Lower Kurast

This article aims to give an overview on Lower Kurast (LK), and what makes an unassuming Act 3 area, that people normally just run straight through, one of the most popular places to farm for single player characters.

    Building blocks and Super Chests

Areas in Diablo 2 are mostly randomly generated; however, they’re made up of certain objects – be it a piece of a corridor, a room, or most noticeably in outdoor zones, buildings.
One such “building block” is a pair of thatch-roofed houses in an L-shape with a bonfire in the corner between them.
The reason why this is interesting is that these houses always spawn with 3 Super Chests in them, along with a Weapon Rack and an Armor Stand.

Super Chests are very peculiar, because the loot in them isn’t completely random; they instead choose what they drop from a pool of ~65000 preset “patterns” made up of a group of predetermined items. 
These are only influenced by the number of players in the game, with 1-2 players picking from the same pool, then 3-4, 5-6, and finally 7-8 from the one containing the most lucrative patterns.
Moreover, the chance of getting each of these patterns is the same. This is great news for us, because a good amount of them include High Runes (HRs) up to Ber, which are normally several orders of magnitude rarer than even a 1 in 65k chance.
But of course there are multiple HR patterns. This varies a bit in every patch, but in 1.13, we knew about and confirmed 3 patterns containing a Ber, and as much as 11 with a Sur. Strangely enough, looting a Sur this way was more likely than almost any other rune between Pul and Sur – despite being much rarer than them.
Other than High Runes, these Super Chests also drop a ton of Charms, Jewels, and Flawless Gems, making them attractive for crafting enthusiasts as well.
The downside of having predetermined loot, however, is that they cannot drop any set or unique items. Most of the time they only drop magic items, with the rare exception when every item drop is rare instead.

    Weapon Racks, Armor Stands

The above two objects also have a special property. The item base that they drop, similarly to Super Chests, is not completely random, but somewhat preset. This is unfortunately not an exact science, and it takes quite a few pops to even notice something strange about them, but we can promise that this is not a conspiracy theory!
The best way to think about them is that the base item they drop tries to be the same every time you open them, but it can be affected by a few things.
Namely, these racks are generated with a seed in every new area, which will determine what item bases can drop from them. What they then end up picking is affected by the map seed (which is always the same in single player), the movement of the player opening them, and most likely the amount and movement of enemies around them.
This means that in single player, it’s fairly easy to “make” a rack drop the same base most of the time, as long as you reach it following the same steps again and again.

The advantage of this is twofold. 
Firstly, for runeword bases, for example, it’s great to have an armor rack printing Sacred Targes by the dozen. Since they are fairly rare to begin with, and the most desired ones have 43+ All Resists, normally it would take a lot of luck to find a well-rolled one if it wasn’t for armor stands.
Moreover, it is not only possible to get unique and set items from these racks, but the chance is also much higher than normal – somewhere along the lines of 1:400 for a unique and 1:160 for a set piece. (Or even higher for class-specific items.)
Therefore, for a single player Javazon player, it might be worthwhile to find a weapon stand that consistently drops Ceremonial Javelins, because that will make finding a Titan’s Revenge considerably easier than farming monsters.
Since there is a weapon stand and an armor rack in every “bonfire block” in Lower Kurast, players can gain added value from their farming sessions by being aware of how they work and adjusting their route accordingly.

    How to farm?

To preface this, since LK farming is by far the best suited for offline players, we’re only going to discuss single player in this section. There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, the maps don’t change in single player mode. This is absolutely vital, because the efficiency of this method mostly depends on the layout of our Lower Kurast map. Offline players can simply keep resetting it by swapping the difficulty to Normal or Nightmare and then back to Hell, then lock in the best one by staying in Hell.
Making use of racks is also only really feasible with a fixed map, as otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to consistently make them drop the same item base.
Lastly, offline players can make use of the /players command to simply access the best chest patterns at /players 7 or 8. This will increase the chance of getting a Sur or Ber by several times compared to lower difficulties.
The importance of finding a good map layout cannot be overstated. Not only is the distance of the bonfires different relative to the Waypoint, but even the amount is random. Lower Kurast can spawn either 1 or 2 special bonfires, therefore the number of Super Chests can also go up from 3 to 6.
In an ideal layout, we have 2, and they are as close to the Waypoint as possible. This is also significant, because it is fairly important to get back to the WP at the end of the run as well. The reason for this is that we can teleport to Act 4 to log out, where we then spawn right next to the WP in the next run, saving us the entire run through Kurast Docks.
It is also mandatory to stock up on keys, because some of the Super Chests will be locked. Assassin players have a slight advantage here, as they can open them without keys as well.

Knowing all this, we simply take the WP to Lower Kurast, beeline to our Super Chests, run back, teleport to the Pandemonium Fortress, and log out. Popping racks and other, non-super chests, corpses and hollow logs is optional, although they can also drop decent loot, including runes and uniques. Sorceresses are the best for this, as they can not only Teleport, but also use Telekinesis to open chests from a distance. 
The great thing about LK farming, however, is that every single class can do it, regardless of gear. The worst that can happen is that they’re slightly slower at it, but since it is encouraged to skip every monster, not being able to kill anything is not an issue at all.