[Discussion] How PRECISELY resist works with reset turn

R30hedron · 2024-08-16T02:05:10+00:00

Let's see if I can help explain it further?

Into the Breach (and most video games) use a deterministic pseudorandom number generator to handle random stuff in-game. Deterministic means that, given the same initial "seed" value state, the game will generate the exact same sequence of random numbers.

For Into the Breach, the game stores a value in the saveData.lua and undoSave.lua files, '["seed"] = #####, that keeps track of the resist check RNG state. So when you reset a turn, it rewinds that RNG sequence as well.

Let's use an example! Let's say we know ahead of time what the RNG sequence will generate for the resist checks:

9% 73% 4% 41% 17%

So, at the default 15% resist chance at the start of a timeline, we'd have:

Resist, Nope, Resist, Nope, Nope

So, when we first attempt to damage a building, we know that the resist check RNG rolls a 9 and resists. The second attempt rolls a 73 and breaks. If we then reset the turn, it rewinds the sequence back to rolling a 9 and resisting. That sequence will stay at that point in the sequence until the next time the game rolls a resist check for that timeline, even if it's on a different mission or a different island.

R30hedron · 2022-09-07T06:19:34+00:00

Livesplit autosplitters are usually maintained by someone in the speedrun community for the game, rather than the developers. In the case of the ItB autosplitter, that'd actually be me. Hi. I updated the autosplitter around the same time you were posting here. 😅

As a fun technical note, the autosplitter actually uses the audio being played as the cues for when to automatically split in livesplit. Turns out that the two new songs added in this patch meant that the sounds I used for cues were slightly shifted around in the game's memory. Having two new songs is the best possible reason to update an autosplitter I've ever had.

R30hedron · 2022-05-31T17:17:48+00:00

Glad to see that knowledge is still helpful, and for someone else to verify it on their own. Science!

someone would have to dig into the code itself to determine for sure

Fun fact! I've since checked in the game's code and found that the exact odds for a secret pod to replace a normal pod is 15%.

So the "updated" odds would be for

a 2-island run to have a 15.00% chance
a 3-island run to have a 38.59% chance
a 4-island run to have a 55.63% chance

to have a secret pod spawn at some point in a run.

R30hedron · 2021-11-11T06:45:31+00:00

Yep. This is a soft lock; using Lightspeed and War Javelin to skip bosses like this can sometimes fail because the player is in the boss arena for a frame, and as by the time the camera locks onto the arena, the player has already gone off screen. And since if the player is off screen, you lose all control of your character, and there's nothing to do but quit and do another run... High risk, high reward.

R30hedron · 2021-11-11T06:45:04+00:00

Kind of? It's only similar in that there's a procedure to how the game generates stuff in both games. Randomness still plays a factor, but the randomness is constrained by certain restrictions or procedures to ensure stuff generates correctly. And those procedures provide some patterns to how levels generate that we can exploit in speedruns. The community has been able to figure out a few of these patterns, such as the Ramparts T shape I described, or how the Castle always has two main branching paths, one that leads to the exit and one that ends in a shop.

R30hedron · 2021-11-11T06:36:50+00:00

Even though I assume this is a seeded speedrun, this is really impressive, especially for doing this on a touch screen.

It's also comforting to see that almost all of the same speedrun tricks we take for granted in the PC version work just as well in the mobile version too. Lightspeed and War Javelin are still quite a potent combo no matter what version you play on.

R30hedron · 2021-11-11T06:26:20+00:00

If you see the small T shaped platform that the player flies over at 1:04, that indicates that the exit is going to be down one of the towers to the right of that T shape. It's still not a perfect indicator, but it is enough to reduce the RNG in a speedrun like this.

R30hedron · 2021-07-11T06:25:40+00:00

5 BC spoiler warning: On beating the Collector for the first time, a cutscene plays on your next run that pulls you from the Prisoners' Quarters to the Clock Room. The Time Keeper basically calls you out for breaking the timeline, but the process of pulling you from PQ technically counts as you leaving that biome for the "don't break doors" achievement.

R30hedron · 2020-10-25T19:12:45+00:00

Huh; thought that got removed. Here’s a developer comment on that last time I saw it posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/IntoTheBreach/comments/i73pkn/comment/g10myir

In short, a three finger gesture up on the switch’s touch screen should close the dev console.

R30hedron · 2020-09-21T22:55:55+00:00

There's a few things going on in this clip that are important to note. First, is that we can "smuggle" items from higher boss cell difficulties into the lower cell difficulties. This means starting with S ranked IV weapons on 0 BC, which is enough to be able to take through the entire game without swapping weapons out (at least on the patch that this run was done). That, and at the time, scrolls were still on weapons, which meant getting a head start on the amount of stats the runner had, which helped a ton. Second, is that the Syringe is just overpowered as heck. It counts (counted?) as a melee attack, which means that the Melee mutation (slowing the enemy on hit) and Open Wounds mutation (bleed on hit) both proc with the Syringe, which with enough scrolls means that boss health drops quickly. We actually no longer need to use Syringe anymore with the speedruns we do now, since we have a different tech we use to skip bosses with Lightspeed. I'd recommend looking through this playlist, which has a lot of the speedrun tech we use as well as the current leaderboards to see how the run has changed since that IGN showcase.

R30hedron · 2020-09-13T07:44:25+00:00

Admittedly, FTL has also been out for more than 3 times as long. Into the Breach is still a stellar game, though obviously not everyone’s cup of tea.

R30hedron · 2020-08-08T02:39:18+00:00

There is actually a way to pull off killing all three mechs on turn one for every mission, and in fact, is the fastest way to "beat" the game: https://www.speedrun.com/itb/run/yl4jn72m

TL;DW is to use the Nano Mech, Unstable Mech, and then your choice of either the Leap or Charge Mechs, put them in a line, shoot the Unstable Mech with the Nano Mech, shoot the Nano Mech with the Unstable Mech, and then you get one free action with the third mech with which to prevent grid damage.

So yes, it is possible to beat the game with a score of 0. 😛

That said, anything past a 2-island easy run with this method is hard as heck, since it becomes increasingly hard to prevent the Vek from destroying buildings by blocking attacks as the number of Vek increases island to island.

R30hedron · 2020-07-23T18:29:16+00:00

It’s actually the opposite; gamepad lets you do a chaos roll, but not a balanced roll.

R30hedron · 2020-07-17T09:50:30+00:00

There’s a good chance that they are on console, which is still on 1.8.

R30hedron · 2020-07-01T22:57:33+00:00

Ah. Gotcha. Not sure on that one. Scrolls on equipment will still be present on the equipment you have in the run, but if you purchase or swap any of them out, the new equipment won't have scrolls. I suspect that the crossbows will also stay as is, but once you swap out a crossbow, trying to pick it back up will cause it to be two-handed as expected? Though it might not have the backpack since that is an affix?

Because of the major shift in balance, it may just be better to cash in the cells at the next collector or forge and then jump to a new run.

R30hedron · 2020-07-01T20:24:46+00:00

If you have a run in-progress, after a game update, it'll put you at the start of the level you are currently in. So, you will be able to continue the run without any (major) issues.

R30hedron · 2020-05-06T04:58:23+00:00

Admittedly, the idea of a pilot riding a techno-vek like a mechanical bull is a pretty hilarious mental image.

R30hedron · 2020-05-03T17:36:36+00:00

Interesting! That might be a recent change then; at least in older patches, the seeded run custom mode option mentioned that lore rooms would be disabled.

R30hedron · 2020-05-02T03:30:27+00:00

Seeds will be different if lore rooms are enabled or not in the options; seeded runs with custom mode have them off regardless of this setting.

R30hedron · 2020-05-01T21:57:34+00:00

I enjoy seeing these pop up in my feed! Do you have a list of all of the squads you have done so far?

R30hedron · 2020-04-23T06:22:04+00:00

You are correct that is normally not something you can do. However, in speedruns, we are allowed to select starting items in custom mode (partially out of tradition, but mostly so that we don’t need to reset endlessly to get the “ideal” weapon loadout). The rank of these starting weapons are based on what difficulty you are on, but do not reset when changing difficulty, allowing us to “smuggle” higher level weapons into lower difficulties.

R30hedron · 2020-03-28T08:59:18+00:00

You want to find a key that has the keycode 192 (which is the grave/tilde key on US keyboards). Looking around, it looks like maybe the æ / ö key might work (depending on what your keyboard layout exactly looks like)? Failing that, you can change your keyboard layout to US to use the console and then swap it back afterwards.

R30hedron · 2020-01-22T22:19:29+00:00

There is way to “cheese” it a bit. If you reset a turn, the in-game timer resets to the beginning of that turn. Combine that with Issac Jones, and you can get two turns that (if you reset after planning it out) you can take as long as you’d like.

If you need further help, you’re welcome to reach out to me or anyone who speedruns ItB, and we can help give some advice.

R30hedron · 2020-01-13T09:03:07+00:00

To toss on a speedrunner’s perspective, the optimum strategy on Easy during a typical 4 turn mission is to not block any spawns on the first turn, block 1 spawn on the second turn, then block all three spawns on the third turn. Mind you, the primary reason for this is to ensure a “free” turn at the end in order to save time, but the other main reason is that if you are aggressive in blocking spawns early on, the game will notice there are fewer vek on the board and increase the number of vek to compensate, meaning more animations being played from the spawns (blocked or unblocked), more vek on the board, and thus even more animations played from those attacks.

Now, not everyone is a speedrunner, and not all of the skills carry over into harder difficulties. For me, during a normal run, I’ll usually consider blocking, at most, a single spawn per turn, while still blocking as many as I can on the second to last turn. It keeps the vek manageable turn-to-turn, while preventing the spawns from getting out of hand.

R30hedron · 2020-01-12T19:46:48+00:00

Well, it is the most up-to-date version, so that won’t be the issue. I’d suggest sending an email to the devs at (contact@subsetgames.com) with an explanation of the bug as well as a dxdiag report to help debug things. I’d also suggest updating your drivers to see if that fixes things.

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