#so I'm sure he'd be gambling on the robot fights out by Svarog's encampment too haha

[feroluce]

Connecting dots tonight (didn't connect shit, I've connected them, etc) because of this post about item descriptions to do with Sampo I saw a few days ago and! I feel like there are so many interesting things that could be implied from this!! Because the recipe for the High-Tech Protective Gear is given to you by Bronya (before the IPC invaded Belobog!), who says this little interesting tidbit about it:

This is an item from before the Eternal Freeze, 700 years ago. Even to the rest of the universe, it would be SORELY outdated. It cannot be made in Belobog anymore due to the loss of entire eras. It is effectively useless; this recipe had to be somewhere gathering dust, kept around solely for archival purposes. There is no reason for Sampo to know about this item or have any idea how it works and yet. AND YET. He's just running around selling knock offs!!

He shouldn't even know how to make these, but the fact that he does means Sampo either

had the blueprints from off-world before he came to Belobog (most likely but also most boring answer)

broke into Qlipoth Fort and copied down the blueprints (completely plausible - he's possibly shown doing exactly that in his splash art)

found another copy out in the ruins of the old world (also completely plausible - Sampo is astoundingly resilient against both the Fragmentum and the cold, as noted by Lynx haha)

Meanwhile, the Inferior Protective Gear recipe comes from an NPC in the underground, and when she gives it to you, she talks about building robots and the robot fighting scene sorry about the quality I didn't have screenshots for her dialogue so I had to use wiki

Which makes me feel like it's safe to say that the inferior gear is mostly being used in the underground, especially by the vagrants and their robots for fights, because...well, who else would use it? Cocolia has made it illegal to explore too far into the Snow Plains, and besides, it's way too dangerous for most civilians even WITH gear. The Silvermane Guards are funded by official sources, they have no reason to rely on Sampo for armor. So it makes sense for an underground mechanic to know the recipe; there's probably not as much market for it up in the overworld.

And if you look at the descriptions, you can see why this probably wasn't something that could be made in Belobog anymore; it requires a charging system of some sort.

We know it's not a problem with the basic materials because all three ingredients can be found right in the administrative district. But the underground only has two of them; somehow, despite being in the planet's crust, and literally crawling with robots...there is no metal down there. It isn't found anywhere, sold by anyone, or dropped by anything. And metal just so happens to be the one ingredient Sampo replaces in his knock off version.

The Inferior Gear uses trash instead, something which, going by the words of that same mechanic, is MORE than abundant in the underground- any good quality parts are extremely difficult to come by down there.

Anyway, all his shadiness aside, I love the implication that Sampo is smart enough to be able to take this item that no one else on the planet probably knows anything about, and was able to figure out what he could replace, and how, and with what, in order to make it easily accessible to the people of the underground, even without access to overworld resources. Because his version DOES work! It literally gives you the exact same amount of defense boost as the IPC one!

Someone should absolutely still knock him around for it, though, world's most slappable face fr fjkdsjfdkjafk

#hsr sampo #hsr sampo koski #sampo koski #honkai star rail #hsr #belobog #he's such a slimeball fjklsdajfkld #I feel like there is something to be said though about the fact that if anyone in the underground is buying this shit armor off Sampo like. #it's either his armor or it's nothing. the overworld isn't exactly sending them a lot of protective gear. #And I'm sure they'd rather have cheap armor they can make and afford themselves than nothing at all. #I wonder if Wildfire would be one of his customers for this stuff or not? #like I think Sampo would be a lot more upfront with them if they were- he's not stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds him. #And Natasha is probably his most important client. We already know Sampo smuggles weapons and is her arms dealer. #It's canon that he brought Seele her scythe- #-and I wonder if it's coincidence that Natasha uses a giant weapon that looks similar to the Silvermane hand canons. #I could totally see Sampo trying to sell his armor to ring fighters to fix the matches in his favor though FJKDLSJAFDKLJ #we already know he bets on the fight club from his About Luka line and his dialogue from the Cyrille the Fool quests #so I'm sure he'd be gambling on the robot fights out by Svarog's encampment too haha #do you think they have penny bets for the kids for that kind of fight #crying imagining Hook tagging along and betting single credits on the fights alongside Sampo's much heftier bets #she still wins more than he does JKLDJSKLAJDS