EX Machine (Halvard)
What it is
It is a smith NPC who opens a window where you place a piece of equipment and tell him to work on its excellent options.
In normal MU, an excellent piece is whatever luck handed you. You kill a monster, look at the options it came with, and keep them — or throw the piece away and start over. There is no way to trade a bad option for another one.
Here there is.
A rule that holds everywhere on this page: failing never destroys the piece. You lose the cost, and nothing else. The piece comes back to your hand exactly as it was.
Where he is
| Where | Coordinate | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Lorencia | 129, 118 | Halvard the Smith |
You must stand near him for the window to work. Walk away in the middle of an operation and it is refused, with nothing charged.
First: what an "excellent option" is
If you have never played MU, it is this. Beyond the number in front of the item (+9,
+13), a piece can carry up to six extra bonuses, each with its own effect. On a
weapon those are things like recovering life on a kill, earning more zen, or attacking
faster.
A piece with those bonuses is called excellent. The more options, the rarer and the more valuable it is.
Each option is on or off — there is no in between. The EX Machine turns those six
switches on, off and around, and does nothing else. It does not touch the item's +,
its level, Ancient or Socket.
How to use it
- Talk to Halvard. The window opens with your inventory beside it.
- Drag the piece into the large frame.
- The screen shows, right away: how many options the piece accepts, how many it already has, which operations fit, the cost in fragments and zen, and the chance of each option.
- To aim, drag jewels into the five small squares.
- Pick the operation and confirm.
Until you confirm, nothing is charged. The screen is a quote.
The four operations
Never all four at once. A piece with no options can only Make excellent; a piece with options can Remove, Swap and — if there is still room — Add.
1. Make excellent
Works only on a piece with zero options. It gains its first one.
| Cost | 30 fragments and 1,000,000 zen |
| Chance of success | 75% |
| Which option arrives | rolled |
It is the only operation offered on a clean piece, and the only way in: without it, a plain piece never becomes excellent here.
2. Remove an option
Works on a piece with one or more. Never fails.
| Options the piece has | Fragments | Zen |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 30 | 1,200,000 |
| 2 | 55 | 2,200,000 |
| 3 | 90 | 3,600,000 |
| 4 | 135 | 5,400,000 |
| 5 | 190 | 7,600,000 |
| 6 | 255 | 10,200,000 |
Careful — this is the part that confuses people most: on Remove, the option that leaves is ROLLED among the ones the piece has. You do not choose. Jewels do not help here, and do not change the price.
If you want to decide which option disappears, the right operation is Swap — that is exactly what costs double.
3. Swap one option for another
Works on a piece with one or more. Never fails.
Here you choose which option leaves. It is removed, and in its place arrives one rolled among the ones the piece does not have.
| Options the piece has | Fragments | Zen |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60 | 2,400,000 |
| 2 | 110 | 4,400,000 |
| 3 | 180 | 7,200,000 |
| 4 | 255 | 10,200,000 |
| 5 | 255 | 10,200,000 |
| 6 | 255 | 10,200,000 |
Exactly double Remove, until it hits the ceiling of 255 fragments. You pay double for choosing which one leaves — and that is all the double buys: which one arrives is still luck.
If the piece already has every option that fits, there is nothing to swap into. In that case the option that left comes back, and you lose nothing beyond the cost.
4. Add an option
Works from one option up to the piece's ceiling. It is the only one that gets more expensive and harder at every step.
| Option you want | Fragments | Zen | Chance | Expected cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2nd | 60 | 2,400,000 | 70% | ~86 fragments |
| 3rd | 120 | 4,800,000 | 60% | ~200 |
| 4th | 240 | 9,600,000 | 50% | ~480 |
| 5th | 480 | 19,200,000 | 40% | ~1,200 |
| 6th | 960 | 38,400,000 | 30% | ~3,200 |
Expected cost is what you spend on average, counting the attempts that fail. Going from one option to all six costs, on average, around 5,200 fragments — and more than half of that sits in the last step alone.
That is deliberate. The second option is cheap so that whoever just made a piece excellent feels the progress the same day. The sixth is expensive so that a finished piece keeps being worth what it is worth.
This is the only operation without the 255-fragment ceiling. On the other three, one operation never costs more than a full stack.
The golden rule: what COMES IN is always rolled
In all four operations, the option that arrives is rolled. It is never chosen.
What you can choose is the one that leaves, and only on Swap.
If you could pick both sides, anyone would build the perfect piece to order, and there would be no difference between an item earned and an item bought.
Aiming with jewels
You can push luck toward the option you want by putting jewels in the five squares.
| Option | Jewel that aims it |
|---|---|
| 1st | Jewel of Soul |
| 2nd | Jewel of Life |
| 3rd | Jewel of Creation |
| 4th | Jewel of Bless |
| 5th | Jewel of Guardian |
| 6th | Jewel of Harmony |
How aiming actually works
Every eligible option enters the roll with weight 1. Each jewel you place adds +2 to the weight of the option it aims at.
So, on a piece where four options are free:
- no jewel — the four weigh 1 each: 25% for each;
- one jewel — the aimed one weighs 3, the others 1: 3 in 6, or 50%;
- five identical jewels — the aimed one weighs 11, the others 1: 11 in 14, or 78.6%.
It is a push, not a guarantee. Even with five jewels, the option you want may not come.
Two things worth money
One jewel or five cost the same. The price doubles if there is any jewel in the window — it does not double again per jewel. If you are going to aim, aiming with five costs the same as aiming with one, and the odds are far better.
Aiming only costs extra on Make excellent and Add. On Swap the jewel pushes the incoming option at no extra cost at all. On Remove it does nothing.
Why only these six jewels
They are the only ones that stack up to 255 in the inventory. The Jewel of Chaos was left out precisely because it does not stack: five of them would take five bag slots for a single operation.
You can take several jewels from the same stack — the game understands "take two from that slot", you do not need separate stacks.
How many options each piece accepts
It is not six for everyone. The ceiling depends on the piece, and the window shows that piece's own:
| Piece | Options that fit |
|---|---|
| Weapon and armour | 6 |
| Level 2 wings | 5 |
| Level 3 wings | 4 |
| Wings of Fairy | 0 — not accepted |
| Horn of Fenrir and Horn of Dinorant | 0 — refused, see below |
If the piece accepts no option, the window refuses and says why.
The price changes with the kind of piece
The cost in the tables above is a weapon's. The others multiply:
| Piece | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Weapon | 1x |
| Ring and pendant | 2x |
| Wings | 3x |
Wings, rings and pendants are the top of the economy and today they come out of the Chaos Machine, expensive and with risk. Without that multiplier, they would leave the forge for the price of a glove.
Why Fenrir and Dinorant are refused
And it is not about price.
On the Horn of Fenrir and the Horn of Dinorant, what looks like a list of options is actually the variant number of the piece — 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16, one at a time. That number is what makes a Fenrir Black, Blue, +Illusion or golden.
If the machine added an option to an +Illusion Fenrir, the result would be a number that does not exist in the table. The piece would lose its name and the four attributes of its variant — paid for, and with no undo.
So Halvard turns both away, with the reason written on screen.
The golden Fenrir does not come from here. It comes from the Illusion Temple, for whoever wins.
When the window refuses
It refuses before charging anything. The reasons:
| The screen says | What happened |
|---|---|
| Piece | The frame is empty, or the item accepts no excellent option |
| Fragment | You do not have enough fragments |
| Zen | You do not have enough zen |
| Jewel | The jewel is missing, or the slot you pointed at does not hold it |
| Operation | That operation does not fit this piece (e.g. Make excellent on a piece that already has an option) |
| Too far | You walked away from Halvard |
| Space | No room in the inventory |
After the first charge there is no refusal left: everything that could go wrong was checked beforehand, without spending anything.
Where to get Fragment of Excellence
The fragment is the forge's currency. It comes from:
- Bosses. Kundun, Medusa, Selupan and Erohim always drop one. Dark Elf, Nightmare and Balgass, half the time. Maya 40%, Red Dragon 30%, Fire Flame Ghost and Phoenix of Darkness 20%.
- Events. Blood Castle, Chaos Castle, Illusion Temple and Imperial Guardian.
- Boxes. The Box of Kundun, at each one's rate.
And the Gemstone — which becomes the Jewel of Harmony, the jewel that aims the 6th option — drops at 2% in Aida and in the three Kanturu maps.
Five-line summary
- Failing never destroys the piece. You lose the cost, nothing more.
- The option that arrives is always rolled. You only choose the one that leaves, and only on Swap.
- Remove rolls the one that leaves. If you want to decide, use Swap.
- Jewels push, they do not guarantee — and five jewels cost the same as one.
- Add doubles in price and drops in chance at every step. The sixth option is a project, not a Tuesday.