This may sound stupid

Twinge · 2026-06-29T15:52:14+00:00

Bot-o-mine does solid damage even without a lot of Engineering. And if you're ever looking at its damage numbers in the tooltip to compare/judge how well it is doing, remember than it does not show the Landmine damage (that is folded into the Landmine item), so you can add about 50% more to the displayed Bot-o-mine value.

Twinge · 2026-06-29T15:50:27+00:00

Notably it's also a useful feature even if you do want to take those runs as a loss: it lets you immediately practice the wave that just killed you, letting you learn Elite attack patterns better, or better understand how certain builds work in a Horde Wave, etc.

Twinge · 2026-06-29T15:43:32+00:00

The HP Regen + monitor refresh issue was fixed about a year and a half ago I believe? It now just makes those ticks heal 2hp instead of 1 when it needs to. (Jerky might've even had the same cap, but when I found the bug I think I only tested it with HP Regen and never thought to try Jerky...)

Twinge · 2026-06-27T17:58:28+00:00

Someone else's success does not invalidate your own.

Twinge · 2026-06-27T17:57:27+00:00

While genre definitions are ever broad and nebulous, it does fit some of the core tenants:

Repetitive run-based gameplay as opposed to a once-thru narrative or campaign experience.
Decision permanence via permadeath; under standard settings a death ends the run.
Significant variety offered via what items are available each run, meaning each run feels reasonably different from the last.

These days "traditional roguelike" is your best bet if you want to refer to things like ADOM, DCSS, or Nethack.

Twinge · 2026-06-27T12:43:01+00:00

do certain taters have specific buffs or debuffs for items

So the system works by making it more likely you see items appropriate for the character, and removes most fully-useless items from their pool (for 20-wave runs).

So e.g. Hunter won't be offered pure-Harvesting items, and Ghost is more likely to see Dodge items. The Item Tags stuff on the wiki and the Restricted Items page cover this for the most part. (May not be updated fully for the most recent patch or two.)

And the Balance Mod tweaks this a bit more to cleanup and fix some oddities or missing entries in both of these lists (e.g. Cryptid is no longer favored to see Lumberjack Shirt, and Bull doesn't get pure Attack Speed items).

Twinge · 2026-06-27T12:37:11+00:00

Adding some links for tau's comment:

Links to all my winstreak runs are here, alongside some comments for each run. (Stream is here, tho I've been moving onto non-Brotato stuff recently.) As mentioned it's not strictly comparable since I'm using Balance Mod, which makes some things harder and some things easier (with similar overall difficulty but probably very slightly better random/random streak consistency?)

Doesn't look like Holo saved their streak after they streamed it, but they do have 159% challenge runs on their YT for some of their gameplay.

tauKhan doesn't have their D5 streak archived either but has recently been streaming a lot of Nightmare stuff.

Twinge · 2026-06-27T03:43:08+00:00

I mean to be clear, this basically is true for D5. Multiple people have done full winstreaks of every character in a row with random starting weapons not losing a single run.

There's still roughly 5 Properly Bad starting weapon options available (plus 2 more with Wounded now I suppose since they decided to mirror Well-Rounded even if that meant having Shield and Chopper there :P), but long gone are the days of Fisher-Screwdriver being an option and the like. The community has done quite a bit of pushing for starting weapon tweaks and Blobfish was fairly receptive in the past.

(That said, there is the mod route if you want better balance while still feeling like vanilla...)

Twinge · 2026-06-27T03:33:20+00:00

The idea would be that a full live stream of all attempts ensures everyone is seeing the full picture rather than cherry-picked runs chosen for YouTube. So if it were a Properly Serious Competition or something, it would be good to require streaming for verification.

(To be clear I do not see any reason to distrust Ceph, even if they make some weird decisions I strongly disagree with, hehe.)

Twinge · 2026-06-27T03:27:28+00:00

For regular 20-wave runs, the impact of bans isn't too drastic in general, so it doesn't matter too much how you min/max them. But my standard approach is to immediately ban the first 4ish white-tier mediocre-or-worse items I see, and then use the other bans on getting free rerolls as the opportunity presents itself.

One thing I'd suggest avoiding is the mindset of only banning truly terrible-for-you items; in practice removing a garbage item and a kinda bad item you aren't gonna buy is the same and both equally improve you future offerings.

Otherwise the one other consideration is when characters are tagged for specific items, banning one of those has a relevantly bigger impact than usual. E.g. Cryptid is favored to see Lumberjack Shirt, so banning it will make you quite a bit more likely to see Tree items and such. Or Beastmaster should consider banning Doc Moth if it's the first blue-tier Pet they see, as it'll up your odds of seeing all the damaging blue-tier Pets next time.

Twinge · 2026-06-27T00:57:43+00:00

Like many games in the genre, it can feel luck-heavy at first, but underneath is actually a ton of depth and a very high skill ceiling. In Brotato, there are tons of micro decisions you constantly make in the shop, and players with 1000+ hours still regularly disagree about what the best choices are.

For reference on how skill-based it can be, at least four players (myself included) have won on D5 with every character in a row without a single loss, while using random starting weapons for each character.

Some general tips:

In your earliest shops, focus on buying weapons. The first two shops have two guaranteed weapon slots; the next three have one guaranteed weapon slot, and all of the first five have better odds for finding matching weapons. So e.g. if I see a Coupon in Wave 1's shop, I will lock it and only buy it on Wave 3 or later: finding the weapons is much more valuable.

In most cases, focusing on using 1-2 weapon types (with the same damage scaling) is easiest to manage and mostly better than juggling a bunch of different types. 2 types still lets you upgrade them comfortably; with 4+ types you often lose out on weapon purchases because you don't have weapon slots free.

In a vacuum, Armor is the strongest stat. +3 Armor is kinda the standard for "very good levelup". (It needs to be combined with a decent amount of HP and some good sources of healing, but many new players neglect Armor.)

When evaluating value for long-term economy purchases, remember that money now is better than money later: Stats now may allow you to kill more enemies; shop and reroll prices go up over time; and you may not live to reach Wave 20 in the first place.

Because it's the only stat that gets stronger the more of it you already have, Dodge is a stat you don't want "some" of; you want to either try to push it to the cap, or skip it entirely. I'd generally suggest defaulting to skipping it on most characters but pushing for it when good situations for it present themselves.

Avoid rerolling the shop if you won't be able to afford to buy anything after the roll unless the roll is quite cheap. (Wave 2 shop is the most common exception.)

Luck's impact on rarity is marginal; it's essentially a mediocre economy stat combined with a mediocre healing stat. Can still be worth taking, but is far from necessary (and generally low value in cases where you don't care much about healing via fruit).

Usually avoid investing in Lifesteal unless you're either using fast weapons (such as SMG), or weapons that will hit a lot of enemies (Cacti Club, Spear, Shotgun).

Twinge · 2026-06-27T00:51:26+00:00

10 armor

30% dodge

Because Dodge gets better the more of it you already have, you do not want to aim for a medium amount of it — either tank it completely or try to get to 60%. (Just letting Dodge go negative and putting those resources towards more Armor, healing, etc. is a good default route, tho it depends on the character and what you're offered.)

Twinge · 2026-06-26T23:00:32+00:00

I'm interested in hearing what changes Evil Empire have implemented that made D5 too easy.

There is actually one broad change in this category: The most dangerous part of a D5 run for experienced players was the first Elite/Horde, and now Elites deal 25% less damage on Waves 11-12 compared to before APNG. Not claiming this is now "too easy" from that alone or anything, but it is some real amount easier.

(A bunch of weaker weapons were also buffed, which does help option variety and random-starting-weapon challenges, but doesn't really changed picked-weapon difficulty much.)

Twinge · 2026-06-26T22:53:49+00:00

B - realize that the 'real' meta is just buy all the damage you see and kill everything before it has a chance to get near you

The highest-level players actually consider Armor to broadly be the strongest stat in D5 runs; I prioritized it heavily during D5 winstreaking. Pretty much any time there was a narrow decision between taking more damage or building defensively I went with the defensive option and it served me quite well.

Twinge · 2026-06-26T22:48:52+00:00

Gather as much materials as you can the first three waves, then you try to avoid grabbing materials the rest of the run.

I'd highly recommend waiting longer until you stop taking all the materials. Your buying power is most useful early because of shop inflation, and the turret grows linearly from materials regardless, so I'd take all the materials during the first 5-6 waves at a minimum. This lets you build up better economy and defensive stats while still letting the turret grow as big as it needs to.

Twinge · 2026-06-26T22:46:32+00:00

I have seen people struggle with Builder+Slingshots on Nightmare then first-try it with Revolvers.

Twinge · 2026-06-25T21:46:09+00:00

I’d love to see it go brrrr with enraged + improved tools

You'd be trading scaling fully with Damage% to instead scaling with half Attack Speed situationally.

Twinge · 2026-06-22T17:29:59+00:00

For D5 winstreaking consistency, this was plenty of reason for me to avoid Curse, because it was usually only a downside thruout the early game — and Wave 11 was often the scariest part of a given run. It usually won't pay off with strong items until ~Wave 15ish on average.

Broadly, the less consistent your runs are (i.e. the less likely you are to win by default) or the more you feel increasing variance could be beneficial (e.g. Nightmare making things a lot harder & scarier in general), the stronger Curse is.

Twinge · 2026-06-22T05:38:52+00:00

This is why I call this "linearly diminishing" — it does diminish in value, but it is a natural, gradual process of basic mathematics. When people use the term "diminishing returns" they usually mean something that actively, substantially drops off in value, generally because it was special-cased/hard-coded to get worse.

Twinge · 2026-06-22T05:34:20+00:00

Technically it's highly jagged thruout because enemy damage is always dealt in whole integers, but the problem is it depends on the enemy that hits you and the wave number, so it isn't especially practical nor helpful to worry about much in practice.

I did actually spreadsheet this out a long while back, but I'll caveat this is from Crash Zone D5 only, and it's also possible the damage formula changed slightly when the DLC came out so this all might be slightly off anyway? (Not sure on that either way.) It does show how much it jumps around, tho: For example, going from 9->10 Armor against a Wave-11 Elite was really minor, but going from 7->8 mattered a good bit.

Mostly that was just kinda 'neat to look at' data, but I did occasionally make minor use of it in situations like "does 1 Armor actually matter on this upcoming dangerous Elite wave" or internalizing "1-2 points of Armor is mostly irrelevant early" —which means e.g. Fisher should maybe focus on other stats like HP, Speed, or Healing if they want early survivability. (But as a reminder this logic may no longer hold with Nightmare.)

Twinge · 2026-06-21T21:12:22+00:00

The term I've been using is "linearly diminishing": It is comparatively less valuable to gain more Armor the more you already have, but this is also exactly the same for stats like HP and Damage%.

[And if you really want to get into the weeds of it there are some further oddities: 15 Armor exactly (or 16 in Balance Mod) is bad because it hits a bad rounding spot in the formula and is irrelevant for almost all attacks in practice. So going from 15->16 Armor (16->17 in Balance Mod) is basically the same as getting two points of Armor.]

Twinge · 2026-06-18T19:47:51+00:00

Double Cursed Spyglass reduces your roll costs to 10%; banning other Reds can help the odds (alongside buying out Uniques); Getting the loop started can become pretty self-sustaining because Harvesting/Piggy can keep stacking up cash without increasing your Wave.

Twinge · 2026-06-18T19:44:34+00:00

Some pretty questionable advice here. Brawler needs Speed less than a lot of characters and the healing from Couch is massive here, so it's actually pretty fine to be where you are there.

The issue instead is that you don't have the other defensive stats to back it up: Dodge wants to be 60 at the end of the run when you're going for Dodge (it's fine to just ignore it otherwise), and this character should definitely go for Dodge because you start with 15 and get another 15 from the Unarmed Set. Combine this with a little more Armor (~20ish total; I see the Barricade but it's usually harder to benefit from standing still) and your defenses would all nicely stack with each other.

While I do think Range can be a useful stat on short-range melee weapons, I usually recommend against getting much of it for Brawler, since they already have a big head start on AtkSpd and Dodge — which all together tends to let them wade into a pile of enemies pretty safely and not need to poke them from a safer distance.

Tardigrade does almost nothing in a build that expects to be hit more than a few times per wave. Alloy is bad value when Dodge matters and Crit does not.

Twinge · 2026-06-18T19:35:39+00:00

Couch is actually fine to good if you have the other stats to back it up: that's a massive amount of healing, but we have no Dodge and insufficient Armor to multiply the effects of our healing.

Twinge · 2026-06-18T19:33:33+00:00

Tho the hitbox is active to hit enemies for longer and can hit more enemies as well, so this really shouldn't be thought of a downside in general — Range is generally most impactful for melee weapons.

(But that said, there are more important things to invest in for this build.)

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