Cooler Yeti: Overview
2025-07-19 // IOTM Overview
This month, we're getting cool. Real cool. We've got the dopest, raddest, sickest, coolest buddy around. Homie wears sunglasses and flexes on the haters. He lives in a bucket of ice and throws you drinks. He also does very little for speed ascenders, who are notably uncool. ... Oh, wait, that's me. Aw, nuts. Let's discuss it anyway!
General Summary
The Cooler Yeti is the familiar spawned from the yeti in a travel cooler. (I appreciate the non-boxed/wrapped creativity in the hatchling!)
As a base familiar, it's a fairy/barrrnacle -- no special formula for either, so it increases item drops at a rate of (55*weight)^0.5 + weight - 3% and delevels your enemy by weight/2 attack/defense, min(weight*4.5, 95)% of the time. It also increases your cold resistance, similar to an exotic parrot; as it is a solely cold resistant equivalent, it gives you +1 cold res per 11 pounds, as opposed to the parrot's cycle through all five elements, which gives +1 cold res per 20 pounds.
It also has a [chat] link! This allows you to spend the yeti's familiar experience in the service of several small boosts. There are four different benefits you can spend experience on:
- For 25 familiar experience, you add some extra stats to your next booze consumed. +25 mus/mys/mox substats, to be exact.
- For 100 familiar experience, you add one random fruit and one random base booze to your next booze consumed.
- For 225 familiar experience, you add 100 turns of the effect "Looking Cool", for +100% item drop and +100% meat drop to your next booze consumed.
- For 400 familiar experience, you double the turngen of your next booze consumed.
Also, it doesn't do anything, but you can ask the Cooler Yeti if he'll always be your friend and he'll give you a thumbs up and an endearing gaze. So cool, yet so heartwarming!
Speedrun Applicability
While the item has serious flair, the actual speedrun utility of the yeti leaves a bit to be desired.
The fairy utility is nice, in a vacuum, and will be nicer in future standards. Currently, though, we have multiple fairies vying for our familiar turns right now in the Chest Mimic & the Jill-of-All-Trades (alongside the perma-standard Gelatinous Cube), and the JOAT is a 1.5x fairy. So using the yeti as your primary fairy isn't likely to be a major consideration until both JOAT and the mimic rotate out. The cold res ability will get speedrunners (on average) 1-2 extra res for your Mmm-Brr Mouthwash, which is neat.
Of the four effects the yeti can add to your next drink, two are of minimal use and two are useful. The +25 stat boon will not be needed until Mmm-Brr rotates out, and even then, it will be an exceedingly low-priority part of our statgain picture. The feature where you trade 100 familiar XP for 1 base booze is kind of cute; there have absolutely been old standards where getting base booze prior to the war has been useful. But given our current leveling picture, unlocking the war and advancing it is virtually always going to be superior to spending 100 familiar experience for a 20% chance at the booze you actually want.
The turngen doubler is actually reasonably useful, and will probably be a part of at least some 1-day scheme before the Yeti leaves standard; while it's a massive expenditure of familiar experience, you can look at it firmly as spending familiar turns to generate adventures. If you are close but not-quite-there to the turngen needed to execute a 1-day, every source of marginal turns becomes extremely valuable. One small frustration with the doubler is that most of our booze with high turngen efficiency is also very small; the math problem of figuring out the most efficient use of the boon is going to (likely) be an interesting problem for 1-day runners in the next few years.
All that said? This is surely the source of marginal turngen that is going to be the first to get thrown in the trash the second we get something better. 400 experience does require some finagling. Even if you boost your familiar XP to +18 (via a warm shoulders wish, leprecondo, TCB, and a mobius ring box enchantment), you still need 23 familiar turns to get your 400 -- and due to the nature of the leprecondo effect, it's unlikely you'll be able to fit that in one spell without reserving 13+ free fights. Still -- if you are trying to do a 1-day run, this is going to be a useful IOTM for you.
Finally, we have the 225 experience boon -- the powerful item/meat effect. There's a lot of dismissing of the effect more broadly, but I think dismissing it is a mistake. +100% item drop for 100 turns is a really, really nice benefit -- it's super comfy, and will majorly help with capping items you need while running non-fairy familiars. If you use the same familiar experience loadout above, it will take 13 turns to get the experience you need -- that's slim enough you can probably fit it into one leprecondo activation without too much trouble. Given how high our nuns meat drop is in modern post-beret standard, I'd be surprised if the meat aspect of the effect saved you more than a third or so of a turn, but the item effect will simplify routing and make runs a bit more comfortable, while also helping with various item searches throughout the run.
2025 In-Standard Synergies
- As with the Chest Mimic (2024), the yeti very much synergizes with anything that provides familiar experience. The main ones worth mentioning are the toy Cupid's bow (2025), Leprecondo (2025), and the Prismatic Beret (2025). (It also synergizes with the cursed monkey's paw, but that is a few months from leaving Standard.)
- The yeti also synergizes with sources of epic booze. Most of the booze you'd want to double requires a pull (like the CyberRealm booze, or the eggnog from last crimbo), but there's a tiny amount of synergy with the Mayam Calendar (2024) and its advanced yam drinks (specifically the size 2 ones that require supercocktailcrafting).
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Cooler Yeti as a tier 4 IOTM, with less than 2 turns saved daily in your average run. It's actually a pretty decent farming IOTM; the turnbloat is clearly better for farming than it is for in-run use, and farmers will get a lot out of a 100 turn +100% meat effect. In actual usage, my guess is that most runners will get the meat/item effect once a run and otherwise put this guy on the shelf. And I don't think the Yeti will mind; lil homie's gonna be chill about it, I bet.
Quick programming note. I've been absurdly busy the last few months as my child continues to grow away from being an immobile potato and towards being a world champion WWE wrestler. Deep apologies about how late this article is. My hope is that I will get the TTT radio backpack done this week. Spoiler alert: it's more useful than the Yeti! Then I'll try to get the mobius ring done, although if I'm honest, the chances of me getting that done before the end of the Hat Trick season on the 15th are pretty slim. Still -- with any luck, I should be caught up by September.
Thanks for your patience, and stay frosty!