Overview
A detailed guide that shows you the best way to get the most EXP out of the Adamantoise hunt in Final Fantasy 15.
NOTE
Due to this fight relying heavily on “Alterna” it is not a guide to teach you the fastest sure fire way to beat the Adamantoise. Aterna is heavily based on RNG and does NOT scale with any of your stats.
This guide is to teach you how to farm it for EXP in the most lucrative way/
What you need
Firstly you need to have obtained the sidequest “Let sleeping mountains lie” and to get this quest you must have been to Cape Caem after chapter 9. You can speak to Iris who will tell you about earthquakes or Cindy may call you and tell you about them.
The Adamantoise will then become a hunt you can pick up from Takka in Hamerhead repeatedly.
Items you need:
Ring of the Lucii
Nixperience Band
Ether/Elixer/Hi-Elixer.
Camping Meal:
Lasagna al Forno
Optionals:
Mooglecharms are optional but give each character a 20% bump in EXP earned so I highly recommend them but if you don’t have them don’t worry.
Restoratives
Since you will be abusing the ever living hell out of Alterna for the fight against Adamantoise you’ll need a lot of MP restoratives. Luckily item usage is broken as hell in this game and restoratives are stupidly cheap.
To obtain any resorative you could ever want you need to go to past Alitssia. There is a vendor right outside the Leville hotel where you spawn who sells everything you could need.
There are vendors around Lucis that sell the same sorts of wares but since there are other things we need in Altissia she is much more conventient.
Get yourselves as many Elixers, Hi-Elixers and Ethers as you can afford and then you’re done with her for the time being. Now we can get what we need for our meal.
Camp Meal
The best meal for EXP in the game though it can get pretty pricey so don’t go mad and buy all the ingredients ever if you don’t want to drain your gil too hard. You can find two of the three ingredients located in Altissia at the Maagho tipster’s venue.
Fine Cleigne Wheat Can be found at a vendor just tucked off to the right of the tipster. He’s standing on a small boat and is hard to miss.
Cleigne Darkshell Can be found at a vendor behind the tipster. He’s standing on a small boat just like the other one and is also hard to miss.
Jabberwock Sirloin is the most pricey ingredient and can be found at a vendor located at Maldacio Hunter HQ inside of the shop near the gas pumps.
Once you have all three of these ingredients you’ll be ready to make your meal at camp.
Fast travel convenience
From Takka to the Adamantoise fight is a decent distance away and you can either use your car to get there or use a Chocobo. I recommend a Chocobo so for fast travel convenience we’re going to do a couple of things.
Firstly, leave your car at Hammerhead. There’s no need to drive it to the Adamantoise. This will allow you to use the “Return to Car” mechanic to instantly get back to Hammerhead when you are done with the mountainous turtle.
Secondly we want to use Criclawe Haven as our rest point. It’s the right in the middle of the Adamantoise and Hammerhead so it’s pretty convenient and you can use the “Return to rest point” mechanic to get back there without ever having to leave the general area. This will only be used when your meal buff runs out but it’s good to set it as your rest point to save needless walking/riding.
The Adamantoise
Now that we’ve got our restoratives, our meal ingredients and our fast travel set up you can fast travel to camp, rest, eat your meal and then fast travel back to Hammerhead. When you’re in Hammerhead go on in to the Diner and talk to Takka;
Don’t let the whole “Level 99!” scare you because we’re not going to be close enough for the Adamantoise to do any significant damage to us. In fact the most damage you’ll recieve from this beast is if you’re trying to hit his head while he’s swinging it around, it’s the fall that kills you, not the beast itself.
Once you have accepted the hunt back out of the menu and a small cutscene will play showing you the Adamantoise in the distance.
When it’s done, walk out of the diner and summon your Chochobo then hoof it on over to the big freak.
You do not need to go all the way up to it, in fact as soon as the battle music starts just hop off of your Chocobo and stay at that distance, so long as you can lock on to him you are fine. Just start spamming Alterna and if it fails? Pop and ether and try again. Just keep repeating this until it works.
There is no garauntee when it will work or how many resoratives you will need to use before it does but just keep trying, it will work eventually and you’ll net yourself near 150K EXP every time you kill it.
Your meal buff timer may get quite low. If it is when you beat it then just return to rest point, camp then return to car to get back to hammerhead and turn in the quest. You’ll get 10K Gil per kill plus some Adamantite than you can sell for 50k Gil each so every time you kill it you’re basically getting 150k EXP and 60K Gil.
DO NOT FORGET to have the Nixperience band equiped. This band prevents EXP from being tallied when you rest and you WANT that to happen until you decide you are done farming.
Tallying your EXP
When you decide you have farmed enough it’s time to tally up your EXP but we don’t want to rest just anywhere in order to do that.
Instead head on over to Altissa. You’ll spawn in the Leville as usual but there are two rest points there. you want the one of the right that costs 30K gil to use and has a x3.0 EXP bonus. This bonus is applied when your EXP tallied. (Make sure you remove the Nixberience band before you do this)
That this means is that if you farm the Adamantoise to get 500K exp and then rest at the Leville for 30K gil that 500K EXP will suddenly turn in to 1.5MIL EXP. If you farm up to a mil EXP on Adamantoise? It’ll turn in to 3MIL EXP and so on.
Being in Altissa is a good opportunity for you to stock up on restoratives and ingredients again before you decide to go back out on another farming run.
I won’t lie and say the farming is fast but you do get a crap tonne of EXP from this method and can reach Level 120 pretty easily if you have the patience to sit through the failures of Aterna.