How to enter Diablo 2: Resurrected’s secret cow level — and how it’s different from Diablo 2

One of the most beloved and infamous secrets of the entire Diablo franchise is the secret cow level. Fan rumors about it circulated when the first game was released, but it didn’t exist… yet. So, the developers decided to take a fun idea into their own hands, creating the secret cow level, AKA the Moo Moo Farm, in Diablo 2. But for anyone new to Diablo 2: Resurrected — or needing a refresher after two decades — how do you get your own one-way ticket to the secret cow level?

Ingredients

Unlike Whimsyshire in Diablo 3, getting to the secret cow level is pretty simple. There’s only one rare item that you need: Wirt’s Leg. When you go to rescue the ever-important NPC Deckard Cain from Tristram’s ruins, you can find the smuggler Wirt’s body. Make sure to take his peg leg off his corpse, which is in the top left corner of the map. You don’t have to keep coming back over and over to find it like the Black Mushroom or Gibbering Gemstone, but you do have to get it before leaving Tristram with Cain, or it won’t be there anymore when you come back.

Once you’ve done that, congrats — you’ve acquired the most complex ingredient of the entire recipe. Yes, it’s that simple. Afterward, you just need a tome of town portal and a Horadric Cube. You naturally get tomes and the Cube by playing through the game, so don’t worry about them. Just put Wirt’s Leg and the tome inside the cube and combine them, and a portal will open in Act I’s Rogue Encampment. That red portal will take you to the secret cow level and let you face off against the evil, hellish cow king.

Differences from the original Diablo 2

Previously, the only rules to the secret cow level were that you have to finish the entire game on a certain difficulty before you could open the portal, and if you killed the Cow King, you couldn’t open the portal at that difficulty level again. For example, say you beat the normal-level Cow King, you couldn’t reach the secret cow level until you beat all of the game Nightmare difficulty and re-did the entire process.

The devs have updated that system so that players won’t be locked out of the level anymore just because they killed the king. You can play the cow level over and over as much as you like. You still have to beat the game first, though. If you look at it that way, isn’t the Cow King the real final boss? The Prime Evils are quaking.