Crystal Hollows Guide [EFFORT][Includes Guides for: Commissions, HotM Progression and Powder Mining] (2024)

_Cozmo said:

Crystal Hollows Guide:

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So I have seen a lot of people asking for help with commissions and hotm progression in general. Because I make my coins through mining, I usually respond to these threads, I'm almost certain that I dont know the best methods, but what I have learnt and used to progress to the point that I am at has worked very well and made for quick progression through the new hotm levels and along the road to divans armor after I returned to skyblock from the pit (rip pit ;-; ). I have seen so many people asking the same things about the crystal hollows, and so this is essentially meant to answer all of those questions in one thread, as well at stopping me repeating myself with replies that are essentially the same. I hope that this thread can be referenced in the future when people need answers to crystal hollows related questions, feel free to ask me to add things if anything is missing.

I wont be covering the early stages of the HotM progression as most of the confusion is usually from players being overwhelemed by the crystal hollows. For the new players that are wanting to learn about the crystal hollows (ch) I will give you a quick description of the crystal hollows:

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There are 6 main areas to in the crystal hollows:

• Goblin Holdout​

• Jungle​

• Mithril Deposits​

• Precursor Remnants​

• Crystal Nucleus​

• Magma Fields​

  See Also

  Crystal Hollows StructuresGuide - [GUIDE] Crystal Hollows Locations + Layout (Completed!)

CH Map (From Sbe):
View attachment 2922278

When you enter the crystal hollows you can spawn in any of the first four areas on the list above. These areas have their own unique crystal type, mobs and structures that can spawn within them.
The Crystal Nucleus is always in the centre of the map, located at roughly (X = 512 Y = 512).
The magma fields is the largest area out of all of these, covering the enitre map, but beneath Y = 64. Remember that you will also gain heat while in this area, which will slowly increase until it reaches 100, at this point you will begin to burn. This can be avoided by drinking water bottles or using either a Bal pet or yog amor.

Goblin Holdout:
The Goblin holdout is home to the goblins, amber gemstones and crystals and several unique structures like the Goblin Queens den and the Goblin King.

Jungle:​

The jungle contains the amethyst crystal and gemstone, as well as sludge, tribe members / younglings and thysts. You can also find the jungle temple in this area, you will know if you are near even if you cannot see it, as it will pause all active speed and just boost effects.

Mithril Deposits:
You can find jade gemstones and the jade crystal here, as well as members of the Team Tresurite group, this includes the boss corleone mob (important for forge recipes as well as commissions). The mines of divan can also be found here, which is the best spot for mining the jade gemstone, this is also where you obtain the jade crystal.

Precursor Remnants:
The sapphire crystal and gemstone can be found here, as well as the automaton mob, and the precursor city structure.

Crystal Nucleus:
The crystal neucleus is one of the most important areas in the crystal hollows, this is where the five crystals (not gemstones) can be placed. Once all the giant statues are holding their corresponding crystal, the crystals will dissapear and summon a pile of loot in this area:

View attachment 2922313

Magma Fields:
The Magma Fields contains the topaz gemstone / crystal as well as the yog and Bal mobs. Bal is a boss, and can be found in the "Khazad Dum" area. This is a giant cavern which is home to a large magma cube in the centre. This boss is similar to the voidgloom seraph in that it takes a number of hits to kill, rather than a health number. Unlike most other bosses, the loot will be dropped during the fight, pay attention to the chat, as rare drops are annouced there, and always keep an eye on your heat number.

One last thing to note about the crystal hollows is that you can break almost any block. There are certain areas like the crystal neucleus and the jungle temple that will stop you from breaking blocks with a "Magical Force", this is meant to stop players from destroying important structures and the parts of the hollws that every needs to remain intact. Other than those exeptions, you are free to mine build anywhere. You can only build in stone or hardstone, but breaking and placing blocks is an important part of the crystal hollows that you should make the most of.

Commision Guide:​

Commissions in the crystal hollows are a big step up from the dwarven mines, a far larger island combined with many more things to learn. Fortunately, you are rewarded for your extra effort, as these commissions will reward the player with 4x the normal xp. Don't worry though! With a little practice, you should be seeing your level rise from 5 --> 6 --> 7 in no time.

Before you get to doing the commissions, there are a few thing that you will need:
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• A drill with a breaking power of at least 8 (Cheapest Option: Gemstone Drill LT - 522 (~5m)), This is for breaking topaz gemstones, don't worry about jasper, this isn't included in the commissions list.​

• A mining set (Cheapest Viable Option + Recommended: Yog Armor (>2m)), very useful for countering the heat of the magma fields, also provides decent mining stats.​

• Any pet, if you want, you could use a mining pet. I would recommend a fishing or foraging pet, as commissions are not only great for HotM xp, they also give insane amounts of mining xp. Make sure to use another pet if you max out one pet, as you don't want to waste potential taming or mining xp. (This is especially useful for people that have underleveled pets, so if you are an sa non with a [Lvl 73] Baby Yeti, there is no excuse to not level this up. Even after you hit HotM 7, you may still come back to commissions, as they are the best way to gain gemstone power and are also the best way to hit mining 60.​

• Aote/v, very important for travelling the mines, the crystal hollows is a big place and taking a few blocks of your journey can greatly speed up your HotM leveling.​

• Royal Pigeon (Birb), optional but very useful. It is possible to do commissions without the royal pidgeon, as there is an emissary in the crystal nucleus, but it is far more efficient to grind out the commission milestones in the dwarven mines to get this item. This item is not soulbound, unlike many other quest items, so if you wish, there is always the option of dropping 15+million coins for a feathery friend to keep you company.​

• Mods, obviously these are optional but they will increase your efficiency by a massive amount. Unfortunately, the best feature for commission grinding is paywalled (SBE) but it's waypoint feature alone (What you would use it for in this situation) is incredible. You can set your own waypoints and are given the map that I used to show the different areas. Sbe is probably the single best mod for commission grinding and I would highly recommend this if you have $5 USD to spare. Any other waypoint mod will do, a skyblock specific one is best.​

Crystal Hollows Commissions:
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The commissions in the crystal hollows follow a similar format to their dwarven counterparts, but require the player to complete a wide variety of tasks. There are a few types of commissions:

• Gemstone Collector: Collect 1000 of the specified gemstone.​

This is the easiest and fastest type of commission, you simply mine the specified gemstone until you have gathered 1000 rough gemstones. The only difficulty you may have with this is finding a gemstone vein of the right type. As I said above, each of the five biomes has their own crystal variant that will only spawn in that biome. This can make it annoying to find the correct gemstone if you need to travel through a large amount of tunnels. Fortunately, there are gemstone veins near the entrance of every biome. The exception here is ruby, which can spawn in any of the biomes and has a lower breaking power than all other gemstones. Here are some vein locations to help:​

Amber:
There isn't much of this crystal here, and you may need to explore further, but if you have high enough fortune this can easily complete a commission.
View attachment 2922340

Amethyst:
Someone has mined out one of the veins here, but there are a ton of exposed veins in the jungle. The two in this shot and many more around the corner to the left.
View attachment 2922348

Jade:
This is a large amount of veins and should be sufficient for almost anyone, further down the tunnel behind me are more exposed veins if these aren't enough.
View attachment 2922343

Sapphire:
Another spot with plenty of gemstones to go around, behind me and up to the right as you enter the tunnel are some more veins.
View attachment 2922338

Topaz:
This is the Jungle Magma Fields entrance. Yet another spot with tons of gemstones, further down the tunnel are a bunch more veins.
View attachment 2922352

Ruby:
This is the Precursor Remnants Mage Fields entrance. This will most likely not be enough ruby for you to complete a commission, above in the precursor remnants there are a couple of ruby veins, the largest of which is inside the wall that splits the two tunnels on the way into the biome.
View attachment 2922354

While these will help you a lot, sometimes these can break or not supply enough gemstones. In this situation I would heavily encourage exploring the area, that is how this update was intended to be, and uncovering your own gemstones can be quite fun.
Oh and what I mean by a gemstone "breaking" is when it fails to respawn. While I don't know the exact cause of this, I believe that it is something along the lines of there not being a player close enough to the vein when it tries to respawn, this is the same system as the spawns for the mobs, you will notice that they only spawn as you move around.
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• Slayer: Slayer [X] number of the specified mob​

This is where the exploration aspect of this island becomes very prevalent. To find the mob the commission requests you need to find a structure that can spawn the mob. Over time, you will learn which structures are the best and worst for each mob, but for now, just explore until you find a structure that spawns the mob you need.
Also remember to kill ALL the mobs that spawn, a structure will respawn its mobs every ~2mins, they will not spawn unless there is a player close enough however. If you leave while a mob is alive, there is an opportunity for the mob spawning to bug out after you run away and the mob despawns, "breaking" the mob spawn.
Refer to the crystal hollows overview to find where each mob will spawn if you need, and as for the boss corleone, don't bother.
Make sure that you can deal enough damage in order to easily kill each of the mobs, they don't have particularly high hp, but if you are particularly early game, this may present a challenge. I believe that the highest hp of any of these mobs is 35,000 (yog). That is not including the tribe members which have 1 billion hp and will insta-kill any one if you hit them or a youngling.
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• Crystal Commissions: Find [X] crystal​

While you can do these commissions, I personally wouldn't bother with them, they are just more structure rng and are incredibly annoying and unnecessary to complete.
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• Misc Commissions: Chest looter, Hardstone miner​

These are quite simple, and harstone miner is exactly what it sounds like, you simply mine 1000 hardstone. This is pretty slow at first, but once you unlock the mole perk at HotM 6, it becomes quite a bit faster.
Chest looter can be annoying, as finding chests can take a while. For this reason, I would recommend leaving any chests that you find for later. Once again, at HotM 6 this commission is made easier through the great explorer perk.
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Setting up a Lobby:

Now that you have an idea of the gear required to grind crystal hollows commissions, the next step is to setup up a lobby to grind in. There are only two steps in this process.

Step 1: Scouting for structures

Due to the randomisation of structure locations, this island focuses heavily on exploration. The spawning of structures is an important factor on whether you keep or change lobby. The way that I used to setup these structures was to look through all the structure spawn spots that I knew, and after that, if I was unsuccessful, I would wander through the tunnels until I found something. If you have bad luck with one structure and are getting annoyed with how long it is taking, leave it for now and move to another biome. Generally I would find structures for four of the five slayers, this meant that there was a greater tolerance for a slayer structure being a b*tch to find.

The best structures for each slayer:

If I have the time and patience, I will find each of these and add a screenshot to the written description, so if you are seeing screenshots below you then I spent like 2 hours finding structures ; - ;. If you dont then I was lazy >:3

Goblin Slayer:

The best spot for this by far, is the room that looks like a hall with wooden scaffolding surrounding a large chasm in the centre that leads into a goblin den. Rather annoyingly, the queens den and the king structure are both terrible for this slayer. Queens is good for amber slayer though.

Sludge Slayer:

Sludge can be very annoying to find, there generally aren't large sludge spots and they will mostly be smaller, more dense structures. The best structure is probably the parkour temple (not jungle temple). This is a fairly large structure and has many sludge spawn slots. Jungle temple can work, but there are only three spawn locations that I know of and this should only be used as a last resort.
Thyst slayer (for those who are very new to the crystal hollows) is completed by mining amethyst gemstones. This has a chance to spawn a thyst (ame-thyst). That is why this slayer does not have its own heading.

Team Treasurite Slayer:

Also known as "team" slayer, this is another that has the potential to be very annoying to find. Even when you do find a structure with spawns, it will often not have enough spawns to complete a commission, forcing you to wait for one or more respawns. The best structure for this slayer is the large mine. This is a large room with a stone platform / room with a tripwire. The rest of the room is a large hole, with a dirt floor and filled with wooden scaffolding. Frustratingly, while being the best structure for this, will only give you 12 out of the 13 spawns you need at best.
Corleone will also not be included on this list, as it is not recommended to go for this commission. Corleone will only spawn in two or three of the many structures, making her far more difficult to find, not to mention her 1 million hp which can cause issues for newer players.

Automaton Slayer:

This is usually pretty easy to find (comparatively speaking), as the only viable structure is the massive Lost Precursor City, this is where the sapphire crystal can be obtained. To do this slayer efficiently, I would recommend memorising a route through the city that gives enough spawns. Remember, mobs will only spawn within about 5-10 blocks of you, so make sure to walk everywhere. To find the city, start by asking for the coords in chat, right after that, start looking for yourself.

Yog Slayer:

This is similar to Automaton slayer, in that there is only really one consistently viable structure. Khazad Dum. If you find another structure that spawns yogs, this can be used, but most will only supply three or four spawns, while Khazad Dum can supply enough for a full commission. To find Bal, once again ask for the coords in chat, then walk around the Magma fields below the jungle (I believe that it is most likely to spawn here). Listen for the sound of slimes / magma cubes "squelching", the sound will be relatively consistent, but will only play within 100 or blocks of Khazad Dum and only while Bal is alive. If you are unable to find Khazad Dum, come back after finding another slayer structure to allow time for Bal to respawn.

This is a very tedious step, it may take you a few lobbies to find a good one, sometimes you will find everything you need within 10 minutes and other times it could take you an hour. Just keep going and don't give up.

Step 2: Connecting the structures

This next step is optional, but will increase your efficiency. Only use this step if you own a royal pidgeon. If you don't use this step, then make your way between commissions by returning to the crystal nucleus and then running to the next commission, this is because of the emissary located in the nucleus. This method can also be used if you are a bit short on time, as you won't have to spend time on the alternative:

Tunnelling:

This is pretty self explanatory, you simply mine a passage through the hardstone from structure to structure. This will greatly increase your efficiency and you can just follow a looping tunnel to any commission. Make sure that the five slayer structures are connected in a way that allows you to loop as then you wont have to travel all the way back through you tunnel rather than just continuing through the loop.

General Tips for Commission Grinding:

• I would recommend that you only use commision slot 1 or 3. If you do this, then you will not waste time on indecision when chosing which commission to go for, only have one option keeps you focused and increases efficiency. The best way to only use one commission slot is to have the slot that you aren't using taken up by a slayer commission that you were unable to find a structure for. Commission slots 2 and 4 are pretty much useless, these will give you crystal commissions (not gemstone collector) these - as said before - are very slow and terrible to complete. Your reward for suffering through all of those commissions and completing your neucleus run is corleone commissions, not fun. Just dont use comm slots 2 and 4, stick to either 1 or 3, not both. Trust me.

Powder Mining:
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After you reach HotM lvl 7, if you wish to continue with mining, and use it as a money making method, you will need to powder mine. This has a minimum requirement of HotM 6 as you need access to the perks "mole" and "great explorer". Mole is similar to efficient miner from HotM 4 in that it mines extra adjacent blocks (only works on hardstone). Great explorer will increase the chance to spawn a chest when mining hardstone. The combination of these two perks makes for the fastest way to grind mithril powder and one of the fastest ways to grind gemstone powder. Chests can contain a ton of different items depending on where you found the chest, but what we are after, is the powder inside.

There are a few different types of power drops, think of them as rarities. Common rare epic and legendary. Epic and legendary powder drops will have purple and yellow text respectively, these can give you thousands of powder in one chest.

An important part of powder mining is knowing where to mine. The best spot (to my knowledge) is the jungle. Anywhere in the jungle is fine, just make sure you don't wander over a biome boundary accidentally and make sure you are mining hardstone. The reason why you want to be mining in the jungle is because of sludge juice. By using a jungle pickaxe and receiving sludge from the treasure chest, you can gain a significant amount of money per hour. Before the gemstone nerf 4 --> 3, this method would make up to 5 mill an hour, now it is about half that, but don't worry, the things you will be buying with this money have dropped significantly as well. On the topic of money, if you are stressing about the price of divans armor, dont. This may have changed from when I powder mined, but purely from powder mining, I was able to forge a full set of divans, with all topaz and jade chambers. Not to mention pristine 5 on my gauntlet. So don't worry about money, it isn't nearly as bad at people say.

What is as bad as people say is the abysmal powder rates that you will get. This may be the fastest way to gain powder, but it is still slow. The reason why you are recommended to wait until HotM 7 is because of the powder buff perk, which is very very useful. You can see anywhere from 20,000 to 150,000 powder an hour at HotM 7, it all depends on your luck with chest drops and your luck with 2x powder events. That's a lotta luck. Because you don't have to set anything up for powder mining, feel free to "chase" 2x powder events (the only useful event). To chase an event, just leave your current lobby and swap lobbies untill you find one with the 2x event still running, this is possible because each lobby is slightly out of sync with the next.

When you first unlock HotM 6, you should invest all of your gemstone powder into great explorer and mole, these are great for powder mining but will also assist in your commission grind from HotM 6 --> 7. When you hit HotM 7, invest all your extra gemstone powder into powder buff. I would recommend resetting your tree at this point. Put roughly 1/3 of your powder into each of these 3 gemstone powder abilities, just use your mithril powder to ensure the 1800+ mining speed.

General Tips for Powder Mining:

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• You don't have to click on the chest loot to gather it, just exit the chest gui immediately after opening it and the loot will be displayed in chat.​

• Stand to the side of the chest while unlocking it, this means that you only have to move your mouse on one axis in order to open the chest, and this makes it easier to unlock.​

• If you have a nice mouse, you may have a dpi button, cycle to a higher dpi (dots per square inch - basically how fast your mouse moves) when clearing hardstone, then cycle to a lower dpi when unlocking a chest.​

• If you are in a guild or a party, you can ask for 2x powder lobbies in chat, which can speed up the process.​

• When you start powder mining, you will be slow, just give it a bit, keep upgrading those 3 abilities and you will slowly increase your rates.​

• Aim for ~1800 mining speed, this will not only allow you to insta-mine hardstone, but also the annoying ores that will not spawn chests when mined.​

• If you feel like you have mined out a large area and you are "boxed in" by tunnels, mine down a few blocks to give yourself more room.​

• Once you have enough mithril powder, switch to doing commissions, as this is a bit faster for gemstone power specifically. I do not think that the same is true for dwarven commissions however.​

HotM Trees and Upgrades:
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The HotM tree can be confusing, but it is more simple than it looks. If you are after a mithril mining tree, then I am not the person to ask, but make sure you include efficient miner and turn off titanium insanium. For gemstone mining, the layout of my current tree (skycrypt in sig) is the best. It is called the "F U" tree, and once you see it you will know why . For gemstone mining, there are not only several perks that you want, but several perks that you do not want. Firstly is efficient miner, this actually works on gemstones, but pristine will not proc on the extra blocks broken, so it is best to right click on the ability to disable it entirely. As a personal preference I also disable all the irrelevant perks to gemstone mining, you can see these on my tree in my skycrypt, these include perks like lonesome miner and titanium insanium.

Many people ask "What is a good amount of powder for gemstone mining?". This is a controversial topic, but in general, you want at least 4.5million mithril powder and at least 7 million gemstone powder. My reasoning behind this, is that the 4.5 mill powder is enough to max all the relevant perks to gemstone mining, and the 7 mill is enough to max Mining fortune II and get a close to maxed level on Mining speed 2 and professional. When gemstone mining, make sure to prioritise mining fortune in your HotM tree, mining speed is also very important, but in general know that:

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Pristine > Fortune > Speed
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If there is anything you need to know / wanted to see in this thread please reply, and I can add suggestions.

No TLDR for u cuz this is a guide L

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Tysm for reading if you made it all the way through, this took so long to write lol.

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