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Video games have their own special kind of mythology, their own intricate web of stories and legends that stretches out across generations. As with much of real-world mythology, whether these legends are true or not is immaterial: all that matters is that they make for compelling stories, the kind that can hold a group of friends in thrall on the corner of the school playground.
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Even when these legends are pure fabrication, they can become so widespread that they become cultural touchstones.Diablo’s secret cow level is one such legend. This is the story of a rumor so compelling that it manifested itself into reality and became the best recurring joke in one of gaming’s most revered series.
Whispers On The Wind
Our tale begins in the hazy days of 1997, when Blizzard released the original Diablo and changed the face of RPG gaming forever. The game was hugely successful, selling over 2.5 million copies worldwide. Of course, when so many pairs of eyes look at a game and pour over every detail, speculation and overthinking are inevitable. This is doubly true in an RPG, where any potential undiscovered secret could lead to powerful, game-changing items: the same logic that fanned the flames of the infamous‘Mew under the truck’rumors in Pokemon Red and Blue.
Said speculation came in the form of the original secret cow level rumor. In Tristram, Diablo’s hub town, players could find three unassuming cows standing near the entrance to the Catacombs. Clicking on these cows once produced a mooing sound, but there were additional lines of dialogue from the player if they continued to click. Eight clicks would prompt the line “Yup, that’s a cow all right!” while a few more would trigger “I am not thirsty!” and a few more would trigger “Hey! I am no milkmaid!”. Further clicks would cause the player to cycle through these three lines at regular intervals.
These interactions sowed the seeds of speculation, eventually becoming the secret cow level rumor. Many players thought there must be more to these seemingly-innocuous cows than meets the eye and that clicking the right cow the right number of times would unlock the way to some kind of secret level populated entirely with other cows.
There Is No Cow Level
These rumors, like those concerning the Mew under the truck, proved to be nothing more than rumors. However, they did become widespread enough that Blizzard took notice, referencing them in Diablo’s Hellfire expansion with the secret Bovine Plate armor.
This was an extremely powerful armor piece featuring high stats and indestructibility. It could only be acquired by finishing the Jersey’s Jersey quest, given out by the Complete Nut, the new title assumed by the character of Lester once he dons a cow suit. The quest was only accessible via command.txt file modification, making it a deep cut that only dedicated fans would experience.
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Including this quest only intensified the hunt for the secret cow level, but hopes were soon dashed with the release of StarCraft in 1998. The game featured a wide range of cheat codes with a wide range of effects, one of which was “there is no cow level.” While the code allowed players to automatically win the current mission they were working on, it left many disheartened, as they rightly took it to be official confirmation that the cow level they’d been seeking all along was nothing more than a fairy tale.
Despite this, some players still held out hope for the bovine brawl of their dreams, and they saw Diablo 2 as a second chance at realizing it. During the game’s development, players would frequently ask if there would be cows to fight in the game, prompting an April Fools post from Blizzard showing two cows doing battle with each other. This could easily have been nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek joke, a nice way for the developers to play into the organically-formed culture of the game world they’d created, but it turned out to be something much more important: the first glimpse of the real secret cow level in Diablo 2.
What Was Moo Moo Farm?
Players would have to wait ‘till the turn of the millennium, and the subsequent release of Diablo 2, before their cow-themed hopes and dreams became a reality. Among its suite of new features, which came together to make the game nearly twice as successful as its already-seismic predecessor, Diablo 2 featured a new item called the Horadric Cube. This was a nifty gadget that let you combine multiple items together to create new ones, and it held the key to finally unlocking the secret cow level.
By combining Wirt’s Leg with a Tome Town Portal, you could open up a portal to a new area called Moo Moo Farm. This was a series of open fields teeming with enemies known as Hell Bovines, cows that walked on their hind legs and wielded axes in self-defense, mooing away in an oddly conversational manner all the while. The level also featured a special “boss” cow, the Cow King, who had a chance to drop part of the Cow King’s Leathers armor set upon death.
While the mere existence of this level would’ve been enough to satiate the fans searching for it like some kind of milk-filled Holy Grail, the secret cow level also proved to be thebest leveling spot in the gameby far. Thanks to the high density of Hell Bovines, and their relative weakness as enemies, players could easily power-level new characters all the way to level 99 here.
However, once a player killed the Cow King, they would be unable to open a portal to the secret cow level again on the same difficulty, creating an interesting scenario in which groups of players would grind together on Moo Moo Farm but deliberately not slay the Cow King boss so they could come back and grind again later. When in a party on this level, it was considered extremely poor etiquette to actually kill the Cow King since doing so could lock off the level for everyone else. The level was later rebalanced, making it a much less efficient means of farming, and in the process, the unique cultural wrinkles that existed in runs of the level were lost.
Happy Anniversary
You’d be justified in thinking that this is where the story ends. We’ve seen the secret cow level. Credits roll, right? Wrong! Given the huge amount of history and buildup around the concept of the cow level, and the great player response to its inclusion in Diablo 2, Blizzard wasn’t about to put the idea out to pasture just yet. They were going to put it on hold, however, until the next entry in the Diablo series came around.
In sharp contrast to the snappy three-year turnaround on Diablo 2 after the release of the first game, Diablo 3 wouldn’t grace our collective screens for 12 long years. When it finally did, in May 2012, excitement was through the roof. Fans couldn’t wait to get back down into the loot mines and toil away with their friends, and the game’s launch and subsequent seasons were enjoyed by a record number of players, both old and new.
For the former group, memories of Diablo 2’s secret cow level remained, sweetened by the rose-tinted glasses of time. Many were expecting a nod to the level or even a bold reinvention of it, but none would have their expectations met until the game’s third anniversary.
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When the big day finally rolled around, May 17, 2025, players were given a one-week window to hunt down a new rare enemy known as Herald to the Queen. It could appear in any zone where Treasure Goblins could, and killing it would immediately open a portal to a stage called Not the Cow Level. Despite the name, the level was densely packed with Infernal Bovine enemies, strikingly similar to the Hell Bovines from Diablo 2. The Cow Queen appeared as a boss here, cutting a much more intimidating figure than the Cow King from Diablo 2, who also appears, albeit in a new ghostly form.
While players could only reach this level for a week initially, more methods for accessing it were added later, including transmuting a Bovine Bardiche with Kanai’s Cube and entering a portal opened by a Treasure Goblin. It serves as a wonderful callback to the original secret cow level in Diablo 2 and a fun evolution of the concept in its own right, bringing a more dynamic and interesting boss encounter to cap things off. Diablo 3 also featured a second cow level in the form of an incredibly rare Nephalem Rift full of Infernal Bovine enemies, making it the most cow-intensive Diablo game to date.
Cowtural Impact
While it may seem like a mere in-joke that got out of hand, Diablo’s secret cow level has actually had a profound impact on video game culture at large. In the same vein as “The cake is a lie” or“Press F to pay respects,” “There is no cow level” has become a popular recurring meme, remixed and referenced both in conversation and in other video games.
Some of these references are, naturally, found within other Blizzard titles. We’ve discussed the “there is no cow level” cheat code from StarCraft, but StarCraft 2 featured a secret chat room known as the Cow Level as well. World of Warcraft took things a step further, getting its own secret cow level in January 2017, during a special 20th-anniversary event for the original Diablo, as well as a related achievement called Lactose Intolerant.
Other developers have paid their own personal tributes to the secret cow level as well. In Goat Simulator, you may journey to a “Not So Secret Cow Farm” via a town called Tristram and face off against laser-blasting cows that walk on their hind legs. In Marvel Heroes 2015, you can fight your way through the “Classified Bovine Sector” and “Bovenheim,” two secret levels full of cow-based enemies. These homages are fun, humorous nods at surface level, but they also hint at a deeply-held respect for Diablo as a series and its impact on not just RPGs as a genre but on video games as a whole.
The Fourth Awakens
Tales of the secret cow level have kept us amused and intrigued for over 20 years. And now, in 2023, we find ourselves in the shoes of the veteran Diablo fans from 2012, who enjoyed the third entry in the series while holding out hope that their favorite in-joke might make a return. This year saw the release of the long-awaited Diablo 4, and, despite only having been out for less than a month at time of writing, rumors and speculation about a new incarnation of the secret cow level in the game are already rife online.
No one has discovered it yet, which may mean that the level will be added later on, as was the case with Diablo 3, or it may just beincredibly well-hidden, beyond the reach of even the most skilled data miners. Whatever the case may be, the fact that players are looking so hard for a secret cow level in Diablo 4 in the first place speaks volumes about the power this simple joke has over dedicated fans and shows just how effective cultural touchstones can be when properly harnessed by game developers.
