The Shiv
Canonically the most powerful weapon in the Underrail cinematic universe. The Shiv defies the law of matter conservation and bends reality around itself:
- Why does Lucas, the quartermaster of SGS, sell a blueprint detailing how to craft a prison weapon?
- Why does crafting a shiv require a blueprint in the first place? Why doesn’t the player character know how to wrap a dirty rag on a metal spike?
- Why do high quality metal spikes require high mechanics to craft a shiv from? You’re still just wrapping a spike in a dirty rag and the stats of the shiv do not change.
- You can use mechanical repair kits to fix shivs. But how do you even repair a shiv? Freshen up the dirt on the rag and reapply the rust to the metal spike?
- How does killing a Naga with a shiv even work!?
- A tungsten spike weighs 1.80 and a rag weighs 0.10, but a shiv made from these two components weighs 0.10! Where does the rest of the weight go!?
- Where does the power of the shiv come from? Is it the dirty rag or the rusty metal spike that gives shivs the 200% critical damage bonus?
- Since all shivs have the same stats, does that mean there exists many identical shivs or that there’s one shiv which can simultaneously exist everywhere?
- Is the shiv omnipotent?
- If the Shiv is omnipotent, can the Shiv create a zoner that the Shiv cannot shank?
These questions and more will not be answered in this post.
Contemplating the existence of The Shiv
Anyways, shiv is a knife type weapon - base damage is 1 to 7, critical damage is 200% and it costs 7 AP to attack, plus the damage that gets through DR/DT gets increased by 25%. Component quality and crafting feats will not change the stats of a crafted shiv, so you get what you see. All shivs are created equal.
Oh, and in case you didn’t quite catch that, the difference between the minimum and the maximum damage is 700%! I mean, it doesn’t look like it’s a big deal, but after all the damage bonuses get applied, it’s very significant.
Overall, the build isn’t terribly complex. Enough DEX to get 4 Ap attacks, stacked crit chance and damage, as much MP as I can get my grubby little hands on and a dash of TM to tie it all together.
Critical Shiv infrastructure
The 200% critical damage screams “Survival Instincts!” so that’s what I went for. Grabbed Cheap Shots, Critical Power (10 spec points) and Ripper (5 spec points). With this setup, shiv gets an effective crit damage bonus of over 1000% against enemies under 20% HP and a crit chance of 80%-85%. First crit tickles the enemy, second one wounds them, third one murders them. Well, not really... Crit damage alone isn’t enough, we’re still working with a base damage of 1-7.
Oh and some non-crit attacks deal single digit damage. Not much you can do if you roll a 1. Expertise would have been nice, but meh.
The bleeding edge of Shiv technology
To help with that I use Taste for Blood. Shivs don’t apply bleeding wounds by themselves and using another weapon for wounds is too AP inefficient. A bladed metal armor is also out of the question because the build needs to wear infused rathound leather armor for extra crit chance.
Enter Nail Bombs.Throw one at the start of a fight, rack up some TfB stacks and refresh them with each kill. If fighting high DT enemies, apply EW to an enemy and then throw the Nail Bomb.
Grenade throw is 15 AP, but more often than not, enemies will have 3 or more bleeding wounds applied to them. Meaning that after three attacks you’ll have full or near full stacks of TfB. That’s +50% melee damage.
This damage bonus is very important. If the stacks are lost, the number 1 priority is to get them back, because without TfB, the overall damage tanks hard.
Lategame I'd sometimes see crits go as high as ~500 against enemies with low HP. Not too shabby for 4ap.
Shivalry is NOT dead - its enemies are
There’s 7 Will for Fight Response.
80 AP without Adrenaline, so that’s 20 attacks per turn. 25 on adrenaline turns.
Fancy Footwork combined with 4 AP attacks, plus Sprint and Contraction allows this build to cross the whole map in a single turn.
And that’s about it for the build. It was ass to play up to level 18. Picked up steam at around level ~20 when the spec points in CP started to add up. At level 26 it had no trouble with anything.
Although, the hordes of bots and crabs in Expedition were annoying, since I had to run around in circles, waiting for EW to come off cooldown, but it wasn’t too bad with LTI.
Did p.much everything except DC, I just couldn't force myself to. But by that point the builds would have no trouble there.
I used fart grenades and bear traps during the beast fight, but otherwise no traps or damage dealing grenades or whatever past Newton, except the Nail Bombs for bleed stacks and Flashbangs and EMPs for CC.
Shiv industrial complex
Also, remember how the shiv weights 0.1? And a repair kit weighs 2? One repair kit weighs as much as 20 shivs, so lugging repair kits around for a 0.1 weapon sounds impractical. What I did was head on over to Foundry, buy all the spikes Leonie was selling and craft myself a bunch of shivs. My game was littered with discarded shivs
The build
Don’t play it unless you know what you’re doing. This build is also not good to use with normal knives.
https://underrail.info/build/?HgMLBwkDBwYARwDCoCgAwqAAAAAAE20PLV4AAABgAABPK2I5JjEGXMKHEks8E8KIKsKFesKzUcOIGuKnvgriqqgF378Some screens
4naga:
https://i.imgur.com/fdD8EYs.jpegBlack crawler:
https://i.imgur.com/7sqIMJM.jpegNote the combat log. One of the attacks is for 10 damage and another is for 500!
The Masters in the sewer:
https://i.imgur.com/VZXJRGj.jpegZenith:
https://i.imgur.com/ZbqKYu8.jpegShiv: The Movie
Grey Army base in one go, no reloads. Barelly. The very last soldier would have killed me if I hadn't won the Initiative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9IQOO7gGZIFort Apogee. Also in one go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PScPWiYFnpI
