PoE 3.29 Abyss Farming Guide: Propagation Allflame Ground-Loot Strategy

🎯 The core idea

Abyss farming in Path of Exile 3.29 stopped being a side objective and became a ground-loot currency engine. You do not do it with Abyss Scarabs. You do it by stacking rare-monster modifiers onto Abyss monsters before they spawn, using the Allflame Ember of Propagation, two Horned Scarabs of Nemeses and a Lightless Astrolabe shaped region — then killing everything and picking scarabs up off the floor. BawLoch measured roughly 1.5–2 divine profit per map, averaging about 1.7 divines, with zero rarity on gear.

• free costs nothing
• cheap small cost
• setup needs preparation
• grind pays off slowly
• skip the thing to stop doing

The whole strategy hangs off one item. Allflame Ember of Propagation, Limit 1, reads exactly: "Substitutes Monster Packs in Area. Pack Monsters that die when Rare spread Modifiers to other Rare Monsters in Area." Those propagated modifiers land on Abyss rare monsters — including ones that have not spawned yet — so by the time you crack the Abyss open, its rares are carrying a dozen-plus modifiers each and drop scarabs like a rare-monster slot machine.

Version warning, and please read it: the Path of Exile Wiki has no page for version 3.29, and the wiki's Abyss article has a version history that stops at 3.21. The 3.29 Abyss rework itself is not wiki-documented at time of writing. Everything below that is marked wiki-verified comes from stable, pre-3.29 wiki pages (items, scarabs, atlas passives, Astrolabes). Everything specific to the 3.29 rework was verified from in-game frames in the source video instead, and is labelled as such. Nothing here is verification we did not actually do.

Is Abyss worth it in 3.29, or is this another dead league mechanic?

Worth it, with a caveat: the thing making money is not Abyss on its own. It is propagation. BawLoch is explicit that the Allflame Ember of Propagation alone would probably clear a divine per map with no Abyss involved at all, and that Abyss is simply the best multiplier available to bolt onto it — because Abyss dumps a large number of rare monsters into a small area, and every one of them inherits the propagated modifiers.

That framing matters for your expectations. This is not an "Abyss or bust" farm. A large slice of the drops arrives before you ever touch the Abyss.

That is normal map clear, not the Abyss. Note the Horned Scarab of Nemeses lying on the ground — which brings us to the first correction in this guide.

The five map device slots: which scarabs actually go in

1. Slot the Allflame Ember of Propagation setupLimit 1, so one is all you can use. It drops from Catarina, Master of Undeath. Allflame Embers are map-device fragments — they are not the retired Necropolis lantern items of the same nickname. 0:44
2. Add two Horned Scarabs of Nemeses setup"Rare Monsters in Area have 2 additional Modifiers", Limit 2. This is the engine: more modifiers on rares means more modifiers for propagation to copy onto Abyss monsters. 1:26
3. Add a Betrayal Scarab of the Allflame cheapThe in-game tooltip in the frame above reads "75% Increased number of Monster Packs Substituted by Allflame Embers in Area", Limit 1. BawLoch is openly unsure this slot earns its place — he suspects two Nemeses plus the ember is already enough substitution. 2:07
4. Flex the fifth slot: Scarab of Wisps or Cartography Scarab of Risk cheapHe ran 20 maps of each and both returned about 1.7 divines profit per map. Scarab of Wisps is "Monsters in Area have a chance to be Empowered by 2000 Wildwood Wisps", Limit 2. Cartography Scarab of Risk is "Area has 2 additional random Modifiers", Limit 1 — note that those two random modifiers do not scale with increased map modifier effect. 2:27
5. Do not buy a single Abyss Scarab skipThis is an Abyss farm that uses no Abyss Scarabs. Because nobody is consuming them, they stay cheap — which is exactly why you also do not want your map rolling them as loot. 4:29

The video fills five map device slots. The wiki documents the map device as having four slots by default with two more unlockable, for six total — so five is a legal but not maximal setup, and there is a free sixth slot available to anyone who has unlocked it. Abyss Scarab tiers, for reference, run: Abyss Scarab, Abyss Scarab of Multitudes, of Descending, of Edifice, and of Profound Depth. A sixth, the Abyss Scarab of Crystals, appears as a ground drop in the source footage but has no wiki page — screenshot-verified only.

Rolling the map: six modifiers and +138% more scarabs

The narration says "an 88% more scarabs map before chiseling". The tooltip resolves that arithmetic cleanly: the finished map reads +138% More Scarabs with Quality (Scarabs) +20%. The wiki's page for Maven's Chisel of Scarabs confirms that at 20% quality it grants +50% more Scarabs. 88 + 50 = 138. The video's number is correct and the chisel is doing exactly what it says.

1. Roll six modifiers, prioritising more scarabs setupThe example map carries six modifiers: Vulnerability, Temporal Chains, Elemental Weakness, 37% increased Monster Damage, monsters gain 80% of maximum life as extra energy shield, and Rare Monsters have Volatile Cores. 3:08
2. Apply a Maven's Chisel of Scarabs cheapChisel after rolling, not before. +50% more scarabs at 20% quality is the single largest flat multiplier you can add for the price. 4:49
3. Treat the Delirium Orb as optional grindHe used exactly one and argues against it: a Delirium Orb adds quantity but also adds rare monsters, and propagation spent on Delirium rares is propagation not spent on Abyss rares. He found Delirium rares consistently less rewarding than Abyss rares. 3:28
4. Do not roll for rarity freeHe ran zero rarity on gear and still reported a heavy T0 unique and raw currency return — roughly 106 chaos orbs across 20 maps without rolling for currency at all. "T0 unique" is community jargon, not an official GGG tier system. 4:08

The Lightless Astrolabe: your Abyss shaped region

The narration calls this "the abyss astrolab". The correct item, per the wiki, is an Astrolabe — and the Abyss one is the Lightless Astrolabe: "Adds a Shaped Region containing Abysses to a quadrant of the Atlas." Astrolabes arrived in 3.28 and are acquired from Eagon Caeserius, guaranteed from memory bosses and with a chance from map bosses once you have socketed the Originator Voidstone.

Two consequences the video glosses over, both wiki-documented and both things that will surprise you at the map device:

• A Shaped Region covers 6–9 adjacent maps including the one you applied it to, all in a single Atlas quadrant. That is your rotation, and it is finite.
• Every map inside a Shaped Region requires Tier 16 or higher to enter. This is not a low-investment farm you can start at yellow maps.
• You cannot apply an Astrolabe to a quadrant that already has a Shaped Region. Burning a bad region out is a real cost, which is why the "burn through it fast with junk maps" advice below exists.

1. Apply the Lightless Astrolabe onto City Square setupYou apply the Astrolabe to one map, and that anchor map is the one you will run most. City Square is the anchor of choice for reasons covered in the next section. 5:10
2. Read the region modifiers before you run anything freeThe base Lightless region always carries "Complete all Abysses to successfully complete Maps within this Shaped Region", "Abyss Monsters have increased Difficulty and Reward for each completed Map", and "Your Maps contain an additional Abyss". The rolled extras are what you are actually judging. 5:31
3. Take the Synthesised Stability keystone grindASR renders this as "symphasized stability". The keystone reads: "Completing a Map Objective within a Shaped Region instead collapses a different Map within the Shaped Region." That is the mechanic that let him run City Square for over half his maps instead of being forced around the rotation. 11:28

Which shaped-region modifiers to chase — and the one that ruins the farm

This tooltip is the whole section in one image. The region rolled +11% increased quantity, "Abysses in your Maps spawn 12% increased Monsters" — and, in the bottom line, "Scarabs dropped in your Maps have 77% increased chance to be Abyss Scarabs".

That last line is the trap. Since this strategy uses no Abyss Scarabs, nobody is buying them, and converting three-quarters of your scarab drops into the one scarab family with no demand is a direct pay cut. The video quotes it loosely as "90% or, you know, 70 whatever the percentage is". The wiki's shaped-region modifier pool gives the real range: 75–100%. The frame shows 77%.

Terminology correction: the narration says "pets" throughout. The wiki's term is pits. An Abyss spreads via a crack and opens 1–4 pits; clearing the final pit spawns an Abyssal Trove (which always contains at least one Abyss jewel) or, sometimes, a Stygian Spire monster instead. At area level 78 and above — map tier 11+ — a four-pit Abyss can rarely open a portal to the Abyssal Depths, a side area ending at an Abyssal Lich.

How to run the map: boss rush first, Abyss last

Read the right-hand panel. "Rare Monsters each have 4 additional Modifiers" — that is exactly two Horned Scarabs of Nemeses at two modifiers each, which is the cleanest possible confirmation that the scarab identification above is right. The same panel shows 279% increased quantity, 327% increased rarity, 79% increased pack size, 166% more scarabs, and "Abysses in Area have 82% increased chance to lead to an Abyssal Depths".

1. Anchor on City Square freeThe wiki describes City Square as a rectangular city map with the bosses always found in the middle central square, and calls it one of the best maps for boss rush farming. The video's reasoning holds up. 6:13
2. Run the boss first to clear the boss altars freeBoss altars block the good altar options. City Square's central boss placement means the rush costs you almost nothing. 5:31
3. Full clear the map before touching the Abyss freeScarabs drop heavily from propagated map rares long before the Abyss. Missing packs is missing income — this is not a rush-to-mechanic farm. 6:13
4. Take quantity and duplication altars freeWith the boss altars already removed, the remaining altar rolls skew toward the currency and quantity options you actually want. 6:33

Layout caveat, unverified: he reports that in two Toxic Sewer runs the Abyss did not spawn at all and openly asks viewers to explain it. Two maps is not evidence, the wiki says nothing about it, and we could not reproduce it. Treat it as an open question rather than a rule.

Clearing the Abyss pit by pit

1. Save the Abyss for last, every time freeThe Abyss inherits the propagated modifiers, so it is the highest-value part of the map. City Square lets you avoid triggering it early; on a map like Jungle Valley an Abyss opening in your path forces the issue. 5:53
2. Clear one pit at a time if your build allows freeKill the monsters around a pit, let that pit fire its spawns, clear those, then move to the next. He concedes it likely matters little — his own auto-bomber cleared the entire Abyss at once and did fine. 6:54
3. Accept that some rares will be unkillable grindRares carrying a dozen-plus propagated modifiers get genuinely dangerous. He leaves them and estimates a much stronger build would add several divines per session. Headhunter helps enormously — for the record it is a Leather Belt, "When you Kill a Rare monster, you gain its Modifiers for 60 seconds", not a Stygian Vise. 12:51

The frame above shows an Abyssal Armoury chest label and an Abyss Scarab of Crystals drop. Neither name appears anywhere on the Path of Exile Wiki. Both are screenshot-verified from 3.29 footage only, and are exactly the kind of detail a wiki lagging a fresh rework would be missing.

The Atlas tree for propagation Abyss

1. Take every scarab node and every map modifier effect node setupThen use the Atlas blocking options to suppress worthless scarab families and bias toward valuable ones. This is the backbone of the tree. 11:07
2. Drop pure scarab-percent nodes for the ore nodes grindHe swapped scarab nodes for ore nodes chasing Bismuth. Be honest about the sample: 2 Bismuth in 40 maps, and his A/B test was 0 in 20 with an ore-chance node versus 2 in 20 without it. That is noise, not a finding, and he says as much. 10:03
3. Take the Abyss cluster that adds a rare monster per Abyss setupHis words: you take this one no matter what, because an extra rare monster from every Abyss is another body for propagation to load up. 11:07
4. Skip Shaping the Mountains — but not for the reason given skipShaping the Mountains does add rare monsters ("10% increased number of Rare Monsters in your Maps"), and skipping it is defensible when the Abyss already supplies plenty. Shaping the Skies, however, has nothing to do with monsters at all — see the correction below. 11:49
5. Think twice about the Abyss chance clusters skipMore Abysses is good; the rider attached to them is not. See the node tooltip below. 10:46

The Abyss Chance node grants "+12% chance to contain an Abyss" but also "Scarabs dropped in your Maps have 12% increased chance to be Abyss Scarabs" — the same tax as the bad shaped-region modifier, in miniature. At 12% it is a much smaller bite than 77%, and BawLoch takes the cluster anyway. Just take it knowingly.

On Bismuth: there is no "Bismuth Ore" item page on the wiki. Bismuth is a Settlers of Kalguur mineral deposit found in maps, and the wiki describes touching a Bismuth deposit as adding elemental monster modifiers to all magic and rare monsters in the area (along with damaging elemental tornadoes). That is why it pairs so violently with propagation — it is a modifier source, not, as the video frames it, a generic "multiplier".

What it actually pays

The honest version, because the video's own numbers do not quite line up. BawLoch quotes roughly 1.7 divines profit per map on both the Scarab of Wisps and the Cartography Scarab of Risk variants, and about 35–37 divines profit across a 20-map block. His stated investment for that block moves between "around 10 divines", "around 11 divines" and "like 20 divines" at different points in the same segment, which is why the profit figure lands on a range rather than a number. His portfolio snapshot for the block showed roughly +38 divines gained, of which about 34.8 divines was scarabs alone, plus around 106 raw chaos orbs with no currency-focused rolling.

Two numbers are flagged UNCERTAIN and you should not plan around them. The Propagation ember price is stated once as "5k chaos ... went up to like 12k chaos" and again as "it was 5 ... it's 12", so the units are ambiguous in the transcript. The Cartography Scarab of Risk price is given as something the automatic captions render as "100kos" — most plausibly 100 chaos, consistent with the scarab prices visible in his portfolio, but we are not going to assert it. Check live prices before committing; the creator's whole framing is that propagation is climbing fast and the margin is moving.

Abyss jewels, Stygian Vises and what this guide does not answer

Several things players search for alongside this strategy are simply not what the video is about, so here is the straight answer rather than keyword padding.

Abyss jewel farming and Stygian Vise farming. The wiki confirms the Stygian Vise is the Abyss-exclusive belt base with the implicit "Has 1 Abyssal Socket", and that it drops always from Stygian Spires and can drop from Abyssal Liches. Abyss jewels come in four types — Murderous Eye (melee), Searching Eye (ranged), Ghastly Eye (minion) and Hypnotic Eye (caster) — and drop from Abyssal Troves, which always contain at least one, as well as from Stygian Spires and Abyss monsters. This strategy will produce them incidentally, but it is not tuned for them: it is tuned for scarabs and ground loot. If jewels or vises are your goal, you want Abyss Scarab of Edifice for Stygian Spires, which this setup deliberately never buys.

Abyssal Depths and the Abyssal Lich. A four-pit Abyss at area level 78 or higher (map tier 11+) can rarely open a portal to the Abyssal Depths, a side area ending at an Abyssal Lich boss. Shaped-region and scarab modifiers can push that chance up substantially — the map frame above showed 82% increased chance. The video never runs one on camera and offers no opinion on whether the detour is worth the time, so neither will we.

Best maps for Abyss. The video's answer is City Square as the Astrolabe anchor, pivoting to Cemetery or Terrace when the region modifiers turn hostile, and avoiding Toxic Sewer on an unverified hunch. All five are real maps; the layout logic for City Square is wiki-supported. There is no wiki-endorsed "best Abyss map" list.

Whether the 3.29 rework changed drop rates. Unknown, and we will not pretend otherwise. There is no wiki page for 3.29 and no patch-note page to check against.

How this guide was fact-checked

Wiki-verified against poewiki.net: the Allflame Ember of Propagation's exact wording, limit and source; Horned Scarab of Nemeses (name, effect, limit 2, drop level 81) replacing the video's "nemesis scarab"; Scarab of Wisps and Cartography Scarab of Risk wording; Maven's Chisel of Scarabs at +50% more scarabs; Astrolabe and Lightless Astrolabe mechanics including the 6–9 map region size, the Tier 16 entry requirement and the one-region-per-quadrant rule; Synthesised Stability; Shaping the Skies and Shaping the Mountains; the pit / Abyssal Trove / Stygian Spire / Abyssal Depths / Abyssal Lich terminology and the level 78 threshold; Stygian Vise and the four Abyss jewel types; Headhunter's base and wording; Bismuth as a mineral deposit; City Square's layout; map device slot count.

Screenshot-verified from the source footage where the wiki is silent: the Betrayal Scarab of the Allflame tooltip at 75%; the 77% Abyss-scarab region roll; the +138% More Scarabs map; "Rare Monsters each have 4 additional Modifiers" in a live map; the Abyss Chance node's wording; the existence of the Abyss Scarab of Crystals and the Abyssal Armoury.

Corrected against the video: "abyss pets" → Abyss pits. "Nemesis Scarab" → Horned Scarab of Nemeses. "Astrolab" → Astrolabe, specifically the Lightless Astrolabe. "Shaping the Skies adds monsters" → it does not. Bismuth as a "multiplier" → it is an elemental modifier source. The Astrolabe's Tier 16 requirement and 6–9 map region size, both omitted from the video entirely.

Unverified and flagged inline: the two shaped-region modifiers about extra pits and extra Abyss rare monsters (wiki stat text is blank); the Toxic Sewer no-spawn claim; the Propagation ember and Risk scarab prices; and, most importantly, the 3.29 Abyss rework itself, which has no wiki coverage at all yet. This guide should be re-checked once a 3.29 wiki page exists.