The Kingdom of Loathing Iotm: Moveable Feast

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The Moveable Feast is familiar equipment which is equippable to any familiar in KoL. In addition, it can be used to give your familiars a temporary buff of +10lbs. When equipped, your familiar will gain 5lbs, will deal elemental damage to your enemies and increases the speed at which your familiar accumulates experience. Details on the effects of the moveable feast are best seen on the KolWiki.

Whether the Moveable Feast makes for a good investment for you depends largely on how you intend to play Kingdom of Loathing:

Hardcore players:

If a lot of your time will be spent in hardcore ascensions then clearly familiar equipment is not a great investment for you; you won’t have access to it during your runs so you simply won’t use the item. If you’re in this camp, it’s probably not worth picking up this item.

Aftercore players:

If you’re playing the aftercore game, diving into the sea or running the clan dungeons for example, the Moveable Feast still looks quite unexciting. The familiar damage doesn’t do enough to make combats much easier, and you can get +5lb familiar weight from pretty much any familiar equipment. The +10lb buff to familiar weight for 10 adventures for 20 combats per familiar per day (for up to 5 familiars) is really what you’re buying this for then.

+10lbs is a good boost, but you can achieve a high familiar weight anyway relatively easily (35lbs with only familiar equipment, Amphibian Sympathy permed and Empathy of the Newt cast from a buffbot). The familiars all give diminishing returns on their benefit, so the higher the weight, the less difference the +10lbs makes.

Farmers:

If you’re farming, you want as much item drop or meat drop as possible. The +10lbs for the Moveable Feast does improve this and can last 100 turns if you rotate familiars, but the price of a Mr. Accessory is pretty high for this buff. It will take so long to pay for itself that the Moveable Feast probably isn’t worthwhile for you.

Softcore players:

This is where the Moveable Feast shines. The +10lb boost makes a big difference early in the game where your familiars aren’t heavy enough on their own. The extra experience means you’ll be getting your familiars up to 20lbs twice as fast, which is also a big boost. The damage from the Moveable Feast is relatively significant as well, and can help you out in a tough combat. In addition, when you switch around familiars, you can still use the same item, so there’s only one pull needed from Hagnk’s.

There are some caveats where it’s less useful in softcore ascensions and these circumstances are when you are using some of the best recent item of the months.

If you already have IotM familiar equipment then it looks less good. The Little Box of Fireworks, for example, boosts initiative and item drops, which are a big help in your ascensions. That said, I’d take the Moveable Feast instead of the Fireworks – when you’re worried about item drops you will run a fairy-type familiar, and the +10lb buff as well as extra familiar equipment should make up for the loss of the Fireworks boost.

If you have the Sugar Tome, again this loses some functionality because you will probably want to equip a Sugar Shield while you can. However since you have only 3 shards per day, this provides a nice option for when you have used the Shields up for the day. It will also let you use the Sugar Shirts more often in the day instead, which is no bad thing.

If you have a Frumious Bandersnatch you won’t want to equip the Moveable Feast to him, because you will want to pull the Bandersnatch’s equipment. The Moveable Feast does still give you the buff, which gives you more stats and more free runaways though, both of which you want as much as possible. You’re also unlikely to be making a 100% bandersnatch run, so the Moveable Feast makes for good equipment when you’re using your fairy, leprechaun or starfish type familiars, for example.

Even if you have these items, the Moveable Feast makes a good pull from Hagnks, so remains a good investment for Softcore players.

Investors:

As always with an item of the month, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen to the price of the Moveable Feast in the Kingdom of Loathing Mall and how much meat you would gain from your investment.

It’s not the most critical piece of equipment even for softcore ascension, but it does have some value there. It is resellable, so anyone that’s bought one might choose to sell at a later date, so there’s more possibility of the price dropping or people selling their items if it rises to astronomical heights.

It’s not unreasonable to look at the Little Box of Fireworks as an example of what might happen to the price on the Moveable Feast and that didn’t show a lot of change. For Investors then, the Moveable Feast looks like it may not be the best IotM that the Kingdom of Loathing has seen to date – don’t expect to see huge profits.