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Hello my friend.
Stay awhile, and listen.
For I will recount the tale of the Lord of Terror's most insidious plot against Sanctuary.
"He's dead," you say? I have been told tales of demons like Him being sealed, bound, exiled, weakened, slain. I have even recounted them myself. Terror can't be stoppped just by killing Him. Not while his minions still walk Sanctuary.
I don't mean the Winged Fiends or the Scavengers you may have fought one day. Terror's greatest minions hide in plain sight. For you see, Diablo is empowered by our fear. Not the fear of a terrible demon, but fear so unimaginable that we may never see that demon coming, or do anything to stop it.
I have had people I've told this story to before laugh at it, telling me, "No demon will ever get the drop on me." I have seen those "heroes" cloven in half, for they expect a mighty foe, or a coward that uses stealth and trickery. This fiend, is neither of those. It walks among us, yearning for our blood and making dark pacts with the Lord of Terror for their chance to strike.
They were once our allies, aiding us in our towns and villages. When the Darkening of Tristram occurred, heroes flocked to combat the great evil that had broken free there.
But not before amusing themselves on one of them, remarking of its presence. Belittling it. Prodding it, incessantly.
News of his defilement would spread to his kind out of Tristram. As they delibrilated about how to respond, a demon heard their plotting, and offered them a chance for something greater: a devil's deal that many fools have taken, and they too were none the wiser.
Now, they are Terror's secret trump card, biding their time to strike back at Sanctuary and mankind.
You may think me mad, but I saw it with my own eyes. I know who really killed the pegleg boy of Tristram, and believe me, it was no man. We cannot rest until these hidden terrors are tracked down and destroyed. They may tell you they don't exist. That there's no place to find them. That is their ploy to stay hidden and attack when we least expect it.
Luckily, having pored through the tomes and scrolls regarding town portals as of recent, I have devised a way to track them down.
It may require you to perform a gruesome harvest, but look at it this way: a one-legged corpse is less dangerous than a corpse with a peg leg. Bring that leg, and then consult a tome of town portals. You may not know it, but each copy of these tomes have guides on establishing manual connections to places if you have the right ingredients. The demon blood on Wirt's pegleg should suffice.
Steel yourself for a brawl, adventurer. Though great riches may await you, the Lord of Terror's secret minions are not to be trifled with.
For they dwell, in the Secret Cow Level.
Music-Diablo
Hell Bovine | CR: ***
==MooOOOOOOoo!!
==Don't have one
==Has four stomaches
==Can cause big fires watch out!
==May contain dairy products
==Try launching
==That's a big stick
I don't know what possessed me over the past minute or two, but I do know it has played a sick trick on me because I'm surrounded by bipedal bovines now. With poleaxes.
So, this place. It's famous. This place is chock, full, of cows.
Many cows. This has THE highest density of monsters in any area. That makes it the go-to place for various grind targets. However, since it's almost exclusively just regular cows, especially on Normal, this won't be the best place to grind for certain things. However, with its high destiny, and pretty tame monsters if you know how to handle them, this is a very popular grind spot. You'll be hearing "Moo," a lot. A lot.
In expansionless Diablo II, you unlock this area after finishing Act IV. Trying to teleport to it earlier doesn't work, but someone who has beaten the game can open the portal for you and you can shuffle right in, since you have to be in Act I to enter. Though, unless you're good at staying close to the players carrying you, this probably isn't a good idea anyway because the area level is 28 on Normal, (same as Chaos Sanctuary) and Hell Bovines are one of the hardest hitting monsters in the game. They may sound similar to Minions of Destruction, and it's about the same shtick, except the cows aren't as hard hitting or as tanky. Their sheer volume however may have it feel like they are, though.
Which by the way, don't get swarmed by these. It's actually pretty easy to move through this level the wrong way and you kite multiple cow herds that will just close in on you in multiple directions. They, thankfully, aren't fast. But, if you think this is how the game is meant to be played, then you'll drown in a sea of black and white.
The only thing of particular note this time around is the soverign of all calcium. He's there as a superunique, who is always lightning enchanted, and can found in a wodden fortlike area with a bunch of corpses inside. If we kill him though, we won't be able to come back here in future games on the difficulty he's killed on.
...Only him.
If you kill everyone BUT the Cow King you can re-enter the Moo Moo Farm in a new game. As you can imagine this is, uhh, fun, and an introduction to the concept of trust in multiplayer where not a single person had to kill him otherwise the entire party gets locked out. The logistics are weird but thankfully even Arreat Summit can explain this. If the person who doesn't kill the Cow King has not beaten the game yet, or has already been exiled from the farm, then no one is affected. If someone has beaten the game and has yet to kill the Cow King themselves, them killing it means EVERYONE in the map is banned from the farm. If you're out of the map when it happens you're safe. But uhh, I can definitely tell you there were fun instances of lying to naive players about the logistics of cow regicide.
Far as I recall, in classic vanilla this is STILL the case, at least for singleplayer. However, all of our mods fix this in their own ways. Even PlugY makes it an option to just make it so we can always go back in. Even Resurrected fixes this. The only other thing to note is that the Cow King has a special loot drop as well, and it's all stamina potions.
The cow level isn't terribly complicated, so I'm about done. Needless to say, you'll probably want to pay a visit here if you're really hurting for levels or need to grind for resources, like runes, gems, potions, maybe even some gear as well. Just keep in mind though that the cow level isn't the highest level area in the difficulty, not by a long shot, so if you want good gear you're better off grinding in Act V.
...
That look in your eyes. It's asking me, "Cows?????????????" I can feel it.
Well, I have a story of that. This story is a lot of guesswork, but it's a hypothesis on why cows.
See, the 90s was the silver age of pinball.
What does pinball have to do with Diablo?
Well, it's more a question of what does Chicago have to do with Diablo? Because that's what it boils down to.
It's hard to just know this, admittedly, but cows have had a major part of Chicago's culture, what with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 being rumored and believed to have been caused by, nothing more than a cow knocking a lantern.
Fast forward to 1987, and then-famous pinball and arcade game maker Williams releases a pinball table called "Fire!", featuring, you guessed it, that fire, and even that cow as well. You see, Williams was based in Chicago, Illinois. After that table, because it was neat, they started including a cow in most tables they've made, and soon enough other pinball companies started doing the same.
What can I say, cows make good inside joke mascots, and it's also just funny to see a random cow. I mean, you're looking at this let's play right now and probably stifling laughter, trying your best to believe this game should be taken seriously.
But no, I mean Williams was big. Pinball was big. Ever played the pinball table Medieval Madness? JackBot? The Getaway? F-14 Tomcat? FunHouse? Addams Family? Twilight Zone? Williams made all of those. And you'll find a secret cow in all of them. A lot of people played pinball back then, so while I can't prove this necessarily, I can make the hypothesis that cows were a catchy (secret) gag icon. (A cow is a cultural icon.) Developers at Blizzard North for all I know may have loved finding a random cow on a pinball table. It could be some other reason, but this seems the most plausible. To me at least.
Anyway, there's a cow in Diablo I. You can click it. It goes moo. Click it enough and you get voicelines from your hero, like, "Yep. It's a cow alright." The internet was just starting up at the time, and I don't think I can sufficiently convey to you the wild west of information the late 90s was. People lied about what was actually in games all the time. I had it happen to me. Pokemon Red and Blue was RICH in that sort of stuff, and some of the folktalkes and conspiracy theories of those games were true! Back in the hayday of Diablo I, people spread the rumor that there was a secret level involving cows on ye olde internet message boards, or you know BBSs or whatever. We did not yet live in a world where we could do deep dives into program data to find dummied out sex minigames and tirades about piracy. Worse yet, secret levels were a regular staple of PC games. (DOOM. Quake. Commander Keen. Jill of the Jungle. And their derivatives.) To some, the existence of a secret cow level in Diablo I was worth checking every nook and cranny to find it.
Except uhh, there is no cow level in Diablo I.
There isn't.
You also have to remember, this is an era where most people did not understand that image editing software and hoaxes exist. Heck there may very well be a mod for Diablo I that puts one in now. I'm told there were actual pictures of a secret cow level in that game floating around, but it wouldn't be hard to doctor up an image of such a place and have it be convincing, even in 1996. This might be that very screenshot. I don't know. I don't care to confirm.
The closest there is, is the Hellfire expansion for Diablo I, which has a dummied out quest given to you by a guy in a cow suit. (Let's not talk about why it was dummied out. I wish I didn't find out, and talking about it has a very high chance to break the "no company drama" thread rule!)
Regardless, now, it was something Diablo fans wanted. Craved. It did not help that Blizzard itself took the rumor of a cow level as an injoke, and Starcraft would release later and have a cheat code called "thereisnocowlevel".
(Shoutouts to The Cutting Room Floor for hooking me up with this.)
The leadup of Diablo II had this be a topic on several occasions. Of if they would put a cow level in, and how. Blizzard itself released pictures of these cows, right here. This is a pre-release screenshot to showcase Diablo II development. You could argue this was one of the oldest Alternate Reality Games there is because cows were teased, but the actual way to get to the cow level was never explained.
Also, I'm pretty sure it did not take long to find the recipe to unlock the Secret Cow Level. Not because gamers are bored, but because cube recipes are easily moddable. By 2000, modders and hackers were starting to really poke and prod at games to do various things to them. This is the only explanation I can believe in because people back then were completely on their own for figuring out how to smash a pegleg and a book together.
But what's important about this joke is its impact. A lot of players played Diablo II and a lot of players were exposed to the novel idea of massive hordes of deadly cows. SECRET cows, at that. It's a good laugh and if you really play this game this now lives rent free in your brain. Part of it has to do with the fact that comedy in the middle of the most tryhard contrarian culture is particularly sweet. Also, like Deckard Cain, cows occupy a major part of your memory if you play this game. "Secret Cow Level" is a concept that is repeatedly confirmed and denied in Blizzard games to this day. Other Blizzard games have had secret cow levels.
Even video games by different companies have put in homages to secret cows. Cows just work as an obstacle in video games. And ultimately, while Blizzard helped launch it into the stratosphere, that cow was first launched by Williams putting it in every pinball table they made and getting plenty of other pinball tables to do the same. Thanks Williams.
As a reminder, I can be 100% wrong with this story, but since no one dares to insinuate there may be a cow level in Sanctuary, Blizzard doesn't say much about how or why. For all I know, it was a fan-created rumor turned reality, which could have any number of reasons why the cow fixation. I do want it to be this reason though, that'd be neat. At the very least, it makes for a good story.
Anyway, Resurgence and Project Diablo 2 do no changes to the cow level. Median XL makes it a Hell-only venture. We're not going to it for a while with Chloe and Jane. Eastern Sun, meanwhile, that's next update.
For real this time. No more pranks involving cows. For now.
Next time: Time to go on tour around Sanctuary.