u/Cravolicious

After hours and hours spent searching for a Love Puppy, specifically documenting many spawns and hoping for a True Love Locket;
Yesterday, while running OCH on Tier 3 a couple times, I ran into a Love Puppy that dropped the item for me (sadly not for my friend).

This was my 5th Love Puppy on this character (all but 2 are documented here and in the prior posts; 3rd was in Legion of Almire replacing a Howlitzer in the left side party button room, second floor, 4th was also OCH but was in the final room before Seerus, in a spawn wave that doesn't drop loot), so honestly that feels like pretty great RNG in terms of getting the item itself but no one I've talked to seems to know the actual odds of the item dropping so.

For anyone following my journey/curious, I've spent 562 hours on this character at time of writing (including probably an hour or two after finding the Locket, also including time setting up stream, time doing Lockdown or other activities with no possible Love Puppy spawns, but also significant chunks of time ACTIVELY looking for Love Puppies) so I guess there's more estimate towards how long it takes to find one of these things?

Anywhoo. Mission accomplished.

THE GOAL:
A few hours of Lockdown using only 0* and 1* equipment, making PvP a viable experience for new players.

WHEN:
8/8/2026, 6:30 pm CST, as streamed live on twitch.tv/jgerrant (watching on twitch not necessary, just be online and queue with proper equipment at the right time). Will continue for minimum 2 hours, or until we feel like stopping.

THE “RULES:”
Tiered Lockdown (make sure to equip a 0* or 1* Shield, or remove your shield. Battle Sprites are automatically not counted), USA server, all equipment must be 0* or 1*, MAKE SURE TO UNMARK ANY LOADOUT WITH 2* OR BETTER EQUIPMENT FOR PVP, you can make sure you've done this right if the Lockdown Icon says "You are Tier 1."

Please do not bring more than 1 UV per item, no Trinkets, max of 3 weapons. This isn’t a hard rule, we have no way of enforcing it, it is a courtesy to maintain a relatively level playing field with players that are otherwise brand new to the game.

Won’t there be griefers?
Likely intentionally and accidently, yes. Since the only way to run this is as Untiered Lockdown, it will be fully possible for Tier 3 players to join with their full 5* equipment and nuke whole lobbies. Our main goals will be to education players joining who don’t understand the gimmick, and hopefully just outnumber willful trolls.

I would ask you this. Would you rather gleefully slaughter new players in a 2011 MMO for an hour? Or would you want to be part of a positive experience fostering new players to join Spiral Knights in 2026?

In particular, if you didn't put together, this is tied to me and my wife's little streaming community we've been building. We have upwards of about a dozen people who have at least tried the game, and this will give them a unique opportunity to experience pvp without just getting nuked by 5* gear (or at least whoever finds the time to join us), and of course I'd encourage y'all to get a friend or two to roll a new knight and introduce em to the game in time for the event.

Aside from checking out the twitch link (we stream regularly) you can join our discord to keep tabs on the event, talk with other participants, and get a ping when the stream/event is starting.

EDIT:
Thank you for the correction from u/Fangel96, we will be running TIERED Lockdown in Tier 1, which should almost completely eliminate any potential for griefing. Please double check the first paragraph of THE "RULES" to make sure you understand.

Prior posts on this topic;
The Prequel/Part I
My First Observations/Part II
Neither are necessary to understand this post, but if you have further questions about my methods/what I've done so far/why, those are good places to check. In short, I'm seeking Love Puppy spawns and hoping to get a True Love Locket, documenting my methods for any who come after me.

Again, the full numbers to start.

>I have documented 1,521 Gun Puppy spawns (regardless of exact variants)
I have documented a combined 1,012 combined Howlitzer and Polyp spawns (again, regardless of variants)
I have seen 2 Love Puppies on this character thus far.

And again, these are just the numbers from my documented methods and attempts, this does not include the grand total of every enemy of those types I've seen on this character (although the Love Puppy count is every single Love Puppy spawn I've seen on this character total, regardless of documentation or not, over about 2 months of play).

Alright, first of all, the main method I attempted this time focused on Howlitzers. This is because of u/Flintsr's comment on the prior post, claiming that Love Puppies have a 1 in 3000 chance of replacing Gun Puppies and a 1 in 2000 chance of replacing Howlitzers or Polps. I don't have any... specific reason to believe this claim? However, this is the first time I've seen anyone claim concrete numbers with certainty, and they made a vague statement about data mining.

Tangentially, a lot of the modern posts of Love Puppy sightings have been in place of Howlitzers and Polyps, and it makes some sense to me that they may have made them more common with the slightly rarer/newer variants of turrets (I've been playing the game long enough to remember when Howlitzers and Polyps were added) so I also have no reasons to doubt this claim.

The only reason my Gun Puppy number went up was Vanaduke runs and 1 from the first method listed below. As stated in the prior post, each FSC run yields a total of 22 Red Rover spawns, I completed another 12 Vanaduke runs, however during one run we took the left path through the third floor (Ashen Armory) missing out on 3 Red Rover spawns. Despite what these posts may lead you to believe, I do have fun sometimes.

Armed with the knowledge that Love Puppies were more common in place of Howlitzers and Polyps, and that the True Love Locket can drop at any depth in Tier 3, I began an initial phase of testing.

Pre-Method: Mission Averaging
Looking at the earliest Tier 3 missions, I run multiple attempts of Vicious and Viscous, In Cold Blood, and Weight of Darkness to see which mission had the highest average of combined Howlitzer/Polyp spawns. I skipped Return of Ur, as that mission is entirely Dark City which does not feature any Howlitzer spawns that I am aware of.

My goal had been to run each mission 5 times, although I only ran Vicious and Viscous once; I saw a single Gun Puppy spawn (added to the total above) and no Polyp or Howlitzer spawns.

My 5 attempts of Weight of Darkness and In Cold Blood yielded the following results;
In Cold Blood was a total of 29 Polyps with an average of 2.4 per run,
Weight of Darkness was a total of 41 Howlitzers with an average of 8.2 per run.

The numbers were clear, Weight of Darkness was the winner, and my fate was sealed.

Worth noting, I did not document how long each method took this time, that seemed like too much effort for minimally helpful info. In terms of Weight of Darkness in particular, it was about 12 minutes to complete while killing everything, about 6 minutes to just run through as fast as possible (for me personally).

ALSO, a significant amount of this research and documentation was done live on stream, come check us out (me and my wife play SK together regularly, we do follow that stream schedule listed).

The Main Method: Weight of Darkness
The plan is simple, same as a Black Kat run, you run through the first floor of Weight of Darkness (a poison Candlestick Keep), and that's it. Sometimes I fought all the monsters and got all the loot. Sometimes I ran straight through. I started doing it before the Black Kat event started, I kept doing it with the event active. I did it with a friend once or twice, I mostly did it alone.

I ran through this floor, documenting total Howlitzer and Polyp spawns (because yes, I saw Polyps multiple times) a total of;

100 times.

I saw a total of 942 Howlitzers, averaging 9.42 (outpacing the initial estimate, that's nice). And you know what's funny? The plot twist here?

The screenshot up there isn't from one of those attempts.

During that time, I was still running arcade, doing my daily Black Kat Prestige mission, and that second spawn was from the latter, just a random bit of luck in an unrelated Candlestick Keep.

Something I also learned during the Black Kat event is that at somepoint the game was changed such that joining a party after a monster had spawned prevents you from getting drops from that spawn. In other words, I can't have friends joining me to roll the dice for a True Love Locket whenever I find a Love Puppy; if I've already found it and I'm playing solo, I'm the only one with a chance of getting it.

And no, I did not get it.

In Conclusion
I know the tone of this post was maybe a bit more aggressive than the prior one but I'm still having a lot of fun. Streaming the game has been great, rediscovering and getting to do all things I never did as a kid in this game has been fun, I still have nothing but good things to say about Spiral Knights as a whole.

Fate is also a funny thing; while my goal is Love Puppies, I saw 2 Soul Jellies while playing with a brand new player on back to back floors, plus a third one today that I didn't post about (I'll put it in the comments here), and as far as I know those are the first 3 I've seen in all my years of playing this game.

Like I said, I'm still having a great time. I doubt I'm gonna make another post about Love Puppy searching unless I find a new revolutionary breakthrough/method, but this was a fun journey, and I hope y'all learned something (or, at the very least, the next time someone like me googles about finding Love Puppies, they can find some actual information instead of just speculation). Preciate y'all, have a good one.

The situation;
My Capcut video project broke and wouldn't open. I uninstalled Capcut and installed Davinci Resolve, starting to learn it and taking the most recently exported video copy of said project to keep working on it from there.
Earlier in the video, I used this font to credit music that I was using. The closest thing I'm seeing in Davinci Resolve is just Georgia or Georgia Pro italicized, but no matter what way I twist and tweak the line spacing or kerning I just can't get it to line up, certain letters (the E and the P) just don't look right.
What font are we thinking this is? And bonus points, is it in Davinci Resolve (kidding, I've downloaded fonts before, I can handle that part).

These were sighted two floors, one after another.
I have been hunting for Love Puppies for over a Month, I have only seen like 5 Black Kats.
Wah.
Huh?

https://www.twitch.tv/jgerrant

POV: you've just achieved consciousness in the depths of the Clockworks and a nearby party button clicks into place.

A few days ago I made a post asking about the odds of Love Puppies spawning and potential farming locations. We had some good discussion, some new things were brought to my attention, but I still didn’t have any concrete numbers that I was satisfied with. I cannot tell you what all the numbers are, but in this post I will go over the journey I’ve been through the last few days, my findings, assumptions and conclusions.

First of all, without getting too into the weeds. My current character was made almost exactly a month ago.

>I have documented in this post 1,259 spawned Gun Puppies (regardless of exact variant).
I have encountered on this character 1 Love Puppy (the above image, encountered using the first method we’ll discuss).

This is by no means every chance this character has seen for a Love Puppy to spawn either. The majority of my documentation was dedicated efforts over the last 48 hours (although I was able to retroactively count all of my FSC runs, more on that later), and while I only checked Gun Puppy and Gun Puppy variant locations, Love Puppies can spawn in place of Howlitzers and Polyps per the wiki (was also confirmed by u/pocket_mage under the original post I made). This number also was only what I was documenting, and didn’t include random Arcade runs, Prestige Missions, anything else I was doing over the last couple days, nay, this characters’ full playtime.

With that being the case, I had seen one estimation that the chance of a Love Puppy spawning was 0.5% and I don’t know where I originally saw that or who came up with that number but I definitely think 1 out of 200 is very very incorrect based on this track record. My major goal is to acquire the True Love Locket, I have seen people mention that as a 1% in and of itself, but unless I start to see significantly more Love Puppies that doesn’t seem like an easy thing to confirm so I’ll have to operate under the assumption that is more or less correct. In conversation under the original post, u/ManletOfManlets confirmed people both seeing Love Puppies and acquiring the True Love Locket as high up as Depth 19, so if depth is a factor in the drop, I think we can safely assume any Tier 3 location is good enough.

That being said, here are the four methods I attempted and/or documented.

Method 1: Operation: Crimson Hammer

The first comment on my original post was from u/ParadoxGam3r who mentioned the beginning of OCH, which has three immediate Gun Puppy spawns. This was, quite frankly, a stroke of genius. With only MSI: Low from my Battle Sprite, I was able to check the start of this mission 2-3 times a minute, clocking in at 3 Gun Puppy Spawns every 25-30 seconds. Over multiple sessions, I logged a total of 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 27 seconds (roughly, phone timer on and off) and checked the start of this mission 200 times, or rather, observed 600 Gun Puppy spawns.

It was during my final 50 checks that I found a Love Puppy, as seen in the image for this post.
I didn’t have a ton of friends online and didn’t think to dm any of my direct friends (sorry y’all), but as you might assume, I did not acquire a True Love Locket from this one Love Puppy.

The process of checking this mission was immensely tedious. I was not killing anything (except the one time there was a Love Puppy, to grab the screenshot), I was menuing, running and looking, menuing, etc. It was mind melting. This is definitely the fastest way I can think of to check potential spawn locations; again, in under 2 hours (with several minutes dedicated to ogling the one that did spawn, as well as quite a few inefficiencies as my brain broke) I was able to spawn 600 Gun Puppies. The best thing I can say about this method is if you are playing bingo, or running a charity livestream or something, if you HAVE to find a Love Puppy, I am 100% sure this is the fastest way to force a spawn.

Method 2: Beyond the Axes of Evil

So I’m leveling this character alongside my wife, which means that I am waiting to complete Rank Missions until we have the time to sit down and do so together. This mission was the only one I had in Tier 3 that I thought had any major density of Gun Puppies (I also chose this mission while still a little uncertain if anything other than an actual Gun Puppy could spawn as a Love Puppy; they very much can, I’ve seen screenshots since then).

I could tell pretty much immediately this was a suboptimal choice, but I stuck with it to get some numbers. After five runs, my average time to complete the mission was 16 minutes, 46 seconds. Admittedly, I was heating some equipment so my only reliable weapon was a Blazebrand which made fights with predominantly gremlins run a little long. The mission ends with either Perimeter Promenade or Perimeter Promenade II, and I don’t think it’s possible to easily determine which you are going to end up in. Running Perimeter Promenade nets you a total of 11 Gun Puppies, running Perimeter Promenade II nets you 17 total. I don’t know if it was my timing, I only hit Promenade II once across 5 runs. I ended up with a total of 61 Gun Puppy checks. I’m sure there’s a good reason to speedrun this mission, Love Puppies are not it.

Method 3: Arcade Arenas

Of course I had already thought about Arenas, and u/PatamonBlade76 specifically brought them up under my original post. My main concerns had been Depth and finding an Arena that was easy enough to access quickly. Well after it had been confirmed that the True Love Locket could be found in the top of Tier 3, lo and behold, my prayers were heard and I was granted Iron Pawn Gate, which has only two potential floors for the top of Tier 3, one of which is a Gremlin Arena.

I ran it 10 times, timing from the point I entered Emberlight and including wait time for the lift to change if it was on the wrong floor. I averaged 9 minutes, 29 seconds for runs that I was able to immediately enter the Arena, with an average of 17 minutes, 17 seconds for runs that had to wait at the lift. I also want to mention that at most I had a run go to 23 minutes with wait time, and I want y’all to keep in mind that this gate layout was the most optimal for what I was attempting.

That being said, I don’t know I’d probably recommend this method. Running Arena is great for crowns and rarities, you check 18 spawns per run through (6 in the first room, 12 in the last room), there are definitely significantly worse ways to keep an eye out for Love Puppies while playing this game. At best, assuming a completion time of 9 minutes, I was checking 2 spawns every minute and making 1k crowns (+materials, minerals, rarities, etc). In total, with my 10 runs, I checked 180 Gun Puppy spawns.

Method 4: Vanaduke
I could not live with my own failure, and where did that lead me? Back to him.

With this character being so new, and having only run the boss through the Arcade, I can confidently document how many FSC run throughs I’ve completed. I didn’t have to back out of any, I acquired a total of 60 Almirian Seal tokens including three times where I received 4x tokens, so I am 100% confident that I have completed 19 runs. At least 4 of those were during this documentation process, half of them were solo and many of them were with one or two players less experienced than myself, meaning I personally saw every monster spawn most of the time. For the few times I didn't... what kind of Spiral Knights player wouldn't announce to the lobby when a Love Puppy spawns? Are you a monster?

In total, FSC includes 22 Red Rovers (4 on the first floor in that ending party button room, 3 on the second floor in the top left nature sprite room, 3 on the third floor in the room with all the traps, the key, and the Trojan spawn, and the fourth floor has a whopping 12, consisting of 6 on the initial bridge, 4 at the end of that first party button room after the bridge, and finally 2 more at the start of that last party button room; I am not counting that one Rocket Puppy room since that respawning bastard can’t drop the Locket, and even if they could it would be out of reach). I did not time my runs, we have spilled enough digital ink about the efficient ways to run FSC and slay Vanaduke, you guys know your pace I’m sure. In total, over these 19 runs, I inadvertently checked 418 Gun Puppy spawns.

In Conclusion:
I’m going on vacation this coming week (yes, I'm missing the Tortodrones, I'm unironically heartbroken) and I don’t think I’m any closer to finding a True Love Locket or understanding Love Puppy spawn rates. But you know what? I am completely fine with that. I love this game, I love that it features things like Love Puppies that are incredibly rare and esoteric like this. I am happy to have done my bit towards the community’s collective knowledge of the game, and I can't wait until the next time I run into one of these guys, and/or share any other attempts I may come up with. Hope y'all learned something, or at least had fun with this post.