How to One-Day DK the Full Metal Lion Way

A short guide written by Full Metal Lion before he forgets it. Tested once, successfully, during Season 2. This strategy has been derived and rederived several times by several people; Full Metal Lion may not have been the first,[citation needed] but he was at least the first to write it down in the form of a wiki page.
You may have heard tales from veteran players about how, using grit, tenacity, and the sweat of their brow, they managed to kill the drive in only one day through sheer force of will. Well, that isn't the Full Metal Lion way, no sir! Instead of being “actually good at the game” you can now DK in only one day by rubbing two mechanics against each other to create the illusion of skill! You, yes, you can now DK without having any particular merit through our new patented 17-step program:

  1. Obtain enough DriveKills to be able to purchase a weapon that does automatic damage. The automatic damage needs to be enough to allow you to kill any monster in one hit. Try not to have too much additional health (via eg the gauntlet) because monster health scales with your health. Cat Launcher should do it, usually.
  2. Do a DriveKill. This can be the one that lets you finally buy the aforementioned automatic damage weapon. (e.g. if you need 20 DriveKills to get the cat launcher, this can be DriveKill 20). Make sure to do this at the right time; you want the server's new day to have just hit, so you have a good 4 hours to try to get your one-day DK.1)
  3. Get enough money to purchase said automatic weapon. There are a couple ways to do this, such as: Almost killing a bunch of Titans before you DK, getting a lot of nicotine gum as presents2), fulfilling but not cashing in a DanQuest before your DK, various other money-grubbing techniques (perhaps involving dkpersist), or legitimate jungling (not recommended; too slow.)
  4. Now that you have the weapon, you have to do a lot of fights. You can head into the Jungle and Look for Trouble, or you can go for a stroll3).
  5. You should be getting into a bunch of fights, which you should all win in one round. Eventually, as you become exhausted, you will also lose all of your health each round, but this will not be important because fights that end in a tie (a double KO) result in the Contestant's health being set to one hitpoint and the monster dying. Some people suggest that instead of automatic damage weapons, one should buy a lightning suit and somehow fight really hard monsters (Bastard/7 Rank) to achieve this effect, but I've never been able to get this to work.
  6. Eventually, you will have one kajillion xp, and be able to enter an Outpost to be accosted for truancy. Fuel up before fighting your masters, or you will die immediately! Ratpacks, energy drinks, cigs, cookies, candies, etc will work, but don't try to cook anything, or you will die of exhaustion.4) Since you can't have less than 0% Stam, this step should be surprisingly easy, as you just need to eat two ratpacks to get to 20% stam, and then one other thing so you don't die while fighting. If you are carrying a lot of crates, you might want to drop them so you don't exhaust yourself fighting.
  7. Should your weapon run out of rounds, you can go into Sheila's Shack O' Shiny and buy any piece of equipment: this will refill the rounds on your weapon. Usually I buy and then sell the cheapest piece of armor available to me, but helmets, gloves, etc also work. Naturally, you have to time this so you don't get ambushed by truancy when you go into town to go to SSS.
  8. You can get up to level 15 pretty easily using this method, then you must simply seek out the Improbability Drive. I don't remember if you need to be not exhausted for this part.
  9. After you kill the drive, etc, check the Hall o' Fame and bask in your own glory5).

This technique has the advantage of being unreliant on the fickle will of various Island events (e.g. Unreps being up, breaches occurring) and can be executed for very low amounts of Supporter Points6). The number of Supporter Points is usually inversely proportional to the reliance on the fickle will of Island events, because gifts are a sure-fire way to transmit req across DKs, but cost small amounts of SP7), while felling Titans and completing DanQuests are completely free from an SP perspective, but more fickle.

Experiment Log

  1. Full Metal Lion's Hazily-Remembered Initial Run That He Would Suspect Was Just a Fever Dream Except for the Fact That He's Totally in the HOF for 1-Day DKs (a long time ago - Season 2): completed as a Kittymorph with a Cat Launcher
  2. Full Metal Lion's Second Serious Try (Oct 8, 2106 - Season 2): Incompleted as a Joker. Full Metal Lion figured out that no autodamage weapon less powerful than a Double-Barrelled Cat Launcher would actually consistently win him fights as needed. However, Full Metal Lion is an idiot who added 80 health to his base starting health through the Gauntlet.8)9) Training Muscle from Tone at Tynan's didn't help. He also chained 86 crates to himself
  3. Full Metal Lion's Third, Semi-Serious Try Which Quickly Devolved into Stream of Consciousness about Crates (Oct 8, 2106 - Season 2): Began as Kittymorph at Rank 7, with only 45 minutes on the New Day clock. Opened the 86 crates. Yearned for a “use all” button. eBoy was selling OSTs and gum at 1,121 and 1,150 req, respectively. The combined value of everything in the crate but the OSTs and the gum was 12771 req. There were 17 OSTs, which I sold for a total of 12,959 req. There were 24 gums, which I declined to sell, as it looked certain I would not reach the amount of money needed to get any good item, but eBoy would have given me about 18000 req, I think. So I conclude that the real expected value in terms of gum of a crate is about 50/86, or .6. With a starting amount of requisition of 300, this would get me up to 44030 req, which is not even half the amount of req I wanted in order to test out a Rank 7 Lightning Suit fmldk. Oh well. I had 100 more crates, but I set them down and someone took them. Peering though the source code it seems that your chance of getting each crateable item is equal. I could be wrong, but that's the general gist I get from the code.
    1. Where was I? Oh yeah. So then FML picked up a DanQuest reward, and played 100 Mysteries until he had enough req to buy a Lightning Suit, which he quickly determined did not have the required properties of killing everything in one hit. Training Muscle from Tone at Tynan's didn't help. Eventually he bought a DBCL and DK'd, though by this point several NewDays had passed. He also learned that a DBCL was not enough to always one-hit every monster above Level 6 on a Rank 7 DK.
  4. Mar 31, 2020 - Season 2. Fujita, attempting an fmldk, contacted Full Metal Lion about having trouble defeating dojo masters at anything below 60% stam (that is, orange stam Exhaustion debuff was ruinous). It may be good to keep this example in mind. (Eventual outcome unknown, though a gander at the Drive Kill Speed Hall O' Fame confirms that Fujita has attained a two-day DK as of 2020-06-09.)
1)
It shouldn't take that long, but just to be safe, no?
2)
when I used this strategy, I used one-shot teleporters to store my cash, they were all the rage.
3)
Go out into the world map and move around a bunch. I recommend moving in a Jungle area to encounter monsters faster (reduces boredom) and being near an Outpost for when you have to go back in, though you might want to go cratehunting (This suggests the tantalizing possibility of multiple consecutive one-day DKs, each using the wealth from the previous via the mechanism of leaving caches of crates around. If anyone actually does this, drop FML a line or comment on this page, perhaps in another footnote)
4)
If a breach is happening, then you might want to pay attention to http://www.improbableisland.com/problem_report.php?op=chat&petitionid=251. I don't know if it matters or not
5)
Not glory glory, obviously. Just normal, everyday, computer-game glory
6)
some techniques rely on items usually bought with SP, like cookies or candy
7)
They cost someone else SP, though! Heck yeah!
8)
Though I don't think I accumulated any more between runs…
9)
Say, didn't I drop out of a full Clan Buff between runs? So many factors.