ArosRising's Character Guide

ArosRising’s Brotato Character Guide.

Use this link for the Guide with Pictures. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EfW2UVO55TejfiSRUObuuZ5FmA2lmgD2lQrJBnQW6hY/edit?usp=sharing

I’m adding a bit of gameplay information and strategy at the end of the Guide: Gameplay guide Upgrade Tierlist

This is a guide aimed for new and intermediate players to help them understand how each character should be built and played. The guide is aimed for completing Danger 5 with the character. I’m still updating the guide as I receive more feedback. If you find Errors, please Message me on the Brotato discord.

Note that this guide is for the Steam of the Game. The mobile version of the game is quite different, especially the free version of the game. Similarly, the game you find ported to other platforms such as Switch or Xbox might not have the same mechanical interactions as the steam PC version.

So be mindful if you’re playing on another version of the game. Certain mechanical details might be different. That said, the overall strategies should still be valid.

Click the links for easy access. Well Rounded Brawler Crazy Ranger Mage Chunky Old Lucky Mutant Generalist Loud Multitasker Wildling Pacifist Gladiator Saver Sick Farmer Ghost Speedy Entrepreneur Engineer Explorer Doctor Hunter Artificer Arms Dealer Streamer Cyborg Glutton Jack Lich Apprentice Cryptid Fisherman Golem King Renegade One Armed Bull Soldier Masochist Knight Demon Baby Vagabond Technomage Vampire Beastmaster Wounded Sailor Curious Builder Captain Creature Chef Druid Dwarf Gangster Diver Hiker Buccaneer Ogre Romantic

My Other Guides & Useful Links My Guide to Brotato Mechanics, Weapons, Stats, and more: ArosRising's Brotato Gameplay Guide My Brotato Multitool. Here you can calculate enemy hp, Weapon DPS, item cost efficiency: ArosRising's Brotato MultiTool 1.4 My Guide to Waves. It details what spawns on each wave, and the detailed stats of each enemy. Information on Elites, Bosses, and Horde Waves: ArosRising Brotato Wave and Enemy Guide Tired of Regular Brotato? Try a Challenge Run: Brotato Challenges For my Guide to Endless Mode: ArosRising's guide to Endless Mode The Official Brotato Discord - I’m a moderator here, and you can always contact me here. I check every day. My Reddit Account - I check messages every now and then. The Brotato Wiki - A great resource for finding information about an item, weapon, or Mechanic. I’ve written a good amount of the pages, and can attest to the accuracy of the wiki. You can make your own Tierlists here

Guides by Other People SquashMyMouse’s Guide to Brotato Another great In-depth Guide to Brotato on the Steam Forum. Very beginner friendly. TacticallyFriedRice’s Brotato Guide A Brotato guide by a very talented streamer and Brotato Player. The Guide is still being worked on. Detritus' Guide to the Mobile Version of Brotato A guide that was made for the premium mobile version of the game. (It uses the old formatting of my character guide, if you wonder why it looks familiar)

Tierlist I made a Character Tier List based on how easy a Character typically is for a newer player to get their first D5 win with. A lot of the characters in the B and C tier become really powerful once you know how they work, but can sometimes be tricky. The D tier are the common Villains for newer players. So don’t feel bad if you struggle with them. The S and A tier are just generally awesome characters that shouldn’t be too difficult.

A lot of Characters become much harder if you’re using the wrong weapons or buying the wrong Stats/Items. So use the Guide to get the general Idea.

You can make your own tier list here: https://tiermaker.com/search/?q=arosrising Introduction

This guide is a guide to the specific characters in Brotato. The guide aims to explain how characters work, and how their mechanics interact with the game. The guide also gives you a guideline for which weapons to go for, what items to look for, and which stats to invest in.

There are many ways to play Brotato, and even the most experienced players have wildly different opinions on how to best play a character. The builds I give in this guide are solid and can beat Danger 5 with all characters, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other builds out there. Keep your mind open. Learn from multiple people, and see what works with your personal playstyle.

I hope you enjoy the guide. Please leave me feedback on corrections, grammar, suggestions and more. I wish to make this guide into the best version it can be. You can reach out on Reddit or on the official discord.

It can be very helpful to have the brotato wiki at hand for the items I mention: https://brotato.wiki.spellsandguns.com/Items

Explanation of terms Difficulty: How easy the Character is to understand and learn to play. Tier: A mix of how strong and enjoyable the character is. If a character is unfun, inconsistent, or has many pitfalls, it subtracts from the tier. Generic Build stats For each character I will talk about how they have different goals for their stats. If I don’t mention something, you can largely assume it just follows the generic demands for whatever weapon and build you’re doing.

Note that the “correct” amount of stats often depends on which items and upgrades you are offered. Some games you’re just showered with good attack speed options left and right, while in others you have to reroll hard to find anything.

You are not going to fulfill every single stat goal, but rather it is a general idea for what numbers you should aim for. And the stat goals are very loose. Don’t take them as strict rules.

Once you have the amount listed, the stat becomes a lower priority. While on the other hand, if you’re severely below the range in a certain stat, it is time to get it up for the boss and elite fights.

The Stats For Endgame: Max HP: 60-80 Ranged / 70-100 Melee HP Regen: 0 / 20-40 (You can go below 0 and rely on life stealing) Life Steal: 0 / 15-30% (You can go below 0 and rely on HP Regen) %Damage: 50-100% (Engineering builds can ignore dmg) Melee Dmg: 0 / 30-60 Ranged Dmg: 0 / 15-30 Elemental Dmg: 0 / 20-50 Attack Speed: 60-120% Crit Chance: 0% / 10-30% / 100% (if your weapon has bonuses with crit, like knife go 100%, if your weapon has 1.5 multiplier like SMG or Fist, go 0%. Engineering: 0 / 30+ Range: Whatever (I like having at least 250-300 total range on ranged weapons, and I want more. on melee I can go lower, but it's nice to reach the 175-200 range.) Armor: 10-25 (Armor is great in all builds) Dodge: 0 / 20-30% / 60% (Dodge gets better the more you have, sometimes you just dump it) Speed: 10-30% (Important to keep you alive, some builds go way higher than 30%) Luck: 20-60 (Luck gives more chests, more consumables, better upgrades and items. It is nice to invest in early as an economy stat) Harvesting: 50+ (Gives both XP and Money, very powerful to get early) Newer players tend to undervalue Economy stats (Luck and Harvesting), and they tend to forget their defenses. Remember to get a solid method of healing. For beginners this means investing into HP Regen or Life Steal (Or both even).

I don’t get +30 Luck and +50 Harvesting in every game. But getting above that value is good. Unlike other stats, Economy stats should be gotten early, so if you didn’t get a lot of Luck/Harvesting before the later waves, then just forget about it.

Unlocks Some of the Items and Weapons that I mention in this document need to be unlocked before you can use them. You unlock Items and Weapons by winning a game on any difficulty with the different characters. Each character has their own unlock. You can see a list of the Unlocks on the Wiki.

If you plan to play a specific playstyle often, then you should look through the list and unlock the items that are great for that build. For example if you want to play engineering, you should unlock the good engineering items: (Explosive Shell, Robot Arm, Compass, Improved Tools)

Some Powerful unlocks that come to mind: Anvil - Win with Arms Dealer Hunting Trophy - Win with Crazy Community Support - Win with Streamer Medikit - Win with Doctor Tentacle - Win with Lich Nuclear Launcher - Win with Soldier Fairy - Win with Renegade These are just a few. There are many other powerful unlocks.

Item Tags Many Characters are tagged for certain types of items. That means that you have an increased chance to find those items in the shops and in crates.

You can find more info on Item Tags on the Brotato Wiki, and also find out which items belong to each tag.

These are somewhat minor, but they make a difference over the duration of a run.

Odds For example, there’s 4 slots in the shop, each has a 65% chance to be an item, and each item has 5% to be chosen from the tagged pool.

This means you’re going to see an average of 0.13 tagged items per reroll. Or if you reroll about 2-3 times per shop, you’ll see 1 tagged item every 2-3 shops.

Manipulation If you’re spicy and ready for an advanced tactic, you can attempt to manipulate the shop - for example the Exploration tag includes Lumberjack Shirt, Tree, and Bag. So the tag pool is rolled, one of these will show up.

Both bag and tree are great items. But shirt isn’t great in many cases. However, because it is unique, buying or banning it also removes it from the item pool, resulting in more of the good items.

General Game Tips See my other Guide: ArosRising's Brotato Gameplay Guide) (Not updated currently)

I will use this space to cover some general takes and tips on the Stats and Items.

Stats Here’s a General take on the stats. On characters I will mostly talk about stats as they diverge from the average case.

Curse: I’ve covered Curse in detail at Sailor. But Generally Curse is a greed stat. It buffs a % of enemies, giving them more HP, DMG and Speed. But in return they drop 33% more materials, and you can find cursed items and Weapons in the shop.

See details on the Wiki

Curse is a bit like gambling. If you struggle to beat D5 on a character, it is great, since it can high roll and give you the most insane runs. But if you’re trying to win consistently, it isn’t great, because you might not get any good cursed items or weapons. And the Cursed enemies can kill you if a strong enemy gets cursed. However, it doesn’t affect Elites and Bosses (Until Endless), so Cursed Runs have an advantage against elites and bosses, if that tends to be your problem.

Another way to consider if curse is good for you, is to look at the character. Some characters like Pacifist or Bull can’t really benefit from cursed weapons, making it much worse. Some weapons are stronger than others when cursed.

Curse increases Base Damage, Damage scaling, Crit multiplier, gives +1 to piercing and Bounce, and increases any special ability. So weapons that crit, weapons with 1 pierce/bounce, and Weapons with special abilities get massively stronger. Some examples are: Javelin, Grenade Launcher, Icicle.

So if you have good weapons for being cursed, If you get items like Black Flag or Fish Hooks, then you have a good reason to go for Curse.

Characters Let's get into it! Well Rounded

Difficulty: Very Easy Tier: B Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Stick Fist Chopper Quarterstaff Cacti Club Hatchet Spiky Shield Ghost Flint Wrench Lute Pistol SMG Shotgun Slingshot Taser Wand Icicle Railgun

SMG is one of the most basic and easy builds. Just get 6 SMGs, get as much ranged damage as possible, and some %dmg and a bit of attack speed. Works well with life steal. Slingshot - Great option. Scales equally well with all offensive stats, and gives that +15 Max HP early to help you survive. Stick - a cheap melee weapon that has an insane start, and gives +15 Max HP from the weapon class bonus. Might want to skip crit due to the 1.5 Modifier. Icicle - A powerful Crit elemental weapon. Icicle is really strong later on with its 3x crit multiplier, and a powerful tier 4 upgrade. Look for synergy items like Ice cube, Frozen heart, and Snowball.

Other good options:

Shotgun - Another good ranged option like the SMG. A bit more slow and bulky, but it melts crowds of enemies. You want a ton of Ranged damage with it. Fist - good all around weapon. If going fist, you might not want Crit due to the 1.5 Modifier. And you will want to build dodge due to the +15% from the set bonus. Taser is a pretty decent Elemental damage option. It gives a ton of early harvesting. Make sure you keep up in DPS early. Wrench - The Engineering Option. Well Rounded’s stats are decent for an engineering build.

Well Rounded can make everything work. Strategy:

There isn’t much to say about the Well Rounded. It can do well with any build or weapon, as the bonuses are very general. The Harvesting boosts your eco, and the HP and Speed sets your defenses up for the early game. This gives you the freedom to fully commit to any build you want.

See the general strategy guide for more advice on how to generally play the game.

And I’ve written more details at Brawler.

Brawler

Difficulty: Easy Tier: A Starting Weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Hand Claw

There’s two builds for Brawler.

Full fists, add Flaming Brass knuckles and Power Fists as you find them. Claws: You go 6 claws, stack attack speed and crit. This is a decent build, but it doesn’t have great synergy with brawler, since you waste your starting fist, which you should sell as fast as possible. Otherwise more fists and less claws will show up in the shop. Secondly, claw doesn’t get bonus damage from the +50% attack speed.

I recommend Full fists.

Strategy The Brawler is one of the stronger melee characters in my experience. The cheap fists, early attack speed and dodge sends you out of the gate with a lot of power. The fists scale well into the late game, and the easy access to 60% dodge makes the brawler very tanky later.

Start the first two shops by locking good items and just spend the two first shops on buying fists.

As the Brawler, the build is quite simple. You’re going fists. Later you add Burning Brass Knuckles and Power Fists to the mix.

Flaming Brass Knuckles: Has a bigger hit box than fist and it provides a burn effect which deals decent damage. Powerfist: Each hit has a chance to explode. Helps you clear out hordes of enemies.

The brawler starts with 50% attack speed, and if you just get your fists leveled up, then you’re already mostly set for your DPS. The important thing for Brawler is to not forget your defenses. This is a tank build. Stats Since this is one of the first characters, I'll go a bit extra into details.

Defense

Dodge: You start with 15% dodge and gain another 15% from the unarmed weapons set bonus. You should look to max out your dodge fast, as it will make you very tanky. Get to 60%. Armor: Armor is a key stat to survive in brotato. I want to have about 5-10 in the mid game and end the game at 15-25 armor. 15 armor means you take 1/2 damage. 30 armor means you take 1/3. There’s a few good armor items like Metal plate or Leather armor. But level up upgrades is one of the best places to find Armor. Max HP: You need to get a bit of max HP early to not die in 2-4 hits. So pick up some items like cake or defective steroids. Medal, or Little Muscley dude. You want to end up with at least 70-100 hp. Speed: Speed helps you get around the map to kill trees and loot hoarders. It is also important to outrun fast enemies and evade projectiles and elite/boss moves. How much speed you want can depend on the build and playstyle. Some builds are fine with 20% speed, while others like to have 40%. For Brawler I like getting to 40% in the late game. Getting 10% speed before the midgame can help you avoid some of the charging enemies and first elite. Healing: There’s 3 main ways of healing, HP Regen, Life Steal, and Consumables . HP regen is slow and steady. Life steal is powerful if you have ranged weapons that hit many times like SMG or Shotgun. Consumable healing is just always great. It is really powerful. Generally every build wants consumable healing, and then you pick either HP regen or Life steal. Sometimes all three. Items to buy: For the brawler you want to go Consumable healing and HP Regen. Look for consumable healing: Lemonade, Weird Food, Jerky, garden. And for HP regen: Plant, Alien Magic, Baby Squid, Fairy, Scarf, Lure,

Offense Brawler doesn’t have to work hard for their offensive stats. The trick is to pick up the cost efficient options that come your way. Always pick the low hanging fruit.

Melee Damage: Get some melee damage early to help boost your fists. Fists scale well into the late game, so you don’t need too much Melee damage later. But there’s a ton of great melee damage items, which you’re likely to pick up. This is not where you spend your upgrades for the most part. Attack Speed: You get the first 50% attack speed for free. So you don’t need to strive for it like you do on other characters, but I still want more than 50%. Buy every coffee you see, and a few upgrades. Range: I like my melee weapons to have around 170-220 range. It makes you quite safe. So I love finding some extra range. However fists are one of the few weapons which function quite well at low range. Getting range efficiently can be hard. But Banner, Spyglass, and Wings are decent ways to get it. The problem is that you also want to buy items that give negative range because they’re great: Beanie, Cyclops Worm, Head Injury, Little Muscley Dude, Scar, and Retromation’s Hoodie. If you’re offered three tier 1 upgrades, and then one tier 3 range upgrade, that’s one of the best ways to get some range. Crit: The fists all have 1.5 crit damage multipliers. So I often dump the crit stat, so that I can buy the good negative crit items. If you’re going for a Claw build, then it is a different story. Economy Getting some good economy items early is a critical part of most great runs.

Luck: Luck increases the chances of items and upgrades being higher tiers in the shop and loot crates. It also increases the chance of consumables and loot crates to drop. It is both an economy stat and a healing stat. I don’t prioritise luck highly. I take the low hanging fruit that comes my way. A random higher tier upgrade, for example a +10 luck while the other options are tier 1. Or items from crates. Harvesting: One of the most powerful stats. At the end of each wave harvesting gives both money and XP. Fertilizer and Peaceful bee are both powerful options even with the melee damage down side. Bowler hat, Tractor, and wheat are also quite decent options. I love picking the +5 Harvesting upgrades for my early levels. XP Gain: also a decent stat. The items are great. Look for Scar, Black Belt, and Bean Teacher. Items Economic Items. These are just generally good value items if you get them early game: Bag Coupon, Tree, Dangerous Bunny, Recycling Machine, Loot Worm. Melee damage: Black Belt, Defective Steroids, Goat Skull, Little Muscley Dude, Mastery. Those are how you get most of your melee damage. Dump Crit items: If you’re dumping crit, look for Goat Skull, Medal, Bowler’s Hat, Rip and Tear, and Octopus. Dump Life Steal Items: If you’re dumping Lifesteal Look for: Plant, Bean Teacher, Clover.

Specific Items Adrenaline is powerful for Brawler. Look for it. Scarf - Lovely stats for you, so if you can handle one hard round, this is neat. Ghost Outfit: You’re in a strong Seat for 70% dodge, so this is an awesome item. Shackles: +8 Hp Regen and +80 Range is really great for you. If you’ve gotten the speed you need, this is a great item that can help you through the mid-late game. Cute Monkey: Great way to get some additional healing.

Crazy

Difficulty: Easy Tier: A

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Thief Dagger Scissors Lightning Shiv Sharp Tooth Shuriken Claw Icicle

All of the weapons are pretty decent but my favorites are: Lightning Shiv - Awesome weapon, get both melee and Elemental damage. It clears the map and feels like a ranged build. Shuriken - Strong weapon once you get going. The +25% attack speed helps you early, and Crazy finds more crit items. Claw - Starts out strong with the +25% attack speed. Stack a ton of Attack speed and crit, and it will destroy most enemies. Icicle - Allows for a ranged elemental build. Can melt elites and bosses later on. Thief Dagger - Earns you extra money for a snowball run.

The other Options: I’m not the biggest fan of these. Knife - Kinda like Claw. Higher damage per hit, but attacks slower. I prefer Claw. A fine Build tho. Sharp Tooth: Doesn’t have any synergy with crit. Just isn’t really a weapon for crazy. Scissors. It doesn’t deal enough damage, and the healing doesn’t make up for that. You can add one to the build for life steal if you want, but I don’t recommend it, as you will see more scissors in the shop if you pick one up, and less of the more important weapons. But it isn’t a terrible choice if you’re really lacking healing midgame. Strategy As Crazy, your melee weapons are basically ranged, since you gain 100 range. Normally changes to the range stat are halved for melee weapons, but the starting +100 isn’t for crazy. So it is like starting with +200 range when using melee weapons. Crazy can start with different precision weapons that are great with Critical builds and Crazy is tagged for crit items, so more will show up.

Sell your Knife: If I’m going Lightning Shiv, Shuriken, or Icicle, I’m selling my starting Knife as soon as I get into the first shop. Having a knife means the shop will try to sell you more knives instead of the other weapon that you actually want. You can mix with Thief Dagger, but honestly, I just sell that knife. Elemental Build: If you’re going for an elemental build, with shiv or Icicle, crazy is already at -30% dodge, so you can pick up Toxic sludge and Alloy for some efficient stats. Also look for the Frozen heart, which is powerful for that build. Stats Get to 100% Crit: All the precise weapons except Lightning shiv have additional benefits from crit. (higher multiplier, money, more hits). You want to get to 100% crit. So for example the Red/Tier 4 shuriken have a base crit chance of 45%. So you need 55% Crit chance to max that build out. And you get 15% from the precise bonus. So you actually only need to get 40% Crit from Shop and upgrades. Gaining Crit: Crit is easiest to get through Items. It can be fine to take a random higher tier crit upgrade. But generally you’re getting more value by taking upgrades like attack speed or Armor. Crit has plenty of powerful crit items that are covered below. Don’t go Dodge: You start with -30% Dodge. It is not worth it to go for dodge. Just leave it in the negatives and pick up -dodge items like, Toxic sludge (Lightning shiv), Alloy, Little Frog, Weird Food. Armor: Since you’re not going dodge, remember to pack a healthy amount of Armor. Melee Damage/ Elemental Damage - Knife, Shuriken, scissors and Thief dagger all want a ton of melee damage. For Claw, Attack speed is better. And lightning Shiv needs both melee and elemental damage. Knife and scissors can really benefit from getting some melee damage early in the game to get your damage started.

Items Negative Range items: Since you have effectively +200 range with melee weapons, you can dump it and still be fine. Cyclops Worm, Head injury, Beanie, Little Muscley Dude, Scar, Gnome are items to look for. Good Crit Items for Crazy: Sun glasses and insanity are the bread and butter for building crit. Alloy is just great for you since you’re not building dodge. Poisonous tonic is also often a good pickup. Situational Crit: Claw tree is good on the melee crit builds. Elemental bracelet is ok on lightning shiv, but actually good on Icicle. Bad Crit items: Blindfold isn’t worth it since you don’t get dodge.

Synergy Items One of the good things about a crit build, is that you have several items that are insane if you have a ton of crit. You want all of these. Hunting Trophies: One of the best items in the game when you have a crit build. This is the unlock for Crazy, and it can earn you tons of money. Tentacles: Gives a chance to heal when killing enemies with a crit. Unlocked by winning on the lich. Lucky Coin: A legendary that gives you 2 luck for each 1% crit you have. A really powerful way to gain 100+ luck for cheap. Giant Belt: This belt makes critical hits deal bonus damage depending on the Current HP of the Enemy. This is super powerful on a 100% crit build. Ranger

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B

Starting Weapons Here are the possible starting weapons for the character. (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Pistol SMG Revolver Double Barrel Shotgun Laser Gun Shredder Crossbow Slingshot Railgun

My Picks: SMG is the most common choice. Look for a sharp bullet. Stack a ton of Ranged Damage. Get some life steal. Shotgun - Also great - insane with ranged damage, and it comes with all the piercing you need. Needs more attack speed. Revolver is also a great choice. Revolver relies less on Ranged damage than SMG and Shotgun, but you still want quite a bit. Revolver is solid early, scales well with Crit, Attack Speed, unlike SMG. Also wants a Sharp Bullet or other Piercing.

Slingshot - Slingshot doesn’t have the same DPS as the other builds, but it gives you +15 Max HP from the Weapon class bonus, and the bouncing projectiles protects you by taking out enemies that would shoot or buff from a distance. Crossbow: The Ranger is also one of the better options for a Crossbow build. You have +50 Range is tagged for +Range Items. When using Crossbows, you do not wanted ranged damage. Crossbow scales better with Range.

Other Options

Shredder also works. Can also be mixed into the other guns if you want something to handle crowds.

Strategy

The Ranged is a pretty single ranged character. You have +50% Ranged damage which is insanely strong, and you only see ranged weapons, which improves your shop slightly. (Or a lot if using slingshot).

But You also have -25% Max HP, which makes ranger one of the harder characters for some players.

Sell your Starting Pistol: Consider selling your starting Pistol, as it causes the shop to show you more pistols instead of what other weapons you might be going for. Look for Weapons with good scaling: Since ranged damage is buffed for you, look for weapons that scale well with ranged damage: SMG, Shotgun, Minigun, Obliterator, Shredder. Guns, unlike many other weapon classes, can mix well. Having some Shredders/Shotguns for Horde Clear, and SMGs for single target damage can work well. Try to combine guns that work with your stats. (SMG’s are bad with Crit, Pistol doesn’t scale that well with ranged damage) However, you don’t have to, and 6 of the same gun might even be the strongest option depending on what the shop offers you. Glass Cannon: Ranger is a common character to go glass cannon on. That said, don’t let the -25% Max HP trick you. You still need Max HP, even if you go glass cannon. Unless you have some tardigrades, you should at least be able to handle a hit from a boss. If you’re a newer player, I wouldn’t try to go glass cannon. Healing: Ranger tends to not take that much damage, and instead relies on dealing damage. So my favorite healing is consumable healing here, since it heals you in big bursts. HP Regen can be fine, and same with Lifesteal if you’re using SMGs. Flies, Armored Enemies: On the Abyss Depths map (The DLC Water Map), there’s several enemies with Armor, which reduces the damage taken by a flat amount. On both maps you find Flies, which spawn projectiles when hit by ranged weapons. These punish SMG/Shotgun builds, since you fire many low damage bullets. If these become a problem, it could be because you’ve not gotten ranged damage early enough, or not enough of it. If you really struggle with these you could try a Revolver build.

Stats

Guns - Dump Range: If you’re going for a gun based build, you’ll have more than enough range and you might dump it in order to buy Blindfold, Cyclops Worm, Retromation’s Hoodie, Scar. Ranged Damage. You get +50%. Ranged damage is already one of the strongest stats. On Ranger it is insanely strong. The easiest way to get Ranged is through upgrades. So look out for them. Items Look for ranged damage Lens, feather, and Small magazine are the bread and butter. Alloy, Honey, reinforced steel, and Wheat are also fine/good. Handcuffs - You want to find this later in the game when you can lock your Max HP. Baby with a Beard: This item is insanely powerful on ranger since you’ll stack a ton of ranged damage. Tardigrade: Tardigrade can be a great option if you’re going for Glass Cannon. Triangle of Power is also a fine option if you plan to not take a lot of damage. Crystal: good attack speed option if you plan on not getting hit. Torture: Torture gives a ton of Max HP and gives you more than enough Healing for the run. Can be a great pickup if you find it before you’ve invested in defenses.

Mage

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Wand Torch Lightning Shiv Taser Icicle Plank SMG Shotgun SMG and Shotguns are kinda joke weapons. You can’t get any ranged damage, so they’re just good for spreading flames.

The best choices are: Icicle - The most straightforward elemental weapon. It deals good damage and scales well with crit. Just get them to tier 4 and they will melt things. Lightning Shiv can deal amazing damage with the bouncing lightning, and the bouncing projectiles now spread burn since the new patch 1.0.1.3. However, mage can’t increase its melee damage attack, so you’re not super well protected from enemies walking into you. Taser gives a powerful slow that can nearly stop elites and bosses. It also comes with the support tag which gives you early harvesting. Tasers can struggle to clear the map, so you need to pick up some early elemental damage, attack speed and %DMG. Look for a sharp bullet, or get better at spreading flames.

Higher Tier Weapons There are several powerful elemental weapons that you can find later into the run: Flamethrower - Tier 2- One of the iconic elemental weapons. Fires piercing flames at a high rate that sets enemies on fire, but deals little direct damage. Works super well with life steal, ugly tooth, and some knockback. Fireball - Tier 2 - Weak explosion that sets all targets on fire. Nice alternative to flamethrower. Thundersword - Tier 3 - A mix between lightning shiv and the Sword. Nice pickup for taser or shiv builds. Plasma Sledge - Tier 3 - Explosive heavy hit hammer. Better on melee builds, but can still be a fun addition to your build, if you want. Particle Accelerator - Tier 3 - Slow, big damage laser beam that scales with engineering and elemental? Slows and sets enemies on fire? It is expensive, but can be a nice addition to your build. Nuclear Launcher - Tier 3 - One of the best weapons in the game. Does scale with elemental damage. I would just buy it in most builds. Strategy:

The Mage is a very strong elemental character. You get a +25% multiplier to your elemental damage, and you get to start with the two powerful burn items: Scared Sausage and Snake. This sets you up for a burn focused elemental build.

Engineering: A tech with mage, is that you can pick up Scared Sausages and Some Turrets. Turrets can spread fire with sausage, which then hits multiple enemies with Snakes. If you have several turrets and a Tyler, you can really have flames spreading all over the map. Pocket Factory is also super powerful for this reason. Landmines also spread flames. But remember that your Engineering stat is -50% so don’t bother increasing it.

Stats Elemental damage: As the Mage, you need to stack elemental damage. Elemental damage is best found through items, but upgrades are also fine. Especially if you’re offered an elemental damage upgrade of a higher tier than the other upgrades. Healing: Burn doesn’t trigger life steal, but it is super powerful with the flamethrower, as its fast attack speed and pierce will trigger life steal very often. Otherwise I would go for HP regen in general. In both cases I want consumable Healing. Dodge: Consider if you’re going dodge. Peaceful bee is quite good if you do, Toxic sludge and Alloy are great if you don’t. Items Melee Damage/Ranged Damage Downsides: Fertilizer, Peaceful bee, Shmoop and Lucky charm, have downsides that don’t matter to you. So they become potentially powerful items. Snowball: Snowball gives +1 Elemental damage when you get an item with elemental damage, from the shop or crate Elemental DMG Items: Toxic Sludge, Fuel Tank, Handcuffs, Gnome, Wolf Helmet are the items I'm looking for to get elemental damage. Boiling water is fine and perhaps the cleanest way to get elemental dmg.

Synergy Items Ugly Tooth is really powerful with Burn, as it slows down enemies while they burn to death. The Flamethrower is great at stacking the slow along with the burn. Pierce/Bounce: When using Taser or Wand, look for Bandana and Ricochet. Getting Piercing or Bouncing is great. And each hit can spread burn. Sharp Bullet is also very powerful, since the actual damage of the hit doesn’t matter as much, since you spread flames. This is a S-Tier item for taser and wand. It is also quite good on Lightning shiv, but I would avoid it on Icicle. Scared Sausage: If you are using weapons that don’t automatically spread fire on hit, then you should pick up more scared sausage. (Taser, Lightning shiv). Otherwise it isn’t worth buying them. Structures also spread fire with this item. Btw sausages add a secret +1 to all your burn damage for each sausage you have. Snakes are great. When you have a snake, everytime you light an enemy on fire, it can spread the fire to another enemy. There is diminishing usefulness to snakes. Once you have 2, you’re likely to already be lighting enough enemies on fire. Eye Surgery makes your burn tick every 0.8/0.6 Seconds. Giving you +25%/66% Burn DPS. The +1 Elemental damage also helps. If you have Snowball, it becomes an easy buy. Other Strange Book: Strange book gives 50% of the regular amount for mage, but you have a ton of elemental damage. So if you have some structures, and or Particle Accelerators, you can pick up the book. Ice Cube - Just +10% damage for you. Nice pickup.

Chunky

Difficulty: Hard Tier: C

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Cacti Club Rock Stick Torch Plank Chopper Double Barrel Shotgun Spiky Shield Ghost Scepter Shredder Revolver Spoon Pruner

Weapons of Choice: Pruner works well with the +3 Healing from consumables. And can really do damage if you find spicy sauces. The Harvesting bonus is awesome. My go-to. (remember to get enough melee damage if you’re using pruner) Stick - Great weapon that comes with +15 Max HP. Choppers give additional healing from consumables, and scales with your max HP. At Tier 4, the 30% Max HP scaling means you can really lean into it. Spiky Shield, as the armor stacking is great on Chunky, and you ignore the -10% speed of the blunt tag. Good knockback keeps you safe.

Shotgun/Shredder/Revolver - puts you at range, which can be a big help if you’re having trouble surviving with Chunky’s healing in Melee. Actually quite powerful. Alternative Options: Spoon - Worse Chopper, except the Fire / Crit gimmick. Rocks are also playable. Gives some nice Armor + HP bonuses. But it isn't the strongest weapon in general. Ghost Scepter - A fun option with an awesome late game. You need to focus on getting enough damage early to keep if you go this route.

Strategy Chunky is a difficult character to learn. You have so many stats that don’t work for you, and you heal by eating consumables, and generally by having more max HP. You need to learn to navigate the battlefield locked at 100% speed without taking too much damage.

Chunky can be quite powerful once you learn the movement and what stats to get. Max Hp, Armor, Attack speed, and Luck are your most important stats.

Keep your DPS up: Dead enemies don’t deal damage. It is easy to get sidetracked by Max HP, Armor, Consumable Healing etc. keep your DPS high on Chunky, just like with other characters. If you fall behind on DPS, you lose out on Materials, and it becomes exponentially harder to avoid damage. Learn to sidestep enemies. Since you’re stuck on default Speed, you’ll have to learn to dodge projectiles and charging enemies at that speed. All these things can be done at default speed, but it requires you to learn the attack patterns. Watch out for Ranged Enemies: Chunky is slow and uses melee weapons. This means that it can be difficult to kill the spitters and buffers. Make sure you chase down the enemies that keep a distance to you, so they don’t stack up. You also need to be vigilant on wave 7, since it can be hard to reach the eggs in time. Consumable Healing: This is your Main way of surviving. Learn to manage your consumption. Leave consumables on the ground until you need them. Get more Healing with Weird food and Lemonade. Get more fruits with Gardens and Luck. Luck Based Build: Chunky has a bigger chance of seeing items that give luck, give Consumable healing (Lemonade, Weird Food), or Baby Elephant, Cyberball. This sets Chunky up for a Luck based build. You want Luck for more Consumables dropped by enemies. So if you have a ton of Luck, then Baby Elephant and Cyberball can deal tons of damage. You also have extra %dmg from your HP. But remember that this is an option, not a requirement. You’ll be more than fine without going for Cyberball/Elephant. Stats Max HP: Max HP is great on you, and also provides a good amount of %Damage. There are some items and weapons that deal damage based on your Max HP, which can be fine. But I wouldn’t tunnel vision on Max HP. You still need other stats. Dead Stats: You can’t really use HP Regen, Life Steal, Dodge, or Speed. That is going to affect how you evaluate items a lot. Armor, not Dodge: Since you can’t really go for dodge, armor becomes super important to increase your Effective HP. Having armor increases the value of your healing. Luckily some armor items have negative speed as their downside, making them easy pickups for Chunky. Healing: Life steal is a dead stat to you and HP regen is halved. So look for other methods of healing. Lemonade and weird food are great for more consumable healing. There are also Items that can provide alternative healing options Luck: Chunky is tagged for Luck, and Luck increases the amount of Consumable dropped by enemies. So get more luck. Shady potion is awesome for you. % Damage: You’ll get a lot of this through your Max HP. So you don’t need to worry about it. But I would still pick up the great items and upgrades you see along the way. Items Max HP Items: Broken mouth is great, Acid is also pretty good. Since you’re ignoring the downsides of those items. Not a fan of alien worm. Medal is also worse. But Little Muscley Dude is great as always Baby Elephant / Cyberball - Since you’re tagged for luck, and might be stacking luck, these can be good. Chunky has the option to go for a luck based build if you find enough of these. So look out for that option. Speed Negative Speed Items: You can use Items with Speed downsides without losing anything. Look for Helmet, Warrior Helmet, Barricade, Statue, Mammoth, Big arms, Shackles has no downside for you. 80 Range is pretty powerful. And if you’re using engineering for some reason, that’s a free additional bonus. Ugly Tooth & Snail: You can’t increase your own speed, but you can slow down enemies. These also have speed as downsides, making them extra good for you. Especially ugly tooth is a must to keep up with Elites and Bosses.

Healing Options Lemonade and weird food - Consumable Healing is your bread and Butter. You need to buy them. Jerky - +3 Consumable healing is awesome. But I’m not sure I want to delay Chunky’s core healing to over 4 seconds. Gardens are quite good on Chunky. Solid healing. Fruit Basket: Also more Consumable healing. Great. You ignore the downside. Alternative healing includes cute monkey, healing turret, and Torture. Tentacles can also be powerful if you have some crit. Goblet: This is awesome for you. Really helps you sustain when fighting a ton of enemies.

Max HP Build Alien Eyes can be strong if you stack max HP Spicy Sauce can become good if you manage to stack them and extra powerful if you’re using Pruner as a weapon. Other Stone Skin - This can be powerful, but you don’t get +%dmg from the Max HP. So I want at least 16-18+ Armor. Baby Alien - If you’re doing well on the Damage side, this is a nice +15 Max HP. Maybe not Padding - You don’t get %DMG from the Temporary Max HP. So padding isn’t doing much. Honey - You ignore both downside, so it is great for the ranged build. Not power Generator - C’mon.

Old

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Scissors Screwdriver Wrench Revolver Rock Plank Chopper Double Barrel Shotgun Taser Wand Pruner Icicle Lute Sickle

Old is pretty vanilla when it comes to weapons. The character specific abilities don’t affect weapons much.

Shotgun - The tightly packed enemies line up perfectly for the shotgun to mow them down. Revolver - Is just a generally good weapon. Pruner - provides a ton of healing and gives the support tag, while being a decent weapon at higher tiers. Sickle - Scales with Harvesting, which you have a bit extra of. Mixes with Pruner if you want. Icicle - Powerful elemental option. Get some attack speed, crit, and elemental damage. And it will shred enemies later on, which is nice for dealing with elites in a small area.

Other Options

The defining feature for Old is the small map and slow enemies. The small map makes engineering more powerful, as the randomly placed turrets end up being close together anyway. So Wrench is a powerful option, along with Screwdriver as a fun option to try. Taser is also fine if you want an elemental build.

But any weapons can work, as the bonuses aren't limiting the Old from any build. Melee weapons like the slowed enemies, as you can dance around them without being hit. Explosive weapons can also become very powerful. Strategy There isn’t much to say about Old. It is a different experience playing on a smaller map, but the slower enemies make it easier to handle. Get used to sidestep projectiles, since you don’t have as much space to dodge in. Especially for Elites and bosses.

As the Old, it is easy to avoid taking damage, as everything moves slower, giving you more reaction time. However the smaller map means you can’t kite enemies around the map as easily.

Don’t fall behind on damage: You need to keep the map clear. Tank up for the Mid Game: Once you get to wave 10+, enemies are going to spawn all around you. At this point you are going to need to up your defenses a bit. Turrets: Even if you're not going engineering, picking up Incendiary turret and medical turret can be an option since the battlefield is so small. Economy: Build up your harvesting and economy early so you have enough power to handle the later waves where it is harder to evade enemies. Get Speed: Get your speed back up. Don’t stay at -10%. Leverage your ability to outmaneuver your enemies.

Lucky

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Stick Rock Fist Chopper Plank Screwdriver Lance Torch Pruner Lute Slingshot Wand Icicle Flute

Lute - Insane with Lucky. Scales with Luck. So you can just stack it and have lutes hitting for several hundreds of Damage. Likely Lucky’s Best weapon. Stick is cheap, and works fine at your slow attack speed. It gives a strong start, and doesn’t require a lot of melee damage, allowing you to focus more on %dmg. Slingshot is a decent ranged option. The bounces work very well combined with your luck damage. However you can fall behind on damage if you don’t find enough Elephants/Cyberballs. Chopper: Chopper grants a ton of consumable healing, which is powerful on Lucky. Chopper can struggle a bit with the damage and range, especially early. But it scales with your Max HP, which means you can skip melee damage for the most part.

Other Options: Flute - It deals a ton of damage and scales with luck. You can stack luck like crazy. But the slow attack speed makes it rough. Mix it with lutes for an easy time. Screwdriver - Some people also like screwdriver because it damages enemies all over the map, just like your Luck damage, and you can largely ignore the -60% attack speed. Fist is another fine melee option. It is fast, and mostly ignores the negative attack speed debuff. However it has a shorter range, and requires a bit of melee damage early. Pruner - Gives harvesting and Gardens, You can mix with Sickles for more DPS. But there’s stronger options.

Weapon Mixing: As lucky it might be worth it to not invest in flat dmg and crit at all. In that case, you can freely combine ranged weapons with melee weapons. Due to your luck, high level weapons show up early in the shop. Adding a Tier 3 spear to your slingshots can give you extra area clear and be a cost efficient investment. Experiment and try what works for you. However if you’re using sticks, you should just use 6 sticks. Strategy

Lucky revolves around the luck stat. You start with 125 luck and you should stack it higher. The idea is to use your ability to deal damage when you pick up material, along with the items Cyberball and Baby Elephant to deal intense luck based damage. You should buy all the cyberballs and Baby elephants you see. You then pick up a lot of % Damage and Luck to scale this.

Baby elephants and cyberballs trigger independently. This means that whenever you pick up materials, or kill an enemy, the game rolls the 25% chance for each of that item you have. So if you have 3 cyberballs, you roll 25% three times, and an enemy is chosen and hit 0, 1, 2, or up to 3 times by the damage depending on how many rolls succeed. (That does mean some diminishing returns due to hitting the same enemy with way too much damage and just doing overkill damage.)

Don’t let Materials Pile up. There is a maximum of 50 Materials that can be on the ground at once. If more would be dropped, the value is instead added to other materials already on the ground. So you lose out on Baby Elephant damage when this happens.

On Negative Attack Speed: It is worth noting that negative attack speed doesn’t work like positive attack speed. Weapons have several hidden stats that determine their attack speed, (Weapon cooldown, Recoil, and range) and negative attack speed only affects one of these stats, while positive attack speed works with all of them. A normal slingshot has a cooldown of 1.22 seconds, while for Lucky it has 1.77 seconds. Normal fists have 0.78 vs 0.92, Stick - 1.25 vs 1.68. So that means picking up 60% attack speed only gives: (slingshot 45% dps increase, Fist 18%, Stick 34%) Instead of the 100%/40% =150% DPS increase you would’ve expected. When you then account for the fact that attack speed doesn’t affect your luck damage, it might not be worth it to go into attack speed at all.

Conclusion: Since negative attack speed doesn’t do too much, you should either stay at the negative 60%. (You can even lower it further). Or you should attempt to get it to at least +50% positive attack speed to get the real benefits, if you stop around at 0% attack speed, it is a waste.

In general Ranged builds are hurt more from the negative Attack Speed. So melee builds I don’t mind tanking my Attack speed even lower. Stats Boost your XP Gain: The high amounts of luck means you’ll find more crates and higher tier items, boosting your economy, but it comes at a cost of -50% exp. You can pick up some Scars or bean teachers to bring you back up to 100%. Those items are extra effective on you. (2.5 scars double your exp gain, normally it takes 5). So make sure you look for Scars and Bean Teachers especially. %Damage will scale both the damage you deal with your weapons, and with your luck abilities. Super important stat for Lucky. Flat Damage and Crit: These damage stats don’t increase your luck damage, and the weapons you’re using, stick, Lance, Lute, slingshot, don’t scale particularly well with flat damage, so you can ship out on most, except the really good offers. For Crit I like just dumping it on Lucky. Speed is useful for surviving and picking up materials faster. Get speed early and a good amount. Ignore Life Steal: Your luck damage does not life steal, and your slower attack speed means that life steal is weaker. So in addition to my consumable healing, I look for powerful HP regen options such as Plant, Fairy, etc.

Items Consumable Healing: The high amount of luck means you’ll find a lot of consumables. So look for lemonade and Weird food. It can end up being your main form of healing early and mid game. Jerky - Great if you want Consumable healing to go from burst healing into your main healing source. I like it on Lucky and in general. Cauldron - Gives a ton of Pickup Range and a good %DMG boost. You’re seeing a ton of consumables, so it is great. Treasure Map: You’re seeing more Crates, so Treasure map can be quite worth it. Pearl: This is just awesome on you. Buy each pearl you see. Easy +17-30% damage. Pickup Range / Auto Collect: Look for items that help your pickup range. Alien tongue, and maybe Little frog, if you’re not going dodge You don’t need much, but the first +30% to +50% is decent. I also love Baby Gecko and Sifd’s Relic.

Negative Attack Speed. If you stay at negative attack speed, several good item options open up for you. Bowler Hat, Defective Steroids, Missile. - good stats for the price. Baby Squid - Great source of HP Regen. And life steal isn’t the best for you, so that’s perfect. Small Fish - Gives a multiplicative 10% damage bonus (75% HP or higher) which is great for your Luck Damage. Stone Skin - When you ignore the downside, it doesn’t take much for Stone Skin to be worth it. Focus - Trade a bit of attack speed for a massive amount of %Damage. Always take. Ball and Chain - Works with Blunderbuss. And you’re unlikely to have weapons faster than 0.75 sec. It gives great stats.

Sample Game Here’s an interesting game. Started Lance. Picked up Bags, fertilizer and baby elephants. Got offered a Blunderbuss early. Since we have -60% attack speed, Blunderbuss is great, since it just instantly reloads. And I’m collecting materials anyway. Blunderbuss carried the single target damage, dealt 3-4x the damage of my other weapons. Helped me being able to kill elites and bosses with ease. I got a diploma to cover my XP gain. Otherwise the game just snowballed. Baby Elephants and Luck damage tore through enemies later in the game. Made the Waves super easy. Lance builds want to be tanky, so I got my dodge and armor up. Negative Attack speed meant that several items got better for me. Stone Skin, Small Fish, Baby Squid and focus. Made 1500 from bags. Trident - I really like that weapon and got offered a tier 3. It mixes well with lance. And it works great with slow attack speed, since its effect wants to one shot enemies.

Mutant

Difficulty: Easy Tier: A

Starting Weapon (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Ghost Axe Stick Quarterstaff Rock Plank Lightning Shiv Brick Double Barrel Shotgun SMG Revolver Shredder Crossbow Taser Wand Icicle

Mutant’s ability to gain more upgrades work well with most weapons.

However a few weapons stick out.

Quarterstaff - Scales with your level and gives XP gain. It is a powerful melee option for Mutant. It also provides some really nice early defensive stats, giving you a cozy start. SMG, Double Barrel Shotgun - Upgrades are the easiest way to get ranged damage, and these weapons are insane if you can get enough ranged damage with them. Also great options Stick - Great Weapon. You don’t have to worry much about getting melee damage or crit. Just get some %dmg damage and attack speed, then tank up. Revolver - Good weapon. Scales well with all damage stats, so just take the best Attack speed / %Dmg / Crit / Ranged damage options you’re offered.

Other options Icicle - Nice Ranged Elemental option. But Icicle builds benefit a lot from items from the shop, so not the best Lightning Shiv - Good weapon, but same issue as icicle. Strategy

The Mutant has only two abilities. Items cost 50% more, and levels require less experience.

This means you’ll end up as perhaps level 33 instead of 23. Or something like that. Especially in the early game, the levels will come fast, and you can expect to level up 2-3 times each wave.

Mutant was changed from +200% XP gain to levels requiring -66% XP on the 1.1.0.0 Patch. The patch didn’t change how many levels you would get per default, but it made + XP gain items much better on Mutant. Before they were bad, now they’re quite good.

Understanding Good Upgrades

The upgrades aren’t born equally. Upgrades like Armor and Ranged damage are much better than Life steal or range. You need to find the great stats through upgrades and attempt to cover the weaknesses through the shop.

See my section on Upgrades and Upgrade Tierlist

Buy your weapons early on: Since everything is so expensive, your weapons will take up most of your shopping money. So just lock items early in the shop and focus on getting to 6 weapons for the most part. Quarterstaffs/Sticks/Revolvers upgrade nicely, while smg mostly need ranged damage to scale. Slow down Later on, I still want to upgrade my weapons later on, but with the +50% shop prices, you can end up spending all your money here. Make sure you don’t skip past stats you need from the shop such as healing. And for SMG, I might want to skip out on the Tier 4 upgrade if I’m strapped for money. Reroll upgrades slightly more than usual. Higher level upgrades have better chances of being higher tiers. And you will reach those levels early. At the same time your shop is more expensive, so these two factors make it worth it to spend a bit more on rerolling for the good upgrades. Manage your Rerolls: Reroll costs for level ups are shared for each wave. So if you have 3 level ups after a wave, you should be careful not to reroll too hard on the first level up, since it will also increase the price of rerolling for the next two levels. Stats

Offensive:

Defenses:

Upgrades are one of the best ways to gain dodge and armor, and you can easily force a great tank build on mutant if you want. Tank builds are usually better on melee builds, since those take more damage, while at the same time melee weapons can’t fall behind on dps the same way ranged weapons can, because melee weapons can cleave as many enemies as there are.

If you’re going for Quarterstaff, I would max dodge and get my armor up. For something like SMG or Revolver I would just get armor.

Items For Mutant, you’ll spend more money on rerolling upgrades, and all items are more expensive, so it is really limited how many items you can get.

So you need to have a high standard for what you’re buying

Economic Items

Economic items are the special case for Mutant. Some are bad like Coupon and piggybank, since they cost +50% and struggle to pay that amount back.

Strong Harvesting items like fertilizer or Wheelbarrow are still good. Remember harvesting gives both Money and XP.

XP Gain is great, since you get so many stats from upgrades, and the effect is multiplicative with the reduced cost. The XP requirement for a level is (X+3)*(X*3). So level 1 requires 4^2=16, and level 2 requires 5x5=25 xp. So 100% exp won’t double the amount of levels you’ll get. Just like I mentioned earlier with your ability.

Barnacle - It will curse you a ton, but the extra stats are quite worth it.

Look for items that offer something upgrades cant: Piercing, Xp Gain, Weapons, Healing, Healing: The HP Regen and Life steal upgrades are awful, so you need to find healing through the shop. Look for any consumable healing items. And otherwise I default to hp regen + consumable for melee build and Life steal + consumable for ranged. Decomposing Flesh/ Baby Squid - These give healing based on your level. That’s exactly what you need. I’ll take both. If i find these, I’m very open to going both Life steal and HP Regen. Piercing/Bounce - Very useful for the SMG or Revolver build. Look for sharp bullet.

Generalist

Difficulty: Hard Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Cacti Club Ghost Axe Ghost Flint Lightning Shiv Knife Scissors Spear Double Barrel Shotgun Pistol SMG Shredder Revolver Slingshot Shuriken Laser Gun Javelin

As the Generalist you need to pick both a melee and a ranged weapon at least, since you can only have 3 of each. Due to your ability, the generalist ends up with a higher amount of melee/ranged damage. So look for weapons that scale well with flat damage.

Melee Weapons Cacti Club - You actually make the spines fired do quite a bit of damage. It recently got buffed quite a bit Spear - Basically works like a ranged weapon, making it easier to fire all your weapons at the same time. Combines well with Javelin

Ranged Weapon SMG or Shotgun are really good since they scale really well with ranged damage. Revolver is also surprisingly great when matched with a weapon like spear. Slingshot is a powerful weapon, and primitive, making it give extra hp with your melee weapons, and making it easier to find the weapons together. Javelin - The new option. Primitive, so it mixes well with Cacti and Spear. And it scales quite well with melee damage.

Other Combos Knife/Shuriken - A Crit based combo that can be fun to explore. Both weapons scale with melee, but that doesn’t make any difference. You still can use good ranged upgrades and items to pump your melee damage. Lightning Shiv / Icicle - Start Shiv, and add Icicles. Go elemental damage and crit. Then you can just ignore your character’s abilities :d

Higher Tier Weapons You can find some nice weapons later on in the shop. Harpoon - Scales with Both Melee and Ranged Damage, making it a really high DPS weapon for you. Minigun - Basically a stronger SMG. Grenade Launcher - Really strong when upgraded and given crit. Nuclear Launcher - Doesn’t scale much with ranged damage, but its just a broken weapon. Trident - upgraded version of spear Sword / Thunder Sword / Captain’s sword - Just strong melee weapons. Strategy The Generalist Is forced to use 3 Melee and 3 Ranged Weapons, but in your Melee and Ranged Damage Stats are linked together. This helps you get more of the better upgrades/items and you gain a ton when you find items that give both Melee and Ranged Damage.

Otherwise the generalist is pretty straightforward.

I don’t find Generalist to be the strongest, since having to have such a mix of weapons is often a downside.

But on the other hand, having a good amount of flat damage is one of the most important things in the early game, and generalist helps you in the right direction.

Careful with mixing many weapons. There’s a ton of powerful higher tier weapons like Thunder Sword or Nuclear Launcher. And they are worth it to add to your build. But each additional weapon makes it more difficult to upgrade and combine the weapons you already have. So I would keep my standards high, and not mix with random Tier 1 weapons I find. Stats Melee / Ranged Damage - Don’t get tricked. Your weapons only need the same amount of flat damage compared to other stats as they do on every other character. You get to mix ranged and melees without the downside.

is important, but don’t let it cloud your judgment. You shouldn’t be buying the bad sources of Melee / Ranged Damage, in fact you should have standards. One of the powerful points of the Generalist is that you have double the options. You can choose the Highest tier between Melee / Range DMG Upgrades. And you can buy the best items that grant melee and ranged Damage. So with that many options, don’t be tricked into buying garbage sources of Damage like Mutation or Riposte.

Healing: I go Consumables healing by default. Then depending on my weapon setup I will lean towards melee/ranged. Cacti/SMG pulls you towards lifesteal, slower weapons like Revolver+Spear pulls you towards HP Regen. But it always depends on the items you find.

Otherwise Generalist plays quite normally. Items Look for Hybrid Items: Look for items that give both Melee and Ranged damage, as their values are doubled for you: Hedgehog, Wheat, Big Arms, Handcuffs, Alloy. Double Damage Downsides: Watch out for items with melee or ranged damage downside. Especially those with both as a downside like Peaceful bee, Lucky charm, or Shmoop. Item Based Damage: Rip and Tear and Baby with a beard tend to be good with you since you stack a lot of flat damage. Pets: Bonk Dog / Catling Gun - They can deal great damage if you have a lot of flat damage, which you have. And you can use both at once. Loud

Difficulty: Medium Tier: S

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Ghost Axe Ghost Flint Lightning Shiv Thief dagger Claw Spear Torch Rock Hatchet Plank Wrench Lance Quarterstaff Pruner Screwdriver Double Barrel Shotgun Pistol SMG Shredder Icicle Shuriken Slingshot Crossbow Javelin

So many choices!

Melee is often a bit easier, since they handle crowds of enemies better.

Thief Dagger gives you a ton of money and causes you to scale out of control. Spear or Jousting lance are great for long range melee builds. Lightning shiv - Tons of bounces will kill everything

Ranged Options.

Ranged options requires you to keep up in attack speed, piercing, bouncing to handle enemies.

Shotgun - Mows down the crowds. Stack ranged damage, and attack speed. Shotgun can handle the crowds and got the DPS. Shredder - The explosion build easily deals with the additional enemies. SMG - If you stack a ton of ranged damage. Get to 34%/51% attack speed. Get sharp bullet. Slingshot - Solid weapon that makes it super safe if you get ahead on damage.

Other options Ghost Axes or Ghost Flints for insane fun stacking. But a bit harder to get going. Javelin - Add some spears to help with hordes and crowds. Javelin provides a ton of DPS. Icicle - Elemental Option. Struggles early with handling the crowds, so I’m not the biggest fan. You can however find other elemental weapons to aid it.

Honestly most builds can work. As long as the weapon is able to handle the number of enemies. Strategy Loud most deal with the hordes of enemies that spawn. Use weapons that can hit multiple targets. More enemies means more money and exp. Loud can gain insane amounts of money. All you need to do is to deal enough damage, and your late game will be amazing.

Watchout for waves like on Crash zone wave 7, where the extra enemies can mean a large amount of eggs spawning. Or Wave 9 on Abyss. Stats You’ll need all the same stats as a regular build, but there are a few stats that are a bit stronger than normally on Loud.

Attack Speed: Generally always a nice stat, but extra nice on Loud since it helps keep up with the extra enemies. Keep it high and it will keep you safe. Crit Build - Tentacle healing on Crit kill, and Hunting Trophy granting gold scale really well with extra enemies. So the Critical Hit based build becomes quite a bit better. Negative Harvesting has no increments. So it won’t grow aside from the -3 each round (So if you have -100 Harvesting, it becomes -103 at the end of the wave, not 108). Negative harvesting also doesn’t take away XP. So it isn’t too bad. Positive Harvesting: Loud can go into positive harvesting. Buying fertilizer or a tractor might still be worth it, but generally you can ignore harvesting in favor of just focusing on dealing enough damage to kill all enemies. Unlike on other Characters, Harvesting is a Luxury on Loud. Healing - More enemies means that Life steal and consumable healing is better. Especially consumable healing. You’re also seeing the mouse item more often, making life steal better. But in all cases, I will invest in Consumable healing. Luck: I like Luck on Loud. You have the extra money early to throw at luck. And it just helps you scale completely out of control, and boosts your healing.

Items Hunting Trophy / Black Flag - These can give you soo much gold on a Crit/Curse build. Look out for them. It is worth going into those builds for them. More Enemies: Pick up Gentle aliens and Mice for more enemies, if you can handle it. These can lead to some of the most fun runs in the game. Gentle alien is especially powerful, since it grants a ton of useful stats. So if you like more enemies, it is a great item. Piercing/Bounce: Bandana and Ricochet can help your ranged weapons clear the enemies. Sharp Bullet is also an option. Rip and Tear and Baby with A Beard are really powerful on Loud. Luck Damage: Cyberball and Baby Elephant’s damage scale with the number of enemies. Since Loud has +30% and a strong economy, it is easy for Loud to reach a point where you have a ton of Luck, Damage and those items. It can be a powerful way to clear the map. But worth noting it doesn’t work with Crit. Goblet: Gives a ton of healing when you have so many enemies. Can really carry your healing. Decomposing Flesh: You like Life steal and gain a ton of levels. Great if you find it early. Multitasker

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Fist Claw Knife Spear Stick Quarterstaff Lightning Shiv Screwdriver Wrench Ghost Flint Ghost Axe Plank Chopper Hatchet Jousting Lance Pruner Rock Spiky Shield Sharp Tooth Double Barrel Shotgun SMG Revolver Laser Gun Wand Icicle Slingshot Taser Shuriken Crossbow Hiking Pole Lute

There are many good options for starting weapons for the Multitasker. It is a lot of fun to try all the different builds with 12 Weapons

It is worth noting that you’ll end up spending a ton of money on weapons, and you have to focus on fixing your %dmg early, so weapons that requires a ton of ranged damage, melee damage, or crit to function can struggle a bit to get going.

Stick is the strongest option, as its ability gives crazy base damage. You don’t need to worry about Melee damage at all. It’s also a cheap weapon, which is nice since multitasker can buy so many. Jousting Lance - Also quite nice, gives you 24-40% ish Speed when you have 12, so you don’t have to worry as much about speed, range, or melee damage. It also sets you up for a strong power generator. Slingshot is a very strong ranged option. Just get enough of the different damage stats, and it will keep you safe. Spear got a great range and is a good option. Hiking pole - a Spear with harvesting weapon class. Once you get to 12, you’ll start really stacking range stat. Since you get the flat damage for free, you can focus on %dmg. Shotgun, SMG can be great, since they scale so well with ranged damage, that you don’t need them higher than tier 1. Revolver - solid at tier 1. Doesn’t require as much ranged damage, so it is easier to get going. Laser Gun - Actually fine when you have 12 weapons. Mixes quite well with Revolver and other guns. Multitasker can really go for a gun mix.

Other Options Wrench is also fine, as it ignores the Damage penalty. You can let your %Dmg go to -100% if you want, since your turrets are unaffected. You can Add some Screwdrivers to the mix if you want. Chopper is a fun meme for +12 healing from consumables. Icicle - similar to the gun builds, but are slightly harder to find due to two weapon classes and it doesn’t have other weapons to mix with, unless you want to add lightning shiv and tasers. (which is actually decent, but can be a bit weird with the range) Taser, Lightning Shiv, are also quite good for an elemental build. Generally, you can go with most options. Strategy The multitasker can wield up to 12 weapons at the cost of losing 5% Damage for each weapon picked up. You start with +15% while at 1 weapon, but you’ll end at -40%. That’s harsh.

This can really be a bit of a trap. If doing a weapon mix build, you might end up buying a ton of weapons, while at the same time losing %dmg fast. You’ll often also spend your money super fast in these cases. And that’s exactly when you’ll get stuck at -30% to -40% Damage and no money. Make sure you pick up the available %damage items such as head injury or injection. And also get some good %dmg upgrades.

Stat Increases are more impactful than upgrading weapons: When you have 12 weapons, getting +10% damage or attack speed might make for a bigger damage increase than upgrading one of the weapons. This can be a hard balance, since Multitasker easily can end up spending all their money on weapons. Make sure you haven’t forgotten a stat. Weapons are far away from you: The more weapons you have, the further they are positioned from the center of your body. As a result, short ranged melee weapons often have trouble attacking enemies on the opposite side of you. Making elites harder to focus down. You either need to keep your range stat higher, or better yet, learn to move closer to the enemies, such that the weapons get their turn to hit. Outside of elites, this can be an advantage, because it gives extra range to the weapon in its direction, and it means that you have weapons ready to attack in different directions. Weapon Set Bonuses: If you mix weapons, you will get more set bonuses. It might be worth it in some cases. (never with sticks tho). But this is very niche, and your first priority is to make sure your weapons scale with the same stats and have similar range.

Items

%Damage items: I’m buying Head injuries, Gentle Aliens, Cyclops Worms. Give me all of it. Glass Cannon - This isn’t the most cost efficient item. But If I’m into the negative with %Dmg, I’m happy to pick this up. Power Generator can really be a powerful pickup. Jelly / Spider - If you do some janky weapon mixing, these can give a ton of stats. Wildling

Difficulty: Very Easy Tier: C Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Stick Spear Torch Rock Cacti Club Hatchet Quarterstaff Sharp Tooth Slingshot Javelin

Sticks are likely the best choice, as you start with an extra stick and it is a great weapon.

Other options Spear - Longer range version of the Stick. Hatchet - a weapon that doesn’t scale that much with tiers, so it doesn’t mind being tier 2. Stack a ton of attack speed a get a bit of range. Quarterstaff - another decent melee option. Get some more xp gain, and enjoy the good weapon classes. Slingshot - Bouncing ranged option. Safe, works well with life steal, but you gotta try to keep up in damage since you can’t go above tier 2. Javelin - Same as slingshot but with melee damage. A bit easier to keep up in damage.

Note that your 30% life steal doesn’t count for scaling Sharp Tooth’s Damage, making it a quite poor option. Cacti Club - the spines can life steal with the ability, so there’s a bit of synergy there. But Cacti club isn’t a great weapon. Strategy Starting with +30% lifesteal, and the +15 HP from primitive Weapons makes for a very tanky character. Wildling got a strong early game, but their late game is kinda capped from the Tier 2 limit. So we have to work around that.

UP your DPS stats: Your weapons can only go to tier 2. This limits your late game DPS output. (but saves you money, especially with sticks, which are cheap) You need a high amount of %Dmg, Attack speed, Flat damage, and Crit to keep up. Secondary damage such as Rip and Tear can also help, or Baby with a beard for ranged. Economy: Use your strong early game to invest in your Economy. Get Harvest, Luck, Bags, Recycling machine, Trees. This will help you scale the late game. Piggy bank, Tractor, Crown. Go big. We want to scale out of control. Defensive Stats: I like getting a lot of armor, and maxing out Dodge on Wildling. It's useful for melee builds that struggle to clear the map quickly. Healing: You already got 30% life steal. So I wouldn’t invest in more. Just get Hp Regen and Consumable Healing. You’re gonna get hit.

Pacifist

Difficulty: Hard Tier: B Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Hand Taser Pruner

Hand is the strongest option for the good protection, and great harvest it provides. I usually don’t care to upgrade them beyond tier 2. You’re not getting that much. But if done early enough, the harvesting might pay off.

Pruner is also quite decent. And it mixes well with hand. Getting the early healing boost can help you get past the early waves where you might struggle.

I like to add 1 taser at some point to the build. It helps slowing down enemies, even the ones that are resistant to knockback. However, adding the taser to the build also makes elemental damage show up in the shop, so there’s a benefit to waiting a bit with adding it.

Strategy The Pacifist attempts a quite different playstyle: Pacifism. You gain 0.65 Money and Exp for each enemy that is alive on the map when the wave ends And also for each despawned enemy.

There is a maximum of 100 enemies that can exist on the map at once. When more spawns, the weakest enemy despawns (Changed with the DLC patch). The pacifist still gains materials in that case. Even if an enemy would drop 3 materials, you still only gain 0.65 Materials from it.

This might seem weak, but when you take into account that you gain materials from all enemies, while other builds miss out on materials from the enemies they weren’t able to kill. And also that enemies don’t have a 100% drop rate of materials.

You can read more details on Materials on the Brotato Wiki.

Tanking up. The Game for Pacifist is unfair. Enemies stay alive, and the game becomes a bullet hell. The game plan is for that not to matter. You Stack Armor, get to 60% dodge, have a ton of speed, and then get as much healing as you can.

Then it doesn’t matter at all, you can just run around and survive anything. That’s the Gameplan.

Moving in Circles: As the Pacifist, you need to constantly put enemies behind you, so you end up running in big circles around the map. Don’t weave back and forth. This would cause you to get swarmed by charging enemies. Crowd-Locking: Enemies can block each other and there is no way for a faster enemy to get past a wall of slower enemies. This means that if you can gather a big group of small mobs, and slow them down with Tasers or the very powerful Ugly Tooth, you can lock Slicers, Elites, Charging enemies inside a wall of slow mobs. This is super powerful, especially against charging elites and bosses. You can run in circles around the crowd to keep it stuck in the middle of the map. Flamethrower: One common and super powerful strategy is to buy a flamethrower in the shop if you see one. Then combine the flamethrower with Ugly tooth, Fried rice, and some life steal. That will provide endless healing, making the run super easy. Despawning: You get money from enemies that despawn. But recently the code was changed and now weaker enemies despawn first instead of random. This makes it quite a bit harder for you, and means that Mouse/Gentle alien is worse. The New Map - Abyss. This one is quite a bit harder. While you don’t experience Wave 7 and 14 of the old map, you now have to deal with the anglerfish chasing you down endlessly. Stats

No Offensive Stats: As the pacifist, you can skip investing in damage, flat damage, crit, and attack speed. To survive, you must invest in your Defenses instead. This means Max Dodge, Tons of Armor, HP Regen, and Speed. If you do that, you’ll win.

Speed: Speed is super important for Pacifist. You cannot kill spawning eggs, elites, or other dangerous enemies, so you need to have enough speed to put those enemies behind you. I want to increase it to +5%/+10% for the early waves, and I want a ton of it for the boss fight. At least 40%+. Wave 7 on Crash Zone and Wave 8 on the Abyss are quite hard and it helps to have at least 10%-15% speed here. Max HP - It is important to get some Max HP early, so you don’t die in a few hits. But it shouldn’t be your main plan for surviving. That said, I still want it higher than on a regular run. Dodge - A great way to become 150% harder to kill, when you have 60% dodge. You get 9-15% Dodge from the Hands Set bonus, and You need to get it to 60% during the mid game, Wave 11-16. Armor- Armor is your other damage mitigation stats. Every 15 Armor means it takes 100% more dmg to kill you. (so 30 armor is 67% damage reduction, meaning it takes 3 times as much damage to kill you.) This then is multiplied with the 150% extra from dodge. So 60% dodge and 15 Armor means it takes 5 times the damage to kill you. This also means any healing you do is worth 5 times more. This is why I recommend going heavy into healing + Damage mitigation rather than more Max HP. HP Regeneration - This is your Bread and Butter. This is how you stay alive throughout a long wave. I would want 40-60 on a solid run. Attack Speed: I’m not super interested in investing in Attack Speed compared to other stats. But I'll take the great options I'm offered. Coffee, Hoodie, or Community Support. We don’t need a lot of attack speed for DPS, but getting more does make your weapons more consistent at applying slow and knockback. Consumable Healing: You don’t kill enemies, so you’ll see very few consumables. If you’re not using 2+ Pruners, I wouldn’t bother with consumable healing (It becomes good if you have 2+ Gardens). And if I’m not using pruners, I will take Alien worms. Luck: Since you don’t kill enemies, you miss out on a lot of the value of luck. You don’t get the consumable drops, and you don’t get more crates from enemies. So you can mostly ignore luck. Curse: Curse is awful on you, since there’s a ton of items you can’t use, and your weapons don’t benefit from being cursed. Also, you don’t kill cursed enemies so you miss out on the +33% Materials. Finally, Cursing a Narwhal or Anglerfish can be your death. They aren’t going anywhere, and now you have to deal with a boosted enemy all wave. Luckily you have the means to avoid getting any curse. So don’t.

Items Ugly Tooth is a key item for the pacifist. Always lock it or buy it when you see it. Snail is also decent. Being able to slow crowds of enemies, and slow down elites is super powerful. But note that it doesn’t slow down the actual charges of enemies. Harvest + Crown: Even with your ability, you can expect to earn less money and exp per wave. So look for harvest items to make up for the difference. Crown and Tractors are excellent pick-ups early- and mid-game. You ignore the downside of many of these items. Harvesting items that reduce damage are also great: Peaceful bee, fertilizer, bowler hat. Negative Dmg, Tank items that reduce your damage are great: Metal Plate, Shmoop, Cape, Cake. Community support is actually quite powerful, and can single handedly supply you with all the attack speed you need. HP Regeneration: Look for Plant, Fairy, Octopus, And Medikit (Which is insane for you), Regeneration Potion, Sad Tomato, Shmoop, Shackles. Baby Squid - Quite great if you can find it early. Pacifist didn’t get much from the DLC sadly. Life steal: You can dump life steal, to pick up Plant, Clover, Bean Teacher. However if you don’t run into those items, You can pick up some life steal, since it can actually be okay with Hand, or if you get flamethrower. If you do, Look for Mouse, Cape, Whetstone, Fin. And perhaps Blood Leech on the later waves. But you’ll be more than fine to dump it. An early Decomposing Flesh is also a reason to move into life steal. Stone Skin - If you get to 15+ armor, this becomes a good source of Max HP. Ghost Outfit - Amazing for you. The downsides are bad, but the extra dodge Alien Baby - You ignore the downside, nice cheap +15 Max HP. Knot - I don’t even upgrade my weapons to tier 4 on pacifist, so this can be an easy +15 Max HP. Wandering Bot - Wandering Bot is a bit expensive, But I find it quite useful. It is able to slow enemies by 300 speed for a split second, with the enemies regaining the speed quickly. The bot can “stun” enemies for enough time for you to run safely past them while they’re slowed. It also hits the front of a crowd of enemies, causing a huge traffic jam for the enemies behind. More/Less Enemies - With the Change to the code, despawning enemies now makes the map harder, so you might want less enemies. But it still costs you in terms of economy. I’m not sure where I stand on it now, but I’m certainly less hot on Gentle Alien and Mouse after this change.

Useless Items for Pacifist

Any items that give dump stats: That’s Crit, %Dmg, any Flat damage, engineering, and so on. Items that relies on killing enemies Loot Crate synergy - You get less crates, so unless you’ve found 5 tree items, these items are bad: Bag, Recycling Machine, Treasure map. Consumable Healing. Same story. Can be fine if you have trees or Gardens. But otherwise not worth a lot. Penguin isn’t great for the same reason. Killing Enemies: You’re not triggering Hunting Trophy or Tentacle. Goblet is also out. Lure too. Material Pickup - You’re barely picking up materials: Metal Detector doesn’t work with your ability. Starfish is also awful, Cute Monkey. Any Curse Item: You don’t want Curse at all. So don’t buy Barnacle, Fish Hook, Black Flag. You get the idea. Med Turret - Only heals for 1 since you have -100 Engineering. Also you run too much.

Gladiator

Difficulty: Medium Tier: C Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold)

Spear Jousting Lance Cacti Club Torch Thief Dagger Knife Plank Ghost Axe Ghost Flint Sharp Tooth Fist Claw Quarterstaff Hatchet Lightning Shiv

The Gladiator is a Melee Only character that is encouraged to use many different weapons. So your start weapon is just a jump off point.

Spear - The longest Range melee weapon. It's Great in just about every Gladiator build. So starting with it means you’re sure to have it. Quarterstaff - Well rounded weapon. Gives some XP, great weapon classes. Sets you up for finding both Spears and Swords. The Tier 4 also deals decent damage.

Fist - A fine start option. Its Cheap and you can pick up many in the first couple shops. But it

Other Options Jousting Lance - Same as spear, but the lower melee scaling makes it less attractive. Crit Build - Thief Dagger - Gladiator has access to a solid Crit build Option. I would start Thief dagger for the money. Then stack crit weapons. You want Thief Dagger, knife, Claw, Scissors. Lightning Shiv can be good if you get it to tier 4, but otherwise you can just add strong weapons in addition to your precise weapons. Just watch out for weapons that have 1.5 Crit modifier. They’re not welcome in this build. Remember your melee damage, as Knife and scissors really want some more melee damage. Ghost Axe - If you start with a ghost axe, you can pick up some quick free stacks in the early game. It can be really strong and carry your late game, but it makes your early game harder. If you go for it, you have to focus on tiering up the ghost Axe to tier 4. If you instantly mix it with other weapons, you’re less likely to find more ghost axes early, and most kills will be stolen by other weapons.

Weapon Strategy The Gladiator gains +20% attack speed for each different weapon. So you want to end up using 5-6 different weapons in the late game.

But in the beginning I Like playing it similar to a regular game. I look for more of my starting weapons. I need 8 tier 1 weapons to combine into a tier 4. So getting more of your starting weapon is great.

Keep an eye out for the good weapons and pick them up as you find them. I don’t buying “bad” weapons just for the 20% attack speed. You start with +5 melee damage, so you should be able to handle the early game.

Its fine to end up with a duplicate set of weapons, if that’s how the shop worked out for you. Losing out on 20% attack speed isn’t that bad if it means having two of a great weapon. But you don’t want to go below that.

Great weapons: Spear - Offers a strong ranged attack that can help you cleave into big crowds of enemies. Very powerful Trident - Insane Weapon. Better spear. Fist, Flaming Knuckles, and Power Fist - Good DPS with Knockback, keeps you safe. Sword / Captain’s Sword - Strong DPS and attack pattern. Great range. Vorpal Sword - About the same as Sword. Wants a bit more melee damage due to the low base damage, and it provides Chances to kill Bosses/Elites. Circular Saw - Good DPS, gives good life steal with a decent range and sweeping attack. Low Base damage and small hit box is a minus. Hammer - Has decent DPS, provides knockback stat, and the hammer has knockback piercing, allowing it to knockback even large enemies. (but not elites/Bosses) Plasma Hammer - Great DPS, Knockback, Insane Explosive DPS. Better hammer. Thunder Sword - Better Sword that slows enemies. Scythe - It has great range and DPS. It will boost your %DMG which is really powerful. The 3hp damage per Second is steep and can kill you, but the weapon life steals some back. Drill - The DPS is fine, the Range sucks. But the Attack Speed buff to all your weapons is insanely strong. Dex-Troyer - Just an insane weapon.

Chainsaw - Great pickup for anti elite/boss damage.

Decent Weapons: Scissors - Ok Melee weapon that comes with good life steal. Chopper - Not the strongest weapon. But it gives Healing and the Blade Tag, which helps you get to Saw and Sword. Quarterstaff - Good weapon classes. Decent weapon. It becomes quite damaging at higher tiers. Claw - Actually deals okay damage if you have a lot of attack speed. But it falls off later if you don’t get crit. Hatchet - good scaling, strong at tier 1 if you have the attack speed coming in. But it needs you to increase your range stat. Jousting Lance - Not as strong as the spear, but still decent. The lower melee damage scaling and negative damage when standing still isn’t the best. Lightning Shiv - You don’t want to be scaling elemental. So it isn’t at its best. Still it is a powerful weapon when upgraded to tier 4. Lute - Adds a damage multiplier, which helps against elites/bosses. Anchor - Good hammer variant. Ghost Axe : Can be a decent starting weapon if you go all in on it. But both it and the Ghost flint get most of their kills stolen if you combine them with other weapons. It’s just not worth it outside of a calculated start. Brick - free money and XP. Deals good damage while it lasts. Spiky Shield - A really strong weapon, but it’s much weaker when you can’t stack armor and ignore melee damage. Still, I would’nt mind picking one up, should I have a lot of armor and find a tier 2-4 in the shop.

Mid Weapons: Ghost Flint - Worse than the Ghost axe, and it gives Attack Speed which you already got a good amount off. A pass for me. Knife - It got insane DPS if you got a Crit build. Without crit, the knife is worthless. Pruner - Gives a Garden which is decent. But you can’t really use the support tag, and it doesn’t deal a lot of DPS: Thief Dagger - Can be okay if you get it early and make some money out of it. But it requires crit, and other weapons will take most of the kills. Plank - Bad scaling, and there are stronger versions of it. Rock - Can be a fine cheap pickup along with your other primitive weapons. But it just doesn’t keep up in DPS. The Tier 1 rock got some high base damage tho. Cacti Club - Mostly useful for its tags and Spikes. You won’t really be able to abuse either. Which leaves the Cacti Club as a kinda weak option. Sharp Tooth - Better when you have a ton of life steal or 6 of them. 1 isn’t doing much. War Hammer - It hits hard, but damn it is so expensive and slow. Quite bad compared to other hammer types if you don’t have engineering synergy. Hiking Pole - Worse spear. And it isn’t great unless you have 6 of them. (missing out on stacking range and the support tag. Sickle - Again, you’re not going for a support harvesting build, so it is kinda awful. Spoon - You’re unlikely to set enemies on fire, and outside of that, the spoon isn’t great.

Never Use: Stick, Screwdriver, Wrench, Hand, and Torch. (Reasons left to the reader) Mace - You got plenty of attack speed.

Strategy

Have Standards: While it might be tempting to pick up a bad weapon just for the temporary attack speed. Remember that it will cause the shop to show you more of the bad weapon instead of the weapons you want. So it is often not worth it. Leave space for combining: If you have 6 Different Weapons, it is really difficult to have room for combining Weapons. So try to stay at 3-4 different weapons during the Early and mid game, so you can get them to tier 4. Late game just go crazy. 8 Tier 1 Weapons = 1 Tier 4. Remember that you want to end up with a red weapon of each different weapon. It takes 8 white weapons to create a red one. Once you have the weapons you need to combine into a single red one, it is time to stop buying more. So if you have two purple spears, don’t buy a blue one. You already got what you need. However, sometimes I actually like having 2 spears, because a spear is such a good weapon. Then I can throw it away later. Exploding weapons can’t trigger life steal as well, and can end up clearing enemies before your life stealing weapons can hit enemies. Be careful you don’t lose your ability to heal. You might want to consider going into HP regen and consumable healing for this reason if you plan on having both Plasma Hammer and Power fist. That doesn’t mean you can’t still have a saw. Stats Attack Speed: Your ability will provide most of the attack speed you need. But still pick up the good options you’re offered: higher tier upgrades and coffee, etc. But otherwise you don’t need to hunt it down like other builds do. Negative luck means that even trees have a chance to not drop fruit. It means you’re only getting 70% consumables in general. It is lowering the amount of higher tier upgrades and items in the shop that you see. And it also means less loot crates. So getting out of negative luck is more important than getting Luck into the positives. HP Regen: I like HP Regen over lifesteal on Gladiator. A lot of melee weapons are terrible with life steal. So HP Regen is much safer. If you want life steal, use a scissor/Circular Saw. Crit - Critical Multipliers: Fists, Quarterstaff and Hammers aren’t great with Critical Hits. So if you have multiple of those, crit becomes much worse. I often dump crit so I can buy Clover, Goat Skull, Rip and tear. If you go for the crit build, then stack it. Max HP / Armor: I like being Tanky on Gladiator. So I keep my HP and Armor healthy. Dodge: Gladiator can struggle with surviving. So I like a tanky build. I like getting Dodge filled up to 60% during the mid-late game for the Elite-Boss fights. But you don’t need it that much early. Range: It really depends on your weapon setup. If you’re using mostly long range weapons like sword, spear, lance etc. You don’t need range. But otherwise, 150 range weapons and below really benefit from some range. Having different weapons makes it harder to rely on them covering you, so a bit of range makes it much safer. I like having +0 to +100 range stat. But I also often end up with negative range, because there’s several great items that gives minus: Cyclops Worm, Little Musley Dude. Scar, Beanie. Items There aren’t a lot of items to shout out. Plant, Leather armor, and mastery are all top tier on gladiator. The general melee build items. The Spider and Jelly items were made for the Gladiator. Buy them every time you see them. Rip and Tear - If you’re not going crit/life steal, this is quite powerful and it might be even if you have those stats. The Explosions help thin out the enemy crowds, taking the pressure off you. Clover - Really a neat item. You want luck and Dodge, and you might not use life steal. Consumable Healing. Weird Food, Lemonade, Fruit Basket, Jerky. Even with negative luck I’m down for consumable healing. Melee Damage: You’re tagged for Melee Damage. So expect to see a lot in the shop. You start with +5, so you don’t need to be desperate for melee damage. The premium Items are Mastery, Little muscley dude. Defective steroids can also be fine. Scarf is great, if you can handle the hard wave. Goat skull is great if you’re dumping crit, otherwise dont. Avoid hedgehog, charcoal. Those are bad for the most part. Saver

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: D

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Chopper Thief Dagger Ghost Flint Pruner Lightning Shiv Cacti Club Spear Pistol Revolver Laser Gun Taser Wand Icicle Lute Sickle

Saver has a Rough start, and their starting weapons aren’t the greatest.

Spear - Great melee option. Upgrading isn’t super important. Just needs a bit of melee damage. Lightning Shiv is also quite powerful. Shiv can easily clear the map with little stat investments. Requires upgrading the weapons to higher tiers. Icicle - Great damage at safe Ranged option. Perhaps the easiest option. Revolver - Also a fine option. Strong tier 1 weapon. Lacks piercing, so look to get sharp bullet with attack speed, or add some shredders to the mix. Expensive weapon. Thief Dagger - Can be fun for the Money run, but can struggle with keeping up in DPS early. Sickle - You start with some harvesting, and it can scale nicely. Don’t start saving until you’ve got the 6 Sickles for the support weapon class. You’ll also need more range and it can be a bit hard early game.

Other Options Pistol can be fine. It is cheap and got piercing. But it lacks the raw dps compared to revolver or icicle. Fist - Cheap and deadly. Just needs some melee damage and it is good to go. However, fist doesn’t protect you much, and saver is often lacking defensive stats and relying on killing enemies instead of taking hits. So fist isn’t a great fit.

Strategy As the name suggests, the Saver is about saving money. You start with a piggy bank, and it will give you 20% of your saved money at the beginning of each wave. Furthermore you gain damage for each 25 materials you hold. (You gain +40% damage for each 1000 gold you hold.)

The Saver is very difficult, as it requires you to carefully manage your money and only spend money on Weapons/items you absolutely need. If an item costs 100 money, it is now 150 money with the Saver’s downside. That is +6% damage if you had kept the materials through your damage ability.

And you could’ve also held onto that 150 gold and it would increase with each wave. 150 -> 180 -> 216 ->259 ->311. Any money kept doubles in 4 waves.

The Saver can reach 5000-25000 gold late game depending on the situation. And you gain +40% damage for each 1000 gold you hold.

I like to have at least 1000 gold as I leave Shop 10. Once you get to 3-4k, you got enough dmg and can spend more money to up your defensive stats. (or just go full glass and save)

So the basic gameplay is to only buy 1-2 weapons per shop. Lock the absolutely best items. Then from shop 3 and onwards you can buy those items. Don’t reroll much, and just focus on saving up money. The later the game goes, the more you shop like a regular character.

Less Rerolling: Rerolling is throwing away money. And since you’re buying less items, you’re also rerolling less. Don’t need to save up too much: You don’t actually need to save up that much gold in the endgame. While you can have 20k+ for the wave 20 boss fight, you don’t need that much. 5k Gold is already +200% damage, which is more than enough. You’ll have a higher win percentage if you’re willing to also spend money later on and get your defenses in order for the late game. Glass Cannon: That said, I end up playing saver as a glass cannon. You’ll have so much damage that you’ll destroy bosses and elites before they can really hurt you. But if you find Padding, suddenly you’re quite tanky for free. Make sure you pick up materials: Unlike on other characters, you’re losing out on gold if you leave materials on the ground at the end of a wave, since you could’ve gotten a 20% return on it. Also, you deal more damage the more materials you have.

Stats Flat Damage (Melee/Ranged/Elemental): Flat damage is one of the best ways to increase your DPS early, so you still need to pick some up, depending on your weapon choice. %Damage: You rely on your ability for all the %Damage you need. Don’t waste upgrades on or buy items that give %dmg, you need the other stats. Max HP + Armor: Early game I take some Max HP and it is most of my defensive stats. Then later you get to shop more. Then you branch into Armor. Later I would optimally like to use Padding to cover my Max HP needs. Take a +5 harvesting early. You start with 15 harvesting. If you take another +5 Upgrade, it will push you to 20 plus the one you got from the end of the first wave. This puts you to 21 harvesting, which is the break point at which you gain +2 Harvesting at the end of each wave. Really neat for your economy. (Harvesting also gives XP, and saver needs those stat boosts) Items For Saver, you’ll be buying very few items in the early game, but then later you begin to shop more like a regular character.

So early game I’m looking for top quality items: Fertilizer, coffee, tree, etc..

Economy Items: Even on Saver, I still like Fertilizer, because it is that strong. But others like Coupon and Dangerous Bunny become quite questionable. While I normally rate them highly, here they cost +50% more gold and you are likely to earn more gold by just not buying anything. Saver also isn’t shopping a lot early, so coupons won’t be paying off for a looong time, at which point the saved up money would beat it out. You’re also not rerolling much, so bunny falls in value. Padding: The Saver’s own unlock, the padding is insanely powerful on Saver. It gives 10 HP per 800 gold you have, so it can easily give 50+ or more Max HP. Buy on sight. %DMG Items: Avoid items that give %DMG, while items that have -dmg as the downside become better. Sample Game Pretty standard game. Just focused on getting icicles in the shop, and then I picked up the good items I saw. I tried to limit my rerolling as much as possible to save money. I think I ended with around 10k gold. But once I got to 3-5k, It was more than enough damage to clear stuff. Padding is a powerhouse here, and gave around 100 HP. Icicle scale really well into the late game, and will melt the bosses^^. Just remember to upgrade them. Since they’re so safe and strong late game, you can afford to save up a bit less, and focus on being stronger early.

Sick

Difficulty: Easy Tier: A

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Scissors Hatchet Ghost Flint Cacti Club Lightning Shiv Sharp Tooth Pruner Ghost Scepter Slingshot SMG Medical Gun Sickle

My Choices are: The SMG or Slingshot are the easiest options. SMG - Gives you tons of Life Steal, just a ton of Ranged Damage, and sharp bullet. Slingshot - The +12 HP from Sick + the +15 HP from primitive along with life steal means you can just ignore defense until the mid to late game. Just get a healthy mix of all the offensive stats, and you should win with ease. Sharp Tooth - Good option, it looks stronger than it is. Sharp tooth’s damage scales with life steal, so it will deal a ton of damage, however the weapon is a bit awkward and it doesn’t heal much with life steal due to killing enemies in one big hit. This is the glass cannon option. You will have great dps, but less healing and you have to get up close. - When playing Sharp tooth you want to stack life steal high and ignore melee damage. Lightning Shiv is also great, as the bounces trigger life steal. You can go full elemental and pick up 1-2 flamethrowers along with the shivs. Flamethrowers are insane with lifesteal.

Other Options Cacti Club isn’t the best weapon, but the spines from the hits can trigger life steal, so you can really heal a ton using that build. Fists are fine as melee.

Don’t like Scissors and medical guns are kind of overkill, since they have much worse DPS than normal weapons. And you have the life steal anyway. Life steal have diminishing returns, so stacking it this high is kind of a waste. Strategy You have +12 HP and +25% lifesteal, and that more than makes up for the 1 damage taken per second. The additional HP and innate healing gives you a head start and allows you to be quite greedy for dps and harvesting/economic stats early on.

So outside of this, the gameplay is quite vanilla. Stats Armor & Dodge. Since you’re going to be healing quite a bit, Armor and dodge can be powerful since they multiply the value of your healing. I often find myself just going with armor, but dodge is certainly about as strong as on most characters. Max HP: You start with a bit extra, but since you tick down and lifesteal can be a bit inconsistent, I really want to have about 15-20 more Max HP than on a normal build. Having a buffer is nice, since Sick often gets into trouble. Attack speed is always good, but it is extra good with lifesteal. The other damage stats have regular value. Life Steal has diminishing returns. You can only heal 1 HP per 0.1 Second. So if you have SMG, you’re already pushing most of that. I don’t mind going higher, but you don’t need to buy random Bats and Butterflies in the shop early (Fresh Meat is the best option of the tier 1 life steal items for you). Focus on your other stats. If you’re playing Sharp Tooth. Stack it, because they scale quite well with it. Items Dump HP Regen: Since you have -100 HP regen, negative hp regen items are great. Broken mouth, Poisonous tonic, Shaky Potion. Don’t take Triangle of Power. You’ll lose 2% damage per second. Weird Ghost and Tardigrade are also bad, but they’re restricted on Sick, so they won’t show up before endless mode. Doc moth - The Healing Pet is insane for Sick. Double life steal healing from just 1 tier two item is great. It is better for ranged builds, as standing in the circle is quite restricting for melee. Blood Donation and Bloody Hand are powerful on Sick as you can support the additional damage. The Bloody Hand is especially powerful, as it usually will give +70% damage or more. Be more careful about blood donation. You might not be able to handle it. Sharp Bullet - Getting the extra pierce means extra life steal. Great option if you have a weapon without innate piercing. Still ok on slingshot for life steal. Goblet / Tentacle - Goblet is amazing since you ignore the down side, and it helps you stay healthy during long waves. Tentacle does the same except better if you are doing a crit build. Like Lightning shiv or Sharp tooth. Kraken Eye: Your self damage will trigger it all the time. Making it quite decent. Salt Water: Your self damage triggers it all the time, so at worst this item is just +10% speed which is amazing. Jerky: Sick often ends up wasting consumable healing because you suck it up even if you just have lost 1 hp. Jerky fixes this issue while also granting a ton of healing. Decomposing Flesh - Strong option for Life steal. If you want more life steal, this is a great way to get it, if you get Flesh early. However, I wouldn’t be stacking them unless playing sharp tooth. Remember the diminishing returns. Farmer

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Hand Spear Stick Torch Quarterstaff Screwdriver Pruner Thief Dagger Wrench Taser Wand Double Barrel Shotgun Slingshot Potato Thrower Lute Sickle

Farmer is quite tied to Harvesting and Consumables, so your good weapon options are quite narrow:

Pruner - Spawns gardens that spawn consumables. Has the support tag for +25 Harvesting. Provides a ton of healing while also boosting your economy by an insane amount. Sickle - Scales with Harvesting, has the support tag. Allows you to just go crazy on Harvesting and have the Sickles provide the DPS.

These two are simply quite a bit better than your other options. You can also start pruner for the extra Harvesting and add Sickles as you find them for DPS.

There’s other options that are great weapons, but you might struggle with keeping up the economy: Spear, Stick, Quarterstaff - Fine melee options. Shotgun, Slingshot - Fine ranged options. Screwdriver, Wrench - For the Engineering build - A bit rough. Lute - Provides Harvesting and Luck, which means more consumables. So it is quite decent, but can struggle with Damage. Thief Dagger - Same story, it gives money, so it can help you make up for the -50%. But it doesn’t interact with harvesting, and it has less DPS.

Strategy Farmer is a weird one. He can spiral completely out of control with thousands of Harvesting, but also fall flat and end up behind if you don’t get enough Harvesting. Basically, your economy from enemy drops is halved, and you have some harvesting benefits that have to make up for that.

+20 Harvesting. - This secures your early game. +3% Increased Increments - This is a neat smaller version of the Crown. +1 Harvesting from each Consumable you pickup while at full HP. Tagged for Harvesting - You find more Harvesting items in the shop.

The Farmer plays out pretty vanilla except that you have to pick up enough harvesting to make up for your -50% less materials dropped. The +20 harvest gives you a huge head start. Gaining you much more material and exp on the first wave compared to other characters. But you need to reinvest those upgrades and extra money in more harvesting.

End of Wave consumable harvesting:Consumables are picked up at the end of the wave. If you have 100 consumables on the ground at the end of the wave, you miss out on 100 materials from the harvesting stat. However, the consumables are picked up and added to your harvesting stat before the 8% harvesting increase is calculated, so you don’t miss out on that. Stay at max HP: Farmer heavily rewards skill. If you can evade enemies and not take damage, you gain more Harvesting from Consumables.

Using Pruners: Pruners can be a bit difficult to use. They don’t have amazing damage or range. But they offer gardens and +25% harvesting from the Support tag. Pruners have some extra Crit chance, but they don’t really have synergy with crit. So I don’t prioritize crit. Instead I mostly focus on getting some Melee Damage. Don’t mind the 50% scaling, it gets better, and it's still the best stat in the early game for scaling your Damage. I also love a bit of extra Range, and ofc boosting the Attack Speed. That also sets you up for Improved Tools.

Items Penguins: Gives HP regen when picking up consumables at Max HP. Perfect for you. Buy all you see. Cauldron: Gives you +20% Damage for 2 seconds when picking up consumables and some nice pickup range. Quite Worth it. Garden - Spawns Consumables, that’s a lot of harvesting potentially. Improved Tools - If you have Pruners, or Gardens in General, Improved Tools makes them drop more consumables. Can be super powerful. Crown - Makes your Harvesting scale by 8% more per wave. If you can find Crown and also boost your Harvesting, it can gain you so much money that you just snowball out of control. Consumable Healing - Since you’re picking up so many Consumables, you should buy every Weird Food and Lemonade that you see. Harvesting Items: Fertilizer, Tractor, are insane. Even with the downsides. Jerky - I’m a bit torn on this. The healing is great, but if you run into a garden and pick up 3-5 fruits, normally you would instantly heal, and if you only needed 1-2 for full healing, the rest would give harvesting. But if you have Jerky, the Healing is delayed, so you lose out on some harvesting.

Stats You need all the standard offensive and defense stats, but farmer has a bit of a different relationship with his economic stats. HP Regen over Life Steal - Pruner at least is better with HP Regen. Having Healing helps you not waste Consumables. I then just dump Life steal for the Plant, Bean Teacher, and Clover. Luck is slightly better on Farmer than other characters. The extra Consumables dropped means more harvesting, and there are several Key Tier 3 items that Farmer really can use. Buy those Lucky Ducks at least. Harvesting: You gotta get it high, as mentioned. But remember not to break yourself trying to get it. There is a limit to how high you should value it. Ghost

Difficulty: Hard Tier: D

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Ghost Flint Ghost Axe Ghost Scepter

All three options are fine. You can go 6 axes, Flint, or Scepters, or mix. You can mix Flint and Axes for a melee build that gives both %Dmg and Attack speed. 2-2-2 Mixed Build: Some players also like going 2-2-2 of each weapon early for a good stat mix. Rely on your +10 Damage to make this viable. You don’t need more Ranged Damage for this build. If you are mixing, start with Axe, as it is more expensive.

Ghost Scepter Build: Personally I like going 6 scepters, since it gives you a ton of HP for the late game. However, the build requires you to stack a lot of DPS to keep up with the enemies. You need a sharp bullet, tons of attack speed, and some ranged damage + good amount of %dmg. On this build you can basically forego defensive stats due to the amount of Max HP you have. Like a weird golem run. Strategy Your gameplay is to get maxed dodge, while using ghost weapons to farm stats. You have to get more Max hp to compensate for your armor.

Ghost can be a bit scary to play, because a few unlucky hits can end the run if you have too little Max HP. Dodging 90% of the time can make you careless, because it seems like you can just stand in a crowd of enemies and just

Switch Weapons Late game: The Ghost weapons have terrible DPS, so you can replace them late game for other weapons. But if you do, remember that you lose 6% dodge, due to the set bonus. So make sure you don’t go under 90% Legendary Weapons: Ghost weapons aren’t the best late game, so if you can find a legendary weapon late game, it can be a super powerful dps upgrade. Scythe is also an ethereal weapon, making it easier to show up. Excalibur’s Armor downside is meaningless to the Ghost, making it a super powerful option.

Dodge and Ghost

You start with 30% dodge, and gain another 30% from the Ghost weapons. It is very important to get to 90% dodge, as being hit 40% of the time is 4 times worse than being hit 10% of the time. But you don’t need to rush it. During the early game, you can survive without the dodge, while you get your stats and economy going. But I want to be at 90% for the midgame.

At 90% Dodge, and -100 Armor, the ghost has 534% effective Hit Points, which is the same as a character with 0% dodge and 65 armor. So you are technically quite tanky. But there are several downsides. Since you take 0 damage from dodges, it often makes you feel immortal, since you are at 100% hit points… Until you aren’t. Don’t let Hybris get you. Play safely, even if you’re at full hp. Stats Don’t need to buy stat: When using Ghost Axe, you don’t have to buy %Dmg. Same with Ghost Flint and Attack Speed, and Ghost Scepter with Max HP. (If you mix the weapons you might still want to buy the better options for those stats.) Consumable healing is very powerful on Ghost, since you can store consumable healing on the ground until you take damage. Look for lemonades. If you have enough dodge, you can pick up some weird food. It is worth the -2 Dodge. Luck: If you rely on Consumable healing, consider getting slightly more luck. Max HP: You need a larger Max HP to compensate for the randomness of dodge. You should be able to take at least 2 hits in a row. You can expect the end bosses to deal about 56 damage with their projectiles. If you have under 112 hp, you can be killed by two hits in a row. If you have under 90 max HP, it becomes hard to heal above the 56 that you need to survive another hit. (Melee Hits are 77 Dmg, so oof) Negative Armor: Unlike positive armor, Negative armor has huge diminishing returns. Being at -90, -100, or -120 Armor makes no difference at all. It is the difference between taking 87% or 88% Extra damage. - This means you can pick up all the negative armor you want. And that you shouldn’t try to increase your armor.

Items Negative armor items are a good pickup: Gambling Token, Glass Cannon, Sunglasses, Wheelbarrow, Community Support. You ignore the downside. Tardigrade was made for Ghost. But it still only saves you from 1 hit. It can be a fine addition if you’re not that tanky. But if you have 150+ hp, it isn’t that good. Fertilizer, Peaceful Bee: I like picking up some early negative melee damage items which are Fertilizer and Peaceful Bee. You start with +10, so you’ll be fine. The stats of those two items are great for you. Adrenaline is Insane on Ghost, always buy, even if you already have maxed Dodge. Not Riposte: I’m not a big Fan of Riposte, it barely does any damage, but you can try it out if you want. It is fine from a crate for the melee damage. On a Ghost axe build, you can stack Riposte for some meme boss damage potential. Not Armor Items: Avoid items that mostly give armor: Leather Vest, Metal Plate, Warrior Helmet. Not Stone Skin: And whatever you do, don’t buy Stone Skin… It will instantly put your Max HP to 1. Speedy

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Knife Thief Dagger Spear Screwdriver Wrench Shuriken Stick Jousting Lance Fighting Stick

My Picks

Shuriken - Scales quite well with melee damage. The weapon clears the map nicely, making it easier to run around at full speed. Remember to get the Crit maxed out. The tier 4 version has 45% innate crit, so you need 55% to get it to 100%. Jousting Lance - Seems like the Perfect fit for speedy. Scales with speed, gives speed. Certainly really powerful. But it also only scales 50% with melee damage. Still, it is really powerful with speedy. Just don’t stand still. Spear - Longer range and better melee scaling. Spear is a viable alternative to the Jousting lance.

Strategy Speedy starts out fast and with a lot of damage. So it is a good opportunity to go glass cannon. Get more attack speed, %Dmg, weapons. Invest in Harvest and Luck. And then worry about defense later.

The main things to learn about speedy, is to navigate at high speeds, and not to stand still. Once you get these down, speedy is just a character that starts with a bunch of free stats.

Fix your Armor: Having Negative armor hurts. You should aim to get that -3 into a normal 10-20 range later in the game. Don’t invest in melee damage: Since you get melee damage from speed, you don’t need to invest in it. Only pick up the best of the best melee damage you're offered. Otherwise focus on other stats. Don’t stand still. If you hold down both the left and the right button at the same time, you’ll stop. So be careful how you move. Power Generator is overpowered on you. Always buy. Max Speed While getting more speed gives you melee damage, you shouldn’t push yourself above a speed you can handle. If you go too high, you might just start running into stuff and die. I would recommend 50-100% speed.

Entrepreneur

Difficulty: Hard Tier: S

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold)

Fist Claw Hand Knife Thief Dagger Pruner Quarterstaff Hatchet Ghost Flint Wrench Plank Hiking Stick Lute Sickle Pistol Shotgun Taser Shuriken Crossbow Icicle

Support Weapons: These get the +50% harvesting, which is insanely strong. If in doubt, this is a great choice. Sickle - The new Hotness, a support weapon which scales with Harvesting for its damage. This can reach insane dps for entrepreneur. But it might need a bit of range to help it out. The sickle is broken for Entrepreneur. Pruner - Gives a good amount of healing early, which will get you through, you can pivot to sickles after. Hiking Stick - Support weapon with spear range, decent early game. It will scale its own base damage by increasing its range, so you get around the -50% downside, and you can buy more range to help it.

Quarterstaff - I would take this and hope to find Spear, Lance, Trident, and other powerful melee weapons and just run a mixed build. Note that it scales with levels, which you’ll have a ton of. Wrench - Allows you to ignore the -50% damage downside, since structures don’t use those stats.You can look at the Engineer character for more details on how to build an engineering build.

Other options Crossbow - Uses range, crit and attack speed a lot. So it isn’t punished as much by the -50% damage. Thief Dagger - Can be fun for a high roll money run, but it makes your early game even weaker. And -50% Damage is rough here. Icicle - A strong elemental option. Scales well with tiers, so you can focus on getting weapons to scale your DPS. Taser/Lute - Support weapons. So they’re still powerful options.

You have -50% modifier to damage. So weapons that scale heavily with flat damage are worse. For example Shotgun.

Strategy The Entrepreneur is a quite difficult economic character. You lose all your gold at the start of each wave, so you have to spend it all at each shop. But once it gets going, Entrepreneur is one of the strongest characters in the game.

Weak Earlygame: Your Early game is quite weak. You start with less money, you have to invest in harvesting, and your Dmg gains are halved. So just make sure you pick up enough weapons early to handle the waves, and make it out alive. The harvesting will carry you later! Spend all your money: You lose all the materials you have at the beginning of each wave. So you need to buy items and reroll until all your money is gone. You need to learn when to buy a bad item, and when to take a really expensive reroll. Recycling: Normally you get 25% back when recycling. Entrepreneur gets 50%. If you buy Recycling Machine, it becomes 85%. Consider getting more luck for crates at this point. It is worth noting that your lower shop prices also lower the recycling value.This also means you can switch weapons a bit cheaper Buying out the Shop: When the rerolls are expensive, you can instead buy out all the items to get a free reroll. If there’s weapons in the shop you can recycle them and get 50-85% of the money back. Stats Get harvesting: You need to invest in harvest and get an insane economy to make up for your downsides. Look for harvesting in the early upgrades and items. Fertilizer is amazing. Damage Stats: When Flat damage and % Damage is halved, Attack speed and crit becomes stronger options to scale your damage.Since you have to spend all your money each shop, you often end up with a lot of random items ,and in turn, stats. So you’re less likely to have dump stats. Another way to up your damage is also simply to Secondary Dmg Stats: Pumpkin, Dynamite and the like, are also halved in effect. (But they are still good in the right situations) Items Crown: The best item you can find. Any Harvesting you gain from Crown is also increased by 50%, allowing you spiral out of control if you find the Crown Early. Harvesting Items: Fertilizer, Tractor, Blood Donation, Bowler Hat, Wheat, Wheelbarrow. You need to buy these and stack up your Harvesting. Recycling Machine: This brings the recycling value from 50% to 85%. Making recycling Crates super powerful on the Entrepreneur. Economy Items: You are tagged for them. Buy any Coupon, Dangerous Bunny, Bag you see. Lure: Entrepreneur gains additional money from recycling Crates. Making Lure really powerful, if you manage to get enough damage to handle it. Not Piggybank: Piggybank makes you gain 20% of your materials at the beginning of a wave, but Entrepreneur loses 100%. So with Piggy Bank you just lose 80% instead. Don’t Buy Piggy Bank on Entrepreneur. Fish Hook - Since you end up rerolling all your money away, you often have good items locked for the next shop, making Fish hook quite decent. Baby Squid/Decomposing Flesh/barnacle - Entrepreneur usually gets a ton of levels due to the large amount of harvesting. So consider items that center around leveling up. Engineer

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Wrench Screwdriver Plank Hammer

Wrench is the way to go. Screwdriver can also be powerful. Plank and Hammer aren’t great.

You can go 6x of either Wrench or Screwdriver for a more clean build, but there’s also merit to mixing them to enjoy a shop where you can use more of the weapons you see. Strategy The plan is to just get a bunch of turrets, engineering stat, and then just tank up so you can survive.

The Nest: Your Turrets spawn in a cluster somewhere on the Map. This is your Nest. It will protect you, but it also means that you’re weaker away from it. If you’re playing with screwdrivers, you’ll have more weapon DPS, and also have more mines around the map. But engineering is most often played with wrenches. So

You will have to survive, evading enemies under your turrets. So pick up good amounts of speed, HP regen (Or Luck and Consumable Healing), Armor and dodge.

It might be worth reading the Wiki Page on Structures.

Blue/Fire/Tier 2 turrets’ burn doesn’t stack. So you want to upgrade your wrenches past blue, instead of having 6 blue wrenches. The Engineer’s Ability to make Turrets cluster really makes Blue turrets worse in general.

Stats Primary Stats: Structures - Landmines and Turrets don’t work with primary stats. So you can ignore Crit and %Dmg. The exception is of course the Engineering stat, which increases the base damage of landmines and Turrets. Engineering Upgrades: Items are the more efficient source of engineering. Though the +2 tier 1 engineering upgrade is decent. So take that +3 Armor over +4 Engineering when choosing upgrades. Rely on Items instead. Healing: Structures can’t life steal, so dump that stat. Focus on HP Regen and Consumable Healing, the usual. Economy: Engineer has a powerful start. So I like getting the Harvesting engine going.

Improved Tools: Lets your Structures scale with 50% of your Attack Speed. While 50% might not seem great, it is quite powerful because it is a new multiplier. The issue is that you’re not likely to pickup attack speed. Pile of Books: Lets your structures scale with your Crit stat. It gives decent stats, and is only tier 2. This means you can find it earlier than improved tools. And it’s the full crit, not 50% of your Crit. So I’m more hyped about this.

So for Attack speed and Crit - I think Crit is the stronger item option. But both depend on how early you find them. There’s plenty of great items you can find that gives negative Attack Speed and/or Crit. If you find Improved tools at wave 15 while you have -20% attack speed, it’s just too late.

Items The Engineering Archetype has a lot of key items to look out for. Many items can affect your turrets. Getting the right items can improve your run drastically.

Engineering Items often have downsides that don't matter to you. They are quite cost efficient and should be your main source of engineering. Look for Pencil, Book, Toolbox, Cog, Compass, Metal Detector, Shackles, Exoskeleton, Robot Arm, Diploma. Turret Items: Look for the turrets in the shop: Tyler, Healing turret, and the other turrets are great. They are a way for you to scale beyond the 6 turrets you have from your weapon slots. Bot-O-Mine - The Engineering pet follows you, drops mines and attacks. A great pickup for you. Pocket Factory can also be really powerful, but it requires you to leave the engineering Nest. If you have multiple tree items it becomes good. But I also want a lumberjack shirt to make sure I can kill the trees quickly. On screwdriver builds, this isn’t an issue. Shackles: Shackles are insanely powerful on engineering builds for the +8 Engineering and the +8 HP Regeneration. So find out how much speed you’re comfortable with for the endgame. I like having 20-25%. Others like higher. Metal Detector: I think this item is quite underrated. Just from the +6 and +2 Engineering, you’re already getting a fine deal. But the +5% material drops usually means +10 to +25 materials per wave. I really like it on Engineering builds. Economy: Since you dump all those stats, many defense and economy items become better: Bowler hat, Cape, fertilizer, Lucky Charm, Metal Plate, Panda, Peaceful bee, Shmoop, Tractor. Sharp Bullet: Since Engineer has -50% Dmg modifications, sharp bullet only reduces the piercing damage by 10%. (So the pierce will do 40% damage on the pierce). I’m very happy to pick up Sharp bullet, since it boosts Tier 1 and Tier 4 Turrets. Tier 2 turrets are unaffected, and tier 3 is slightly nerfed. Bandana and Ricochet are amazing for you if you are using Wrenches. The -%damage doesn’t matter, so you pick these up cheaply. If you already have Sharp Bullet, Bandana isn’t very good, but Ricochet is still super powerful. Explosives: Both Landmines and the Tier 4 Turret scale with Explosive damage and size. So look for Dynamites, Explosive Shells, and Plastic Explosives. If you’re a screwdriver build, you want to stack these items. If you’re wrenches, you might want to skip the dynamite in the early shops, but I want them later on during the mid-late game.

Structure interactions Small Fish: Works with Structures. If you aren’t using improved tools, you get to ignore the downside. It’s a cheap way to get a small damage multiplier. Ugly Tooth works with your turrets (And landmines) and keeps enemies within range of your turrets for longer, and makes it easier to dodge enemies. Explorer

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Screwdriver Stick Torch Chopper Plank Hatchet Crossbow Shredder Taser Wand

Explorer has several starting options. Shredders are a neat choice, as they are great at killing trees and large groups of enemies. You can easily make up for the -40% damage with explosion damage. Look to upgrade with Rocket Launcher and Nuclear Launcher later. Sticks, as they will deal a lot of damage early and are cheap. Helping you get through the rough start. Cacti Club gives +25% damage, and +15 Max HP with the Set Bonus, which is super good for you. The spines also cuts down trees all over the map.

Other Options: Screwdriver - Going for an engineering build can also be quite strong. The early game isn’t the best, but if you find pocket factory, it can be insanely strong. Picking up Wrenches is also fine. Choppers can be fun for the insane Consumable Healing. However the short range and low damage makes it hard to clear the large groups of enemies. Taser can be good for an elemental build, but has a rough start. You won’t be killing a lot of enemies, but the Support Tag will boost your income. Pick up Flamethrowers later. You can also mix in an early torch for knockback and spreading fire. Pocket Factory is insane with burn builds if you can find Scared Sausage. Pacifist: Explorer can also go for a more pacifist playstyle. Start with Taser, build some hands. You just focus on defensive stats and farm trees. Remember to stack some harvesting. Strategy The explorer can feel like playing a different game. The map is huge, there are more enemies, but they drop less materials. You start with -40% damage. Most importantly There is a ton of trees spawning.

For the Explorer, your first goal each wave is to move around and kill trees for profit. Killing enemies is still a good source of income, but it isn’t your first priority.

For Explorer, some items are really important. Bags and Recycling Machine are completely busted on you, and you should be looking for them. Once you have them, you begin earning much more money.

Trees: You start with +12 to your tree stat, which is the same as having 12 of the tree item. That means that every 10 seconds, 4-5 trees will spawn. Normally trees spawn each 10 seconds into the wave. So you get the first spawn after 10 seconds and the next after 20. Explorer has an ability that makes the first wave of trees spawn at the beginning of the wave. The next spawn is still after 20 seconds. You can read more on the wiki on odds for tree spawning.

Have Area Damage: More enemies spawn, and you deal less damage. That often causes big groups of enemies to pile up in the middle of the map as you move around them. Make sure your build has a way of dealing with these big Stats Consumable healing: Each tree drops a consumable. More enemies spawn, and the -50% materials doesn’t apply to consumable drops. So yeah, a mega ton of consumables drop. This is your primary form of healing. You better be buying every lemonade and weird food you see. Or I’m taking away your Brotato privileges. Adding some HP regen or life steal is also fine. I mostly go HP Regen. Big Map, Fast Speed: The Map is huge. This makes the Speed stat much stronger. On one side it allows you to get to more trees, and also collect more materials. But the huge map also means larger gaps in between enemies. Note that some elite abilities have limited range, and you can just completely outrun the danger of a lot of the elites. I like getting the Speed %DMG: You start with -40% Damage. You should attempt to get this fixed, otherwise you’ll struggle to deal damage. Negative %Dmg is very punishing. Items

Recycling Machine: Is insanely powerful - it increases the amount items recycle for from 25 to 25%+35% = 60%. This makes it much stronger than the tool tip might seem. Explorer recycles a lot of items from crates, and this provides 140% more money from that. Bag: Bags can catapult your run into easy mode. They can provide you with so much money. Tree: Even if you already have a lot, more trees is still awesome, because you are built to take advantage of it. Explosions: If going shredders/screwdrivers look for Plastic Explosives, Explosive Shells, Dynamite Power generator: You lack %DMG, but have a ton of Speed. Quite the match. Pocket Factory: Pocket Factory is great. It spawns turrets for every tree, which means it will spawn 4-5 turrets every 10 seconds for you. Even if you don’t go for Engineering, that’s still a good amount of free damage. And the turrets also kill trees for you. Lighthouse - Pocket Factory counts as 1 structure even if you spawn 100 turrets. So you can take Lighthouse if you have pocket factory for the +19 Engineering, which is quite worth it. Engineering Burn Builds: Explorer can do some cool things by combining Engineering and Elemental build. A regular melee or ranged build will also do fine, if not better, but this is fun. Understanding how these builds function is key to make Explorer be super strong. Key players are items like Pocket factory - spawns turrets when you kill trees, Strange Book - converts elemental damage into engineering. And Snake - spreads the flames. The Book item will provide both stats. Treasure Map - You’re getting Crates all the time, so treasure maps are likely to pay themselves off. Doctor

Difficulty: Very Easy Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Scissors Medical Gun Strategy

As the doctor you have 2 options. Melee build, where you go Scissors. Here, you can hope for the Circular Saw, which is basically just much stronger scissors.

For Medigun, you hope to pick up a bandana, Sharp Bullet, or ricochet to help with the area clear. Baby with a beard can also do it.

Stats

Attack Speed: The +200% attack speed and -100% cancel out, so you have +100% with medical weapons. You have -100% with all other weapons. So stick with medical weapons.

You can still pick up more Attack speed, but the value is effectively halved, since you’re already attacking at double speed. Medigun needs it more than Scissors/Circular Saw.

Great Healing: You’ll have a lot of LIfe steal from your weapons. And your HP Regen is doubled. You can dump the life steal stat with little to no loss, since your weapons basically already max it out (It can only trigger once per 0.1 second). Since you have so much healing from the get go, I don’t focus much on healing early. What Healing to get. I still want to end up with a lot of HP Regen in the late game. So I’m looking for Plant, and some of the big HP Regen items later. You can dump Consumable healing for some alien worms, if you don’t want to use consumable healing. DPS Stats Ranged: When using Medigun, it has a quite high base damage for a ranged weapon, so ranged damage isn’t super important. Focus on getting %DMG. Get crit from insanity and Sunglasses. Then look for some ranged damage and Attack speed when you see a good option. DPS Stats Melee: When using Scissors or Circular saw, they have super low base damage, but scale well with melee damage. So Stack melee damage like crazy. Scissors and Saw both have some base Crit, so don’t focus on that. %Dmg is also important. Armor/Dodge: Your survivability is lacking due to the half armor. You should still pick up the good armor options. And aim for 60% dodge. Dodge is going to be your best source of Damage mitigation during the later waves and boss fight. Max HP: Since your armor is halved, I like to have a bit higher Max HP, so that I’m not instantly killed in two hits before my healing can kick in and save me. It also helps prevent unlucky dodge streaks from killing you. Attack Speed Breakpoints: The Attack speed skill got some breakpoints. You start at 100%. There’s a big increase at 101% You always want to at least pick that one up. There’s still a good amount of benefit to be gained from going higher, but there’s diminishing returns at play. Items Weird Ghost and Sad Tomato are good, since you quickly heal back up to full. Blood Donation can give you a ton of harvesting, and you can easily sustain the damage. Bloody hand is also great for this reason. Regeneration potion is super powerful if you can find it. Makes you heal 4 per tick while 50% or lower. Fairy and Medikit are just generally insane HP Regen Items. Doc Moth: Doubles all your healing, quite insane. Really powerful for the ranged build. Still powerful for the melee build, but having to stay within the circle is more difficult. Not Rip and Tear’s Explosions can mess with your lifesteal. So I’m out. Baby with a Beard: This is neat on the other hand, since it helps a medigun build clear the stage.

Hunter

Difficulty: Hard Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Thief Dagger Spear Claw Scissors Hiking Pole Shuriken Crossbow Shotgun Icicle Javlin

The Hunter was made for Crossbows, and Crossbows were made for the Hunter.

Shuriken: Struggles a bit more early, but it scales well into the late game. You’ll have to get a ton of melee damage tho. Fun build Icicle: The elemental crit build. Look for eye patch to help you out with the crowds of enemies. That said, Shuriken is decent and Thief Dagger / Spear can be fun.

Hiking Pole: It is decent because you start with a ton of range, and the range you gain also gives %damage. But you’re losing out on the Harvesting, and the pole has a 1.5 crit modifier, which is awful. (If you see a sniper gun later on, buy it and enjoy the insane dmg) Thief Dagger: A bit harder to get going, but you’ll have insane economy later on. Strategy The hunter is one of the best glass cannons. Your Hit Points are crippled, but you can dish out immense damage at long range.

Hunter can be a hard character to learn, since you’ll need to be evading projectiles and not get hit. You can rely on your damage and range to keep yourself safe, but Elites and Bosses can be tough.

You need to decide how tanky you’re going to go. If you’re skilled or find some tardigrades, you can try to completely ignore defenses all together and go glass cannon. You will have insane DPS, but likely die to an elite/boss or random bullet. I like to ignore defenses for the first 5-9 waves on hunter and then get tanky enough to survive about 2-3 hits.

Sniper Gun: If you’re going crossbows, you can pick up sniper rifles along the way. Sniper Gun is a super powerful weapon. But you need a lot of range, and it only has a base Crit Chance of 20%, so you’ll need more Crit. Also, Sniper Gun requires you to have at least 1 piercing or Bounce before it is good, so have that in mind. But if you manage to get these things, Snipers can outperform crossbows by a ton! But there are also cases where you don’t need it. So it isn’t always worth the investment. Healing: I really want to rely on consumable healing. Hunter spends most of their time at 100% hp, and then is hit one time down to low hp. So you want burst healing. Consumables are perfect for this. Stats

Range Instead of Ranged Damage: Range is much better than Ranged damage for Crossbows. If you pick +2 ranged damage upgrade, it only gives +1 damage with the crossbow, however the same tier +30 range upgrade gives +3 damage and +3% damage. In the case of Sniper Gun, it is even more extreme. Range If not Crossbow: If you’re using other weapons, that don't scale their damage with Range, you shouldn’t value Range very highly. The +10% %Dmg is neat, but not enough. And if you already have +100, it should cover a lot of your needs. However, Hunter is still low HP, so it might be a tactic to pick up more of the good Range stat options you see and get to +200ish, where you effectively are playing a ranged build with melee weapons. It is important to get to 100% crit, so your weapons pierce/bounce on each hit, but don’t take a 3% crit upgrade over 10% attack speed. You’ll get there, stay efficient with your choices. Crit needed: Red/Tier 4 Crossbow has 45% crit, so you need to aim for 55%. Same for Shuriken. Thief Dagger is 40% Attack Speed: Crossbows don’t get better attack speed as they are upgraded, and are pretty slow, so you need to get more attack speed to compensate. The other weapons also want a decent amount of attack speed. Dodge & Defense: Dodge can sometimes struggle when you have lower Max HP. Since it takes less hits to kill you, you’re more prone to unlucky streaks of not dodging. Also, Hunter is usually busy with getting enough offensive stats. Just stick with some armor and a good amount of Max HP. %Damage: You’ll a good chunk from range, but head injury and cyclops worm aren’t as good for you. So look out for options like gentle alien/injection/bone dice - All great glass cannon items.

Items Range: If you’re using Crossbow, you need to look for Glasses, Wings, Baby Gecko, Banner, poisonous tonic, night goggles. Tons of great options. I’m not big on scope. Shackles: This is insane for you. 80 Range and 8 HP Regen is great. I like to lock them, and then forcing a speed upgrade before buying them in the next shop Non-Harvesting Economy: You can’t gain harvesting, which is a really powerful stat. Look for alternative income options like bag, tree, recycling machine. Hunting Trophy: Insane for you, one of the strongest items you can find as it bass boosts your economy. Lootworm: This pet is quite neat. I like it generally, but here it helps giving you a bit extra economy and it helps picking up hard to get materials which can be difficult sometimes on a long range build. XP gain: Scar isn’t as great, but Bean teacher is awesome, Celery Tea can also be quite powerful early, since you might have enough damage to handle it. Similarly, a glass cannon build ignores the peacock downside. Tentacles are a super powerful way to heal if you can find them. Basically an always buy on crit builds. Tardigrade: If you’re going glass cannon, Tardigrade can be powerful. Glass Cannon: If you’re going glass cannon, gummy berserker, Community support, and Glass cannon can be powerful items to allow you to kill everything before you take a hit. Crystal/Triangle of power: If you can pull off the glass cannon build, these provide quite a bit of stats.

Artificer

Difficulty: Hard Tier: C Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Plank Shredder Screwdriver Wrench

Shredder is the default option. Good safe ranged damage. Get a bit of ranged damage early. And try to get some attack speed. Plank is also quite good. It takes a little more skill to not get hit, but you can stack elemental damage for some really big explosions. Wrench: Artificer got updated to have +100% damage with tools. So you can use wrench and screwdriver now! Your explosive turrets just have +175% damage since they’re not affected by regular %Dmg. So the goal is just to upgrade your wrenches to Tier 4 as fast as you dare. Screwdriver: Perhaps one of the most fun builds in the game. Try it out. Your mines deal +175% damage. The key to winning with screwdrivers is to get some explosion size. But also don’t forget to stack some engineering.

Higher Tier Explosive Weapons: When you’re using plank and shredder, you want to be looking out for the powerful higher tier explosive weapons you can find in the shop: Rocket Launcher, Nuclear Launcher, Power Fist, and Plasma Sledgehammer. These are really powerful. Shredder is mostly looking for the ranged options, while plank is fine with the melee options and the nuke. Strategy The Artificer is a bit of a glass cannon centered around explosions.

You have -100% damage but deal 175% extra explosion damage. So that means you deal 75% bonus damage with explosive weapons, but 1 damage with all non explosive weapons. You can stack elemental damage for bigger explosions.

But these powerful upsides come at the detrimental downside of -50% armor modification.

So stick with explosions. Use Dynamite and Explosive Shells as your main source of bonus damage. Since you already start with +75%. %Damage is otherwise a low priority. No matter what build, attack speed is super powerful and is the key stat to increase. Crit also works with explosions, so it is useful in all builds

The plan is to just blow up all enemies with a rather glass cannon build.

Explosion Opacity: You can scale the opacity of Explosions in the gameplay menu. This is very useful, so that you don’t get blinded by all those explosions.

Stats % Damage: You start with +175% - 100% = +75% DMG while using explosive weapons. So %DMG is already a lower priority. You can find really cheap Explosive damage through Dynamite, which you should be buying. Regular %DMG options aren’t as effective, or needed, so I would skip many of them. Attack Speed: I really like attack speed. Works great with all weapons, and it really helps those long cooldown weapons protect you better. Try to get a good amount of it throughout the game. Flat Damage: Both Plank and Shredder like some flat damage early to get their base damage up, so look for some Ranged Damage. On Plank I’m mostly looking for melee or elemental damage. However, Rocket Launchers and Nuclear launchers scale much less with flat damage, so if you get some of those, flat damage stops being important. Elemental Damage: Getting Explosion Size through elemental damage can be decent if you’re picking up the good elemental items, but don’t buy every +elemental damage you see. The benefit is good, but don’t bend over backwards to get it. Plastic explosives are more efficient. But it is fun to see how big your explosions can get. So I don’t blame you if you just go crazy. Planks: However if you use Planks, you can scale with elemental damage, and then pick up Strange Book for even more scaling. So in that case, go crazy. Nuclear launchers And Plasma Sledgehammers also scale with Elemental Damage, making it even better. Healing: Avoid Life steal. It doesn’t work with explosions. Rely on HP Regeneration and consumable healing. Defenses: Normally, Armor is the strongest defensive stat. For you it is halved. I still want some armor. So you should still look for some of the stronger options. If you see a higher tier upgrade, or leather armor for example. You can go into Dodge if you want to be more tanky, and also get a bit more Max HP. But on the other hand, Artificer can also just be a bit of a glass cannon. On melee builds, it is harder to get away with glass builds. Crit: Critical hits work with weapon explosions, but not Spicy Sauce or Rip and Tear. So it is just about as effective as on other builds. Except that crits might be quite overkill on the High damage per hit of the Tier 2+ Explosive weapons. A Plasma Sledgehammer or nuclear launcher already kills most enemies in a single hit. So I wouldn’t invest too much into crit unless you get some of the synergy items such as Hunting Trophy or Tentacle. If you’re doing Screwdrivers, I would focus on crit and try to find Pile of Books. Items Mutation/Book - The hybrid items that provide both Ranged/Elemental and Engineering/Elemental are quite useful in their respective builds. Handcuffs: Look for Handcuffs late game. They are quite powerful for double +8 stats. Spicy Sauce can actually do some good damage, if you manage to stack them. But the first one isn’t super good. Rip and Tear can become crazy on plank builds with a lot of melee damage, if you manage to get multiple. Bandana and Ricochet are great with Rocket Launchers and Nukes, as they explode on each hit. But aren’t good with Shredders. Sharp bullet should be avoided if you have shredders. But it is good with the Launchers. Avoid Secondary Damage: Baby with a beard, Alien Eyes, Cyberball all suffer the -100% damage. So you shouldn’t get them. Honey: Amazing for the Size, damage and +3 Ranged damage if you’re doing shredders and even Rocket Launchers. But I wouldn’t do it on builds that can’t use the ranged damage. Frozen Heart: Burning is useless for you anyway since you have -100% damage. But damn 8 Elemental damage and +5% crit is crazy good. That’s +32% explosion size. Worth it even on Ranged builds Strange Book: Gives you engineering equal to your Elemental damage. Can be quite fun and powerful for Engineering or plank builds. Arms Dealer

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: C Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold, yeah as if you had a choice.) Pistol

Your weapons are destroyed when entering each shop, so you’ll have to pick up somewhat random weapons each round. There are however some things to note.

Weapon Classes: When you pick up a Weapon, you’ll have a good chance to see more of that weapon, and to see more weapons with the same Weapon Class. So consider which weapons you pick up. Get Enough Weapons: One of the most common mistakes is to not get enough weapons for the next wave. Being too picky can result in your death. You want to enter the waves with 6 weapons. Locking Weapons Once you have enough weapons, you can lock a good weapon for the next wave, setting you up to see more of the same weapon and the same weapon class next shop. Strategy As the Arms Dealer you have to build the weapons you use each round. In the beginning you’ll have a lot of money, and the weapons are cheap, but it quickly becomes quite expensive to have to find weapons on each round.

The idea is to find a path: Melee, Ranged, Elemental. Engineering is hard to make work, since there are so few weapons, and since engineering doesn’t benefit from the +33% dmg.

You can also combine several of the builds.

Builds Melee: The Easiest and strongest. There’s more melee weapons, so it is harder to get in trouble in the shop. Melee weapons also cleave enemies, which is super powerful if you’re behind. Any melee weapon can do if you just got a ton of melee damage. Ranged: Another option. You have fewer weapon options, so this build revolves around locking a gun for the next shop for insurance. SMG and Shotguns can super carry with your +33% ranged damage, and shredder can solo big crowds of enemies. I usually dump ranged if I’m not going for a ranged build, so I don’t Elemental: Elemental got some new toys in the newest patch, but there’s still very few weapons to find. However, once you’ve got some Scared sausages and snakes, suddenly you don’t even need weapons to do an elemental build. I like Elemental as my secondary build on top of a melee build. Engineering: I wouldn’t. It is too difficult to get enough turrets in the shop, and there’s way too few weapons to find. You would have to chain lock wrenches between shops. However If you get strange books, and some

The easiest path, and strongest, is going for a melee based build. It is easier to build for melee weapons, and they are better at clearing a wave when behind. You can spice it up with adding some Elemental Damage and Scared Sausage. There is room for cool hybrid builds on arms dealer, but if you’re struggling, you might just be better off going pure melee.

The Support Start: One of the strongest openers for Arms Dealer is to only pick up support weapons. Any will do, and they should be able to clear the first 2-4 waves without too much issue. This gives +25 Harvesting gives you 25 extra money and exp, and a permanent 1-2 Harvesting from the increment. Good Economy, Strong Early: Between 30 Harvest and Dangerous Bunny, you have a strong economy, and you can also have 6 weapons already from wave 2. This makes you really powerful early. But your late game is at an disadvantage, since you have to find and pay for weapons each wave. So you need to invest in even more economy early and snowball into the late game. The +33% Damage bonus on %damage, melee, ranged, and elemental damage helps. Remember the fundamentals: There’s a ton of cool items that you can pick up on Arms Dealer as secondary sources of damage. And it is easy to build towards 5 different cool things. But remember that your core strategy is to have 6 decent weapons that scale with Melee, Ranged, or Elemental. So remember to get items that give you the core stats. %dmg, flat damage, attack speed, Hp, Speed, Armor, healing. Just like you would on another character. And when you Go with the Flow of the Shop: While Arms Dealer can do some really mean Luck or Burn builds, the shop won’t give that to you each run. Keep your eyes open to what you’re given, and make the best of it. Getting Free Rerolls: Arms Dealer do some tricks in the shop. Whenever you clean out the shop, you get a free reroll (and it stacks with the reroll from the bunny if you still haven’t used that). One easy way to get free rerolls is to save your 8 Bans for when you have a shop with 1-2 useless items in it. Then you ban the items and get the reroll. Arms Deals can combine this with the extremely cheap weapons. You can buy even terrible weapons and just recycle them. This can be powerful in the first couple of shops to look to support weapons and powerful economic items like Bag/Fertilizer, Coupon, etc. Stats +33% Damage Modification: you have a +33% damage modifier to all damage. This includes %Dmg, Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, and Elemental. It also includes secondary Damage stats such as boss damage, explosive damage, or piercing damage. Healing: Since you can’t rely on having weapons that work with life steal, I tend to avoid it. Rely more on HP Regeneration and Consumable healing, since these are constant between waves. Luck helps finding higher tier Weapons, and boosts your Economy. It also provides more consumable healing. Arms Dealer has the early game power to invest into Luck. So I like to pick up the good options, like a higher tier upgrade or a Luck Potion Harvesting: You start with 30 Harvesting, but I want more. Arms Dealer is strong early, but can struggle later. Investing in harvesting can even this out. Defenses: You’re often playing a very mixed melee build. This makes it hard to rely on your weapons knocking enemies back, or killing them. So you’re taking a bit more hits, and you might have weak waves where you struggle with clearing. So building tanky can help a lot here. If you managed to get a good economy, I would get the regular defensive stats, but also Max out Dodge. Knockback - I like keeping this positive. Have +3 to +10. Helps you stay safe. Getting above +10 can begin to interfere with your ability to kill enemies as weapons with innate knockback begins launching enemies away. Items For Arms Dealer it can be nice to have some secondary damage. Or Item based damage to help you clear the waves. It helps you stay strong between waves, should you have an awful shop.

Rip and Tear / Baby with a Beard: These are really powerful if you’re building melee/ranged damage. They can cover you on waves where you have weak weapons. Pets: The newest addition of Secondary damage is a really big help for Arms Dealer. Ratzilla might not look like a lot, but i’ve found it to be really solid additional damage. I would always buy the pet of the matching damage typing I’m going with. Bonkdog - Melee, Catling Gun - Ranged. But Pets also really make me considering going into a hybrid build. Blazemander is solid at spreading flames. Luck Damage: Cyberball and Baby Elephant can deal good damage with Arms Dealer due to your +33% damage modifications. It's also secondary damage you can rely on between waves. I’m not the biggest fan of these, but if you get it rolling, it can be quite powerful. Hybrid Items: If you’re building towards multiple damage types, you should look for hybrid items such as Alloy, Handcuffs, gnome, or Hedgehog. Crown: You start with +30 Harvesting, so Crown is often worth it. Elemental Burn Build: If you get Scared Sausage and Some Snakes, you can stack elemental damage, and all weapons will work for you. In this case, also get turrets and landmines. Blue Turret / Incendiary Turret: Even without Engineering, this turret can do a lot of damage on its own. So buying one can be a nice bit of secondary damage. Other Turrets: Turrets spread flames if you have scared sausage, so if you have that with some elemental damage and snakes, even a regular turret can dish out a ton of damage if you have the synergy. Elemental Build Items: If you’ve dipped into the Elemental build, then there’s a ton of powerful options. Ice cube - can be triggered by the scared sausage. Strange Book: This can be the key items for some really fun builds. Now you get Engineering equal to your Elemental, and as mentioned your turrets can spread flames with scared sausage. If the items come together, you can really have a fun build. But this is also what I mentioned about getting distracted. Frozen Heart: A bit of a mixed one. It makes your Burn quite a bit worse, but it also gives a ton of stats, and makes your weapons + pets scale with 10% of your Elemental damage. This helps the Ratzilla quite a bit. Knot: Knot prevents you from recycling weapons and from combining weapons. However, you can still buy new weapons. So it is quite a bit of stats for arms dealer. Not being able to combine is still bad, but it might just be worth it for the +15 max HP and +15% damage. Sunken Bell: Deals a ton of damage on Arms Dealer. And it is quite useful should you have a few bad waves where you’re struggling to clear. Just have a bell and go to 40% hp during the last seconds of the wave. Different Weapons: You often have 3-6 different weapons. So look for the items Jelly or Spider that rewards having different weapons. Bone Dice: You reroll a ton, and like %Dmg. So I don’t mind getting some Bone Dice. Just remember to buy a bit more Max HP to compensate. Spyglass: Did someone say reroll a ton? Spyglasses are great on Arms Dealer. Makes it easier to secure good enough weapons. Dangerous Bunny: You start with one, and you want to buy any additional ones you see.

Streamer

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: D

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Stick Cacti Club Ghost Flint Ghost Axe Scissors Screwdriver Wrench Spear Plank Pruner Spiky Shield Crossbow Double Barrel Shotgun Laser Gun Medical Gun Pistol Shredder SMG Revolver Slingshot Ghost Scepter Taser Wand Icicle Javelin

There’s a lot of options. Some are really bad. A lot of the melee options are really rough. Here's my favorite ones. SMG - Super strong and protects you well. But you gotta get that ranged damage. Slingshot - Safe option that clears the map with fewer requirements. Quite safe. Scales well with all damage. But it also leaves materials from kills all over the map. Wrench - Really powerful, but slightly more difficult to get going. But you can just freely scale out of Control, since your structures ignore the -%Dmg. Also Wrenches and structures grant 2 armor, so it's really nice.

Other: Revolver is also a powerful option with its good dps and knockback. However the reloading really sucks when you’re standing still. Stick - The melee option. Stick got enough range and good base damage. It is cheap, allowing you to get the materials rolling by standing still. Melee streamer is a bit more difficult than Ranged. So try your hand at what works for you. Medigun - Decent after its last buff, and the healing helps you stand still. You can combine it with other guns. Strategy The Streamer is one of the harder characters to play. I’ve put him in D Tier because most newer players struggle with the Streamer. But the Streamer can be really powerful if you get the playstyle down.

You gain money when standing still, and a huge combat bonus while moving. However enemies drop less materials and exp, and standing still doesn’t grant XP. So you will be behind on XP, but you can earn tons of money to make up for it. And the combat bonus while moving is powerful.

Don’t Stutter Step - Kill enemies and then stand still There is a delay from when you begin to stand still, to where you begin to gain money. So you want to switch between moving and standing still as little as possible. Start each wave by standing still for as long as you can. Then once you are attacked, you begin to move and stay moving for that +40% attack speed and damage. You keep moving until the extra Damage output has cleared the battlefield. Only stop if you see that you have an opening where you can get 2-3 or more ticks of income.

Manage your Gold. You need to manage the amount of money you hold. If you spend all your money in the shop, each income tick only gives +1 gold. You need 67 gold for +2, 100 for +3, and so on. So try to keep a decent amount leftover, as much as you can get away with. But be careful, as you lose %dmg and speed when you hold more material. Managing this balance takes some tries.

It takes 834 Gold to max the gold income of 25 per second, 1500 gold if you can stand still all 60 seconds. If you have piggy bank, it is 695 Gold.

Dmg% and Speed. You lose both of these Stats as you hold more gold. You lose 3.33% Speed per 100 gold, and 6.66% damage. You need to be wary of this. If you stack too much gold during a wave, it can prevent you from moving at all. And it can also mean that you stop being able to deal damage. And you can’t get rid of materials during a wave, so be careful.

Buy additional %Dmg and Speed Stats. You have to focus on getting enough of these stats. Consider that you will be hovering around 200-1000 gold for a lot of the game, so you’ll need more than usual of these stats to keep up. Engineering: If you’re playing Engineering you can ignore %Dmg. Speed might still be important. Unless you manage to break the game and earn enough gold to be invincible.

Elites/Bosses - You can spend your gold before a boss/elite wave. This will return your %Dmg and Speed to normal, and with your 40% Attack Speed/DMG bonus while moving, you have a good shot at beating the elite/bosses. Mouse Aim: If you’re a bit more advanced, you can attempt to manually aim your weapons. Ranged weapons fire about 50 range longer than they target, so you can reach enemies keeping a distance to you from further away, or strike spitters as they come towards you, before they fire. If you’re a newer player, this might just get you killed tho. Stats Armor: You are tagged for structures, and you should get your armor from buying structures. Doesn’t matter if you’re going engineering or using 6 smgs. Buy those cheap structures. You don’t have to buy Armor items or spend upgrades on it. Landmines, turrets, etc are super cheap for +2 armor. Dodge: Depends on your build. If I'm going SMG, I don’t need it since I have so much armor. But for example wrench builds can break the game if you get a head, and simply be at -100% speed. For those builds I would go dodge. Otherwise you don’t need it. Harvesting: Unlike Harvesting and Materials dropped, your money ability only gives money, not exp. So while you make tons of money, you’ll be down on exp. Getting Harvesting can help here. Items Piggybank: - It’s great. You save up materials before the start of each wave anyway. So it’s just free gold. Structures: Turrets, Landmines, Gardens, Wandering Bots all give you +2 armor, making them good pickups. Even if just for the armor. Bot-o-Mine: Counts as a structure, pretty great if you’re going engineering, otherwise fine. Catling Gun: This is insane for a smg build, since you can trigger the double attack speed by standing still on top of it. Adds quite a bit of dps to your build. Improved Tools. - If you have a good amount of structures, this is quite a fine item, even if you’re not doing engineering. Candle and White Flag can actually make sense on Streamer, since you mostly care about standing still, and enemies only drop half the materials. But I’m mostly looking for them in a crate. Don’t wanna pay too much for it. Wisdom: While I’m generally not a big fan of Wisdom, it can be useful on Streamer, since your Damage % naturally decreases throughout a wave, as you gather more materials. So the High bonus late in the wave is very welcome. Baby Gecko / Sifd’s Relic: If you get to the point where you can stand still for the most of the game, getting auto pickup for materials is pretty nice. Standing Still Items: These can be great if you manage to get to the point where you stand still most of the game. But if you’re relying on moving around a lot, they aren’t the best. Statue with its +40% attack speed can really help you be able to deal enough damage while standing still, but it also means that moving doesn’t do much for you, since you have +40% either way. Still, the statue is powerful. Not Stone Skin: Stone Skin sadly doesn’t work with the Armor gained from structures 🙁 Pocket Factory: Pocket Factory is finally fixed and gives +2 armor. Still not the most impressive item unless you have trees or is going for an engineering build. Cyborg

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Wrench Screwdriver Plank Pistol SMG Revolver Double Barrel Shotgun Crossbow

You start with a Minigun. That is powerful. But you also get to choose a weapon.

I like to start with one of the Engineering weapons that I plan to be going with: Wrench, Plank, or Screwdriver.

Otherwise you’re not guaranteed to find an engineering weapon. On the other hand, Minigun provides the Gun tag, which will supply your shop with more ranged weapons.

I like to find some SMGs or Shotguns instead of starting with them. You want weapons that scale hard with Ranged Damage.

Fun Crossbow Build: You can also choose crossbow and sell your minigun, and just go for a range build, meaning you have no abilities as a character. This isn’t a good build btw. Strategy The Cyborg has +200% Ranged Damage for half of the Wave, and then that ranged damage is converted into twice that much engineering.

So that means every time you buy 1 ranged damage, you get 3. Which is then turned into 6 Engineering at half-way through the wave. The Clock timer at the center top turns Blue when this happens.

So you need a mix of ranged weapons and engineering weapons.

I like having 1-2 ranged weapons, and 4-5 engineering weapons. More engineering weapons means better crowd clear and safer second half of the round, while more ranged weapons means easier times with elite and boss waves. I like combining some engineering weapons just before an elite wave and pick up an extra ranged weapon. And when you get the boss wave, you just want to have as many ranged damage weapons as possible.

For your Ranged weapons, SMGs are really strong. They will take down elites, and with the insane ranged damage, they can handle even large crowds of enemies. Shotgun is also a decent option. Other ranged weapons can also work. Miniguns, Gatling Gun, or the Insane Chain Gun are also options. (Chain gun scales with both Ranged Damage and Engineering, making it busted on you.)

You can also pick up a weapon like Rocket Launcher and Nuclear Launcher, which don’t scale well with Ranged Damage, but in return offer a lot of power in the Engineering Phase.

For the Engineering weapons. Try the different options. Wrench gives you ranged turrets which keeps you safe, along with a ton of knockback on your wrenches. Screwdrivers gives a mix of melee damage and mines

Elite/Boss Slayer: Cyborg is rather good against elite and Boss waves, since the insane Ranged Damage scaling and single target damage of the ranged weapons are typically able to kill the Boss/Elite during the Ranged Phase. Boss Wave: I often stock up on ranged weapons in the last shop. Engineering weapons don’t do much here. You want the bosses dead before 45 seconds have passed.

Stats

What stats to get?: Consider which stats actually benefit both of your weapon types. Primary stats do not affect structures. And SMGs have a bad critical hit multiplier, so I like to skip Crit if i’m using that and haven't upgraded my Minigun. %Dmg/Attack Speed: You still these. Depending on the amount of ranged weapons you go with. Ranged Damage. Yeah, just saying it another time here. TONS OF RANGED DAMAGE. ALL OF IT. Healing: I prefer HP Regen over Life steal on Cyborg on this patch. The Minigun is good with life steal, but if you’re only using 1-2 ranged weapons it just isn’t enough. Consumable healing good as always. Don’t take Engineering: Be careful! You have -75% Engineering modifications, so don’t pick up engineering stat. Only get it through ranged damage. Can’t go Melee/Elemental: In the same vein, you have -100% Melee and elemental damage, so you can’t scale plank and screwdriver with those stats, you won’t be able to use Strange Book. Knockback: I like getting some knockback from Coil or Boxing glove. It makes your minigun protect you in the second half.

Items

Cyborg has a ton of specific interactions with items. You’re tagged for structures, so expect a ton of them to show up in the shop, along with ranged damage, your other tag. Sharp Bullet/Bandana/Ricochet - If you’re using wrenches, then getting more Bounces/piercing for your weapons + turrets is high on the list. Minigun already comes with a default 1/2 piercing for tier 3 / 4. So picking up sharp bullet hurts it. Improved Tools: If you have already beaten Cyborg, you have Access to the Improved tools, which lets your Turrets and Landmines scale with 50% of your attack speed. Buy Turrets: Pickup as many turrets as you can find, and landmines. These will help you a lot during the Engineering phase. Pocket Factory is Great on Cyborg, since it lets you stack up turrets during the first half of the wave, just in time for your Engineering Phase. Explosives: No matter which Engineering Weapon you choose, you'll be using explosions. Landmines, Explosive Turrets, or Plank. So look out for Dynamites and Plastic Explosives. Honey: Extra shoutout to this item. 3 Ranged damage and extra explosion size and damage? It couldn’t get much better. Lumberjack Shirt can be useful for killing trees during the second half, since your ranged weapons don’t do much now. Nail: This might seem awful on the surface. -2 Ranged damage hurts, and the +5 engineering is -75%. But that’s to try to nerf this item for cyborg. This is absolutely busted for you. Say you have 8=24 Ranged damage, For minigun 3 that’s 13 Dmg per Hit. (0 %Dmg). Now during the second half, this becomes 48 Engineering, which makes Minigun deal 11 Dmg per hit. That might not seem too great, but remember that a regular character with 8 ranged damage would only deal 5 dmg per hit with Minigun. So you can just switch to 6 Ranged Weapons and win. Clockwork Wasp: A really powerful item for engineering build. The +5 Speed alone is worth a lot of the price. Getting +10% attack and spawning speed on your structures is amazing for the price. Mines especially benefit from wasp, since mines can only spawn on whole seconds, and it rounds down. So Screwdriver spawn times with 1 wasp becomes 12/9/6/3 into 10/8/5/2. Improved tools: Decent item. There’s a limit to how much attack speed you want on your weapons. Minigun maxes out at 21%. While SMG has breakpoints at 1%/34%/51% you can aim for. So 10% attack speed, and maybe 10-25% attack speed for your structures is quite a decent deal. Pile of Books: The +3 Engineering is reduced by 75%, and Both Minigun and SMG aren’t good with Crit. So I think i’m skipping this unless you got a super rich run where you can build crit. Glutton

Difficulty: Hard Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Pruner Chopper Thief Dagger Fist Hatchet Jousting Lance Screwdriver Plank Shredder

There are some of the Starting weapons that actually work well with Glutton’s abilities. Pruner spawns Gardens that Spawns Consumables (So you explode more often). With a Pruner build you can gather large amounts of % Explosion damage. And Pruners Scale with Melee damage just like your Innate ability. This is my Go-to.

Shredder is a pretty strong weapon in itself, and it likes the extra explosive damage. The Downside is that you have to build both Ranged and melee damage if you want to scale both Shredder and your own Explosion. Plank both scales with Melee damage and Explosive Damage.

I’m not a big fan of the other options. But they can work: Chopper: Gives you more Consumable healing, but it doesn’t scale well with melee damage, and it doesn’t spawn consumables, or scale with explosion damage. Thief Dagger: Can allow you to earn some cash to make up for the +25% shop prices. But your explosions will steal the kills from the daggers. Screwdriver: You get a ton of explosive damage for the mines.

The best explosive weapons can only be gotten at higher Tiers later in the game. Rocket Launcher, Nuclear Launcher, Plasma Hammer, Power Fist. All are great and I would pick them up later in the game. (Depending on if I’m going Melee or Ranged Build). Pruner especially can be upgraded quite a bit by picking up some explosive weapons. Note that Rocket Launcher and Nuke are great even on melee builds, since they have such a high base damage. Strategy Glutton is a quite fun and unique Character. You create a huge explosion whenever you pick up a Consumable. Furthermore you gain 1% Explosive Damage if you had full HP when you picked up the Consumable. This creates a fun, but difficult mini game where you navigate around the map, trying to not take damage, while picking up consumables. This then clears up enemies around you.

The Explosions scale with 500% of your Melee damage, and can be boosted by Spicy sauce, causing it to also scale with 100%/200%/300%/400% of your Max HP. (Super weird and bugged interaction, where the damage from spicy sauce is just added to your larger explosion). Later in the game, the explosions can deal 1000-3000 damage, which makes them instantly kill annoying tanky enemies such as Armored bruiser, Pursuers, Tentacles, etc. Glutton doesn’t care if that tentacle with the red buff has 1000+ HP, it is gone.

If you’re using Pruners, you’ll rely more on your explosions to clear enemies, while if you’re using explosive weapons, you’ll rely more on those.

Elites/Bosses: Your Explosions can wreck Elites and Bosses. Try to lure them close to your gardens, and time the explosions so that you hit them. Stats Melee Damage: It is important to pick up some Melee damage early, as it empowers your own explosion by 500% of the Value. The base damage of the explosion is 10, so you need to increase it so that it kills most enemies in one hit. This will keep you much safer. HP Regen, Not Life Steal: Explosions don’t trigger life steal. So I would go HP regen most of the time. (Life steal can still be ok with Shredder) Having HP Regen helps you not lose Explosion damage to not having full hp. % Damage: If you’re using Explosive weapons, you can rely on dynamites and your ability to gain %DMG. If you’re using Pruner, you’ll want a bit of %Damage early to scale your DPS. XP Gain: Since you start at 75% Xp gain, the first couple of XP gain items you pick up are extra impactful. Try to get it to at least 120%, Scar, Bean Teacher, Black Belt are all fine options. Luck: Luck gives more consumable drops, but since you already start with +50, I wouldn’t prioritize it at all. You don’t really need more.

Items Penguins: Gives HP regen when picking up consumables at Max HP. Perfect for you. Buy all you see. Consumable Healing: Getting increased consumable healing, Lemonade and Weird food, is super powerful on you, and will cause you to gain more Explosive damage, since it takes less consumables to fully heal you. Additional Consumables: Look for Gardens and Tree items. They spawn additional Consumables. Improved Tools: The Improved Tools Item can help your gardens spawn consumables much faster if you have attack speed. Insane for the pruner build. But it can also be useful if you have 1-2 gardens. You don’t need much use of the ability before it becomes a fine item. Hybrid Items: If you use Planks or Shredders, look for items that increase multiple damage types like Hedgehog, Gnome, Alloy, or Big Arms. Explosive Damage: Dynamite is good on you if you’re using Shredder/Plank, since you won’t get as many consumables. But if you’re using Pruners, you’ll get plenty of explosive damage, so Dynamite might not be necessary. Explosive Size: This stat is insane for Glutton. Get Plastic Explosives and Explosive Shells. Rip and Tear can deal a lot of damage on Glutton if you have a melee focused build. I recommend it. The more you stack, the stronger it gets. Spicy Sauce is really powerful - Spicy sauce scales in a weird way with Glutton, and it just adds its damage to the same explosion as the one you make when you pick up consumables. And it does this 100% of the time, not just 25%. This makes Spicy Sauce a great way to scale your Explosion, especially if you’re using Shredder, Chopper, or any weapon that does not scale well with melee damage.

Jack

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: A

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Jousting Lance Wrench Torch Hatchet Stick Spear Laser Gun Pistol Revolver Crossbow Shuriken Taser Wand

Knife Jousting Lance Wrench Torch Hatchet Stick Spear Spiky Shield Brick Lute Spoon Shuriken Laser Gun Revolver Crossbow Taser Wand Icicle Railgun Flute

The cookie cutter option is either Laser Gun or Revolver. I like mixing both together, since that means you get to buy more of the weapons you see in the shop.

Icicle - A powerful elemental weapon. Icicle wants crit along with the regular offensive stats, and it really wants to be upgraded to tier 4, but it can reach devastating single target dps. Brick - The Materials dropped is tripled. So a Tier 4 brick drops 600 materials when it breaks. It isn’t the most reliable build, but it is uniquely strong on Jack. You want to instantly combine the bricks you have equipped as fast as possible, as a tier 2 brick drops more than two tier 1 bricks, and the same is true for tier 3 and 4. Later on, at Wave 9-12, or when you lose all bricks during a wave, you can pick up any powerful melee weapon you find, like a powerfist/plasmahammer/any Sword/

Other Options: Crossbow: Another nice range option. It requires more range early and crit to scale, so I recommend the easier options, but it is decently powerful.

Jousting Lance has also been quite powerful, as it has the range and speed to keep you safe. Stick is also a decent option. Just a really powerful melee weapon. Spiky Shield - Powerful melee option. Spear - Good melee weapon with great range.

Jack’s intense Enemies means that some weapons just aren’t great. So you might have a bad time with some of the other options. Strategy Jack is one of the hardest characters in the game for newer players. While there might be fewer enemies, the amount of bosses and elites are the same. (and You’ll only face elite waves). And while you have +125% bonus damage to elites and bosses, it doesn’t make up for the +175% hp they have, and you have nothing to protect you against the +35% extra damage they deal. So Jack will test your ability to dodge elite and boss abilities.

More than 30% enemies actually: The “30%” enemies is actually more than it seems, since everytime a group of enemies spawn around the map, there is a minimum of 1 spawned enemy. So if 2 enemies would have spawned, you would still face 1 enemy. (so only 50% down here) On Nightmare Mode, there’s a lot of 1-off enemies spawning. This means that Jack will get 100% of those, but also the 3x materials. This means the Nightmare difficulty will be extreme. You’ll face insane waves, but also be super rich. Rich: If you manage to actually kill the enemies that spawn, Jack is one of the richest characters. The plan is to use this economic advantage to get ahead for when the bosses spawn. Deadly Elites & Bosses: Elites are much stronger for Jack. Harder to kill, and they hurt more. Horde waves don’t spawn for Jack, so get ready to face Elites every game. Learn the patterns of attack, and be ready. Jack is usually never more than 2-4 hits from death. Stats

Curse: Curse ends up being about the same as on other characters. There’s fewer enemies, and you’re built to do single target dps, so you can handle the strong cursed enemies that spawn. And with the extra money, you’re more likely to find a good amount of cursed rewards in the shop. Focus on DPS: If you’re using a ranged build, you need to focus on getting enough dps, especially early, to keep up with all the enemy HP you have to shoot through. If you have enough dps, you get kills, and thereby a ton of materials, allowing you to snowball. Crit: On one hand, crit has less overkill because enemies have much higher HP. But on the other hand, you’re not going to be able to make a strong use of the Crit synergy items like Tentacle/Hunting Trophy since they scale with the amount of enemies. It depends a bit on the weapon, but if you’re using a 2x or better crit multiplier weapon, you’re likely going to build some crit later on, just because you have plenty of money. Defenses: I like going a bit of glass cannon on Jack. Since you take fewer, but stronger hits. Start with the usual Max HP to get out the range where you die to 1–2 hits. Pick up armor as you find it. Dodge becomes much more unreliable when you take fewer, but bigger hits. So I skip it sometimes, though Jack often has a good enough economy to get it late game. Glass cannon or not, You’ll need to tank up for the later half of the game. If you’re doing a melee build, I would aim to get 100% of the time. Speed: You want to get your speed up. There are less enemies on the map, giving you more room to move around. Also, more speed allows you to better avoid Elite/Boss projectile Attacks. Healing: You’re using slow weapons on a few enemies. That means no life steal. HP regen is great as usual. Consumable healing is a nice addition here. On one hand, less consumables spawn due to the fewer enemies, but trees still give consumables. Jack takes damage in bursts, so the burst healing from consumables is really useful.

Items Avoid item damage: There are many items that become less powerful with less enemies. Baby with a beard, Cyberball, and Rip and Tear come to mind. Get more Enemies: Since your biggest issues are Elite and Boss Waves, you can pick up Gentle Alien and Mouse to increase the amount of enemies you encounter. While this will make the game harder, you also gain tons of extra materials from those enemies, making the Elite and Bosses waves relatively less scary. Going from 30% to 35% represents somewhere around 7.5%-10% More enemies when you account for how the spawns work. However, you only want to pick up these items in the early game, where you have time to reap the economic benefits. Don’t pick it up late. Avoid Less Enemies: Reversely I would avoid Candle and White flag, as it will cause you to gain less materials. (but you can pick them up wave 15-19 in some of the last shops) Silver Bullets - Since you already have +125% Damage against elites and Bosses, SIlver bullet isn’t as impactful. But it can still be ok, since Elites and Bosses can be your main issue. And you’re rich. Tree - Tree is an auto buy on nearly every character. But it is extra juicy on jack. Getting 9 materials is awesome, and it provides extra consumables which is nice when you don’t have as many due to less enemies. Lootworm - Ranged builds love the help picking up materials, trees have triple value, and there’s more materials dropped, so the 10% extra will give more. Lootworm is just a great pickup for jack. Lure?- The amount of Loot hoarders spawned is affected by your less enemies. So only 1 will spawn, 93% of the time. But it will drop 24 materials on death, making it worth it. But it can also be super hard to kill. Bait - Quite safe on Jack, since the DLC patch, the Bait can’t randomly spawn 5 lamprays. Triangle of Power - I also love this one, since Jack tends to take fewer hits than other characters, but each hit doing more damage. Perfect item for a ranged class cannon build.

Lich

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold)

Scissors Chopper Thief Dagger Stick Knife Ghost Shiv Sharp Tooth Pruner Hatchet Rock Spiky Shield Lightning Shiv Spoon Ghost Scepter Medigun SMG Wand Icicle Slingshot Crossbow

The Lich has several interesting options. Some can heal and trigger your passives. Some weapons aren’t hit hard by the 50% modifiers. Those are the qualities we are looking for.

Great options Stick is cheap and has amazing base damage, so you can skip buying Melee damage. Also gives +15 hp for your ability. Spiky Shield: A great weapon. You can ignore melee damage and instead just stack armor. Great for a really tanky build. Slingshot is a powerful weapon, and its “single target damage to multiple enemies around the map” style of damage works very well with your HP based Damage, as they can clear the map together. Hatchet is also a fine option, very cheap and high dps late game. You don’t need melee damage, and can just stack Attack speed for DPS. Remember to maybe get some extra range to make up for the low base range. Medigun: Recently buffed, Gets good base damage at higher tiers, so just focus on weapons rather than seeking out ranged damage.

Other Options Chopper is actually pretty decent. The extra consumable healing isn’t at its best here, but the Choppers scale with your Max HP, meaning that you once again can skip Melee Damage. Fun if you’re going for that Max HP build. Scissors: A decent option with a ton of life steal. Struggles a bit with having low base damage so you gotta bite the bullet and get a bit of melee damage here. Crossbow can avoid the DMG modifications by going Crit and Range. Can be a decent choice actually, but the start is a bit slow, and you need to focus on getting attack speed, range, and crit instead of playing around your Ability. Make sure you get some range early. Ghost Scepter: This one can be fun, but it is a bit harder. It allows you to stack HP like crazy. The issue is keeping up in DPS. Sharp Bullet really helps, and you also need a ton of attack speed. Your Damage Ability also helps keeping up in DPS. Icicle - A powerful elemental weapon. But it stacks crit and is hit by the 50% a decent amount, so not that great. SMG seems good with Lifesteal, but it is really hurt by the -50% Damage modifications. Still a powerful weapon tho. Pruner: Good weapon, but you don’t need the vast amount of consumable healing, and the -50% really hurts when it comes to getting enough DPS. Strategy As the Lich you have a good deal of Healing right from the start. You also have a damaging ability that helps you keep up with clearing enemies.

Stay Below Full HP: You want to be using your Healing Damage Ability at all times. So you will want to intentionally take damage from time to time, to stay below Max HP. But be careful not to get too low HP and die from an unexpected hit.

-50% Dmg: The -50% damage modifications is a really hard penalty. It affects %Dmg, Melee damage, ranged damage, Elemental Damage, even Explosive damage and Piercing damage. Nevertheless you still have to increase your % Damage, since it both benefits your weapon and your HP ability. But you should take this into account. It does affect how much melee/Ranged Damage you should pick up.

Two Builds: To me, there’s two different mindsets to play Lich with. You can take the free healing stats and damage ability, and then just play somewhat normally. Or you can really try to lean into the damage ability by stacking Max HP, Healing, and Armor/Dodge with a bit of %dmg to increase the ability. Ranged builds are more of the first, and melee likes the latter.

Boost your Weapons: Your ability to deal damage when healing is powerful, but you’re still going to be doing the majority of your damage with your weapons. So don’t forget to get Attack speed and a bit of Crit. How often you heal: Lich doesn't care about how much you heal, but rather how often. So you can dump consumable healing and take Alien Worm. Additional Healing from Items like Cute Monkey and Tentacle is also quite good at triggering your Ability more often. Potato Thrower can actually be a nice Late game Tech for lich if you’re doing Ghost Scepters, or another ranged build and you have enough Max HP. Nightmare Difficulty - On nightmare difficulty, the environment projectiles can be a decent way of taking controlled damage, without having to let enemies near you.

Stats

Healing: You start with +10 to life steal and HP Regen. So you can’t really dump either. I recommend stacking both. It will trigger your ability a lot. Damage: Since %DMG and Flat damage are halved, you need to adjust accordingly. If you’re using Sticks, it means you can basically skip Melee Damage. But if you’re Using SMG’s you still need to pack some Ranged Damage. Attack Speed and Crit are still at full power and are ways to increase your DPS. But they don’t affect your damage ability. Defense: Lich can be in a bit of a weird situation - Max HP and healing increase your DPS, and you might be tanky enough just from that. I recommend some armor since it is so great. But you might not need more to survive, so you can often just skip dodge. Especially on ranged builds. Tank Build: If you’re using melee weapons, Lich can really go for a tank build. If you have a ton of healing, ton of armor and maxed Dodge, you can basically let enemies walk all over you, while your Melee weapons get to crush the crowds of enemies. Items Legendary items Healing items: There are tons of super powerful Legendary Items that are amazing on Lich. Regeneration Potion, Grind’s Magical Leaf, Extra Stomach, Medikit, and more. Doc Moth: the Healing pet doubles your HP regen and Life steal. Since it makes those stats heal for 2 instead of 1, it doesn’t trigger your ability more, but it is still worth it to have the moth flying around should you get pushed to low HP. Pets: Pets trigger life steal, so they’re a bit better. However they’re hit by the -50% damage mod quite a bit so I’m not super high on most damage pets.

Jerky: The Jerky item from the DLC is perfect for Lich. Not only does it give a ton of extra healing, it also splits the healing into many instances, triggering your ability multiple times. Another fun trick is that legendary chests heal for 100 hp, so everytime you kill an elite or boss, it drops 100 uses of your passive. Really powerful. Lower your Starting health: Sad Tomato and Weird Ghost are good items for Lich, since you can easily heal the downside, and the damage at the start of the round actually means you just deal more damage. Bloody Hand and Blood Donation are amazing for you. You can easily handle the Damage per second, and might even welcome it. And with the downside gone, you’re left with the amazing stats. The legendary weapon Scythe is Similarly quite a beast on Lich. Sharp bullet: This is a bit better on you. The -50% damage mod makes this -2.5% damage and only -10% piercing. And getting additional piercing means Not Torture: Don’t take Torture as it will nerf your Damage dealing ability to only happens once per second.

The Max HP Build Alien Eyes can be quite decent with Lich, since you gather a good deal of Max HP. I like it more on ranged builds, where you might have piercing for it, and where the projectiles are more useful to your damage output. If you’re going for a Max HP build, it can really deal good damage. Spicy Sauce - Mostly for max HP build. Spicy Sauce gets much stronger when you have 2 of them, so you need to stack them if you’re going for them. They can become quite strong. But it isn’t an efficient source of Max HP on its own. You’re paying for the ability.

Apprentice

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Knife Lighting Shiv Cacti Club Fighting Stick Ghost Flint Ghost Axe Hatchet Torch Plank Pruner Screwdriver Wrench Pistol SMG Double Barrel Shotgun Shredder Slingshot Taser Shuriken Ghost Scepter.

Apprentice is a Treat. So many powerful choices.

SMG and Shotgun are super powerful just due to how strong the Ranged damage increase is. Cacti Club or Lightning Shiv for some hybrid Scaling. Both also spread Flames with Scared Sausage on the projectiles they spawn. Slingshot is a super powerful weapon, and the +15 Max HP really helps. And the Bounces spread burn in a powerful way. Safe option. Wrench can be powerful for some engineering where you also deal good melee damage, and your turrets set people on fire. Get those Scared Sausages.

Other: Fighting Stick is fine, since you like getting exp Gain. At Tier 4, you’ll get 3.25 DMG per level when you include the 2 melee damage! But it isn’t super interesting compared to other options. Ghost Scepter is also surprisingly ok. The Max HP gained is super helpful, and the Ranged Damage you gain helps you keep up in damage. You still need that Sharp bullet and tons of Attack speed. Later you can switch to basically any weapon you want.

Any weapon can be fun with Apprentice. And you can combine many different weapons if you want. Strategy The Apprentice is quite simple. You gain all damage types on level up. But at the cost of -2 Max HP. Normally you gain +1 Max HP on level up, so now you instead lose one HP. This might not seem like much, but it adds up quickly and can reduce you to being a very fragile Brotato.

The Apprentice is by its nature a glass cannon, you’ll gain tons of damage for free, but you’ll have to look for HP items to stay alive. Your Hybrid Stat gain also means you can combine multiple damage types to deal with your enemies. That means multiscaling weapons, while picking up turrets and burning enemies with scared sausage.

Stats Get XP Gain: Leveling up has a lot of value for you. So pick up Scars, Bean teacher, etc. Make sure you gain a ton of levels! Don’t invest in expensive flat damage. You gain a lot of flat damage from your ability. So you should only get the good options that you’re offered. If your damage comes from multiple damage types, you might want to just rely on the Flat damage you get from your ability. Get Max HP: You’re constantly losing Max HP. Make sure you get some Cake and Break your Mouth (Broken Mouth Item). Weird Ghost can be quite powerful, since you’re often at the point where you’ll die in one hit anyway. Defenses: You often end up just being a glass cannon, as you fight to keep your Max HP up. So just get a bit of armor when you can. Skipping out on dodge is fine. Delayed Healing. Since you’re a glass cannon that relies on killing enemies before they damage you, you should just rely on the healing provided by consumables for the early parts of the game. Then in the later parts of the game you can invest in Life steal or HP Regen as normal. But generally speaking, those stats won’t be as important for you. Negative HP Build: a fun build/challenge people often try is going into negative Max HP with Apprentice. You can freely pick up items with Max HP as a downside. Even if you have -50 HP, you’ll enter the Wave with 1 Max HP. (don’t get armor or dodge, or healing at all.) Just Tardigrades.

Items Since you have all that flat damage, items that scale with those types of flat damage are quite cool. Tardigrade: Tardigrade can be quite powerful for Apprentice if you end up having very low Max HP. Look for Hybrid items: Look for items like Alloy or Handcuffs that give multiple damage types you need. Pick up Burn: You gain a lot of Elemental damage, so pick up Scared Sausage and Snake so your attack spreads burn. Pick up Turrets: You gain a lot of Engineering, meaning that turrets deal some real damage. Turrets can also spread burn with Scared Sausage, so that is a potent combo. Same with landmines. Baby with a Beard/Rip and Tear: These can be neat for additional ability to clear the map. I’m not the biggest fan of Rip and Tear. But I like Baby with a beard. However if you already are clearing the map with all that burn. You might not want to invest in these. Cryptid

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Hand Claw Knife Cacti Club Pruner Chopper Ghost Axe Thief Dagger Lightning Shiv Ghost Flint Rock Stick Hatchet Jousting Lance Screwdriver Plank Ghost Scepter Shredder Pistol SMG

Cryptid Is really geared towards a melee build. You don’t want to harm the trees that spawn, and you get HP Regen, while you can’t Life steal. Ranged weapons are often great with life steal, and they’ll pop the trees. So I suggest Melee. Engineering is also a problem for the same reason, since turrets will pop trees all over the map. Fist - Functions well at low Range, good dps, and gives +15% dodge chance to help you get to 70%. Thief Dagger - These daggers will earn you tons of money. Cryptid gets a ton of money early, which helps you get going, and then Thief dagger can help you scale into the late game, if you struggle keeping trees alive. Stick - A safe and powerful weapon. Good range if the other options are a bit hard for you. Not a lot of synergy, but just good. Claw - The Cryptid’s own unlock is quite powerful on cryptid, as it both gives dodge, and scales super well with the +3% attack speed you gain from dodging. Hand (Pacifist) - Cryptid is quite good at a pacifist build. Most of your money comes from Trees anyway, and hands allow you to move freely around the map without killing trees. Jousting Lance is perhaps the strongest option you have. Requires you to not stand still, but the long hitbox and free tank stats are great.

Strategy The Cryptid tries to survive while running around the map, avoiding the trees. Your ability to move around the map becomes limited the longer the wave goes on, as more trees spawn.

As the Cryptid, you’ll have a very strong economy as long as you can manage to keep trees alive, and it can really make you have a great early game. Cryptid also has a super powerful late game with the 70% dodge cap, bonus attack speed, and free HP Regeneration. Generally a powerful character.

Keep the Trees alive: Cryptid Gains 12 Materials and XP per tree that is alive at the end of the round. Trees only drop 3 materials, and have a 20% chance to drop a crate. (That chance decreases for every crate that drops during a wave). It isn’t worth it to kill trees. The crate drops won’t cover it. Also you’re losing HP Regen. But don’t be afraid to kill trees: During the later waves, especially if you’ve bought some of the tree items (Which you should), the map will be covered in trees. Don’t be afraid to kill a tree or two to keep a path open. It isn’t worth dying for 9-18 Materials. Avoid Ranged and Engineering: Explosions, Turrets, Long Range weapons will often pop trees without your consent. So it is best to avoid picking up these, including long range melee weapons like spears. Range: You have -100 range by default. This helps you not kill trees by accident, but also makes it harder to hit enemies. Learn what amount of range you’re comfortable with. If you don’t have enough attack speed, enemies might hit you, before your weapons can react and hit the enemies. Simply make sure you have enough attack speed or get more range. Whatever suits you. Build Dodge: Cryptid gains attack speed when dodging, and has a dodge maximum of 70%. This is stronger than it might sound. 60% dodge means you can take 150% more damage before dying, since only 40% of the attacks hit. 70% Dodge means you can take 233% more damage before dying, making it way stronger. And don’t leave it at 63-67% dodge or something. GET IT TO 70%!! Luck: Cryptid has less reason to build luck. You won’t be killing trees, which is where a lot of the crates come from. I still like the good Luck options, Clover sticks out. But I’m less willing to invest in it. Consumable Healing: Cryptid can’t life steal. But I like to get consumable healing, since it allows you to use all the trees as health packs during elite and Boss fights. Later in the game, you End up killing a lot of trees anyway.

Pacifist Build: Just get 6 hands, don’t get tasers, since they have awful range, and will kill trees. Focus on getting speed up for wave 6-7, then you just build your dodge up. Look for Max HP and Armor as well. More HP Regen is also welcome. Look for the Ugly tooth and Wandering bot, two stables of the Pacifist archetype. Dump Luck and Consumable healing on this build. Move in circles around the Map. You can still kill trees with Hands. So try to dodge them a bit. But don’t risk your life for a tree. Just kill them, it doesn’t matter. And don’t buy Lumberjack Shirt Items Trees - This is the best item you can find in the shop. Tagged Items: You’re tagged for Dodge and Exploration. At the Tier 1 items, this means Peaceful Bees, Trees, Bags, and Lumberjack shirt. So if you ban Lumberjack Shirt, you’ll see more of the other 3 items. Which all 3 are great items. Dodge Items - Get those peaceful bees. You’re gonna see a ton of them. Otherwise the Key dodge items to look for are: Blindfold - if doing crit build, Clover, Leather west, Adrenaline, are all insane on you. Gambling token is a meh item you sometimes buy to get your dodge finished, it isn’t as cost efficient as the others, but it gets the job done. Standstill: Cryptid can have issues moving around the map, and can become super tanky with Hp Regen and Dodge. So Barricade, Chameleon, and Statue can be a possible build in some cases if using short range weapons like claw or fist. But these items, as always, can be a trap that gets you killed. So be careful. Consumable Healing: Weird food is a broken item. So even though it reduces your Dodge, I’m buying it everytime. Also look for the Lemonade HP Regen: You’ll get a lot of HP Regen from Trees, so you don’t need to be desperate for HP Regen: Look for Plant, Fairy, Lure, Mammoth, Medikit, Regeneration Potion.

Fisherman

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Rock Spear Fighting Stick Screwdriver Spiky Shield Torch Stick Pistol SMG Crossbow Double Barrel Shotgun Laser Gun Revolver Shredder Slingshot

You are welcome to experiment with different weapons on the Fisherman, but there are two options that most default to:

Stick - Cheap and high base damage. With the % Damage from the baits, the Stick deals immense damage without further investment. I like getting some range on Sticks. Spear - Allows you to cut deep in the ranks of the Lampreys that spawn at the beginning of the wave. Has decent base damage.

Both of these are also primitive, providing you with super useful early Max HP to get the ball rolling on the bait.

Ranged weapons in general struggle to deal with the big burst of charging enemies.

Shredder can be a fine alternative. You can pick up rocket launchers and nuclear launchers later. Shredder does have a weaker early game. But once you get past the hurdle, it becomes very safe later in the game.

Strategy

The Fisherman is a very difficult, high risk, but high power character. Your Shop always sells the bait item for 1 gold, but how many can you survive to buy without dying? Your entire game revolves around buying the bait item, and learning how to handle all the enemies it spawns.

Many people struggle to beat this character, so be ready for a challenge.

Each Bait costs 1 gold, gives 8% dmg, +2 Harvesting, and spawns enemies that drop materials. It is an insanely good investment. But Lampreys also spawns throughout the wave depending on the number of Baits you have. So while you become super strong, so will the challenge you face.

On the other hand, the Bait takes up 1 shop slot, which can really be felt and it can be hard to get enough of the items you need. Enemies also drop 50% less materials, so you really need the extra harvesting form buying baits along with the extra materials from the lampreys to keep up.

Temper your Greed - You don’t need to buy 5+ Baits each round to beat the game. 2-3 is enough. Maybe you become stronger later in the run and can handle more. Boss & Elite Waves - These become quite Easy for the Fisherman. With the insane amount of damage you deal, Bosses and Elites melt in seconds. If you’re nervous about winning the wave, you can simply skip out on buying baits in the shop before the Boss wave or elites waves. So instead of 30 lampreys spawning, you’ll just instantly murder the Elite. Learn the Patterns of the Lampreys - Lampreys are quite tanky, and will chase towards you, charging you every few seconds. When they charge, they will fire 2 projectiles, one to each side in a V shape at the start and at the end of each charge. You can learn to predict and dodge these.

Movement: In order to survive on fisherman you need to learn to how move and decode the Lamprays. For the Initial wave of Lamprays that spawn at the start, you might want to use the Wall/Corner of the map. Then later on you can move to the middle.

Wall Hugging - You can stutter step along the wall. The Lampreys will charge you, and you can just move slightly to the side, and they slide into the wall where you can just kill them. The projectiles are also quite easy to dodge from this position. Standing In a Corner - If you are using sticks, and have a good amount of attack speed (maybe 60+%), you can stand in a corner and have your sticks just kill any incoming Lampreys as they charge you. The projectiles will be fired away from you, keeping you safe. Standing in the Middle - Standing in the middle means you have more options for dodging, and you’ll generally clear the map more, making it safer against projectile enemies. So if you can get to safely stand there, it's nice.

I find that if you’re playing on Nightmare Difficulty, the Lamprays are quite a bit harder to evade, and I want more speed.

Early Game

In the early game you want to get your 6 weapons as fast as possible, and perhaps get some flat damage, Max HP and Speed.

Mid and Later

Once you get to wave 10+, it becomes hard to avoid taking hits all the time as Fisherman. For melee builds, this means you want to have a solid tank build. This means Armor + Dodge + Healing. But it's harder for Fisherman. You get less level ups due to the -50% materials, unless you’ve really boosted your harvesting. I want to get Armor and Dodge in my upgrades.

Healing: You really want a ton of healing, and you’ll want to find it in the shop. However, that's harder with only 3 slots. Take all Consumable healing on sight: Lemonade, Weird Food, Fruit Basket, Jerky. All the extra Lampreys means consumable healing is even stronger.

I’m down for both Life Steal and HP Regen, it’s more about getting the good items. I’ll go over it in the item section.

Stats

%Dmg from Bait - You’re going to have 200%-800% damage from baits depending on how crazy you are with the baits. You don’t need to invest in %Dmg. So don’t buy it from other items or from upgrades. You can take items with negative damage without worrying.

Max HP - You want to get some early to not die from the initial burst. But later on, its not that important, and I would rather focus on improving my healing, Armor, and dodge. Speed: There are multiple ways to handle this. On a stick build I actually like being at 0 speed, since I’ve got the exact play pattern against the lampreys down for this speed. But having higher speed can get you to a point where you can outrun Lampreys which can be useful. Figure out what you like. I’m not really scared of elites or bosses on fisherman, so I don’t need the usual speed for that. Attack speed is important for keeping up with the swarm of enemies that spawn during the later waves. I really want a lot of attack speed to protect me in the midgame when tons of enemies spawn. Crit: Crit is kinda bad on the surface - you one shot enemies for the most part, meaning it doesn’t really do anything for you. But both hunting trophies and tentacles are really powerful and can justify you going into crit. Harvesting: I’m not worried about harvesting on scaling. You just need to be able to survive to win. So I’m mostly getting harvesting from baits. But I will still pick up stuff like tractor, crown, or fertilizer.

Items Negative %DMG. You have %DMG to spare, so look for: Cake, Metal Plate, Insanity, Coffee(duh). (Bandana, Ricochet, Small Magazine for ranged) Dangerous Bunny: The Free Reroll is super powerful on Fisherman, since it means more bait, but also allows you to see more items in general. Since your shop basically only has 3 slots, this is needed. Buy all 3 if you can. Spyglass: Same logic as Bunny, Helps you see more items. Lure: The item unlocked by Fisherman happens to be quite awesome on him. Fisherman can use the HP Regen, and has absolutely no issues killing any looters with the insane DPS you’ll have. And the Crates are super nice, since you see less items. Crown: Since you’ve got so much Harvesting, Crown is just a powerful item for you. Rip and Tear - Rip and Tear can provide some insanely powerful explosions, since it scales with melee damage and %Dmg. The item gets much stronger the more of them you have. It can help you clear the crowds of enemies easier. Ranged Build: For the Shredder build - look for Explosion size (Plastic Explosive and explosive Shells) and Bandana. Difficult Start of Wave - For the Fisherman, the start of the wave is always deadly. So avoid items like Sad Tomato, Weird Ghost, and Wisdom which will depower you during the beginning of the wave. Whetstone - This item can pull me into life steal build. And knockback is useless for fisherman anyway. Consumable Healing: Look for Lemonade, Weird Food. They are really powerful. HP Regen: Look for Plant, Fairy, Medikit, Regeneration Potion. And more. Healing

Life Steal: Fin, Cape, Whetstone. And I’ll take bat or butterfly later on. HP Regen: Fairy, Alien Magic, Lure, Grind’s Magical Leaf, Medikit, Octopus, Regen Potion, Consumable Healing: Buy all Look for Lemonade, Weird Food, Jerky, and Fruitbasket.

Decomposing Flesh and Baby Squid are fine if found early. Scarf - You love all these stats, but the 25% enemy speed next wave can kill you. Shackles - Really strong stats, HP Regen and range (mostly for a stick build). But you need to have gotten the 20-40% speed you wanted. Golem

Difficulty: Medium Tier: B

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Chopper Fist Ghost Axe Hatchet Knife Plank Rock Spiky Shield Stick Torch Brick Spoon Pistol Revolver Slingshot Crossbow Ghost Scepter Flute

The Golem has several interesting options.

Powerful Options Stick - Super solid melee weapon for the Golem. Slingshot - Great Ranged Option. Revolver - Also Great. Spiky Shield - Decent melee option, since it scales with Armor.

Ranged Options are nice if you struggle with taking too much damage when playing golems. Might be the easier option, since melee can be difficult with healing turned off.

Other options: Chopper - You got a lot of Max HP, but you can’t benefit from the additional consumable healing. So I prefer Spiky Shield or Stick. Hatchet / Fist - Generally decent melee weapons. Rock - gives a lot of Armor and HP, but isn’t the greatest weapon. Strategy

The Golem cannot Heal. But instead You gain +33% more Max HP and Armor. So you want to stack those stats to survive. The Golem can play kind of like a more extreme version of Chunky.

In the early waves you will breeze through with your 39 starting health, but as waves become longer and longer, the lack of healing becomes a bigger downside. Learn how to move carefully and avoid stray projectiles and not walk into damage. Some damage is unavoidable, but you’ll have the Max HP to handle that.

If you’re struggling with not taking damage in melee, switching to a ranged build can be easier.

Strong Early Game: The Golem has a super strong early game, and it is hard to die in the first 5 waves. Use this to invest in harvesting and other forms of economy. It will help you out later in the game. Falling below 50% - When you lose more than 50% of your HP, you gain +40% attack speed and +20% movement speed. This is a powerful boost that can help you outpace enemies, or keep up in damage output. Going below 50% - Sometimes you might choose to go below 50% on purpose to activate the boost. The main reason for doing so is to increase your Damage output. Especially with ranged Weapons. It can give you the boost you need if you want to kill an elite. But it is dangerous. Once you go below 50%, you can’t get that HP back, so the strategy will kill you sometimes. Stats Golem’s Offensive stats are quite vanilla, but the defense is built with more Max HP and Armor instead of Healing. Max HP: 100-300 (More for melee builds) HP Regen + Life Steal:Dump, since they don’t work for you. Armor: 20-50 (More with Melee, especially spiky shield) Dodge: If I’m going ranged, I’m probably not bothering with dodge. Just get enough damage, and your Armor + HP will be enough. Speed: Your +20% panic bottom speed helps you in elite/boss fights, and other situations, but you still need a bit of speed, like 10-20% to prevent you getting chased down all the time, taking unnecessary damage. Luck: With no Consumable healing, Luck isn’t a great stat for golem. I’m only taking higher tier upgrades and crate items. I’m not gonna invest in it.

Economy: With strong early game stats, but struggle to survive later on, Golem is one of the characters that really wants to have good economy. Stack harvesting and economy items early on. Be greedy. Items Ignore Downsides: Since you can’t heal, that also means that any items that have negative healing as a downside become good. Broken Mouth, Shady potion, Clover, Banner, Bean Teacher, Poisonous Tonic. HP Scaling: The golem can reach a large amount of Max HP. Items such as Alien Eyes, Spicy Sauce, or the weapon Potato Thrower can become quite powerful. Cheap Max HP: Torture and Alien Worm are actually really cheap Max HP, since their downsides normally are really severe. Stone Skin: The Golem Unlock Stone Skin, which gives Max HP equal to your Armor, can be quite good if you have 15+ armor. Good Armor/HP Items: These are the items I’m otherwise looking for: Broken Mouth, Leather armor, Medal, Metal Plate, Avoid Items that Damage you: Blood donation, Bloody Hand, Scythe aren’t good on Golem since you can’t gain the HP back. Nothing more annoying than noticing that you have 20 HP left, but there is 22 seconds left of the wave. 🙁 Maybe not Power Generator - The temporary +20% speed from going below 50% HP doesn’t give 20% Damage, sadly. That said Power Generator can still be a fine item if you get your regular speed up to 25% or higher.

King

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Circular Saw Knife Hatchet Ghost Axe Lightning Shiv Torch Plank Spear Jousting Lance Sword Hammer Spiky Shield Vorpal Sword Lute Trident Pistol SMG Crossbow Double Barrel Shotgun Rocket Launcher Taser Fireball Flute Grenade Launcher Javelin

King has a ton of options, and can do just about any build. But the optimal choice is quite boring.

Strongest options Pistol - perhaps the strongest king build. Pistol has high base damage, so you don’t need ranged damage. And it is cheap. You can mix in 1-2 other guns, but those are more expensive. And the optimal way to play king is likely a very boring build where you just rush those tier 4 weapons. You can have 4 blue pistols on wave 3. You can have 2 red pistols on wave 6. It is hard to lose if you rush Tier 4 like that. Fist: Cheap and high base damage. The melee version of the pistol. Hatchet: Cheap and scales with Attack speed. Weaker start than the others and needs range, but it deals great damage later on.

Other Options (Stronger, but more expensive weapons): Lance - Gives speed and has good early damage. Just need a bit of speed and you’re set for base damage. Spear - Strong Long range melee option. Spiky Shield - Strong and safe melee weapon. Just stack a bit of armor. Javelin - More expensive and requires melee damage compared to pistol. But it can reach really really high DPS. Cursed Javelin is insanely strong. Lute: You can do a fun luck build with lute. It is decent, but lute is a bit clumsy compared to your other options. If you do, look for baby elephants, Cyberballs, pearls, treasure maps.

Tier 2 Options: These don’t have a base tier 1 weapon version of them. So you won’t find more in the shop early. That means you have to mix weapons. This is much more risky and won’t lead you to tier 4 weapons as quickly. Its the more Fun/Unique option, but not as streamlined and strong.

Rocket Launcher/ Grenade launcher - You want mix with shredder and go into an explosive build. Can also just mix with guns like Revolver or Pistol. Sword / Vorpal Sword / Trident - Strong weapons, Quarterstaff and lances are decent options for tier 1 mixes.

Less strong tier 2 options. Hammer - Can go into Bricks/Rocks. A bit more rough start. Circular Saw - Can go both Scissors or chopper. You’ll struggle to deal damage early. Fireball - You can mix with whatever Elemental build you want. Wand, Torch, Icicle.

Strategy

The tooltip can be slightly confusing but you: Lose 2 HP for each different Tier 1 item you have. (only the first copy loses you HP) Lose 15% Damage and HP for each Tier 1 weapon you have.

Notice the difference between weapons and Items here. They’re not the same.

And you gain +25% damage and Attack speed bonus per Tier 4 weapon.

Getting to Tier 4 weapons is all that matters

The King revolves around getting to Tier 4 weapons as many and as quickly as possible. You’re losing stats from buying Tier 1 items. So don’t. Just focus on getting weapons.

For items, you want to skip tier 1 items for the most part. Any money spent on early items is money not spent on getting to tier 4 weapons. Even when you see tier 2+ items, you should have a high quality standard for what you’ll buy. Because it is just often more powerful to focus on weapons.

Later on when you’ve gotten a couple of Tier 4 weapons, you can begin spending more money on items.

Skip basically all Tier 1 items: The first copy of each Tier 1 item has a -2 Max HP tagged along with its effect. This makes most items you buy terrible. Some items can still be worth buying, but they delay your weapon progression. Always Combine Above Tier 1: As King, you want to combine Tier 1 Weapons as soon as possible, even if it means going below 6 weapons. The -15% Attack Speed and Dmg penalty is very harsh. Having one Tier 1 weapon while waiting to upgrade it is fine. But you don’t want more. Only the First Copy: It is only the first copy of each Tier 1 Item that gives -2 HP, so once you have gotten the first one, you can buy away when you see the item again. So if you find an early Fertilizer, Bag, coffee, or Weird food you could pick it up. But I would never consider anything less. But honestly I would hope to get them from crates. Be ready for the Midgame: Mid game can be a killer with its elites and stronger enemies. Try to make sure your build comes online so you’re ready. You need to already have at least 1 -2 Tier 4 Weapons by this point. Don’t mix more than 3 weapons early. If you can avoid mixing weapons, that’s usually the strongest, but I love doing some mixing. Try to limit yourself to 1-3 different weapons, or you’ll struggle to combine weapons at all.

Stats The Key for king is that you need to get some Max HP early, but then Late, Tier 4 items will help you get to what you need.

You should still get a bit of attack speed early, but otherwise you can focus on Flat damage and other stats. Getting up to 150% attack speed and %Dmg means that those are less priorities late game.

Spend your upgrades on Defense: You’ll have tons of DPS from spending all your money on weapons. And you’ll have your damage stats covered. So spend upgrades on Max HP, Armor, Speed. And maybe some harvesting early. Take the good stuff you’re offered but know that these are your priorities %Damage & Attack Speed: - You can get up to 150% of both Attack speed and %Damage if you get all 6 Tier 4 weapons. That’s all you need. You don’t need to focus on getting it from other sources. Luck: You start with 50. That is all you need. If you got a luck damage build going, you can invest more, otherwise it is a low priority. Items

King is boring when it comes to items. The more I play king, the less Items I buy. I basically don’t shop items before I have 1-2 Tier 4 weapons. Don’t get distracted by Tier 2 items on Wave 4-8. Later on you can shore up your stats and healing.

Look for Tier 4 items. You gain +5 Max HP from each Tier 4 item. This is quite a bonus, so you’ll be willing to buy more Tier 4 items than normally. HP Items: Outside of maybe broken mouth, you’re not getting all the tier 1 Max HP items, and you might be down some hp from buying tier 1 items. Late game, Tier 4 items will cover you. But early-mid, you want to pick up a Padding/Acid. Stone armor is also great if you’re stacking armor.

Jerky - If you’re skipping lemonade and Weird food, this doubles your consumable healing and is great. I wouldn’t mind maybe going into Weird food a bit later on, since it is so powerful. Not Fairy - King is one of the few characters where the fairy is awful. For fun Cyberball & Baby Elephant: King starts with 50 Luck, so it can be tempting to go for a luck build. It is not a strong build, but it can be fun.

Renegade

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Pistol Revolver Shredder SMG Laser Gun Medical Gun Shotgun Taser Wand Icicle Ghost Scepter Crossbow Shuriken Slingshot Railgun Flute Javelin

You have +2 Projectiles and +1 Piercing, so you optimally want weapons that have only 1 base projectile, and no piercing, or a good piercing damage modifier.

Generally speaking renegade won’t have issues with their weapons being able to deal with hordes of enemies, but the -80% Damage modifier means you’ll have to play catch up to deal enough damage.

The Guns: SMG: Full benefit, tons of life steal and damage. The 1 damage minimum becomes powerful here. Pick up a ton of ranged damage, go for 6 SMGs. Get at least 34% attack speed. Get some life steal. Awesome build. Revolver: Full benefit, good knockback. Mix with Laser, round out your stats. Super solid. Laser Gun: the 25% Piercing loss is neat, and the overkill damage isn’t a problem.

Mixing these three guns is also quite powerful, revolvers and laser guns especially mix well. Otherwise 6 SMGs is a great build.

Shopping: You can’t have melee weapons, so see a ton of the weapons you want if you go for a weapon in a weapon class with mostly melee weapons. For example the Primitive weapon class only has Slingshot and Javelin as ranged option, so when the shop shows a weapon of the same weapon class, you’ll have 1/2 of getting the weapon you want. Instead of 1/7 with guns.

Flute - Chance to instant kill and gain an ally is quite powerful with the triple projectiles. Only one Ranged weapon in the Weapon class pool, so you’ll see a ton of flutes. Javelin - You’re wasting a bit of piercing, but it is a quite strong weapon. Also there’s only 2 ranged weapons in the pool. So you get a ton. Insane with Curse Slingshot / Shuriken - Fun bouncing options. Shuriken needs crit. Icicle - elemental option, needs crit, great with curse.

Other Options Crossbow - decent ranged option. 3 weapons in the shop pool. Shredder is also quite neat.

Some Notes: Ghost scepter - can be fun. Renegade fixes the Scepter’s issue with dealing with multiple enemies, but you’ll need to fight to keep up with the DPS needed. Shotgun/Taser - Renegade wants to avoid weapons with multiple projectiles, since you don’t get the 3x damage output. Wand - Burn Damage really suffers from the Damage modification, but the Piercing and Projectiles really spread the flames well. Not a great choice. Strategy

The Renegade is super powerful once you learn the playstyle. Your weapons fire in random directions, and deal tiny amounts of damage, but the triple projectiles and Piercing allows even single target guns to clear out crowds of enemies.

You gain +10% (+2% reduced) damage from buying new Tier 1 items. This is how you’re getting %Dmg. Don’t waste your upgrades on it. In the first 3-5 shops, you don’t want to lock or buy bad Tier 1 items. Just do like on any other character and only buy the good ones.

But once the midgame of wave 7+ hits, you begin collecting tier 1 items, and you shouldn’t be shy to buy items that do nothing. Once you hit the late game you might even want to pick up items that are bad for you. (But don’t buy -1 Ranged Damage items)

Stats Tier 1 Items: There are a Total of 54 Tier 1 Items to be found. That is a total of +540% damage, or +108% Damage after the -80% modifications. % Damage: Since all Tier 1 items have +10% damage, all other sources of % damage pale in comparison. Why would you pay so much for a cyclops worm, when every Tier 1 item gives the same? In the same vein, items like Metal plate and Insanity also become better since the negative % Damage is also reduced by 80%. Ranged Damage / Attack Speed / Crit: These are the offensive stats you need to look for to multiply your damage output. Crit is slightly better on Renegade since you don’t overkill as much, but on the other hand, SMG has a terrible 1.5 Crit multiplier. Life Steal: Renegade is super powerful with life steal, since the triple projectiles with piercing offers 6x the chance to trigger life steal. Even a few % can heal you a lot. Especially if you’re using SMGs. That said, This is currently a HP Regen meta. So I would likely get both. Crit: Critical hits are slightly better on Renegade, since your attacks deal less damage, there is less overkill. So it can be a solid way to increase your DPS. However Ranged Damage and Attack Speed are still more cost efficient ways to gain DPS. But Crit is a decent Third. Worth noting that SMG has a 1.5 Crit multiplier, so I would really avoid investing in crit here. Curse: Several of your weapon options are quite good with curse: Shuriken, Javelin, Crossbow, Icicle. Consider going into curse if you’re using one of those. Items Buy Turrets in the Shop: Turrets are super powerful with Renegade. Structures Ignores the -80% damage, but still benefit from the +2 Projectiles and Piercing. Look for the Tier 1 and 2 Turrets in the shop and Pocket Factory. But you can’t equip Melee weapons, so forget about that wrench dream 🙁 Medical Turret: This turret also gains +2 projectiles, and it will heal you 9 HP! Insanely powerful. Secondary Damage: Secondary Damage such as Cyberball, Alien Eyes, Baby with a Beard, Rip and Tear are all quite useless on Renegade, since the -80% damage really kills it and they don’t benefit from the +2 Projectiles. I would just avoid them. Bandana/Ricochet - You ignore the downside of these items, and especially getting bouncing attacks is insane for you since they have perfect aim. Avoid Sharp Bullet. Since you already have +1 Piercing, this means you go from doing 100% + 50% dmg and instead do 100% + 30% + 9%. So you lose damage from buying Sharp Bullet. Fairy: The Unlock from Renegade, Fairy, is insanely powerful on Renegade and worth it to pick up even if you’re not going HP Regeneration. (You’re buying plant and mushroom anyway at some point.) Giant’s Belt can be insanely powerful with Renegade due to the number of projectiles. But it requires you to either have crit, or be ready to build some. However, it doesn’t take a lot of crit (10-20%) Before the belt becomes insane.

One Armed

Difficulty: Super Hard Tier: D

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Thief Dagger Ghost Axe Ghost Flint LIghtning Shiv Scissors Cacti Club Torch Plank Hatchet Chopper Double Barrel Shotgun Laser Gun Pistol Shredder SMG Revolver Taser Wand Shuriken Slingshot Crossbow Pruner Jousting Lance

As One Armed, you are limited to only one weapon. So choose Wisely. You can switch it out later if you find, for example, a Nuclear Launcher, or even better, a legendary weapon like Chain Gun. You have many options but the following stick out.

The easiest options are:

Lightning Shiv, the easiest option: The melee part can be quite scary, but it spawns projectiles for each enemy hit, so if you stab into 10 enemies, that is up to 10 bouncing lightning strikes spawned. Lightning Shiv can easily clear the screen and can’t fall behind easily unlike other weapons. Remember to get both elemental damage and melee damage. Slingshot. Decent and Easy Option, Can struggle with clearing enemies mid-late game. SMG (My Favorite but difficult): Smg Maxes out its attack speed at 201% Attack speed. So get that. Then just stack a ton of ranged damage and look for a baby with a beard, bandana, or ricochet. The SMG build can high roll out of existence, but it isn’t very reliable.

There are also some fun options.

Ghost Axe Scales double damage. Fun build, But hard to survive. Switch to a better weapon later in the game. Plank is also a fun option. But harder. Hatchet: Starts out with a ton of base damage due to your 200% attack speed. Boost its range, and it can work quite well. It is fast and scales well with melee damage. Shredder isn’t bad either.

Strategy The one armed can only use one weapon. But you are given some really powerful buffs to compensate. +200% attack speed and all damage you pick up is doubled. One armed can do some insane builds if you are lucky, but also struggle with surviving and dealing enough damage.

One Armed is considered one of the hardest characters. A lot of weapons are traps, since they aren’t able to protect you or clear the map alone. So make sure you’ve chosen one of the suggested weapons. You have to learn to evade enemies while your weapon does its job. You can’t expect your weapons to kill every enemy coming for you.

You are tagged for +damage items. And they are good for you. You need to get a lot of %Dmg and Flat damage to keep up with the enemies. You save money by not having to buy weapons. Invest that money in damage. Luck Damage: One Armed is also a very good option for a luck build, since you are looking for the extra secondary damage, and you have +100% Damage scaling, so you can really make those Cyberballs and Baby Elephants hurt. Healing: With one Weapon, life steal isn’t the best option for you. Consumable Healing + HP Regen is the way to go. Stats Attack speed isn’t that important for you. Going from 100% to 110% attack speed means +10% dps. Going from 300% to 310% means +3,33%. So take this into account when buying items. Coffee becomes +3,33% DPS, -4%. Instead of the normal 10%, -2%. The 201% Attack Speed Breakpoint & Above. It turns out that every weapon in the game has a Big Breakpoint at 201% attack speed. So I recommend picking up a level 1 Attack speed upgrade or similar, such that you have at least 201%. You can look up Attack speed Breakpoints with my Multitool calculator. Crit: You’re likely killing most enemies in one hit. So Crit is in many cases wasted. Maybe you can pick up some of the good options, but otherwise I just stick to DMg% and Flat Damage, since they are doubled. If you find a Hunting trophy or some tentacles, it could become attractive. Speed: Having a good amount of speed helps protect you when that one weapon fails. For example lightning shiv likes having a decent amount of speed. Range: Since you only have 1 weapon, it is centered on you, which means it has less range. If you’re using something like Lightning shiv you need to boost its range for extra safety. Items

Secondary damage items can be very powerful: Baby with a Beard, Rip and Tear. These can help you clear up the hordes of enemies and you can scale them very well. Baby with A Beard especially is insane on One armed. Piercing/Bounce: Items like Bandana and Ricochet that allow you to hit more targets. This makes them critical on builds With SMG, since it only hits 1 target normally, and the item also really empowers Baby with a Beard. The Doubled -%Dmg might seem scary, but remember you’re seeing a ton of +%dmg items, and it takes the same amount of head injuries/ Injections to make up for a ricochet, Doubled or not. Not Sharp Bullet: The -20% Piercing Damage is doubled(-40%), so the second hit deals only 10% damage. So I would avoid Sharp Bullet unless I have a Pumpkin coming up. Wandering Bot: I find this one to be quite useful on lightning shiv builds, or other melee. Its ability to stop enemies around you is key to giving your weapon enough time to attack again and wreck the enemy before it hits you. All damage is doubled. Even dynamite (+30% dmg, great with shredder), Pumpkin (-30% is all you need for shotguns), Silver Bullet gives +50% for you.

Bull

Difficulty: Medium Tier: C

Starting Weapons You can’t have Weapons. Strategy You don’t have weapons. Instead you have a very powerful explosion. You also start with very powerful defensive Stats. The plan is to build up your defenses, and the damage of your Explosion.

Get enough speed to where you can control when you want to collide with the enemies. Aim for the enemies that deal low damage to you. Herd enemies into big group and then clean them out. Bull can be difficult until you learn the ropes.

4 Items Per shop: Since you can’t wield weapons, you’ll see 4 items per shop. This also means you should be quite picky with which items you buy. Because you’ll see a lot. Just because an item gives you the stats you want, doesn’t mean that it is good enough to buy. Especially be critical of items that offer damage. Lens giving +1 ranged damage is simply not good enough, you can find so much better.

Don’t be at full HP: Make sure you’re using your regeneration. Being at full hit points is kind of a waste. You want to herd enemies, and constantly trim them down in efficient explosions while staying at a healthy amount of hp, but not full.

Enemies Elites, Bosses: It can be difficult to kill bosses and elites on Bull, unless you are doing well. In many cases you just want to be focusing on surviving and also farming the wave. Horde Wave. Horde waves are rough. Having some speed and enough armor + regen is key. With so many enemies spawning, you’re gonna take hits and it is hard to control. But try to weave between the enemies as much as you can to reduce the frequency of getting hit.

Crash Zone Wave 7 Eggs: Remember to search for the eggs in wave 7. You can kill them by walking into them, but once they hatch, they become difficult for Bull to handle. Wave 11-12 - Pursuers - can be outrun, but you can also herd them into a group and kill them by walking into weaker enemies. Wave 14 - Spawner

Abyss Wave 5 Buffers Wave 9 Hammerhead sharks: These can overwhelm the map. If you got the damage, take them out quickly, otherwise Stats Armor and HP Regeneration is your Bread and Butter. Get as much of both as you can carry. Max HP isn’t as important. You pick up max HP through Alien Magic, Alien Worm, Medal, Warrior Helmet, Little Muscley Dude, Defective Steroids. Don’t pick it up alone, Get it in good deals with other stats. Speed is whatever you put on top of bread and butter. It allows you to choose when you get hit. Buy those Beanies, Medal, Compass for speed. Having 6-10% for Wave 7-9 helps a lot. I like having 15-20% for the later waves at least. Having 40%+ can be nice for the boss fight. Useless Stats: Range, Engineering, Attack speed, Life Steal, Crit, are dump stats. This Scrambles which items are useful. Take your time to think about what items and stats you actually need. Dodge: Once you get to wave 15+, the game is mostly about surviving. So you can go into dodge to help survive longer, and especially during the boss fight. However it messes with your explosions. So I mostly skip it. If you have self damage you can get into it. What Damage to get: Elemental, Ranged, and Melee Damage all increase the damage of your explosion. But Melee damage comes at half the price of the other two. So a tier 2 Melee upgrade with +4 melee damage is better than a tier 3 elemental damage upgrade. Luck: Luck is okay. It gives extra healing and helps you get some of the powerful higher tier healing/Explosion items. But on the other hand, I’m also buying Mushroom and Alien Magic. Luck is also hard to get into because the downside of Shady potion and Lucky duck are rough. Curse: I would avoid Curse as much as possible. You can’t get cursed weapons which is the most powerful aspect of curse, and you deal Area damage, so single, really strong enemies suck to fight. Items

Blood Donation: One of the most powerful Items you can get is Blood Donation. It makes you explode every second. Once you have that, you can go for dodge. Otherwise you might not want dodge, as it prevents you from exploding when you want. Bloody Hand is also worthwhile just for the effect even though life steal is useless on bull. Explosive Items: Dynamite, Plastic explosion, and Explosive Shells all work with your explosion. They are extremely powerful for you. Dynamite is by far the best way to get % Damage for you. If you get enough Dynamite, you can skip out on normal damage items. Bonkdog: The Pet Dog scales with Melee and Explosions, making it a decent pickup for extra damage. If you want to kill elites and Bosses, it also can be quite helpful Rip and tear, especially if you stack them, can be powerful pickups. It can create powerful chain explosions that clears out any stragglers that might be just outside of your radius. And the chain explosions also kill bigger enemies that survived your main explosion. If you pick up Rip and Tears, it is time to focus on melee damage for your damage, more than you already did. Dumping Crit: Your Explosion only scales 1.5 times with Crit, but it already deals enough damage to kill most small enemies. I tend to allow my crit to go into big minus, so I can pick up efficient items such as: Goat Skull, Medal, Compass (If you need the speed), and Bowler Hat. Core Tier 1 Items: Look for Plant, Mushroom, Defective Steroids, Goat Skull, Toxic Sludge, Beanie. Propeller Hat is also good. Doc Moth: The New Healing Pet is insane for you. Moving within the Aura isn’t optimal, but the payoff of double HP regen is absolutely insane. Insane HP Regen Items: Medikit, Regeneration potion, and Fairy are all completely insane for Bull and can keep you alive through some insane situations. Generally speaking I find myself having more than plenty of damage with Bull, so I’m not afraid of taking items like cute monkey or lost duck, as the effect is strong and you can recover the damage. Same thing with metal plate or tractor. But skip Broken Mouth and Hedgehog. The minus HP regen is not worth it. Stone Skin: I want to be stacking Armor on Bull, so Stone Skin quickly becomes amazing. Small Fish: A 10% multiplier to your explosion damage. And you ignore the downside. Baby Squid: +1 HP Regen per level. This is awesome for you. And you ignore the downside. Coral: Can be quite a meme build if you manage to stack a few with a barricade. But otherwiseI’m never standing still, so it is horrible. Don’t get baited. Sunken Bell: Sunken Bell basically makes a super version of your explosion. It scales with the same stats as your explosion, but + engineering, so it will deal quite a bit of damage. I quite like sunken bell, especially if you’re slightly behind, or struggling to clear the screen. If you’re getting swarmed by enemies, this will clear the screen for anything but the strongest enemies, and will give you some time to heal up before taking damage again. And it helps you gain more materials by blowing up a ton of enemies. If you’re focusing on surviving you might not actually get to Kraken Eye: Triggers by the same things as your regular explosion, so it is a decent addition if you want more damage. But I’m not the biggest fan of going curse on Bull, since you can’t find any cursed weapons which is usually the best reason to go for curse. Jerky: I like having the healing spread out on Bull. And +3 Consumable healing is awesome. Ball and Chain. You don’t have any weapons, so this is just free +3 Armor and +15% Damage. Knot. Same story, just free +15 Max HP and +15% damage. Frozen Heart: Just an easy +8 to your damage stats. Not Ice cube: Sadly Ice cube doesn’t work with your explosion :(

Soldier

Difficulty: Hard Tier: S

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Crossbow Double Barrel Shotgun Laser Gun Pistol Shredder SMG Taser Revolver Wand

Shotgun, SMG, and Revolver are all premium choices. If using Shotgun or SMG, you have to focus on getting a ton of ranged damage.

Crossbow, Laser Gun, and Taser can also work. Soldier can pull most weapons off due to the insane starting stats. Strategy The Soldier comes with a lot of firepower and strong abilities. The Downside is Major. You cannot attack while moving, so you want to stand still and fire. You only count as moving while you are holding down a movement button. The moment you release it, you count as standing still. So if you move around and dodge by tapping the moment keys instead of holding them down, you can shoot while moving. This movement is called “Stutter Stepping”.

Once you learn the stutter stepping, Soldier becomes one of the most powerful characters in the game.

You have additional knockback. Which keeps you quite safe. Spawned projectiles and turrets also use knockback, and are quite bugged. So be mindful of rogue enemies being pushed around if you have that. Pickup Range: You start with a ton of pickup range. It is really a neat thing to have. You don’t have to wander around the map and pick up materials. Don’t buy more pick up range. You already have enough. Also Consumable healing comes flying towards you.

Stats Get more Speed: You start with +10% speed, but it is a good idea to get more, unless you’re going for Etsy’s Couch Standstill build. If you have enough speed, the stutter stepping won't make you slower than normal. Life Steal: Life steal can be worth it on Soldier depending on your weapon. Still a 50/50% on which healing you’re going for. Ranged Damage: Since you already have 50% dmg and Attack speed, make sure to get ranged damage early to balance it out for greater dps. Especially since the Soldier’s weapons scale well with ranged damage. Ranged damage will be your most efficient stat until you have gotten a lot of it. HP Regen vs Life Steal: Soldier with SMG or Shotgun is quite good with life steal, but HP Regen is often just the better Choice. Items

Standstill items: The Standstill items have been buffed, and are now quite good. Statue is basically always super cost efficient on Soldier, since you can only fire while standing still. So I would buy it nearly always. But don’t let it drop your speed too low. Barricade and Chameleon can also be quite good, since you stand still more often. But don’t make it your strategy to get hit. And you’re also likely to be moving while you’re Esty’s Couch: You can’t rely on hoping to find this legendary, and I tend to lose when I get it. It is mostly a trap.

Masochist

Difficulty: Easy Tier: S

Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Rock Scissors Cacti Club Ghost Axe Spiky Shield Sharp Tooth Torch Brick Lute Sickle Double Barrel Shotgun Medical Gun Wand Icicle

My Picks Scissors - Very strong option - you heal much more from the innate life steal. But you need to get a ton of melee damage for this build. Look for Circular Saws as a weapon upgrade. Spiky Shield - Perhaps the strongest option, Unlocked by winning with Masochist. You can ignore the melee damage and just stack armor. Super hard damage potential, but the knockback can make it a bit harder to use. Medigun is pretty decent due to the life steal. Find a sharp bullet and you’re golden. Other options

Rock is also quite decent. Slow, but it gives you HP and Armor, allowing you to tank more hits. Sharp Tooth - gives you some life steal and deals good damage. Loves Shotgun is also an option. Just get some early life steal and ranged damage.

Generally Ranged builds are a bit harder. Masochist deals no damage at the beginning of a wave, so enemies stack up. That’s no issue for melee weapons, as you just cleave the crowd. But ranged builds can struggle to deal with the stacked enemies. Strategy The masochist must take damage to deal damage. Each time you take damage, you gain +5% dmg for the rest of the wave. You start off each wave dealing 1 damage, and at the end of the wave one-shotting everything. To allow you to take such damage, you start with insane tanky stats. Once you understand how to take damage and build tanky enough, Masochist becomes one of the strongest characters in the game, since you can survive anything while dealing insane damage.

The plan is to stack lots of armor, some Max HP and get a ton of Healing, so you can take the damage..

Manage your HP. You want to be below Max HP for most of the wave, so that you’re getting the most out of your healing. You want to start the wave by getting hit as much as possible, so you can begin dealing damage. Be careful with going too low. You don’t want to be at the point where 1-2 hits can kill you, since accidents can happen. Manual Aim: Sometimes at the start of the wave, I manually aim my weapons to attack behind me, so I can walk into an enemy without killing them. This usually allows them to get a couple of hits in.

%Damage Masochist starts with -100% damage during the beginning of a wave. You gain +5% Damage whenever you take damage. For the most part I suggest just dumping this,

I’ve done some strategies where I actually buy %dmg, but that’s been mostly relevant on %run difficulties, where enemies deal double damage and you can’t farm %dmg as easily.

Stats

Round out your DPS Stats: You still need Attack speed, flat damage (unless spiked shield), and a bit of Crit (not on scissors, it already got more than you need) Healing Over Max HP: You want to take damage all the way through the wave. Healing in any form is more important than Max HP. You already start with a good amount of Max HP. You still want more Max HP than the average character tho. Speed: Remember to pick up some speed, so you can choose which enemies hit you. Seek out the enemies that deal least damage and use them to pump up your %Dmg. But you don’t need as much as for example a squishy ranged build. I like 10% for early-mid, and 20% for later. Some like to have more and that’s fine. Life Steal: Since you end up attacking enemies while not dealing damage early in each wave, it sets you up for some good life steal. On masochist I like going both HP regen and LIfe Steal. If you’re using Scissors or medigun, you do not want more life steal, since those weapons basically max you out. Dodge: Dodge makes you more tanky, but it doesn’t allow you to get hit more, and it slows down your ability to stack %Dmg. I would rather invest in other defensive stats. If you have found Blood Donation/Bloody hand, you can go for it. But you might not need it at all. Still, it isn’t bad to build up dodge in the late game, since it helps you survive bosses. Luck: Masochist has great benefit from some nice Epic and Legendary items, and loves some consumable healing. Making Luck a neat pickup if you find a good source for it. Lucky Duck Items Dumping %DMG. Look for items with negative %DMG - Coffee, Insanity, Metal Plate, Small Magazine, Propeller Hat, Tractor. And so on. Doc Moth: This Tier 2 pet doubles your HP Regen and Life steal. It is completely busted. Buy on sight. Blood Donation is insane for you. The +40 harvest is great, the damage each second is greater. During the 60 sec of a wave it is gonna build you towards 300% damage, with more in the boss battles. If you get blood donation, you can start building dodge. Otherwise Don’t get dodge, as you need to take hits. Bloody Hand is also amazing for this reason. The stats it gives is also Awesome. Life Steal: Whetstone, Fin are quite nice. But in the midgame-late game, picking up bat and butterfly isn’t the worst. Decomposing Flesh / Baby Squid: These are really powerful if you get them early. Healing Options: Cute Monkey (If not Ranged), Goblet is awesome. Tentacle is great if you have some crit. Consumable healing: Great as always, buy the whole package: Lemonade, Weird Food, Jerky, Fruit basket. HP Regeneration has some insane items at Higher Tiers: Fairy, Medikit, Regeneration Potion. All are insanely strong. But I would avoid Sad tomato in many cases, since Masochist likes to take damage from the beginning of the wave.

Knight

Difficulty: Easy Tier: S Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Sword Hammer Spear Torch Spiky Shield Jousting Lance

Sword is the strongest starting option. Spear is also good.

Hammer is also fine, but the slow attack speed makes it a rough experience. Jousting Lance doesn’t scale well with melee damage, so I would skip it. I don’t recommend Spiky Shield or torch.

Knight will generally work fine with most weapons. Strategy As the Knight you have several insane upsides. You start with a tier 2 weapon, and all weapons you find are tier 2+, and you can only find Melee weapons. This makes your shop highly efficient, but the downside is that you cannot boost your economy with harvest. You gain insane amounts of free damage as you stack armor, but your attack speed is halved. This turns out to be a good deal, as the Knight is one of the strongest melee characters.

Weapon Mixing: There are many ways to build the Knight, as you can combine and add any of the good melee weapons to your setup. Maybe a spear for some range, or a Plasma Sledgehammer for insane area clear. My personal favorite is 4 swords and 2 Circular Saws. The Saw has 100% scaling, fast attack speed, lots of life steal, innate crit, and good range. It is insane with Knight. The Different Fists are also good options. 6 Spears are also powerful. It is hard to go wrong here. You can basically look at the Gladiator list and take a hint for which weapons that are great to add.

Stats

Healing: I’m going for HP Regen and Consumable Healing. Your weapons are too slow and heavy for life steal. Get your life steal from Circular Saw. Get Melee Damage mostly from Armor: Ignore melee damage except if it is really cheap/efficient. You’ll get more than enough from picking up armor. Attack Speed: Even if your Attack Speed is halved, you should still get some Attack Speed. You should still pick up higher tier attack speed upgrades and Coffee. Crit: I’m not huge on Crit for Knight. You’re killing a lot of enemies in one hit, so that’s a lot of wasted damage. I might still pick up an insanity here and there. But if I get offered Medals, I’m dumping crit. Dodge: Going dodge is an option. Pick up leather vests, Blindfold, Cape, Adrenaline, Clover and Higher Tier Upgrades. But if you feel tanky enough, you can skip it and just focus on Armor. Luck: Luck Provides a form for economy and healing for knight, which is neat when you can’t get harvesting. So I value Luck Slightly higher on knight. Items Economy Items: You can still invest in economy items. Look for the evergreen Bag, Tree, Recycling Machine, Lure. Negative Harvesting: -80% Harvest might as well be 100%. Just ignore it and buy items that grants negative Harvest. (Mouse, Bat, Leech, Rip and Tear) Stone Skin (Golem Unlock) is great on knight. The Attack speed downside is halved, and you’re already stacking a ton of armor. Armor Items to skip: I like everything except: Helmet, Duct Tape, Triangle of Power, I Skip these. Melee Damage: I would honestly only buy Mastery, Little Muscley Dude, Mammoth. Rest is skipped. Small fish - Downside halved, you often want to go for oneshotting enemies. Baby Squid - Halve the downside and you like the HP Regen. Ball and Chain - You got low attack speed and wield slow weapons. Ball and chain is often just crazy good. Jelly/ Spider - I find it easy to end up with a mix of weapons. These items become decent if you have 3+ different weapons.

Demon

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: S Starting Weapons (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Thief Dagger Lightning Shiv Ghost Axe Ghost Flint Torch Ghost Scepter Wand Taser The biggest weakness of the Demon is the bad starting weapons. So one option is simply to sell your starting weapon and look for something better.

The Demon likes to have 1 hp for a good part of the game. So using ranged weapons makes it a bit easier.

Ghost Scepter is powerful, and guarantees a powerful late game. But it struggles to clear the waves early. Look for attack speed and sharp bullet. This is my preferred weapon. If you’re a newer player, you might struggle with this option. Thief Dagger is also insanely powerful late game. It is melee so you can’t go as crazy with the shopping, since its harder to survive with 1 hp. Lightning Shiv is a very powerful and user friendly option. Stack Melee and elemental damage and it will have no issues clearing the map. Taser can also be a fine option.

Other You can start with Torch and hope to find a Slingshot, Spear, or Stick. The primitive Set bonus is insane with the Demon. Then Sell the Torch. This won’t always work out tho. You can also just buy a good gun like a revolver or SMG. Demon has a lot of leeway in the first shop. Strategy The Demon can be hard to understand how to use, but is one of the most broken characters in the game. You abuse the early shops to get ahead, and then you just manage your Max HP at a safe level later. In the endgame, you should be super strong and be able to handle the bosses with ease.

Spending HP You can spend your hit points to buy items. That means you can also spend the 10 HP points you start with to buy extra items. It is worth noting that Weapons/items are really cheap during the first 1-3 shops, and so is rerolling. So often the plan is to buy items until you have 0-1 HP left. (If you have 0 or less hp when starting a wave, your hp becomes 1 for the wave, but you still have to earn those HP back before your HP increases to 2 or higher. So no free HP.)

So your economic advantages: 13 money turns into HP, which can buy up to 20 money worth per HP. You can spend up to an extra 10 HP, or up to 200 money. And finally during the early waves you can buy MAX HP items for less HP than they give.

HP items: A broken mouth costs 2 Max HP early, but gives 5 Max HP. So that is free 41-60 money at the cost of -1 HP regen. Same with Alien Worm, Cake, Weird Ghost, Acid.

This can cascade into a shopping spree early where you just buy tons of weapons and good items while gaining HP.

Item prices: You buy items using Max HP instead of materials (Item price is 1 hp per each started 20 gold. So an item costing 1-20 gold = 1 hp. An item that costs 61-80 gold = 4 hp.) Shop to 1 HP: Early game I like to stay at 1 HP for optimal shopping, then switching wave 6-10 into normal Max HP. Late game you should save up max hp, since you get it very efficiently. Buying out the Shop: During the First 1-3 shops, you got plenty of Max HP, and you’re often limited by your materials. So when it costs 7-10 materials to reroll, then you can simply buy all the items and weapons in the shop, and it will make the reroll free. If you could use 2-3 of the Weapons/Items in the shop, then this might only cost you 1-2 HP to reroll. And you can sell the weapon back for a bit of materials. HP Upgrades: During the early game, hp upgrades are super powerful, since they are essentially a bag of cash you can spend. And during the early game, you can get a lot of stats for 3 hp in the shop. Don’t Reroll all your materials away. The demon uses HP to Buy, and Materials to reroll. So I sometimes see players spend all their materials to reroll in the midgame. (Its fine for the first couple of shops). You gotta save that material, since it is converted into Max HP at the end of each wave.

Items Piggy Bank: The Demon is often not able to spend all their materials each round, since it keeps half, and only uses it for refreshing. So a piggy bank can be good. Also, don’t over refresh, since keeping more material means more Max HP for the next round. Spicy Sauce/ Alien Eyes: These can deal a good amount of damage if you get multiple of them and a ton of HP. Not needed, but can be a cool addition. HP items: They start out strong. Being pure profit, then later they become useless. Stats Max HP: In the early game you spend most of it. Then in the midgame you keep a comfortable amount of it. Then in the late game you let it stack high. 100-300 Max HP isn’t unheard off. But you don’t need that much. Economy Stats: I like to abuse the insane early game power to stock up on harvesting, luck, and xp gain.

Baby

Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Scissors Plank Screwdriver Pruner Sharp Tooth Quarterstaff Knife Stick ← Take this one Rock Wrench Shuriken Taser Wand Slingshot Pistol

Stick: This is the best weapon by far for Baby. Stick gets more base damage for each other stick you have. A Tier 1 Stick will have 100 base damage if you have 24 of them.

Rock: Ton Classes give +21 Max HP, 3 Armor, and -10 Speed. So that’s covering your defensive needs early, if you can just get the speed fixed. Rocks also give - / 1 Armor / 1 Armor, 2 Max HP / 2 Armor, 2 Max HP per rock. So stacking a ton of tier 2-3 rocks really buffs you up. Rock also got insane base damage. So playing rock will cover your need for Melee Damage, Armor, And Max HP. So you just need some attack speed and %dmg. They’re also super cheap. Still, it is quite a bit worse than Stick.

Wrench/Screwdriver - Engineering gets most of their stuff from the shop, and engineering doesn’t need as many primary stats to scale its damage. I would go for a mix to get more weapons.

Quarterstaff - Decent Weapon, gives XP gain. - I would want to pick up stronger weapons later on.

Random Bullshit GO. - Start with some decent weapon (Quarterstaff got good classes), then just pick up other good melee weapons. Then you just add high tier good melee weapons to the mix. Here’s a picture. I also added rocket launcher because it doesn’t need ranged damage to be great.

If you’re doing this build. Look for the items Jelly and Spider, since they give bonuses based on how many different weapons you have. The new Captain’s Sword can also be quite strong if you fall behind on weapons.

Strategy: The Baby is a weird character. You don’t get upgrade stats, and instead you get more and more Weapon Slots.

To help combat this, you have +12 Harvesting and -20% Shop prices.

Upgrades after 24 Weapon Max: Once you Max out your Weapon slots, you begin getting Regular Upgrades with Stats. It can be worth it to try to get to level 25, since this means a guaranteed Tier 4 Upgrade. Stats Baby struggles to get enough stats. You don’t have access to stats from upgrades for the most part, and you end up spending a ton of your money on weapons.

This means that you can easily end up with 20 weapons, but not enough %DMG and Attack speed. Keep in mind that once you have 15+ weapons, getting more stats can often give better value for the money compared to buying the 16th weapon.

Secondly, I often find myself very low on defense, since I cover that mostly through upgrades. Be careful with skipping the good defensive options, like warrior’s helmet and metal plate.

Rare Stats: Armor, Attack Speed, and Ranged damage. These can be difficult to come by from items. (Ranged damage got easier with the new update.) Healing: Healing comes mostly from items, so it isn’t a big issue for Baby. Consumable healing is great as always. But Lifesteal also is great, because you can have so many weapons. So outside of an engineering build, I would consider getting a bit of life steal from the good sources, Early decomposing flesh, or a whetstone if you’re willing to dump knockback. Items You don’t have access to Upgrades (Unless you level up like crazy) So that means you have to get all of your needs from Items. Exp Items: You level up slowly. Pick up Scars, Bean Teachers, early Celery Tea, a pea cock. You name it. Getting 50-1000% Exp is really nice. Worth noting that it might be more fun than strong to reach 20+ weapon slots. Coupon: With 5 coupons you can stack the prices down to 55%. That’s really powerful. So look out for Coupons in the shop. Jelly/Spider - Baby sometimes have many different weapons. Bone Dice - I find myself rerolling a lot on Baby. So this is a great way to get a ton of %damage. Just remember to get some extra Max HP.

Shopping for Stats Attack speed: Important stat, though having multiple weapons helps. I’ve found myself looking towards banner often on baby, as I’m struggling to get enough attack speed. You get coffee and the other good items ofc. The Extra range is also nice when you have so many weapons. Armor/Dodge. Armor is Key, so I’m buying every Metal Plate/ Medal / Leather Vest I’m seeing. That also puts me into dodge a bit. And you can get some. But it is super hard to fill up dodge without access to upgrades.

Vagabond

Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Cacti Club Chopper Thief Dagger Spear Sharp Tooth Hand Claw Quarterstaff Hatchet Plank Ghost Flint Spiky Shield Lightning Shiv Torch Lute Shuriken Crossbow Revolver Laser Gun

Cacti Club has been the go-to starting weapon for the early +15 max HP, and especially the +25% damage.

Spear - Great weapon for melee mix builds. Quarterstaff - Two strong classes. Sets you up for more weapons. Lightning Shiv - Great if you can get it to Tier 4. Not Strategy: The Vagabond is a bit of a weird one. Similar to Gladiator, you are rewarded for getting different weapons. But here you can’t have two of the same.

Each weapon contributes to all weapon classes you have. So if you have 4 weapons, it will count you as having 4 weapons in each weapon class you have at least 1 weapon in. Collect Weapon Classes: You want to have as many weapon classes, and you want the strong weapon classes. A lot of them give 5 upgrades worth of stats. And most are good. Primitive, Medieval, Heavy, Blade, Precise, Unarmed, Support are the ones I really want to fill out. Dual Weapon Class Weapons: Weapons can have 1 or 2 weapon classes. Look for the weapons that have two. But also remember that the weapon has to be good. Get to 6 weapons fast: You need to get to 6 weapons to get the weapon class bonuses. Don’t be afraid of picking up cheap, weak weapons that you’ll sell later. Blunt is also nice because all the weapons are dual classed. And it fixes your armor. But the negative speed hurts, and it isn’t giving you a lot of upgrades once you account for the negatives. Bad Weapon Classes: Gun with 50 Range, Elemental if you don’t use elemental, tools, explosive, medical. These are some of the Weaker class bonuses. So if you’re getting them, it should be for the good weapon. The Naval class’s +5 Curse is also weak, but you’re getting other classes with it and a strong weapon. Melee. You’re likely going to be playing melee. There’s more weapons, and most of the juicy weapon classes are primarily melee. You can pick up awesome ranged weapons later like a Nuke or something. But it is easier to focus on one damage type, so you’re not buying Melee, Ranged, and Elemental damage. Secret ability - Can’t find lower tier weapons: Vagabond has a secret ability that means you can’t see lower tier versions of the weapon you have from the weapon pool. So if you have a tier 3 Fist, Tier 1-2 fists are removed from the weapon pool. This helps you combine weapons, and improves your shop. Once the Weapon is tier 4, it won’t shop up at all. Look for High Tier Weapons: While we can sit down and write a list of the perfect combination of weapons that covers the most Weapon classes, in practice it comes down to what the shop gives you. If the shop offers an early good Tier 3 weapon, then you take that. Weapon Classes: See the Wiki for a list of Weapon Classes.

Weapon Classes and choices: See my section on gladiator for more depth on weapons.

Heavy: The Heavy +25% dmg is super powerful

Cacti Club - I’m often starting with this weapon. Only for the Tags. It is the only Heavy Tier 1 weapon. But it is also the worst.

Look for Hammer or Rocket launcher as possible replacements, Flamethrower or nuclear launcher are also options.

Support: Not a must, but a nice 12.5 harvesting. Get in early, then you can leave later. I’m looking for Pruner/Lute to get me in. You can level a pruner up and it will be an okay melee weapon with the garden on the side. Otherwise I would want to replace the weapon class later on once it has served the purpose with the harvesting. Lute, even with Both classes being halved, is quite great. Gives you a lot of economy while it acts as a damage multiplier. Sickle, Taser, Hand aren’t too great. Hiking Pole won’t do much for you in the long run, but is an okay starter weapon with a decent base damage.

Precision: I want Precision, I’m looking at 3 weapons.

Lightning Shiv - two classes. The precision is more important than the elemental. But shiv is also really strong when leveled up. Claw: Gives 15% dodge on the side. Fine DPS. Scissors: gives life steal and 5 HP regen. Sets you up for Circular Saw.

Medieval: 3 Armor and 6% dodge. Insane set. I want it.

Here we have some fine options. Sword is likely my Best in slot if I can get it, and I don’t have another blade. I like Lance. It is a good weapon, but it doesn’t come with another class. It is decent in the slot. Quarterstaff and Spiky Shield are also okay. Especially if they’re your link to their other weapon class. And Quarterstaff becomes quite the weapon once it is tier 4.

Primitive: You usually don’t have to worry about getting a primitive weapon. Especially if you do the Cactus Start. You get this from Cacti Club, Quarterstaff, or Spear.

Blunt: I don’t seek this out, but it does give some good stats. If you get Hammer, you’re getting blunt. Spiky Shield is a decent weapon. I’m not too impressed by rock, tho it is a cheap and quick way to tank up.

Legendary: What are you doing? That’s -100 Max HP. Come on.

The Setup An ideal setup would look something like:

Hammer, Rocket launcher or Flamethrower for the Heavy (Bonus Blunt on hammer). Circular Saw or Sword for Blade. Spear for Primitive Claw/Fist/Flaming Knuckles for Unarmed. Quarterstaff or Lance if you don’t have Sword. Lightning Shiv - can skip if you got Claw or scissors.

You’ll take what the shop gives you, so your setup will switch a few weapons around. Finally, any high tier items like Nuke, Powerfist, Thunder Sword, Particle Accelerator, Stats Vagabond gets a lot of free stats from the sets. With a good setup you’re looking at: 25% dmg, 21 Max HP. 5 Melee damage, 5% life steal, 6 Armor, 21% dodge. 15% crit. (-10% speed :( )

This sets you up for the early game. Speed and Attack Speed: These are two core stats that you’re not getting from the classes. And if you have blunt, you’ll be at -10% speed. Make sure you get these covered. Crit: Notice that the 15% crit can either be all the crit you need, and you don’t need to invest further, or it can be your opening to go for a crit build. Look at your weapons. You’ll often have 1-3 with less than 2 crit damage multipliers.

Armor: You start with -5 Armor, because you’re going to get 3-6 for free from classes. Be a bit careful early. As a melee class with a weapon mix, you can expect to get hit, so get plenty of armor. Dodge: Again, you’re taking some hits, and you’ll have 15% from unarmed and 6% from medieval. So it is well worth it to get to 60% for Vagabond and be really tanky. Luck & Harvesting: These are reduced by 50%. So they’re mostly not worth bothering with outside of a random tier 3 upgrade or crate item. Picking up a Support tag weapon is still great tho. Items The Jelly item you unlock on Vagabond is beyond insane for you. 6 Max HP for this cheap is unheard of. Spider: Similarly, the Gladiator’s Spider is also Amazing for you. Recycling Machine: This can be valuable if you happen to have some trees, and if you’ll be selling weapons later.

TechnoMage

Unlock

Particle Accelerator is quite expensive, but it is a fine pickup for Elemental builds. It also scales with Engineering, so those builds can also use it. It also loves a Strange book. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Wrench Screwdriver Plank Torch Lightning Shiv Pruner Taser Wand Icicle

Icicle: The new and cool elemental weapon. It works well with crit, ice cube, and frozen heart. You can pick up pile of Books if doing a crit run. Quite powerful weapon, but single target. You can combine it with Lightning shiv, Flamethrowers, or Fireball. But Full icicle build can also work fine. Taser is decent. You start with +4 elemental damage and 2 turrets. This helps tasers keep up in damage. Get to 6 tasers. Enjoy the +25 harvesting fixing your shop prices. Then you can branch into other elemental weapons such as Flamethrower, Icicle, and Fireball. Tasers also deal decent damage. Lightning Shiv - Just a solid weapon. Lightning Shivs are powerful when upgraded to higher tiers.

Playstyles:

Elemental Focus - Just play like a mage, use 6 elemental weapons. Cheap structures give +2 elemental damage and spread fire with scared sausage. This has been the most common and powerful playstyle. Engineering Focus - Play like the Engineer. Your weapons are Wrenches/Screwdrivers, but you can get a ton of attack speed by buying elemental damage. This build loves Strange Book and frozen heart. - I’ve found this playstyle to be a bit weaker. Mad Hybrid - Have you gone mad? You can just do both at the same time? Well it might not be the most effective style, but it's fun. Strategy: Generally, I’ve seen technomage played mostly as an elemental character. You’ll start with 2 turrets and +4 elemental damage. Structures give +2 elemental damage, so they become pretty good pickups.

Burn - Scared Sausage: Any playstyle with the Technomage will end up with a ton of elemental damage, so you should be making advantage Stats Your Stats are going to depend on which build you’re going for.

As the Elemental build, you want offensive stats. %DMG and Attack speed are standard, Elemental Damage you get from structures. And then if you’re going Icicle you’ll want crit.

No engineering stat for the Elemental build: If you’re going for the elemental build. It isn’t worth buying +engineering items for the most part. There’s exceptions like Alloy or strange book. Your structures can deal damage by spreading fire with Scared Sausage instead. Engineering build See other engineering characters for more details, but you can skip out on Attack speed and Crit. Unless you have pile of books. Also you don’t need improved tools since you get structure attack speed from elemental damage.

Other than that, you want more tanky stats as an engineer. But also, since you might want to get scared sausages and lean into some burn spreading, and perhaps even have an elemental weapon, you’ll want to keep a decent %Dmg stat. Items

Turrets. You should be picking up every cheap turret for the +2 elemental. Landmines too. Tyler - Great turret. Scales with both engineering and elemental and can apply a ton of fire. Blazemander/Bot-o-mine Pets- Quite good if you have the Elemental/Engineering to back it up. Bouncing & Piercing. Several Elemental weapons are great with extra hits. Shiv, taser, wand, fireball, all love a sharp bullet. Icicle already got piercing, but it will take a bandana Strange Book - This doesn’t count the elemental damage you have from your structures. But it is still quite good. You’ll often have some good structures, and this can add a good chunk of damage to those. Pile of Books/Improved tools: If you’re going the engineer build, these are fine build around items. If you’re going the elemental build, I’m less excited. Remember that you’re gaining structure speed from your elemental damage, so Improved tools aren’t as good for you. Can’t get negative Melee & Ranged Damage: This opens up a ton of decent options. Fertilizer, Peaceful bee, schmoop, and Lucky Charm become a bit better. (Fuel tank, strange book, elemental bracelets too!) Vampire

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: B Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Claw Sharp Tooth Ghost Shiv Hatchet Knife Thief Dagger Lightning Shiv Scissors Spiky Shield Stick Torch Screwdriver Wrench Shuriken Pistol SMG Shotgun Medigun Revolver Shredder Crossbow

Sharp tooth: Can reach some insane damage numbers when you’re on low hit points. Not a weapon I’m super impressed with outside of vamp, but good on Vampire. Spiky Shield: You gain armor on lower hp, and shield offers more armor and HP. The big hit box of the shield and knockback gives it more control in the risky melee playstyle of the vampire, but the knockback also makes it harder to control when you get hit. Stick: A strong and easy melee weapon. The +15 Max HP from primitive helps the early waves. Lightning Shiv: A really strong weapon. Shiv also is better with life steal than the other melee options. SMG: If you want a ranged option, SMG is always there. It lifesteals a ton, and you can just take damage if you’re falling behind on clear. Powerful option.

Strategy: The Vampire is a character that relies on taking damage. Similar to Lich, Bull, and Masochist. You start with -60% Damage and have reduced Max HP, but you gain %Damage, Armor, and Life steal the lower your current HP is.

Here’s A table over the stats gained: Current HP % Damage Armor Life Steal 100% -60% 0 0% 90% -40% 2 3% 80% -20% 4 6% 70% 0% 6 10% 60% 20% 8 13% 50% 40% 10 16% 40% 60% 12 20% 30% 80% 14 23% 20% 100% 16 26% 10% 120% 18 30% 1% 138% 19 33%

The Sweet Spot Looking at the table, I see a sweet-spot around 50% to 33% HP. Within this range, you deal a ton of bonus damage, have decent armor, and enough Life Steal that you can rely on it.

So during the Wave I want to run into enemies or projectiles to stay within that range. But it isn’t easy, because once you get low, you begin to life steal a ton. And if you get too low, or put yourself in too much danger, you can easily die, since you are running around at low HP.

I’ve seen people just stay at full hp during a wave, and then struggle to clear a wave. Remember you need to clear the waves and collect the money. So you gotta get low. But don’t get cocky and get yourself killed by trying to be at 10% HP. Stats Life Steal: You get up to 33% Life stealing from your ability. So unless you’re going sharp tooth, it isn’t something you need to stack endlessly. Still, you’re aiming to float at about 50% HP, which is 16% life steal. If you’re using melee weapons you probably want some more. If you’re using Smg, you don’t need that much. If you’re using Sharp tooth, you want a ton. Max HP: Yes it is reduced by 25%, but the more Max HP you have, the safer it is to juggle your HP at lower amounts. Vampire gains a ton of stats, so the biggest issue is dying to unexpected damage. If you get a ton of Max HP, it becomes much easier. Armor: You want some extra armor. It makes your healing go further, and it helps you control how much damage you take. Dodge: I don’t like Dodge early on, especially on Vampire, since it interferes with your ability to control your current HP. But later on, the Melee builds like having dodge. It makes you super tanky in the later waves. %Damage: Looking at the table, Vampire actually has a ton of innate %dmg when you’re at lower Hp. So it isn’t a priority for me. But I would still get the good options. Attack Speed: Nice to get. You already got some %dmg, and it boosts your life steal. Luck: Luck has much less value for Vampire. You can’t heal from consumables, so the biggest upside is gone. Items Ignore Max HP Downsides: Consumable healing and HP Regen are dump stats for you. That opens you up for Alien Worm and Broken mouth as two options that both are more efficient than Cake. Also you can pick up Weird ghost and quickly life steal your way back. Alternative Healing: You can’t use HP Regen or Consumables. But Life steal can sometimes be a bit unreliable as your sole source of Healing. So there’s options. Cute monkey gives healing for collecting materials. Tentacles are awesome if you’re heavy into crit. Med turrets can also provide healing on demand. If you’re doing the ranged build, you don’t need this. Doc Moth: Double Life steal is just great. Better on ranged builds, as it is easier to stay in the aoe. Don’t get yourself killed trying to stay in the zone. Goblet: You ignore the downside, and this really provides a ton of healing. Blood Donation: Taking damage isn’t actually that great. It makes it harder to control your HP. However, the +40 Harvesting is insane, and you can handle it. Take it if you see it early, and it will carry you onwards. However, I don’t fault you for skipping it if you’re not comfortable with it. Bloody Hand: This is just great, at this point you don’t mind the 1 Damage. Bloody hand just wins the game. Poisonous Tonic: You ignore the downside, and it gives decent stats. Decomposing Flesh: It isn’t like you have super synergy with your own unlock, but an early Decomposing Flesh just gives a ton of Stats over the duration of a game.

Beastmaster (Still finishing this up) 🙂

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Starting Pets (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Bonkdog Catling Gun Blazemander Bot-o-Mine

Generally I like starting with a Catling Gun, as it offers both high DPS and it can protect you well. The other pets are also viable. Blazemander is also a solid starter. It doesn’t protect you, and it doesn’t scale as well into the late game, but it prevents you from falling behind on wave 5-9 if you’re not finding more Blue Pets.

Strategy Beastmaster can be a bit of a feast or famine character. You can’t use weapons and you have to rely on pets for damage. But the shop doesn’t guarantee pets the same way it does weapons. So if you’re unlucky, you can fall behind on pets/damage. But on the other hand, Beastmaster scales with all 4 stats, and isn’t limited to 6 weapon slots, so later on you can scale to the point where you can just afk in the middle of the map as your pets handle the enemies.

Before we go deeper into strategy, let’s cover the pets.

I’ll start by giving a general description that applies to other characters, then we can talk beastmaster.

Pets

BonkDog - chases after enemies, has a charge ability where it will charge and explode, dealing decent damage. The dog is decent at damaging groups of enemies and it sticks on Elites/Bosses, dealing a lot of damage to them. Blazemander - Runs around, spreading fire to enemies. It doesn’t deal much damage contact, but if you have elemental damage, the burn will kill most enemies. It also sends out pulses of fire that sets groups of enemies on fire. It is a decent pickup on elemental builds if you can use the extra crowd clear - For example an icicle build likes having it around. Jellyfish - A bit expensive for no direct stats and difficult to actively use. It can be really strong against some elites/bosses - The Dead Whale boss on Abyss likes to spawn slow moving projectiles all over the map that limits your movement, Jellyfish can just eat these up. On the other hand, jellyfish doesn’t protect you against the rotating projectiles around Elites/Bosses, or the projectiles coming from the ground and up.

Doc Moth - I’ve not had a ton of experience with this yet. It moves in circles around the map, providing an aura that doubles your Healing from Lootworm - Lootworm will run around collecting materials. If a tree spawns, it will find and kill the tree. Lootworm has a 10% chance to double the materials it finds, so you basically want to leave materials on the ground for it early in the wave, so you get the 10% extra.I like to manually collect materials near the end of the wave, even if I miss out on the 10%. I find it more important to have the materials for the shop. If you have Sifd’s Relic or Baby Gecko, the materials are vacuumed towards the worm instead of you. Later in the game, the little guy just can’t keep up, and you can for the most part play like he doesn’t exist. Good economic item early in the game. Materials picked up by the worm counts as if you picked it up. So Baby Elephant, Cute monkey, Blunderbuss works with it. Scapegoat - The Tier 4 Pet. Scapegoat can feel a bit weird, since it doesn’t do anything but taking damage. But it is an extremely powerful tank for some builds - Especially Ranged glass cannon builds. It can take the aggro of elites and bosses, making it safe for you to just shoot them down.

Pets - Mechanics Items now showcase their types, which can be Structure and/or Pet. There’s a ton of animal items in Crit - Pets can crit and they use your crit chance. Bot-O-Mine requires you to have pile of books, since it is a structure.’

Back to Strategy!

Generally speaking my Strategy is to start by focusing on buying efficient flat damage and Ratzilla in the shop. A bunch of Rats will carry you for some waves. Then once you get to around wave 4-6 you can expect to see blue items more regularly. At this point you’re looking for more Blue Damage pets. If you just can get enough blue damage pets, you’ll win.

Having bonkdogs and blazemanders are neat for clearing groups of enemies and chasing down elites, but what I’m really hoping to get is a critical mass of Catling guns and Bot-O-Mine, to the point where I can stand on top of where the Cats spawned in a group. When activated they have insane dps, and the bots will create a mine field under you. Now you play like a mix of Soldier/Engineer, staying in the nest, but leaving to collect a bit of materials and evade enemies. The Lootworm is trying its best, but there’s just too many materials now, so you gotta chip in.

Later on your Elite/boss waves are quite easy. You want to have tanked up enough to take some projectile hits. Then you just want to evade the bosses. Circling around the nest deals amazing damage. And otherwise your Bonkdogs should be dealing good damage.

Navigating the Shop - It is really important to get enough blue pets. You want to be rerolling 2-3 times in the Wave 5-12 shops. It is quite easy to find a ratzilla and some more useful items and instantly spend all your earnings. So my advice is to first of all be critical of what items you’re buying. Do you need life steal/armor this early? Do you have enough Ratzillas? Boiling Water isn’t a cost efficient source of flat damage - so skip it and find something more efficient. If you raise your standard and get the rerolls, you’ll on average get the pets. Which Pets to buy?: I’m starting with buying the first 4-5 Ratzillas, then I lower priority on them. But I will pick up more throughout the game, but I might skip them to get the rerolls i need. I will be buying all the blue damage pets, and often banning the healing Docmoth, simply because banning it results in better odds for damage pets.

Curse: Curse isn’t your friend as beastmaster. Curse spawns enemies with more speed, HP and higher damage. And these have a higher chance of making it past your chaotic force of pets. Usually the strongest benefit of getting into Curse is the cursed weapons. Which beastmaster doesn’t have any off. Cursed pets are nice, but not the same powerlevel. So I would avoid Curse as much as you can – which sadly isn’t much as your Pets tend to seek out and kill the Curse Hoarders that spawn around the map. Giving you Curse against your will.

Bans: As I’ve mentioned in other parts of the guide, one of the most powerful ways to use bans is to ban the last 1-2 items in the shop to get a free reroll. As beastmaster, you have 4 items in the shop, so you can look for these free rerolls from level 1 off. Otherwise there’s also the option of banning DocMoth when you see it, as it is a Blue/Tier 2 Pet. And you would much rather have the damage pets.

Stats Speed: Speed is a key stat for you. Just like Pacifist, you for the most part need to run away from enemies and elites, and you have no close range protection from weapons. However, you gain +2% speed per pet you own. So I don’t buy speed, I just get it from my army of Ratzillas. Dump Stats: You do not benefit from Range and Attack speed. So quite a few items become great on you. Defective Steroids, Missile, Pencil, Toolbox, Stone Armor, Focus, head injury, cyclops worm, scar, Little Muscley Dude. These are powerful items to look out for. Crit: Pets can crit, but only have a 1.5 Crit Multiplier. So a tier 1 upgrade for 3% Crit only gives a 1.5% DPS increase compared to the 5% you get from %DMG. So I often dump this. Dumping it gives you access to Goat Skull and Pencil as two really efficient flat damage items. But if you have a strong, rich run, going crit can be fun. Hp/Armor - Pretty normal stuff here. You deal a ton of damage, but the damage is spread around the map, so you’re not as protected. So I will always want to have a good amount of HP/Armor/Healing. Healing - Life steal: Consumable healing is still awesome. But pets can life steal for you! If you have a bunch of rats and other pets, that’s a great amount of hits. And they’re quite consistent with it, unlike lifesteal on melee builds. I like to dump HP regen, as it opens up for Shady potion, Broken Mouth, Goblet (another amazing healing option), Hedgehog. Dodge: Getting to 60% dodge is great on beastmaster. But I often find myself dumping it instead. I usually have so much pressure to get damage and pets in the early mid game, and then find myself with Dodge in the negative from Weird Food, Toxic Waste, Alloy. At that point I’ll do fine with just Armor and the usual. Luck: You start with 10 Luck, and getting a bit more luck early can help you get more Tier 2 / Blue damage pets. Which is really valuable compared to what other characters can get. Best options are Shady potion - dumping HP Regen, Metal Detector, or a propeller hat. I love getting a random higher tier upgrade for luck. But I’m not taking 10 Luck over 4 melee damage at level 5.

Flat Damage The beastmaster’s pets scale with all 4 damage types: Melee Damage, Ranged Damage, Engineering, and Elemental Damage. This is quite similar to Bull. This means that you should look out for items that give multiple damage types. Alloy, Handcuffs, big arms, gnome, reinforced steel, etc.

Just like with Bull, Flat damage isn’t priced equally in the shop, but your pets scale equally with them. So this means you want to focus on the better sources of flat damage. Melee damage is usually the cheapest, then Engineering, then Elemental, and finally ranged damage.

Secondary Damage It might be tempting to go into secondary damage types - Like Turrets, scared Sausage, Rip and Tear, and baby with a beard. But I’ve found best success by focusing on pets. Even if you get some turrets in the shop, they require quite a bit of engineering before they become great. They also don’t benefit from the %Damage. And you do not want limit the flat damage you buy to engineering. Baby with a beard is likely the worst, since ranged damage is the hardest to come by. Scared sausage is fine if you have the elemental damage. But the best source and reason to go into elemental damage for you is Frozen heart, which doesn’t exactly help burn. Also Blazemanders are doing just fine spreading the fire. Rip and tear can be ok if you’re dumping crit and have a ton of melee damage. But I also find that I don’t need it and that my pets handle it fine at that point.

So the conclusion is that you just focus on pets and don’t plan to go for these. Now if an option like an explosive turret, scared sausage, or rip and tear shows up while you have the flat damage for it, then it is fine to pick up.

Items Power Generator - The speed you gain from pets are not considered “permanent”, so they do not work with power generator. So this is a skip.

Knot: You have no weapons, so this is a freebee Ball and Chain - Same thing. Pets aren’t locked by the 0.75 sec cooldown minimum. Explosion Synergy: (Dynamite, Honey, Plastic Explosive, Explosive Shells). - BonkDog and the Robot benefit from this. I really need to have an overweight of these two, then I might pick up there. But generally, they are quite expensive for what you get, when you’re only partly an explosion build Piercing/Bounce - These work on pets and are an okay pickup if you have a good amount of Catling Guns and Bot-o-mine. But they aren’t required or needed often. Ice Cube - While playing beastmaster, each Damage Pet scales with Elemental Damage, meaning even the rats will trigger Ice cube. So it is a decent 10% multiplier for its price. Nail: Nail works with pets and is generally a powerful pickup. Not only does it provide 5 engineering which is a decent amount of flat damage for you, it also gives pets a +20% scaling with engineering. If you’ve leaned into engineering, this can be quite powerful - Specifically for the rat pets. They go from scaling with 10% of your engineering to 30%. So Nail can open up an engineering path for you. However, pets scale with %damage while turrets don’t, so there’s a bit of a conflict of interest if you’re going the whole way. Strange Book: If you have elemental damage, this can become quite strong. Especially if you have Nail. But elemental damage is usually more expensive to come by than Engineering or Melee damage, so you’re not likely to have a ton unless you’ve found Strange book early. Not an Auto buy. Especially since it got the -1 melee and ranged damage. But it is worth it on raw stats alone once you have about 8+ elemental damage, and it has potential engineering synergy. Frozen Heart: Same logic as Nail, and you can use the crit decently. But it does mean your Blazemanders become less powerful. Still, this is a ton of flat damage and a damage increase, so I’m Likely to pick it up. Handcuffs: This is a really powerful damage power up, +24 Damage. But don’t get it too early. Lighthouse: Another really great source for flat damage. Note that Wandering Bot and Bot-o-mine are structures and reduces the Engineering you get.

Enemies If you’re confused by the names, see the wiki Beastmaster is a unique character and some enemies can be quite a challenge for you. Abyssal Depths - Blobfish - The Blobfish on Wave 10 spawns curse hoarders (Sea pigs) and Lamprays on death. Normally I like to time when I kill these, so I can carefully handle the Lamprays, but on beastmaster, they will just die randomly when your pets kill them. Not only does this give you more curse, it also sends lamprays, which are quite challenging as they can charge you. Crash Zone - Slasher Eggs - The slasher eggs on wave 7 on Crashzone can be a bit of an issue. Hopefully your rats can find and kill the eggs before they hatch. So the solution to this wave is to have enough damage and pets. Crash Zone - Pursuers - On wave 11 you’ll face these jerks , and they can be quite the issue if they get to speed up. Especially if you have a horde or elite wave on Wave 11. Again, the solution is just to have enough damage. Having a cluster of Bot-o-Mine and Catling Guns can help you focus them down as they come for you.You should also have the speed to outrun them for some time. Horde Waves - These can be quite challenging if you’ve not gotten enough pets. Horde waves spawn so many enemies that it is hard to run around without getting caught. And pets like the Blazemander, Bonkdog, and rat just run off and attack enemies, leaving you without protection. If you have enough Gatling Cats and Bot O Mines, they can provide protection. The key is to either have enough damage to keep the number of enemies down, or have some defenses, so you can take some hits while trying to survive. The damage option is better.

Wounded

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: B Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Stick Fist Chopper Quarterstaff Cacti Club Hatchet Spiky Shield Ghost Flint Wrench Lute Pistol SMG Shotgun Slingshot Taser Wand Icicle Railgun

The keen-eyed will notice that Wounded can start with the same weapons as Well Rounded and has the same base stats. I guess Well Rounded got beat up.

For Wounded, you want weapons that deal high DPS, and you want range to keep you safe. I would entirely avoid melee weapons.

SMG: Great DPS potential and range. Keeps you safe. You have to focus on stacking ranged damage. Shotgun - Shorter range and harder start, but it has better late game dps, and when you take the crit modifier into account, it shreds bosses. Icicle: Great DPS if you can get them to tier 4 and stack crit. The Elemental option. Railgun: The weapon you unlock by beating Wounded. Great option. When using railgun, I would stack dodge. You don’t need ranged damage here.

Other options:

Slingshot - You miss out on the Max HP and the low range sucks, but if you get enough hp for the Bounces to clear the map, then

Going for a melee weapon is much more challenging, so if you want the extra challenge, go ahead.

Strategy: Wounded dies the first time you take damage. You have two options of defense: Dodge and Tardigrade. You start with one tardigrade.

Wounded is very hard. Perhaps the most difficult character to play. In order to win, you have to know the game and what is throwing at you. You gotta know what projectiles will come at you.

The best way to not get hit, is to kill enemies on sight. You want to stack and have insane DPS. You should be killing elites, horde waves, and bosses before they get to corner you.

Since you have high DPS, and don’t have to spend on defense, you also have a bit more room to invest in economy early game.

Advantages: Your item pool is much smaller. All the healing, armor, HP, etc items are removed from your shop pool. Meaning you will see Dodge, Speed, and damage more often. You don’t have to spend any money on defense. You can freely use any items with defense downsides.

There’s a limit to how much strategy will help you. You have to be good. But if you’re struggling and not winning, then you can hope to get lucky. Try forcing runs where you have a bit of harvesting and some luck. Because the run gets exponentially easier if you’re lucky enough to find some tardigrades.

Stats: You can dump all the healing, Max HP, Armor,

Dodge: If I have railgun this is a yes. Otherwise it isn’t as great. I would likely pick it up later in the game to hedge my bets and hope to survive another hit or two. Range: Range is great and makes you safer. But you want to get it from the good options. Damage Stats: You’re going to be investing in all damage stats that apply to your weapon. Speed: This is about the same as you would do on most ranged builds. Get it to where you are in control and comfortable. I would recommend 30%-60%. Items: Sunglasses, Gummy Berserker, Wheelbarrow, bone dice, injection - Some of the lower tier items that are extra powerful for you. Glass Cannon, Community Support, night googles, jet pack, Ashes, Starfish. There’s a ton of very powerful items with negative armor/HP downsides. Triangle of Power, Crystal - These are very efficient since you’re not getting hit. Tardigrade: You’re gonna be buying all tardigrades you can come close to. Ghost Costume: Good option if you’ve gone for dodge. You ignore a lot of the downside. Peacock: The +50% enemy damage doesn’t matter. Bean Teacher is also awesome. Silver Bullet: This helps you beat Boss/Elite waves which are the most scary waves for Wounded.

Abyssal Terrors DLC Let's get into it!

Sailor

Difficulty: Easy Tier: B

Unlock

A bit of a snowballing item. I would buy it on characters like Explorer, Druid, Lucky, or Curious, where you can expect to see a ton of crates. It is great for endless builds. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Anchor Trident Blunderbuss

So Sailor doesn’t have many choices. Like Knight you can only use tier 2 and above weapons, which is a big upside. Especially for naval weapons, since they only exist at Tier 2+

Anchor - Standard big slow Swing weapon. Scales well with Melee damage and especially with curse. Trident - Really powerful spear weapon. The bonus damage against high health targets is huge, but it is additive with your 200% bonus damage against Cursed weapons. Still, this is a powerful and easy choice.

Other Options Blunderbuss - This Gun reloads when you pick up materials. Note that if you have multiple Blunderbusses, only one reloads per materials picked up. It is fine having 5 melee weapons and 1 Upgraded Blunderbuss in the last slot to abuse the materials picked up. Be mindful that Non-naval weapons don’t get the +200% Dmg against cursed enemies, so Sailor doesn’t have the options of going for a Blunderbuss + other Ranged weapons build. I generally wouldn’t start with it. It is better as a spicy pickup. Weapons to look out for: Not Harpoon - Despite being a naval weapon, there’s no Curse scaling. It doesn’t do much for you. Captain’s Sword (Captain Unlock, Tier 3+) - This is a Sword on Steroids - it has 100%/125% Curse Scaling. In general I would always welcome this powerhouse on a melee run, but it is especially powerful for highly cursed characters like Sailor. Strategy: To understand Sailor, first we must understand curse. So let’s spend some time on that.

The Curse Stat The Curse stat is a new stat introduced in the new DLC. You can gain Curse from killing the new Curse Hoarders that spawn on both maps, from items that have curse, and from certain Characters that gain curse. Finally, the new naval weapon set also gives curse.

Once you have curse, powerful cursed enemies show up with a purple outline around them. You’ll also see Cursed Weapons and Items in the Shop and in Loot Crates. The odds of all this scale with how much curse you have.

Cursed enemies have +150% HP +2% per curse stat, +25% Damage, and +15% speed. In addition they drop 33% more materials. The more curse stat you have, the more often enemies are cursed, also they gain more and more HP.

Generally, the Curse stat should be considered an economic stat, and a “risk vs reward” stat. You make the game harder, but you yourself also become much more powerful. But you want to have the curse stat earlier, such that you get more waves to see cursed items in the shop, and enjoy the +33% materials.

One of the biggest benefits of Curse is that it only affects regular enemies, so it allows you to become stronger while not affecting elite and boss fights. So if those usually cause you trouble, having a very cursed run can allow you to just wreck bosses. Curse also allows for insanely high roll runs, so if you

Be mindful of how much curse you pick up. Especially later in the game. Cursed items give a ton of curse themselves, so the powerful items come at a hefty price.

Curse also comes with a risk of being unlucky. You always take on the added difficulty when you go into curse, but you don’t always get the reward of cursed weapons and items. Sometimes the shop just shows you cursed weapons you can’t use, or items that are bad for you. That’s the risk. So if you’re trying to consistently win D5 runs without dying, you should be careful with going into curse.

Back to the Sailor As the Sailor, you have two primary advantages. You deal 200% more damage towards Cursed enemies, and you get to start with Naval weapons, which scale with Curse Stats. Your 200% Bonus damage only works when using naval weapons.

I think the worst thing about curse is the enemies with huge Health boost, but because of your Triple damage, and curse scaling, this is totally negated for sailor, and instead you clear faster when you have a ton of curse. This tips the Curse stat from being Risk vs Reward, to being mostly reward.

You also have +25 Curse from the start, so The strategy is quite simple. Use 6 Anchors / Tridents or any mix of those two. Buy any Captain’s Sword you see, and then you can add a blunderbuss if you want.

Sailor basically plays like any melee Spear/Hammer build.

Focus on Weapons early!: Your weapons are expensive. I recommend just focusing on weapons for at least the 2 first shops, and focus on getting to at least 4-5 weapons. First Shop Prices: If you do well on wave 1, you can afford an anchor (57 gold), or Trident (58 gold). So be mindful of rerolling if you’ve hit those numbers. Look for the Sea Pigs / Curse hoarders - the Loot Aliens that give +1 Curse per kill. You can find them on the Edge of the New Map on wave 4/5. Cursed Weapons: If you see a really powerful non-Naval Cursed weapon, you can consider picking it up, but be mindful that 20-30% of enemies are going to be cursed, so you’re losing out on a ton of damage, if it isn’t a naval weapon. Stats

Curse - Stack it. You get to ignore a lot of the downside of tanky enemies, so it means more powerful items and weapons. Melee Damage - You can expect to have 25-100 Ish curse stat. And your weapons scale with curse, so you’ll need less melee damage. Still I would buy the good options like Goat Skull or Mastery. %DMG - You start at -25% So make sure to dig yourself out of that hole. Negative %Dmg is awful to have. Speed: You don’t need a ton of speed, but getting some early, like wave 5-9 can really help you while your slow weapons cool down. Some enemies are way easier if you have +10% speed. Attack Speed - Remember your attack speed! Those weapons are big and slow. Dodge - Capped at 20%. Dodge gets better the more you have. 60% dodge makes you 150% harder to kill. 20% makes you 25% harder. So don’t value dodge highly, and instead just take it if some comes from loot crates or High tier upgrades. Crit - This one depends on your weapon setup. Anchors really don’t need the additional crit, since they only have a 1.5 modifier and already hit hard. Armor - Extra Important, since you’re a heavy melee build that can’t go dodge. Healing - Look for Consumable healing, HP Regeneration. I’m dumping Life steal often here, unless I get Decomposing Flesh. Items Generally you want the items that give curse. Corrupted Shard - You’re tagged for cursed item. And you lack %dmg. This item is great on you, buy all of them. Black Flag - Gives materials per killed cursed enemy. That’s a ton of money for you. I would take it if I find it early enough. Fishing Hook - Fishing for cursed items is fun and great on all characters, but you actually don’t mind all the cursed stat that comes along with it. So it is quite good on sailor. Barnacle - Same story, you like the upgrade stats, and don’t mind the curse. Rip and Tear - You’re likely to dump crit. Rip and Tear got changed to -5% crit, so it should be good for some extra clearing. Ball and Chain - Great with Anchor and Blunderbuss, not so good with trident or Captain’s sword. Look out for the Cursed version, which has a lower minimum cooldown, so it works with more weapons. Not Small Fish - Is additive with your +200%, so It has less value. Also Additive with Trident. I’ll still take one from a crate, but wouldn’t buy it in the shop.

Sample Game

For the early game I didn’t shop a lot and instead focused on spending all my money on weapons. Once I had 4-6 weapons, I resumed normal shopping. The mix between anchor and trident meant that I saw a lot of my weapons in the shop. I didn’t pick up much max HP or defense early, and it was a bit scary. But as the game went on, I got some good cursed weapons and items and became stronger. Once I reached wave 16+ I began just getting ready for the Boss wave, since my build was handling the normal waves without much issue. Some items like frozen heart or improved tools were from crates, so that’s why I got them. Crit and Dodge ended up coming my way, so I stacked some. Early Cursed Bean Teacher was MVP. Gave some extra levels. I was struggling to survive around wave 6-10, then I found Goblet and Jerky. Both of these items are great buys to instantly get a good amount of healing for a build. Knot was the last pickup. Always great if you can find the Stat locking items in the last shops. For the Boss Fight, I focused the Dead Whale, while trusting my 2-layer melee weapons to also handle any incoming smaller enemies. So I could focus on carefully avoiding enough projectiles. Once the Whale got low, I dived the boss for the kill, got the 100 Heal, and then I could peacefully take out the Eel. Notice that most of my flat damage for my weapons came from the Curse stat. I only had a small amount of melee damage.

Curious

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A Unlock

Ironic for Curious to be unlocking an item that duplicates itself. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Brick Cacti Club Ghost Shiv Hatchet Knife Plank Rock Torch Lute Pistol Shotgun Icicle Javelin.

Weapon Builds: As the Curious you have to mix different weapons, or suffer -10% damage per same weapon you have. Don’t worry about having 2-3 of the same weapon for a wave or two just to upgrade.

Just like Arms Dealer, Gladiator, or Vagabond, this means you should consider which damage stat you’re going with (Melee, Ranged, Elemental) Javelin - The strongest entrance to a melee build. Look for a spear, which shouldn’t be too hard to find. Then later on you can add all the Higher tier cool melee damage weapons. Icicle - Great entrance to the elemental build. Look for Lightning Shiv, Taser, Fireball, Thundersword, Particle, Flamethrower. Shotgun - Entrance to Ranged. Look for Revolver, SMG, Blunderbuss, and other ranged stuff. You’ll need to get ranged damage through upgrades. Brick - Man I love brick. It might break at the start of the wave, but you can earn some sweet experience and money while setting up a melee mix. Strategy: Curious requires you to play a bit differently, but he is quite strong when played right.

-10% Damage per weapon: Since you lose damage for having the same weapons, you’ll want to use 4-6 different weapons. Like Gladiator or Vagabond. Don’t be afraid of having two of the same weapon. For example I had a Tier 4 Spear, then found a Tier 3 Cursed Spear, so I went with 2 Spears. That’s just -10% Dmg. -10% Damage per item: Curious also loses 10% per duplicate item. So later in the run, many items in the shop become useless.

Free XP Gain: You gain 2% xp Gain from every different item you have. That will usually become 100-200% free extra xp gain. Don’t worry too much about it, it mostly a passive effect in the background.

Stats Curious ends up with a mix of all stats from all the items. That means it is harder for you to decide on a dump stat. Stay flexible and see what synergies pop up.

Got some free dodge items? We’re going dodge. Got a hunting trophy? Crit.

Every Stat is limited - Since you can’t pick up duplicates of items, You often just have to take what you’re given. This can be an issue if you’re trying to fix your %DMG, armor up, or similar. If I’m low on %DMG, and i’ve already got a copy of most Damage items, then I can’t shop for it. Use Upgrades for Stat selection: You should always do this in Brotato, but for Curious you really need to find the stats you need in upgrades. Luckily you’ll gain a ton of levels from the Extra xp gain. Items Curious have a strained relationship with items. It is rarely worth having more than 1 copy of each item. Some Tier 4 and some cursed items are powerful enough to still be worth it with -10%.

Bag: You can at least 2 crates per wave, so that’s a ton of money from bags. Bag is one of the few item that can be worth the -10% Damage. But only if you get it early, and if you can still handle the waves after it. Recycling Machine: You’ll often recycle duplicate items from crate. So the machine is awesome. Treasure Map: You see a ton of loot crates, why not get +20% more. Fairy: You collect so many different Tier 1 items that the fairy becomes insane. Spyglass: You start with Spyglass. It reduces the cost of rerolling both upgrades and the shop. I’m willing to take the -10% sometimes if I get it in a crate early. It helps you find those upgrades, and shopping. Going from 75% price to 50% is huge. Jelly & Spider - You’re mixing weapons, so the first copy of these are amazing. Don’t buy Whistle - There’s spawning more Loot hoarders than you can kill. Speeding them up is a bad idea. And since they get +10% per kill, you’re already not able to kill all of them. Leveling items: Curious will level up a lot, so look for items that scale with leveling. Baby Squid, Decomposing flesh, Barnacle.

Sample Game So for this game i started javelin, picked up a spear and some bricks. Then I just looked for powerful melee weapons. I picked up a Sunken bell, which ended up helping me kill enemies while I were behind on weapons because I was fishing hooking to curse them. Once I got the weapons going, I already had a ton of different stats from random items, and the Bags + Starfish meant the run just snowballed as you can see.

This isn’t the best sample game, since it ended up so cursed. I struggled around wave 6-9 due to having duplicate weapons and 2 hooks + 2 bags. I had to look for %DMG upgrades to fix it. Ended up with 33 Knockback due to lantern + 2 coil combo. Nice to look for. Later on Some %dmg items were worth it to tank -10% for. Warhammer was awful here. Javelin (30K), cursed spear (25k), and spear (20k) carried the bossfight, since you don’t always get to be in melee range. Black Flag came in around wave 13 and earned 750.

Builder

Difficulty: Hard Tier: A Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Brick Plank Javelin Shotgun Laser Gun Medigun Revolver Shredder SMG Slingshot Ghost Scepter Flute Taser Wand

The Turret Weapon. Builder is special in that your Turret copies the base stats of your best weapon (Highest tier, then most expensive, then damage). So you want to have a strong ranged weapons. I recommend the following

Revolver - Strong Tier 1 weapon in your hands. Becomes really strong dps later on with turret. Slingshot - Clears the entire map, making it quite safe. A bit lower dps on single targets SMG - Shoots fast and scales well. Make sure to look for sharp bullet and a ton of engineering to scale the turret. Other fine options Shredder - Great for aoe, but can struggle with elites/bosses. Javelin - Insane weapon if you can get it cursed. Otherwise it isn’t the strongest option. Can struggle a bit early game.

Higher tier weapons of note: Generally speaking I don’t think you need to any of these, and the starting options are just great and safe, since you can get them to tier 4. But some runs might bless you with some Crazy options.

Nuclear Launcher - This one is really powerful and will clear the entire map with ease. But lower single target damage. Rocket Launcher is also great. Remember to get them a sharp bullet. Grenade Launcher - Quite powerful if you can get it to tier 4 and add some crit with pile of books. Insane with Curse Minigun - I don’t know how the attack speed works for turrets. But this might be a decent weapon once you upgrade it to tier 4. At Tier 3 with 50% scaling, I’m not the biggest fan. Harpoon Gun - This gun got amazing range, good piercing, great scaling. It is quite the weapon. And I can recommend it. BUT! Every single enemy hit by your turret will be pulled towards you and not the turret.

Trap Weapons! These weapons have downsides that you might’ve not considered. Multiple Projectile Weapons: Shotgun, Taser. These are awful. When revolver goes from 1 to 2 projectiles, that’s double DPS. When your Shotgun goes from 4 to 5, that’s +25% DPS. Med Gun / Wand /Pistol / Ghost Scepter - These are just generally awful. Your weapon needs to be dishing out Damage. Ghost scepter works, but that’s a meme build^^ Shuriken/Crossbow - Cool weapons, but they heavily rely on critting, and you can’t apply your crit stat unless you have pile of books. Sniper Gun - If you have piercing/Bounce sniper And Pile of books, Sniper can be powerful. The Turret translates the range scaling with 5x the engineering scaling. So 10% range scaling becomes 50% engineering scaling. Blunderbuss - It Doesn’t use all the attack speed you get on the turret. And it forces you to pick up materials, which isn’t something you want to have to do. Particle Obliterator: It looks cool with its particle beams. And it can be awesome really late. But midgame the beams offer little protection. Fireball/Flamethrower - I’m not big on burn based weapons. They’re simply not strong enough.

Sidearms - Melee Weapons Since you’re not increasing your stats, your ranged weapons on your person aren’t gonna be doing a ton of work. So I recommend adding a few melee weapons to fill the weapon slots.

Some weapons have really nice defensive bonuses from their Weapon Classes. So it can be nice to have 1 ranged weapon and 5 tier 1 melee weapons.

I find myself drawn to Blunt weapons. - remember to compensate for the speed. Spiky Shield - Great hitbox and knockback, really protects you. Scales with armor. Classes give a ton of Armor. (and some dodge + HP) My choice. Brick - Deals great damage, scales with engineering, breaks into money and XP. Cheap Rock - Gives Armor and HP when tiered up. Classes give more armor and HP. Lance - Gives Speed, scales with speed, good range and base damage. Class gives armor and dodge.

Then the more out-there options. Rarely worth it. Quarterstaff - Scales with levels, provides Armor, Dodge, and HP from classes. Plank - scales with engineering. Explosions can clear crowds of enemies if you fall behind. Can help against a horde wave. Lute - Luck and Harvesting from Classes. Can give damage debuff. But I’m doubting how much use you get on the buff. It can help with elites/bosses. But are you standing next to those to hit them? Hand - Knockback, Harvesting, more harvesting and dodge from classes. Chainsaw - Scales with engineering and deals Percent Health Damage. But it is so damn expensive. War Hammer - Scales with engineering, hits hard, resets your turret. Too expensive to be good.

The Turret: Mechanics Let’s cover how your Turret works.

Uses your Weapon: The Turret uses your “Strongest” Ranged Weapon, as mentioned above. Highest tier, then most expensive, then damage. Converts all scaling into Engineering scaling. If you have a Harpoon as your turret weapon, it scales with 100% Melee and Ranged Damage. This is then converted into 100% + 100% = 200% engineering scaling. Range scaling, found on crossbow or Sniper Gun is converted at a 1=5 Rate. So the +10% Range stat scaling becomes +50% engineering scaling. Burn: If the weapon inflicts burn, then the turret will also inflict the same burn, but blue and scaling with 100% engineering. Collects materials: At the end of each wave your turret eats all materials that you would normally have bagged. This means that you lose out on a good deal off money AND XP. Upgrades: Every time the turret collects 5 materials, it gets +1% Attack speed and +1 Range. When you have +30/+150/+300 Range, the Turret also gains +1 projectile. So the turret can end up shooting 4 projectiles at 300%+ Attack Speed. Crit: Your Turret uses the base crit chance of the weapon. So unlike other structures, it can crit by default. However you need Pile of Books in order to apply your crit stat to the turret. Build Order: Wave 1-5 - Collect all materials for yourself. The shop is cheaper early, the price for upgrading turret remains the same. Wave 4-7 - You should have a tier 4 Weapon ready. Once this is the case, leave most of the materials on the ground for the turret. Upgrade it fast to 2 projectiles. Wave 7-15. - You should be steadily upgrading your turret now. I would like to have tier 3 for the first horde/elite. And tier 4 for about wave 14-16. It depends on your run. You can rush it or wait. These are also the waves where you can find a stronger weapon for your turret. Wave 15-20 - The Endgame. Your Turret is tier 4. You should be picking up most engineering stat options on your way. Your goal is now to tank up. Get armor, dodge, max hp up. Find a ton of HP regen. Wave 20 - For the boss fight, simply run around avoiding a fight. Your turret should have the range to attack the bosses, otherwise you can keep the bosses near the turret by running in a circle around the middle. Your other weapons should be able to handle the trash enemies around you, if your turret doesn’t bounce. If you’re built right, this should be one of the easier boss fights.

Strategy:

Curse and Cursed weapons: Getting a cursed weapon will supercharge your turret. Consider killing some of the curse hoarders on the edge of the map on wave 4-5 on the new map. Your weapons barely matter. The turret scales way harder, and can often have 10x the damage of your best weapon. Your priority is keeping the turret happy. Any money spent on dealing damage outside of the turret should be examined critically.

Watch out for this fellow, He spawns on wave 10 and some later waves. When he dies, he spawns Lampreys. Your turret might kill it, but not be able to kill the lampreys before they stamp on your face. So I want to have gotten a bit of speed when we get to wave 10+, so that I don’t get run over.

Stats

You have -75% damage

Dump Stats: Your Damage stats are dump stats. %DMG, Melee, Elemental, More Dump Stats: Life steal (unless you have a ton of smgs.) Range, Crit - As mentioned, your Crit stat isn’t applied to the turret unless you have pile of Books. You can’t rely on finding that in time, meanwhile Pencil and Compass are two critical items for you. So you can expect your crit to be in the negative by the time you find it. So I Dump it unless I feel crazy and find the Pile of Books super early. Items Fishing Hook - Can be super useful to get your weapon cursed. A cursed turret weapon is insanely powerful Bounce Piercing - Getting extra Piercing/Bounce is nice. Remember you ignore the -10%/25% damage penalty of bandana and ricochet. Sharp Bullet - Special shout out to Sharp - Not only are you ignoring the -5% damage, the -20% piercing damage is also reduced by 75%, so your turret only loses 5% piercing damage for +1 piercing. That’s crazy strong. Nail - Actually good. Worth it just for the +5 Engineering. The +20% engineering scaling doesn’t apply to your turret, but it lets your weapons do a bit extra damage for free, which is awesome. - You can just have a few tier 1 smgs to work with nail. Lighthouse - As expected your unlock is crazy good on you. It gives you 27 after the 50% buff. It will instantly make your turret hit much harder. Goblet - Life steal doesn’t work with your turret, But Goblet does. Pile of Books - This let’s your turret gain your crit stat. Can be good. It’s much better after the buff. Not Improved Tools: Not worth it. Just rely on your turret’s own scaling. Not Baby Gecko/Sifd’s Relic. - These make you attract materials, meaning you lose control to feed your turret. Sifd’s +3 armor is nice, so you might want that one once you’ve maxed out the turret. Not Loot Worm - Same logic. Prevents you from being able to quickly upgrade your turret in the midgame. Not Strange Book - You have -75% elemental damage. Not Silver Bullet - Affected by -75% damage. Small Fish - This isn’t affected by the -75% so it is actually a fine multiplier for your turret. Sample Game Pretty simple game. Started SMG, picked up some Bricks. Got one SMG to Tier 4. Then I focused on upgrading the turret until it reached tier 4. I picked up some harvesting upgrades and eco items early. I bought just about every engineering items in the shop during the run. Then for the later parts, I really pick up a ton of tank items. Got a lucky mirror into Potato. 🙂 Sharp Bullet is critical for your turret being able to handle the vast amount of enemies. Nail boosted my smg dmg to 20-25 per hit. Made them able to protect me better. On the last round, my Turret did 82k Dmg, while the SMGs did 2.5-3.5k Dmg. So even with nail, they just don’t matter for DPS. Lighthouse is a broken +27 engineering when you account for your +50% modifier. Notice the healing items - Goblet, Jerky, Fairy.

Captain

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: C Unlock

Don’t get distracted by the weird empty slot ability. This is a Sword with +10/+20 Base damage, better attack speed, curse scaling, and at Tier 4 it scales with 125% melee. It is a great sword for most melee builds. It is rare and expensive, but worth it. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Knife Hatchet Spear Ghost Axe Ghost Flint Chopper Quarterstaff Torch Plank Lightning Shiv Shotgun SMG Revolver Slingshot Shredder Javelin

You want weapons that scale well with upgrade, and that can handle crowds of enemies. For the Early game you want to be playing with 1-3 weapons, so they need to carry their weight.

Spear - Classic melee option that cleaves groups of enemies. Slingshot - Very safe option if you just can get enough dps. Javelin - New nice option. Upgrades well, pierces a ton of enemies. Mix well with spear if needed. Shotgun/SMG - You’ll need to focus on getting ranged damage, but this can clean house. Lightning Shiv - Harder to use, but very powerful. Similar to one armed lightning shiv.

Higher tier weapons: There’s multiple powerful weapons you can add on to a captain build, but here’s a few shoutouts. Explosive weapons like Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher, or Nuclear Launcher are all powerful weapons that upgrade well, and can clear a ton of enemies. I wouldn’t mind adding one to a ranged build sometimes. Trident - Just a standout upgrade to a spear. Lovely addition to a melee build. Captain’s Sword - Powerful upgrade to the sword, and extra powerful for you while you have empty slots. Don’t worry about going up to 6 weapons later even if you have this weapon. Blunderbuss - This ranged weapon can really solo crowds of enemies if you play well around it. It upgrades super well. Strategy: So the captain is one of the harder ones. You gain levels slower, but you get more xp while having empty weapon slots.

When you level up, the upgrades give double stats (Already included in the numbers you see). This is a ton of stats. And it means that captain can highly select what stats they get, and when. You can pump harvesting or ranged damage if you reroll for it.

Basically I play Captain as a ranged glass cannon that tries to clear the battlefield with as few weapons as possible. I still get my Max HP up a bit early, so I don’t die in 2 hits, but most resources are spent on offense.

Spend gold on weapons: You get so many stats from upgrades. It is key that you focus your shopping on getting weapons. Especially during the early shop, which has more weapons.

Early game weapons: Usually my early game weapons are a tier 1, 2, and 3 weapon, or just how few I can combine into. I’m careful with combining into Tier 4 weapons, since we hit a point in the game where one strong weapon can’t clear, so I get more. Midgame Weapons: I want to be sitting at 3-5 here. More than enough to clear while staying safe, but also having those 1-3 slots for 60-180% xp. Late Game: 5-6 Weapons. I might be sneaking in the last xp, but now it is time to fill out the weapon slots at play at full power. Remember that the Captain’s enemies are stronger. That’s your downside.

Stats Attack Speed: When you’re using fewer weapons, Attack speed helps you keep up. Most of your Attack speed comes from Upgrades, so look out for them. Flat Damage: Understand your weapon. Some weapons like Javelin require a lot of Flat damage to be effective. Same for SMG/Shotgun Harvesting Upgrades: +5 Harvesting was always the most powerful upgrade early. At double value, it is crazy strong. Tanking up: Captain can just switch around and pick a few level ups to get dodge and armor up. While you should be picking up good defensive options in the shop during the mid-late game, remember that Captain is perhaps the best character in the game at switching from increasing damage to tanking up. Items For items it is a bit different for captain. Firstly you want to be spending mostly on weapons early, and you’re going to be spending slightly more on rerolls for upgrades.

When it then comes to spending money on items, you can cover any stat with your upgrades. So buying items is often more about getting a good deal than looking for stats. And ofc buying effects that you couldn’t get otherwise.

Economic items early: Coupon, fertlizer, bag. The usuals. XP Gain: I like to get some XP gain early on captain. Double value upgrades are powerful. Super cost efficient items. You get your stats from upgrades, so items are more about getting good deals. Stats that are cheaper as items: Crit, HP Regen, Life steal. Some stats are easier to get through items than upgrades. Sample Game I start Slingshot. First shops I focus on finding slingshots and buying a few items. I Look for harvesting upgrades. Wave 2-5 - I just get slingshots and pump dps upgrades. Wave 6-10 - I’m at 3-4 slingshots. Picked up a random +30 Luck upgrade, and some armor. Take the random tier 3 upgrades that come your way. Wave 10 - I combined too aggressively and struggled hard on this wave. Wave 11 Elite was spicy. I nearly died from not knowing the phases well. Wave 12 - My dps begins to outscale the waves, and I feel super strong. Wave 15 - I go up to 6 weapons, I’m cruising and feeling strong. So now I look to tank up so I don’t lose it. Wave 16 - A Tier 4 HP upgrade for +24 HP fixed it. Picked up more HP regen and a leather west. Wave 19 - My stats are looking healthy - I find a lucky cursed Adrenaline, which signals that I need to spend the last shop and upgrades on dodge. - I get to 52% Wave 20 - Super easy. I just stand at 300 range from the bosses. The slingshots take care of all small enemies, and I’m tanky enough to survive the projectiles I fail to dodge. Generally. It feels like you’re fighting to keep up in DPS, but once you get ahead, it becomes easy. I got some cool cursed items later in this run, but generally speaking, be vary of dipping into curse on captain. Your enemies are already strong enough.

Ogre

Difficulty: Easy Tier: S Unlock

A quite weird weapon. It has a smaller range, and faster base cooldown than similar big heavy swing weapons. The melee scaling is also lower. The -3/-6/-10 Attack Speed actually hurts quite a bit if you put it into a build. Mace work best with themselves for the most part. The weapon class combination is one of the best in the game. I would use this on Ogre, Buccaneer, and Dwarf. But be careful. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Brick Rock Plank Cacti Club Chopper Spoon

My recommended: Fist - Faster melee weapons aren’t hit as hard by Negative Attack speed due to the weird math behind it. So you can have a pretty normal fist run. And fist got good base damage later. It is cheap and efficient. Brick is perhaps my favorite. Brick deals a ton of damage, and earns you free money + experience. But it is risky, and it sets you back a ton of weapons when it breaks. Brick is great for trying to roll for tier 2+ weapons, since remove themselves as you get better weapons. Rock - Cheap, gives Max HP and Armor in tons, High base damage. Great early game weapon for Ogre. Struggles to deal good dps, and reach enemies if you have longer ranged melee weapons. Chopper - The Tier 4 Chopper scales with up to 30% of your Max HP. It also provides free healing. With this build you can just focus on %dmg and HP. (Can’t dump crit as freely when using choppers)

Higher Tier Weapons and weapons to find.

Spear / Trident - Having a weapon that can start explosions at long distance is quite powerful. The Trident is even stronger, and its ability to deal bonus damage to full HP targets means it makes a ton of explosions. Hammer/Anchor/Maul/Plasma Sledge - There are a ton of hard hitting slow weapons that are great for starting explosions. Strategy:

Your attacks should be able to explode large groups of enemies, but you also attack slowly. If you’re pressed, I like to stay closer to the edge or a corner of the map, such that enemies come from one side, and thus group up more. Try to avoid being attacked by single enemies from all sides.

Easy Wave Clear, Low Elite/boss Damage. I rarely find myself lacking damage to clear the waves, but I can struggle with killing elites/bosses. You don’t have to. Just survive. Once I’m near the end game, I want to make sure I got enough speed, armor, dodge, and healing to pull through the boss fight. Here your abilities aren’t helping you much.

Your explosion Can’t Crit. Upgrading 1 Weapon to a higher tier. - For example if I’m doing a fist run, I might upgrade one fist to tier 3-4 if I find myself struggling to pop explosions. Even having one weapon is usually enough to handle the Crowds.

Stats Max HP: Your Explosion scales with max HP, so you want it to be a bit higher than normal. If your %Dmg: The best Damage stat. It scales both your weapons and your explosion, making it great for you. Attack Speed: Your Explosion scales with negative attack speed, and you start with 50% negative attack speed. You can pick up more negative attack speed through items and it is okay, but it still hurts your weapons. So only do it when the item gives you something you want. Life Steal: Explosions can’t life steal. Don’t get life steal. Crit: Your explosions can’t crit, and many of the weapons you use have 1.5 crit multipliers. So I often dump crit on Ogre. If you do, you can pick up Goat skull, medal, and Rip and Tear as cheap items. Curse: Ogre is better without curse mostly. You don’t rely on the DPS of your weapons to kill enemies for the most part, and cursed weapons are the best thing you get from curse. Also having some enemies have much higher health means that they don’t explode or die from explosions. Speed: Ogre doesn’t need that much speed, but I would still like to get it fixed, so that I don’t end up in trouble with the Elites and Bosses. Items You ignore crit, attack speed and life steal downsides. That gives some good shopping options. Small Fish - You don’t mind the negative Attack speed Baby Squid - Negative attack speed, and HP Regen is a fine source of healing for you. Defective steroids, Bowler Hat, Missile, plant, Bean teacher, medal, goat skull are more great options I’m looking for.

Ball and Chain - Your weapons rarely hit the 0.75 limit. So this is insanely powerful. Goblet: Powerful Healing option since you don’t get life steal. Powerful since ogre clears out crowds quickly. Torture: If you haven’t gotten a lot of healing, torture with its +15 Max HP is also awesome. Jelly - If you find yourself with 3 or more different weapons, it is time to pick up jellies. Explosive Items: Dynamite, Plastic Explosives, and Explosive shells are pretty good for boosting your explosion. (Honey is just too expensive) More Enemies: You clear out more enemies for free almost. Gentle alien gives perfect stats, so I want that. Mouse gives pretty bad stats, so I’m skipping that. Black Flag: If I’m going curse, this is pretty good. Scarf: Gives just the stats I’m often looking for. Alien Eyes: You’re stacking Max HP and %Dmg anyway. So Alien eyes are dealing dmg. But the real benefit is that Alien eyes can trigger explosions at range around the map. Riposte - As a joke, if you got dodge, then you can explode ranged enemies around the map by walking into the projectiles. Spicy Sauce - You’re already stacking Max HP and Explosive stats. So spicy can be nice. As always spicy sauce is better in multiples, since it scales on both the % to trigger and the damage. Sample Game This is a pretty classic Ogre game.

Started brick, and got a ton of them for economy. Then picked up enough rocks to make a red Rock. (Rock is a great stepping stone, but I will sell it later if more powerful weapons come up.). Dumped life steal, crit, and attack speed. I didn’t manage to get that much healing, but +7 consumable healing and a baby squid held the thing together. Having 32 Armor helped.

Diver

Difficulty: Very Hard Tier: ? Unlock

That’s a lot of income. But it comes with quite the risk. I like it. For some builds it just doesn’t matter if enemies deal a bit more damage, because they’re going to be instantly dead from your rich build. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Claw Thief Dagger Knife Scissors Sharp Tooth Shuriken

Thief Dagger - Comes with free money. Goes from 2x crit to 4x. Scissors - The life steal is handy and can make it easy to survive. Good melee scaling. Shuriken - Seems a bit weird, since it is a ranged weapon, but the Crit multiplier goes from 1.5 to 3.5.

Strategy: Okay, the Diver… Let's get started on this mess of a character. The Diver is hard, expect a challenge.

Diver hits enemies with ranged damage weapons, so that you deal 4x damage to them, then you slaughter the tagged enemies using buffed up melee precise weapons.

First: Precise weapons! Precise weapons have +2x Crit multiplier. So Thief Dagger crits for 4x damage for example. Worth pointing out that Shuriken goes from 1.5x to 3.5x Crit. - Meaning you’re getting a 133% DPS bonus. But Knife goes from 4x to 6x (At tier 4), providing only 50% DPS bonus. So I would be looking at the precise weapons that are powerful even at 1.5-2x crit multiplier. I have Scissors, Thief Dagger, and Shuriken on my Mind.

Secondly - The Ranged Damage Debuff: You apply a Debuff with weapons that scale with ranged damage. Enemies hit by any Ranged Damage weapon get a blue outline for 3 sec. This debuff makes them take 4x Damage. (Multiplicative with %Dmg and crit) You have -100 Ranged damage, so you’re just using ranged weapons to tag enemies.

The Harpoon gun You start with a harpoon gun, you buy and sell harpoon guns for 1 gold. It shoots quite fast and pierces multiple targets, making it decent for tagging enemies. It has a minimum range, so it won’t target close enemies. It has negative knockback and pulls enemies towards you.

Choosing a Debuffer I usually want 1-2 weapons to debuff enemies. I’m not 100% sure what’s the optimal options. But so far: 1 Harpoon gun + 1 SMG has been decent. Many players I talk to dislike the Harpoon and sells it. So find out what you like. Otherwise you want something like a shredder/shotgun. If you find Cacti Club. Just sell everything else and use cacti clubs as your debuffer. Stats

Crit -You should max out your crit chance with your precise weapons. Melee Damage - You get some free HP Regen from stacking melee damage. And in general the precise weapons scale well with melee damage. So pick up a ton of melee damage. Healing - You’re automatically going HP Regen, so find the good options here. Life steal can be good if you’re going shuriken, or if you have cacti club. Decomposing flesh early is a good way into life steal. Otherwise Consumable healing is great as usual. Items

Crit Synergy Items: Hunting Trophy, Tentacle, Lucky Coin, and Giant’s Belt are all awesome since you’re going crit. Sharp Bullet - You don’t care about the piercing damage, so this is a cheap way to apply more debuff Eye Patch - You’re stacking crit, so this is also a pretty decent piercing option for you. Baby with a Beard - It applies the Debuff. BUt the price is quite hefty. Might be worth it if you can afford the minus range too. Alien Baby - you just go from +250% to +260% enemy Health. So it is often worth it.

Pets Lootworm - Trees can’t be debuffed, and can be difficult to kill, especially because you’re busy with just surviving and killing the enemies. So Lootworm is great. Doc Moth - If you use Harpoon, You can stay in the aura and have the Harpoon drag enemies towards you. Diver gets quite a bit of HP regen from stacking melee damage, so Doc Moth can quickly become decent. If you’re doing scissors, It’s broken. Bonk dog - It doesn’t have your crit bonus and it often don’t attack enemies that you have the debuff applied to. I will skip damage pets. Catling Gun - This does apply debuff, but I don’t think it’s worth the cost, since it wanders around the map. You could consider buying it midgame-late game for some extra debuff.

Sample Game Started with Scissors. Used Smg + Harpoon for debuffers. Then found Cacti Clubs and replaced them. Scissors + Fairy + HP Regen from the melee damage meant that I couldn’t die really. Hunting trophy gave 1000 gold. That was nice. Run ended up really powerful later on.

Hiker

Difficulty: Easy Tier: A Unlock

Most Melee builds can use all three stats. It is a damn good deal too. So I really like a scarf if I’m confident in not dying on the next wave. Be careful of taking it before an Elite Wave and not before bosses. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Hiking Pole Fist Hand Lute Thief Dagger Lance Stick Flute Pistol Taser

Hiker is built around Speed, so there’s only two real options here:

Hiking Pole - Gives you the sweet +25 Harvesting from the support tag, and then it slowly builds up range as you move over the duration of the game. Meaning it will deal great damage in the Late game. Lance - Gives free speed and scales its damage with your speed stat. Powerful early game weapon too.

You can mess around with other builds. Stick is okay, and Hand can do a weird pacifist run style build. But I don’t recommend it. Strategy: Hiker is super simple. You take Either Lance or Hiking Pole, then you stack speed and keep moving. Then you win.

Early shops I buy Weapons, Speed items, and economy items. Try to get to 6 weapons really fast, since both Lances and Poles give income.

Don’t mix weapons - 6 of the same. Pole scales with range and gives range. So it doesn’t like to be mixed. Lance gives speed and scales with speed, so it is similar. However I’m more willing to mix lance with other melee weapons later on in the game if some insanely powerful curse weapon shows up. However, since I’m not really building any melee damage, other weapons are unlikely to beat the lance. Stay moving: You gain Max HP and money from moving. Try to never stand still during a wave. Don’t Run into walls: The amount of steps you also depends on the distance you move. So walking into the wall means you don’t get money and Max HP. Scales linearly with Speed: From a bit of testing, it seems like steps taken scale linearly with the Speed stat. Stats Speed - Stack it. Beanies and Onions are your bread and butter. Wings and Fins are amazing for the +10%. Especially early you want as much speed as possible. I’m happy to spend upgrades early on speed too. Max HP: You end up gaining around 50-75 free Max HP from your Ability. So you don’t need to worry about spending upgrades on Max HP. I’ll take a higher tier upgrade, Max HP from crates, and I love the Medal item. But I’m not looking for Max HP. Melee Damage - Hiking Pole gains free range for its base damage, Lance scales with Speed. You simply don’t need melee damage. Healing: Life steal isn’t the best with Pole and Lance, so I’m looking for HP Regen and Consumable healing. Tanky Build - I find myself taking a ton of damage from moving at high speed with a melee build. So I like to get tanky. I want a ton of Armor, and I’m looking to get to 60% dodge later in the game. Trust your Ability to get the Max HP for you. Attack Speed - Lance and Pole both do fine with little attack speed, yet I also like to get around 40-80% attack speed to boost my DPS. I take the good upgrades and good Items. I don’t go out of my way to hunt down attack speed. And I’m happy to take some of the minus attack speed items. Items Power Generator: Gives you a ton of %damage. Best item you can find. Small Fish - Pretty great damage boost for slow hard hitting weapons. I’m happy to pick up a few of these. Harvesting - I’m looking for peaceful bee and Fertilizer. Your weapons only scale 50% with melee damage and get a ton of base damage for free, so you can easily take these. And Harvesting is great for you. XP Gain - I like some Scars and Bean Teachers to make you gain those levels. Speed items: Beanie, Terrified Onion, Medal, Wings, fins, Jet pack. Clockwork Wasp is fine. And Compass is also decent. Leather Vest - Already a good item. But it is just great on Hiker. You want both stats, and you got Max HP to spare. I never pass this on Hiker. (I sometimes pass it early game on other characters, or I pass it if I’m dumping dodge.) Sample Game Very basic Lance game. Started out by picking up some harvesting and XP gain. You don’t get a lot of XP since your ability only gives money. So adding some more with harvesting is great. Picked up all the speed I found. Got an early baby squid, which ended up giving me 20 HP Regen. Great stuff. Small fish is also great for this kind of heavy hitting melee build. Lance is powerful early and I could just focus on economy. Starfish was greedy but ended up giving me a ton of money. Then I picked up some Armor and dodge, while getting more good items. Couldn’t kill elites, so I just skipped by them, until I got bloody hand which gave me the Damage to kill the third elite and the bosses. Ashes came in for the Boss DPS. (Bloody hand made me go life steal) Game was generally pretty safe as long as I was careful while moving around. My ability as Hiker gave me 63 HP, so I could generally focus on other stats.

Buccaneer

Difficulty: Medium Tier: ? Unlock

A bit niche. But also fine. -10% Accuracy isn’t a lot. It is a fine pickup if you have a crit build. But ranged Crit builds usually already have piercing/bounce - Javelin/Shuriken/Crossbow. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Brick Cacti Club Rock Spear Torch Shotgun Laser Gun Shredder Icicle Flute Slingshot Crossbow

There’s a few interesting options. Let’s start with the Ranged options. Buccaneer will reset the cooldown of all weapons you have whenever you pick up materials, so ranged weapons can just rapid fire a ton of shots, even if it is a super long cooldown like Laser gun. Laser Gun - Super long cooldown - Feels awesome when you manage to chain shots together. But it can also struggle a bit to clear groups of enemies. Shotgun - Long cooldown, standard ranged option. Stack a bunch of ranged damage and this will keep you safe and your enemies dead. Shredder - Decent ranged option. It sets you up for Rocket Launcher / Nuclear Launcher which are really powerful options later on. Icicle - A bit low cooldown weapon for Buccaneer’s taste, but that also makes it less relying on materials. Just remember to get some crit later on.

Melee - Doesn’t reset anywhere as fast as ranged options due to the swinging animation, so you get much less DPS. But on the other hand, due to the attack animation, you also have a wall of constantly swinging melee weapons that makes sure you always have access to materials.

Spear - Long animation, and decently slow, so a good melee option. You can combine it with javelins to get some more single target DPS, while keeping spears for the crowd clear. Brick - The Joker option - Brick gives 2x materials on Buccaneer - so a Tier 2 Brick breaks into 60 money and 60 XP. That’s insane. But it also puts you at risk of not finding a weapon, as your last brick breaks. The idea is that you start brick and then ride it for profit early until you find some strong weapons to pivot into.

I don’t want to be using rock, Cacti club, torch, etc. They are simply weak weapons unless you have synergy with them.

Weapons to look out for

Blunderbuss - Pretty decent weapon to reset with - Less damage than a laser gun, but got an extra pierce and better crit modifier. Rocket launcher / Nuclear Launcher - Long cooldown, hard hitting aoe hits. I don’t mind taking them on melee builds, since they work fine with their base damage. Trident/Anchor - Powerful slow hard hitting melee weapons to pivot into. Hammer/Plasma Sledge/War hammer - More hard hitting slow melee weapons.

Others: Slingshot will also work fine. Slingshot is nice for clearing around the map. When you’re ahead on DPS with slingshot, you’re very safe, and Buccaneer deals a ton of damage. However, if you mix some Laser guns into the build, you’ll see them out-dps the Slingshots by a ton. Crossbow - Overshadowed by other options, but otherwise fine.

Mixing weapons - Having a mix of weapons can help you have both single target and area clear - can help you not get stranded without materials. Strategy: Buccaneer revolves around their ability - You reset all your weapons whenever you pick up materials, but to keep it in check, only half the amount of materials are dropped and you have -100% attack speed.

Leave materials on the ground - The worst thing you can do is to get stranded with 4 seconds of cooldown or similar. It is a good idea to always have a few backup materials nearby so you’re never out. Fighting Elites / Bosses. You deal immense DPS. You should be killing Elites and bosses during the run. However, that can be a bit tricky. Because if you get too close to an elite, your weapons will blow their cooldown on it, killing nothing. And you might be left without materials. So the trick is to keep a bit of distance, and make sure that you’re also taking out regular enemies. Stats

Attack speed - It really isn’t worth it to fix your attack speed. You’re not using the cooldown for the most part, as you just rely on chaining Material pickups. Speed - Speed ends up determining how fast you can pick up materials and reload your weapons. So make sure to get some. Just don’t be stuck at low speed. Curse - You have the DPS to handle cursed enemies. So curse can be a decent option for you. Cursed enemies also drop 33% more materials, which is nice for extra reloads. Items Items with Attack speed downside are great for you: Missile, Stone skin, Baby Squid, Small Fish, Bowler Hat, Heavy Bullets, Focus. All are great options. Trees still drop 100% materials, so you just get 6 materials per killed tree. That and trees are great sources of guaranteed cooldown reset. So I buy every tree I see on Buccaneer. Starfish - This one is basically doubled for you. Baby Gecko / Sifd’s Relic - Pulls all the materials to you, which can be nice, but also makes you lose control over the timing of the resets. So I’m not a fan. Similarly, pickup range can make you lose control. However! Later in the game, things become more chaotic, and there’s more material going around, so by then I don’t mind getting some pickup range. It also helps you not have materials stuck behind enemy lines. Sample Game Started Brick - Earned some good money. Went into ghost axe, which sucked. But I found an anchor and pivoted into anchor, Brick, Trident. Found a Tier 4 Rocket Launcher later on which became my strongest weapon by far. Otherwise, just some solid economic items. 4 Trees is awesome since the materials from trees aren’t halved. Similarly, the starfish gains double value.

Second Game Started Laser gun. Stacked some economic items. Got lucky with a pumpkin + Sharp bullet combo in the shop. Went into fish hook + curse. I picked up a plasma hammer, which was useful for one horde wave, but after that it didn’t even get to swing much, since I was murdering everything. The Grenade launcher ended up dealing much more damage than the rest on non elite/boss waves - since the Reload is also reset on picking up materials. And cursed Grenade Launcher is broken. I picked up a ton of broken items - cursed coil, power gen, sea shell, bloody hand. Game was over and I just killed everything. Some takeaways are that Buccaneer can handle a ton of enemies - 5 gentle aliens, and can also handle curse, since you’re reloading laser guns. It doesn’t matter if enemies have extra health at that point.

Gangster

Difficulty: Hard Tier: ? Unlock

Grenade Launcher is a weird bouncing explosive weapon. It also reloads and has a higher crit multiplier. In my experience it is super powerful when upgraded to tier 4, if you build crit with it.

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Knife Thief Dagger Lightning Shiv Pistol Revolver SMG Shotgun

While the gangster has quite a few on theme weapons, I would recommend only two of them to start with:

SMG - Great ranged dps, requires building more Ranged damage. Revolver - Good ranged DPS, scales with all offensive stats nicely.

As the gangster you want to be able to handle elites. And you’ll get extra shopping power from stealing, so I think it is better to just stay safe at range, which also offers the most single target dps.

You can also go for a money run with Thief Dagger, or try your luck with Lightning Shiv, but you’re going to have a harder time with Bosses and Elites.

Higher Tier Weapons. Often, higher tier weapons and legendary weapons are held back by their price. But that’s not an issue for Gangster. Strategy: The Gangster is a bit of a weird one. You can’t lock items, and items are 20% more expensive. But you have the ability to steal one item per shop.

Stealing The Gangster has the ability to steal 1 item or weapon per shop. This makes up for the increased prices and the inability to lock items. Elite Spawns: Stealing has a chance to spawn an elite for the next wave. The chance is Price * Item Tier * Wave /120 in %. (Max 95%) Price Example: So an Alloy costs 170 gold on wave 10. For you with 120% prices, thats 204 gold, a tier 3 item, and on wave 10: 204*10*3/120 = 51% chance of getting caught. Elites spawning: You can encounter 2 elites during an elite wave if you stole before the wave. Similarly you can end up adding an elite to your boss wave on wave 20. Think hard when stealing before an elite/Boss wave. Probably not the best idea.

Stealing is a nice minigame. Every time you see a decently expensive item, you have to consider if you could find something more expensive by rerolling. And just because something is expensive, doesn’t mean it is good. And then you have to consider spawning an elite.

How you approach the gangster really depends on your goals. If you’re trying to be consistent with winning, then you have to be careful with stealing. If you don’t mind gambling your wins away, and you just want a single D5 win, then you can go crazy.

Killing any Elite increases future elite/boss HP by 15% and DMG by 7.5% per kill. Yes. any kill will make all further elite fights harder. And this includes the 3 elites you’re seeing by default. So consider letting the elite live sometimes. Risking a wave to get a red chest is often worse than just farming the wave and skipping out on the +15%. Remember it stacks, so you can easily face bosses with +75%/+37.5% HP and DMG. Reroll less - You can’t lock items, so you only want to reroll if you have your steal available, or if you have the money to buy most items/weapons you would hit. Stats There's not a ton of things to say here. Gangster doesn’t have any effects that majorly messes with your stats. You’re most likely doing SMG or Revolver build. So let’s just cover the basics

Ranged Damage - Super important for SMG/Shotgun/Minigun. Stack it. Speed - Very useful for surviving elite fights safely. Remember that you often meet elites way before wave 11. So have some speed ready. Tankiness - Armor and Max HP are great to have. Don’t be in 2 shot range. Dodge - You can dump it, Ranged builds don’t have to go into dodge. However, depending on the items you find, you might be pushed into dodge. 60% dodge is pretty great for elite and boss battles later on. Weird Food and Alloy are major reasons to drop dodge. Feathers can pull you in. Items As the gangster your relationship with items is a bit different, since you’ll want to be stealing expensive items. But otherwise you’re building a quite regular Ranged DPS build. Recycling machine - You’re quite likely to recycle 1-2 Tier 4 items. So the recycling machine pays itself off quite quickly. Silver Bullet - Getting a multiplicative +25% damage against Elites/bosses is just what you need. Once a gangster run gets rolling, Elites and Bosses are the only threat. So get thos silver bullets.

Sample Game So I had to play quite a few games here. I had some where I died to the vast amount of Greed. Since I just couldn’t stop spawning elites on elite waves. :(

But also because I prefer if the game’s aren’t too broken. I gave up. Gangster’s games often just end up looking insane due to all the extra Tier 4 items and stuff you steal. But let’s cover it.

Started SMG, stole an smg and bought 2 more. So started wave 2 with 4 dmgs. I’ve also had games where I steal something expensive like Scar or Gentle Alien. Picked up the standard mix of economic items, some early ranged damage with feather, etc. Stole a Blunderbuss and kept upgrading it. It is quite powerful, and dealt more damage than a SMG during basically all waves. And on some waves, it did more than double the damage of a SMG. Took an Early Cursed Knot. It felt like a mistake later, as I passed over cursed SMG’s and other good stuff. Got some lucky Legendaries, which just made me immortal.

Dwarf

Difficulty: Hard Tier: C Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Hammer Tier 2 Wrench Tier 2 Brick Tier 2 Mace Tier 2

You don’t want your tier 2 starting weapon to break, so this isn’t a good time for brick. And the Turret from a wrench steals kills. Hammer - longer range and better melee damage scaling. (sets you up for bricks!) Mace - quicker attack speed, higher damage. (easier start, more powerful start)

Weapons to Look for:

Brick - Don’t want to start with it, but I don’t mind picking it up. It earns you a profit and it deals great damage since it scales with both melee and engineering. Chainsaw, Warhammer - Both Melee and Engineering scaling. Spear/Trident - Having a really long melee weapon like spear is perfect for racking up a ton of kills with one hit. Especially if you got one long ranged weapon and some weapons with shorter range. So I like having one really upgraded spear/trident. Tho I don’t mind ending up with more of them later. Maybe Not Plank/ Plasma Sledge - These have good scaling and can be quite powerful on you. But they also just shut down your ability Just decent weapons: Quarterstaff, Sword, Fists: They are fast, and provide a safe knockback effect. Fast weapons are less affected by negative attack speed. Strategy: The Dwarf gains Engineering(and melee damage) from killing 6 enemies with the swing of 1 weapon. You start with -50% attack speed to help you have big slow swings.

Explosions, spawned projectiles, turrets don't work: Explosions don’t count for killing 6 enemies with a hit. It must be with the weapon itself. Leaning into engineering actually costs you stats. Dwarf gains a ton of engineering over the duration of a game. So it is natural that you want to pick up turrets and landmines in the shop. But doing that too early actually hurts your ability to farm stats. This is a weird internal conflict for dwarf. You don’t want to have turrets too early, but you also would like to have them later to help with damage.

I’ve not played enough with dwarf to completely say what's the best strategy yet, but it seems to me that you’re better of playing as a full melee build, that picks up med turrets and can use engineering scaling weapons like brick and chainsaw.

Combine weapons early Or don’t: I like to be below 6 weapons, making it easier to farm stats. But remember that this is quite risky. So find out what you can handle. Remember that you don’t actually need to have farmed that many stats to win. And this gets me killed quite a bit :( Don’t get yourself killed trying to farm stats. It is always tempting to try to maximize stat gains, but trying to group up enemies on wave 8+ instead of just surviving and farming the wave is super dangerous, and is likely to lose you more than you gain. Mouse control - if you’re tryhard and playing on PC, you can turn the options on in such a way that you only attack when pressing the mouse button. I have the press to aim with mouse on, so I can use the mouse to aim the attacks away from enemies. It gives a few extra stats during the early game if done well. Stats

Melee damage / Engineering - You’re hoping to get most of this through your ability. I wouldn’t buy any except the best of the best options. Attack Speed: This is halved, so we ignore it. In order to get big benefits from getting attack speed you need to get into the positives. So this is a dump stat. Healing - Lifesteal isn’t great. You hope to get some healing from med turrets. But otherwise just get the good HP regen and stack consumable healing. Dodge - You start with -20%, so I’m just dumping this in most cases. Weird food here i come. Crit - You should be killing enemies in one hit, and many of your weapons have a 1.5 Crit multiplier. So crit is often another dump stat unless you get some items that pull you in. Armor - You’re gonna get hit, and you can’t build dodge. So Armor is premium. A key stat to get from upgrades. %Damage - When dumping Attack speed and crit, and you’re getting flat damage for free, this is the only damage stat you actually have to buy. So pick up the Headinjuries, Cyclops worms, missile, Items Negative Crit/Attack speed items: You can use your dumpstats to find some nice items: Medal, Compass, Small Fish, Baby Squid, Bowler Hate, Defective Steroids, Missile, Stone Skin, are items I would look for. Med Turret - this is perhaps the best thing you can find. Pick up any of these you see. Having turrets around that heal for 5-10 HP per shot is amazing. Turrets in general - I like to pick these up for the later waves. They can deal great damage, but they steal kills from your ability. Bot-o-Mine & bonk dog - These pets are also quite decent due to your large amounts of engineering and Melee damage. Clockwork Wasp - already okay with the speed bonus, but getting 10% on current or future turrets you pick up is great. Lighthouse - If you don’t have a ton of structures, this is +10 to +20 engineering, and half of that in melee damage. You shouldn’t be spending money on flat damage, but I’ll take this. Sunken Bell: Man this Bell hits hard on a well stacked dwarf. It just takes out the entire screen. It is quite a nice backup if you end up messing up by greeding for stats. And I like just triggering it when there’s 3 seconds left to farm the wave. Ball and Chain: This just offers a ton of great stats and you ignore the Attack speed downside. Nail: This is just free damage. You have a ton of engineering. Awesome for Dwarf. Not Improved tools - No thanks, it will lower your structure’s attack speed. Not Rip and Tear - You’re likely dumping crit and have a ton of melee damage. It would be perfect for you, but it absolutely shuts down the ability to gain further stats. You can pick it up later if you want. But your ability is done when that happens. Sample Game Started hammer. The blunt tag made me find a brick, so I stacked bricks. Combined down to 2-3 Weapons. I knew I was going to get into a weapon mix, so I picked up jelly in anticipation. I also got all the classic economic items. Got some small fish and plants. Quite nice for dwarf. Sunken bell wasn’t super useful on this run, but it still could clear a wave if I got in trouble, which was super nice for an elite wave against the shark. I got some lucky Legendaries and Med Turret. I also picked up some other turrets. But they didn’t matter at all due to the weapon setup I had. Back to weapons. I found a spear around wave 8. Then I added on a mace and then trident. Got a Captain’s sword and finally Chainsaw. These are some really great weapons I found. Very lucky. You don’t have to weapon mix like I did. Dwarf does just as fine with the same weapon, But the hammer into Brick method kinds sets you up for such a playstyle. The Chainsaw especially was awesome. Not only does it scale with both Melee and Engineering and did 373 per hit on wave 20. It is also a fast short range melee weapon, which ignores negative attack speed due to some math I don’t have time for here. The Chainsaw did 32.933 Damage. My second and third highest were Hammer on 9568 Damage, and Captain’s Sword on 8447 Damage. Chainsaw is just that powerful for killing bosses due to the 2% damage vs Bosses and Elites.

Chef

Difficulty: Hard Tier: B Unlock

Spoon is a Max HP scaling weapon that crits on burning enemies. It is quite good on Chef, but it isn’t seeing much use outside of that. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Spoon (chef unlock) Chopper Fist Knife Hatchet Stick Torch Screwdriver Wrench Plank (Don’t take this) Pruner Cacti Club Wand.

There’s a ton of trash here. So let’s stick with the good weapons.

Spoon - the best option, since it was made for Chef. Crits on burning targets, so if you can get your fire going, it will have insane dps. Fist - Solid melee weapon, but more importantly it gives you a good chance of finding the flaming knuckle fists. Which apply burn, but don’t scale with elemental, so they get the triple damage. It is great for Chef.

Other Options Stick - just a really solid weapon. But it struggles with applying fire. Picking up a flamethrower here also means dealing less damage. Pruner - Strong weapon that spawns a ton of consumables. Can pick up some sickles for dps and stack harvesting.

Traps: Watch out for things that scale with elemental: Plank, thunder sword, plasma hammer. While you might be using them as a melee weapon, their elemental scaling means that they cannot gain the +200% damage.

Engineering options are also kinda awful, because it is so hard to apply fire all over the map to help your landmines and turrets. Strategy: Enemies have double health. You set enemies on fire, and then you deal triple damage. Pretty simple. Quite simple.

Fire Update: Post the first update on Oct 27 2025, you now gain the bonus damage from fire on the same hit that applies the fire. This has made Scared Sausage even better.

Fire Weapons: Unless you have 3-4 sausages, it is quite useful to have a weapon that applies fire. I like Flamethrower or Fireball. Torch with its free spread on Tier 3+ is also acceptable. Flaming Knuckles: This fist weapon applies fire without scaling with elemental, so it can benefit from the triple damage bonus. Worth picking up on many melee builds. Elemental weapons can’t triple. Remember that any weapon that scales with elemental damage can’t get the triple damage bonus. So plank/torch can’t benefit from it. Torch can still be worth it for applying the fire. Elites/Bosses. Your 300% dmg vs their 200% HP means that Cook is quite solid at killing elites and bosses. So I would always like to build myself towards being able to kill an elite. But it can be a bit hard to handle elites with melee builds.

Spoon Build: Needs Fire Weapon: Spoon Deals a ton of damage on Chef, but you really need a fire weapon to ignite enemies. Scales with max HP, so you can get most of the Base damage for the weapon from Max HP. Only 50% Melee damage, so only get the best options. Auto Crits - So you can dump crit. Medal, Goat Skull, Bowler Hat, Octopus are things to dump for. Crit Synergy - Since you crit all the time, Hunting Trophies, Tentacles, and Giant Belt are amazing.

Stats

Your stats should just be the standard, depending on your build.

Tanky: I like to build tanky. Chef often ends up in the thick of it. Surrounded by enemies. Having the Armor, Dodge, Max HP, and healing to keep up is quite useful. Healing: I like all healing on Chef. Consumable healing is extra great since you got some luck. Life steal can be insane if you have flamethrower, and since enemies often get hit an extra time before dying. Hp regen is just solid like always. %DMG: Your +200% is multiplicative with the %dmg stat, so get %dmg as usual. Elemental damage. You can’t stack this, so just remember.

Items Scared Sausage, Snake: These help you spread flames, so I recommend them.

Greek Fire - Quite powerful legendary for you, helps you break down elites/bosses.

Blue Turret - Applies fire all the time. Quite a useful pick up if you’re lacking reliable ways to apply burn. But I often skip it if I’m already covered. Fried Rice - I’m not the biggest fan of this item. It can be okay if you spread a lot of flames with something like fireball or flamethrower. But I would skip it if you’re just scared sausage and melee weapons. Luck Build: You can go for baby elephant/Cyberball. But honestly, they’re basically at 50% damage due to them hitting enemies that are likely not on fire. However I could still go for a pearl. Recycling machine - you got +35 Luck, so you’re seeing more crates. It might be worth it to invest in Recycling machine.

NOT THE FROZEN HEART: Frozen Heart is restricted on Chef, so it won’t show up before Endless mode, but if you see it, don’t take it. Taking the frozen heart makes all your weapons scale with elemental. Meaning you lose the ability to do triple damage at all!!! Not Eyes Surgery: Makes burn tick faster, so you have shorter time to kill enemies. And the burn doesn’t deal much damage, so the item is just a downside for you.

Consumable Healing: Chef has good reason to go deep into consumable healing, since you got +35 luck and gain free firespread from the explosions. So I would just dive into these synergies.

Spicy Sauce - Doesn’t apply its damage unless the enemy is already burning, even after the Oct 27 update. But if you’re stacking max HP with Spoons, or going deep on consumables, spicy sauce is still quite decent. Plastic explosive. - Can be worth it if you got 2 Spicy Sauces. Cauldron - The Druid unlock gives you bonus damage when picking up Consumables. And as chef, that also sets enemies on fire. So that’s perfect timing for taking out enemies. And you get +35 Luck, so that’s more consumables. Garden: Consumables on demand. Lemonade/Weird Food - Already great items, even better here. Fruit Basket - Gives enemies 1% chance per basket to drop a fruit, if they wouldn’t already drop a consomable. This is better than it sounds, and absolutely worth it if you’re deep on consumables. Sample Game Here’s an interesting game. Started fist. Got an early sausage and flames knuckle. So I had my fire covered. Did the classic eco items and stats. Then I picked up a stoneskin while I had 6 armor. This allowed me to focus on stacking up armor. (Only got to 19, so not a massive payoff). But that combined with the 15% dodge from unarmed allowed me to really tank up. Got a random cursed coral and statue, making me go into a weird standstill build that I don’t recommend. So this is a bit of a chaotic build. Missed attack speed for a long time. But the point is that it went fine because I had fire and tankiness.

Sample Game 2 Here’s Standard game where I made a ton of mistakes. Started Spoon, got an early flamethrower, and the game was set. Got the standard economic items. I picked up eyes surgery from a crate, which is so bad. I lost range and gold, and now my flames don’t last as long. I got a torture from a crate later on, and then I just kept buying healing :) Spoons deal a ton of damage when you have the auto crit, so I didn’t have to worry too much about dps. I just tanked up. Tentacles would’ve been awesome without torture, since you crit all the time. Barnacle + XP gain gave me a ton of extra stats.

Druid

Difficulty: Medium Tier: A Unlock

Cauldron is awesome on Druid, since you ignore the downside and eat a ton of consumables. The +20% doesn’t stack, so if you eat multiple consumables within the 2 seconds, it just refreshes the duration. It is a quite good item for characters like Farmer, Glutton, any pruner run, any luck run. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Claw Ghost Flint Cacti Club Rock Chopper Quarterstaff Pruner Sickle Lute Stick Spear Flute Slingshot Ghost Scepter Icicle Wand Javelin

The Druid has quite a few neat options

Lute - Probably the strongest druid option. Just rush 6 lutes, enjoy the +25 Luck and Harvesting. Then you just lean into luck and go crazy. Insanely strong later on. Stick/Spear - Just strong melee options. Pruner - Spawns a ton of fruits, so you can stack Luck.

Javelin/Icicle/Slingshot - strong ranged options. Going ranged means having more control over not randomly running into poisoned fruit. If going Icicle/Javelin or crit on sling, you can also gain healing with tentacle, which is nice for Druid.

Other Options:

Flute - You got some luck, so it can be fine, but I’m not a big fan of flute in general. Rough start. Sickle - 25 Harvesting early, and you can stack harvesting for a strong late game. But I feel like Lute just does this better. I love the Druidic theme it has tho.

Strategy: Druid is a bit of a weird one, you get extra Luck and consumables, but you have to avoid all the poisoned fruits. Druid is great for a luck based build, and can scale out of control in the late game.

Aside from the Luck build and dealing with the healing situation, Druid plays out quite vanilla.

Poisoned Fruits: As a downside for all the luck and extra fruits, Druid poisons 33% of all fruits. That includes fruits from trees and gardens.

They deal full damage and scale with your consumable healing. As the game goes on, they basically become landmines. But at the same time, you get so much free healing from the extra consumables.

Poisoned fruits aren’t pulled to you at the end of a wave. But they do have 33% chance to give +1 Luck, so you actually want to pick up Poisoned fruit for luck. You also want to pick them up while at full hp just to

Stats Luck: You start with 15 Luck, and you can expect your ability to give you another 50-200 luck over the duration of the game. Healing: You have -100 HP Regen and Life Steal - so you rely on consumable healing and alternative sources that you can find. Items Alternative Healing: Consumable healing is strong, but it can be nice to have some alternative sources of healing to help even things out: Cute Monkey and Goblet are awesome. Tentacle is great if you got crit. HP Regen and Life Steal Downsides: You have some extra dumpstats: Look for Broken Mouth, Clover, Shady Potion, Exoskeleton, Bean Teacher, Goblet, Poisonous Tonic. All are powerful options for you. Not Tardigrade/Triangle of Power/Crystal - Might not be good here. Druid likes to eat the poisoned fruit for extra Luck stat. Which means taking a lot of damage. So these aren’t gonna be great for you. You can choose to invest in these and then not pick up poisoned fruits, but then the map becomes a minefield.

Luck Baby Elephant and Cyberball can end up dealing a ton of damage if you go into Luck Pearl - Is absolutely insane on Druid. You get a ton of luck, which gives a ton of loot crates, which means finding more pearls, and then you just get one million +DMG%

Consumables: You want to buy every Lemonade, Weird Food, and even Jerky you see. Gardens are pretty nice, since you have so much consumable healing. But they also put out poisoned fruits. So I will buy gardens, but it isn’t important. Cauldron: You pick up consumables all game. This is great for you. Extra Stomach - This is one of the best legendaries in general, but it is extra awesome on you. You’ll get +8 Max HP per wave. Fruit Basket: Druid start with the same ability as Fruit Basket. You give enemies 3% to drop a fruit, and each Fruit Basket increases this by 1%, Up to 7%. Powerful addition for you. Loot Crates You gain a ton of loot crates due to all your Luck. Treasure Map - Is worth it if you go into Luck. Doesn’t take many Loot crates for it to earn itself back (5-10 on average). Bag - Will earn a ton of money. Buy on sight. Recycling Machine - Increases the recycling money you get from loot crates from 25% to 60%. Awesome for druid. Sample Game Started Lute, rushed to 6 lutes for Luck and Harvesting. Got some harvesting upgrades, stacked luck. Then the game just took off. Stacked tanky stats and consumable healing. Picked up Baby Elephants and Cyberballs. They ended up dealing 800 damage at wave 20. Got 13 Pearls adding 43% dmg each.

Sample Game 2 I did another to showcase a more normal run. Stacked eco early. Made side to get my melee damage up for javelins, since they got low base damage. Got some items where I could ignore the downside: Clovers, Broken Mouths, bean teacher etc. Tentacle + Cursed Tentacle meant a ton of healing with Javelins. My 3 Bags, Recycling machine and 3 Treasure maps meant a ton of money. Later on the big amount of luck meant that I got a ton of legendary items.

Romantic

Difficulty: Medium Tier: ? Unlock

Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Lute Chopper Fist Spoon Scissors Sharp Tooth Hatchet Cacti Club Claw Flute Double Barrel Shotgun Shuriken Slingshot Medical Gun SMG Taser

SMG - The easiest option. You do a regular SMG and the vast amount of hits means you get to charm a ton of enemies. Remember to get ranged damage and look for sharp bullet. Shotgun - Much like the SMG, the Shotgun offers a powerful ranged option with a ton of small hits. Slingshot - Safe and easy option. Gives +15 Max HP for some extra charming. Chopper - You get the +50 Range, and Chopper offers a ton of free healing + it scales with Max HP, so you can focus on that. Still, melee is less safe, so you’re hurt more by the loss of armor. And the hard hits means

I’m not a fan of flute on Romantic - you already have the charm effect built in. Strategy: Romantic is quite Vanilla. You can play him with most builds. The charmed enemies are simply a bonus that helps you clear the battlefield and provide some dps.

The Charm ability is also an execution ability. It instantly kills any enemy with less than 25% HP when it triggers. The +50 Range with Melee weapons is not halved. So it is like having +100 Range Stat.

Charmed Allies

Charmed Allies last for 8 seconds. During this time they will move around, using special moves, and slamming enemies for bonus damage. Charmed allies can even heal and buff you. If you charm an enemy that shoots projectiles, it will shot enemies. If you charm an enemy that spawns eggs or other things, those will hatch charmed, fighting for you. Charmed enemies drop their materials on death after 8 seconds. If the wave ends while they’re charmed, you’ll gain their material drop directly, just like pacifist / harvesting. This means that charming the Hammerhead sharks from wave 9 on the Abyss Map will let them spawn several eggs, which hatch into slicers. And you get materials for all of that. Charmed Allies are mostly a passive thing that just helps out your DPS. Charmed enemies deal +200% damage, or triple damage.

Curse As Romantic you get - 3% Damage and -1 Armor per 5 Curse. That means you just want to avoid getting any curse if you can. Cursed Items give 1-9 curse. It isn’t worth it unless it is a crazy strong item. Remember that the Curse on cursed weapons scale as you upgrade them. So even if your tier 1 cursed weapon gives 1-2 curse, it will give +9 at Tier 4.

Don’t Kill these!!! They give +1 curse, which isn’t worth it for you.

But if Charmed enemies kill them, you don’t gain curse! Stats

%DMG/ Armor - You can expect around 20-50 curse depending on how few curse hoarders you kill, and if you can stay away from cursed enemies. That’s -12% to -30% Damage and -4 to -10 Armor. It is super easy to get into the negatives, which means you stop dealing good DPS. But the biggest issue is that romantic can die so easily. Some games I’m just chilling, and suddenly I’m at -4 armor during the mid game. This makes elite/boss waves super hard to survive. So monitor these stats and make sure you invest in them. Max HP: I like to get a bit extra. It protects you against your awful armor. And it gives you extra DPS from the increased chance to charm enemies.

Items Avoid Cursed Items: Cursed Shard, Fishing Hook, Barnacle, Black Flag, Kraken Eye. You should highly consider any cursed Variants of items that show up. A cursed cup of coffee might sound nice, but it might not be worth the negative stats it gives. Stone Skin - It doesn’t count the negative armor from your ability. So if you’ve stacked a ton of armor to make up for your Ability, Stone skin can give a ton of Max HP. Sharp Bullet - Awesome if you have SMG/slingshot. You care about hitting multiple times, so the extra hits from sharp bullet is amazing. Sample Game Bit of a silly sample game. I Recommend SMG or ranged builds for your first try. Got a ton of early choppers. Bone dice ended up giving me 31 DMG / -4 HP. So it helped me keep up with the %dmg loss from curse. I tried stacking dodge and Armor for a tanky build, but I didn’t really get there. However, I managed to get a ton of HP Regen (21 from Squid). And Consumables healed me for 21. So that kept me alive during the boss right. With Melee build, you’re less safe, and you charm less enemies, since you rely more on big hits. And I didn’t have the DPS to kill elites early. Still it went fine. Chainsaw was a late pickup specifically to kill the bosses.

Creature

Difficulty: Medium Tier: S Unlock

Barnacle is another powerful scaling item from the DLC. The Curse per level is quite a downside, unless you really want to get into curse. But the extra Stats from upgrades is quite powerful. I often buy Barnacle, though I’ve not done the math and actually seen if it is worth it. The +35% is applied directly to the upgrade, so the number you see is what you get. A Tier 3 armor upgrade will show up as +4. It rounds down. If you take +2 Armor, you get 2 Armor, not 2.7 Armor. Starting weapons: (Recommended Weapons in Bold) Fist Claw Cacti Club Sharp Tooth Sickle Hatchet Rock Stick Spiky Shield Chopper Torch Plank SMG Shredder Icicle Ghost Scepter Javelin

Lots of bad options here.

There’s three things Creature is looking for when choosing a weapon. Scales well with the 0.35 Curse Scaling - Ranged damage is favored here. For a weapon like SMG, you can just get Curse instead of Ranged damage and deal so much damage. Can tolerate negative Range - You lose 10 Range on the end of a Wave, and that adds up. Guns and ranged weapons don’t suffer as much from this. Meanwhile, a 150 range melee weapon really doesn’t like -100 range. Becomes powerful with Curse - Creature starts with a Cursed Fish Hook and can easily curse weapons. So you want weapons that become super powerful with curse.

Cursed weapons Curses increase stats by: +40% +2% per wave (max 20) + - 30%. So curses can range from +12% to +110% Cursed weapons have their Base Damage, Damage Scaling (But not your 0.35 Curse Scaling), Crit Multiplier (by 1/5 the amount) increased. They also gain +1 Bounce or Piercing, and a bonus to any special effect.

Okay. So what is the conclusion?

You want a ranged weapon that either scales well with the 0.35% or gets really powerful with Curse.

Weapon Choices: SMG - Scales really well with 0.35 Curse Scaling. Super powerful. However, SMG doesn’t curse well. It doesn’t use crit, has barely any base damage. So you just get better ranged damage scaling, which you’ve likely replaced with Curse. Even with that, the Curse scaling is strong enough to carry. - When using SMGs you don’t need ranged damage, and you don’t need to upgrade your SMGs Shredder - Also benefits a ton from the curse scaling, but comes with better base damage and crit scaling, so the cursed version is a bit better. Javelin - Just insane when cursed. It gets the Damage, and huge crit multiplier bonus. It gets +1 piercing, and most importantly its special ability to crit every X hits, becomes X-1. So the Tier 4 Javelin now crits on every hit. Icicle - A bit like the Javelin - Gets another Piercing and good crit multiplier.

SMG / Javelin are my favorite options.

Avoid big heavy weapons like Hammer or obliterator - Your extra Curse scaling doesn’t do much here. Strategy:

Fish Hook - Fishing for Cursed items. As the

Kill the Curse Hoarders: They give +1 Curse and 5 Materials. You want it on Creature. Stats

Range: You’re losing 10 per Wave. Take a look at your weapon. SMG got 450 Range with the bonus. Javelin scales up to 425 Range. Shredder - 500. Icicle - 400. So I don’t like going below 250-300 range on ranged weapons. So I would look for some random higher tier upgrades, or other good range deals you get offered. If you’re going for a melee build, you need to be much more aware of this. XP Gain - XP gain is good, and it is generally not something where you want to be below 100%. Scars, Bean teachers are nice. And if you get a celery tea, it stops the XP decay per wave. Melee/Ranged/Elemental Damage: You really don’t need to buy this. Just get the absolutely best options. Note that melee damage is slightly better here, since you get 2x the amount. Engineering: Don’t go engineering on Creature. Healing: Pretty standard stuff. But you’re likely to make good use of life steal with a javelin or smg build. So keep that in mind. Items It is worth noting how items become much stronger with curses. For example if an item gave +3 Ranged damage and -2 Armor. In terms of upgrades that item gives +1 in total. You could also have an item that just gives +1 ranged damage. Those would be a similar in power uncursed, but look at what happens when they’re cursed. (Let’s assume +100% curse power) The +1 Ranged becomes +2, a total of +2. But the +3 becomes +6 and the -2 becomes -1. So it becomes a total of +5. So it went from +1 to +5.

It is also worth noting that cursed items rounds in your favor. So if a value is boosted to +2.1, it becomes +3. And if a downside is reduced to 1.9, it becomes 1.

So that’s why community support curses really well, the positive rounds up to +2, and the armor is reduced to -1.

Some items I keep my sight on are: Sharp Bullet, Community Support, Power generator, Glass Cannon, ball and chain.

You get the idea.

Look out for the Great Range items like Wings and Shackles. Shackles can fix you up once you’ve got all the speed you need. Piggybank: If you’re locking items to curse for the figh hook, you’re likely to have some money saved up for the piggy.

Cursed Items: You gain damage from having curse, so you can take on additional curse with little cost. Black Flag - You want to Curse this one. This is insane on curse builds and can easily earn you 500-3000 gold. Corrupted Shard - Nice cheap +3% dmg. Fish Hook - You already have one, so you want more. Barnacle - Your Unlock and it is quite good on you. Kraken Eye - Powerful explosion effect for you, but also just some Max HP and Curse. Sample Game Standard SMG Run. I didn’t need Ranged Damage at all. I went hard into curse. Rerolled a lot and locked stuff I couldn’t afford. Got an early Cursed Black Flag which ended up giving me 2486 Gold. I never struggled with Dealing damage. Got a celery tea to stop my XP drain. The bonus stats from Starfish and Black flag along with having 100+ curse meant that enemies hit really hard. And I never really got my armor fixed. So I wasn’t far from dying. That was a mistake. Should’ve had more armor. I had 3 shotguns at one point. But that was awful, since I had sea shell (doesn’t work great with multi projectile weapons) And Sharp Bullet. So SMG’s just outperformed it. Cursing SMG’s barely increased their damage. Tho it was slightly better since I had crit. I picked up the Harpoon gun for fun. It dealt like 4x the damage of the SMG when it got to pierce stuff, but it only did 50% ish against the bosses.

Endnotes Thanks for reading my Guide. If you find any mistakes, or if you have feedback, please write me a message on discord or reddit.

The guide doesn’t exhaust everything there is to know about Brotato. The guide is meant for beginners and intermediate players with some mechanical knowledge for more advanced players.

The Gameplay guide has more about the mechanics in the game. But if you excel further, you need to challenge yourself. Do challenge runs, %Runs, or Rotation runs. Watch and talk to some of the experienced players. You can find some of the best players on the Discord if you need someone to spar with, or ask a question.

Gameplay Guide I have basically abandoned the old gameplay guide, so here I’ll add some sections on stuff I want to write on.

Restricted Items

In a patch following the Abyss DLC, some items were restricted on characters that couldn’t use them.

For example Armor on Ghost, or Life steal on Golem. When an item is restricted, you cannot find it in the shop or in loot crates.

You can read the list of restricted items on the page I wrote about it on the wiki: https://brotato.wiki.spellsandguns.com/Restricted_Items

While this sounds like a big deal in theory, in practice the requirements for an item to be restricted are quite… Strict. It only affects 26 characters, with 17 of them having 5 or more banned items. So it is a big deal for a handful of characters, while most others might see 1-3 less useless items during a run. It also prevents some traps like mastery on generalist.

Restricted items return to the item pool once you enter Endless Mode. Banned Items After Evil Empire took over the reins of Brotato, they added the Ban system to the game.

After you’ve won a game on Danger 3 or higher, you can turn on the ban system in the run options.

During a run, you can ban up to 8 items from the shop, or when you recycle them from a loot crate. You can’t ban weapons.

There are some points to take away from this.

Banning useless items means that they won’t show up again, making the future loot crates and shop have a better item pool. Banning items improves the chances of seeing items of the same tier. If you remove eight tier 4 items, that’s going to make you find better tier 4 items, but it doesn’t change the quality/usefulness of tier 1-3 items you find. Banning tagged items also removes them from the tagged item pool. You can ban items when you recycle them with loot crates. This still gives the same money as recycling does, but also removes them from the item pool. Recycling the last item in a shop gives you a free reroll. Getting a free reroll has the value of seeing 4 new shop slots, which aren’t just limited to the banned item’s tier, but can be anything, including weapons.

And the strategy points are. You get more value from thinning out the item pool earlier. If you’re going to ban 8 useless tier 1 items, you should do it as quickly as possible. This gives you more shop reroll with the improved item pool. There’s Extra Value to banning Tagged items, if they’re useless. For example, Artificer is tagged for explosive items. This means the shop and loot crates, when they serve you a tier 1 item, have 5% for that tier 1 item to be explosive. In this case, there’s only dynamite and landmines. So if you were to ban landmines, that would mean you now have 5% for the item to be dynamite, which is quite a bit more useful on a ranged damage Artificer build. So key tagged items can be worth it. The value of banning an item is equal to the extra shop slots it gives you, accounting for tier. If you ban a tier 1 item that would have shown up 3 times, you’ll now see 3 new, hopefully useful tier 1 items. If you banned a tier 4 item, you’re really lucky if you saw it again on a regular run, but if you would’ve seen it again, you now see 1 new tier 4 slot. Seeing more tier 4 items is clearly more powerful than tier 1, but the issue is that you don’t find Generally, banning tier 1 items gives more value outside of endless. Tier 1 are the most common, and are the ones that you’re most likely to have come up in the game multiple times. Banning items for rerolls is generally speaking way more powerful than anything else you can do with bans. Getting a free 4 extra shop slots is instant pay-off and usually more than you would have gotten over the duration of a game. It is so powerful that I spend most of my bans for this, and also will ban 2 items for a reroll, and sometimes 3 items. Some characters can abuse free rerolls early for a super powerful start. Characters like Arms Dealer and Demon can buy up the extra weapons in the early shops with ease, and can use the shop bans to supercharge their early game shopping spree.

Generally I ban tagged items if there’s something like Landmine on Artificer, Lumberjack on Cryptid. It can also just be if you’re doing mage, and decide you’ll never buy charcoal anyway. - That will give you more toxic sludge and boiling water.

Most of my bans are saved for when I find chances for free rerolls. If you don’t want to wait for that, I would just ban the first 8 useless tier 1 items i see. Another good option is to maybe spend 3-5 bans at the first shop, and save the rest for rerolls.

Guide to upgrades

Whenever you level up in Brotato, you’re offered an upgrade. You’re offered 4 out of 16 possible stats.

Reroll: You can pay a bit of gold to reroll the 4 stats. This will give you 4 new stats, the ones you’ve just had doesn’t show up on the reroll. Several Level Ups in the same wave share Reroll Cost. So if you level up multiple times, don’t reroll the first upgrades too many times. Fixed Tiers: Some levels have fixed upgrade tiers. Level 1 = 4 Tier 1 upgrades. Level 5 = 4 Tier 2 upgrades. “Higher Tier Upgrades” - When I refer to “Higher Tier” upgrades in my guide, I mean the situations where you’re offered for example three Tier 1 upgrades, and a single Tier 3 upgrade. The Tier 3 upgrade might not be the most wanted stat, but I often take it, since you get a ton of stats. Better Upgrades: The Barnacle Item improves the amount of stats you gain per level up. The Captain Character also gains more stats per level up.

Strategy for Upgrades:

XP Gain: I generally value the XP gain items as good economic items. Early Scars, Black belts, Bean teachers are great items. Reroll for stats you need: You can almost force the upgrades to give you the stats you need by rerolling. This isn’t the case in the shop, where the odds of rerolling into what you need is much lower. Fixed Tiers: When offered a fixed tier at level 5/10/15/20/25 you want to either hit one of the S tier upgrades, or one of the A/B Tier upgrades that you need. Don’t be afraid to reroll these. Its the best way in the game to force a stat you need.

You can see the upgrades on the Wiki

Upgrade Tierlist This tierlist is mostly to give you an idea on how I value upgrades. Remember that the context of your run changes the value of stuff.

S Tier upgrades: hard to get enough of from items at a good price

Attack Speed Ranged Damage Armor Harvesting (Early Game)

These are the stats that you’ll reroll upgrades to seek out. Harvesting is only S tier in the early game, and it then becomes worse.

A Tier Upgrades: Decent to get from both items and upgrades.

Max HP Melee damage Speed Dodge. (D tier early, S tier later)

Great to find at higher tier, You’re fine with taking these as equal tier upgrades. I often spend my level 5/10/15 here on the stat I need. You’re ready to reroll if you need it. For example if you lack Speed or Max HP for a wave. Dodge is D Tier early game, and becomes S tier while trying to get to max Dodge later in the game.

B Tier Upgrades: These you take when offered higher tier, or if you really need them:

%DMG (B+) Elemental Damage Engineering (A Tier for the +2 TIer 1) HP Regen Range Crit

This is the tier of upgrades where you’re happy to take higher tier upgrades, but you’re rarely spending your equal tier upgrades on these. So this isn’t where I spend my level 5/10/15. These stats are generally easier to get from items. Engineering, Crit, & HP Regen, %DMG have +1 to their tier 1 upgrade. So these are ok in the beginning, but get worse later in the game. +2 Engineering is a good upgrade. I find myself picking %dmg a ton, and it is a decent upgrade. But there’s items that offers %dmg at a great rate, Cyclops worm, Speed generator, etc. If you have enough crit synergy items and weapons with higher than 2x crit multipliers, Crit becomes A to S tier.

C Tier upgrades: These just aren’t given at a good enough price for upgrades.

Luck Life steal

These I only want if I’m offered a higher tier upgrade. I almost never take these if other stats are offered at the same level. Luck is better in the early game, and I’m not sad to pick up a +10 luck upgrade in the earlier levels, if I’m not offered any other useful level 2 upgrades.

F Tier upgrades:

Any stats you’re not using.

Don’t get Melee damage on your ranged damage build. Don’t get crit or Dodge if you’re dumping it. If you already have 150 HP, maybe invest in other stats. You get the idea.