Black Myth: Wukong has numerous ways for you to improve your character, including boosting skills, armor upgrades, and new weapons to craft. But that’s not it. Eventually, you’ll unlock an NPC named Xu Dog who will make Celestial Medicines for you that can improve stats like health, defense, stamina, and resistances to various Four Banes effects. To do this, though, you’ll need to collect a bunch of Mind Cores. Here’s one of the most efficient ways to gather them.
There are plenty of enemies that provide guaranteed one-time drops of Mind Cores, and you can also periodically find this material in treasure chests. However, if you want to purchase every Celestial Medicine available from Xu Dog, you’ll have to do some grinding (or play the game on New Game Plus multiple times).
Luckily, there’s a great Mind Core grinding spot late in the game—albeit one where you should be prepared to spend a lot of time working at it, as the drop rate is pretty low. Let’s take a look at the Valley Entrance Mind Core farming spot.
Valley Entrance Mind Core farming spot
To get started farming for Mind Cores, you’ll want to use a shrine to fast-travel to Flaming Mountains > Furnace Valley > Valley Entrance. There are two enemies near this shrine that have a small chance of dropping Mind Cores (while also providing decent XP and Will as an added benefit).
Note: To slightly improve the drop rate of Mind Cores here, equip the Golden Carp curios.
When you arrive at the Valley Entrance shrine, you’ll be seeking out two shield-wielding enemies along the linear path ahead of you. There will be some rock foes that try to fight you on your way there, and it’s up to you whether you want to fight them or just run by and leave them in the dust.
The first shield-wielding enemy will be right in your path as you move through this area, while the other can be seen just ahead of him. Your goal is to defeat them as quickly as possible, so use Immobilize when possible, then charge up a heavy smash attack from behind to (hopefully) take them out in a single hit.
Afterward, use your Incense Trail Talisman to return to the shrine and repeat the process. The hope being, of course, that some of these runs will result in a shiny new Mind Core. It’ll be a slow process, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t score one for a few tries in a row. You’ll get them all eventually! And then it’s back to Xu Dog to cash them in for all manner of benefits.
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