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[Aoi]

Less crashy would be good too. I've achieved multiple NG+-capable games, except they crash-on-load. Not an exploration/memory thing either, since loading them into a clean world has the same issue. (And given how hard it is to get to the point you can actually play NG+... eurgh!)

[MrRoboto75]

My point is you get shot up the instant you peek out of cover.  You can't return fire without a hefty health tax you can't pay.

And the enemy density gets to the point that you basically cannot avoid fights.  And avoiding fights means you have no money.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I'll add to the "what difficulty spike" notion.

Compared to the Fungal Caverns (the loot-rich area on the left of the second floor), the third floor is easy. Annoying enemies are aplenty, but they still die in a few solid hits as usual, and those that don't require hiding and maneuvering. Plus there's hardly any rock, you can dig with abandon, and there's very few environmental hazards to watch out for besides explosives.

At that point you've been through two holy mountains, and an area rich in both gold and loot. If you don't have spells and/or items that let you manage enemies, it's your own lookout.

The game's a roguelike, you're not going to speedrun your way down unless you really know what you're doing. The third floor only "spikes" in difficulty if you've been avoiding the difficulty on the previous floors. If you're taking your time and preparing properly by scouring the previous floors for good wands and items, it's a much smoother progression.

[MrRoboto75]

I'll add to the "what difficulty spike" notion.

Compared to the Fungal Caverns (the loot-rich area on the left of the second floor), the third floor is easy. Annoying enemies are aplenty, but they still die in a few solid hits as usual, and those that don't require hiding and maneuvering. Plus there's hardly any rock, you can dig with abandon, and there's very few environmental hazards to watch out for besides explosives.

At that point you've been through two holy mountains, and an area rich in both gold and loot. If you don't have spells and/or items that let you manage enemies, it's your own lookout.

The game's a roguelike, you're not going to speedrun your way down unless you really know what you're doing. The third floor only "spikes" in difficulty if you've been avoiding the difficulty on the previous floors. If you're taking your time and preparing properly by scouring the previous floors for good wands and items, it's a much smoother progression.

There's no difficulty to avoid in the early levels because, guess what, you can fucking dodge and avoid taking damage.

What you're telling me is skill barely matters as you gamble on loot actually being useful for once (it usually, usually isn't at all, most wands are borderline useless without beating the level and changing them).  If you don't get something broken by level two you may as well reset until you do.  Which isn't up to you at all.

[NJW2000]

All the levels are difficultly spikes of one kind or another: level four checks whether you have the wits to survive REALLY aggressive enclosed environments, level five is a dps check with some crazy stuff thrown in, level six tests whether you can navigate rapidly lethal situations without making a mistake, etc.


Level three does seem to stand out to players that have been playing for certain amount of time, but haven't gotten really confident with the game yet. I think that's to do with the specific thing it tests, although I'm not sure I can put into words what that is.

[Kagus]

My general strategy, before 1.0, was to just run through the first few levels while barely touching much of anything. Just get to the holy mountain, avoid the health and magic restock, grab a perk, and hop out.

Then I'd make my way to the ice caverns and, if I'd had some decent luck with perks, I'd head to the right and make the climb up the cliff face to that secret area. The gap between that and the lava lake, and the one between the shores of the lava lake, are just close enough that a carefully controlled hop can clear it.

With my perks and hopefully a lucky wand or two, I could start thoroughly scouring each level on the way back down, and making use of the health and recharge bonuses I'd left behind earlier (if necessary). If I had some really good kit (including some mobility stuff), I might even head out of the cave and over to the pyramid for some cash and potentially a neat wand or two that I could cannibalize back in the holy mountains.

With any luck, I'd have some form of digging that could get me through the holy mountain walls by this point, so I'd do that and carefully piece my way downwards while being able to backtrack and either grab heals or just fiddle with my wands a bit.


That was my standard routine for most runs, which was really sad because while it was highly effective it was also torturously slow and tedious.

[Frumple]

... wait, people actually have trouble dodging the ~porno grind~ critters shots? Usually you just go up or down or duck behind something solid, though? The explosives or the bots have been what killed me in that region, iirc. The guns are mostly pretty predictable...

[MrRoboto75]

... wait, people actually have trouble dodging the ~porno grind~ critters shots? Usually you just go up or down or duck behind something solid, though? The explosives or the bots have been what killed me in that region, iirc. The guns are mostly pretty predictable...

In my experience, they shoot the very second they have line of fire on you.  They don't have to be visible on screen to do this.  Outside of the sniper rifles there's no wind up animation, its just bang.  And once the bullet's in the air you're not moving far enough soon enough to be out of the way.  And if you're airborne you've also been stunned, so that's another hit.  There doesn't seem to be anything to realistically do other than just outright not be there.  But you have to be there because there's no where else to go.

Either I get a wand capable of shooting around corners, or peeking for practically a single frame and firing past the side of the screen.  Or inevitably face tanking and losing because you cannot spend health willy-nilly.

[Frumple]

Yeah, it's been my fairly consistent experience that, if you got a bit of momentum going (and you, like... should? Always, when you're in open spaces, more or less), the delay between them and you is enough to drop under or jet over shots without that much trouble? Don't quite know how to put it in words, but there's like a flow to movement you can pick up that makes the hissy critters (and a lot of other stuff) not that bad. You can see it in youtube vids from some of the folks that run pretty hard.

If they're far enough away you can't already see them (and thus pretty easily predict where the shot's going to come from and when, or just kill them before they can shoot with bouncy shots or whatever), they're far enough away bullet transit time lets you react, basically. Usually. Least they have been for me, and I'm not exactly some kind of reflex god or somethin', ha.

[Frumple]

(response to removed post removed)

 you can also just cheat. Give yourself some extra health, more perks, slow the game down when you're in a region that's giving you trouble, etc.

Noita's still plenty fun when you're doing stuff the game would rather you not be doing, heh.

[forsaken1111]

Nothing wrong with cheating if it enhances your enjoyment of the game or helps you learn. When I was first playing Noita I used some 3rd party tools to make myself invulnerable so I could learn mechanics and layouts, now I don't need them

[heydude6]

I got good at noita by reading guides. I didn't study every trick in the book, but I learned about essential basics such as purifying toxic sludge by mixing it with water, killing enemies by throwing emerald tablets at them to get double money (and insta-killing more problematic enemies like fire mages), robots being weak to explosion damage, as well as a few wandbuilding fundamentals.

Spoiler: Starter pack to wand building (click to show/hide)

1. Some spells contain modifiers (these are listed at the bottom of their desc). If you include those spells in a multi-cast block, those modifiers are applied to each spell in the block. Spells that may be unimpressive on their own, may have a lot more value when used to modify a multi-cast block. Luminous drill for example has a famous -0.55 cast delay modifier. Pair it with a slow spell like energy orb, and suddenly you're firing it much faster at the cost of the drill's extra mana demands. Now you just need to do something about recharge time...

Some notable spells:
Digging spells like luminous drill, digging bolt, CHAINSAW!!!! (This thing is ridiculous, It has to have hidden stat bonuses), for cast delay and recharge speed reduction.
Arrow, reduces spread by -20 degrees, best paired with scatter multi-casts and triplicate bolt
bubble spark and spitter bolt. Both have a negative cast delay and though it isn't as much as the drills, some wands don't have that much cast delay to begin with, so these are an easy candidate for baby's first machine gun wand.
Heavy spread. This is a projectile modifier, rather than a projectile itself, but in my opinion it's one of the best ways to reduce recharge time since it comes with a recharge time reduction of -0.25 in addition to the less pleasant accuracy decrease. Just attach it to a disposable spell who's accuracy you don't care about (digging spells are a great candidate since the recharge reductions stack), and place this group at the end of a wand. Now when you finish firing your real spells, you can reload them much quicker.

2. Spell wrapping. When a multi-cast modifer like Double spell can't find enough spells to fill it up completely (or a modifier doesn't have a spell to the right of it to modify), it will read the beginning of the wand again and pick a spell from there to fill itself up. It cannot select a spell that it already has inside itself. At the simplest level, this can be used to give a wand one last explosive burst it has to reload. Eg.

sparkbolt - sparkbolt - double spell

If you fire this thing, you will fire the first 2 sparkbolts sequentially, and then you fill be able to fire off a 3rd shot that contains 2 sparkbolts at once before having to reload. You went from 2 sparkbolts per magazine to 4 spark bolts, literally doubling your firepower per magazine. This trick is more useful on wands with longer recharge times. If the recharge is negligible, then it probably would be more optimal to place the multi-cast on the front since you'll be constantly firing double sparks rather than on every 3rd shot.

A more useful trick you can do with spell wrapping is DOUBLING the recharge time reductions of spells like digging bolt. The reason why this works is because recharge time modifers in noita are cumulative. Every time a spell that modifies recharge time is cast, it modifies the wand's recharge time. Once the last spell is cast, the wand checks the recharge time, applies it, and then resets it to the default you're familiar with. I'll show you another example.

digging bolt (-0.17 recharge time reduction) - spark bolt - heavy spread (-0.25 recharge time reduction)

Total Recharge Time Reduction: -0.59

What's happening is that the digging bolt is cast, adding the first -0.17, then heavy spread is cast. Since there is no spell to the right of it, it wraps around to the start, picks digging bolt again and this combination has a RTR of  -0.17 + (-0.25) = -0.42. You got the same RTR as if you had an extra digging bolt.

Here's what you can do with two heavy spreads:

heavy spread (-0.25 recharge time reduction) - spark bolt- spark bolt - heavy spread (-0.25 recharge time reduction)

Total Recharge Time Reduction: -0.75

First spark bolt is wildly innacurate, but disposable. You can probably figure out the rest.

Once you learn all these tricks, you'll be able to manufacture machineguns with less and less.

After that, I figured out a lot of things on my own.

There is so much to this game, and as you play you will discover new tools you can use as well as new ways to make use of existing ones (You can do some truly evil stuff with teleport bolts). Noita is ultimately a game about knowledge, and how far you will consistently go is dependent on how much you know. It's like nethack in that regard. The game is full of all these weird and interesting tricks that completely change the way you play it once they're discovered (Did you know pheromone flasks are amazing in Hisii base?)

As you learn more, you discover new things and find out that the objective of beating all 7 floors and the final boss is only just the tip of the massive iceberg hidden inside this game.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Yeah. Like half of the "getting good" at Noita, is just knowing things. Knowing what you need at what point in the game, knowing what to look for, knowing how to solve specific puzzles and avoid specific pitfalls, knowing what spells to combine and how, knowing how to use the potions and items you find, etc. It's knowledge and ingenuity first, and the actual action-platformer reflexes are firmly second, even if they're still very important. It's a proper roguelike, even if it's the least Rogue-like roguelike I've ever seen. The things and opportunities it gives you are random, and it's up to you to figure out how to succeed with what you're given.

[forsaken1111]

Yeah agreed, the only way to 'get better' at noita is to increase your knowledge of the game and its systems and what is needed at each level. Yes there are difficulty spikes but all of them can be handled with prep and knowledge.

[Aoi]

I find the difficulty jump between 3 and 4, and 4 and 5 to be the largest... 2 to 3 didn't phase me much.

Tight quarters, explosions, electricity+a lot of metal, freezing gas, stronger enemies, difficult to dig terrain... They all stack together in 4, whereas you were presented with (some of) them alone in earlier areas.

In 5, you're back to semi-open areas, but you're now up against stuff with mid-high mobility with vastly higher damage capabilities and absorption that, unless you have a wand stronger than if typical for a straight-down run, you can't just power through.