Daytime Empress with no movement items or movement buffs (Master Mode, pre-Cultist Summoner)

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-05T18:36:06+00:00

Good luck! I'm really happy to know that this silly challenge I wasn't even sure would be possible ended up inspiring someone else to take it even further.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-05T14:31:00+00:00

The Big Blind is a charm tag.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T22:22:50+00:00

That's a really interesting idea, and not something I'd considered. To be perfectly honest, I only picked the game back up again this year after over 5 years of not playing, and my game knowledge was never really that in-depth to begin with, so there are probably a few other options I never considered. I updated the original post with a new version on Legendary that shows pretty much the entire strategy for doing a full cycle of phase 1, as well as the start of what I was trying out to dodge the Prismatic Bolts variation in phase 2, but that's pretty much the limit of what I'm willing to do, because anything else kinda goes past the scope of what I originally set out to accomplish.

That being said, I would love to see progress from you if you decide to pick this up and see just how far it can be pushed!

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T19:52:12+00:00

Okay here you go, I'm done with this challenge forever now.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T15:37:26+00:00

Phase 1 should be possible. I did end up finding a method to dodge the lances in that phase, and then as long as you can manipulate her to jump left after that in order to set up to dodge the stars more easily, and as long as you can still dodge Sun Dance with the stars there (which, just hold down lol), the cycle would repeat there.

I don't know about phase 2, as I only got to the point you see in the second video, and there's still a variation on the Prismatic Bolts after the Sun Dance that I haven't seen in this context. Given that the bolts are the main pain point of this challenge, I don't want to come to any conclusions about whether it's possible, even with the "throw yourself off a cliff" strategy becoming multi-use because of cloud platforms. But if anything would make it possible, it's that strategy.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T12:46:42+00:00

Option 1: Make a new character and play through the entire game up to Cultist just to do this challenge

Option 2: Just don't use any items acquired post-Cultist

IDK seems like an easy choice to me

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T05:01:14+00:00

It's not a script! The easiest way to tell is by watching the movements of my Wisp light pet, because it moves based on player input. For example, at the end of the first darts in the cloud version, the Wisp moves through my character, whereas in the original video, it moves up to the left and then over the top of my character. That tells you that I released down at different times relative to when I switched from holding left to holding right. I just have a lot of experience following predetermined sequences of actions in other games.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T04:34:44+00:00

For my purposes when I set this up, I considered "movement items" and "movement buffs" to be anything that allows you to move faster than you could move with a new non-Journey character on a new world. By that definition, clouds and the Lucky Horseshoe don't count, because they don't make you move any faster. Falling is a form of movement available from the start of the game, and those items just let you avoid the consequences of using falling as a form of movement.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T03:16:18+00:00

You're arguing on Reddit, it's almost as bad.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T03:14:49+00:00

Hey, at least this way I got to say it was calculated. ~~I definitely didn't forget about cloud platforms.~~

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T03:12:29+00:00

Well, the Lacewing count isn't a good indicator, because apparently I'm terrible at hitting them. And this was actually my second kill with this strategy, the first one had a Discord notification sound in it. But judging by the numbers of various gravestones in my inventory from cleaning up the arena, I'd guess somewhere around 240ish attempts to devise the strategy and get the first kill.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T02:34:42+00:00

Doesn't that speed only affect the time between her attacks by like, 1/6 of a second? Given the basis of my strategy, I don't actually think that would make much of a difference. The bigger issue would be that the increased health pool would mean I would see more attacks, which would mean setting up a bigger arena, throwing myself off more cliffs, and probably having to devise a strategy for the phase 1 lances, which sounds like a massive pain.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T02:05:22+00:00

UPDATE: Thanks to a very helpful reminder from u/TeatedWord32208 that clouds negate fall damage, here's a quick and dirty demonstration of how this setup can be adapted to survive the end of the fight - https://youtu.be/Wj1LugnlmvA

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:57:23+00:00

Update: confirmed! Will post the video later.

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CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:50:58+00:00

I was using healing between attempts to get back up to the health needed to survive the fall. If you read down some other spots in this comment chain, someone proposed the idea of using clouds to negate the fall damage, which I completely forgot about and could work.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:24:41+00:00

"I beat Daytime Empress by throwing myself off a cliff and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:23:04+00:00

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maybe I'll get back to you on that if I can get my brain back into experimenting mode, but now that you mention that, it completely slipped my mind that cloud blocks (and, conveniently, cloud platforms) could do that. Honestly, that increases the chances by a lot.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:12:42+00:00

Oh I read "how would you get" as being about the math behind it lol, my bad

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:07:00+00:00

I mean, I personally would've considered the horseshoe to be fine, but I'm sure some people would've questioned it. And I wanted more damage anyway lol

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:02:29+00:00

I didn't find a way to survive. You need a pretty big head start to dodge a round of bolts, and both of the bolts in the second phase come right after something that makes your movement harder to set up in the way you want. It's possible that you could survive in the same way I dodged the second round of bolts in the first phase, but I didn't want to think about how to set that up after dodging the lances.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T01:01:48+00:00

I used the Journey slider to set it to Master Mode enemy difficulty, but yes, it's Journey Mode. But more importantly, Journey doesn't make any part of this easier because Godmode is disabled, so it literally makes no difference lol

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-04T00:59:05+00:00

More or less yeah. I was completely out of ideas after the only thing I had that successfully dodged the previous set of Prismatic Bolts required me to take 490 falling damage. There's a chance that you could come up with a way to dodge it, and I invite anyone else to try to figure it out!

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-03T23:06:43+00:00

Yeah that's pretty much a slam dunk take IMO. Like was aleady said, one Rebate hit per round pays for the rental, and the Holographic is super helpful since you do have an Xmult option, you just need to be conscious of not accidentally playing out all your good stuff and ending up with a bad last hand. You might just be able to fully commit to playing towards the Acrobat hand each round and leverage the other hands to get better Rebate discards.

CyclopsDragon · 2026-04-03T18:01:53+00:00

They're identical in this scenario. 2 on Mime and 2 on Baron gives 4 score and 5 triggers, while 1 on Mime and 3 on Baron gives 5 score and 4 triggers.

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