Lower Kurast (LK for short) is a great place to farm high runes in Single Player, Hell difficulty. There are 3 or 6 super chests and each of them has only 65534 combinations (2^16 - 2). Some of these combinations contain high runes. You can roll a decent map and have 30-60 second runs where you check all 6 chests. On multiplayer, maps are rerolled every time, so this is not a viable strategy - you can still check the chests, but it will not be such a power method for farming high runes.
LK runs are also good for farming charms, jewels and gems as they appear very often in the chests.
This short guide includes everything you need to know about LK farming.
Runes
As mentioned above, there are 65534 combinations and some of them contain high runes. The type of high runes available in those chests depends on the player setting (e.g. type '/player 7' command in chat or go to settings) and whether the chest is locked or unlocked. Your chance of getting runes does NOT depend on MF.
The table below shows the number of combinations (out of 65534 total combinations) that contain runes, for each player setting, along with some probabilities when farming all 6 chests.
Note that there is a 19% chance that a chest is locked and 81% chance that it is unlocked. There are slightly different rune combinations for both cases, so they have been averaged out.
/p 1-2
9
8
9
4.2
6
2
4
3
2.2
1
/p 3-4
12.4
7.4
12
8.4
4.4
3
2
4
4.2
2
/p 5-6
16.4
11
10
5.2
5
6
2
4
5.4
4
/p 7-8
16
10.2
14.2
5.4
11
6
5
2
9
2
From the table, we can see that is best to farm the chests on players 7-8, unless you are farming specifically for Lo rune, which is slightly better farmed on player 3-6.
Let us now take a look at some probabilities. Probability is defined as P, we assume 6 chests are farmed at 30 seconds per run.
For players 7-8:
- P(getting at least one Pul+ rune) = 0.00737 or expected 1 rune every 136 runs, appr. 1.1 hours.
- P(getting at least one Ist+ rune) = 0.00369 or expected 1 rune every 271 runs, appr. 2.3 hours.
- P(getting at least one Sur or Ber) = 0.00101 or expected 1 rune every 990 runs, appr. 8.3 hours.
Runes Probability Calculator
You can input the players setting and your desired runes to get a probability calculation for your selection.
- P(at least one from 6.2 selected runes) = 0.00057 or expected 1 rune every 1754 runs, appr. 14.6 hours.
Finding Super Chests
In Lower Kurast you are looking for a campfire. There are two huts, one is to the left, the other is on top. The first contains 2 super chests, the second - 1 super chest. This is illustrated in the image below:
A Perfect Map
Lower Kurast maps can spawn 2 campfires for a total of 6 super chests. In a perfect map, you will have the waypoint and the two campfires very close to it.
Start from the waypoint, go through the chests and come back to the waypoint. Teleport to Act 4, save and exit and repeat.
Take your time to find a good map, because a few seconds save over thousands of runs could mean hours. An example of a good (not perfect) map is given below:
Reference here.
Pul
Um
Mal
Ist
Gul
Vex
Ohm
Lo
Sur
Ber
1-2