Monster Sanctuary Beginner Tips and Detailed Explanation

Example: if you have an attack that does 4x 80% damage then the combo meter will get 4 “stacks”. Each stack is worth 5% extra damage. Therefore, that would be 20% increased damage for your next monster.

Tip: If one of your monsters has a skill that applies buffs or heals to your party, it is recommend to use the buffing (or healing) move first during the round as this doesn’t benefit from combo, but still adds to your combo counter. Then, make sure to have your “heaviest hitter” go last so as to get the most benefit from the combo meter bonus.

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are four main categories which you should concern yourself with: Combat Duration, Healthiness, Buffs / Debuffs and Execution.

Duration: Winning the fight in a smaller number of turns.

Healthiness: How much health your monsters have at the end of each turn.

Buffs / Debuffs: How many Buffs / Debuffs you’ve used during the fight.

Execution: how well you played during the fight.

For Duration, every move that each individual monster makes is considered 0.33 of a turn. This means that if you can finish the battle with just one or two of your monsters making a move in the final round, your score will say X.33 or X.66 turns. This will of course increase your score by having a lower turn count number.

• capped at 6000

For Healthiness, the key part is “health at the end of each turn“. This means that it’s ok to take a few hits during battle, as long as you heal them up before each turn ends. Depending on how badly wounded your monsters are, sometimes it’s worth taking that “one extra action” from your healer to drastically improve your Healthiness score. If you’re “hardly wounded”, however, it’s likely best to end the battle “that much sooner” and increase your Duration score. Since Healthiness only measures “health”, using shields is an effective way to protect your health (and Healthiness score) since the damage your monsters take are applied to shields first before their “actual health bar”.

• capped at 3500

For Buffs / Debuffs, add points based on how many Buffs / Debuffs the player applied throughout combat and how many DOT (damage over time) effects enemies received.

• not capped

For Execution, Does multiple things: first, it grants points for the first two acting Monsters based on their combo counter – so for every hit / heal / Buff that your first two Monsters land, your “Execution” rating goes higher. Secondly, “Execution” rewards the last acting Monster based on how much damage it deals relative to the enemies’ health. Lastly, “Execution” grants additional points whenever any of your Monsters exploit an enemy’s weakness.

• capped at 4500

As seen in the above screenshot with the scoring breakdown, the higher the score you get, the better loot that you find! More importantly, this effects egg drops from monsters. The higher star rating you get, the higher chance an egg will drop from a wild monster.

Something special to note, however, is that when fighting Champion monsters, you must achieve a 5-star-rating to get its egg to drop! Champion rewards are different from regular encounters since they’re only awarded once for the entire save file. For example, if you get a 3 star rating on a champion, and fought it again later, no matter how good or bad of a rating you get, you will never get the rewards again since you’ve already collected them. The only way to get more rewards is to achieve a higher rank than you’ve done before (essentially, a new “high score”).

Thankfully, you can rechallenge champion creatures which you’ve already defeated at the Keeper’s Stronghold.

As of the Mystical Workshop update (July 22, 2020) a “secret sixth star” rating has been added to the game! This was done to give players who have mastered the game “an extra challenge to aim for” with some additional rewards.

How Sixth Star Works — obtaining 5 stars in an encounter requires 10,000 points, and the 6th one requires 12,000 points.

So what do you get?

• In Regular Encounters with wild monsters, the 6th star gives a small bonus to gold gains and increases the chance to get double common/rare drops.
• In Champion Encounters, the 6th star gives 3-5 Reward Boxes, with the type depending on which Champion monster you’re facing.

Keeper battles are similar to PvP, with the rules being a bit different compared to fighting wild monsters:

• Each Keeper uses their full team of 6 monsters, but there will only 3 monsters active as usual.
• If a monster gets knocked out, its keeper must switch in one of their reserve monsters (pending they have any left in their active team of 6 monsters).
• The Keeper who goes first only gets two actions as a drawback for the advantage of going first. (Note that vs NPCs the player always goes first for keeper battles. In online PvP, the game randomly selects who acts first).
• You win the duel by defeating the 6 monsters of your opponent.

The Infinty Arena is a great place to test your team or farm items, but there are a couple things to note.

• There is a limit of 5 Reviving Actions (items / Revive Spell) per battle.
• Used consumables are refunded after you’re done in the Infinity Arena.
• Note that the Infinity Arena drops Reward Boxes, so you can farm them there. See the possible loot Here.[monster-sanctuary.fandom.com]

– You can “donate” extra eggs and monsters at the Keepers Stronghold by talking to the blue person in the screenshot. This process gives smaller rewards upon donation, and larger rewards on getting a certain threshold of army strength donated. Donation is also great to keep your monster inventory clean if you don’t need extra copies of common monsters.

– There is a Monster farm in the Beach area where you can leave your monster and also retrieve them. This does not give exp, or any other rewards. It’s just a way to clear your inventory or create a Collection gallery!

– Stores will sell better items the higher your Keeper’s rank is.

– You can can reorganize your skills in battle (by pressing “Select” on your controller, for example).

– Monsters respawn after you’ve done three battles. Repawn is NOT based on a time period or walking around.

– If you’re ever lost and want a tip on how to proceed, open the menu and select Talk. This will show a “quest log” of sorts, where your Spectral Familiar will give you further info.

– There is a name-changer NPC standing in the same area as the Evolution Tree. So if you change your mind on a name, no worries, you can always change it.

– If you ever make a mistake and want to quickly “undo it”, note that the game only saves in two instances:

• When you go to the menu and select “save and quit”
• When you “change an exploration screen”. When changing screens, you will notice in the bottom corner of the screen “autosaving”.

As long as you don’t trigger either of these “save conditions” you can press “Alt – F4” on your keyboard to fully-close the game without saving. BE WARNED: be very careful with this so as to only quit without saving when you want to. Thankfully, the game auto-saves so often, that even if you end up in a situation where you “accidentally” closed the game without saving, you’ll likely lose only a few minutes of playtime.

– In options you can change the combat speed up to 2x, this will save a good amount of time if you are grinding or just enjoy a faster pace!

–Food gives a semi-permanent buff. Each monster may have up to 3 food-bonuses active at a time. For every new food given to a monster, the oldest food bonus will be removed and the new one gets placed at the beginning of the food list. Since you will find better quality food as you progress in the game, if you’re going to feed your monster (for example) “two lesser bonus foods and one higher bonus one”, it is best to use the weaker food first, then the stronger one, so the weaker ones will get overridden first when you give it better food later on.

– While there might be a limited number of Shift and Switch Stones available to find in the wild, they can also be found in Reward Box Level 2 (for Shift & Switch) and Reward Box Level 3 (Shift only). Remember that Reward Boxes can be farmed at the Infinite Arena.

– Shifted monsters spawn with a 25% chance per encounter (not per monster)
(equal chance to be light or dark shifted)

– After you beat a certain boss alchemist at the top of the Sun Palace by the Sun , you will obtain an egg which will hatch a Koi This will give you a monster exploration power which will allow you to travel through / jump out of water. When you have this, make sure to go check a variety of other areas in the game that you’ve been to before because this opens up some new options.

– Normal monsters will be farmable for shifted versions when you have “shifting” unlocked. Note that shifting becomes available after you beat the alchemist boss at the top of the Sun Palace .
Therefore, you might want to hold out on using shift stones on monsters whose eggs you can easily obtain in the wild. Some “shifted” Champion monster eggs are farmable as well, notably being the Monk, Minitaur,Qilin, Raduga, Beetloid, Specter and Steam Golem in the wild.

– Because of the above, it is currently “most efficient” to use your shifting items on:

• Your Starter (Spectral Familiarl)
• Champions which don’t have their eggs farmable in the wild anything other than Minitaur, Monk, and Steam Golem
• Skorch, because at the moment, you only obtain one of their eggs (not available in the wild).

Good news: as of the Mystical Workshop update (July 22, 2020) any monsters found in Reward Boxes will have a 50% chance to be shifted! Note that you must have the shifting feature unlocked have defeated Zosimos at the top of the Sun Palace area before this chance is enabled.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/814370/discussions/0/1637543304843161398/#c1637543304843263050

Originally posted by Ntonisthier:

The enemy scaling is based on the number of rooms you have discovered that have a Monster encounter inside of them. The more you explore, the stronger wild Monsters become.
This also means that, if you missed a path in one of the earlier areas, and later come back to it, the Monsters there will be at your level.

There’s also a minimum level for some areas. The minimum level of Sun Palace is 18.

Originally posted by Sersch:

Also note that once a level is assigned to a room with monsters, they will stay at that level on that savegame. The idea of this system is to have similar experiences independent of the order the player explores the areas. (once you complete blue caves you are free to either explore stronghold dungeon, ancient woods or snowy peaks first). The level of your own monsters is not relevant for the enemy spawn levels.

While playing the game you might notice how some abilities refer to number of buffs or debuffs on a monster. Since this subject can be a little confusing, I’ll explain how things work.

Using the above screenshot as an example, it says that your enemies will take extra damage based on how many “debuffs” they have on them.

Debuffs include things such as: Burn / Poison / Chill / Armor Break etc.

Debuffs do NOT include things such as: Bleed / Wound /Blind / Tether.

See this screenshot for example

You will notice how “debuffs” are in red on the enemy while the bleed “stacks” are in yellow above the debuffs. This is done to indicate that they are mechanically separate from each other. Therefore, the Fungi’s ability for enemies to take extra damage per debuff doesn’t count things such as bleed or wound “stacks” on an enemy, but just the number of “debuffs” they have on them.

Things become further complex when you add in multiple instances of the same debuff / buff. Note that under base game rules, each buff / debuff can only be applied once to a monster. However, with certain special talents from monsters, certain buffs / debuffs can have more than one instance. See the below screenshot:

Notice how it says that it can go to three instances of poison, but that each additional instance of that debuff is only half as effective. This applies not only to the effect that the debuff itself has, but is also applied to the “number” of them as well.

1 buff / debuff = 1

2 buff / debuff = 1.5

3 buff / debuff = 2

Therefore, using the Fungi as an example, if an enemy had 3 instances of poison on it, it would be equal to 2 “debuffs” in terms of calculating its [Dominance] power, and thus 6% extra damage that the monster would take.

The answer really comes down to “because of game balance“. Since (through various methods) it’s quite simple to get very large stacks of bleed / wound on enemies, if these were counted for the calculations for “per number of debuff” abilities….it would be extremely broken and overpowered.

Remember that everything is same is true on the flipside with buffs, look at this example:

So if Catzerker had two instances of regeneration buff on it, it would only count as 1.5, and would thus be a bonus of 4.5% from [Heroism].

Also on the positive side, “Charge” and “Age” stacks don’t count as “buffs” for the above-stated reasons of “game balance”.

Lastly, since stacks aren’t buffs or debuffs, they aren’t cleansed by abilities which say they cleanse those.

Basic Teambuilding Advice

At this moment, we are not planning on including extensive discussion on “how to build a team of monsters”, because that is a large subject. However, for some basic info on that, see below:

Originally posted by Conan The Librarian:

In Monster Sanctuary, things are pretty flexible since all of the monsters are good and worth using. What’s important is team composition. There are of course multiple ways to build a team, but the most basic formula is making sure to have Tank / Support / Healer / DPS between your three monsters.

As a classic early game example of this:

Yowie (tank / healer)

Vaero (support)

Catzerker (DPS)

The answer lies really in which monsters YOU want to use, as long as you’re building a balanced team.

Another classic example could be:

Magmapillar (shield-tank support)

Blob (support healer)

Monk (DPS)

So yeah, just learn to look at monsters and what they do so you can identify which roles they can fulfill. Since monsters have talent trees, usually they can be built in a variety of ways.

– The default save file location is:

Windows: C:\Users\User\Documents\My Games\Monster Sanctuary
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Monster Sanctuary
Linux: ~/.local/share/Monster Sanctuary

Why would you want to know this? Well it is always a good thing to make a back-up every once in a while. Or when there is an issue with your firewall or virusscanner and you need to make an exception for the file location.

– Back-up save file location (only for windows as this is only used when saves couldn’t be created in the documents folder):

C:\Users\USER\AppData\LocalLow\moi rai games\Monster Sanctuary