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Path Overview: Z is for Zootomist

2025-03-02 // Old Man Yells At Paths

EDITOR'S NOTE: This post was contributed by noway258 (#1735780), a speedster from the aughties who volunteered to write up a path overview for us! Thanks a ton to noway, also known as Tomato Soup on Discord in the Ascension Speed Society. If you would like to post something on Loathers.net, or have an idea for a post that you'd like for me to put on my to-do list, please reach out; you can contact me at Captain Scotch (#437479) in-game, docrostov on Discord, or make an issue or pull request on the Loathers.net GitHub. This site is for everyone! My hope is to post a review of the toy Cupid bow later this week. Now, iron out the wrinkles on your zoot suits, and read on to learn about the jazzy grotesqueries of being a Zootomist!

So, it's March. That means the new IoTM and path are here! You've got a cute cupid's bow, a cute leprecondo, and a cute new path, right? Oh... ew. That's disgusting. Lot of synergy here, but the path's theme is decidedly gross.

Core Path Modifications

The premise of the path is that you play a new class, the Zootomist. You don't have access to your permed skills, and normal methods of statgain don't work. The only way to level is to graft familiars onto your body. To do this, your familiar has to weigh 2 pounds more than your current level.

Your lab contains a chamber where you can graft the familiars onto your body, as well as a specimen preparation bench. This is the progression mechanic for the path; it gives 20 XP to your active familiar. You start off being able to use it once per ascension, and you gain 1 use per completed softcore Zoot run and 2 uses per completed hardcore Zoot run. You can have up to 11 preparation bench charges.

This path also features a unique path reward -- you gain a hatchling for one of 11 new familiars. You will gain one hatchling for your specific player ID; to get all 11, you'll need to trade for the others. These familiars are especially useful for grafting to your feet, for powerful kicks.

Zootomist Strategy

In this path, familiar XP is the name of the game. You want to do most of your grafting quickly in order to reach level 11 and start advancing the McGuffin quest. That's ten grafts -- all but one, as the last graft gets you to level 13. That's 645 necessary familiar XP, and you'll need an additional 169 to graft the final familiar, which gets you to level 13. That's where the toy Cupid bow has a ton of synergy. Among other things, it gives +2 familiar XP per combat, tripling your base rate. Certain familiars also give buffs that boost familiar XP gain once you graft them to your nipples, which you should target ASAP. The Mayam Calendar and Apriling Band Helmet also are immensely valuable, each providing flat bunches of familiar XP you can use for some of your middle-level grafts.

You have 11 slots available for familiar grafting. These slots are:

  • Head; 🧠 = passive intrinsic
  • Left Shoulder; 🧠 = passive intrinsic
  • Right Shoulder; 🧠 = passive intrinsic
  • Left Nipple; 🪄 = castable buff
  • Right Nipple; 🪄 = castable buff
  • Left Hand; 👊 = combat skill
  • Right Hand; 👊 = combat skill
  • Left Buttcheek; 🧠 = passive intrinsic
  • Right Buttcheek; 🧠 = passive intrinsic
  • Left Foot; 🦵 = combat skill, but powerful
  • Right Foot; 🦵 = combat skill, but powerful

Let's go through some of the best familiars for each slot!

Passive Intrinsic Slots 🧠 (Head, Shoulders, Buttocks)

These slots all have equivalent bonuses. They add bonuses and buffs to your Grafted intrinsic; you can essentially look at these 5 slots as your opportunity to add passive bonuses to your character. In my opinion, ther head should give double the bonuses. But who am I to argue with TPTB? For the detailed data, check out our Zooto tool to find the bonus that will get added to your "Grafted" intrinsic when you graft that familiar. In the following overview of the "best" grafts, I only highlight the most ascension-relevant bonuses:

  • Mechanical Songbird: Gives you +35% item, +150% combat initiative, +30% meat. Good mix of the best few buffs, though not necessarily optimal in bleeding edge play.
  • Smiling Rat, Jumpsuited Hound Dog, and Baby Z-Rex: These give the most +meat, each giving +65% meat drop. Also give +15% item and +50% initiative. Great for nuns, and still helps out a bit for modern zmobies & 8-bit realm, along with some item drop help.
  • Autonomous Disco Ball, Scary Death Orb, and Clockwork Grapefruit: They give the second most item drops, at +25%. But it's really only +10% over the +meat bonus monsters above, and they don't have any meat or init bonuses -- the wiki calls them out due to the high item, but we wouldn't necessarily recommend these.
  • Exotic Parrot: This one is pretty cool -- +10 prismatic damage, +45% meat, +15% item, +100% initiative. It's one of the better suites, as prismatic damage is helpful in a lot of spots in a run. However, beware -- if you need Exotic Parrot as a familiar to cap any resistance tests, don't graft it here!
  • Ghuol Whelp, Misshapen Animal Skeleton: These are sleepers! They give +55% meat, +15% item, and +50% initiative, very similar to the rat/dog/z-rex group!

For a bleeding edge player, we would recommend grafting Smiling Rat, Jumpsuited Hound Dog, Baby Z-Rex, Ghoul Whelp, and Exotic Parrot. (If you need the parrot for res purposes, swap it with Misshapen Animal Skeleton.) This gives you an overall intrinsic of:

  • +300% Combat Initiative
  • +295% Meat from Monsters
  • +75% Item Drops from Monsters
  • +10 prismatic damage
  • Stupendous Sleaze Resistance (+4)
  • Slight Spooky Resistance (+1)
  • Slight Cold Resistance (+1)
  • Maximum HP +145
  • Never Fumble
  • -1 MP to use Skills
  • Damage Reduction: 25
  • Weapon Damage +10

Not bad!

Castable Buff Slots 🪄 (Nipples)

The two nipple slots are distinct. Each gives you a skill that you can cast to get a buff. The big benefits are familiar XP (critical for grafting!) and -combat (only available on the left nipple). Let's go through the options. Left nipple buffs are marked with 👈, right nipple buffs are marked with 👉.

  • 👈 Stab Bat: gives +5 familiar weight, +1 familiar XP per combat, +30% item, -5% combat, and +50% initiative. Incredible combo.
  • 👈 Scary Death Orb: gives +30% item and -10% combat. Misses some core buffs from good ol' stabby, but does have a bit more noncombat help.
  • 👉 Killer Bee: gives +1 familiar XP per combat without giving +combat. Also gives +150% initiative, which is great! (Oily Woim also gives +1 XP/com without +com, but may be desirable for finding modern zmobies.)
  • 👉 Baby Gravy Fairy: gives +10 familiar weight, +5 combat rate, +50% initiative, +50% mysticality, and +45% moxie. The elemental variants also add a few different bonuses, like meat drop (for sleazy) and elemental resistance (for flaming/frozen).
  • 👉 Helix Fossil: gives +10 familiar weight, +50% muscle, and +4 stench resistance. Useful for -very- low shiny accounts, as the stench res simplifies Twin Peak, Haunted Kitchen, and (usually) the Hedge Maze. Not recommended for full shiny.
  • 👉 Mosquito: gives +1 familiar XP and +150% initiative, like the Killer Bee, but also has +5% combat.

At the bleeding edge, we'd recommend Stab Bat as your left nipple and Killer Bee as your right nipple. As there's little else for your MP to do, you can consider these as (essentially) always-on intrinsics you can turn off if needed. Combine those two buffs and you'll get primary benefits of:

  • +2 Familiar Experience per Combat
  • +200% Combat Initiative
  • +30% Item Drops from Monsters
  • +5 to Familiar Weight
  • Monsters will be less attracted to you

... alongside a bunch of silly little buffs:

  • +30 Spooky Damage
  • +10 Stench Damage
  • Mysticality +50% & +20 flat
  • Moxie +30
  • Stupendous Spooky Resistance (+4)
  • Regenerate 20-30 HP per Adventure
  • 2x chance of Critical Hit
  • Weapon Damage +10
  • Familiar Damage +10
  • +25% Damage vs. Skeletons
  • +50% Damage vs. Werewolves

"Meh" Combat Skills 👊 (Hands)

This path doesn't really care if you throw hands. The punches just do some damage -- oftentimes with elemental alignment -- and (sometimes) delevel. The only strategic use for your hands is to add something that does cold damage if you need help with the Blech House noncombat. (If that is you, try to use Cold Cut for a maximal cold damage punch. Not necessarily recommended, it still takes longer to get to Blech than in normal standard -- clovers are a better solve for your extra bridge parts in this path.)

For most runners, though, the hands are essentially your dump slot. Use the hands as a place to throw in any familiars that incidentally build XP while you're doing your run after they've served their purpose. A few good options are:

  • Burly Bodyguard: After one combat with your bodyguard, your bodyguard gains XP equal to your Avant Guard progression squared. You get 1 point for each softcore AG run and 2 points for each HC AG run, capping at 11 points. This actually is awesome for this path, as it becomes a free 121 familiar XP when maxed out, perfect for one of your final grafts.
  • Gelatinous Cubeling: If you're doing the Daily Dungeon, you should be using Cubeling to grab its helpful drops. Might as well put it on your hand once you've gotten the helper drops, since you won't be using it again until your next run.
  • Reassembled Blackbird or Reconstituted Crow: You'll be using this for a bit of time in the Black Forest. That means that you'll have some "free" XP on it from the turns you use in the forest, making it an attractive choice to save some turns spent powering up a useless familiar.

At the bleeding edge, you probably just do Bodyguard + Cubeling, assuming you have the patience to get your AG progression points dealt with. For low-shiny players, you may not be running with IOTM familiars for most of your run, so you could end up with things like a powerful Oily Woim or an elemental gravy fairy or something of the like. Feel free to place that on your hands when time permits.

Powerful Combat Skills 🦵 (Feet)

Having dealt with the minor combat skills that don't matter, let's touch on the ones that do. Grafting familiars to your feet unlock a powerful kick skill. There are several powerful things that you can get from these skills -- kicks can give either a sniff, a yellow ray, a banish, a pickpocket, a heal, or a stun. These are assigned to each familiar based on their familiar tags.

There are three levels to each benefit; if a familiar has multiple conflicting tags, it will give a variety of benefits but with less power -- IE, a low-power sniff and a low-power heal and a low-power stun. If a familiar has optimized and minimized tags, the familiar will give the Level 3 version of the subskill, which maximizes the benefit and makes the skill much more powerful. The three primary benefits of note to speedsters (and the ones you'll want to pick up) are:

  • Level 3 Yellow Ray: This is a freefight yellow ray that only has a 31 turn cooldown, the best in the entire game. Think of it as 3 jurassic acid spits for the price of one! You can get it by grafting the Quantum Entangler from the Quantum Familiars path, or you can get it from grafting the Foul Ball or Defective Childrens' Stapler familiar rewards from this path.
  • Level 3 Banish: This is a banish that lasts 100 turns. It doesn't end the combat, but -does- make the fight free, and only has a 31 turn cooldown with Everything Looks Blue. This is great, because ELB really doesn't conflict with anything; it's just free! You can get it from either the Dire Cassava or the Phantom Limb familiar rewards from this path.
  • Level 3 Sniff: This is a sniff, similar to On the Trail from Transcendent Olfaction. Interestingly, it's actually -better- than Olfaction, and has zero cooldown; if you wanted to, you could sniff every monster you encounter! (I really don't know why you would want to do that.) At max level, it has been spaded as 5 additional copies of the sniffed monster, with additional queue rejection. This is really good for low-shiny, though high shiny folks (and those with the McHugelarge Ski Set) may find it unnecessary. You get it from the Heat Wave or Observer familiar rewards from this path.

At the bleeding edge, you'll want both the yellow ray and the banish. At lower shiny, you may want to consider swapping in the sniff; if you have the Roman Candelabra, you probably go banish + sniff. If you don't, YR + sniff is (likely) the best combo, getting you additional ways to get repeats of useful monsters while still helping you a bit on forcing items to drop.

Other Interesting Path Decisions

Having covered the core path mechanics, there are still quite a few interesting optimization puzzles to solve as you think through all the fastest ways to toot your zoot. Let's cover those now!

Astral Gear & Turngen

As with most paths, it's pretty much down to the belt or the mask -- folks with full shiny sets generally do not need the astral pet sweater anymore due to the useful alternate equipment you'd rather be wearing (e.g., toy Cupid bow or tiny gold medal or the familiar's native equipment via TCB). The +20% item drop from the mask is (mostly) a drop in the bucket. Monster Level is a lot harder to come by, and you do need it in multiple parts of your run. So the Astral Belt for +20 ML is going to be the pick for virtually all players.

In terms of your astral snack, astral hot dogs are strictly worse than astral pilsners due to the lack of statgain. The real choice is turngen from pilsners or extra Lucky! charges from astral energy drinks. Given the new Leprecondo (analysis coming soon!), we'd highly recommend leaning pilsners.

Choosing your Moon Sign

The +10% statgain bonuses are entirely irrelevant here. So it's down to just your specific bonuses, unlocked zones, and other general boosts. Most of the buffs themselves are very marginal; the best ones are +5 familiar weight, +5 adv/day, and +1 prismatic resistance. So the real benefits are the zone-specific benefits from each moonsign area:

  • Degrassi Knoll is good for cheap desert access, cooking options, free meatsmithing (if you're making a muculent machete), and the mushroom garden (spooky mushrooms for grue egg omelette for turngen). Signs are Mongoose (+20% damage), Wallaby (+20% spell damage), and Vole (+20% initiative).
  • Little Canadia gets you an extra +1 ML, the logging hatchet, and the ability to monkey paw wish for forest tears for the muculent machete. The logging hatchet skews the distribution of your bridge parts a bit, but can be helpful if you need to spend a ton of turns on your smut orc bridge. The 1 ML is nothing. There's a little benefit here, though! Signs are Platypus (+5 familiar weight), Opossum (+5 adv/day, food), and Marmot (+1 prismatic resistance).
  • The Gnomish Gnomad Camp allows you to learn how to wear a shirt. That's actually pretty useful, as getting the necessary Damage Absorption to max your bonus in the 8-Bit Realm is actually a bit more difficult than usual in this path. From the Gno-Mart, you can also get a +6ML potion, candy for your candy egg deviler, and a few +mys/mox potions from pork gems that help on the tower tests, if you happen to save them. Signs are Wombat (+20% meat), Blender (+5 adv/day, booze), and Packrat (+10% items)

The big decision here is Knoll vs Gnomes; Canadia's benefits almost certainly aren't worth it over those two. In a 2-day, Knoll saves you a decent amount of early meat and gets you extra turns via a D2 Grue Egg omelette, along with a free machete. The Gnomes give you a tiny bit of extra ML, enough DA to trivially cap 8-Bit, and a meat/item bonus. Both have their place. Bleeding edge runs will probably consider both!

Normal vs. Hardcore

In the last several metas, Normal and Hardcore have been essentially equivalent; last year, they didn't even have different daycounts, making normal just "HC + 20 pulls" in every possible way. In older metas, you would often get fun dynamics where normal was 1-day and hardcore was 2-day.

It's a little too early to tell if Zoot is going to end up with that kind of interesting dichotomy. (My guess? Yeah, this will probably be 1-dayable by the end of the season.) But there is one extremely interesting twist that Zoot has introduced over the traditional avatar path. The Zootomist can actually read skillbooks. This is huge -- it means that in softcore, if you own BOFA, you can pull your dog-eared Book of Facts and gain access to recall habitat copies! You also can pull your used copy of a Pocket Guide to Mild Evil and gain access to 3 evilpockets per day. It also means that if TPTB introduce another skillbook style IOTM, they could add even more differentiation between softcore and hardcore.

Other Path Resources

Having read all this, here are a few more resources for Z for Zootomist:

  • The lovingly crafted spading sheet goes into a ton of detail about familiar tags, exact spading, and how the userbase figured out how the path worked.
  • Here at Loathers, we (read: Gausie) made a great web tool for digging into familiar tags: Zooto! It's lit. Use the rightmost button to filter what information you want to see, and you can filter and order by specific enchantments or skills through the up/down buttons over each column.
  • The writer of this piece (noway258) posted his top-10 logs in the Ascension Speed Society discord, in the #logs channel. We also have logs from Zasq, Monty, Bean, and other great speedsters who are digging into the path. If you want to see the current best runs, join us on discord!

Thanks again to noway258 for writing the main content of this piece. Now, go, lowly tarnished -- thou'rt actually quite fit, even to graft. Zoot it up!

Article contributed by noway258