Smokie's Harness
Essential · Essential_PalGear3★Harness gear for Smokie. Setting off its Partner Skill picks out where Chromite sits nearby.
Nothing is crafted from it — it is an end product, so anything you make is meant to be used rather than banked as a component.
Details
It stacks up to 9,999.
Smokie's Harness Crafting Recipe
Leather×20
Fiber×50
Dark Fragment
Paldium Fragment
Wood×25Crafting it takes 115 materials across 4 types.
Where to Find Smokie's Harness
Smokie's Harness is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Catching Smokie is the easy half — the harness itself does not appear on the Technology tree until level 58, and it costs 3 points there. That is the same level the whole Chromite economy opens at: Hexolite is 2 points at 58 and the Metal Detector is 3 points at 58, so all three want the same handful of points in the same session. If you can only afford one, this is the one. It is 40,000 work to build against the detector's 500,000, and the bill is 20 Leather, 50 Fiber, 5 Dark Fragment and 40 Paldium Fragment against 30 Plasteel, 15 Computer, 20 Nightstar Sand and 100 Paldium Fragment. The harness also weighs nothing and has no durability to run down, where the detector is 25 weight with 400 durability and occupies a weapon slot you would rather hand to a gun.
Using Smokie's Harness Well
Holding the harness switches on two separate things, and only one of them is the sniffing. The detect ping is the half you trigger yourself, and its cooldown runs from 3 seconds at the first partner-skill rank down to 2 at the fifth — effectively no cooldown at all by the standards of the game's other detection skills, since Tombat's ultrasonic sweep sits on 60 seconds falling to 30. The other half is passive and is the one worth condensing for: Chromite you collect goes up by 100% at rank 1, then 110, 130, 160 and 200% at rank 5. Rank 1 already doubles the take, so the harness earns its cost the moment it is finished and condensing is an improvement on top rather than the point of the exercise.
Two conditions decide whether that bonus is actually running. Smokie has to be the Pal you have out — the effect reads off the active partner, not a Smokie sitting in the party list behind another Pal — and it does not stack, so carrying a second Smokie adds nothing at all. There is no partial credit either: with the harness not in hand the partner skill is inert, which is why a Smokie caught at level 20 does nothing for your Chromite for the next thirty-eight levels. Smokie Cryst is not a substitute, either; the Ice variant traded this skill for a base-camp Cooling buff and detects nothing.
Doubling Chromite matters because Chromite is the half of Hexolite you cannot see. A Hexolite is one Chromite plus one Hexolite Quartz, and the quartz is an ordinary node — 635 of them sit on our map. Chromite has no nodes to mark, because it is buried until something uncovers it, which is the entire reason the game hands out two different ways to find it. Everything past that point is a Hexolite bill: 50 for a plain Hexolite Armor rising to 100 at the top tier, 40 to 80 for the Hexolite Helmet, 100 to 200 for a Lightweight Hexolite Armor or a Laser Gatling Gun, 130 to 260 for an Energy Shotgun or a Plasma Cannon, 135 to 270 for an Overheat Rifle. Read backwards, each of those is a Chromite count, and the harness cuts every one of them in half before you have condensed Smokie once.
Smokie's Harness — Smokie's Gear
Smokie's Harness is Smokie's own gear — no other Pal can equip it, and Smokie cannot be ridden or put to work in its geared role until you have this in your inventory.
Equipping it turns on Smokie's partner skill, Dig, Smokie! Dig!.
Smokie is Dark, which is what decides where it is worth taking — the gear does not change its typing, only what you can do with it.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Other Pal gear items at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
