Most newcomers to Borderlands will get through a playthrough or two, maybe complete some DLCs and then start to wonder about finding some of the rare weapons they didn’t come across. And upon browsing this site they’ll probably say something like, “Holy crap. That repeater pistol blows away my best machine gun! Forget ‘Borderlands best weapons’ – how do I get something I can hopefully kill Crawmerax with?.” Yes the creators of Borderlands put a lot of effort into a stingy and mysterious loot generation system. It’s that witholding of incredible firepower that keeps people playing and playing. And the gameplay dynamics are so good that – yeah – it’s worth it – the really rare and amazing guns tend to feel really amazing. And doubly so if you put some effort into finding them.
In the course of playing Borderlands, you’ll see some rare guns, granted. Oranges and purples will pop up now and then and it will be exciting. But if you want specific things and high quality, it’s going to take some farming. Farming is the repeated looting of certain high-value-density areas. So what approach should you take and where should you begin?
The Crimson Fastness
The first place you’ll likely be able ‘farm’ is the “The Crimson Fastness”. It offers 4 red chests is very close proximity to a jump point. Under the latest patches, red chests are second only to Crimson Lance chests in terms of the loot quality they offer. Anyhow, you basically go in and sneak by or fight the guards as you plunder the chests. Once you reach the last chest, you exit out of the game, and then start it up again. When you come back, all the chests are refilled with loot. Simple enough. Over a few dozen runs you should have some pretty impressive finds. Specific chest locations can be found here Ice Car’s Farming Guide v3.00
The Armory
The second place you’ll be likely to get to is “The Armory”, or as some call it “The Farmory”. If you set it up right, it completely trumps the Crimson Fastness in terms of efficiency, as one run is basically equivalent to a dozen in the Fastness in terms of chest count. Plus, a good proportion of the chests in the Armory are Lance Chests, which can even contain Pearlescents. Beating Knoxx is hard, but a lot easier than Crawmerax. Do some reading here about how to trigger Unlimited Armory Farming: Ice Car’s Farming Guide v3.00
Crawmerax the Invincible
After that, and levelling up to around 61, Crawmerax becomes an option. In my experience, Crawmerax is the ultimate way to farm because so much loot gets dumped on you each time. It’s also pretty challenging but when you get good at it he can be killed in 5 minutes or so. Note that if you start playing him at level 61, you will level up VERY quickly because even if you just kill one minion per try, they are worth a lot of experience points. With Brick, this is the loadout that I first conquered him with:
Vendor Farming and Ransacking
The other two main ways people farm include A. jumping around to different vendor locations to look for good stuff and B. Ransacking with Mordecai, but I haven’t done either of those very much. Ransacking is very entertaining though: the goal is to kill as many enemies as possible within a few seconds of each other; every one killed drops some potentially amazing loot! Popular locations for this include Zombie Island, Skag Gully and The Underpass in Rust Commons East.
Good vendor farming points have gun and medic machines very close to the jump, so you can check the machines as quickly as possible. Some examples are the Underdome and The Lost Cave. UPDATE: check out ctownpeepers’ awesome vendor farming guide: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?p=2601242#12
On Vendor Farming: I’ve used this approach lately. It’s much more useful for finding a shield or COM due to the higher likelihood of Ned’s machines. The next point is the 20 minute window between loot: the goal is to make a run to all vendors within that time or less-if less ending the run where you would like to start and then restarting. The goal is to travel to New Haven, Jakob’s Cove, Middle of Nowhere, Lucky’s and Fyrestone looking for weapons, and literally every fast travel location has shields and grenades. This is especially useful when thinking about getting specific grenade mods. Though the most useful vendor location is crawmerax’s lair-though that’s quite a trip and a serious wait.
Thanks for the writeup Clark – I haven’t done too much vendor farming so I’m glad to hear about the experience. When I did it was looking feverishly for a Corrosive Longbow and never found one : (
I disagree, the best place to get your unlimited guns, cash & ammo is on the cellar room in Tartarus. There are about 30 red chests, loot them, exit and come back for all you need.
Thing is, the ‘awesome level’ of those chests in Tartarus Station is very low – so you might get a lot of stuff, but chances are the rarity won’t be that great.
Once again, I disagree. The cellar room in Tartarus keeps updating with new guns as your skill level grows. I am skill 31 level now and it has lot of weapons for level 34. I just keep going back after I level up 3 more skill points.
This is my first playthrough of Borderlands, so I can’t say how long Tartarus provides new weapons, but I will continue to go there until the end of the game. I like that you don’t have to kill enemies or search for red chests to get rewarded.