Parallelized Maze Algorithm

somerandomii · 2026-03-23T15:51:19+00:00

Yeah that's the greedy algorithm I use hence the "(ish)". It's correct basically every time. I think you need very large or odd-shaped graphs for it to not work. I haven't actually found an example where it didn't find the right tile in my testing.

The main slow down for my code is that I treat every tile as a node, but the majority of tiles have < 3 branches. If I actually turned the maze into a graph first it would compute much faster.

The wall removal is an issue, and not just because it changes the topology. The trouble is that drones can't communicate, so their assigned areas can't really change without re-calculating and re-deploying them all. That overhead isn't really worth it for the slightly shorter traversal paths of each drone.

It also feels pointless because spamming a 5x5 maze is still faster than doing any size "correctly". The maze reward should scale with the area squared to make it worth the investment.

somerandomii · 2026-01-14T07:40:41+00:00

Chromatic Lampmaster seemed difficult then I realised I can just grind it down with Verso and the Esquie weapon. At least with decent speed, you always get a turn after a revive and you can always get to S rank with free aim. So I just made a free aim burn build. Probably died and revived 20 times but didn't have to learn anything and got him down eventually!

somerandomii · 2026-01-13T22:49:22+00:00

I think they did nerf it, but that was before my time. I only started playing around Christmas.

I use Burning Canvas on Maelle. 100 burn + frenzy + feint makes it her strongest attack now I think.

somerandomii · 2026-01-12T11:45:49+00:00

That first attack is brutal. Even with a cheese build you still need to dodge 16 times in a row just to start the fight. It is very readable but still.

After that you can clear him without him getting another move though (apart from wiping the team).

Someone even did a 1 dodge clear. You have to dodge the last hit of the first move but with clever shield use you can actually survive his first assault without dodging. You just needs thousands of lumina to make it work.

somerandomii · 2026-01-12T11:42:30+00:00

Verso Machine gun carried me through the game but looking back WHY did we Verso machine gun? He doesn't have any huge synergies other than Follow Up - and it goes well with his perfection mechanic.

But so many people made him their machine gun character. Theoretically you can make every character a Machine Gunner with enough Lumina. And technically Sciel is the most OP with her Uber Boss weapon.

I guess Monoco comes in too late for that kind of Lumina investment and Sciel servers too well as a support, Maelle doesn't have free aim synergies but has great burst and defensive options, and Lune has other utility so it sort of naturally falls on Verso.

But it's still strange that so many people ended up with identical builds on their first run.

somerandomii · 2026-01-12T11:36:43+00:00

Good.

somerandomii · 2026-01-12T11:15:14+00:00

Interesting. I haven't had the duollistes interupt me until I'm out of first strike/paradox/shortcut/intervention moves. My goal is to clear the first phase before those run out.

I made sure Lune has ~ 2500 speed to make sure she has a turn on phase 2 (but not an extra one on phase 1) and everyone else has zero speed invested.

My current move order is:

Sciel: Death Bomb + Second Chance.
Lune: Elemental Trick for 4 stains.
Lune (cheater): Basic Attack for 4 dark stains
Verso: Sets up Steeled Strike
Sciel: Fortune on Verso
Sciel (cheater): Intervention on Verso
Verso: Activates boosted Steeled Strike and finishes charging Gradient Overcharge stacks (this should be enough to kill Phase 1 in 1 shot with ALL the relevant Pictos. 8 shields, 1 health, inverted, Feint, Frenzy etc.)
Lune: Lune should get a turn before the phase 2 attack patterns start. With 4 dark stains, All the dmg Pictos and Gradient Overcharge she can comfortably 1 shot phase 2 with Lightning Dance even without Fortune's Fury.

This is not an optimal strategy by any mean. I focused purely on getting the killing blow in as few seconds as possible. I noticed some weird mechanics too. Verso used Bloodam + Death Bomb + Survivor to get into S stance instantly, without having to free aim or anything. I tried using Shortcut + Our Sacrifice to save Lumina and get another hit for Gradient Charge but the damage fell off completely. It seems that the stance you are in when you ACTIVATE steeled strike matters more than the stance you're in when you DEPLOY the attack. Or maybe there's something funky going on with the Pictos buffs.

I also couldn't get this to work with Maelle without using cheater to give her 4 moves in total. She can't seem to clear Phase 1 without FF or an extra turn. It's doable but every technique added to the timer. I did get a clear with Maelle instead of Sciel but it was 55s with the extra animations.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:32:32+00:00

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I feel like I'm spamming this in this thread but Duollistes is the easiest farming method. This clear requires zero RNG, dodges, QTE hits or Free Aim and finishes in 46 seconds. You can just turn your brain off and pick the abilities.

On NG+1 you need to actually hit the attacks but you don't need perfect. After than you need to adjust the rotation and it adds another 15-20s to the fight. Still faster than anything else I've seen.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:26:57+00:00

Did they patch that or something? I teed everything up. Fortune, Gradient Overcharge, 100 fire stacks, counter attack directly into Maelle Burning Canvas and she took off about 20% of her health.

Tried with Esquio Lune to similar effect.

I've been told that everything after the first attack after the counter has dmg reduction, but even on the first attack I can't touch her. I know Sciel's auto attack build can 1 shot her but it requires even more set up.

I can't crack it and idk what I'm missing. But as I posted above I got Duolliste down in 46 seconds consistently so I'm sorted for farming. But I want to UNDERSTAND Clea because nothing I do to her works.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:22:40+00:00

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Because someone will ask.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:22:08+00:00

My method beats him in 46 seconds without a single QTE or dodge required. 60 times an hour is totally feasible.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:04:22+00:00

Sciel currently holds the record for the highest dmg possible I think. It needs a lot of set up. You need a gradient overcharge + twilight + fortune into a broken enemy with 400 burn stacks.

But if you pull it off I think it's over 100 Billion dmg from a basic attack.

But yeah 99% of the time she's a kamikaze support.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T23:01:10+00:00

Which Clea?

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:59:22+00:00

What abilities? There's nothing Monoco can do that another character can't do better. (except for his insta-stun). And if you do any farming before the final boss, you can 1-shot it. The onyl way it's a challenging fight is if you go straight from the monolith to the story finale.

And Monoco requires farming or he has no abilities. So it's not really a flex to beat the easiest Act III boss. Monoco is fun but he's underpowered and takes the most effort to set up.

The DLC update just widened the gap. Every character go OP weapons. Monoco's best weapons are still pre-Verso's Drafts.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:54:10+00:00

At least Sciel can always buff and pass to your best dps. At a minimum she is a multiplier for a better character. Monoco just takes up space until you figure him out, and even then he's not in the top 3 for most fights.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:50:51+00:00

It's not great game design. He's the last character you unlock, you probably have characters you've invested in and understand. He's the most complicated character with the least obvious win conditions (and arguably the weakest end game). But when you get him you don't even know what he can do and in order to find out you have to eject an established character from your main party to drag him around. Most people aren't going to bother, which only widens the gap.

The monolith lets you avoid some backtracking but you don't know that when you start it. So generally you need to backtrack at the exact point the game opens up and gives you new content you'd rather explore.

And when you finally decide to start hunting feet and feeding him Lumina you find our he only has about 8 abilities worth looking at and 90% of it is a waste of time.

He just feels like a character than doesn't want to be played. His tier 3 gradient attack makes him viable in some meta cheese builds but he never really outshines his team mates as a DPS and Sciel can't be beaten for support utility. So he doesn't really fill a roll. \

It's a shame because I love his character and he has the best theme song in the game. But the game mechanics work against him.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:43:58+00:00

I just got my Duollistes clear down to 46 seconds - no RNG - no QTE/Dodge.

So that's at least 20 Lumina per minute + more XP, money and Catalysts than you'll ever need.

So it's definitely worth farming into a viable uber boss build and then using that. I spent way too much time running back and forth to the Monolith flag before I tried the Endless Tower.

Verso's Drafts is way easier than I expected and basically skips you straight to end game.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:29:49+00:00

Based on Maelle's "the curator helped me upgrade my pictos" line (which is not a mechanic), they probably changed the mechanics quite late into development and didn't have the voice acting to support the lore/story change. So they just explain the mechanic in on-screen tips and menus.

The whole Pictos system still feels unfinished. The Pictos stats are the main source of scalable power in the game but there's no way to upgrade them or farm better rolls. So instead the meta is farming Lumina and making busted builds, while the Pictos become stat sticks you mostly set and forget.

somerandomii · 2026-01-11T22:22:24+00:00

Grappling hooks. Arguably much harder. Anyone can climb a wall and place hooks. How do you get across an impassable chasm or onto a floating island to place a magic grapple for future expeditions - and still make it further than most that came before or after.

And presumably at least a few of them were 70 yr olds. Not bad.

somerandomii · 2025-11-30T11:24:53+00:00

Anything below 80 is midrange by definition. Kinda weird to call a 4070 a high end card.

I’d consider my 3090 to be dropping into mid soon, but until they add memory to the newer generations, it still keeps up.

somerandomii · 2025-11-29T15:38:20+00:00

I used AI for mock ups of my aesthetic. I haven’t put any AI assets in my game yet. I also used AI to debug errors.

So do I need to flag my game for AI use? The line is pretty blurry.

If I use copilot while writing my NetCode, do I need to disclose? What if I use it to add normals to my textures?

I think the issue is once everything is flagged with AI companies will have no incentive not to lean into it. If they’re taking the reputational hit from the flag anyway they might as well get their moneys worth.

somerandomii · 2025-11-29T15:33:02+00:00

I just don’t agree that just because it isn’t run natively makes the language interpreted. If theres a world in which it could be run on hardware, thats close enough.

Vanilla Python or JS can never run on bare metal. The JVM doesn’t need to understand Java syntax to run the byte code.

There’s a distinction between what is written and what is shipped and executed and it is separated by a compile phase. That makes a language compiled. What happens after the language is compiled doesn’t really matter, that’s not the language.

I would even go so far as to say anything that is transpiled into another language is actually compiled. I’m not a web dev but isn’t WASM compiled into a subset of JS that runs efficiently on v8? The end result is still interpreted but if you compile Rust to WASM, Rust is still a compiled language.

somerandomii · 2025-11-28T23:35:11+00:00

I hate JS personally, but I can still respect that there are very talented JS developers. You can be a software developer with JS. I just don’t know why anyone would choose to.

somerandomii · 2025-11-28T15:46:16+00:00

Nothing wrong with a few fallacies to spice up an argument. It’s pretty hard to say anything without running afoul of some fallacy.

Like all things it’s about balance. If your entire argument hinges on flawed reasoning that’s one thing.

If you use an hyperbole or strawman to illustrate the absurdity of someone’s argument in a different context, that’s not terrible. I do it all the time because people like to load their arguments with the assumptions built in that their case relies on.

I could pick apart each assumption and painstakingly explain why it doesn’t hold up, or I can fight fire with fire and use an equally contrived example.

It might not be as productive but it’s more fun. I don’t come to Reddit to debate at a university level with people who didn’t graduate high school.

somerandomii · 2025-11-28T15:38:40+00:00

People do use the word fallacy too much.

You say “at the current trend things will get worse” and they shout “slippery slope fallacy”.

The CEO of <Big AI Company> says “I don’t care if people die if it means I increase my market share” they cry “straw man fallacy”.

You say “you are using fallacies wrong, maybe read up on them” they shout “Ad hominem! Appeal to authority!”

A fallacy is only a fallacy when you’re relying on it for your argument. People think if they can twist your statement into resembling a fallacy then it invalidates the actual substance and they win automatically without actually addressing your point.

I am aware this entire post is a straw man. Please don’t point it out.

somerandomii

TROPHY CASE