Strongboxes Beyond Demon Farming

Overview

The creator of the strategy builds around the Ambush Scarab of Containment, which removes normal monster packs from the map and replaces them with roughly 20 to 40 strongboxes. Opening those boxes gives raw currency and divination cards, and because containment scarabs have become very cheap (70c) the strategy is profitable again despite its reputation for being dead.

The twist the creator adds is Beyond. Every strongbox dumps a dense pack of monsters into a small space, which is ideal for spawning Beyond demons, and those demons contribute extra raw currency and unique items on top of the box loot. The strategy still works without Beyond, but the creator considers Beyond points a better use of the atlas tree than a larger pile of scarab nodes.

Atlas Tree and the Required Mastery

Strongbox farming needs few atlas points. After taking the essential strongbox nodes, the creator takes only the efficient scarab nodes and spends the remainder on Beyond. Breach is banned, since breach hives appear to block strongboxes that spawn inside the hive area, and the usual cheap scarabs are banned as well. The same tree is used for both versions of the strategy below.

The one non-negotiable is the caster mastery granting 25% chance to open a nearby chest when you cast a spell. It is what makes map rotation fast, and faster rotation is where the profit comes from. Note that Arcanist strongboxes are currently bugged and will not open from the mastery, so those have to be opened manually.

Scarabs, Maps and Astrolabe

Four Ambush scarabs form the core: Containment, Discernment, Compartments and Potency. The fifth slot is flexible. The creator ran a plain Ambush Scarab, a cheap filler scarab, or Horned Scarab of Awakening depending on prices.

Maps are bought rather than rolled. Loot from strongboxes scales only with item quantity, so the target is eight-mod corrupted maps with quantity as high as possible. Increased currency and increased scarab mods are still worth having, because monsters from the boxes and the Beyond demons do drop items that those mods affect, and including them barely changes the price of the map.

A Delirium astrolabe is optional and recommended when it does not slow the run down. No boss kill is needed, the goal completes as you progress through the map, and the delirium orbs plus vault access cover its cost.

Two Ways to Run It

Version one is the straightforward clear. Run any layout you like, such as Jungle Valley, Toxic Sewer, Strand, Beach or Dune, and open every strongbox in the map. The creator averaged around two minutes per map, with two to four minutes being typical.

Version two is the Haunted Mansion rush. That layout is narrow enough that 10 to 20 strongboxes spawn packed together in one small area, reachable in about 20 seconds. You open the cluster, ignore the two to eight stragglers elsewhere in the map, end the delirium and portal out. Profit per map is lower because boxes are left behind, but map prep costs exactly the same either way and a fast, tanky character can finish in roughly one minute, so profit per hour ends up higher.

Notes

The recorded sample is 40 maps over two hours, run before the atlas tree and scarab setup were finished. The creator's later min-maxed session was faster but only 10 maps long, involved a lot of deaths and included a lucky run, so it is not the figure used here.

Profit depends heavily on containment scarabs staying cheap. Variance is high in the good direction too, since the strategy has a reasonable chance at expensive divination cards, T0 uniques from Beyond demons, and high value currency such as Hinekora's Lock or a Mirror of Kalandra.

The creator quotes everything in divines and never states a divine price. The chaos figures shown here use 170 chaos per divine, which is the rate implied by the creator's own per-map cost breakdown, and every chaos figure scales with that rate.