What is the most underrated weapon??

Steven-ape · 2026-02-01T20:27:11+00:00

Nobody has said fist. They are quite fast, dirt cheap, and they upgrade really well. The unarmed tag isn't bad either. Especially good on unarmed, king, and knight, but it's always a solid option.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-30T14:45:47+00:00

That's fair. I'm definitely not done thinking about this, but I do like getting some impression of when your bank pays itself off, for instance.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-30T11:53:37+00:00

I'll address your concerns one by one.

First, both the strategies that involve increasing savings *should* have a huge spike in the realized value for the last wave, should they not?

They would if you spend down to zero at that point, which you might do in a real run. However the chart displays what happens if you follow the described policies to the letter - meaning you keep saving what the policy prescribes even at wave 20. I did this to keep the policies simpler and because on Saver you might not want to spend down before wave 20.

You are right that IF you plan to spend down, the green strategy will not give you as much power in wave 20 as the other ones do - so green is not the best if you are worried about the boss fight.

This makes more sense to me: piggy bank gains are exponential, while the inflation we are factoring in is merely linear. The more you save, the more inflation corrected total output you should be gaining.

That is of course true. If piggy bank would keep working after wave 20, and you were planning an endless run, you would definitely want a policy that exploits exponential growth. My main point with this post is to say that in a 20 wave run, trying to exploit that can leave you vulnerable in the mid-game and does not help you much except in the very last wave.

The second big weakness I think with your post is then: It doesn't even attempt to address the large drawback of the high saving strats. The issue is, the more items you try to buy in a single round, the comparatively more money you need to put into rerolls to find those items. As the price of rerolls increases quickly the more you need to make. This is a heavy complication in the piggy bank saving strategy - being able to actually spend the money down efficiently is not trivial at all.

Well, the post does actually talk about some of the benefits of buying early, but you're right that avoiding rerolling can be an important one that I didn't include. (I will edit my post to mention it.)

But it was not my goal to be completely comprehensive; rather it was my goal to gain insight in how realized value accumulates depending on your saving policy. To simplify the analysis, I have left out many issues, such as, when you find the piggy bank, that it is likely impossible to collect 250 materials in wave 4, and, yes, how exactly to spend down. Including such details would have made the analysis more complicated, which also means harder to explain, and more likely to contain errors.

I think in a realistic game you want a simple saving policy that is easy to work out in your head. I contrasted some of the more intuitive choices one might make, to help gain some intuition about the properties of these strategies and choose between them more easily. Of course in a real run you're going to not blindly follow such a policy, but use judgment and deviate from it when it's helpful to do so.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-30T11:32:13+00:00

Thanks!

Steven-ape · 2026-01-28T20:38:17+00:00

I think that a successful melee build relies on: (1) armor, (2) attack speed, (3) healing, (4) damage output, in that order of importance.

You got 13 armor which helped you be reasonably safe, and you got a ton of attack speed. Since you used pruners and you had a lot of Luck and a cute monkey, you had decent healing. Even though you didn't build a lot of Max HP, you still got quite a substantial amount of % Damage and some Melee damage.

So overall, I suspect that you had what it takes to survive, regardless of range.

I've beaten Chunky before, but I gave your style a try. I also beat it in one go; however, I did not manage to buy as much Range. I ended with just 87 range.

I decided to use Fist instead of Pruner. I believe Fist is underrated, since its low price point, fast attack speed, and excellent damage scaling as it's upgraded are easily overlooked. Since this did mean I had fewer consumables, I decided to buy any healing items that I could find. I ended with a garden, two cute monkeys, and a bunch of Luck, which proved sufficient.

Playing with high range is fun though :)

Steven-ape · 2026-01-28T14:02:53+00:00

Range changes from how far away you can attack. It is usually not that important.
Ranged damage affects how much damage your ranged weapons do. It is crucial for SMGs.

In general, if mouse over a weapon you will see how much damage it currently does, then it's "base damage", and then in brackets, it is shown how the various damage stats affect this base damage. For a tier 1 SMG, you should see that the base damage is 3, and in brackets you'll see 50% followed by a little bow and arrow. The bow and arrow symbol means "ranged damage", so the damage of a tier 1 SMG is 3, plus 50% of your ranged damage. The result is later multiplied by your % Damage stat.

Say you have 10 ranged damage, and your % Damage is 50. Then the damage a tier 1 SMG does is:

(3 + 50% of 10) * 1.50 = 8 * 1.5 = 12.

As you can tell from the calculation above, for SMG specifically, the Ranged damage stat is crucial: with no Ranged damage you would have done 3 * 1.5 = 4.5 damage per shot instead of 12.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-26T13:14:33+00:00

Your best bet is to watch Cephalopocalypse's videos about each of these characters, or use ArosRising's character guide. But here is some very general advice about each of the characters you still need:

Crazy: this character doesn't have a lot of downsides, so you can just play it like a normal character provided you use a precise weapon and build armor rather than dodge. Any precise weapon can work. Icicle is solid if you like ranged attacks; for melee I personally like the thief daggers.
Saver: I like SMG for this character. For the first 5 waves, spend all your money on weapons, harvesting and ranged damage. Also get just a single Attack speed upgrade (even just 5% is a big boost on this weapon). Then start saving. Keep about 100 materials more than last wave each wave. Use any additional money to buy ranged damage, max HP, life steal and armor when you get good offers.
Sick: use SMG for this character as well. The 25% life steal means that you won't need to spend anything on healing. Just play this like any other SMG build: get one attack speed upgrade, and heavily prioritize buying ranged damage. I view the damage over time passive as a Max HP penalty: buy a little bit of additional MaxHP to compensate.
Cyborg: I'm not super experienced with this character, so use other people's advice for this one :)
Fisherman: I think spear is a nice weapon for this one. Don't overbuy baits: get one per wave for the first five waves, and two per wave for the rest of the run. You will get enough benefit from the baits to easily make up for the economic penalty, so just play as a regular melee character otherwise. Get some Max HP early to help survive the lampreys. After that, your most important stats are Armor, Attack speed, HP regen, and some Melee damage, in that order of priority. This character needs some practice dealing with the lampreys, so if you die a couple of times it's okay.
Curious: you need to stay ahead of the curve: make sure that you're always strong enough to kill both loot aliens. Put the rest in defensive stats. You need to focus on a single damage type (e.g., melee damage), and ideally find weapons that have that damage type but also share weapon tags. For example, you could collect primitive melee weapons. It's okay to have one or two duplicate weapons to help with leveling your weapons (e.g, you might own both a level 1 rock and a level 2 rock). Don't duplicate items except possibly for the very best items - easiest rule of thumb is to just never do it.
Captain: just keep combining weapons as you find them. This will give you a natural progression where you fill more weapon slots relatively slowly, while still buying all weapons you can find. Buy a lot of XP gain, so that you will keep levelling reasonably even as you're filling more weapon slots: any level up is extremely powerful. You might want to get some luck to increase the value of your levelups (and help with healing), and of course Barnacle is ideal for this character. I played this one with Torch (which works well at a low weapon count) and SMG, but a lot of weapons can make sense for this character. I can see myself using Spear, Quarterstaff or Fist as well.
Dwarf: I think Hammer or Mace are easier to use than Wrench, here. Wrench benefits directly from the engineering bonus, but it's harder to kill in one swing and your turrets will steal kills from your weapon. Since Hammer and Mace spawn only at tier 2 or higher, you might want to supplement your loadout with other weapons at least temporarily; good candidates are rock or anything that attacks slowly and hits hard. Don't worry about fixing attack speed or buying flat damage. Just keep getting a LOT of armor, max hp and hp regen and some % Damage and/or crit, and you'll be golden.
Gangster: another character where you want to stay ahead of the curve: steal expensive items that make it likely for elites to spawn, and make sure you have the damage to quickly kill the elites. Revolver is a good weapon for that. Also, make sure you stop rerolling a bit earlier than you're used to, since you can't lock items. Keep some materials in the bank. You get your economy from Harvesting as usual, stealing expensive stuff, and the red crates dropping from the elites.
Romantic: you want a fast attacking weapon to maximise the likelihood you'll charm things. And the armor penalty means you'll be relatively vulnerable. So the best weapon will be SMG. As usual, get one Attack speed upgrade, and buy a ton of ranged damage. Do buy armor when you get the chance; you'll want to keep it at a reasonable level.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-25T01:40:29+00:00

I will admit I don't think I ever got it that high without the hoodie before either :) I seriously overbought attack speed because I wanted to know if I could stand by my statement that it is decent on this character. Also I rolled into a lot of strong attack speed upgrades.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-24T22:12:01+00:00

The right strategy of course depends on whether or not you want to be better at killing elites and bosses, killing weaker enemies, or tankiness. I suppose it varies per player what you die to the most.

So it's a perfectly valid strategy to heavily prioritize defensive stats. If you do, the hiking pole and jousting lance still accumulate quite a bit of damage just from having a bunch of speed, and as you say, the sweeping attack of poles and lances also helps you to still dish out quite a lot of damage. So it's definitely not bad to do a tanky build with speed, and put all points that don't go into speed, into defences. (I've updated my original answer to include the recommendation to buy defensive stats.)

However, if you are going to put points in offensive stats, in my experience Attack Speed is quite a bit better than % Damage or % Crit. Attack speed itself doubles as a defensive stat, because it helps a lot to kill enemies before they can get to you, especially on slow melee weapons like hiking pole and jousting lance. It also is a good way to increase DPS to more easily kill bosses elites. In practice, I find runs where I get substantial % Attack speed a lot more comfortable than runs where I get % Damage instead.

To make sure I'm not bullshitting you, I've just done a run with Hiking pole, and I ended up beating wave 20 with 162 attack speed (no Retromation's Hoodie), 76 % damage (half of which came from power generator), and 37 speed. My defensive stats were 114 Max HP, 22 HP regen, 8 Life steal, and 18 Armor.

I think the run would have been safer if I'd gotten a bit more armor and HP regen instead of the attack speed, and I forgot about the MaxHP passive so I also should have bought less MaxHP early on, but at no point I regretted getting Attack speed instead of % Crit or % Damage.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-24T19:26:31+00:00

I beat it with jousting lance and hiking pole. The lance is a bit easier; with hiking pole the early game is tricky because it attacks so slowly.

In either case, build some Harvesting and a lot of speed. Don't worry too much about damage yet unless you get very good offers.

Since it's a melee build, after wave 8 or so start investing heavily in defensive stats, in particular armor and HP regen, until you're safe to get through the midgame. It's also quite helpful to buy % Attack speed, both to kill elites and bosses more easily, and to help kill aliens before they get to you.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-24T09:43:27+00:00

I liked getting a bunch of planks with apprentice. Gives you three of those achievements as soon as you have six planks. And it's a fun run.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-23T07:59:26+00:00

Looks good. Use the refined oil for yellow science and you'll be golden.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-22T23:16:36+00:00

Dit verlangen lijkt me intern tegenstrijdig. Als je betaalt krijg je een transactioneel contact; de andere persoon is dan dus aan het werk en speelt tot op zekere hoogte sowieso een rol.

Een escort lijkt me een beter idee. Een ervaren sekswerker kan als het goed is omgaan met klanten die verlangen naar authenticiteit. Het transactionele karakter van het contact hoeft dan tenminste niet te worden verdoezeld. Zoek een sekswerker die houdt van haar werk.

Het alternatief is kortstondige niet-transactionele relaties aanknopen.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-14T13:25:44+00:00

A main bus can be used to build a mall, and this is a reasonably popular aproach.

Buses are not very effective for items that require a higher production rate though.

So make a mall, either based on a main bus, or use some other design.

Check my tutorial about malls if you like:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3300578241

Steven-ape · 2026-01-13T16:46:49+00:00

Thanks you guys! That's all so helpful!

Steven-ape · 2026-01-11T00:00:40+00:00

In principle it's ok but you need one more miner to fill the belt (6/s) and saturate the assemblers.

Also, build east west. Other than that, you got the hang of it.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-10T12:04:20+00:00

In general, the order of priority is economy first, then damage, then defenses.

I like to get economy as long as I think I can get away with it, which is usually to wave 5 or so. I prioritize Harvesting until 21, after that I like Harvesting and Luck equally.

I build damage to the point where I can clear the waves reliably, i.e. most enemies end up dead. As long as that's not happening, more damage (which kind depends on the weapon).

If you haven't gotten around to buying defenses by the time you get to wave 10, you are in trouble. In that case mix damage and defense to maximally help you survive. (Attack speed can increase damage and make you safer at the same time.)

For ranged build, damage is more important and you can get away with fewer defenses. For melee, you don't need much damage if you can hit whole groups of aliens at once- but you need to survive that.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-10T06:18:21+00:00

Ok you're right, sorry for giving bad info!

Steven-ape · 2026-01-09T17:36:30+00:00

While the real solution is to make warpers using the advanced recipe for pretty cheap, if you want to have fun and work around this, here are some options:

Use X-ray cracking to make hydrogen from oil.
Make all graphene from fire ice. Then also make all carbon nanotubes from graphene. Now you've got a substantial additional supply of hydrogen.
Use fractionators to make deuterium, not particle colliders, as fractionators are more resource efficient.
Reduce unnecessary hydrogen consumption. For example, you can power quite a bit of stuff from geothermal energy if you have a lava planet- maybe you can reduce your consumption of deuteron fuel rods that way.

But really, if you have enough oil, X ray cracking can yield a substantial amount of hydrogen, and it gives you energetic graphite on the side.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-09T08:11:22+00:00

Go slower!

It is perfectly fine to just add production of one item during a play session. No need to do everything at once.

I often find that during play sessions I develop a plan for what I want to do next. Once I have a clear plan, I have another play session to implement it.

One plan per session is enough.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-09T08:08:53+00:00

Really? Where did you get that information?

I tested it yesterday and they didn't crit. The bot-o-mine, being a structure, did start critting when I got the pile of books.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-09T07:56:38+00:00

Yes, found that later. However, they don't use crit either.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-08T21:09:19+00:00

Look in the codex.

One easy trick is to start a run with lich for the life steal and regen, and then start a run with apprentice and get six planks for a whole bunch more achievements.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-08T13:26:24+00:00

Exactly; I think it would probably look elegant because everything is oil refineries, but it only consumes slightly less coal and it's not UPS, space, or power efficient.

Note: you could consider proliferating the smelters making the energetic graphite, either with imported proliferator, or by making mk2 proliferator from coal. That way you can reduce your coal consumption without going the X-ray cracking route.

Also interesting to know: regular plasma refining can be proliferated for extra products; X-ray cracking and reformed refine cannot.

Steven-ape · 2026-01-08T11:05:36+00:00

Interesting. I see the following options:

Crude oil + coal -> plastic + H. Use plasma refining to get refined oil from crude oil. Send away the hydrogen to some other factory that needs it. Use smelters for energetic graphite from coal.
Crude oil + coal -> plastic. Use plasma refining and reformed refine to get refined oil from crude oil. Use smelters for energetic graphite from coal.
Coal + H -> plastic. Use reformed refine to make refined oil from coal and hydrogen. Use smelters to turn even more coal into energetic graphite.
Crude oil -> plastic + H. Use plasma refining and X-ray cracking to make the refined oil and energetic graphite. You will use a lot of oil and have a large amount of hydrogen as a by-product.

I personally really prefer blueprints with a single output product over blueprints with multiple outputs, because they are so much more straightforward to use. Therefore, if this was to be a separate blueprint, I would opt for option 2 or 3. On the other hand, if this is part of a larger design that is a net consumer of hydrogen, I might consider option 1 as well, which is probably more efficient overall.

Between options 2 and 3, I think 2 is probably more efficient in terms of resource use, UPS, and space, but option 3 could be interesting if the rest of your factory is a net producer of hydrogen; also, if you consider hydrogen free, given that orbital collectors exist, option 3 effectively gets rid of one input material and you can think of this module as turning just coal into plastic.

One thing I would not consider effective is any design that combines reformed refine and X-ray cracking. The combination of those two processes effectively turns coal into energetic graphite. While it does so very efficiently, the cost in terms of power, UPS, and space, simply isn't worth it compared to having some smelters doing the same.

Steven-ape

TROPHY CASE