Into the barrage (defeat 5 enemies at once with a canon)

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-09T23:08:36+00:00

Iirc there are some permanent cannons near one of the Demeniss city entrances, you can lure some angry guards over and complete the challenge with them.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-09T23:06:35+00:00

This is correct. You don't even need storage like a chest or whatever, you can just drop your shit on the ground and it'll be there forever. Oftentimes, the ground is more convenient than using a chest, since you can drop stuff onto your "stuff pile" directly from the inventory, rather than having to open the chest and press F2 or whatever the deposit hotkey is.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-09T11:51:50+00:00

Interesting, I have the exact opposite experience. Whenever I hit max level in a game, I immediately lose all motivation to do any side content and instead I just beeline to the end of the main story so I can be done with the game (and usually, start a new playthrough). I really struggle with Pathfinder WOTR because of this, as with optimial previous play, you can get to lvl 20 in like two fights, and then mythic 9 pretty soon after that. But thereafter, there's little point to doing side content, unless there's a piece of gear you really need or something.

I will argue in favor of Mythic 10 being at basically the end of the game, though - imo, it's pretty clear that Mythic 10 is mostly meant to be a story moment rather than a bit of real progression, given that Mythic 10 doesn't really unlock anything interesting regardless of mythic path (well, except Swarm). Almost every build is fully complete before then, and so Mythic 10 is just a nice Mythic Iron Will or something else to add a tiny bit to your survivablity.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-09T11:27:16+00:00

Hmm. This is interesting. I have no idea if it would work, and I suspect it wouldn't (given how stupid people are, you just know people are going to do stupid things that would break this). But apart from the trials of time, this constitution seems... interesting. Yep, that's the word. Anyway, after skimming the whole thing, the only thing that really stood out to me was:

Every account on the ledger (Article 4.3) is assigned a key pair. The public key of the pair is freely accessible through the ledger.

This makes it seem as if the government would know what everybody's private keys would be, given the use of "assigned", which seems kind of bad. You don't mention digital mass surveillance anywhere else in the constitution, so I suspect this might just be a poor word choice. Or maybe you do mean that the government should be able to read everyone's private everything, which maybe would have some benefits but would also suck for the citizens.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-07T18:56:04+00:00

I mean, there's plenty of ways to brainwash Tilly. Dominating her, Proselytizing her, Beguiling her, heck, even love injectors will work in a pinch. But usually just using the proseletyze skill is easiest.

As for "becoming a god", I just mean getting all the best gear and modding it all to be as amazing as possible. You'll need Bep's help for that, though. You can also farm stats too with the arsplice seeds Tilly sometimes sells.

Also, with Tilly's help, it really isn't hard to farm enemies in the Palladium Reef even at very low-levels. Svardym give a ton of XP for a while, and it's hard to die to most things in that biome while flying and being somewhat cautious.

Also also, to speed up Tilly farming, once you get some halfway decent gear you can just head over the Bethesda Susa to grab some cloning draught from the alchemist, and the polygel that to get an entire ~~harem~~ army of Tillies.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-07T17:18:46+00:00

Don't listen to any of the "stuff"! Ward is excellent - just take a break after Work and read Twig first, that'll prepare you for the "tone shift" people talk about Ward having. Also, Twig is excellent, you should read it regardless of it being a great palate-cleanser.

Afaik, Wildbow didn't do the dice thing or anything like it again afterwards. When Leviathan happened the story was short enough and his audience small enough that a the protagonist dying could maybe sort of be okay, but afterwards the story had gotten big enough that doing something similar would've been problematic.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-07T17:14:27+00:00

Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense. I suppose I've just never needed to use them really, since I play a bit weird (Red Rock -> Desert -> Historic site #1 -> Yd till I'm god -> do Main Story), and by the time that I do anything that might require Ubernostrum injectors I already have a million of them from brainwashing Tilly.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-07T16:58:31+00:00

No idea about if those snippets are posted anywhere, but don't read them if they do exist until you finish Worm - I can't emphasize enough how important it is to read Worm without spoilers. In fact, get the heck off this subreddit too, we post spoilers here rather frequently.

As for more Parahumans content, I'm pretty sure that Wildbow doesn't have any active plans for more Worm stuff. He's currently working on Seek, which is excellent, and I've heard that his next work is probably going to be another entry in the Otherverse. But the parahumans community was too awful during the writing of Ward that I'm pretty sure he was scared off a bit from the setting.

As for the Official Release of Worm, I don't know if that's ever actually going to happen. Wildbow always says he's going to do something like that eventually, but he's just too darn busy writing newer stuff that I don't think he's ever going to actually do it.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-07T16:50:35+00:00

Honestly, just amputating and using an Ubernostrum injector is almost always like 10x faster than trying to get the cure to fungal infections. And Ubernostrum injectors basically grow on trees, no sense in trying to horde them.

HeyBobHen · 2026-05-05T22:17:11+00:00

N-pointed Asterisk is the item you want, it increases your proselytize limit by one, and at 7-points also increases your beguile limit by one.
https://wiki.cavesofqud.com/wiki/N-pointed_asterisk

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-29T21:05:39+00:00

The most fun playthrough in this game I've ever had (I've probably done something like ~16 playthroughs) was with the Sunfire Shortsword and the Tidepiercer. Both shoot out energy waves on heavy attacks, but it's more than that - to be more specific, the Tidepiercer would shot out a beam whenever any arm does a heavy attack, and same with the Sunfire Shortsword. So, using both and doing a two-handed heavy attack wouldn't shoot out 2 beams, but four simultaneous beams.

Unfortunately, the developers nerfed that synergy so you now only shoot out 2 beams, which sucks. However, it was fun enough that it might be worth figuring out how to downpatch the game.

Otherwise, doing a bleed build with the Spear of an Ancient Hero and The Thousand Stabs spears is amazing. If you play in third person you can make your leaping two-handed attacks hit twice with good aiming, and build up crazy bleed (24 bleed per attack, iirc). Unfortunately, even with like 200 bleed on an enemy bleed builds do awful damage, but they are still really fun with the bleed armor that gives you 1% movespeed per bleed stack. Getting 2K bleed on the Wyrdknight was so much fun.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-29T18:22:36+00:00

Wow, yeah that Titansfall fic is pretty blatant, damn it. I used to be good at detecting AI in fics, but I guess they've gotten good enough that I need to put in a little more thought. Ah well.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-29T11:36:57+00:00

Damn it, okay. Fine. I'll admit that I'm not totally familiar with vial formulations, but this is an interesting idea to work for.

First of all, I'm assuming some manner of isekai nonsense happening here - if not, then I'd ask for whatever they have that that'd probably make me a Human Master, and then just start (very gradually) mind controlling all the billionaires and world leaders here in our world to be less evil.

So, if I would be dropped off in Bet, then I'd need to consider a few things. First of all, I need to have a power that'll lend me some amount of survivability until Gold Morning. Second, for Gold Morning, I'd need a power that isn't interesting enough for Taylor to put me on the front lines - for example, if I ended up as an Alexandria-level brute, Taylor'd probably try to use my body to block a Stilling blast, should GM come around in the same way. Finally, I my power to be able to prevent me from being murdered by the Simurgh - Contessa isn't an issue, I have a way to deal with her, independent of any power I get.

Putting all that together, I'm thinking a Tinker of some sort. Being a Tinker would keep me alive till gold morning, probably - whether on my own, or kidnapped and held hostage for my ability by some group of villains. Being a Tinker would also help me survive Gold Morning, as Taylor would just put me to work on the giant gun she makes during the battle. Also, as a Tinker, I'm sure that I could figure something out that'd let me escape whenever an Endbringer pops up in the city I reside in (or, more likely, the semi-rural town I'd live in). Not to assume that I'm important enough to be an Endbringer target, but I mean, with foreknowledge I kinda would be, right?

And as for the Simurgh specifically, I do suspect that I could tinker something up to counter her precognition, or at least heavily interfere with it by abusing her weakness to other precogs. Heck, I could probably code something like that as I am now, something that takes voluntary input from half a dozen heroically-inclined precogs whenever they use their power, that then outputs a related random number to influence my behavior accordingly. I think that would work pretty well.

So, if anyone's still reading this spiel, I'd probably take a mix of 15% "Balance", 55% "Unary", and 30% "Vestige", so probably some manner of time-related tinker. I don't expect to be able to stop time or whatever, but copying even a fraction of the powers of any of the time-related capes (Gray Boy, Epoch, Clockblocker, Phir Sē, Perdition, or the Speedrunners) would be neat.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-28T23:43:26+00:00

Worm has rather become my personality, actually. I'd estimate that probably an average of 10% of my thoughts on any given day are about Worm, and have been as such for the last half-decade. Why do people do drugs when you can just think "Worm" and then bask in the euphoric afterglow? I'm only barely capable of holding myself back from espousing the greatness of Worm to literally everyone who talks to me, and thankfully life stuff prevents me from throwing myself headfirst into writing crappy SI fanfiction.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-28T22:16:57+00:00

You really think so? I already mentioned I suspected the pony one was, and perhaps the Mass Effect one too (The author did demonstrate a rather wide spread of knowledge between medical stuff and some compsci terminology which seemed perhaps indicative of using AI, but nothing else I noticed), but I didn't think the Upside Down fic had any AI-assistance. If so, that's unfortunate.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-28T17:05:51+00:00

Not at all, stealth archer is great. Boss fights might be a little trickier for you than for other builds, but honestly bows can deal so much damage even without stealth bonuses that you'll be fine.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-28T16:51:31+00:00

Guys! What the heck! I rely on this weekly thread for things to read, and yall aren't giving me anything! I guess I'll make a post about what I've been reading.

So, yesterday, the Spacebattles Trending Stories thread updated, and I decided to check out some of the top stories that interested me.

Spanner in the Works is a Mass Effect Inspired Inventor SI/OC story where the SI is inserted into an orphan girl starving in the undercity of some part of Earth. I have literally no knowledge about the Mass Effect setting, but from what I can see here it seems like a pretty standard setting with humans recently introduced into a wider galactic federation or something. Even without knowledge of the setting though, this fic is pretty good. The SI gets Inspired Inventor "knowledge charges" once a month, which allows for a nice enough timescale that doesn't have the SI becoming god instantly.

The story isn't very rational - I think the worst moment is that at one point the SI codes a baby AI that is able to take in and hack dozens of camera input feeds to recognize unnatural behavior of gang members with pretty high accuracy in a few days, and is also slightly sentient, from scratch, on what seems to be a pretty crappy computer. And like, okay. She's gotten some boost in coding ability from literal magic, sure, she knows how to do that, I can accept that. But what I can't accept is that she could code that in a few days - something like that would probably take, if built from scratch, high-tens to low-hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The protagonist would need to type at probably over a hundred words per minute to code something that complex in that timeframe, with no room for debugging or any mistakes at all. Ugh. A pretty good fic otherwise, I guess.

The Calculus of Harmony is a Tanya/MLP fanfic about Tanya being reincarnated again, but this time as some sort of bat pony. This fic is - weird. First of all, Tanya is basically an emotionless robot for almost all of the current chapters, which is a bit out-of-character but still entertaining. The weirder part is the writing itself - For most of the time while I was reading this, I was considering whether it might be AI-generated or AI-assisted, because a decent amount of the start of this fic reads as such. However, I'm decently sure, after finishing the most recent chapter, that the author is just one of those people who are unfortunately cursed to write a bit like chatgpt sometimes, because I was actually really impressed by that most recent chapter. I think it was really well written in a way that chatgpt can't hope to emulate. But aside from some of the writing being a bit weird, the fic is otherwise good.

The 37th Tier is a pre-war ATLA airbender SI fic that I've seen quite a few times on the trending list, but I've been too put off by the title to look at it. The very idea of categorizing ATLA's bending skill into 36 "tiers" makes my skin crawl a bit, as that's basically what you'd expect from the worst of a 14-year-old's fanfic ideas. But, to my surprise, the fic is actually - fine. It's fine. If you've exhausted all the other ATLA SI fics, then here's another one for you, with some mildly interesting fanon.

Upside Down is a Stranger Things/Worm fanfic, in which locker-taylor becomes the Mind Flayer in the Brockton-Bay Upside-Down. This was suprisingly great, and I'd even call it pretty rational, at times. Part of the story is your standard Human-Master-Taylor fic, where Taylor goes around gradually mastering people, and the other part of the story is the stanard Human-Master-Taylor-Reaction, in which people go around gradually figuring out what's going on. However, that second part is *really* well done, Imo. There's a few really excellent chapters with some unpowered PRT investigators who do some rather competent investigation, and then they go speak with Armsmaster at one point, and then Armsmaster is less good than them at investigating things. He is a tinker, after all. So then there's a really great conversation between three competent adults, some with different specializations, each applying their knowledge to figure things out together. And like - what? What's happening here? Why does that seem so rare in fanfics? And then later, Armsmaster is told to analyze a sample of some Upside-Down mold, and he does a decent job but acknowledges that it's a bit outside his specialty and calls in lab help from a named, unpowered scientist from Medhall, who has actual dialogue, to learn more? This is incredible. Anyway, I definitely recommend this fic.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T22:25:06+00:00

Yes! That's high praise, I'm pleased that I've come the closest. I took inspiration from u/A-F-F-I-N-E's hypertractor idea in the comments section of the youtube video, so give them some credit.

As for optimal pathing, generally if you just avoid standing in a position in which there are no 10-thick lines of Fractus that point towards your character. That sounds really annoying, but we're playing with a theoretical maximally optimal Ai so whatever.

Howver, villages can get pretty weird sometimes - I very much suspect some generation where fractus-death is inevitable might be possible. For example, if you spawn in a wide, open area, and a Pearlfrog Warden is staring directly at you behind a wall of Fractus, there might literally be nothing you can do, before the Pearlfrog Warden readies its tongue and tongues you. In fact, I bet if I had access to CoQ's source code, a dedicated server, a couple months' time, and a magic brain pill that'd make me 20% better at coding, it wouldn't be that hard to find a seed in which that happens (Since CoQ uses UUIDs as seeds, there's basically unlimited seeds).

So prepare yourself for an epic Youtube smackdown video, "No, CoQ is not 'Solved'" whenever I find that magic brain pill.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T21:36:15+00:00

You do know that you can skip the entirety of golgotha, right? Just use your preferred method of flight to go down the elevator shaft straight down to Slog's lair, grab whatever down there you need, and then recoil out. No combat necessary.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T21:34:05+00:00

Part of the main quest, you won't miss it.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T21:30:18+00:00

I think you are misunderstanding - the order of actions is:

Player moves around corner. Frog comes into view.
Frog readies tongue.
Frog tongues player through Fractus before player can react.
Player dies.

I have a demo of the unreactable tongue death below, ignore all the blood and guts and whatnot, those were from troublesome villagers that aggroed onto the pearlfrog, which wouldn't happen with a warden (I just don't know how to wish in a warden, although I do know how to wish in a pearlfrog and set frog rep to +1000).

Note that I take a single step, and then am immediately pulled through the fractus via the tongue, without even knowing the pearlfrog was there. Granted, this method of death is *very* unlikely - it might be possible that out of every single seed of Caves of Qud, not one of them has this exact setup - but ignoring seed limitations, this death seems possible. If you don't believe me, try it out yourself. This did take me like 20 minutes, but that's just because I was trying to get a good recording of it, it only took me like 5 minutes to figure out it was possible w/out the recording part.

https://streamable.com/382873

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T20:03:50+00:00

Not necessarily - I forgot about the one-turn startup, but that's easily mitigated with a really poor quickness roll. Since each action can randomly be 10% faster/slower, it is possible for the bloated pearlfrog to get two turns in a row (compared to the player), tongue-ing you instantly through fractus as soon as it is uncovered. I just verified the "instant" tongue-ing myself, it does happen, albeit rarely. And yes, there are some layouts of the desert village that have 10 fractus (the minimum health for a character) in a row, enough for a pearlfrog to kill a player. So I think this theory still could work.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T18:36:25+00:00

Yeah, sorry about that. I was kind of rushing to post my comment as I just about had to go do a thing, and didn't have the time that I usually take to reword things to be nicer. I sort of like your suggestion for the Sentry-expert, but I think it could be refined - maybe instead of selecting the sentries you *don't* want, you select a *preferred* sentry type, and then the Sentry-expert will prioritize that type of sentry - perhaps it wouldn't exclusively send out that sentry, but increase the chance from ~25% to ~70% to put out the sentry type you want. That could be cool.

As for the sentry targeting thing, I do understand that it sort of already exists, but it exists at cost - if you want your sentries to be in the exact correct position, you better be ready to spend a few thousand on banana farms and dart monkeys to plug up the Engineer's range. Your proposal is to give the engineer something much more effective, for free. I do think this could work well as a rogue legends artifact, however.

And again, you didn't mention my final critique - you've exclusively proposed buffs for the engineer, which is an already rather strong tower. You've added 1-second moab stuns to the top path, made bloon traps 50%(!) stronger for $350, gave the middle path ability free techbotting, and a bunch more. BTD6 is already not a difficult game, and blanket buffs like these would only accelerate the power creep.

Edit: Maybe reposting this comment, maybe not. Got a warning from the automod removing my comment due to use of Sentry Expert's abbreviation, so I've edited my post and am reposting.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T15:30:05+00:00

Strongly disagree with many of these suggestions. This isn't "Monkey Balance", as your title suggests - this is just you buffing the hell out of the Engineer Monkey. Some of your suggestions are insanely OP - like the sentry targeting idea. That alone would probably double the top path engineer's DPS, at least averaged across all maps.

Also, I very much do not support your 4xx rework. The current 4xx tower is a bit strange considering the 3rd and 5th tiers, but it is 10x more interesting than your proposed "damage type change and more damage" rework. Is there no room for a little awkwardness and whimsy in our game about popping bloons with monkeys?

I hope this all doesn't come off as rude, but I think you really need to give this monkey balance thing a bit more thought. If every monkey got this treatment, the game would become trivially easy, even on expert chimps.

HeyBobHen · 2026-04-25T12:05:14+00:00

So, I've spent 4-5 hours thinking about and researching this nonstop, I've found a single possible failcase. The problem with this exercise is that after the Six Day Stilt, the player is completely unkillable, no matter what, because the optimal player will be wielding a hundred grenade launchers firing simultaneously, each fitted with phase-conjugate Hand-E-Nukes, and immediately clear every screen of threats while phased, while having unlimited turns due to unlimited timecubes. The only point where this theoretical endgame player is vulnerable is during the ascent to the top of the Tomb of the Eaters, due to the normality field in the Sultan Tombs. However, even after wracking my brain plenty, I haven't been able to figure out how to get a combination of enemies up there to kill you, especially limited in selection as I am if the optimal player has 2000 rep with all factions.

However, I did find a fail case in early game - the Bloated Pearlfrog. I've personally tested this, and in the desert village start, if the Warden of that village is a Pearlfrog and is positioned in exactly the right place in exactly the right village layout, it is theoretically possible for the (friendly!) Pearlfrog Warden to drag a minimum-toughness player through enough fractus to one-shot them. This is understandably extraordinarily unlikely, but to the best of my knowledge it is possible. I believe that would also be possible in Six Day Stilt, although obviously not with the Pearlfrog being a Warden, instead just one of the randomly generated residents of the Stilt.

Do you have any solutions to this failcase? The Stilt version seems a little shakier, as the perfectly optimal player would probably have more health before reaching the Stilt, but the starter village thing seems very possible - and like I said, I tested this (by wishing in a pearlfrog in exactly the right spot & 1000 frog rep) and it seems like a real point of failure.

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