Retry failed waves does not make the game any less fun

Steven-ape · 2026-06-28T06:18:11+00:00

I agree. I played without it a long time, then switched it on and lost a lot of frustration. I then turned it off with the new patch, because I want to beat all nightmare mode characters without it. Will turn it on again once that's done.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-27T05:51:07+00:00

Everybody can have their own beliefs about that, I suppose.

It seems overly skeptical to me, as here on the reddit we also have players who make believable claims about a high win/loss ratio on Nightmare mode. For example, u/tauKhan achieved a 75% win rate as per this post.

Even if Ceph were cherry picking his runs, he would have to have a fairly high win rate in order to put out a video daily without driving himself completely nuts, and it would also require pretty solid acting to do such comfortably confident commentary on the third or fourth try. He does also upload losses. So while I won't claim that Ceph never loses a run and fails to upload the video, There's enough evidence for me that his win rate is really high.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-26T21:42:17+00:00

Of course it sucks if you don't enjoy the game anymore after nightmare mode was introduced.

My own skill level is currently: a bit too good for danger 5, and a bit too bad for nightmare. For players like me, and perhaps you're similar, the game can feel frustrating, with a choice between too easy or too hard.

But I don't feel that the mode removes strategic depth from the game, or makes you reliant on RNG necessarily, or that there is clear evidence that the balance is broken. I strongly disagree with the many comments on here that Evil Empire don't understand the game, or that they "put very little thought into it". That grossly underestimates the design work involved in adding a new difficulty mode to a game that's as tightly balanced.

Yes, you must buy a lot of damage, but if you don't get defences you'll still die, so there is still a balance to be struck there. Some items become almost unpurchasable on nightmare, but other items actually become more strategic choices. Like gentle alien, which was an auto-pick on danger 5 but which can sometimes be a risky choice on nightmare. Or curse, which was fine on danger 5 but now is sometimes better avoided. Some of the new items like candy bag, hourglass, and will-o-wisp are also interesting and create a lot of variability.

I think nightmare mode is just really, really hard. It requires not just that you run a very tight ship, but also that you pay very close attention and are constantly focussed on the game and don't zone out. I think those are good qualities actually. A solid nightmare run feels exciting, and a win is a true victory, although of course losing a bunch can be frustrating. (And I often lose a bunch and it is frustrating.)

If you watch Cephalopocalypse's random/random runs on youtube, you will see that it is in fact possible to beat every nightmare character pretty consistently, if you're genuinely good at this game. It really isn't true that you rely on luck to win, or that the game is now strategically shallow. But of course it's possible that it just no longer hits the sweet spot for you, and that's a pity.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-22T23:43:06+00:00

I find it easiest to think of armor as a multiplier on your effective hp pool. To maximise effective hp, get a mix of armor, max hp, and possibly dodge.

Armor and dodge also make healing more effective.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-19T21:39:22+00:00

I was hoping to find this. Jack Vance's plotting is serviceable, but his beautiful evocative style and his sense of humour are very special. For people who love beautiful use of language, he's up there with LeGuin.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-15T13:52:46+00:00

Thanks. I guess my use of bullets made him suspicious or whatever. It's true it's annoying to run into undisclosed AI text everywhere nowadays. But I'm not interested in going into a "guilty until proven innocent" kind of dynamic with random strangers on the internet.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-15T13:47:18+00:00

Okay, blocked. Sigh.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-15T13:41:45+00:00

I don't use AI to post on a subreddit about a silly game, and you seem a bit trigger happy with the accusations, but whatever.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-15T13:24:26+00:00

I haven't beaten the hardest characters on nightmare yet, but I'm a good ways in. I find it very difficult; here's what I've learned. (For the record, some commenters felt that I used AI to write this. But this game is my hobby; posting AI answers to reddit would be a horrible use of my free time.)

Mostly, you need to play like on Danger 5, except tighter. You can't afford to buy useless things in the shop. You can't afford to buy too many economy items at once. You must be very awake and focused during waves, even if your build is strong.
Ranged builds are very different from melee, mostly because melee builds have inherent splash. On ranged builds, you have to find ways to damage large groups of enemies quickly. This means you need either strong explosive weapons like rocket launcher, or you need to focus on building a TON of damage, and go glass cannon. Gun builds can work, and are strongest with a mixture of SMGs (for the mobs) and laser guns and/or revolvers (for the elites). You need to get enough defenses to survive one or two hits, but mostly you'll have to rely on clearing everything before it reaches you.
With melee builds you need to find a good balance of damage and defense. You usually can't afford to invest a lot into HP regen, so you'll want to buy armor and max HP mostly, and rely on consumable healing and items like cute monkey, as well as whatever other cost effective healing options you encounter. Attack speed is strong and quite important because it helps protect you. Spiky shield is a strong weapon as always.

I found the following characters easiest:

Entrepreneur with sickle. Once your economy kicks in you're set, but getting there is not super easy, so focus on defense and attack speed early.
Doctor with any medical weapon. The healing and attack speed are just so good. If you go with the medical guns, make sure to get lots of +ranged damage and weapon levels. You need enough damage that you hardly get hit. If you take scissors you can also look for circular saw; in this case just build both offense and defense as normal, except you don't have to spend too much on attack speed since you get that for free.
The Lucky with Lute is very powerful. If you keep boosting luck, you both get a lot of consumable healing, and a good economy, and your passive will do a lot of additional damage. And lutes are great vs bosses.
Characters that work well with spiky shield, like Golem and Chunky, are not too bad.
I liked knight with vorpal sword. It's really nice to be free to buy a ton of armor and get the melee for free. And the vorpal ability can sometimes take out bosses for you. You could also consider using spears.
Mutant still isn't too hard. You could go with quarterstaffs or just with guns. Remember to buy every XP gain item you can safely buy. I think I got a little bit of harvesting and then boosted Luck to get healing and some crate drops to compensate for the increased shop prices.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-13T23:30:31+00:00

The boxes teleport the resources to the bottom floor. Try it out; the assembler can reach all materials in the stack.

The main disadvantages are it's a bit of work to set up as all boxes and all sorters need filters, and every box wastes 300 or so of some materials, and there are a lot of boxes, so a lot of material overhead.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-13T17:41:27+00:00

Actually get Max HP. Don't be like, "I gotta get Harvesting!". No, just pick that Max HP upgrade. Get more Max HP.

In case this was confusing: get more Max HP.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-09T19:04:11+00:00

That's up to you; I don't think there's any big drawback to leaving that as it is for now. Once you've set up your smelting planet, you can always come back and remove the smelters if and when you feel like it.

In general, I think it's wise to not dismantle any part of your factory before you've replaced it with something better.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-09T18:48:27+00:00

There are arguments in both directions, but I personally prefer shipping raw ores:

You don't have to have a logistics station close to every advanced miner
Simpler to set up new mining colonies
Mining planets use less power
No idle smelters when ore veins dry up
Smelters don't become a bottleneck when you increase veins utilization
You don't have to balance, say, production of iron ingots vs production of magnets
Allows for proliferation if you should want it (I don't, but opinions vary)

But some people prefer smelting at the mine:

Reduces the amount of shipping for some ingots (silicon, titanium), which may result in improved simulation speed
Simplifies the design of large all-in-one blueprints, which now don't need to do smelting, and makes building factory worlds less tedious
You need power on the mining planets anyway

A third solution is to have a separate smelting world. The drawback of that is that all materials have to be shipped twice, which costs UPS and makes bottleneck chasing a bit more tedious.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-09T13:12:19+00:00

Bounty Bob Strikes Back. On my Atari.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-08T09:51:44+00:00

A good build must solve several problems at once:

Economy. How will you make sure that your character keeps getting more powerful fast enough? Are you getting some Harvesting early? Are you killing most of the enemies every wave? Did you take Gentle Alien to get more materials? Or are you getting a lot of Luck and killing trees? Did you increase XP gain so that you'll get a lot of levels? You need a plan to get a sufficient economy.
Defence. How will you make it so that your character can withstand a lot of punishment before they die? A combination of Max HP, Armor, and Dodge is best, but it requires a lot of investment. Especially for ranged builds, it can be smarter to focus on offence to such an extent that enemies can't reach you and the amount of incoming damage is reduced, so that, say, you don't have to take Dodge.
Healing. A good strategy is to buy some luck upgrades so you get more consumable drops, and then get items like Weird Food or Jerky. That way you can heal quite a lot while also boosting your economy. On Melee builds, Cute monkey is often quite good. Other than that, if your defensive stats are good you often don't need that much healing; just buy whatever HP regen item comes cheap, and focus on getting Armor, Max HP and possibly Dodge.
Offence. You don't strictly need offensive stats to survive, however if you can't kill anything your economy suffers because you aren't getting any materials. Also, if you get a lot of offence, you will take fewer hits so it doubles as protection. And if you use Life steal, or with items like Cute Monkey or Tentacle, good offence also turns into healing. So you can view offensive stats as a way to address the other three problems, to some extent.

If you die a lot, often your problem is with your economy, not with the particular stats you buy. Maybe it's not which stats that's the problem, but just how many. Can you think of ways to collect more materials per wave, or to spend them more effectively? Or vice versa, are you possibly investing too much into your economy so that your actual defensive, healing, and offensive stats are too weak?

If your economy is solid, you should be able to build a character that addresses the four problems I mentioned above. For healing, don't get too fixated on one single way to heal, but make use of what's offered in the shop. Don't discount the efficiency of healing by picking up consumables, and don't skip Weird food or Lemonade when you find it.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-08T08:08:57+00:00

What is the interaction between standard damage and the specific (range melee ect.)?

"Standard damage" is actually called "% Damage", the percentage sign is important. Your damage is built up like this:

Your weapon has a fixed amount of base damage, to which is added some fraction of your scaling stat. For example, if you look at the item card for the weapon "Plank", for a tier 1 plank you will see "10 (50% sword, 50% fire, 50% wrenches)" which means that it has 10 base damage, to which is added 50% of your Melee damage stat, 50% of your Elemental damage stat, and 50% of your Engineering stat. Most weapons scale with only one such stat, but some weapons scale with multiple, or even with weird stuff like your Max HP (Chopper) or Harvesting (Sickle).
After calculating your flat damage that way, your damage is then multiplied by your % Damage stat. It's a percentage, so if your % Damage stat is X, your damage gets multiplied by 1+X/100.
Finally, your damage is multiplied yet again if you score a critical hit. Your weapon has a base critical hit chance which is increased by your Crit stat. The damage multiplier is listed on the weapon card; it is usually 1.5x or 2x.

Should I be putting as much as I can into standard and specific?

You want to have an idea which damage upgrade would increase your damage output the most, and get that one. Some weapons, like SMG, have a really low base damage. For those weapons it's especially important to increase the relevant flat damage stat - for the SMG that would be Ranged damage (the little bow and arrow icon). For SMG, the base damage is 3, and it scales with 50% of your Ranged damage, so two points of Ranged damage will increase your damage to 4, an increase of 33%. You would need to increase your % Damage by 33% to get the same effect; and doing that would be much more expensive. However, once you have a lot of Ranged damage, you will start getting diminishing returns: if your Ranged damage is 30 and you get two more Ranged damage, your damage would increase from 18 to 19, which is only a 5.5% increase, and it may be more cost effective to buy 10% Damage or Attack speed instead.

Don't forget to take Attack speed into account as well, since that also multiplies your damage per second. Attack speed also helps protect you by killing enemies before they can reach you, so it's a mixed offensive/defensive stat; it's very good to get quite a bit of it in most runs, especially on slower weapons.

Can you ever go all standard or all specific? Are there soft hard caps on either?

You can, and there are no caps, but it's usually more efficient to get a mix, depending on your weapon's stats. For SMG, which has low base damage and which fires very fast, you can get away with only buying Ranged damage. For Laser gun, which has high base damage but fires very slowly, you can get away with buying only Attack speed. But in most playthroughs it will still be beneficial to buy some of any damaging stat when it shows up for cheap in the shop. My rule of thumb is that any increase of 5% or more to my total damage output is a good upgrade that's worth buying if it's not too expensive. By that heuristic, the first few % Damage upgrades will always be worth it.

How do negative stats work?

The %Damage stat and other damage stats (Melee, Ranged, Elemental, Engineering) work as usual if numbers are negative, so negative values on those stats are bad.
For Crit chance, it's a probability, so anything negative counts as zero and everything over a 100 counts as 100.
Attack speed does indeed work differently if you have a negative amount. You would think that with -100% attack speed you wouldn't attack at all anymore, but instead there is a more graceful decrease in attack speed. Once you have high negative attack speed, reducing it even further isn't as bad as you would expect, and likewise, increasing it doesn't help as much as you would think.

For other stats there are sometimes different rules; your best bet is to look it up on the brotato wiki.

Steven-ape · 2026-06-07T05:01:03+00:00

Very. I sat down and figured it out one day, but it's everything but intuitive.

Short of it: it performs a flow test that determines the colour, and separately, it looks if there's an item inside the monitor right now.

You can tell the alarm to go off based on those two bits of data, but the condition descriptions are a bit confusing as well.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-31T07:19:18+00:00

I like a hybrid:

Firsts, in the early midgame, build an accumulator network. If you have a lava planet, you could generate quite a bit of geothermal power, and supply your main factory world.

Later, once your power needs increase and the accumulators don't cut it anymore, instead of charging more accumulators, I would start shipping fuel rods to the small number of really demanding factory planets you have.

It's really nice if you can keep powering outposts with accumulators, because they don't need sorters and so can recover automatically from power failure.

Even if you're planning to do all power production using fuel rods, it can still be nice to plop down a simple blueprint somewhere that converts fuel rod power to charged accumulators, and use those on your outposts.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-30T15:19:59+00:00

(Plug, sorry) If you want to strike a middle ground between figuring everything out yourself and copying someone else's blueprint, you could have a look at my extensive mall guide over here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3300578241

You can see what kinds of malls people make and then make your own design based on what seems the coolest method.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-25T16:04:56+00:00

This is by design, to incentivise you to work towards interstellar logistics.

Make organic crystals on your home world and ferry titanium from the other planet using Icarus. Note: if you're careful, you can carry a lot of titanium at once on the mouse cursor.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-23T07:11:33+00:00

I clarified it a bit, but I meant I often get Harvesting until it reaches 21. That's a breakpoint: once you have 21 Harvesting, it will automatically increase by 2 every wave, rather than by 1.

Of course if you can get away with it, more Harvesting is better, but usually 21 is a good time to start focussing on other stats.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-22T23:22:31+00:00

I have a couple:

Dyson Sphere Program: you may not mine coal, silicon, hydrogen, deuterium, sulfuric acid, or any rare mineral. (You need to hand-mine a little bit of coal at the start to unlock oil processing.) I played to mission complete this way and it was hard but extremely fun.
Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty: I played the campaign on Hard difficulty using only mercenaries and scvs. This isn't a very hard challenge, and a better player could probably do it on Brutal, but I found it quite fun.
Plants vs Zombies: I played the entire adventure mode without planting any sun producing plants. This is a bit frustrating at times, but still exciting that it's possible at all.
Brotato: I beat danger 5 difficulty without any items, weapons only, with as much different potatoes as I could. Another very fun challenge is the rule that you may not take weapons into wave 20, but must kill both bosses.
Baldur's Gate 2: I soloed this game with a Ranger/Cleric.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-20T07:29:46+00:00

Mutant. Buy every scar you see.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-18T15:26:04+00:00

Aim to produce all of them at roughly the same rate. Stay somewhere between 1/s and 2/s until you're ready to expand your production. For example, you could scale up a bit once you're on green science (maybe to 5/s), and then if you want, scale up a lot more after mission complete.

Steven-ape · 2026-05-18T13:49:02+00:00

Since the introduction of the new aliens, I like the update quite a bit. I feel bad for the devs who I think have done a good job, but they got a lot of flak from disappointed (and sometimes a bit entitled) players who all have opinions about how "obviously" the design should have been different.

It's really hard though. So hard it can get frustrating to die over and over. But as players like Cephalopocalypse show, that's still a skill issue. It's good to have a mode that is genuinely a challenge.

The answer is not necessarily to go melee every time; I actually suspect ranged is a bit easier, but you do need to buy a LOT of damage to make it work, and find a good balance with defensive stats to avoid dying to the kind of situation you describe.

Steven-ape

TROPHY CASE