The trophy part of this guide shows easy it is to get trophies; easy, medium and hard. Please note that these are my catagories based on my hunting. I might have got lucky on some trophies and unlucky on others. Hence, you should take the difficulty rating with a large bag of salt. That being said, I have tried to show three catagories and an overall "Gut Feel" difficulty. The three catagroies are:

1. Prevalence. How easy is it to find this mob?
2. Killing time. How long do they take to kill?
3. Trophy drop. How good is the trophy drop rate (Disclaimer: The author is not responsible for your hissy fit because I say it's an easy drop and you never get one).

You will need access to some stuff if you want to be a hunter. How you choose to hunt is, of course, entirely up to you as far as weapons/vehicles but some other things are important too:

- Access to a recylcer with at least a TL90 recylcing tool, recycling lube and at least 65 points of recylcing.

- Wood, metalplates and metal pipes. Wood can be obtained from rotten/metal boxes or from looting plantlife (Toxic plants, etc). Metal pipes and plates can be found in rotten/metal boxes as well as from blowing up a vehicle. Provided you have your LE out you can blow up your reveller or quad (don't do other vehicles, it will get expensive) and pick up the plates. My favourite places for rotten/metal boxes are the shopping areas in MB and the front gates of NC, however there are tons of places that have boxes. Also, some mobs drop plates (TH Reactor mobs drop plates as well as some robots iirc).

- Combat Rank changing weapons. To get the best drop rate you need the mob to drop a "full load" of loot. You do this by lowering your combat rank (the first number in your rank - i.e. CR10 = 10/xx). Weapons of low TL do this for you, but even when equipped the CR takes a while to drop (try zoning a few times). This is why I try to use vehicles a lot, as they fix your CR for you (quite low too).

Once you have your carcass, the recycler needs to put them in the processor with a combination of wood/metalplates/pipes. I won't bore you with the details, but they are always either:
- 2 Wood, 2 Plates, 1 Pipes
- 3 Wood, 2 Plates
- 2 Wood, 3 Plates

Mobs don't just appear anywhere on the map. Likewise, they don't randomly appear after you just killed a mob. Understanding what to kill to get your mob to spawn is key to getting the rare trophies. Example:

Let's take somewhere that everyone should be aware of: J-01 (the bunker and MB zone)
There are at least three spawn groups in this sector. The group names are made up by me.

1. The Robots. This includes Warbies, Spiderbots, sentinels, etc.
2. The Bunker. Includes Launcher Cyclops, Butchees, Agressors, Mutant Corp/gunmen, etc.
3. The Mercs. The City Merc guard NPC's.

Now, if you kill a merc guard (good luck with that), when it de-spawns the game will not spawn something from the other groups...ever. If you kill a mutant corporal a warbie doesn't spawn and so on. The server (semi?) randomly picks a mob from a list of mobs in that group that the sector will allow. And every sector has a different set of groups and lists.

Why is this relevant? Well, an example for the hunters is the Fierce Glider. This is not in the "swamp" mob group (killing a Fierce Floating Jelly for example will never yield a Fierce Glider spawn). It's in the "Reptile" group (killing a swamp snake might yield a Fierce Glider spawn). I'll go in to detail for the rare ones in the advanced notes.

Now, for spawn points - Mobs spawn within range of a spot somewhere in a zone. There are usually multiple spots for each mob group within a zone. Sometimes mob groups share the same spot.

Some zones have spawn points that are ideally suited for someone on a vehicle (i.e. Jankins Lab - You can circle the zone on a bike and be able to see every mob). Some are better suited for people on foot (F-03 has a massive Swamp spawn point to the left of the road, it's a bit tight in there for a vehicle and you end up in the water a lot). Decide how you are hunting and choose (you've researched the spawn points beforehand yes?) the one that's right for you.

If you thought the normal trophies were bugged; you will be dissapointed to hear that the master trophies are even worse. The script for the Master Hunter NPC (certainly ViaRosso Sec 3 on Terra) is so bad that I spent days hunting Saurus Bulls before switching to Swamp Warriors and getting the trophy.

There are three Master Hunter trophies; and each one takes supposedly eight trophies to get however the hunter only takes seven from your inventory. Also, he always tells you that you don't have the correct amount of trophies, so keep an eye on the comms window to see if you got one (it says 'You gave away a Chaos Creeper [or whatever] trophy').

Listed below are the three lists he asks you to get, and listed nest door is the confirmed (as of Patch #156, List confirmed by Dirus 3rd April 2006) required trophies. As I mentioned above - He only takes seven of the eight required. I cannot confirm whether only taking seven of the eight will get you a master trophy, or whether you need all eight in your inventory and he only takes seven.

I'm probably just getting old, however there seem to be some things that are "odd" about trophies. One of them is definite (I'm absolutely 100% convinced anyway), the others are just maybe.

1) Firstly the definite one - All trophy mobs, with minimum Combat Ranking drop 5 items of loot. ALWAYS.
They may drop 3 of one type and then 1 each of 2 other types, but the total always equals 5. You will know you are hunting the correct mob if you get 5 pieces of loot. In my conspiracy theory and wine-soaked brain I think this is because KK has had so many problems with loot drops (Percy, Chasers, Spider Queen, for example) that they had to default the total number of items dropped on trophy mobs to 5. Want to try it? Go kill a Warbot and a Warbot Titan and you will see the normal 80/80 warbot drops somewhere around 8 to 10 pieces of loot (I don't remember exactly) and the Titan drops 5. It's my story and I'm sticking to it.

2) You will soon get used to the spawn points - Mobs that spawn right on the outer edge of the spawn point radius seem to drop better than those near the center (I'm mad, I know it!). On a few occasions I have seen the mob and thought "That's an odd spawn place, I bet there's a carcass in that one" and sure enough, there it was.

3) Time of day - Well, clarification - The 0:00 re-spawn. When you kill a mob, whether you have looted it or not the server clears away the body and re-spawns as per the zones spawn list. If you can get lots of dead bodies on the ground (Swamp mobs are easy for this) and 0:00 clears them away; I am partially convinced that the new mobs spawned at 0:01 have a higher chance of having a trophy in them.

4) Zone edges - You know those edges of each zone that mobs tend to dissappear in to? You can't get to them without zoning, but there they are in the distance. Try to bring them back in to the zone so you can loot them, I think they have a higher chance of trophies. I must admit, this one is tenuous even for me.

Final Words: I hope you got something useful from this guide. I'm done hunting now. Feel free to in game DM/email me; I have a VR3 Apartment with my trophies in and I will gladly show you around if I'm not busy - Maybe I'll ask a GM to put an all-access door on it. I'll try to help with any Trophy questions you have too. Thanks/Recognition should go out to Toxen; who although I have never spoken to him, put together some good message board threads regarding broken mobs, etc that KK obviously (semi) fixed and served as a starting point for this guide.

Happy Hunting!

Debonair
Debonair P
Debonair Tank
Debonair S