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

Theoretical here of course, but that might make sense from a developer standpoint.  I know they wanted a hard to figure mechanic but unless there's a dupe glitch (or MM) to test with, I don't think there'd ever be consistent ability to drop boss souls.  Unless they predicted exploits to dupe items I don't think even From would be cruel enough to have Boss souls be a trigger (or more accurately a different trigger).  

Is there any information on leaving vagrants alone?  I thought I read or heard something about them getting stronger over time.  If that's accurate then that could account for the idea of items gaining value.  However, this opens the door to further variables.  Especially if the vagrants drift if left alone.  The chances of spawning a drift, leading to spawning a vagrant for yourself to letting it alone and spawning a stronger vagrant which in turn leads to spawning the strongest vagrant back to your world seems unnecessarily convoluted.


EDIT: Sorry, if I had more time to play I'd be running tests too but I have very limited windows these days.

Has anyone actually received a decent item from a vagrant? I have had a few myself and just gotten petty items such as rubbish or small amounts of souls. From my personal experience vagrants seem to do very little :(though the idea of vargrants is awesome, just falls short in delivering imo.

Hey, Retro, if you have a good idea of what item drops forms a particular drift item or vagrant have you experimented with different covenants? It would be interesting if a sunbro and darkwraith had different results. Extrapolating: Does soul level affect them? Does a higher soul level result in better stuff? Okay, I know: too many variables.

FROM Software should release a book with all the secrets. Another +1 for your testing.

I've done testing at different levels and haven't noticed a difference yet, but I could try a level 1 Way of White vs a level 500+ Darkmoon and see if the Drift Item bags or resulting vagrants are any different.

I don't hold too much stock in the speculation about vagrants getting more powerful over time though, because much like other early Vagrant speculation, you have to wonder how did someone come up with that? It's not something vouched for the by the devs in the manual, guide book, or early interviews, so I think it was a baseless guess on trying to explain why some vagrants have better drops or appear as red.

The manual nor future press guidebook say anything about the items or vagrants 'improving', but an early article does have this to say (which supposedly has confirmation from the devs):

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.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/24/dark-souls-multiplayer-musings

You could see how someone might assume this means that the longer something sits around, the more it'll transform into something better. However, I think this bit of info more closely matches what I'm observing: An item is dropped, it turns into a cheap / useless item in drift item bag form, but then after not getting picked up and moving around to other worlds, it eventually turns into a Vagrant with a better item inside. How long it actually takes to turn into the vagrant, or how long the drift item bag takes to find another world, doesn't seem to affect what the item turns into.

Though another variable to consider is Vagrant HP. Perhaps they might have more HP based on some characteristic of the player who created them. Low level might mean lower HP, higher level might mean higher HP? The futurepress guidebook lists a range of HP values for both the Good and Evil Vagrant types. There's probably a reason the HP is listed as a range, because some variable probably allows it to change.

But stuff like what their HP is and whether or not different Evil Vagrants are capable of doing different amounts of damage though are on the bottom of my priority list for the time being.

Here's another Good White vagrant, with a slightly lesser soul item. I'd never seen this drop before, but I was able to predict it based on patterns I was seeing:

Why isn't there a way to look in the game code for this?

I'm not sure. From what I understand, without the source code it could be so heavily obfuscated that it'd be incredibly difficult to do so.

Here's a table I made, a sort of "rough draft" for what a completed Good Vagrant table might look like:


There are more items to test (weapons, armor, & rarer consumables not found in the mega mule), and of course I'll need to figure out how to create red vagrants. I also need to make sure it's always consistent like this, but so far it looks like it should be.

This gives me a more organized way to plan future tests and find out what information needs to be solved. I should also be able to predict some of the Red Vagrant drops once I know how to spawn them. One of their known drops is a Gold Pine Resin for example, so of course those will probably correspond to the Rubbish drift item bags.

Here's another new drop documented, this time a Green titanite Shard that came from either dropped titanite Slabs or Blue titanite Slabs (not sure which, ran out of Slabs and then the Vagrant appeared part-way into my Blue Slab dropping session).

So it was Slab --> titanite Shard drift bag --> Green titanite Shard vagrant, which fits the expected progression. I was guessing it would maybe be a Large titanite Shard instead, but it was still something that was only a little bit better than a regular titanite Shard.

Found another drift item source. Dropped Rare Ring of Sacrifice ---> Prism Stone.

No luck yet on testing other rings, but it'll probably take a lot of testing to see if other rings work.

I also got what I believe was +10 Armor ---> titanite Shard.

I don't know which item spawned the Shard exactly, but thankfully it showed up pretty quickly so it's only a small list of potential items that created it: Standard Helm +10, Hard Leather Armor +10, Hard Leather Gauntlets +10, Hard Leather Boots +10,  Chain Helm +10, Chain Armor +10, Leather Gauntlets +10, Chain Leggings +10. Seeing how there's nothing special or unique about any of those, perhaps any max upgraded armor (or +10 specifically) works...

I'll try some +5 and unique non-upgradable gear instead shortly.r

I did some testing with Eyes of Death. Dropping only one of them instead of two each time. I wanted to know how well that would work. It worked pretty well, I guess. However, the most interesting result of these tests was the fact that the two white vagrants I got both dropped a Dung Pie instead of a Charcoal Pine Resin. After the vagrants I wanted to see what the drift bags were containing. Just as I ran out of EoDs I got one bag that was a Rubbish.

So does this mean that Dung Pie and Charcoal Pine Resin dropping vagrants both have Rubbish as the drifting item?

Anyway, here's the test results if you're interested:

long spoiler is long:

Also, I've yet to try dropping Pendants or Rubbish. Will try them at some point.

This is great! The one problem with my table is that the third column makes a bit of an assumption-- noticing that Vagrants appeared to always drop the same thing based on what was in the Drift Item bag, but I didn't actually test/ create all of those Vagrants.

The good news is that 1) You managed to create Good Vagrants for yourself with a good success rate (proving I'm not crazy :p), and 2) the Drift Item bag still contains what was expected.

So for now take the third column with a grain of salt. It could be that the Good Vagrants drop one of a couple or so random items based on what the drift item bag contained, or that it drops something specific to what the original item dropped was, despite seeming to 'lose' that identity when becoming a Drift Item bag.

I'll try to replicate your test to see if I can get a dung pie, but for now I'm still working on expanding the first two columns of the table. You can find newer updates in post #34 still, I'm currently finding a bunch of rings that can create Prism Stone drift bags as well.

Re vagrants getting stronger the longer they're around, I think there were reports (and possibly video?) of vagrants that actually appeared to be physically larger, not just with better drops.  Both the free range vagrants I encountered in normal play were regular size, so I have no firsthand knowledge of this.  The story I recall is someone encountering a giant evil one up between the two AL silver knight archers that blocked the entire "intersection" and one shot them when they tried to kill it.

I also had a really weird drift bag experience yesterday.  I was derping around at the Township bonfire in between coop runs on my channeler trident character, and out of boredom started doing the dance move.  When I finished the 2nd or 3rd one, a drift bag containing rubbish appeared at my feet right beside the bonfire.  I assume it was purely coincidental, but strange nonetheless.  It actually appeared right at my feet such that when I stopped the dance I got an instant pickup prompt from it.

The first time I seen a vagrant was a red one in Sunlight Altar as you already know. I also ran into a red vagrant in a rather odd place, in case this area isnt known, at the small tower in the Undead Burg with the crossbow hollow that overlooks the hollow soldiers right after the firebombers but before the Bull Demon boss tower. He was at the very top with the crossbow soldier.