Thralls and Truncheons

When you equip your helper out in the world while they follow you will it kill the thralls it hits or will they switch targets to something conscious? I know there are named thralls in the purge so I’m curious about this as a way to gather them without my base wiping them from the face of the land before I get the chance.

The AI is not smart enough to have your follower mimic your character and switch from a sword, axe, etc. to a trucheon just because you have. If you want your follower to knock out enemy NPCs, give them a truncheon and take away any lethal weapons they have.

Similarly, if you’re going to have a purge with human enemies, you’ll want to equip your defenders with truncheons and set the Engagement behavior of any pets to Attack Nothing to prevent the murder of would-be thralls. Just be mindful, you’ll need to manually kill any KO’d NPCs you don’t want, otherwise when they wake up they will resume attacking your base, even if the purge has ended.

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Thank you :slight_smile: that’s slightly how I figured it was I was just wondering is all. I’d definitely equip all my guards in areas I want to capture enemies with truncheons or blunted arrows. I’ve never actually had a base in a higher area purge zone in my sandbox because building the pieces was such a pain when I first started. I bought and played the game to completion 2 years ago but it was recently that I restarted.

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Oh, if you use Blunted Arrows, then also make certain to give your thralls very weak bows (like the non-epic DLC bows) and to put Blunt fittings on the bows.

This is because even the blunt arrows still do lethal damage based upon the bow that is used. Since weak bows don’t do much lethal damage, that ensure the amount of concussive damage they do outpaces the lethal damage. Learned this one the hard way. :sweat_smile:

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Thank you so much :slight_smile:

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Also, if all thralls are knocked out, it ends the wave/purge. If ends the wave, a second one will be regrouping. So no need to hurry up and kill the KO’d ones you don’t want, just pile them to the side and poison them when you get a chance. I believe on officials it is 15 minutes before wake up. more than enough time to work 3 or 4 waves before burning the bodies.

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They do make a good source of things for the altars don’t they?

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Indeed, I had a 9 wave Lemurian Scout prefer tonight. I walked out of it with 100 Slivers of the Unfulfilled, and another player with 102. And we weren’t even the only players performing clean up either. :money_mouth_face:

BTW, on long purges like that, if you don’t kill as you go, you WILL have them start waking up on you. With strong 3 wave purges like the Army of Nordheimers or Cimmerian Berserkers, we refer to that as the 4th wave.

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LOL! You only need one more wave for the 5th wave just like the movie :stuck_out_tongue:

Do pay attention to your thralls’ behavior and aggro distance if you do this, though. I made a huge pile of KO’ed NPCs once and tossed poison gas orbs at the pile - and my nearby base defense thralls decided there was a fight going on and ran at the NPCs, so straight into the poison cloud. And as I play on single-Player I haven’t equipped my thralls with gas masks.

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I have a small clan of 4. During a Purge we have our lower level guy on body poking duty. His job is to walk behind our truncheon zerker wall and poke guys we don’t want until they die. He doesn’t play much but gets a crapload of experience. If he runs into a strange name he asks if we want it then drags it back to the wheels. Me and another person have our thralls with big weapons put on attack nothing running through groups and searching for T4’s if we run through a group and nobody we want is in it we just micro with E and slice down waves with a nice cleave weapon normally archers.

If it’s just me online I am the body poker. I use my thrall with a fatty 2h to clear them if there’s none I want to make my job easier just E and let the follower go nuts. I normally leave the cats on normal settings and a rope to drag enemies into a pile near them incase they do wake up because our base is not full T3 structure yet and we’ve had problems with enemies just getting into some weird spots and breaking stuff.

Build a kill room with a ramp/stairs as the only entrance so that you must climb to exit. The “cliff edge” acts as an impassible barrier to an active NPC/thrall AI (does not include follower, obviously) but still allows you to drag an unconscious NPC over it. A carefully placed stairway acts as a “NPC check valve” that I use often in my solo game.

so that you must climb to exit.

editing to mention that you can also have a set of stairs as the exit, but they can’t connect to each other.

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