Farming Rates: Which Route Actually Pays Best

How Should You Compare Farming Rates?

Most farming advice ranks dungeons by reward size. That is the wrong axis. The number that decides your hourly income is reward per run divided by the time a run reliably takes, and "reliably" is doing the work:

• A route you clear in 60 seconds with 100% consistency beats a route you clear in 5 minutes with a wipe risk, even when the second one pays three times more per clear.
• Clear time collapses toward your build, not the dungeon. The 20-second Pudyin Den loop is 20 seconds only if you delete enemies instantly; at half that damage it is a slow, mediocre run.
• Loot capacity is a real cost. Running until your item slots fill adds sorting and travel time to every subsequent lap, which is why fixed bail-out points beat "keep going".
• Difficulty is not a reward multiplier by itself. Heat gates specific drops: Gadget Parts improve from Spicy underground ruins, 5-star weapons are Super Spicy only. But picking a heat you cannot clear cleanly costs more than it pays.

One honesty note about this page. Published clear times exist and we cite them; verified per-hour yield totals do not exist for this game. So the runs-per-hour column below is our arithmetic on sourced clear times, and we deliberately stop there rather than multiplying it by reward estimates nobody has measured.

Clear Times and Runs Per Hour

Every clear time here is published by Game8; the runs-per-hour column is ours, calculated from it and assuming no downtime between laps (so treat it as a ceiling, not a promise).

Source disagreement, printed rather than resolved: Game8's English edition (July 31) clears Awlmun Den in about 25 seconds with Speed Tank gadgets equipped; Game8 Japan (August 4) gives about 35 seconds for a fully specified seven-step route with named part thresholds: Dash Distance Change at 80%+, extra-large Flywire length, Cooldown Reduced at 20%+. The Japanese figure is newer and comes with reproducible requirements, so treat 35 seconds as the honest planning number and 25 as the ceiling for a maxed Speed build.

The Two Multipliers That Beat Route Choice

Before optimising which dungeon you run, check that both of these are switched on. They apply to runs you are already doing, which makes them strictly better than shaving seconds:

• Title rank raises Spirhalite Shard income by up to +100%. Titles come from your total relic value, so relic collection is a farming upgrade, not a side activity.
• Excavating past roughly 70% of a big crystal applies a scaling bonus to everything you mine after that, from 1.2x up to 2x. The practical rule: never leave a crystal dungeon part-mined. Finishing the deposit is where the run's value concentrates.
• Goldie (キンシャケ) spawns rarely during anomaly waves in crystal dungeons and announces itself with the Salmon Run sound cue. It drops shards on every hit and pays a large bonus if you kill it before it escapes, so burn your Showstopper on it without hesitating.

The Semi-AFK Farming Build

Some routes clear themselves if the gadgets do the shooting. This is Game8's low-input build for Temprah Den and Pleyn Den, built on auto-triggering gadgets and a cooldown passive that ticks while you hide in your own ink:

• Shot Pot (スケットポット): the load-bearing piece. Prioritise Double Trouble (ストックアップ), Cooldown Reduced and Auto Trigger on Hit; add Multi Shot and Shot Damage Up when you have them.
• Splatellites (ヌリヌリサテライト): the third slot once your Tactical Tank is maxed. Cooldown Reduced, Auto Trigger and Scorch first, then Satellite Addition and Duration Up.
• Gadget Recovery (Submerge): the Relic Power that shortens cooldowns while you are submerged. Between deployments, sink into the ink and let it tick.

It is semi-AFK, not AFK: you still collect Power Eggs and fire Showstoppers manually. Use the time it frees to level a tank or Bot Buddy you have neglected. Game8 suggests cycling support characters to 30 uses each while you farm, since the runs pay levels regardless of who you bring.

How Far Has Automation Actually Gone?

The semi-AFK build was the ceiling for about a week. Since late July, three separate communities have pushed past it with hardware: a microcontroller wired to the dock that presses the buttons for you. We are documenting this because it is happening and nobody is reporting it in English, not because we are recommending it. We do not publish build instructions:

• The open-source build. A GPLv3 project on GitHub turns an ESP32-S3 development board into a wired Switch controller and stores a 48-step routine in the board's own flash memory, so the loop survives the browser or the cable dropping out. The published loop period is 63.595 seconds, the most precise timing figure anyone has put in public for this game, because it is a firmware constant rather than a stopwatch reading.
• It came from a controller macro first. The board project credits a Bilibili creator's original macro and links their video, which is titled as a roughly 30-second loop for 5-star weapons plus Spirhalite shards and crystals. The macro is the game knowledge; the board is only a way to replay it.
• Three communities, one dungeon. A Chinese written tutorial documents an automated Temprah Den route, and an English YouTube upload claims a 100% AFK Temprah Den setup on a cheap microcontroller. Temprah Den is exactly the stage Game8 Japan independently picked for the semi-AFK build, so the manual build, the Chinese macro and the English rig all converged on the same room.

What none of it does is skip the game. Every one of these setups requires you to have already beaten the story and hand-farmed the materials, crystals and gadget parts that the build needs. The automation replaces the repetition at the end, not the progression that gets you there. And one caveat that the source projects state but their audience often skips: Raiders has online co-op and SOS requests. These rigs are scoped to solo play, and an unattended controller is a different proposition the moment another player can join your raid.

What we could not verify, stated plainly: we did not run any of this. The 63.595-second figure is the firmware's own constant, but the project does not say which dungeon that particular loop runs, so we do not attach it to Temprah Den. The "100k+ per hour" number is a video title, not a measurement we can check, and it misspells Spirhalite, so treat it as a claim. The Chinese tutorial also names a second farming stage that matches nothing in our verified 61-stage dungeon database, so we have left it out rather than repeat a name we cannot place. Nintendo has said nothing about hardware macros in Raiders.

Which Crystal Dungeon Drops Which Materials?

All six big-crystal dungeons sit at Salmonid Lv80 on Super Spicy, so none of them is meaningfully better for 5-star weapon hunting. That makes the material table the only reason to prefer one. Pick the dungeon that stocks the part you are blocked on:

We checked the "all Lv80" claim against our own dungeon database rather than taking it on trust: every shard-mining dungeon in our verified 61-stage table carries Super Spicy Lv80, with no exceptions. Every material is named after the Salmonid that drops it, so this table doubles as a hunting list.

Farming FAQ

Related guides

• All Dungeons and Islands: the Complete Stage List
• All Items and Materials in Splatoon Raiders
• Which Weapons Are Worth Investing In?
• Super Spicy: Unlock, Prep & Rewards
• Best Builds & Recommended Loadouts
• Splatoon Raiders Weapon Farming

Sources

• 周回おすすめダンジョン・半オート周回も紹介, Game8 (Japan)
• ウズシオのかけら集めの効率的なやり方・金策, Game8 (Japan)
• レベル上げの効率的なやり方・おすすめ周回場所, Game8 (Japan)
• Farming Guide: Best Dungeons To Farm, Game8
• Semi-AFK Farming Guide, Game8
• Splatoon Farmers: ESP32-S3 controller firmware (GPLv3), ShikyC, GitHub
• 一个基于ESP32的低成本速刷涂击队素材的方法, 織ShikyC, bilibili
• 【涂击队】30秒速刷5星毕业武器+涡潮岩材料全自动攻略, 我的茕茕孑立, bilibili
• 基于ESP32-S3_n16r8单片机的涂击队自动刷素材教程, Keylol 其乐
• 100% AFK Splatoon Raiders Farming (100k+ Spiralite/Hour!), Deathm0b, YouTube