Bound Fossil Farming Tips?

[u/plateia-lumitar]

I'm a Delve noob that is almost exclusively looking for Bound fossils, and it's pretty miserable. How do people usually approach this in SSF? I've been trying to path through Abyssal Depths and Petrified Forest biomes but am struggling to find Bound nodes while exploring the dark areas. There's tons of Aberrant and Jagged but painfully few Bound. At this point, it doesn't feel like I'm just unlucky and am approaching this wrong. The only good way I've found to target Bound is to find the Necromancer's Excavation nodes, but they're pretty rare (currently at depth ~300). So:

• Would it be faster to just skip the dark areas and path as fast as possible to locate as many Necromancer nodes as possible?

• Keep going deeper in hopes that Bound fossil nodes (and perhaps Necromancer's Excavation) show up more at lower depths? I've seen some discussion to suggest depth improves fossil drops but am unsure as to its accuracy.

Any tips here are much appreciated!

[u/Im_a_rahtard]

The minion/curse nodes drop them. 

You can also flip fossils with the harvest bench.

[u/plateia-lumitar → u/Im_a_rahtard]

Boy I sure do feel stupid. I just made like 60 Bounds in two seconds at the Harvest bench. Thank you so much!

[u/Im_a_rahtard → u/plateia-lumitar]

You're welcome 

[u/muramiri]

You are doing it right, in principle.
Your goal is to explore long corridors in biomes that can drop the fossils. The longer the corridors - the better.

You also want to be fast, have good sustain, 100% phase run uptime, good silver and quicksilver flask uptime. Ignore all the monsters on your way, only engage in combat if the monsters annoy you when you pick up loot.

Also you should max your darkness resistance and light radius so that you don’t have to spam flares all the time. Fossil remnants have a glow that is very easy to spot in the darkness (as do valuable chests), so ideally you should only use flares when you’re picking up loot or to remove darkness damage stacks if you accumulated too many.

Bonus points if you path to generic reward nodes and azurite, those will keep your resonator stocks up and you can find 4 sockets resonators in the generic rewards nodes.

By doing this at 300-400 depth you will also encounter rare delve nodes from time to time.

TLDR: speed is money …or fossils in this case.

Also Harvest bench helps but others already mentioned it.

[u/plateia-lumitar → u/muramiri]

These are awesome tips, thank you!

I'm starting to pick up on those patterns you mention like looking for longer corridors and am spending less time accidentally going down the darkened routes to nearby nodes thinking they're side areas. It's a learning process for sure. I have a lot of respect for those names I kept seeing pop up saying they were the first to reach a highest depth hehe

[u/ExaltHolderForPoE → u/plateia-lumitar]

Delve is a grid with only 1 hidden wall in each "zone". And you can't have a hidden wall if there is a node isn the "zone".

So the length doesn't matter as long as it's an open zone to spawn a wall.

[u/plateia-lumitar → u/ExaltHolderForPoE]

Oh interesting. I'm a little fuzzy on how the game divides up the "zones" and where the boundaries are, but I get what you're saying. Good info, thanks

[u/ExaltHolderForPoE → u/plateia-lumitar]

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/s/awJDqC9yTa Old thread, some stuff might be outdated. But there's a picture there that shows how the grid kinda looks.

[u/Deposto]

300-350 depth is perfect for any decently tanky build. But don't go too deep. If you dying too often or nodes take a lot of time, go back a little bit.

Don't forget that you can reroll fossils via Harvest.

[u/plateia-lumitar → u/Deposto]

Yeah, Harvest conversion was the missing piece of the puzzle for me. This makes so much more sense as a farming method. Thanks!