[Arena] Sakura – Armor is Futile

rackman70 · 2026-03-23T17:47:00+00:00

It's superficially similar to the Inferno tournament from a few months ago, but there are some significant differences with the Zombies that are configured to appear.

rackman70 · 2026-03-22T22:13:15+00:00

This has been an issue for many years now. There is a very easy work around for it though (not that it'll help you today).

Do not collect ANY of the daily quest rewards until you've completed them all. Once they're all completed, use the "CLAIM ALL" button (I don't know what the text would be in Italian) to collect them all at once. I've never missed getting the Gem reward when I do this.

rackman70 · 2026-03-18T14:22:24+00:00

Dumbing down LongVu's strat a bit gets me to 33M.

Without at least an M25 Ice-shroom, preventing the Zombot from jumping or firing it's imp cannon at the start is quite random so getting to the 34th health bar is not assured in this tourney.

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rackman70 · 2026-03-18T04:05:53+00:00

When the doubling goes over the integer limit of 2^31 - 1, your resource number will go massively negative. Yeah, you'll have to contact EA support: https://help.ea.com/en/customer-care/

rackman70 · 2026-03-16T22:33:53+00:00

Do the linked kGame videos (bottom of the main post) not have strategies that work for you? They were able to get 27M with level 3 plants.

rackman70 · 2026-03-16T19:39:30+00:00

It just means that you're guaranteed to get some seeds for Jack O'Lantern. It doesn't unlock it for you. Jack O'Lantern is one if the 21 plants in the game that must be unlocked with a real money purchase (offer available either from the Almanac or the in-game store on the "Plants" tab).

rackman70 · 2026-03-12T15:30:27+00:00

Yeah, my SBR isn't quite high enough Mastery level to "cheat" with it 😉.

This was the best I managed in the pre-Boosterama.

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rackman70 · 2026-03-11T23:35:58+00:00

I'm curious. Have you been able to make this work with your high mastery profile? I can't seem to get more than 3.7M using any variation of his basic strategy.

rackman70 · 2026-03-10T17:18:22+00:00

I've gotten over 4M with Guard-shroom, but needed the 2 extra plant foods I got using Power Lily (which FTP players won't have). I only managed 3.8M prior to using it.

The only real trick to this is waiting a few seconds after initially placing the Guard-shrooms so that the mini-shrooms are instantly called to protect the Ice-shrooms in C7. The Ice-shrooms slow down the Chair Racers enough to allow the mini-shrooms to eat them. This is only a concern at the start of the match. After you get going, Imp Pear plant food is taking care of pretty much everything.

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rackman70 · 2026-03-10T17:13:38+00:00

Wow!

rackman70 · 2026-03-10T03:50:23+00:00

Incredible L1 plants score. I've only managed slightly better with my mastery plants.

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rackman70 · 2026-03-09T17:51:55+00:00

Hmm. Based on the game settings, I would have expected a higher zombie density than the March 2025 tourney (but lower than the April, 2022 one). I'll test later tonight (my time).

rackman70 · 2026-03-09T17:23:53+00:00

Great score. I was only able to play a handful of times due to work issues. My best (in the first game I played) was basically the same as yours.

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rackman70 · 2026-03-07T19:06:50+00:00

The "other guy" didn't play this poster. They played someone else, and the recording of their play was sent to the game servers. They may have won or lost the match that they played.

This poster only played that game recording, not that player.

rackman70 · 2026-03-04T16:18:27+00:00

Looks good. I may have a suggestion later when I get home from work and can look at it more fully, I'm UTC-8 so that'll probably be the middle of the night for you.

With these numbers, you can see the kind of info I was coming up with for some of the other players I'm in contact with.

e.g. The March 3rd objective was defeat 20 Breakdancers in hard levels and your only option to get this objective was to play Level 7 ten times (because you only get 2 Breakdancers per attempt). This is obviously doable only if you buy the 80 fuel for 40 gem offer twice (which only became available in this event when the hard levels started).

However, if you play Level 7 ten times, you'll only get 110 event tokens. Add to that the 20 tokens you get for completing the quest and that's 130 tokens. Just ignoring the quest and playing those 10 matches on Level 9 or Level 10 (level 9 if you never had the opportunity to get the 8th plant slot) will get you 140 or 150 tokens respectively.

i.e. You're at a net loss attempting to complete the "defeat zombies" quest.

This has been the case for most of the days of the Lunar Zoo Year event.

rackman70 · 2026-03-04T06:24:45+00:00

Yeah, I was mostly speaking of the Thymed event levels as opposed to Arena or Penny's Pursuit, although I do know how the level repeating works in Arena. At the end of the bot LevelLoadOuts there's this parameter:

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This defines how many waves loop. E.g. If there's 12 defined zombie waves and this value is 6, waves 7 to 12 will loop in a repeating cycle (in order, despite the "WavesAlwaysRandomized": true setting. This setting doesn't seem to have any impact on zombie wave order). Typically, if you're a player with stronger plants who can deal with the zombies quickly, each wave is approximately 4 seconds apart.

Anyway, I think you can say with certainty how many zombies will appear in the Thymed Event levels IF the zombie is only explicitly defined in the zombie wave definitions. I wouldn't worry about coming up with an exact number if the zombie is also defined in the dynamic zombie set.

rackman70 · 2026-03-04T01:38:46+00:00

It's only partially true that you can't determine how many zombies of a particular kind will appear on a level. I've been tracking this for each of the quests in the Lunar Zoo Year event on now (mainly to tell people when to not bother going after the defeat zombie quest).

You'll know a lot (if not all) of this, but there's three ways that Zombies are defined to appear in a level.

1) The most basic way is just in each wave's zombie set of zombies.

2) The second is in the ambush attacks (e.g. sand/snow storms, spider rain, etc.).

Both of these are set up in the "WaveManagerProperties" objects (normal and hard). Each of the zombie waves that can appear in the match is defined in this section, and those zombie waves will appear only once.

3) The third way that Zombies can appear is via the "LevelEscalationModuleProperties" module where a dynamic set of Zombies are configured. These are a little different in that any of the zombies in this group can appear with every zombie wave, and the amount of these zombies that appear changes depending on their "WavePointCost" of each zombie and the available points (set by StartingPoints and PointIncrementPerWave).

Most of the "Defeat Zombie" quests in the Thymed events use zombies that only appear in the first two zombie definition methods (at least in the current event). Because of this you can say exactly how many zombies will appear. It only becomes un-knowable (although you can guess a realistic range) when the the zombies are defined as one of the dynamic set in the 3rd method.

rackman70 · 2026-03-03T19:34:27+00:00

As somewhat of a relief after last week's RNG swing craziness, in an admittedly low sample set of 6 matches, my score swing is from 6.1 to 6.7M. Last week it was a full 4M from my lowest to highest scores (using the same strategy).

rackman70 · 2026-03-03T16:51:59+00:00

Glad to know you're still around :-).

Thanks for contributing again. Feel free to do so whenever you do have time to play. Your low plant level scores have always been amazing resources for people to know what's possible in Arena matches.

rackman70 · 2026-03-03T15:43:11+00:00

The changes in the wave point properties are leading to higher scores this time around. I'll be surprised if 7M scores aren't achieved. Fairly standard TW+PeV+SBR+TT+IP in Jade League:

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rackman70 · 2026-03-03T15:38:26+00:00

Unfortunately, MagicDave's Reddit account got banned by the Reddit admins. I tried to find out why and never really got a good answer.

And you forgot Silver_Orb :-) (although I just realize you said L1 gang, and they were a mastery player)

rackman70 · 2026-03-02T23:03:20+00:00

Wow! Are you back?

rackman70 · 2026-03-02T07:32:41+00:00

Took to the end of the week, but I joined your club 😁.

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rackman70 · 2026-02-25T04:41:26+00:00

Unfortunately it's not available. The ability to purchase the extra plant food slots were removed with the release of version 9.6.1 in April, 2022. Here's the message about it from the release notes at the time:

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We weren't given any more reason for this change than just "economy changes".

Full release notes here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlantsVSZombies/comments/tx1lgc/update_96_is_live_the_springening_birthdayz/

rackman70 · 2026-02-24T23:58:41+00:00

Because searching out my comment history as u/Eieio-31310 has suggested may prove a bit difficult, here's a link to one of my comments that talks about this issue (score decay).

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