand how gem drops worked, we named different edited dungeons Dual or Static, but at this point they are basically the same. We have full control now which gem effects are Native and therefore common in an edited dungeon. What is important to note is that we still can’t change the shape of gems that drop. This is still tied to the area (or specific enemy) you’re farming the gem from. An interesting thing to mention, is that whenever we use multiple bytes that have the same gem category, the OOE chance seems to go down drastically, making the desired gem effects even more common. One special case is when we use no gem category bytes at all. In that case, the game throws all gem effects into one pool, making them all Native (or OOE). This is particularly good when you want Blood ATK UP gems from Merciless Watcher bosses. To note though, with a ~1/408 chance, these gems are still extremely rare, but it allows us to try to farm for these gems, while normally it was practically impossible.

Bloodtinge gem farming

Doing all this research in Bloodborne made me notice some mistakes when it comes to information, which is only normal since most information about the game is hidden and we have to figure it out ourselves. One I’d like to focus on is connected to the well known OOS Bloodtinge farm and the amount of misconceptions there are. So I will try to explain how I think it works based on my knowledge when it comes to gems. I will also compare the traditional Shotgun Watcher farm and the new farms that were made possible by understanding the gem category system. The new farms are edited dungeons where you can try to farm the Merciless Watcher bosses for 32.6% Bloodtinge gems. There is a lot of confirmation bias going on when players farm gems, from myself included. You convince yourself something is working differently than expected because it brought you better or worse gems, while in reality you just got (un)lucky. Then you try to find evidence to support those ideas, but in fact, most evidence in these cases are just feelings and not based on actual data and statistics. To make statements like “the Watcher in dungeon A is yielding better gems than the Watcher in dungeon B”, you need thousands of gems from multiple sources to be able to prove it and you have to look at all farmed gems, not only the ones that are OOS. Even when you have that, you need to understand that the difference in both datasets may be due to simple randomness, just like how our 8000 Isz gems we collected have small differences compared to what was calculated. Doing this research made me understand that even 8000 gems is not much at all when you have many gem effects that have a less than 1% chance of occurring. Some key pinpoints: ► There are a couple different glyphs where you can try to farm Shotgun Watchers for 31.5% Bloodtinge gems. There is NO evidence whatsoever to suggest that there are different drop rates between different Shotgun Watchers. No evidence from farming and no evidence from datamining. To make suggestions like that you need many thousands of gems from multiple sources to be able to say anything coherent. Seeing differences between different farms with a small dataset is easily explainable by just randomness. However, a single Shotgun Watcher can give different players different outcomes based on their Discovery level and the runes they are wearing. We know now that the Curse rite gives the player 1000 extra hidden Discovery if they wear any number of Discovery enhancing runes. This bonus is increased to 5000 when there is a Terrible Curse active. More Discovery makes gem drops more common from non-boss enemies.

► You can’t do statistical analysis on the OOS drops, only on the total gems you’ve collected. You get way too few of them with too many varieties in shapes, effects, ratings and curses. Assume we farm 10000 gems, which is a lot, just 300 are approximately OOS. If you do analysis on these OOS drops, you’re just basically doing analysis on a dataset of 300 gems, which is way too small. So the only thing we can do is use datamined information, our experience and a bit of math to do analysis with. ► More Discovery increases the chance of a gem to drop but doesn’t change the rarity of the gem effects or ratings of the gems that drop. So stack up as much Discovery as you can with Eye runes, the Milkweed rune and the Arcane stat without ruining your character of course! More gems will drop with higher Discovery, which means more OOS gems will drop as well given the same time frame, but the OOS chance and the rarity of each gem effect described by the gem categories stay the same! This also means that you don’t have to stack Discovery farming gems from bosses, since they already have a 100% chance to drop a gem. ► Since the drop rates for each Shotgun Watcher is the same, it makes TIME the most important factor farming Bloodtinge gems. How fast can you kill a single Watcher? The fastest non-edited route I’ve seen is the one in naapatbx, where I could do average runs of 35 seconds including loading screens, which made me able to kill approximately 100 Watchers per hour. This post has been edited in August 2020 using a lot of new information we've gathered. I used to write down comparisons between different farms here, but now I've made a new post about that. You can read that here, it was also added to the farming wiki page under the How To Farm Bloodtinge Gems category.

Ending note

I’m of the opinion that what we do is for the best for the community as a whole. We provide ways for the community to get more out of the game by opening up new farming possibilities and interesting new dungeons, which gives more highly desired longevity to the game. I believe that being open is the best way for people to understand what we do. We experienced so much negativity, often for no reason, which I think comes from people that don’t understand what we’re doing and what is possible to do. And that is partly because there are places on Reddit where you can’t talk freely about this stuff, so people will stay uninformed and make their own “truths”. Therefore I hope that this post brought some perspective from our point of view. We shouldn’t be scared that this information will be misused, most of it has been available for almost a year now and everything is fine. There is such a high entry cost to be able to edit your save file and so little that you can do with it in terms of dungeon editing. Information about editing impossible-to-get gems directly to your character has been out there for so long and I feel we get the blame for that while we have negative opinions about that kind of stuff as well. It’s not good for the community that people run around and one shot everything. If you see someone like that, I would suggest to block this person on PSN so that they can’t be connected to you again. And that’s where the difference is, we provide ways to farm for gems, you still have to work for it if you want them. The gems from the edited dungeons are not overpowered and they are legitimate gems that you could farm without the use of these dungeons. Some gems might be extremely rare, but that doesn’t make them overpowered. We just turned down the randomness factor to make farming these rare gems practical. We even managed to create a new farm, that will “only” take you a thousand hours to get a perfect 32,6% Bloodtinge gem setup, where normally, the time it would take to get these gems would be multiplied by 57! You can call this intended by the developers, but I wonder if they really did intend for gems to be that rare. I think the gem system is beautiful, but overcomplicated with too many variables resulting in some gems that are practically impossible to get, like these Bloodtinge gems. But maybe that is the beauty of it.

The Tomb Prospectors accomplished much in 1 year time. Everything we discovered is kind of connected to each other and has been made possible not only by save editing and looking through the param files from OpenBorne and newer versions of the game, but also by the hard work of dedicated people. The Isz glitch has been figured out, how dungeon generation works and how it is tied to unique items within the dungeons, the Discovery system has been explained and now how gem effects and OOE work in Chalice Dungeons. I think it is worth mentioning many people worked together on our Discord for a long time to make all of this possible. If you want to know more about Chalice Dungeons in general or have questions about edited dungeons, the Discord is the place to be. Everyone is welcome, we’re always happy to help you on your adventures and to answer your questions. A big thanks to everyone in the Tomb Prospector community who helped in this research, most notably Foxy Hooligans, Altair, Jetayvid and Tapechi15. And a special thanks to Trin. I could never have done all of this without your help and support. Edited in August 2020