It turns out Diablo 4 does have a secret Cow Level — here’s how to find it

One of the longstanding traditions in the Diablo franchise has been the Secret Cow Level — or, to use its proper name in Diablo 2, the Moo Moo Farm. The idea of a cow level originated with the very first Diablo game, where a rumor spread that if you clicked on a cow enough times, you’d enter a hidden cow level. In Diablo 2, with the assistance of an unlisted recipe in the Horadric Cube, one could open a portal to this realm, replete with the Hell Bovines that had killed poor stableboy Wirt, along with their dastardly monarch, the Cow King.

Diablo 3 included not one, but two references to the Cow Level — one, Whimsyshire, is a realm of rainbows and unicorns that is both a nod to the Cow Level (the ghost of the Cow King is even involved in unlocking it!) and the dev team poking fun at people who criticized Diablo 3 for daring to have colors in its world’s palette other than brown, grey, and dried-blood red. Diablo 3 also included a second manifestation of the Cow Level, cheekily named Not the Cow Level, as a secret level that originated with the game’s third anniversary, once again featuring a field full of Infernal Bovines and their new potentate, the Cow Queen.

So naturally, since it’s a tradition at this point, one of the recurring questions since Diablo 4’s release has been: is there a cow level? And the answer, it turns out, is… yes!

Thanks to the hard work of the members of the Not Finding a Cow Level Discord, as revealed in a video by LoatheBurger, the three-part path to entering Diablo 4’s own Cow Level has been uncovered. It takes a fairly major time commitment, though, spread across all three parts of the game — the base game, Vessel of Hatred, and Lord of Hatred — and one step has to be started and completed within a real-world week. Luckily, you can do any of the three parts in any order, so if one step sounds mind-numbingly tedious to you (spoilers: one of them is) then you can work on the others, until you have all three parts complete.

Here are all the steps to follow to reach Diablo 4’s Cow Level. As long as it’s a Tuesday, anyway.

Part 1: Bovine massacre in the game’s original zones

In every zone of Diablo 4, especially Scosglen, there are cows. To start off the task in the original zones, your job is to cleanse Sanctuary of them — 666 of them, in fact. Once you’ve started your cow massacre, you need to kill 666 cows in 666,666 seconds, which is just over a week of real-world time. On your 666th kill, you’ll get a relic (each one a nod to how you entered the Cow Level in Diablo 2):

• The Bloody Wooden Shard in Kehjistan or Hawezar
• The Musty Tome in Fractured Peaks or Scosglen
• The Intricate Metallic Fragment in the Dry Steppes

Once you get the first relic, keep going; swap zones and go find the others. You’ll need all three; community consensus seems to be that you’ll need to kill about a thousand cows total.

Take your three relics to the eastern side of Ked Bardu, where you’re looking for the fountain surrounded by three ox statues. Dropping each relic into the fountain will cleanse it and allow you to offer it to one of the now-interactable ox statues; once you’ve offered all three of them up, you’ll get a Strange Key. Take that to the previously-closed Forlorn Hovel cellar on the eastern tip of Scosglen to open it up.

Inside you’ll find some dead villagers, and cows. A lot of cows. Not ominous at all! Kill them all and you’ll collect the first part of the puzzle, a dried-up Stamina Potion.

Part 2: Hunting relics down in Nahantu… and corrupting them

In Nahantu, at the Kurast Docks, Samuk, and Kichuk, you’ll find new scrolls that hint towards three tasks you’ll need to undertake in order to collect three Diablo 3-flavored relics. Wowhead has a pretty good guide on these tasks, but in short:

• For the Jabbering Gemstone you’ll need to thank three statues southwest of the Kurast Docks
• For the Crooked Staff you’ll need to completely untrain your character of all skills, dismiss your Mercenary, and use only the baseline attack ability to kill an Elite in the Great Shelf;
• For the Rusted Old Bell, you’ll need to visit twelve bird statues in Five Hills

With these three new relics in hand, find three Cordycephic Zombies north of Ichorfall and kill them together to spawn a patch of black mushrooms; drop all three relics into the mushrooms to corrupt them — you’ll know you’ve succeeded when they emit purple smoke. You can offer the corrupted relics to the braziers at the Oka’bo Temple southeast of Kurast Bazaar to get an Unusual Key. Like the last key, take this one to the Forlorn Burrow cellar west of the Bazaar; inside, an otherwise-normal wall will collapse and reveal more cows, who — upon being slaughtered — will drop the Rusted Bardiche. That’s the second item you’ll need!

Part 3: Sinning in Skovos to finally find the portal

The third arc of the Cow Level hunt first requires finding the Outcast’s Journal (thanks yet again to the Not The Cow Level Discord for all the legwork, and also to IGN for their written guide), located in a hidden niche on Mount Hefaetrus in Skovos, northwest of the Fool’s Quarry waypoint. After reading it, you’ll be told that “Blind are those who deny their own sins.” Of course, now it’s time to admit our own sins by going back to the Kyovashad Gatehouse (remember this scene from the base campaign?) and burning a piece of wood with your sin on it. You’ll need to do that part each time you take on a new “sin quest,” in order to activate that quest.

Check in with the Outcast’s Journal each time, as well, to get a hint as to where you’ll be headed next; you can do the first three in any order, but save Greed for last. Here’s what to do for the first three sin quests:

• For Pride, head to Celestia and defeat Ballistas until an Amazonian Bolt drops. Take this to the Idyllic Reach cellar in Phillios, load it into the ballista there, take the zipline to a statue of Inarius, interact with it, and defeat the boss that spawns to obtain Father’s Chains. Take these to Antia’s Flame in northern Phillios and burn them to complete the Pride sin quest.
• For Anger, go to the Training Grounds in Temis and attack a Training Dummy there until it drops the Amazon Training Helm; equip it. With it on, defeat Corrupted Amazonian enemies across Celestia until the rest of the set drops; each time a piece drops, equip it. Wearing the full set, head southeast of Akarat’s Bulwark to find Vasha the Unbroken and defeat them for Mother’s Rose. Take Mother’s Rose to the Temple of Courage in the northern part of Athulua and burn it to complete the Anger quest. (And don’t forget to put your regular armor back on!)
• For Fear, you’ll be going to the Ruins of Broken Reason in Lycander, where you’ll find a crow on a ruin wall by a small sundial. Interact with the crow to make it fly away, then follow it. When it stops, it’ll drop the Hierophant’s Skull. Take this to the Temple of Life, also in Lycander, and burn it.

After collecting and burning each of these items, you’ll get the Hadopelagic Key.

Now go back to the Kyovoshad gatehouse to burn your Greed sin, and return to Skovos to read the journal again. Next, you need to go back to Hawezar and find the coffin that you used way back in the original campaign to go to the Temple of the Deathspeaker — except it’s not there anymore! Instead, you need to fish it up (so be sure to train fishing before you get to this step). Interact with it with the Hadopelagic Key in your inventory to unlock it and head back to the Temple of the Deathspeaker. Proceed through the dungeon to find your final relic… Neyrelle’s Arm.

Take your cow quest relics and combine them at — where else? — the Horadric Cube. Putting in Neyrelle’s Arm, the Stamina Potion, and the Rusted Bardiche will yield a cache that contains a new title, an emote, and a new relic: the Torn Page.

Head to a location on the eastern shore to find the Outcast’s Boat. You’ll find some fun stuff there, but most importantly you’ll find a new cellar containing a hecatomb that in turn has a circle of cows. One of the NPCs here has given you a hint to come back on Tuesday; using this method, you can access the Secret Cow Level by killing the circle of cows on a Tuesday while your sin is set to Greed.

Have fun in the Secret Cow Level!

Epilogue: Returning to the Cow Level, and a shortcut for others

Luckily, if you want to revisit the Cow Level, you don’t need to go through this many steps again. This time, return to Kyovashad Gatehouse, where you’ll discover a new sin: Moo. Burning the Moo sin and then returning to the Outcast’s Journal will open a portal for you to return to the Cow Level. You can also use the original method, but the alternative portal doesn’t require you to set your sin to Greed again, nor does it require you to wait until a Tuesday.

Also, remember that emote? With your sin set to Moo, you can now Moo at others; mooing at other people lets them set their sin to Moo in Kyovashad, at which point they will be able to interact with both the journal to use the alternative portal. They can’t moo at other people to help them unlock it, but they can visit the Cow Level themselves, so if you unlock it — help your friends visit the Secret Cow Level!

Once again, I’d like to give a big shout-out to the people who’ve put in all the hard work, tinfoil hat theories, and tedious cow-slaying to help find the Secret Cow Level in Diablo 4. This was truly a community feat, and it’s also amazing of the devs to put in such a lengthy secret with so many nods to Diablo history.

Now get out there and kill yourself some cows!