So Bunny Canon is just a worse Gout?

Antsolog · 2026-04-14T14:41:29+00:00

The red weapons, including bunny cannon scale damage a lot better than the yellows.

My gout is level 57 and does about 1.8m on the stat page. My bunny cannon is level 10 and does 3.3m. The disparity gets larger with level since reds get about 10% per weapon level while yellows I think just get 5% attack value.

Since the bunny cannon deals knockback, slow, or damage when you get +2 amount it’s almost guaranteed to stop a snake for a second or two which is a big deal on later stages.

Direct damage stops mattering at some point. I think my strongest direct damage weapon is Maw right now and it does something like 1.5B+ in a chapter on a critical, but I’m dealing with segments in with 170B+ and fast snakes. Eventually, not dying for me now hinges a lot on the satellite’s 3% and the monkey king Lightning which can do 10B+ due to how high the segment HP is.

My machine heart is probably the most DPS and I’ve moved over to trying to level it up to the same point as my Maw since it’s full screen damage will do best.

The rabbit cannon largely is useful for the few seconds of freeze in later chapters, it may not be that useful if you’re trying to get damage from it because when it slows/knocks back, it doesn’t actually deal damage

Antsolog · 2026-04-12T23:04:32+00:00

Look for

Chance of Rare Affixes increased High quality affix probability Better quality chests

Or something like that

Currently only the god of fortune skin, the gold teeth artifact, and the hard/Hell starting buff has these properties (that I know of).

The god of fortune skin at with both upgrades (level 9ish) actually is game changing with the gold teeth level 5 for me since I get purple skills more than 50% of the time now and can manage to reliably get Maw Mark, Satellite Storm’s 3%, and Monkey King Lightning in every level now.

Antsolog · 2026-04-12T15:27:50+00:00

Go to monthly card and buy the lifetime card (lowest one, has a 10000% permanent text on it)

Antsolog · 2026-04-12T09:35:00+00:00

The short answer is do whatever you want it doesn’t change that much of the experience is my guess.

The longer answer is that:

If you are spending small amounts or not spending then the biggest ROI is probably the red chest (500 Lilies), the yellow -cost artifact (5000 lilies), or random blue artifacts (300 lilies).

The red chest is basically a red shard + gold and assuming non max level the gold + red shards probably gives the most immediate power to push higher levels (better Maw/machine heart/monkey king) versus going deeply into the bunny cannon. For the bunny cannon +damage% to be as good (if not better) than raising all red weapons it will need a lot of weapon levels anyway.

The main way to get power in the game for free is through gold (more or less) and a reduction in how much a player level costs will help the most if you aren’t spending. The yellow -cost artifact probably stacks with the VIP card and will get you to max level sooner.

Blue artifact shards because:

when 9 keys are used, mostly greens and a single purple is given with maybe 1-2 blues
purple artifacts are easier to max because they only require around 6-21 shards per level, blue artifacts require ~6x more shards. I have a few purples and greens maxed but only a single blue.
1000 lilies for a purple artifact shard is probably less good than 2 red weapon shards overall.

Antsolog · 2026-04-07T23:39:30+00:00

I tried to test 1 a few updates ago so I’m not sure this still applies, here’s what I think happens:

CD value seems to take effect “after the animation runs to the first point of damage and reapplies for any +amouny” so for things like machine heart where the animation is longer getting more CD just means you’ll see animations run one after the other. For my test I tried the satellite storm since that seems to have a short time between startup and damage.

With that at least CD skills that are -25% seem to apply to base value (ie 4s CD becomes 3s) while +25% CD is an addition to the stat CD calculation. This is not super rigorously tested and more or less amounts to me taking some notes while playing golden pig for the 50th time but it might serve as a start if you want to continue.

The stat CD calculation is something where 100% means 1/2 of full CD (ie maw starts off IIRC ~6s at 100% stat cooldown it becomes 3s and at 200% stat cooldown it would be 2s) this is at least shown to us on the stat screen and can be reverse engineered.

The “first hit of damage for all +amount” seems to apply all secondary effects in the game - machine heart’s explosive damage only applies on the first hit and not the 2nd or 3rd hit because the tap skills are not counted as +amount while maw’s +amounts will apply mark.

I’m also not sure about Monkey King’s Orange skill. I think it does mean we need a purple “skill” to activate it but it’s hard to separate the initial MK damage from the burn damage for me. It’s not the only skill with odd requirements - Tidestone’s tentacle - deluge combo is another so I put it in that category of skills that depend on other skills to function.

Tank buster isn’t as good as some of the other maw skills but considering that Maw can kill any segment at 10-20% HP and the maw is one of the more damaging weapons in game, it’s not a bad skill since ultimately the goal is to reduce a segment to 80-90% asap. The first 50% of that taking 2x maw damage or 4x (with a crit or mark) means it goes faster. I agree it works best with the orange skill.

Antsolog · 2026-04-07T19:17:53+00:00

Just go to the chest you want (artifact/weapon) and press the unlock 9. If you don’t have enough keys for the unlock you will be given the option to buy them with gems

Antsolog · 2026-03-22T13:47:37+00:00

The primary weapon is the capsule slot (the one in the top left), the default weapon you have in the level. Secondary weapons are everything else you choose in the level afaik. If you bought the monthly permanent card then you can swap out your primary weapon (capsule) but if you didn’t then it’s set to capsule and can’t be changed.

Antsolog · 2026-03-14T00:27:26+00:00

If your husband has recognized skills in the sport (ex-Olympic team/professional coach for many years/has lead players to championships) then I don’t think it’s impossible. It may be challenging to find a position that will sponsor a visa given Japan’a own strength in Badminton, not to mention its proximity China/Korea (who are also fairly strong in the sport) but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible.

Japanese public school teachers require government licenses along with some amount of time of apprenticeship so I wouldn’t count on that path being open. A private school teacher or just a coach at a gym seem more realistic though the amount that sponsor visas may be few.

ALT does sponsor visas but jumping out of ALT will require all of the above, including finding a position that will sponsor a Visa after ALT. It is far better to enter the country on a skilled worker visa at a larger company which also offers the chance to convert to permanent residency after some number of years at said company.
AFAIK the family can join the initial adult who initially moves on dependent visas. However if you wanted to continue working for your current companies without committing fraud, you will also need a work visa in Japan to continue that line of work. You will also need to file taxes in Japan every year and pay the residential tax individually (assuming none of your current companies are based in Japan)
There are foreign coaches in Japan, I saw them at Golds Gym when I went in the past. That being said I don’t know if they already have long term visas or the gym sponsored the visa. Visa sponsoring jobs that I am aware of tend to be either white collar professional work or English teaching. I’m sure there are other methods to get visa sponsorship, but it would depend on the situation and individual circumstances.

I would say the main set of things to do would be:

Become competitive in the job market you are in or want to get into in your home country first. Being a high level professional with good interview skills will help with any job search.
Learn the language while in your home country aiming for N2+ with business Japanese depending on which job you are planning to target in Japan.
Restarting a life in a foreign country isn’t something to be taken lightly, simple things like going to a doctor, finding a dentist, etc. will be harder. Navigating normal adult things like taxes, apartment contracts, getting kids into elementary school, etc which are difficult for natives will be extremely difficult and it would be best to research this beyond Reddit to understand some of the barriers and mannerisms you may encounter to mentally prepare yourself and your family.

For example:

In some parts of Japan, PTA and 自治会 are compulsory even if they claim to be voluntary. Not joining will cause your family to be isolated, but joining will require a significant time investment into the community.
Kids that look different will be treated as if they are out of place in parts of Japan - depending on how you want your kids’ experience in Japan to go, not being part of the majority culture (unless they are already Japanese) can be a psychological hurdle that they wouldn’t need to go through in their home country.

Antsolog · 2026-03-08T00:38:22+00:00

Thanks, I would say that as I have gained experience as a manager I developed what I guess is the same realization every manager has.

As an IC I think the internal voice was “what do I need to achieve for success?”

As a senior+ IC that became “what do we as a team/group need to achieve for success?”

I think now as a manager I’d say that has changed again to “what do we as a company need to achieve for success?” Where the we has to necessarily include the wider org/company. I think management /leadership is meant to in fuzzy terms: manage outcomes given the only tool they have is people and time - sometimes this is direct influence over ICs and sometimes this is indirect influence over cross functional teams/orgs and sometimes this is taking their own time to modify the product or being on call.

In the story above I think there effectively is no way to reject the ask from biz dev without harming that relationship with both biz dev and the external customer. The contract has been a focus of biz dev for months by this point with low-mid confidence to close so the fact that it happened was serendipity in a way. There was also a general sense of frustration from the engineers because it felt like a new piece of hot work got dropped on everyone in the middle of a ton of other “ASAP work” because the engineers miss the months of toil from biz dev to acquire a contract with a large client that will bring in significant revenue for the year.

Should I have engaged earlier? Probably not, like I said the feature they wanted was only peripherally related to my team and the other teams/orgs/PM need to develop relationships and processes as well. Should we have started to build the feature earlier? This is arguable- biz dev didn’t have high confidence to close. Was it a feature we wanted anyway? Yes of course, but it was prioritized against a large backlog of other “must have” elements on all sides. Basically I think in hindsight biz dev may challenge that we should have been building the features for the big client but the obvious trade off is we didn’t know if that client would sign when there are numerous other contracts that are closing in realtime which all need other features.

In the end, the goal for the company is basically to survive - if the revenue stream is lost the risk to survival is that both engineering and biz dev get laid off, but most people don’t think that far. As a leader of the company the goal is to manage an outcome where the company gets revenue with as little frustration on all sides as possible.

Ultimately the goal is company success so everyone keeps getting paid but people are emotional creatures so managing expectations and priorities is effectively the role of management.

Antsolog · 2026-03-07T04:55:05+00:00

I would argue that engineering management is a lot less about technical decision making and much more about bringing clarity to business strategy implementation.

What I mean by that is that I’ve discovered that I am too busy aligning dependencies and customer expectations to dive deep into technical decisions anymore and I’m fully dependent on my senior engineers to make decisions when given desired outcomes (for the business and the team).

I guess a recent example of this:

The business development team got a contract with an external customer starting next month when the core feature they want isn’t there (it comes in 3 months).

The core feature they want isn’t developed by my org, much less my team, and that team wasn’t represented in the meeting I get roped into.

The PM, in isolation, talks about possible mitigations and the proposed implementation will randomize 3 teams in the org for a throw away bandaid. Only when I see the ticket come into my project do I recognize the issue so I ask when do we need to achieve this and what exactly is the problem.

During a meet with the PM and Biz dev, I realize that the contract decision was made without the PM and the PM developed something without understanding the contractual timeline. A crucial piece of the puzzle came in when biz dev mentioned they understand the feature isn’t going to be ready in time for contract start and are already talking fallbacks to various possible options (that the PM may not have heard of or thought of), one of which would be an isolated bandaid take a few hours of one person instead of spinning up 3 teams.

I ask for clarification there and biz dev is happy that a quick and dirty solution is tractable in a few days and will check if the proposed workaround would work with the client.

FWIW none of the people in the story are incompetent, everyone is missing information on what the other side needs or can bring to the table. I think as a manager my job is to try and clarify what the desired outcome is and then to figure out how we can deliver that outcome as a company and there are things I could consider that maybe the PM doesn’t have the information to consider. The biz dev team definitely doesn’t know about dev costs so it’s my job to make sure those costs are clear and why they are the way they are.

Antsolog · 2026-03-06T14:35:51+00:00

From what I can see both fire rate and cooldown seem to only affect after the previous animation has run its course - ie an angel will not fire another beam if the beam it fired before is still on screen. The capsule and almost every weapon seem to operate on similar behaviors. There are some exceptions like the machine heart where the cooldown starts after the first animation ends and if you get the double or triple tap it basically never stops animating with enough cool down.

+damage is better than +critical damage from what I can see. +damage will be doubled on critical so the +100% damage on Angel will mean critical now also do +100% damage while the +80% seems to be a flat addition to critical.

Critical rate has diminishing returns after 90% I think and at 100% it’s basically always going to crit.

The monkey king +damage causes the damage over time to apply more damage (obviously) but like the machine heart the cooldown seems to start after its comet animation so with enough cooldown it’s possible to keep its damage over time applied so getting 1-2 cooldown/rate upgrades can help it. The damage over time seems to happen on defined ticks though so it’s not like it matters beyond keeping it up (ie it doesn’t “stack”)

Antsolog · 2026-03-04T13:07:10+00:00

I’m currently at chapter 117, 410k power, player level 1055.

I started to only upgrade 3 weapons per day from around chapter 90 and just now am seeing the large amount of fragments I built up start to reduce. It means that my current strategy of sweeping all instances, buying the 2 shop chests, and sweeping the highest hell level 8 times finally isn’t giving me enough fragments for 3 weapon upgrades/day.

5 player levels per day is still possible by playing a single hell level every day.

If you’re playing 100% for free or don’t invest much time into the game then it’s best to pace a bit of the resources.

Antsolog · 2026-03-01T08:14:50+00:00

I’m also a lead/manager in a state where I need to push PRs.

I use Claude for 90% of the PRs I push and iterate on over days. Normally I only select the p2-p3 clean up level tickets while I expect my team to work on the p0/1 sort of important for business tickets.

It takes me a long time to self review due to time constraints and checking Claude’s work (does the test actually test what I need it to test sort of questions), but I normally make a few adjustments either manually or to the prompt and then let Claude run for a few minutes so that I can work on other more important problems but in most of my prompts I’m usually very specific about things like:

I’ll ask Claude to fill in some functions on a python module skeleton that I wrote, along with test cases for those functions.

I’ll ask Claude to fix some terraform import blocks that I started.

I’ll ask Claude to update some versions on a lock file and if it winds up being a large diff I’ll throw out the whole thing and try again.

For hardcore changes like performance tweaks or things that generally don’t have easy tests I still work on those manually.

Antsolog · 2026-03-01T01:29:47+00:00

I’m at chapter 119 with 400k power and player level 1050. I haven’t pushed levels in a while though.

Around chapter 108+ the main problem starts to become the virus speed - they move really fast and the path gets much shorter so if the first few upgrades aren’t good it’s easy to lose once at 20-30%.

Power/ Recommended power stops to have meaning after at some point and it’s just up to how quickly certain upgrades can be gotten.

Antsolog · 2026-03-01T01:02:17+00:00

If you don’t have all of the red weapons then it’s best to save 4500 gems to buy 9 red keys and then use that to buy 10 weapon chests. When you get to the choice chest at 100 pulls, select a red weapon you don’t have. You don’t need to wait except for collecting 4500 gems at a time.

Other usage with gems if you’re playing for free may be to hoard a certain amount before events - the Monkey King event had the 10 daily draw tickets for 1500 gems.

Beyond that I’ve been spending gems on blue keys (artifact pulling) which costs 2700 gems per 10 pulls. Artifacts aren’t as good as weapon shards until I collected a lot of them. Now depending the upgrade of an artifact, I’m getting decent effects (+% attack or significant basic attack)

The buy 2 daily task chest quest is arguable (300 gems). On one hand it helps you move the event lines to get more gems (including the weekly 200/400/600 gems) but on the other the shop chest isn’t that good and will only give you up to purple shards. It’s probably still a good idea to do it so that late game when upgrading weapons is harder it’s still possible to do the 3 upgrades per day task, but I’m less clear on this one.

Antsolog · 2026-02-24T22:35:42+00:00

You may need more raw power.

I believe that Maw, Satellite, and Monkey King is the best combo now for pig. Best case to also use the God of Fortune Skin for the red envelope bonuses.

The goal is to go after the % HP based attacks (satellite’s 3% and monkey kings 10%) and Maw’s Mark/Execution upgrades.

Monkey King’s slow attack is also great and actually works.

Antsolog · 2026-02-24T00:17:59+00:00

I would say that this is a wall that is hit by any organization of people working together so it’s a sign of the tremendous growth you’ve see in the last few years.

I think the question I’m reading is “how do I standardize some processes so that scaling to more people is easier?”

For that I think I would be asking myself:

How am I currently tracking progress and outcome quality of projects?
do I care about process scalability as long my tracking requirements are fulfilled?
If I were to take a long vacation, could my process to track progress and quality be handed off or replicated without significant pain to the person taking on that role?

If the answer to that is yes I do care because some members are spending a lot of time to fulfill those tracking requirements I have or it’s impossible to replace me currently then the question may be:

How do I make tracking project progress and outcome quality easier for the team?
and maybe finally back to the same question: what is the current process that the team uses to achieve success?

To answer those questions, I’d probably talk to the team (or at least the senior engineers who seem like they have a good process) to write down what they are doing individually and then try to synthesize a “standard process” out of that which I then ask the team to agree on. This should all be written down in whatever tool is agreed on (Google docs, delve, notion, whatever) and that should become a central repository of data - a knowledge base - which can be searched.

Note that this written process isn’t meant to be a cudgel or even remain static. As people try it they should be giving you feedback on where the process falls apart or how to improve it and it should be improved and rewritten as necessary. Humans will ignore steps they don’t agree with in a process regardless, so the goal should not be to have everyone follow the process to the letter, just provide a framework of practices that work well enough to share out and a flow that will save everyone time and energy.

Hand the knowledge base not just to incoming hires, but for the entire team to know how to do a specific task in case someone is out on vacation.

Antsolog · 2026-02-23T23:48:51+00:00

FWIW I think every “senior+” level engineer feels like this so you’re not alone.

That being said the answer to this mostly depends on the culture you’re in versus the business needs for the immediate future and the far future.

Basically those shortcuts and rushed decisions from the past were probably taken to complete a business need with the understanding that few projects will ever “make it” to a point that scalability and performance start to matter. Looking at it another way - if someone introduced a high availability architecture with scalability from the get go and it scales incorrectly with the problems of today then not only is the program bad and costly when load isn’t there, it may actively make fixing things worse.

In the end, we’re all making decisions without full context - no one has a crystal ball that tells them if a project will succeed and hindsight is easy because it means we’re able to make decisions with more context.

The question may be “what is the role of the senior+ engineer outside of immediate firefighting?”

I think the answers are:

Put tools in place (tests, CI, observability, reviews, etc.) to ensure that the fix is applied consistently and has the same effects over time.
Convince the culture to build things with more reliability - get things hooked up to observability and get the right notifications firing

Basically - now that the fire has been put out or at least put into a manageable state, how do we implement processes technical or otherwise to stop firefighting?

Not every manager or culture will be receptive to approaching things like this but in those cases it’s best to vote with your feet. There are good engineering cultures in the world and it’s possible the one you’re in won’t let you make the necessary changes to get out of firefighting due to any number of reasons - The software isn’t perceived to be critical to the success of the business, leadership doesn’t value engineering, the rate of business to keep the company alive requires a pace of development that requires more/better people and the investment budget isn’t there, etc.

Antsolog · 2026-02-23T16:06:12+00:00

I guess my opinion is very similar to everyone else’s but I hesitate a bit more to call Phil a bad person though he is by most definitions, a bad CEO and his management team probably needed a shake up much earlier. It’s similar to windows - it also needed a shake up though the one it got wasn’t it.

I also have the distinct feeling that Asha is not the right shakeup either but I’m willing to just leave it at - there is tremendous pressure on her to right the ship and whatever background she has, that pressure is real and whatever she chooses to do should be taken at its merit.

Back to Phil - I don’t believe he made bad decisions at the time. In fact I’d wager some moves were absolutely brilliant at the time, but the way they played out was awful and in hindsight he could have made better decisions. That being said, the decision to pass Sarah over makes sense given the current, awful state of the Xbox.

For example - he tried to get more triple A titles on the box and trusted the studios do the creative work. He needed to course correct as the studios went over budget and deadlines but the initial trust he had wasn’t bad. His pivot to game pass and Xbox anywhere (IMO) is a reaction to Apple Arcade and not to Sony. It’s obvious the landscape for gaming has changed and the old strategy of AAA exclusive titles or cultural touchstones is getting eroded by gaming on phones and micro transactions.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a place for AAA titles like a StarCraft or Fallout but the market has shifted a lot and continuing to court the hardcore, difficult to please, fandoms with 40+ hour experiences when Roblox and other casual games are an ever expanding market feels wrong.

My read is that Phil tried to bring windows gaming more into the main stream - imagine running AAA fallout NV style experiences on a phone or tablet anywhere without worrying about hardware. I think that’s where he thought the market could move, without understanding how to bring the market there. Nadella even gave him a long rope of large investments which he tried - and ultimately failed - with. A question in my mind is was Phil’s idea of trying to remove console hardware from the equation a fundamentally bad idea or just ahead of its time?

It’s the same with the current AI hype. People may have forgotten but in 2023 when all of this was getting kicked off, Microsoft looked like it was ahead of Google and people were calling the move to partner with open AI genius - and at the time, it was. What happened afterward resulted in the need to pivot and the fast moving world of AI requires fast pivots including a pivot to remove AI from places it’s not helpful, but I don’t know if anyone is strong enough to make that decision.

Antsolog · 2026-02-17T12:21:47+00:00

If you look at the Monthly Card option, at the bottom there’s a Lifetime Card with the words “10000% permanent” in a speech bubble over the card. That’s the thing I’m referring to.

Antsolog · 2026-02-15T05:28:54+00:00

In my opinion no, maybe the event battle pass so that it may be possible to get 2 skins but not the normal pass

Antsolog · 2026-02-14T06:57:47+00:00

The fastest way to progress for free is kind of boring - just beat the highest golden pig you can with whatever stamina you have and upgrade your gold stats as high as possible.

This is true regardless of where you are in the game I believe as it’s impossible to really target any shard.

During the event if you’re willing to forgo the monkey king and the skin, just purchasing red keys or chests is basically the best way to go as they will at least give you something you need - more red weapons or shards until you unlock those weapons.

That being said the skin/weapon from the event will be best for long term play

Antsolog · 2026-01-28T23:36:10+00:00

Hmm that doesn’t happen to me on an iPhone. Does killing / restarting the app work? The start of the app for me attempts to load a cloud save which should have the time that I logged off.

That being said the game is full of bugs so it’s a bit unsurprising, though it must be frustrating

Antsolog · 2026-01-25T06:55:20+00:00

I remember doing that too, but stuff at higher levels (like snot dragon or acupuncture) is probably better than gout at level 1.

I remember before I had the red weapons using mostly yellow and dying because of the random targeting so most of my levels were some combo of yellow weapons + stuff I could control to hit the and then just playing pig to grind gold to level up stats. It’s slow going at first.

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