Yesterday on the Diablo 4 subreddit, a user by the name of MrFrodoBaggins posted the sum total of his findings from a three-day stint through Diablo 4's cellar levels, which are small, bitesize dungeons you can find scattered throughout Sanctuary.
"Hello everyone, I decided to diversify the levelling of the second barbarian a little and thought, why don't I go through the basements 10 times each and see what happens."
Let's do some napkin maths really quick: assuming each basement took them two minutes to complete, that's roughly 42 hours of solid basement delving. I think if I had to endure that, I'd emerge looking like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, but MrFrodoBaggins did come back from his journey with some interesting statistics.
Over the course of his adventures he amassed a mere 200 legendary items, 13 uniques, 80,000,000 gold, and enough XP to get him from level 84 to 89. He also found that certain enemies, such as treasure goblins and the Butcher boss, were shockingly rare in this brand of content.
In 1,270 cellars, MrFrodoBaggins only bumped into the Butcher three times, while treasure goblins followed with a miserable seven encounters.
While the loot MrFrodoBaggins amassed seems like a lot on paper, considering the riches and XP one can amass in around 40 to 60 hours of Diablo 4, that's surprisingly little. It makes me wonder how many of my forays into these underground killboxes were actually worth the time and effort.
"The most profitable thing that I got on this journey is Ore and Grass, which I collected running from cellar to cellar."
That being said, it's not always about the money. In my bloody journeys through Sanctuary, I've often found the cellar to be a useful palette cleanser: a break from trudging through the overworld that doesn't eat up 15 to 20 minutes of my time like a full dungeon will. That said, I doubt I'll even rack up a thousand basement diving sessions in months, let alone three days. Godspeed gamer scientists, we salute you.
