Nuclear Throne is Vlambeer's classic top-down shooter roguelike. This movie aims to reach the titular throne and reach the credits as quickly as possible with no additional restrictions.
Setup
Make sure to run the
savefile setup movie before running this movie, as well as follow the movie annotations.
Game Mechanics
Feel free to skip the following paragraph if you know how the game works.
The gameplay of NT is fairly self explanatory. You spawn in a randomly generated stage, upon killing all the enemies a portal appears which takes you to the next stage. There's 4 main areas consisting of 3 stages each, and 3 in-between areas which are 1 stage long. The final stage of each main areas features a boss fight. Each stage features a weapon chest, ammo chest and a rad canister, in addition to that enemies can randomly drop weapons, ammo or health packs. Rads are the game's experience points, you collect them from dead enemies or the aforementioned canisters. Each level up grants a choice of 1 of 4 mutations, which are perks that help in the run.
1-1
I open all interactables without killing too many enemies to spawn Big Bandit. This boss usually only appears in 1-3, but spawning him in 1-1 and killing him quickly enough will take me to Oasis, one of the game's secret stages.
The weapon in the red chest is a Crossbow, which is one of the best 1-1 weapons. It deals solid damage and the bolts pierce weaker enemies, allowing me to kill multiple enemies with one shot.
I pick Extra Feet as my mutation, granting me extra movement speed. This speeds up traversal through the future stages.
Oasis
This level features the first use of Reload Cancelling. Picking up a weapon from the ground will instantly reload it, so by constantly swapping weapons I can fire once every 4 frames, with an additional shot of the weapon I'm using to reload cancel with inbetween.
3-3
Clearing Oasis puts me in 3-3, skipping 5 levels. I once again use reload cancelling to quickly kill Big Dog.
Portals only start spawning once the last enemy killed finishes its death animation. Boss animations are usually quite long, so leaving a regular enemy as the last one to die allows me to skip waiting for the boss animation to finish.
I pick Last Wish for my mutation. This perk gives full health and a bunch of ammo which isn't very useful, but it also allows entrance to the next secret stage.
4-1
Here I pick up the Heavy Crossbow, a slower, but stronger version of the regular crossbow. This is the main weapon for most of the run.
I pick Stress, giving me higher fire rate at lower health. This mutation speeds up stage clearing significantly, as the crossbows normally have quite a slow reload speed.
5-1
I offer 4 health to the flower, which spawned thanks to me having picked Last Wish. This instantly finishes the level and takes me to the Jungle. Last Wish is also refunded, so I get to pick another mutation despite not having levelled up.
I pick Bolt Marrow, giving me homing bolts. This is very good for more efficient stage clearing.
Jungle
I drop to 1 health to benefit from Stress as much as possible, not much more of note here.
I pick Scarier Face, which makes enemies have 20% less HP.
5-3
This stage really shows how powerful the combo of Heavy Crossbow and Bolt Marrow is, allowing me to clear multiple enemies with every shot.
I do another boss death animation skip on Lil Hunter.
6-1
At this point the regular Crossbow stops being as useful, so I swap to the Auto Shotgun to help clear stray enemies while the Heavy Crossbow is reloading.
I pick Strong Spirit, allowing me to survive one lethal hit. This effect normally refreshes when entering a new stage with full health, but I never take advantage of this, rather just use it to set up Stress again.
7-1
I drop the Auto Shotgun for the Nuke Launcher, a weapon which allows me to shoot rockets which follow the cursor and cause very powerful explosions. I also reload cancel with the Heavy Crossbow to clear all the enemies extremely quickly.
7-2
The Auto Shotgun followed me through to this level, allowing me to once again reload cancel to get rid of most of the enemies right away.
I pick Rabbit Paw here, which doesn't do anything at this point in the run, but I had to pick something.
7-3
The final level, after activating the throne bossfight I stack up 10 Nukes, which when detonated will instantly kill the boss. The game ends upon sitting on the throne after it explodes, however by standing in the correct spot when the explosion happens I both die and sit on the throne at the same time, which still counts as beating the game.
Something to note here is before the big explosion each of the smaller ones is an actual explosion with a hitbox, so I have to avoid them to not die too early.
Special Thanks
Huge thanks goes to
-7, who created a tool to search through the seeds, picking out ones with the correct mutations and weapons. This TAS would be much slower without her help.
Possible Improvements
- As always with roguelikes, better RNG can always be found. While this seed had a very good build, the levels themselves weren't amazing. Especially 6-1 was quite long compared to even the RTA record. I believe a truly optimal run would always be able to reload cancel to clear every enemy on every level.
- There's also definitely timesave possible in the way I clear each stage, it's very hard to optimise each shot when taking the enemies' random movements into account.
- Manipulating fewer health drops to maintain Stress better could probably save a handful of frames.
- It's very possible that another weapon/mutation build could be faster, there are many options in this game and this is just one I thought would work best.
Samsara: Dropping due to personal life events preventing me from being able to judge anything with a clear mind.
ikuyo: Claiming for judging.
