I think I may have spawned a couple vagrants for myself. Would love for others to try and replicate this.

EDIT: DISCLAIMER -
Over the course of this thread, the tl;dr is that I HAVE learned how to spawn vagrants. There's plenty of testing still needed to learn more about specific requirements and what's truly going on behind-the-scenes, but a lot has been learned and significant progress has been made.

However, there is a ton of thinking outloud and speculation in these posts, where later discoveries render earlier posts outdated. I'm leaving them here, but if you're looking for an easy guide on how to spawn vagrants, that'll come later in a new discussion thread when I have more facts available.

Here's a quick summary:

Facts:

-Evil Vagrants are caused by lost batches of a large amount of humanity. Double suiciding to lose a bloodstain containing a large pile of soft humanity is a tested method that appears to work.
-Good Vagrants are created by abandoned items.
-You can create both types of vagrants for yourself, but it's not a "direct" method (more on that in the speculation below). If you're persistent enough, you can make it happen, but it requires a lot of patience. I've made 10 for myself so far (6 evil, 4 good).
-Vagrants have specific spawn locations, just like invaders. They won't appear directly where humanity/ items are lost.

Speculation:

-The most likely reason you can create vagrants for yourself is because they're getting passed around to other worlds, most likely players in your IP pool. So vagrants ARE normally created by other people online, but they have a small chance of coming back to you. I consider this to be a solid hypothesis based on my testing, it can almost be considered fact.
-There is likely a mechanic that passes around the two last items you dropped and abandoned to other worlds. I don't believe dropping 30 items is any more beneficial than dropping 2, because the first 28 are likely discarded entirely.
-The passing around of these bags that can result in Good Vagrants is almost certainly why Vagrants are also known as "Drift Items".

Unknowns:

-How much lost humanity is sufficient for creating Evil Vagrants?
-What causes some to appear as red? (all have been white so far!)
-Assuming that a stray bag "drift item" turns into a Good Vagrant after being passed around across multiple worlds (basically a guarantee at this point), how many times does it need to be passed around to turn into one? 3? 5? No idea.
-Do the last two items you drop always find their way to another world, or is chance involved?
-Do only certain items work? I've had success using the items that Good Vagrants drop to spawn Good Vagrants, but that's not a known requirement yet.

(original post below)
- - - - -

So I finally began some vagrant testing and got a couple unexpected results. I was starting with two main hypotheses, which are that Evil Vagrants are created by others losing a large amount of humanity (not dropped items, which I expect more likely to result in Good Vagrants), and that you have a chance of sending these Vagrants to another player's world (not your own).

Of course no one knows the exact methodology, but presumably by losing a "large amount of humanity", a direct quote from the manual, they mean losing a bloodstain that contains a large pile of humanity in it. I've been wanting to try and test this for a while, and recently a player informed me that shortly after a friend summoned him for trading, he died twice on the Hellkite bridge in his own world, losing a pile containing 98 soft humanity. His friend had an Evil Red Vagrant appear by the Sunlight Altar only a few seconds after his death, a known vagrant spawn location.

With that basic expectation in mind (it's how I always assumed it should work), I tried to replicate it and something weird happened instead.

TEST #1

1. I summoned another player via white soapstone by the Sunlight Altar to get connected, hopefully increasing the chance that he's targeted by a vagrant I might create.
2. I black crystal him back to his own world, then I double suicide, losing 99 soft humanity. He waits around for a vagrant, but never sees one.
3. Steps 1 and 2 are repeated again. No results again.
4. I try again, this time summoning him into my world and deciding to also try dropping some items and dying while he's present in my world. We get invaded, I kill the invader (probably unrelated, you'll see in a moment)... then drop a pile of 99 humanity (item-form), and 99 Purging Stones.
5. As soon as I respawn, I get an Evil White Vagrant in MY world:



Bear in mind that on that last attempt, I didn't actually get to double suicide and lose all my soft humanity. So was this vagrant created by the 99 item-form humanity or 99 Purging stones I dropped? Or was one of my previous attempts successful, but just delayed?

Also, why did I get a vagrant instead of someone else? They're also known as drift-items... maybe test #1 was successful for another stranger online, but they never found it, then it drifted into my world, only by coincidence after the 3rd test was conducted? That might make sense, but then again I'd expect Vagrants to be a little bit more common if they drifted around to more worlds if they aren't found after spawning.

So I'm left not knowing what to think. It's somewhat of stretch to think that maybe it was a coincidence, given the rarity of vagrants, but not impossible. Did it really show up regardless of my actions, or did I trigger it for myself?

TEST #2

1. I did another series of tests, this time without summoning anyone else nor getting invaded. I tried the same basic process, double suicided with 99 humanity, no results.
2. Double suicided again with 99 humanity, no results.
3. Double suicided again with 99 humanity, no results.
4. All out of most of my humanity again, this time I drop 99 item-form humanity and 99 titanite slabs and suicide once.
5. Immediately after respawning, I find ANOTHER Evil White Vagrant by the Sunlight Altar again.

So, I made it happen a second time. Crazy, huh? Or just extreme luck, but I really doubt two vagrants can be a coincidence.

The problem is, I've tried this whole process again maybe 7 times and haven't had any luck. I'm also doing more drop events of random items after running out of humanity. If you're wondering how I can keep doing this, it is through illegitimate means (PS3 Mega Mule).

I'm going to keep trying, but I'd love to see if anyone else would be interested in trying the same or similar tests. I can't promise you'll have any luck though, it may have "worked" for me 2 / 9 times so far.

Oh, I should also add, I've been able to prompt those "stray item bags" for myself several times during these tests. You know when a random prism stone, lloyd's talisman or rubbish shows up on very rare occasions?

I think those might have something to do with item-spawned vagrants, but there's no direct evidence for this yet. My guess is maybe they're under-developed or failed item-vagrants. As Ublug here can vouch, he discovered a way to sometimes make these appear in your own world by abandoning items over and over and returning to where you abandon them. I can verify that I repeated his methods and got the same basic results, but with a lower success rate as I can recall.

The difference here is that instead of dropping two items or two groups of items and running far enough away and back to trigger their disappearance, I'm just suiciding.

I've gotten about 4 bags of Lloyd's Talismans so far, once I got two at once side-by-side (no rubbish or prism stones yet):


What's cool though is that one time I dropped a Firekeeper Soul and a Copper Coin, and found 1 titanite Shard in its place! I haven't heard of that being found before, so I thought that was neat.

It's a low success rate, but usually all I'm doing is dropping two stacks of 1 item and suiciding, and every now and again I find one of these random items in their place. It's an easy test that anyone can try. One other player has after reading about my tests. He had a much lower success rate than me, taking over ~50 drop/suicide attempts to finally find a LLoyd's Talisman (and no vagrants yet)...

tl;dr - I feel like I haven't gotten any closer to figuring out any specifics, but after a few hours of testing I saw a couple vagrants and at least 5 "stray item bags'. Both of these are known to be pretty rare, so it's more likely that I'm doing something right, rather than pure coincidence.

edit: Just got another titanite Shard after dropping two bags of 1 humanity and suiciding.

What soul level are you testing with? I think your success rate may increase dramatically if you were in a rare range; say 600 or so. Less people likely online at that level.

Of course, this assumes that vagrants infect people in your soul range.

Retro - seems like you are doing something right to spawn vagrants in your world. As you say though, its quite hard to pin down the specifics of what you need to do, as there are so many possible behaviours and contexts.

I would love to join you in your research but fear i would not have the time to farm 99 humanity needed for the test? and on that note, how are you able to get hold of so much humanity?

Retro, have you done offline testing? From has placed examples of most online game mechanics in the game for offline players (as far as I know anyway). It stands to reason if they've done Resonance rings, Black Phantom boneweels, white and gold summoning chances and invasions for offline people they may have done Vagrants as well.

Assuming that vagrants and drift items spawn randomly across player worlds, you might be able to up your chances by being offline as it limits the world to.....you know....1

Some potential evidence of this: I've always had a shady internet connection and many nights I might as well be not connected to other players at all. One night I was doing forest invasions, attempting anyway, and Vagrants had been talked about recently. I had a ton of Crystal swords so I would drop a few in my world and wait for an invasion. When I was finally summoned to fight forest invaders (only happened a few times in a couple hour playing session) I would also try to drop swords in their world. So in this instance, internet wise I was connected to a very limited pool of worlds.

This is the ONLY time I've ever seen a vagrant. I spawned after a loss in the forest. I put my cat ring back on and was wandering around killing trees and noticed a little red one by the Wolf Ring ledge.

Retro wrote:Oh, I should also add, I've been able to prompt those "stray item bags" for myself several times during these tests. You know when a random prism stone, lloyd's talisman or rubbish shows up on very rare occasions?

I think those might have something to do with item-spawned vagrants, but there's no direct evidence for this yet. My guess is maybe they're under-developed or failed item-vagrants. As Ublug here can vouch, he discovered a way to sometimes make these appear in your own world by abandoning items over and over and returning to where you abandon them. I can verify that I repeated his methods and got the same basic results, but with a lower success rate as I can recall.

This reminds me of a gravelord servant i met some time ago. He was gravelording in anor londo near the first gargoyle. He apparently had 99 eyes of death in his inventory because every time he killed SoV, there appeared one eye of death on the ground. Then after some time (i don't remember any specifics) when i returned to my world i found rubbish on the ground. So dropping items and not picking them up must be the way to spawn those "stray items".

But anyway, i can certainly do some testing. I'll let you know if anything happens.

Well well... It actually worked after a few tries. 

99 soft humanity + 99 slabs failed twice
99 soft humanity + 99 gold pine resins failed
99 soft humanity + 99 eyes of death failed
99 soft humanity + 99 purging stones worked!

I recorded the vagrant but you've probably seen a lot of those. It dropped 1 humanity. Sunlight altar, SL 372.

FinPeku wrote:Well well... It actually worked after a few tries. 

99 soft humanity + 99 slabs failed twice
99 soft humanity + 99 gold pine resins failed
99 soft humanity + 99 eyes of death failed
99 soft humanity + 99 purging stones worked!

I recorded the vagrant but you've probably seen a lot of those. It dropped 1 humanity. Sunlight altar, SL 372.

That's awesome! We're definitely getting somewhere.  

In the past, I used to dismiss incidents where people claimed that they probably created vagrants for themselves, assuming it was probably a coincidence. Afterall, there are seemingly lots of events where people find vagrants or stray item bags without losing humanity or dropping items, so "other people" creating them seems like the most likely cause in most situations.

However, here's something I didn't consider-- what if when you create a vagrant, it takes the list of players you're connected to (the entire IP pool), and randomizes it, and sends it to a random person on that list? Hypothetically, the player who is creating the vagrant could be included in the draw as well. There's no evidence to support this, but it might explain why the majority of vagrant tests fail. They could be getting sent to random players, but every once in a while you may manage to target yourself or a friend...

Or there could be more to it than that, and there isn't a guaranteed way of triggering one. Perhaps losing a large amount of humanity twice is sufficient, but no matter what it only has something like a 1/10 chance of being created? I hope this isn't the case, it'd be pretty awesome if on each of these tests a vagrant actually was being created each time, sent to random people.

MiketheMushroomMan wrote:I would love to join you in your research but fear i would not have the time to farm 99 humanity needed for the test? and on that note, how are you able to get hold of so much humanity?

I'm using an illegitimate save file that comes with 99 soft humanity, 198 humanity, and 198 twin humanities. I've always maintained in the past that the only hope for testing vagrants was the PC community, although some tools has made it more viable for those of us on PS3.

I realize discussing methods for cheating here against the rules, so I won't go into details... it's something I understand, but at times it's also a little frustrating because I really want to see the silver lining in what hacking/ cheating can do. It can be used to learn more about the game in ways that would never be possible otherwise.

Green__Eagle wrote:What soul level are you testing with? I think your success rate may increase dramatically if you were in a rare range; say 600 or so. Less people likely online at that level.

Of course, this assumes that vagrants infect people in your soul range.

I saw the Vagrant with a level 60 and a level ~100. My failed tests also includes another level 60, and a bunch of other random levels (~400, ~500, etc). I'm considering moving to the Demon Ruins instead, which hopefully has a much smaller population.

skarekrow13 wrote:Retro, have you done offline testing?  From has placed examples of most online game mechanics in the game for offline players (as far as I know anyway).  It stands to reason if they've done Resonance rings, Black Phantom boneweels, white and gold summoning chances and invasions for offline people they may have done Vagrants as well.

I'll try some offline testing later on. I've seen two reported incidents of players seeing Vagrants offline, but both times they said they were online earlier in that playthrough. So we can't be certain when/ how it spawned exactly. If it's possible for a vagrant to linger in your world if you don't encounter/ aggro it (like an un-retrieved golden item drop), perhaps it could've been waiting around from earlier in the playthrough...

The Future Press guidebook explicitly states:

Drift Items are online, multiplayer based items, and as such, you will never see them if playing in Offline Mode.

Of course we have a couple reports of players seeing them offline, and the future press guidebook is known to have wrong information, but they could mean that they can't be created while offline.

The only time I ever saw a vagrant it spawned after returning to my world from being summoned. The host had been dropping bunches of items for another phantom prior to co-op, and some of the piles were just discarded (not picked up). Could corroborate your ip pool theory.

Another successful test!

Demon Ruins (protruding ledge by the minor capra demons) - SL 451:


It's another Evil White Vagrant. That's the same kind of vagrant in all 4 successful events so far. Perhaps the distinction between white vs. red is the white ones are ones you create for yourself? The red ones have the red hue of an invader, afterall. We can't be sure yet, but just an idea.

I did a very similar test to FinPeku again:

1. I dropped 99 titanite slabs and suicided. This left a pile of 99 soft humanity after reviving. No result.
2. Suicided to lose remaining pile of 99 soft humanity. No results
3. I popped twin humanities until I had 99 soft humanity again. Dropped 99 White titanite Slabs and suicided. No result.
4. I dropped 99 Red titanite Slabs and suicided, this time also losing the bloodstain containing 99 soft humanity. No result.
5. I popped twin humanities until I had 99 soft humanity again. Dropped 99 Red titanite Slabs and suicided. No result.
6. I dropped one pile of 95 Eyes of Death, another pile of 4 Eyes of Death. I suicided, this time also losing the 3rd pile of 99 soft humanity. Success!

I think I may try some more tests now where I only lose soft humanity over and over, vs only dropping items, to see if we can find out which action is responsible.

The main modifier here seems to be dropping humanity-items, which is weird. It should happen when you lose humanity inside you.

This is the kind of thing Dark Souls II should made more "accessible", accessible meaning it's easier to learn how it works and it's less bugged (because it's clearly bug, otherwise by now we would've discovered the way to trigger it). Who knows, maybe adding an NPC called "Patches the Hunter", who hunts for vagrants to get their loot, and tells you a bit about how they work or something like that.

Well, I do like that they gave us a truly mysterious mechanic. Because vagrants aren't integral to the game in any way, it's fun to have like a weird easter egg. They wouldn't be so special if it only took a couple months to figure it out.

We also can't say that it's bugged yet. There are so many possible variables to consider, it could be working perfectly and we just don't know what's going on yet. I didn't drop any item-form humanity in the most recent test, only soft humanity and other items.

While I can't participate in this test, I'd like to suggest using Quelaag's Domain. To be precise, the Ceaseless Discharge area.
This area and Lost Izalith should have the least traffic. I'm not sure if there's a Vagrant in LO as well, but in this particular spot, the Vagrant spawn at the very tip of the land, right before it connects to the lava while Ceaseless is alive. I met Vagrants in this exact place two times and I believe it should provide to be a better testing ground than Demon Ruins, because there still are people that co-op and invade there a lot.
I dunno about you guys, but I always have at least one invasion, or co-op before I clear the area and go for the boss.

Interesting enough is that this particular Vagrant spawns in a place, which has online disabled. You can't use signs, nor invade in there.

That's another location I plan on trying. There are a couple other offline areas that are known to have vagrants as well, like the Undead Asylum and Great Hollow. I just realized, the Great Hollow is probably a great spot as well. The known location is inside the base of the giant tree by the all of the mushrooms... not a long walk from the Ash Lake bonfire at all.

Another thing I'll be sharing soon is a comparison of the known & documented vagrant locations vs. the ones that are listed in the Future Press Guidebook. There may be a small error or two in the guidebook list, but the majority of it has been accurate. There are quite a few locations in it that remain without documentation, so it could serve as a sort of fun checklist of other areas where we could try to make them appear.

Drift items, indeed...

All of you who do this sort of scientific testing are owed a debt of gratitude from the community. 

Do you think it makes a difference if your boss is alive?

Maybe the clue is drop something, die elsewhere and die again before you regain your souls. I would like to try: drop something, die, drop something, die again before regaining first batch of souls.

99 humanity sounds like a high number, too. Maybe the trigger is greater than 10 humanity since chaos weapons max on that.

Green__Eagle wrote:
99 humanity sounds like a high number, too. Maybe the trigger is greater than 10 humanity since chaos weapons max on that.

This is my read as well, 10 humanity is the cap for chaos effects, and also (and perhaps more germanely) the soft humanity cap on increasing your item discovery absent equipped items.  Dropping 99 of items, particularly humanity, may be too much and skew the mechanic in some way; I doubt the designers anticipated folks routinely being able to drop that much.  Testing in the range of 5-15 items may make this go a lot faster and also enable more folks to participate.

The random item spawning is also very tantalizing.  I've had this happen to me a number of times in Firelink of all places, finding items like lloyd's talismans or rubbish near the bonfire even though I haven't died there or even passed through it in ages.  Not sure it's tied to vagrants since I'm not sure there is a vagrant spawn point in Firelink?

Oh, I agree... I don't believe that 99 soft humanity is required, but being the max it should be inclusive of the needed amount. The reason for overshooting is that because we don't know what numbers are sufficient, I want to work with something that should surpass the needed amounts.

Once we learn more about the most sure ways to get them to appear, I definitely hope to try and figure out the base requirements. As it currently is, I can do hours of testing without success (there were a couple more failed sessions after the last vagrant I spawned). Adding another variable to it might just cause more failures at this stage, which will likely make things go slower, not faster. I don't want to introduce the possibility that I'm not dropping enough humanity just yet.

My goal is to approach things from the opposite direction. Find a routine where spawning vagrants seems to work with trying 99 soft humanity. If I can get that down, then I'll try 50, then 30, etc. Another humanity breakpoint to consider is 30. It's where curse resistance maxes out, so if it's not as low as 10 but also not obscenely high, 30 might be a good candidate.

Green__Eagle wrote:Do you think it makes a difference if your boss is alive?

I don't think so. The area boss was undefeated when I had the vagrant spawn these 3 times, but I'm pretty sure that past vagrant encounters of mine included an incident or two where they appeared in a zone with a defeated boss. Vagrants can also appear in the Great Hollow, which hopefully means there isn't a mechanic that ties them to bosses.

I did forget to mention an important finding! When I got my 3rd vagrant with these tests, I never went human. So we can probably rule out being human as a requirement for creating a vagrant. And it's certainly not a requirement for seeing one.

befowler wrote:
The random item spawning is also very tantalizing.  I've had this happen to me a number of times in Firelink of all places, finding items like lloyd's talismans or rubbish near the bonfire even though I haven't died there or even passed through it in ages.  Not sure it's tied to vagrants since I'm not sure there is a vagrant spawn point in Firelink?

Yeah, there are no reported sightings of vagrants at the Firelink Shrine. This is also corroborated by the Future Press Guidebook's list of locations, which doesn't include Firelink.

Stray item bags have been found at firelink, but I don't know if that's yet an indication that they're not related to vagrants. If the stray item bags are perhaps something that turn into Good Vagrants after getting passed around more, it could be that the bags appear wherever they are abandoned at first, then they move to the nearest spawn location once it's actually a vagrant.

We should keep the possibility in mind that the whole stray item bag thing is just a distraction... a bug of sorts. It could be the game not properly erasing an item upon reloading, and then glitching the item ID. What makes me think it may be an intended mechanic though is how vagrants are also known as "drift items". And how people also seem to find these items in their worlds without initially dropping things themselves. If they're "drifting" into other people's worlds, it almost seems like it can't be a coincidence, and might be the very reason Vagrants are also called Drift Items.

Another thing I want to test with a partner is to see if we can create a situation where we send stray bags to each other. It's been noted that people have found them after disconnecting from a world where an item hasn't been picked up (I and others have seen this). What I want to know is if this can happen without being in the same world... if the item bags can TRULY be sent to other players online. So we'd summon each other to get connected, but instead of dropping items first, we black crystal to our own world. Then we'd start dropping items in specific locations, and check the others' locations to see if we get a bag from them.

My fourth vagrant!

Yet another Evil White, this time using the spawn location behind the titanite demon in the catacombs:


This time I didn't drop any items at all, only lost humanity. This nicely matches my original hypothesis that evil vagrants spawn from lost humanity specifically, and probably have nothing to do with dropped items (which I believe Good vagrants do).

1. Suicided in the titanite demon hallway, putting 99 humanity into a bloodstain pool.
2. Suicided again in the same area, permanently losing the above 99 humanity.
3. Popped myself another 99 soft humanity using twin humanities, suicided again (putting 99 humanity into a bloodstain pool).
4. Vagrant was waiting for me there when I arrive again.

You'll notice that it didn't appear immediately after losing a batch of 99 soft humanity, but that it was between 'double suicide' sessions. In earlier tests, I lost a bunch of humanity, without vagrants showing up, then I dropped some items and suicided, then had the Evil Vagrant show up right after. That made it look like the dropped items may have been responsible, but I think what's actually going on is that there can be somewhat of a delay.

Vagrant #5!



Same process as above, only it took an extra set of steps to work (two more suicides with one more pile lost).

edit: Something I've been noticing...

I think I believe in the IP pool hypothesis for now, where the idea is that you can send a vagrant to a random player in your IP pool, but that list includes yourself, allowing the possibility of creating one for you.

1. When I conducted my first test, I got a vagrant after abandoning 2-3 humanity piles

2. When I conducted my second test roughly a day later, I got a vagrant after abandoning 2-3 humanity piles. But then when I tried several tests with new characters on the same PSN right after, I only had failed attempts for several hours.

3. When I conducted my third test session, I got a vagrant after abandoning several humanity piles. Like #2, I tried again for a couple hours afterwards and it only failed.

4. Same as above, but then I logged out, switched to a new PSN, and was able to get #5 again fairly quickly afterwards.

Why is it that it seems to generally work more quickly after allowing time to pass between testing sessions, or switching over to a new PSN? I think whenever I try more tests shortly after getting a vagrant, my IP pool is likely growing in size, thus reducing the chances I'll get a vagrant.

For a moment I was considering that there's an invisible timer that doesn't let you create more than one for at least several hours, but I was able to just get a vagrant #6 shortly after vagrant #5:



I find it interesting that they're always coming out white. I was thinking that maybe ones you create for yourself are white, but another player recently claimed to have gotten a white one without dying any time recently before seeing it.

The future press guidebook says the vagrants will drop something based on the type of player that created the vagrant, and we know that the red and white types are distinguished by their drops. I'm a Darkwraith +3 (every character on the Mega Mule is), so you'd expect my vagrant to come out red if it had anything to do with covenants. Instead, Mega Mule characters don't come with any PvP sin on them... maybe white vagrants = from players without sin, red vagrants = sinners?

I may try to get indicted and then see if my vagrant comes out red, but first I think I'll try some more tests dropping less humanity. I'd love to find out the minimum amount needed.

MYSTERIOUS MECHANICS BE DAMNED I WANT TO SOLVE THIS

Keep up the great work, feels like you are on the cusp of figuring this out!  I may have missed it in the chatter, but did skare's suggestion of trying it completely offline do anything for you?  I agree with his assessment that the designers likely tried to ensure every "online" aspect was also available for offline players in at least some limited way.

If I can pry myself from Zero Escape I have a MM account that could help test

I haven't tried any offline testing yet, but I intend to do so soon.

I did a couple sessions abandoning piles of 50 soft humanity instead of 99, no success yet. I'd be surprised if the amount needed was greater than 50, so for now I'm assuming it was just bad luck.

I had a VERY weird experience with testing dropped items some more. I was just sort of messing around after one of those failed ~50 humanity drop sessions, so I relocated to the Undead Parish bonfire to drop items outside the church (the dead-end corner behind the archer is one of the Good Vagrant locations):

(not my screenshot, just an example)

I wanted to see if I could maybe spawn a good vagrant, so I arbitrarily began some testing with the Sunlight Medal. Instead of dropping huge piles, I'd drop 2 piles of just 1 at at time, near that corner. Then I'd run back towards the stairs / bridge area and jump off to suicide.

Every now and again, I'd find a new bag waiting for me, replacing one of my old ones, containing rubbish. That's not a surprise, if you abandon items over and over you can expect this to eventually happen.

But then I tried a new idea, based on what I read in an old article I found:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/24/dark-souls-multiplayer-musings

...we've reached out to team Dark Souls for confirmation regarding the below cobbled-together details and received confirmation on the following info:
...
Vagrants
Things like discarded items and lost Humanity transform into different forms and wander through other people's game worlds. If people leave them alone without picking them up, they keep moving, eventually transforming into very valuable items. This is another way for players to help each other, with the sense that everyone is helping to bring these items into existence.

Assuming that is accurate, one important thing it says here that it doesn't say in the manual or future press guidebook is "If people leave them alone without picking them up, they keep moving..."

If that's true, that falls in line nicely with the hypothesis that picking up these stray item bags may essentially be 'intercepting' a good vagrant before it turns into one.

So I decided to try something different and not pick up stray bags I found. What I did was this:

1. Drop two single bags of a Sunlight Medal and suicide over and over.
2. If I found a stray bag, I wouldn't pick it up, nor would I drop additional Sunlight Medals. I would suicide again to abandon the stray bag.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 over and over.

I found that the more I did this, eventually the more frequently I'd start finding stray bags. This is a very rough generalization, but I could do something like twenty drop sessions without getting any, then out of the next 10 events or so I'd find stray bags just a couple times, and then after that it got to the point where sometimes there were stray bags 3 or even 4 times in a row, sometimes with 2 or 3 appearing at once.

I think maybe these bags ARE getting passed around to other worlds. And because I'm doing it over and over, I'm eventually getting more and more sent back to me from the players who aren't finding them.

But here's where it gets really strange. I once returned and saw FIVE stray bags at once. Excited at the massive pile, I was very curious. I wanted to find out if maybe the contents of the bags were improving somehow. You know how we typically find prism stones, rubbish and lloyd's talismans in these bags (and also titanite shards, as I've recently experienced)? My guess was that maybe after getting passed around a bunch, the contents of these bags were going to improve before they turned into a vagrant. I wanted to see if there was going to be something different inside.

Going against my decision to leave the bags untouched, I figured picking up just 1/5 wouldn't be a big deal. I only got 1 Rubbish again, but as soon as I picked it up all five separate bags all disappeared simultaneously right in front of my eyes. What?!

Maybe it was just a glitch, or maybe it's an indication that different unretrieved items can coalesce into a good vagrant? Maybe I caught them at a stage where they were becoming connected to each other?

I tried replicating it again with just causing two stray item bags to appear at once. It didn't occur again, I could pick up each bag separately. I'll try again and see if they become "linked" at 3 or more bags, or if it'll even happen again...

Boy, those programmers at FROM SOFTWARE can keep secrets, can't they? It's been almost two years. You would think someone would share a secret with a friend... on the hush hush (don't you know).