Arknights: [Darknights' Memoir] Farming Strategy. What Should You Farm?

Short Recap

With Darknights' Memoir (DM) beginning shortly, you may still be wondering what exactly to do in the event. In the Farming Guide and Event Operations page, it was mentioned that the best stages to farm are DM-6, 7, and 8, for Sugar, Kohl, and Oriron, respectively. A question that naturally comes is: which one should you prioritize?

I'll be referencing Penguin Stats for drop rates and Moe's spreadsheet for stage efficiencies throughout this article.

Check out the Farming Guide and Event Operations page for some context of what I'll be talking about:

DM and Chapter 7 Stages

Since Chapter 7 was released in the middle of DM on the CN server, it's reasonable to compare the hypothetical efficiencies of Chapter 7 with DM's stages.

Even when looking at the Chapter 7 stages, 7-18 only has one extra drop aside from Oriron, and 7-12 similarly has only one extra drop aside from Sugar. 7-5 may be able to compete with efficiency for Kohl, but it does have a lower raw drop rate than 4-4 (and 6-11). Unfortunately, I don't know how to calculate all the efficiencies myself, so my best guess is that those 3 stages are all lower in efficiency than our best stages currently.

With all that said, which one of the three is the best to farm during the 21 days that DM is going to run? Simply looking at the efficiencies from Moe's spreadsheet tells you that DM-7 is the most efficient of the three, but I don't think that's the best plan given the event schedule.

DM and Other Events

DM-7 is a great place to farm Kohl, yes, but Grani and the Knights' Treasure (GT) has just finished its rerun. GT-5 is actually more efficient than DM-7 as can be seen , so DM-7 should be the lowest priority simply because we had the GT rerun already. Hopefully, you've farmed your fair share of Loxic Kohl from GT-5 and you're fine with focusing on other materials now.

DM-6 has the lowest amount of Sanity needed per T3 Sugar drop, so it's a good idea to stock up on Sugar there. However, there is a future option that is almost as efficient as DM-6 in the future. RI-7 from Gavial's event has slightly better drop rates of Sugar than DM-6 and costs slightly more Sanity, but is almost as efficient as DM-6 as seen in the prior linked spreadsheet. In case you don't farm enough sugar from DM-6, you can get your deficit from RI-7.

On the other hand, DM-8 is superior in Oriron drop rate to all future events so far in CN (as of the time of this post), with the second best option being FA-8 from Rewinding Breeze, having a drop rate lower by 19%, and FA-8's farming efficiency is lower than DM-8 since it has EXP as extra drops. You won't get a better deal than DM-8 for farming Oriron for the foreseeable future (except CC stores because they're technically free Sanity-wise).

Of course, your farming needs depend on what future Operators you want to pull and how much of each material they need. Check out the Planner to get an idea of how much you'd want to farm from this event, or use the respective pages of the materials:

As a baseline, I'll be looking into the costs of the new and unreleased Operators from the Asbestos/Tsukinogi banner up to the Blemishine banner. I calculated the costs to raise them from E0 1 and SL1 up to E2 1 and SL7; here's what I found:

You need quite a bit more Oriron than either Sugar or Kohl, so it does reinforce the idea that Oriron is the best material to farm from DM.

Oriron may be craftable from T2 and T3 items unlike Kohl, but considering the higher amount of Oriron you need over Sugar and Kohl, DM-8 is the best stage to farm in our next event.

Because GT just ended, DM-7 is less valuable now and should only serve to cover any Kohl deficit you think you may have from GT-5.

My personal recommendation would be to spend 11 days farming DM-8, 8 days on DM-6, and 2 days on DM-7 just to make up for the shorter-than-usual duration we had for the GT rerun. Sanity potions should be spent on DM-8 as much as possible.

I'm welcome to suggestions if you think I should change anything, and please tell me if I made any mistakes somewhere here.