Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher Guide to PVP

In a hurry? Don't like reading much? This section just contains all of the information you need to make sure your first kaiju generally works. (You hit stat caps, it's legal, it attacks, and your cookies all work.)

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Personalities Exist

UKMR introduces personalities, which affect the way that AI-controlled kaiju act in battle. Personalities are arguably the most interesting part of UKMR PVP, and they're very powerful. Some AI personalities hard-carry entire builds. FakeLife's quick and dirty explanation of how each AI personality acts is here. The full details are here if you really want to see all the math.

About ⅓ to ½ of the personalities range from bad to non-functional, so don't leave it up to chance. You should consider what personality you want to aim for before getting started.

Personalities are tied to your kaiju's aging type, so you'll need to make sure that the personality you want is possible for the breed of kaiju that you pick. For example, if you want to raise a Sevenger with the Brave personality, you need to pick a sub-breed that has the Early aging type. (Ace-Killer Sevenger, Baltan Sevenger, Gan-Q Sevenger, or Metron Sevenger.) Other Sevengers can never have the Brave personality.

Save often early in your kaiju's life to ensure that you don't pass into Life Stage 3 without a good save to go back to in case you roll the wrong personality. Like a lot of RNG in this game, the chances of getting each personality seem to be seeded each week, so if you can't get the personality you want after several resets, you can freeze your kaiju, let a week pass on a different monster, then unfreeze and try again with a different RNG seed.

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Cookies give unavoidable stats...

and can make your stat minimums more than 1.

Cookies come with powerful abilities, but also come with stat bonuses which can ruin your plans and make you go over stat caps if you don't know they're a thing. These stats can never be trained away, so if you have a cookie which gives your kaiju 50 Defense, then its minimum defense becomes 51, and can't go any lower. Any raising plan should take into account the stat gains from cookies.

In general, we tend to use the shop cookies for competitive play, since they give the fewest stats, which is beneficial in stat cap formats. Also, it's faster to generate a lot of cookies if you don't have to scan an NFC every time. See the section towards the end on Setting up Save Files for more information on a way to make this less tedious.

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No Rest Method

The no-rest method in UKMR is fairly straightforward, and should get you to any competitive stat cap with no big issues.

This will keep fatigue and stress perfectly in check, but not anger, meaning your kaiju will rampage every once in a while. Rampages can raise stat caps and make future rampages less likely, but can sometimes waste weeks of training and cost you a little bit of money.

In general, you should let your kaiju rampage a bit early in life when its stat gains are bad anyway, in order to reduce your anger limit on future turns. Later in life, if you want to prevent a rampage, replace an Astro Mint with a Relaxing Cacao as needed.

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Grit Cookie Order

Assuming you're in a format where it's legal for a monster to have both Self Repair and Overnight Revival, and you want your Kaiju to have both of them, feed your monster the Self Repair cookie first, before Overnight Revival. Otherwise, both of your grits can proc at the same time, wasting one of them.

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Learning Techs

In order to have a chance to learn a tech during errantry, the only requirement is that your stats are high enough to learn it. The only stats that matter are the trainer's preferred stat, and the offensive stat tied to the tech. (You don't even need a high rank for special techs.)

For example, if you want to learn a power tech from Alvaro (whose favored stat is defense) and the stat requirement is 8000 DEF, then your Power + Defense must be at least 8000 in order to learn the tech.

In some formats (notably lightweight) it can be difficult to learn these techniques and keep your stats where you want them for the final build. The drug capsule items which add 100 to two stats and subtract 100 from one stat are great for learning these. For example, if you want to learn an 8000 Defense requirement power tech, but are stuck in Lightweight where the stat cap for a each stat is 6000, you can feed your monster Power Capsules (-100 LIF, +100 POW, +100 DEF) until you have enough power + defense to learn the tech, then you can feed you monster Shallots (-100 DEF, +100 INT, +100 SPD) to drop your defense back to 1.

These stat capsules are very expensive. Make a monster that can farm the April 1 Kanezo Ranch Award to get money for these, and buy them on sale if you need to save the money.

This is the section that will get you up to speed on the metagame for UKMR competitive play. This is many of the hard-learned lessons we've found in years of playing the game, distilled into a quick read.

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Grits are guaranteed

There are two cookies/traits in the game (Self-Repair and Overnight Revival) which give your kaiju the ability to survive an attack that would otherwise reduce them to zero life. Guaranteed grits are maybe the most important element defining the UKMR meta game. They limit the impact of otherwise insane looking cookies like Fury, Villainous Instinct, and The Demon Awakened, they encourage people to run Sharp Senses to work around them, they give cookies like Land Soldier and Fit to Survive time to work, and much, much more.

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Grits require you to have more than 1 life

As mentioned above, grit cookies are extremely valuable, especially to speed builds. However, both grit cookies come with some life which can never be removed. (Self repair gives at least 40 life, and Overnight Revival gives at least 120.) This means that any kaiju which has at least one grit has at least 41 life, and most speed builds in lightweight have 161 life exactly.

This, combined with things like the lowering of the form bonus, the existence of Sharp Senses, and faster guts rates means that speed kaijus can't rely on dodging every attack or reliably winning grit ties when a match goes to time. This means that low-damage speed builds aren't very reliable, and instead speedsters need to have enough power to be able to knock out their opponent over the course of a 60 second match to be consistent.

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Guts Rates (GR) are faster

...in this game because of -2 variants.

The kaiju generation shrine allows you to produce variants with different base stats, stat gains, lifespans, movement speeds, and most importantly, guts rates. All kaiju can have a guts rate two less than its base version. (To a minimum of 7.) For example, Windom Eleking has a base GR of 11, but you can create one at the shrine with a guts rate of 9.

Legend Cup has every possible kaiju variant listed, and a pair of keywords which can generate that variant. Because of the existence of variants, basically every competitive kaiju is from the shrine (not bred) and is a -2 GR variant.

Because -2 GR variants exist, guts rates in UKMR are much faster than other MR games. Kaiju attack more often than you might be used to, withering is weaker, and since attack animations are also longer in UKMR, very fast GR kaijus are more likely to cap their guts.

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Form bonus is only 5%

The bonus/penalty to Speed/Defense based on your kaiju's form in UKMR is only 5%. So, if you have a kaiju with 5000 speed, 5000 defense, and max skinniness, your effective speed is 5250, and your effective defense is 4750. Compared to competitive MR2, this means that speedsters can't save as many points in speed to put elsewhere, and have a bit of a harder time. Fortunately, guaranteed grit cookies help out speedsters a lot.

Note that if you are in a format which allows your monsters to hit the true stat cap of 12000, form, cookies, and other bonuses can raise your stats above the cap.

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20% Breakpoints and multiples of 5

If a game goes to time, the kaiju with the greatest percentage health remaining

If your kaiju's life is a multiple of 5, then Self Repair will leave you with exactly 20.0% health left, while a kaiju with any life total which is not a multiple of 5 will have 19.9% health remaining. (The game cuts off the hundredths place and beyond instead of rounding)

This can result in some very fiddly metagaming involving life totals. For example, if a kaiju with both grits and 161 life fights a kaiju with both grits and 170 life, then:

• The kaiju with 170 wins if they both end the match at 20% health due to Self Repair (19.8% to 20.0%)
• The kaiju with 161 wins if they both end the match with 1 life due to Overnight Revival (0.6% to 0.5%)

Also, it's rarely relevant, but unlike MR2, the game tracks life percentage to more than 1 decimal place during the match (for the purpose of cookies with life checks, like Bone-Wing Maneuvers) but the final check when the match reaches time only checks to the first decimal.

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Stubborn Heavyweight is a thing

There's one particular build you should know about before you pick your techs. A monster with the Stubborn Personality and the Heavyweight trait moves forward very aggressively, and can't be pushed back very far. In matches against these monsters, you'll probably spend about 70% of the match in slot 1, 25% in slot 2, and maybe 5% in slots 3 and 4.

It's not a common build, but if your kaiju doesn't have a good slot 1 tech, then it will destroy you if you do run into it.

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There's no spam attack AI

If you're used to MR2 competitive play, you know that monsters sometimes sit in one slot, spamming the same move on frame 1 over and over again until it misses. There's no such AI pattern in UKMR.

There's a whole lot of battle cookies, and some are better than others. It's impossible to list every build that has seen some success, even in a tiny scene like ours. There's still a lot of room to experiment and come up with something new, but just to give you an idea of what you might see, here are the most commonly used cookies.

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Bone-Wing Maneuvers

In most formats, Bone Wings is just banned. On kaijus with any speed, it's the best damage mitigation cookie in the game, and at high stat caps, the 40% speed boost it gives gets completely out of hand. If you can productively run Bone Wings, you run Bone Wings.

Bone Wings is allowed in Lightweight because lower stat caps combined with the 5% form bonus means that speedsters really need this to function. Speedsters in Lightweight basically always run this cookie and both grits.

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Self Repair/Overnight Revival

Guaranteed Grits. If you come from other monster rancher games, these are as strong as they sound. You usually run one of these, or both if it's allowed. Most rulesets have specific rules on whether or not you can put both of these on the same kaiju, so make sure to review them.

Guaranteed grits are one of the most important elements defining the UKMR metagame. They limit the impact of otherwise insane looking cookies like Fury, Villainout Instinct, and The Demon Awakened, they encourage people to run Sharp Senses to work around them, they give cookies like Land Soldier and Fit to Survive time to work, and much, much more.

If you can only run one, which one you run depends on your build. These cookies serve the same purpose, and while it's easy to theorycraft situations where one might be better than the other, there's so much RNG that it often doesn't matter. Self Repair tends to do better when matches go to time and life percentage is the deciding factor, and makes you more resilient against Sharp Senses damage. Overnight Revival is a little more likely to proc later, giving you an extra hit, especially on kaiju that can drain or heal.

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Fury/Villainous Instinct

Big dumb power boosts. Not as strong as they look thanks to guaranteed grits, but still commonly used cookies on tanks, giving them a lot of defensive power and the ability to destroy opponents even with their weakest techs.

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Giant of Light/Young Warrior

Both of these cookies let your kaiju swing more often once they get to low health. These cookies are often used on slow GR kaiju, but everyone can use them. Giant of Light gives guts and Young Warrior makes attacks cheaper, and if you only use one, which one you want to use depends on a lot of factors (your GR, how your personality works above and below 50 guts, if you're expecting withering, and many other things.)

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Penetrating Venom/Sharp Senses

The knockback cookies. Sharp Senses deals 4% of an enemy kaiju's max life in damage when you push them back, and Penetrating Venom has a 30% chance of poisoning the enemy when you push them back. Sharp Senses can KO an enemy, but poison cannot.

These cookies completely ignore hit percentage, providing counterplay to speedsters (especially those with Bone-Wing Maneuvers) and to the very powerful grit cookies. The welterweight format is run very rarely, but it's basically defined by the existence of these cookies, even more so than the oppressive cookies in other formats, like Bone-Wing Maneuvers, Self Repair, and Overnight Revival.

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Fit to Survive

A heal cookie which is run on builds with cheap and accurate techs (usually paired with Fury or Villainous Instinct) to turn a kaiju into a hulking tank that can survive more hits, heal up, and kill with massively buffed hit techs. Often works well on aggressive personalities like Stubborn and anything with a good slot 1 option.

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Heavyweight

Heavyweight makes it so your opponent's push-backs only push you to the border of slot 2 and 3. This cookie is frequently used with personalities that move forward aggressively (usually Stubborn) in order to control the spacing of a fight, trying to win a match between your kaiju's slot 1 and 2 techs and your opponent's slot 1 and 2 techs. It's not a common build, but it's not super-rare either, and if you have a weak slot 1 (or even worse, an empty slot 1) this build will completely destroy you when you do run into it. (Telesdon starts with this trait for free.)

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Big Birdy

Makes your pushbacks push your opponent all the way into slot 4. Used rarely for heavy slot 3 and 4 builds, or alongside poison/burn techs or Penetrating Venom's poison, but if an opponent has Heavyweight, then it trumps Big Birdy and they won't get pushed back very far.

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From the Void

Stops the timer for 10 seconds if you're losing. When this procs, most traits that normally last until the end of the match (for example Bone-Wing Maneuvers) end early, making this a soft counter to those strong traits. But since most formats don't go to time very often, this is more of a niche solution to those problems.

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Great Darkness

Reduces the opponent's skill by 20% for the last 20 seconds. Mainly used by speedsters in formats where Bone-Wing Maneuvers or double grit cookies aren't allowed, but sees play in other situations too.

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Invincible Guts

If your opponent ever has more guts than you in the last 30 seconds of the match, then this cookie makes them lose 30 guts (once per match.) A fairly solid all-purpose cookie that sees a bit of play.

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Energy Overload/Radio Controlled

The Confusion build. Energy Overload gives your kaiju a 20% bonus to Power and Intelligence whenever they commit foolery, and Radio Controlled reduces foolery time. This build has some nice advantages compared to other buff builds:

• Unlike many offensive boosts, it's not reliant on getting hit X times in a row without dying or surviving until the last X seconds of the match.
• It buffs power without weakening Intelligence (unlike the main power option, Fury.)
• Intelligence buffs are hard to come by in general.

Unfortunately:

• It's still reliant on foolery RNG, and sometimes your kaiju will never commit foolery, or they'll CONSTANTLY commit foolery.
• It's only a 20% stat boost.

For all these reasons, this is a pretty fringe build, but it has won multiple tournaments, so it's not a complete joke.

The way to make your kaiju commit foolery in battle is to get its loyalty to zero. (See the section on bananas for more on how to do this.) If you use these cookies, you probably want attacks in every slot, since you'll cap guts a lot.

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[Tech Type] Tech Boost

The cookies which give a boost to some specific type of tech (heavy techs, fire techs, long-range techs, etc.) There's a LOT of these, and their 10% bonuses aren't enough to be worthwhile, unless they apply to almost every tech you have. You can just get bigger bonuses elsewhere.

Little things that you don't really need to know, but which might be interesting, or might save you a little bit of trouble.

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Setting up save files

Farming for cookies is annoying. There's really no better way to get a cookie you want than to roll on the cheap cookies at the shop until you get what you need. But if you want to avoid having to reroll for the same cookies over and over again, thereHs a way to do it.

First, roll a nice supply of the cookies you want, ideally at least one copy of each cookie you expect to use often. After that, when you are getting close to finishing your build, save the game to a dedicated save slot (which you will use for ALMOST finished monsters). Finally, finish the build (without saving over your dedicated slot) and upload your monster to the versus registry in the Arena. This works because the versus registry is completely independent from your save slots. Once you have uploaded your monster to the versus registry, you can reload your dedicated slot, and you'll have a copy of your monster which is ‘almost' finished if you need to change things.

The main downside of this method is that if you decide you want to make a small change to a monster (perhaps your tech lists didn't work as well as you thought it would and you want to change things) then you have to reload your monster from the ‘almost finished' save and finish the build again to re-upload it.

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Guts correction is really weird

...and the math is not fully data-mined

So far, the community hasn't done much with guts correction. Guts correction DOES exist in UKMR, and monsters with slower guts rates and more guts saved up in a fight will do more damage and take less damage. But we don't have all of the specifics of the Guts Correction formula data mined yet, and what we do know doesn't seem quite as straightforward in UKMR as it is in other MR games.

There's room for some experimentation here, but because of the power of the -2 Guts Rate variants, people mostly just aim to have as fast of GR as possible.

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Reaching Stat Caps

Nobody tries to perfectly cap stats in competitive play. There aren't perfect breakpoints in the formulas in UKMR where a single point in a stat makes a huge difference, and hitting exact stats relies on very rare items which give very small bonuses to single stats. As long as you're under the stat caps, you're fine.

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Banana Order

Magic Bananas are mainly used in UKMR to quickly change your kaiju's loyalty. The standard no-rest schedule is efficient enough to not need these items. Magic Bananas can have one of three effects, and which effect a magic banana has is locked in immediately after you purchase it.

• +10 Dependence, +10 Fear, -10 Stress
• +10 Dependence, -10 Fear, -15 Fatigue, -5 Stress
• -10 Dependence, -10 Fear, -30 Fatigue

The three kinds of magic bananas are sorted in your inventory based on their effect. The +10 Dependence, +10 Fear, -10 Stress bananas will be towards the top of your item list, the -10 Dependence, -10 Fear, -30 Fatigue bananas will be towards the bottom of your item list, and the +10 Dependence, -10 Fear, -15 Fatigue, -5 Stress bananas will be in the middle. A visual example of how these are arranged in inventory after purchase.

Early in a kaiju's life, you can buy a large number of bananas, start using them from the top of the list to get the +10 Dependence/+10 Fear effect, and as soon as a banana gives you any other result, you can sell the rest, as you've used all of the good bananas. If you still need more loyalty, you can buy more bananas in bulk and repeat the process.

The bananas which lower both dependence and fear are sorted to the end of the list. This can be useful to know if you want to make a confusion build with Energy Overload and Radio Controlled, which wants the kaiju to have low loyalty. You can simply use the bananas at the end of the list to drop your loyalty, sell when you get another result, and repeat the process if needed.

Please be sure and check any specific tournament's rules for caveats or adjustments. These raising routes are here to help you learn how other people have made a specific builds for competitive which you can follow or make adjustments for your own build!

15000 Mixed Lightweight Format

ZeBruh (Dada Eleking) by Frenzied Potato

This monster was raised in Ultra Kaiju MR for AI v AI

1. Using Keywords: Main: wz~ Sub: legend at the alter, summon an Eleking Dada with gr9. The plan is to run Eleking Collider in slot 1 and Antenna Discharge in slot 2. The personality you want is Fiery since it has the highest chance of walking forward and lowest chance to shove. This will keep the Kaiju battling in slot 1 and 2.
2. Eleking Collider is learned from Alvarro with a threshold of 7000 to learn the tech. That means Int+Defense has to be at a minimum of 7000 to learn the tech. Since the stat cap of Light Weight is strictly 15k you must plan accordingly to learn the tech and dump the defensive stat while staying under this cap! The plan for this kaiju is to hit 5k intelligence and 2k defense to learn Eleking Collider. Through drug use you will be able to dump the defensive stat for other needed stats.
3. After summoning the Kaiju immediately equip Def+ Drill cookie. Make sure to give the kaiju 5 bouquets to to raise fame to 100. Go back and forth between Defense drill and Int Drill while eating 12 skill caps (-100 speed +100 life/skill) . This will drop speed to 1 and give you enough skill to start learning May's hit techs.
4. Use the Errantry Wild Woods to learn all the techs you need from it. Just make sure you have the right trainer there(May then eventually Alvarro). This is done to raise POW++ and LIF+ with -SPD and -Int. Errantries in other places may increase some stats beyond the cap. Make sure you save before errantry just in case you do not learn the tech from May (Flames → Lightning Speed → Antenna Discharge is the order).
5. Around 1 years old or Life Stage 3 the personality will change. Save frequently and reset the week before the change occurs until you get Fiery.
6. While allowing rampages to happen, continue with INT drill x3 and DEF drill x 1 eating Mandarin juice x3 a month with astro mint x1 a month. Be sure to not exceed 2k Def and 5k Int. The reason we drink so much Mandarin Juice is to drop all the stats to give us more of a buffer at the end of this raise. It is far easier to increase stats then it is to drop stats!
7. Continue using Wild Woods Errantry for tech acquisition. Atenna Discharge is the final tech we want from May. Eleking Collider should be learned from Alvarro once 2k Def and 5k Int is attained. Remember to reset if you do not learn the tech.
8. Use Reset Powder to clear traits, equipping new traits: Self-Repair , Invincible Guts and Jewelic Blaze (this will add 61 SPD and 131 DEF that cannot be lowered)
9. The remaining 1985 DEF is removed with 19 Speed Capsules (-100 DEF +100 POW/SPD) while resting each week. This transfers 1900 defense to power and speed.
10. Now to remove remaining SPD that was raised from the SPD capsules with 19 Skill Capsules (-100 SPD +100 LIF/SKI). Feed these while alternating LIF SKI and Pow Drills using a LD, LD, LD, Rest, replacing a LD with Rest if you're getting too close to cap.
11. Try and get LIF to a number divisible by 5. This can help during a "Grit" tie (1 LIF on both Kaiju). IE: If the life total is not divisible by 5 when you self-repair you are going to be at 19.5% instead of 20%. Many rounds are often decided upon ties.
12. Finish topping off any remaining stats while staying under the 15k Stat Cap (Lesser of POW or INT is ignored in the particular tournament rules this Kaiju was made for)

~Frenzied Potato

1. While on the Ranch, press "L" to access the Arena.
   
2. Select VS Mode from the Arena menu.
   
3. Select Register Kaiju from the VS Mode menu.
   
4. Choose the Kaiju to register and press "A" to confirm.
   
5. Your Kaiju is now uploaded for other folks to fight against for fun, or to be used in a community PVP tournament that you signed up for.
   
6. If you need your Search Keyword to submit with a tournament application, Select Kaiju Registry.
   
7. Select the monster you wish to notate the Search Keyword for; It will be listed just below the Kaiju's name. The Search Keyword can make it easier if there are more than 1 Kaiju with the same name, or if part of the name is censorted etc.
   
   The Search Keyword will always be found and is unique to each Kaiju upload (Even the same Kaiju uploaded multiple times will have a unique Search Keyword)

Other Info:

• Uploaded Kaiju are a frozen "Point in Time" of the Kaiju. You may upload any Kaiju at a point in time. Continuing to raise the Kaiju will not change the Kaiju that was uploaded.
• If you wish to remove any uploaded Kaiju, select "Kaiju Registry" to see your currently uploaded Kaiju and remove any unwanted Kaiju. Deleting a Kaiju from the Kaiju Registry does NOT delete them from your Ranch or Association, it only removes the uploaded copy.

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VS Mode preparation Tips

Cookies can be difficult to acquire, and Reset Powder is only available twice a year.
follow these steps to save some hassle and reuse these items for multiple monsters:

1. Save your game.
2. Use your Reset Powder to clear out any Rearing traits (If you haven't already)
3. Apply your desired Cookie/Traits.
4. Register Your Kaiju, and select the Kaiju you've applied the cookies to.

With your Registered Kaiju copied to the Online Registry with the applied cookies, you can now reload your game to a point before using the cookies and Reset powder. This will not affect your uploaded Kaiju as it is a captured point in time when it was uploaded.