Need help with rock crab farming

[puppylovingkitty]

I need to farm rock crabs as quick as possible for the crab shell ring. I do not have access to monster musk or trinkets, what’s the fastest way to farm rock crabs, and how many could I feasibly farm in a day? Should I reset floors that are multiples of 5, like floor 115?

 

[Grumples]

The elevator method would be fastest, I think. Depending on how far you are in the game, I'd stick to floors 20 or 25, as hunting for lava crabs might be too dangerous/time consuming. Rock crabs do have little eyes, to tell them apart from rocks, but it's probably faster to just run around and let them attack you first. Mega bombs may help speed things up, if you've got a lot of them.

Since their spawns seem to be kinda random, it may take a while, or you may get lucky and find a lot quickly. Happy hunting!

 

[VampireCake]

You can quite often tell them apart from rocks as they'll be a bit out of place - rocks generate on a tiled grid to fit the terrain. If you see a rock that looks oddly out of alignment, it's a rock crab.

Explosives are faster, though.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

The easiest ones to find in my personal experience are by far the rock crabs in the lava floors of the mines, they're always the regular rock texture (not the 'stone ore' grey rocks), and you basically reset an elevator until you see rocks that are suspiciously misaligned.

Your best bet is resetting 105,95,0 repeat as those are rather spread out when you actually head down the ladder and have the inventory or elevator menu open, though you could easily mix in 115 and 85

 

[nicodeux]

Rock crabs do have little eyes, to tell them apart from rocks, but it's probably faster to just run around and let them attack you first.

I never heard that rock crabs have eyes (at least while they still have their rock shell), so I looked at the wiki to learn more and indeed, there are two pixels that are brown instead of black when a rock is a rock crab in disguise.

However, I'm unsure if these two pixels are intended to be eyes. Whatever, they look tough to spot and I would rather recommend using the misplacement method instead of spoting those two pixels when looking for rock crabs. Or better, as mentioned above, heavy bombing if one can afford it.

 

[Grumples]

I never heard that rock crabs have eyes (at least while they still have their rock shell), so I looked at the wiki to learn more and indeed, there are two pixels that are brown instead of black when a rock is a rock crab in disguise.

However, I'm unsure if these two pixels are intended to be eyes. Whatever, they look tough to spot and I would rather recommend using the misplacement method instead of spoting those two pixels when looking for rock crabs. Or better, as mentioned above, heavy bombing if one can afford it.

Yeah, I'm unsure if those tow dots are eyes, but I've always imagined them to be. Little eyes poking out from under a rock spying on you. lol But I agree, it's a very slow way of looking for them amongst a ton of other rocks.

 

[cvrcek]

If the concern is getting the ring as fast as possible in game time, but you're willing to spend a lot of irl time, then try taking screenshots when you enter the game (through the menu). Then you can literally look at every single rock without spending any game time.
If you're okay with mods, you can use Blade's map predictor to speed up ladders. https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/6614


If you're concerned about irl time; bombs, lots of bombs.

 

[MogBeoulve]

Ha! I knew there was a visual difference. I just didn't know what it was.