PLAY ADA'S TRAIL Ada's Trail

BOX CUTTER

BOX CUTTER
DAMAGE7–11
DPS31.6
SPEED0.30
RANGE32
REQUIRES LEVEL 1

BOX CUTTER is a melee weapon, wielded from level 1. STRENGTH is the stat that scales it.

The requirement cuts both ways: nothing below level 1 ever drops one, and a hero below it banks the find rather than wearing it.

It is a pool base, so it climbs: the same shape returns later in the campaign as CERAMIC CUTTER and MONO-EDGE CUTTER, at requirements the endgame can actually meet.

Off a shipping desk on the GOODCO floor, still smelling of packing tape. It cut ten thousand boxes of engine parts before it ever met anything that bled.

What it does

  • SWEEPThe swing carves a 60° cone and strikes everything standing in it. INTELLECT widens that cone as you grow, out to a full half circle.
  • EDGEDIt has an edge. A blow that takes a body's whole health in one goes clean through it, and the two halves fall apart along the swing.
  • PRICED FORAbout 1.2 target a swing. That is what the damage budget assumes it reaches, which is why a wide weapon carries a smaller blow than a narrow one of the same level.
  • CRIT WEIGHTA critical hit lands for 1.9× — a flat trait of the melee class, the same on every weapon in it. Your build earns the crit CHANCE; the class fixes what a crit is worth.

A dropped copy carries 130 swings of wear. At zero it does not shatter — it falls into the bag unusable until a repair kit mends it, and the hero draws the best thing left.

A fresh find in the hands of a hero who has spent no stat points — the piece itself, with nothing of the wielder in it. Your own STRENGTH, DEXTERITY or INTELLECT lifts these from there, as does an item level found deeper than the requirement.

Make quality

Every plain drop of this base rolls a make quality on top of the numbers above — the craftsmanship of that particular copy, stamped at the moment it drops and frozen for life. It scales the damage and the wear budget together, and it leads the name: a BROKEN BOX CUTTER and a PERFECT BOX CUTTER are the same base item and not the same find.

The bands overlap on purpose, so a good CRUDE can out-swing a poor NORMAL while a PERFECT always clears a NORMAL. Which one you get depends on the level of whatever dropped it: the two odds columns below are a level-1 killer and a level-60 one, and everything between is interpolated. Craftsmanship and magic are exclusive — a magic-or-better find is always normal make.

MAKEDAMAGESCALEODDS AT MLVL 1ODDS AT MLVL 60
BROKEN5–70.58–0.82×20%0%
CRUDE7–90.73–0.97×25%6%
NORMAL8–100.90–1.10×52%54%
SUPERIOR9–111.03–1.27×3%28%
PERFECT10–131.16–1.44×0%12%

What it becomes

The same shape comes back twice more, further down the campaign: an EXCEPTIONAL version and an ELITE one, generated from this base rather than authored beside it. They keep its look, its cadence, its reach and its arc; what changes is the level they ask for and the numbers priced onto the curve at it. A venue that pays this base pays its whole ladder, so a first-map find keeps dropping — as something else — into the endgame.

GRADEREQUIRESDAMAGEDPSREACHES
BOX CUTTER (normal)17–1131.61.2
CERAMIC CUTTER2422–3294.71.3
MONO-EDGE CUTTER4326–40115.71.6

The per-hit blow barely moves up the ladder, and that is the point: a longer-reaching weapon in a bigger build sweeps a wider slice of the crowd, so the same damage budget buys more total output at a similar figure per target. Read the REACHES column beside the DPS one.

Named items built on it

One relic wears this shape, with an authored block of bonuses on top — each on the rung of the ladder it names.

BOX CUTTER, a base item weapon in Ada's Trail, shown on the map of GOODCO HQ where it drops
BOX CUTTER — where it drops, in GOODCO HQ.

Where it comes from

Every one of those pools carries CERAMIC CUTTER and MONO-EDGE CUTTER along with it — the game expands a pool entry into its whole grade family at roll time — so the same venues keep paying this shape out at requirements 43 deep.