With the well-deserved success and general positive reception of Diablo 4’s second season, many players praise the quality-of-life changes, the new vampiric skill system and the addition of the world bosses.

Among these, Duriel is the most sought after, since his loot is the rarest and most powerful. The boss is a cakewalk for a decently built character. Of course, the premise is that you have to prepare a lot of Diablo 4 Gold to upgrade your character.

However, in order to summon him, players need to collect Living Steel from Helltides. And this can be a tedious task, especially when compared to the similar, but much more fun and player-friendly Blood Harvest.

So, in this guide, we’ll take a deep-dive into the mechanisms of how the new Living Steel chests operate, despawn and respawn, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage and optimize how you farm Living Steel.

#1: The Cost Of Opening A Living Steel Chest

The average player would skip over this part of the guide, saying: what about the cost? It costs 300 Aberrant Cinders to open a chest. It’s that simple, isn’t it? No.

For some reason, even if it says that you need 300 Cinders to open a chest, you actually only need 280. In fact, you can open a Living Steel chest even if you have as low as 280 Aberrant Cinders on you.

#2: The Number Of Chests

There can be either 2 or 3 Living Steel chests up at the same time, and this number depends on which zone is affected by the Helltide.

If the Helltide is in Scosglen or Kehjistan, there will be 3 Living Steel chests present on the map at the same time. For any other zone, this number is only 2.

For example, this Helltide only affects the region of Kehjistan, therefore you’d expect 3 chests being there at any given time. Clear? Good.

So far, everything has been relatively straightforward, but there is an additional twist to the spawning of Living Steel Chests. And the understanding of this mechanism separates a decent Helltide farmer from an efficient one: the Living Steel chests, similarly to Mystery chests, respawn at another location on the top of the hour.

In practice, this means that at exactly at the top of the hour (for example at six o’clock 0 minutes, five o’clock 0 minutes and so on), the chests disappear from their original positions, and respawn somewhere else.

If you opened a chest before this reset, then you’ll get to open the newly spawned ones after the respawn. This doubles the number of chests you can potentially open during one Helltide, and dramatically changes the optimal farming method of Living Steel. Because ideally you’ll want to open all Living Steel chests before this reset, and all of them after the reset as well.

Now this is not always possible, since the Helltide can end at the top of the hour (in this case there is no respawn) or it can begin very close to the top if the hour, in which case there is simply not enough time to farm the required Aberrant Cinders before the reset.

Nevertheless, an experienced Living Steel farmer should always maximize the number of chests opened during Helltide by taking advantage of this mechanism.

Hopefully, this guide has been useful for you, and maybe you learned some tricks on how to make the grind for Living Steel just a little bit less painful.