4-11: Diamonds or Dross

Past the bar and the limb shop, the houses and the private storage that make up the main stretch of Black Desert City, an immense metal structure towers in the gloom, all abrupt edges and no windows.

By now, the gang has seen plenty of dilapidated hulks they have no choice but to marvel at from afar, grander than anything the modern world can produce, their secrets lost to time. For a change, this one's a building they can go inside. The map refers to it as the “Scraphouse”.

The ground floor is open to the air, almost resembling a hangar of some sort. At one side, a long, thin ramp leads up to the second storey, a vast room with a gleaming metal floor, largely empty but for what seems to be a smithy and shop set up in the middle.

Feet are kind of a funny thing to fixate on when between the three hivers and Horse with his skeleton leg, the organic humanoids present have a single foot between them. Beep, a fellow skeleton of course, barely bats an eye at this strangeness. He steps up to see what a store in a place like this sells, his mind coursing with visions of rare treasures and legendary blades.

Beep experiences his heart sinking into his shins—then he actually looks at the Scraphouse's wares. Quin obviously doesn't have a clue what they're sitting on. This shop is a treasure trove: Blueprints for crafting a variety of rare weapons and armour, a smattering of valuable research materials including AI Cores, and an abundance of incredibly high quality weapons!

The Scraphouse sells the best weapons of any shop in the game bar none. It's basically the weaponry counterpart to Armour King, with a mountainous stock of Edge Type 1-3 weapons and Specialist and Masterwork-grade crossbows that refreshes daily. They can't quite boast the finest weapons in the world like Armour King does armour—Edge Type 3 is only the second best weapon grade. However, the best (Meitou) isn't available at any shop anywhere, so I'd say it still more or less counts. The Scraphouse still has incredible wares well worth boasting about were Quin so inclined.

After much deliberation, the gang ends up spending more than half of their entire savings, lightening their wallet from 212,814 Cats down to 109,020. They buy a bunch of blueprints, crucially including one for the Dustcoat, a black leather longcoat that boasts an impressive 80% acid resistance. One of those will let any member of the gang brave the Deadlands' acid rain without fear.

The gang also snaps up a few Edge-grade weapons but, ultimately, not the falling sun. It's purely a matter of money. Falling suns are actually incredibly good despite what the description implies. Adding up their cutting and blunt damage, they hit the hardest of any weapon in the game, with hefty 50% damage bonuses to beak things, gorillos, and leviathans on top of that. The downside is that they take both strength and dexterity to make use of, being quite heavy and splitting their damage between the two types. This one costs 47,952 Cats, which would halve again what's left of the gang's stockpile after their other purchases. For comparison, an Edge Type 2 combat cleaver—which the gang did buy—costs 23,976, a mere half as much as the falling sun. Good heavy weapons are just crazy expensive.

Bidding the seductively gargantuan sword a wistful goodbye, the gang clambers down the Scraphouse's narrow ramp and disappears back into the rain. From here, they head north.

In the north, the gentle, rolling hills of the Deadlands tense up and draw themselves inward, scrunching into sheer cliffs that enclose winding, narrow canyons. This place is known as the Iron Valleys, a land alike the Deadlands in its ceaseless acid rain, prowling spider bots, and ancient ruins.

The ruins here are smaller than those of the Deadlands, less accomodating even to machine life. There's nothing like the Black Desert City here. No thinking skeleton makes this place their home.

The pitch dark hiding them from ruthless security spiders, Silvershade spends the last few hours of night plundering an ancient armoury. More accurately, Silvershade spends a few minutes plundering most of it and a few hours struggling with the lock on the armoury's safe, which is barely within their means to even attempt. As they prevail just in the nick of time before the morning's brightness gives them away to the spiders, the rising sun yields a falling sun: A Mk II-grade falling sun, that is. It's three weapon grades lower than the one at the Scraphouse the gang really wanted but that's still quite good.

Silvershade hands the falling sun to Burn, one of the gang's strongest members and a heavy weapons specialist. They're happy to trade it for their plank sword—a worthy weapon of the same grade as the falling sun, just slightly less deadly. When the expedition returns home, Ruka will get the hand-me-down.

The Iron Valleys' other armoury and workshop have more nice loot the gang is happy to take but nothing we haven't seen before. At the workshop, though, Sadneil gets their first taste of combat. That is to say: They get their head spun around by a fragment axe-wielding broken skeleton. When they come to and peel themself up off the ground, the fight is still going.

That's how it goes sometimes. Robots can be pretty hard to keep down if you don't have the option of yanking out their vital circuitry like with iron spiders. Since the gang can handle these guys so comfortably, though, it kind of works to their advantage—it just means more combat experience.

After finishing up at the workshop, the gang has seen what there is to see of the Iron Valleys. It's time to head home.