Xenoblade Chronicles X

[Kylo Ken]

Each skill has a special mission on the mission control board. They're like little riddles you have to figure out.

That's awesome, and thank you, gives me a reason to play now.

 

[Ronin]

That's awesome, and thank you, gives me a reason to play now.

They're called "Off the Record", I believe.

 

[the8thark]

They're called "Off the Record", I believe.

That is correct (all of quests are called "Off The Record") and I know the mechanical one requires a flying skell. Not sure about the other two.

@the8thark There are a few islands like that. That one, I believe, holds the blueprints for a Super Weapon for Skells. There's another one that also holds blueprints.

On a side note, I found a pretty decent way to level up the side characters and get them affinity points.

First, take on as many side quests as you can. It helps if they're "tougher" type quests (i.e., they will require fighting enemies higher level than the level of the character you're trying to level up).

One easy way of course is to take a low level character with you and 3 other stronger members, and then fight enemies your level. Even if they die, they get XP.

But if you just do a bunch of quests with strong characters, then, right before you finish the quest (accept the reward from the quest-giver), just switch to the weaker characters you're trying to level up/affinity up. Those "tougher" quests will give plenty of XP and affinity. I just leveled up two characters 4 levels just by completing a bunch of quests I had done in Cauldros, even though they didn't go with me at all.

It's not the only way to do it, but it's super fast and easy, and doesn't require sacrificing a party member slot with a weaker character to do so.

Thanks a million for the tip. That I didn't know about but it looks like a really good tactic. You just have to make sure it's not an auto complete quest, like the fetch or kill quests from the board. They are completed as soon as you get the required number of items/kills required.
I also didn't realise that dead characters get the same XP. That makes things easier. I don't have to worry about keeping them alive at the end of a fight. I can just win it and save the TP for the finishing blows.

 

[CrimsonCavalier]

Thanks a million for the tip. That I didn't know about but it looks like a really good tactic. You just have to make sure it's not an auto complete quest, like the fetch or kill quests from the board. They are completed as soon as you get the required number of items/kills required.

That's another good type of mission to get some cheap XP with. Just get the characters you want to level up and accept all the missions you already have the materials for.

I also didn't realise that dead characters get the same XP. That makes things easier. I don't have to worry about keeping them alive at the end of a fight. I can just win it and save the TP for the finishing blows.

Yeah, it was a surprise to me too, but I found out when one of the characters died and leveled up TWO levels. I believe she was level 15 or so, and my characters were already in the low 40s, and I killed a low level 40 enemy.

 

[DeactivatedUser2]

I quit playing the game for about two weeks, and coming back to chapter 9 was a nightmare. Any tips on Ga Jiarg?

 

[CrimsonCavalier]

I quit playing the game for about two weeks, and coming back to chapter 9 was a nightmare. Any tips on Ga Jiarg?

I'll be honest, I had to die the allotted number of times and reduce the difficulty for this fight. Even though I was 4 levels above him and his party,

Spoiler

his high agility/evasion meant that I kept missing. My tactic was to get rid of the three minions he has and then take care of the girl cat before I engage him. Doing otherwise means that you're missing him, but still getting killed by 1000 papercuts by his minions. It was an incredibly frustrating battle, and even after the difficulty was reduced, I barely beat him. Best of luck but I'm not really sure what advice to give you other than, leave the area, level up a lot, and come back.

 

[Night Owl]

You have missed 3 of them. I have gotten every single one you can get without the ship in act 4. You need the ship to get all 50. I say 50 because once you nab 50 of them, then the other 48 appear. Once you have found 50 + 48 for 98, then the 99th one becomes available.
For the first 50, you do not need a flying skell to get them, but a few of them really required some tricky jumping to get. One in particular required me to get ontop of the massive NLA side walls to jump onto an otherwise inaccessable roof of a building to get. Also a few of them are under NLA as well around all the pipes and water. The place you land off when you fall off NLA basically.
[...]
I am not sure if other such islands exist in the game. Later on I'll take a look.

I've gotten back to the point where I have more lobsters to find.
So far it seems to work as follows:
You have the first 48 lobsters, which allows you to find the 49th. The 49th lobster initiates a cutscene after which you can probably find lobsters 50-98. (easiest way onto the NLA walls without a skell is to jump onto them from the freight entrance used at the beginning of the game.)

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There are other such islands, I think I've found at least one in each continent's waters.
They all seem to be small islands like that with at least a treasure and maybe a tyrant on each Island.
The enemies seem to generally be in the 40+ range on the islands.

 

[the8thark]

I've gotten back to the point where I have more lobsters to find.
So far it seems to work as follows:
You have the first 48 lobsters, which allows you to find the 49th. The 49th lobster initiates a cutscene after which you can probably find lobsters 50-98. (easiest way onto the NLA walls without a skell is to jump onto them from the freight entrance used at the beginning of the game.)

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There are other such islands, I think I've found at least one in each continent's waters.
They all seem to be small islands like that with at least a treasure and maybe a tyrant on each Island.
The enemies seem to generally be in the 40+ range on the islands.

That's exactly how I got onto the walls of NLA. It seems collecting the lobsters are scripted in the way you have said. I'll collect them later. I'm still avoiding the story (I'm in Chapter 4) and doing as much side content as I can. I might hit the story soon though. Thanks for the advice.

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I have done as much of the collectapedia as is possible without a skell. Just passing on the information to you all.
Here is the percentages for each continent of the collectapedia I have done.

Primordia - 100%
Noctilum - 100%
Oblivia - 95%
Sylvalum - 91%
Cauldros - 100%

Here is a few hints as how to get everything. You have to farm each collectable in the correct areas of each continent and some are much rarer (ie take slonger to farm) than other collectables.
Also if you really want division rank faster you can swap to the Curators core to get you 5x as much division points per collectable pick up.

Primordia - Nothing hard here, it's all straight forward. Auroan Bones though take ages to farm in the caves. Took me 30 minutes to get them. Everything else was easy enough to find.

Noctilum - Mostly easy. But some of the collectables are locked away in the flying skell only area . . . well so I thought but if you hit the Noctilum waters area NW of Noctilum then you can farm these few collectables. If you go too far north though you'll move into a different set of collectables. You'll know the right area when you get to it. Takes about 10 minutes of auto swim to get there if you start at the beach at the bottom of Noctilum. The rest are easy to get. Just use the collectable filled cave (there's about 100 collectables in there) to make the cave ones easy.

Oblivia - Not hard here. Most are in the open. Easy farming. There is a little cave with about 20 collectables in it, it's a very small cave and you can farm that for the cave collectables. I think the last few require a skell. I have not tried very hard to collect them. I will try later. I suspect the last few do require a flying skell though. I will let you know if I manage to get the last few without a skell.

Sylvalum - Most of these collectables are in the open, easy to farm. The cave collectables are hard to farm simply because there's no low level caves. There is one at around level 35-40 you can use. It's good XP in there as well while you are collectable farming. You can't avoid some of the enemies deep inside the cave if you are collectable farming in there. But that's ok XP + division points is all good while you are farming the collectables you need.
The last few you can't get without a flying skell. They are in the walled area you need a flying skell to enter. I tried to see if they were in the ocean. No go. It seems 91% is the max you can do as the last few are all from that same area you need a flying skell to enter.

Ovlivia - Surprisingly you do not need a skell to get them all. You do have to travel all over Cauldros to get them. Also there is a level/gear requirement to get them all but I'll explain this later on.
Firstly you just scout around Cauldros to get as many as you can. About 75% of them are pretty easy to get. They are all over Cauldros. The last 25% are tricky to get.
The cave collectables are hard because there is only one cave with a low enough level to farm colelctable. Most of the enemies in here will not attack you. It takes a while to farm this cave as there only a few collectables there. Then you have to wait for the respawns to farm again. Secondly this cave is platforming heaven/hell depending on how much you like 3D platforming. Basically jumping from pillar to pillar over lava. If you have enough health you can make it back to safe ground if you fall. This is more time consuming than hard to be honest. Also it has to be this way as there's no other caves available to you below level 50.
Next you have to swin around to the north west side of Oblivia. The best way to do this is start as the eastern beach of Oblivia then swim north than east. This is the best way as you can get place a node on a very unusal FN site. It's surrounded by enemies that are single digit levels. As in level 8-9. Also the yellow box on that island has 2x mining probes in it. The yellow box is obtainable without a skell if you really look at the mountain so you can find the way to jump up it. This is just a side point, once you have reached north west Oblivia via swimming you can actually jump up oblivia. One of the sides is sloped and not a cliff so you can do it. Once your up there you have two chocies. Farm the few collectables you need there or jump down to the nearby senic viewpoint oasis. There is no water there though, it's all just acid. Also don't kill much there as you'll wake up the fat tyrant that will one shot you.
Once all that is done, you have two rough areas left. The castle ruins and the castle core. The castle ruins (outside and inside the ruins) can be accessed by mountain climbing and then jumping down and accessing the fast travel point there. I am sure there is a more straight forward method to get there but I didn't use it. If you search out the castle ruins (inside and outside) you'll get more much neede collectables.
This leaves one area left. The castle core. Remember how I said above that getting 100% of the colelctables in Oblivia has a level requirement? Well this is the time where the level requirement comes into play. There is an area inside the castle ruins that has 2x machine gun turrets blocking a path. You will know it because the other side of the room has a teleporter in it. The teleporter is easily accessable but not where we want to go. We need to get past the 2x machine gun turrets. If you are too low levelled they one shot you dead. I would recommend level 40-45 here. I guess you could do it a little lower levelled too. I did it as level 42 (if I remember correctly). How I got passed the 2x machine gun turrets is I locked on to them to start a battle but didn't attack them. I activated a defensive art (to protect my ass) and ran right through them. They both wailed on me but I didn't die. I did have a couple other enemies on my ass as well but they died easily enough once I was out of the range of the turrets (on the other side of them). Also level 40ish helps as this castle core has a few unavoidable enemies and it's best to kill them then try to run away from them. This area is level gated, unlike most of the rest of Xenoblade Chronicles X. But with getting to level 40 and having a defensive art (not just healing, you need a art to reduce the damage done to you, I used defensive stance) is not too hard to get.

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Here are three screen shots I took while getting all of the collectables in Cauldros. I'll put them in a spoiler tag as they could be considered spoilerish. Well the last two certainly could be spoilerish.

Spoiler

This is me ontop of the mountain I said above. The one totally north of Cauldros. It's a very weird place. Low level, not at all connected to Cauldros. I guess it's a nice fast travel for later in the game when you are searching the oceans for secret islands. Past that, the island has little use.

This is one of the rooms inside the castle core. It looks really cool. Reminds me of old games like Myst and the like. Certainly one of the better areas in the game.

I found this room. No body home.
Maybe if I progress past story chapter four things might happen here.
Proof Xenoblade Chronicles X is open world. Well once you hit chapter four. There is not that many areas at all gated by requiring flying skells.

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Here are some other screenshots I have taken in Xenoblade Chronicles X. Some are funny and I'll add my own quick captions to them. For your perusal.

I climbed a mountain. Just cause I could (I don't have skells yet). The night sky view was so amazing I had to take a screenshot of it.

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Just the moon here. Took ages to get this shot. It would either rain or some fat flying bastards would get in the rode fo the shot. But I finally got the shot I wanted. I am very happy with how the shot turned out.

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This cave looked amazing. So I cleared it out and took a shot of it. But I could not clear it all out, because things would respawn before I killed them all. I could not kill them all faster than the respawn rate. But I did my best and the screenshot is not all that bad.

This cave is called "Turtle Nest"

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I thought this cave looked amazing too. I got a nice shot of it.
There are two screen shots of this cave as it is a curators paradise. Full of respawning collectables. I just took one chot of the amazing cave and one shot to show you how many collectables there are here.

This cave is called "Beachside Trove"

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This cave is not all that good looking, but it also has a mountain of slowly respawning collectables. Well worh farming for Blade division rank points if you are a curator (like me).

This cave is called "rockmole burrow".
FS site 224 is right inside the cave. It's the only inside (roof covered) FN site I have seen all game.

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The New Los Angelos Open has begun !!!
Both players - X and Doug shake hands before the match.

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The best (and only) pool party in New Los Angelos

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"I do not have enough middle fingers to respond to that"
The best comback / insult / compliment ever. I am so going to use that one day.

 

[CrimsonCavalier]

Rockmole Burrow is awesome. I was so scared to go in front of that thing, but I collected a butt-load of stuff.

Anyone else finding Lin's dialogue at times extremely inappropriate?

Spoiler

In the New to New LA mission, she talks to Director General Chausson like she has some sort of rank. What a little p.o.s.. Who does she think she is? Why does she think she can speak up whenever adults are talking. I wish she would die.

Or better, she just needs to go back to the Skell maintenance area where she belongs. Her dialogue ruins any sort of continuity and importance or severity in the story. It's just ... wrong. No 13 year old would talk to the leader of the city like that.

Also, has anyone found the Resident Evil reference?

 

[Lozjam]

Rockmole Burrow is awesome. I was so scared to go in front of that thing, but I collected a butt-load of stuff.

Anyone else finding Lin's dialogue at times extremely inappropriate?

Spoiler

In the New to New LA mission, she talks to Director General Chausson like she has some sort of rank. What a little p.o.s.. Who does she think she is? Why does she think she can speak up whenever adults are talking. I wish she would die.

Or better, she just needs to go back to the Skell maintenance area where she belongs. Her dialogue ruins any sort of continuity and importance or severity in the story. It's just ... wrong. No 13 year old would talk to the leader of the city like that.

Also, has anyone found the Resident Evil reference?

She's a thirteen year old.....
I mean, that's kind of in her character traits. I know I didn't respect authority because I thought I was more intelligent than them(and I was more intelligent than them). As a teenager, you just don't care for any sort of title unless they prove themselves to you personally. It's just kind of a fact of life.

I mean, Chausson is kind of an ass too. But that comes with being a politician.

So yes, I think it's inappropriate at times, but it's supposed to be that way.

 

[Triforce King]

Hey guys, look what I got! I don't know why some people was complaining about the skell license exam, it wasn't hard to me?

 

[Kylo Ken]

It's good to know that people are starting to see that Lin is a piece of ****.

 

[the8thark]

It's good to know that people are starting to see that Lin is a piece of ****.

Yep she is. I'll keep her till the story is done then I'll trade her out for someone else.

Who I really hate is HB. He's just so arrogant and thinks he's the best at everything. So much so that he instantly turned me off having him in my party. I tried him out for a bit but his arrogant attitude in every conversation he has put me off even more. Post game I'll just level his affinity/level to max and hten never use him again.

 

[Kylo Ken]

Wait til you get the Sam-moo-rai, he's a trip.

 

[Ronin]

Wait til you get the Sam-moo-rai, he's a trip.

You mean Bozo? I can't stand his type of character whose untrained pupils think they're skilled enough to take on any foe like their master, and they end up getting themselves killed. It's a cliche and predictable pull at setting up a non-tragic moment.