Dark Grenade
Weapon · WeaponThrowObject0★Thrown ordnance for mid-range fights. A few seconds after it leaves the hand it goes off, dealing Dark damage to anything nearby.
Dark Grenade is among the best throwables by attack — 2nd of 11, at 750 against the 4,000 of Frag Grenade Mk2.
It feeds no other recipe, which makes it a terminal item: craft what you will actually carry and stop there.
Details
It weighs almost nothing and stacks to 9,999, so there is no reason not to carry a full stack.
Dark Grenade Crafting Recipe
Gunpowder
Corrosive Solvent
Wood×4
Sulfur×2
Venom Gland×1Crafting it takes 2 materials across 2 types.
Where to Find Dark Grenade
Dark Grenade is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using Dark Grenade Well
The level 40 technology costs 2 points, but it is not the real gate — Corrosive Solvent is. The solvent is its own technology at level 37 for another 2 points, and it is mixed at a Production Assembly Line from one Venom Gland plus one Sulfur. That puts the throwable at 4 technology points end to end and makes the honest bill per grenade one Venom Gland, one Sulfur and one Gunpowder. Like the Water variant and unlike most of the line, it wants no Stone at all, so the ten-stone habit from Frag Grenade does not carry over. It also builds slower than the plain one: 13000 work against 10000.
Neither half of the solvent is scarce once you know where to hit. Menasting drops 5 to 10 Venom Glands on every kill and Shroomer Noct 4 to 8, with Prixter and Dandilord at 4 to 5; the village, caravan and dungeon merchants all list them at 300 Gold, and a Caprity Noct on a ranch makes them renewable without fighting anything. Sulfur comes out of the ore nodes scattered around Mount Obsidian and the desert — hundreds of them are mapped — with Pierdon dropping 4 to 5 as a bonus and the Blazing Cavern expedition returning 20 to 40 a run. The throughput limit is the solvent bench itself at 15000 work per unit, so batch the solvent well before you need the grenades rather than mixing one at a time.
Dark's only bonus matchup is Neutral, which is a short list but an important one: Hartalis as a raid target, Paladius, Kingpaca, Mimog, Grintale and Nitewing all take extra from it, and none of them resist a thrown weapon the way an armoured boss resists small arms. Everywhere else the element tag buys you nothing, because the throw lands the same flat 750 as the level 25 Frag Grenade — only Frag Grenade Mk2 hits harder. Treat it as the answer you pack for a Neutral fight and keep plain Frag Grenades for general use, since those cost stone and gunpowder instead of a two-step chemical chain.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Frag Grenade Mk2 at 4,000 attack; step down and it is Dragon Grenade at 750. The size of that step is what decides whether the crafting bill is justified yet.
Other throwables at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
