Year 2 is gold for me. Year 3 is shit. It’s bizarre.
It gets a little easier when you collect the ants for your homestead. They give you permanent buffs for cornucopias, stuff like % not to take damage, % not to have your gun break, damage and rate of fire on your base gun etc.
Obviously it takes a little while to find them and upgrade them. I think they only spawn on the second maps.
I find that if you take Rye, it can make the game a little easier, especially if you’re under pressure and can’t farm as much as you’d like, because he’ll often get to keep guns, which means you can keep rocking stuff like the Biodegrader which is sort of an auto-clear if you upgrade it a couple of times.
I know it’s never the same for everybody, but I’m on Year 9 and I’ve found the challenge pretty spot on for my abilities. I managed to fail the boss yesterday with about 5% HP remaining. That stung.
Before Atomicrops I was pretty into Enter the Gungeon, which I would say is about twice as hard, so maybe that prepared me for this.
/edit
One more thing! If you aren’t already, make sure to always plant your heartbeets in fours and fertilize them to the max, because that gives you more hearts.
Same with roses, which you can use to buy heartbeets if you need 'em. No fertilizer required there.
Yeah I recall almost always hanging on to beets, roses and sunflower seeds so I could make megacrops and yield more hearts, roses and cashews. I tried to do this with the better seeds in general. Only if I was in a pretty dire situation would I plant them as singles. From October 2020:
@Kolbex Yeah, I recall struggling with year 3!
I can’t quit this game. Found the fourth ant, and I think I can see how I might be able to grind my way past year 3 eventually with copious cornucopias from year 2.
I found four ants long ago. I’m hoping I can keep collecting enough cornucopias in Year 1 to help me finally get past Year 2 with all those minor Ant upgrades. I’m just not good enough at avoiding incoming fire to be able to do it without more upgrades in Year 2.
I’m stuck on Year 6. I breezed through 4 and 5 but with 6 it appears the cost the weapon upgrades has increased making it pretty rough at the beginning.
Approaching 44 hours played. That’s just on the PC version (I also played a little on Xbox). At some point I have to just stop and move on, right? 50 hours maybe?
After you beat year 10.
This game is like trying to juggle on a unicycle while breathing into a paper bag.
Years and years ago I saw someone describe Demon’s Souls as a game where you delve deeper and deeper into a world that hates you, but that description is so, so much more accurate for this game.
Also you grow plants.
Year 2 complete. I emphasized kicking ass and I got lucky on the farming powerups that I found.
They call it bullet hell for a reason :)
I’m working on Year 10 now, I feel like luck starts to become a bigger factor the further you get. I really need a weed cutter or a megaton early for this one. I can’t farm enough to get all the season rewards, which means my combat stat isn’t as high as it could be, which means clearing stuff is harder.
I started skipping the Jungle biome as much as possible with Year 9. Between the swarm plants bombarding me, and the cheshire cats forcing me to dance I tend to lose most of my hearts down there.
If I have a weapon that lets me keep my distance, I feel like Plains 2 is about as difficult as Jungle 1 with better rewards.
Luck also really comes into play with those weapon upgrades.
I did it on Year 1, but the advanced biomes were still kinda rough, as was The Spore You Know :P
I had an Year 1 run today where I got so used to my Jackhammer gun being fixed round after round that I completely failed tor realize that it broke right before the boss round in Winter. Which meant I went up against the spider boss with a starting pea shooter. I had about 20 heart health at full by then, but I still died, because the peashooter is just so little damage, the spider battle just kept going and going and going and going and eventually all my health was gone. The only thing doing any real damage to the spider was my five turrets placed around my far.
Is that the key to beating the game with the pea shooter? Turrets? Maybe drones as well?
I had five or six turrets when I did it (I also drew the spider), no drones. The carrot tractor helped, I think, with like three charges energizing my turrets (and I think my pigs, two or three of them, had turrets, too).
Oh yes, animal turrets! That’s the ticket!
You can only use what the game gives you.
I tried getting that achievement today. I unlocked a new character that does everything fast. Stuck with the starting gun. The winter boss I got was the moon bunny. I think the spider is harder, so I felt a little relieved. But just like the spider, if you can’t do a lot of damage and destroy the minion generators fast, it becomes a battle of just trying to survive against ever growing minions instead of a battle of trying to get the boss.
Unfortunately I didn’t get many turrets setup by the time I got to the winter battle. I only had two turrets, but I did have 4 drones, which helped me out a lot in prior fights, but the drones just don’t do enough damage in the winter boss battle. I just need to either luck into getting more turrets or more drones. The time before this one, I got the pig turrets, but I died early on in that run unfortunately. I think if I had the pig turrets in this run, that could have been the turning point and I could have won.
I just need a little luck in which powerups I get.
Ok, on my current run I’ve got the power ups to make turrets do more damage and knockback, to fire at a longer range, and to fire faster. I think that’s all 3 upgrades to do with turrets. And I’ve already got three turrets setup and two scarecrows. I guess now I need to go back to concentrating on getting health and maybe drones. If I can luck into animal turrets that would be wonderful, but in this run, it’s possible that I won’t need them. I’ve got all this in the summer season and fought the UFO boss. Oh yeah, and I got another turret as a reward, so next time I play, I can set up another one. I just need to not die so all this doesn’t go to waste.
Rest in Peas achievement is mine! Woohoo!
This game has a hold on me so tight. I’ve got to start weaning myself off of it.
I started feeling like it was like trying to fish while being harassed by a swarm of mosquitoes and it weaned itself. I’ll probably go back to it someday.