King GurglerReport
English:King Gurgler · Characters
The Alpha Fishman chieftain squatting in the island lab on Fishman Island, with sixty thousand Cats on his head and a Meitou-grade Combat Cleaver in his hand — but the real problem is that the head cannot be sold.
King Gurgler commands the entire Fishman population of Fishman Island, south of Catun and below the Bonefields. He himself sits in the Island Lab at the island's far south-western tip — a research facility left over from ancient times.
The wanted notice
Wanted: the Giant King Fishman Charged with the kidnapping and eating of the residents of Catun. Neither man nor beast, this thing resembles a cross between a Hiver and a crab, at ten times the size. Dead or alive, though only the corpse is required. Believed to hold the coast south of Catun. The head must be handed in as proof. Additional intelligence: the King Fishman is reported to possess an ancient weapon of a fallen empire. Assassinate him and the weapon is yours. Bounty: roughly 60,000 Cats
That "ancient weapon" is a Meitou-grade Combat Cleaver. The Combat Cleaver is one of the few weapons in the cleaver class with no stat penalties: +30% armour penetration, +25% damage against robots, light and broadly usable. There is exactly one at Meitou grade in the entire game, and it can only be taken from him.
The sixty-thousand-Cat trap
This is the pitfall new players fall into most reliably: police stations do not accept the head. Carry the Gurgler Head into any station and the guards will simply congratulate you, then tell you to go and find a buyer willing to collect it.
Which turns the problem into this: the item is priced at 60,000, and a merchant carries at most 25,000 Cats by default. To sell the head you first have to buy heavily from that same merchant and wait for him to accumulate enough cash to pay. The usual approach is to buy AI Cores at a Scraphouse, or blueprints at the Great Library.
Assessing him as an opponent
The bulk of an Alpha Fishman gives him an outrageous Strength of 86–94. The rest of his numbers are far less frightening: Toughness 36–44, Dexterity 21–29, and his six weapon skills and melee attack/defence likewise land at 36–44, with Perception at only −3 to 5.
The real hole is movement speed: an Alpha Fishman tops out at roughly 16.9 mph, so even a character with terrible Athletics can walk away, and the race cannot swim. His 140–250 hit points are substantial, but his ability to chase is poor, which makes him a very safe kind of boss to disengage from.
The patrols on the island are startlingly large (20–40 ordinary Fishmen plus 0–3 Alphas), and the real obstacle is usually not the King himself but the waves of bodies on the way in and out of the lab.
World states
Killing or imprisoning King Gurgler rewrites the ecology of the whole area:
- Cheaters Run, Fishman Island, The Pits and eastern The Pits stop generating Fishman patrols entirely.
- The island's Gurgler Nests only spawn while he lives, up to six at a time.
- The unowned spawn groups on the island are likewise bound to whether he is alive.
In other words he is not merely a bounty target but a single-point switch for the Fishman threat across this entire stretch of sea. For a player who wants to operate along the southern coast long-term, dealing with him clears the whole route in one move.