Monodent of the Sea: Overview
2025-10-24 // IOTM Overview
EDITOR'S NOTE: I have been swamped at work and my daughter just started daycare, which has brought with it an unyielding plague upon my house. As such, I used a summary of the monodent from legendary KOL superstar accodorian (#) as the base for this. Enjoy this lightly edited article from one of the GOATs.
We're going to start this one out with a major complaint. Despite the description saying that it's great for roasting marshmallows, and the IOTM being released just before Yuletide, it doesn't actually roast marshmallows! Ugh! That complaint registered, let's start talking about our monodent -- it's like a trident, but not three. Is it for thee? Let's find out.
General Summary
The Monodent of the Sea is a 1-handed spear, with a damage range of 20-40. It features 3 enchantments, all of which scale by T.
- +25 x T Hot Damage
- All Attributes + 5 x T %
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- T Stats per Fight
What is T, you might ask? Well, you might drink it with an English breakfast, you might put a golf ball on it, and it may feature prominently on the A-Team. But in the context of this IOTM, it refers to Tines -- your monodent starts out with 1 tine and scales up to 10 tines. So, you know. Monodent, bident, trident, etc... all the way to Decadent, which is one of the main jokes. You accumulate tines by defeating constructs; your tine count is min(10, floor(sqrt(X)), where X is the number of constructs you've defeated with the monodent equipped. These tines persist through your current ascension. (I am still going to refer the [tines]dent as a monodent for the rest of this article, because it makes it easier to follow.)
In addition to the three flat enchantments, the monodent also comes with three skills.
- *Sea dent: Summon a Wave -- Once per day, outside of combat, you can use this skill to flood the zone you most recently adventured in for the rest of the day. The flooded zone becomes an underwater zone with a -30% pressure penalty. Because it's a negative pressure penalty, this means that you get a +30% boost to meat, items, and initiative. As the zone is underwater, it requires the Fishy effect to adventure in the zone for only 1-turn cost; helpfully, having the monodent equipped will give you 1 turn of fishy at the start of any combat while equipped in a flooded zone. (Also, you cannot flood zoneless locations or underwater locations.)
- *Sea dent: Throw a Lighting Bolt -- This is an 11/day combat skill. This provides a non-free instakill for the current monster, also banishing that monster for the rest of the day. Unlike monkey slap or batter up, this does retain the monster's drops. One monster at a time can be banished by lightning bolt, so you can toggle it away from a mistakenly banished monster by casting it again.
- *Sea dent: Talk to Some Fish -- This is a combat skill with no daily limit. If the current monster is not a fish, a boss, or immune to instant kills, this skill transforms the current monster into some fish. This is a scaling monster that drops beefy/glistening/slick fish meat at 10% chance apiece, alongside a 30%/20%/10% shot at dull, rough, and pristine fish scales (respectively). Basically: it's CLEESH, but with a scaling monster.
Speedrun Applicability
Unlike a lot of the monodent's surrounding items, this IOTM is reasonably simple and straightforward for speedrun usage.
The base enchantments are (largely) pretty unnecessary, but will constitute mild comfort for some ascenders; in a normal run, you don't fight that many constructs, but it's pretty likely that you'll end up with something in the neighborhood of a 20-30% boost to all attributes. That will help a tiny bit with tower tests. Probably. The hot damage is going to be mildly helpful in no-perm paths for anyone with a hot damage tower test, as well, as you can get a huge chunk of your necessary hot damage painlessly with the monodent. (In paths with perms accessible, though, you just cast Song of Sauce, which gets you all the way there.)
The skills are all useful in their own ways.
- Lightning Bolt is the most straightforward, helping you out any time you only want to encounter a single copy of a monster. Things like the party skeleton (especially in combination with BCZ refraction) are a good target here, as well as things like the pygmy janitor or any of the nightstands in the haunted bedroom. In some cases, you might want to just have the monodent equipped as a "break in case of emergency" banish -- for instance, if you're in the Palindome and you hit a non-dude, you might as well banish the crappy monster you hit and make it a little more likely to find a dude later.
- Summon a Wave is quite useful in the current challenge path (11,038 Leagues Under the Sea) and only mildly useful outside of it. While you can't actually use it underwater, you can use it anywhere that you're stacking free fights (so, CyberRealm or Shadow Rifts) and get one free turn of fishy for each turn you spend there. Buyer beware, though -- you need to make sure you keep the monodent equipped in that zone, because if you don't, each free fight will cost an extra turn, and that's terrible. Still -- 10 turns of fishy is a nice boost. In normal ascension contexts, I expect you probably just use this for +30% meat drop for nuns, which is minimally useful but technically helpful.
- Talk to Some Fish (also known as FEESH, for CLEESH but with feesh) is the skill with the highest upside but the trickiest general usage. In a vacuum, you should consider turning almost every useless fight in a run into Some Fish; you'll get extra substats, extra meat (via autosell of the surprisingly expensive scales), extra fish meat (useful in 11,038 leagues for more turns of Fishy), and a reset to most per-fight flags. Unlike the monsters you get with CLEESH, Some Fish is a copiable monster, which means that it doesn't operate the same way for the purpose of older IOTMs like the Backup Camera. But being able to reset your in-fight flags means you can get things like extra pages for your familiar scrapbook, extra damage for your Vampire Vintner's damaging effect to increase the power of its familiar XP wine, and extra uses of once-per-combat skills (like tearing away your pants, summoning lovebugs, surprisingly sweet stabbing/slashing, flyers for the war, etc). Also, you can CLEESH your Fish, so in unrestricted you can encounter three monsters in a single fight and do all that crap throughout the fight. Dope!
It's worth noting that most of the benefits noted under Talk to Some Fish rely on IOTMs that are out of standard. This does reflect some of the skill's upside; effectively getting +1 free CLEESH per fight is a highly degenerate power that would have solid synergy with a lot of older IOTMs. Even though it isn't a must-have skill right now, there's a decent possibility that it will become meaningful in the future.
2025 In-Standard Synergies
- The monodent pairs well with both the closed-circuit pay phone (2023) and CyberRealm (2025). By flooding either of the free fight zones you get from these two IOTMs, you can get a few turns of Fishy off of your free in-zone fights in 11,038 Leagues Under the Sea. CyberRealm also has the extra synergy that you can stab up a few constructs to gain extra tines from.
- The blood cubic zirconia's (2025) skills all cost substats to use, and Some Fish are scalers, so you can stack up a bunch of extra substats from fighting those fish. Also, in paths without access to CLEESH, Talk to Some Fish is a good alternative when casting BCZ: Refracted Gaze to get drops from every monster in a zone.
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Monodent of the Sea a tier 5 IOTM. At least for now. It is a complex IOTM, but not a particularly meaningful one in the world of turnsave. You may be able to save a turn or two in a run from effective usage of the Lightning Bolt banishes, and (perhaps) eke out an extra BCZ freekill from the mass of free scaling fights from your constant entanglements with Some Fish. But the enchantments do very little to improve your lot in life, and the flooding skill is essentially just a 30% meat or item drop bonus in a single zone, which isn't really that great. Still, the FEESH skill has some major untapped potential in modern standard, and this will impact routing in a positive way with additional leveling power, quicker completion of flyering for the war, and an extra combat trivializer for avatar paths. For a bad turnsave IOTM, I kind of love it.