Tethered Skeleton

The Tethered Skeleton is the primary enemy of the Field of Tethered Bones and the player’s first encounter with a mechanically non-trivial foe. Unlike the Wandering Hollow, the Skeleton has a special mechanic — a grab attack that immobilises Shades — which forces the player to engage with the combat system more carefully. The Skeleton is also the primary source of Bone Ash, the Ascension-tier-1 material.

This page covers the Skeleton’s stats, its behaviour in combat, its drop table, and its lore.

Stats

The Tethered Skeleton’s stats at the player’s first encounter (Field of Tethered Bones, encounter 1):

Stat	Value	Notes
HP	450	Moderate for tier 1.
Attack	65	Moderate.
Defence	45	Moderate.
Speed	60	Slow; the player’s Shades will usually act first.
Affinity	Earth	Weak to Water, strong against Fire.
Resistance	20% to Earth	Resists same-aspect attacks.

The Skeleton’s stats scale with encounter difficulty. In the Field’s later encounters, HP reaches 1200 and Attack reaches 150. The Skeleton is the primary enemy of the Field, and the player will face hundreds of them over the course of farming Bone Ash.

Behaviour

The Tethered Skeleton has two behaviours:

Basic melee attack — a single-target strike dealing 1.0x Attack damage. This is the Skeleton’s default action.
Grapple — a single-target attack that deals 0.5x Attack damage and immobilises the target for 2 seconds. The Skeleton uses Grapple on a 15-second cooldown, prioritising the Shade with the highest current HP.

The Grapple is the Skeleton’s defining mechanic. The 2-second immobilisation is long enough for other Skeletons to land several free hits, which can be devastating in groups of 3 or more. The counter is to bring a Shade with a knockback skill (such as Kagaribi’s Cinder Burst, which applies a small knockback on hit), which breaks the Grapple and creates space.

The Skeleton’s priority on high-HP Shades is a deliberate design choice. It encourages the player to bring a tank Shade to absorb the Grapples, freeing the damage dealers to attack without interruption. This is the player’s introduction to party composition, and the Field is calibrated to teach this lesson — a party of three damage dealers will struggle with the Skeletons, while a party with one tank and two damage dealers will clear comfortably.

Drop table

The Tethered Skeleton’s drop table:

Drop	Rate	Notes
Munin	100%	20–40 per kill, scaling with encounter difficulty.
Bone Ash	12%	The primary Ascension-tier-1 material.
Old Coin	0.05%	Extremely rare; the Wandering Hollow is a better source.
Tethered Bone	3%	A crafting material for tier-1 gear.

The Bone Ash drop is the Skeleton’s primary value. At a 12% drop rate, the player can expect roughly 12 ash per hour of active farming, which is sufficient for the first Ascension in 2–3 days. The community has optimised the farming route through the Field to maximise Skeleton encounters per hour, and the route is documented on the Items Index page.

Lore

The Tethered Skeleton is the lore-explanation for the Field of Tethered Bones’ primary inhabitant. In the metaphysics of Yomi, a Tethered Skeleton is the remains of a soul that died with unfinished business so consuming that the soul cannot let go even in death. The soul’s persistence is anchored to its skeleton — the bones are the “tether” that keeps the soul in Yomi — and the soul’s behaviour is a repetition of its final moments.

The Skeleton’s Grapple attack is lore-justified as the soul’s attempt to “finish” its unfinished business, whatever that business was. The soul reaches out to grab the player’s Shades because it cannot distinguish them from the people it was trying to reach in life. This is reflected in the Skeleton’s in-game model: the skeleton is in the posture of a reaching grasp, frozen mid-motion, and the Grapple animation is the soul completing the reach it could not complete in life.

The Field of Tethered Bones is the most populous zone in Yomi, because the mortal world produces many souls with unfinished business. The lore establishes that the Field has been growing steadily for centuries, as the mortal world’s population has increased and the number of souls with unfinished business has grown proportionally. The community has speculated that the Field’s growth is connected to the Hollows’ proliferation (see Wandering Hollow), but this has not been confirmed in the lore.

The Skeleton’s resistance to Earth-aspected attacks is lore-justified as a consequence of its tether: the skeleton is bound to the earth of Yomi, and earth-aspected attacks are partially absorbed by the tether. The Skeleton’s weakness to Water is similarly lore-justified: water is the element of the crossing, and water-aspected attacks weaken the tether, hastening the soul’s dissolution.

Variants

The Tethered Skeleton has several variants, each appearing in different zones of Yomi:

Tethered Knight — a stronger variant appearing in the Hollow Shrine. Higher HP and Defence, lower Speed, and a powerful single-target skill. Drops Old Coins at a higher rate.
Tethered Dancer — a faster variant appearing on Mount Kagura. Lower HP, higher Speed, and a Merriment debuff on hit. Drops Kagura Bells.
Tethered Wraith — a ghostly variant appearing in the Drowning Marsh. Lower HP, higher Attack, and a stacking slow on hit. Drops Drowned Silk.
Tethered Priest — a spellcasting variant appearing in the Frozen Peak. Moderate HP, high Attack, and a Frostbite debuff on hit. Drops Frozen Tears.

Each variant is a recolour of the base Skeleton model, with adjustments to the posture and animations to reflect the variant’s lore. The variants are documented on their own bestiary pages where they have significantly different mechanics; otherwise, they are noted on this page.

Trivia

The Tethered Skeleton’s Grapple attack is the only mechanic in the game that can be broken by a knockback. This makes knockback skills unusually valuable in the Field, and the community has compiled a list of Shades with knockback skills specifically for Field farming.
The Skeleton’s in-game model is one of the most detailed in the game, despite being a “trash mob”. The developers have stated that this was a deliberate choice, intended to convey the Skeleton’s tragic backstory through environmental storytelling.
The Tethered Skeleton is the only enemy in the game with a unique death animation. Instead of dissolving, the Skeleton’s bones collapse into a pile, which remains on the field for the rest of the fight. This is a lore touch: the bones are the soul’s tether, and they persist after the soul has dissipated.