When you’ve progressed into the Residential District of the pond in Mudborne, you’ll find a massive map that’s mostly blocked off by flooding when you first arrive. In speaking to Kroaka, the engineer up north near where you enter from the Central Junction, he tells you you’ll need to drain the area to proceed.
Draining the Pumphouse is one of the first big goals as you’re exploring the Residential District in Mudborne, especially if you’re pursuing Compendium progression. Here’s how to buy a Drainer in Mudborne and use it to drain some of the mod flooded areas in the pond.
Power The Machine And Soak Up The Water
You can see the huge swaths of flooded areas preventing you from making it very far into the Residential District map when you first arrive, but your first destination isn’t too far from the bridge into the area from the Central Junction. Go into the Site Management bridge just beside the inactive Gateway Nexus portal, where you’ll meet Kroaka, the engineer trying to solve the flooding problem.
He tells you that you’ll need to begin by draining the Pumphouse, the building on the island just south of the Site Management building. Inside, you’ll find a huge pool of water, for which you’ll need one of Kroaka’s patented Drainers to deal with. To begin, you’ll need to trade Kroaka for a Drainer back inside of Site Engineering. He’ll ask for five Moon Jellies, five Weeds, and five Reeds in exchange for one Drainer, so if you’re looking to get a few, you’ll need to make the trade a few times over.
Once you’ve got your Drainer in hand, your next and arguably most crucial step is powering the machine somehow once you’ve gotten it into the Pumphouse. In Mudborne, machines are powered by a frog’s Ribbit, an A.N.O.U.R.E.S. trait level you haven’t needed to pay much mind to until you’ve entered the Residential district. However, you’ll need to find a mushroom that raises the Ribbit stat someplace so you can breed a frog with maximum Ribbit.
You’ll need to grow a Raucous Conecap mushroom, which grows in the water when you’ve boosted the Saturation around an area (especially if you’ve placed a Cultivator with some good compost in the center of it to encourage spore growth). By grinding these mushrooms up and combining them into a magic mud that uses only Raucous Conecaps in the recipe, you’ll be able to use this magic mud on Common Green frogspawn to breed for a Foul Screamer (their Odour stat gets maxed in the process, too).
However, it’s not just a Foul Screamer that makes a Drainer work; just because the machine has power doesn’t mean it’s capable of actually absorbing the water. For that aspect, you’ll need two of any frog with a minimum Saturation stat inside of each Drainer as well. Any frog will do, but you’ve likely already made a couple Weeny Sponges by the time you’ve entered the Residential District.
By placing one maximum Ribbit frog and two minimum Saturation frogs into a Drainer, you’ll be able to siphon water from any flooded areas in Mudborne, from the Pumphouse as part of the story and beyond.
After the water is gone, you can use your Hammer on the Drainer to pick both it and the frogs inside of it back up in one fell swoop, free to reuse them whenever you next need a Drainer in Mudborne.
