The Pit feels very slow on insane. Any tips?

[TheDevastatingDenis]

So I've beaten the game on hard with multiple characters and right now i'm trying to play on insane. I seem to have a pretty promising ranger with 13 floors cleared (Broma Dai and K'Ktar with lots of ammo, Tarka Warhammer, Padded Armor and living steel patch, lots of intant healing, food, unlocked psi armor already).
However, there is a few things that concern me.

a bit about how i play:
My style of playing this game is rather slow (although it seems pretty effective): i sleep and rest a lot, I abuse guns that use multiple ammo per shot by reloading them with one, at the cost of not being able to shoot consecutively and having to reload all the time, i pick up almost everything that isn't bolted to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ground and has a potential use and brag it all across the floor since I run out of inventory space rather quickly.
my games as a result take rather long (for example, one successful hard run i hade took around 40 hours) but not too long since all of these time consuming strats usually come into play in the mid to late game.

However, in insane mode, there are lots of mobs and lots of drops and loots of food as well, so around floor 11 or 12 i already found myself dragging stuff across the floor, and sleeping all the time to preserve heals since there are lots of enemies to beat up for food. this has me worried that the game will last forever or that i'll run into some other issues, who knows.

if anyone knows how to avoid being slow as hell without losing much effectiveness i'd be happy to listen! As well as any stories, tips or ideas on how to best play on insane (ranger preferably) would be much appreciated!)

[Azulavis]

With Ranger's 3 move speed and low food consumption I was able to carry more items between floors, but still I was picking only what is really necessary + lots of Hinge Spike and Door Spike ingredients and ammo I can't use. I don't remember wasting too much time, but I didn't get very far with Ranger. 4 or 5 times the runs ended when I stepped on wormhole trap, many times I've been insta-killed by Large Morrigi Drone and such. Ranger gets very small amount of health increase compared to other non-psi characters and that's a big issue on Insane.
High Finesse helps dodge Wormhole and Teleport traps and also when combined with high weapon skill (Rifle) increase chance to hit with ranged weapons as well as being able to shot enemy with Deflect skill active. Mechanical and Computer are important, Resistance up to Psi Armor, Telekinesis up to Manipulation. That's all I can think about.

[TheDevastatingDenis]

so this is my current loadout:
https://sun1-27.userapi.com/bxYjVXGJ_eS1Q9Y6M6mXrfg4-LvSrdXz9FxWOw/cNDrEv7eswQ.jpg

i seem to be doing ok, however there are two things that have me worried:
1) i have quite a bit of food, but almost all of it is uncooked (haven't found a lot of cookers/creation stations/portable cooker) so i'm kinda struggling to keep myself topped off without wasting food by eating it uncooked and it's also only floor 25... so even though i have a lot of food ingredients, i still have half the game to go so it might not be enough
2) so i do have lots of stuff, sure, but once again, it's only floor 25 and yet it feels like 35, so i'm honestly not even sure i have enough stuff to last me the game. espesially in terms of durability.

generally speaking the floors feel like they are deep into the late game, but it's only floor 25
and i just don't know if i have enough food and durability to last me the game since late game enemies generally drop less food than early-to-mid game ones. And it definitly doesn't help that resting to heal is a 100% necessity or else i would of ran out of healing a loooooong time ago. (if only the slave collar would show itself)

Originally posted by Azulavis:

With Ranger's 3 move speed and low food consumption I was able to carry more items between floors, but still I was picking only what is really necessary + lots of Hinge Spike and Door Spike ingredients and ammo I can't use. I don't remember wasting too much time, but I didn't get very far with Ranger. 4 or 5 times the runs ended when I stepped on wormhole trap, many times I've been insta-killed by Large Morrigi Drone and such. Ranger gets very small amount of health increase compared to other non-psi characters and that's a big issue on Insane.
High Finesse helps dodge Wormhole and Teleport traps and also when combined with high weapon skill (Rifle) increase chance to hit with ranged weapons as well as being able to shot enemy with Deflect skill active. Mechanical and Computer are important, Resistance up to Psi Armor, Telekinesis up to Manipulation. That's all I can think about.

[Azulavis]

On Insane stronger enemies spawn earlier, +1 additional enemy per each run and enemy Penetration goes up +1 for each floor, which make them do more damage to you.
You have good weapons, but you need a better shotgun, Adamantium Claws, Worpal Blade, Lightning Sword (any strong melee weapon) and another efficient energy weapon to finish off enemies (bots may drop Enduro Carbine or Rifle). At this point pretty much your only source of new weapons are Weapon Vaults, which may contain unusable PBA-only weapon or some junk (mine, bio mod, fuel cell). You still have the chance of finding Medium weapons lockers in Hiver queen's rooms up to floor 33 when they stop spawn. In later floors there are more rooms - more chance to get cooker, your Bio Blaster may become useful. Floors 33-36 have nothing useful in them, you may consider using wormhole traps. When possible, craft Pheromone Baits and Cyber Scramblers. Since you have Rosetta Brain, you can use Meditation chambers to heal to full health, some Meditation chambers can be used twice. If you don't have psi Manipulation, it's worth to invest into.
There is one trick - if robot room have no Master Mind and there are some Ravenous Zuulings, you can throw Pheromon Bait on Ravenous Zuulings, they'll go berserk and attack robots, their attack will cause robots to go berserk too and clean the room for you. Sometimes Pheromon Bait affects robots (obviously a game glitch).

[Azulavis]

It is also a good idea to take notes about useful objects on previous floors and good doors reacharge delay (good doors 200 moments, bad doors 30 moments). You can open steam browser in-game and write down all that information if you put this code in the address bar of the browser:

data:text/html, <html contenteditable style='background: rgb(51,51,51); color: rgb(102,102,102); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;'>

Adjust font size, font family and colors as needed. (I'm currently using Linux Libertine font as my favorite).
More about it in guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1465244827

[TheDevastatingDenis]

Energy weapons are great and all but i barelly hava any bindings so i can't really afford to make a lot of energy back packs, kind of a dillema actually... there's even an empty K'Ktar in the gear pile

Manipulation... funilly enough my initial leveling strat was exactly like yours with going to psi armor and manipulation, but after countless tries at insane i cut back on manipulation to buff other things like foraging, lock picking, computer and mechanical when possible to maximize my chances of finding good loot as soon as possible cus that seemed to be my downfall on insane. But now that i finally got a run going and it picked up some speed, i kinda' miss it a lot so i am on my way to it at this point (already have about 20points in it), cus yea, it is incredibly handy and i also don't really see myself finishing the run without skipping a bunch of stuff with wormholes. (i also had grav boots at some point... but they broke)

As for adamantium claws i tried to make them once and failed (chance was pretty high, bad luck). I think i do have the ingridients for it, but i wasn't in to much of a rush to make them since i have a Starspear, a Warhamer and the starting sword, so to me it seemed like my melee package was pretty much as versetile as it can get (Star sper + 3 mave speed op as hell), although low max hp and high pen from enemies still means i gota rest a bunch, which is mainly why food worries me a bit.

all in all thanks for the info!

Originally posted by Azulavis:

On Insane stronger enemies spawn earlier, +1 additional enemy per each run and enemy Penetration goes up +1 for each floor, which make them do more damage to you.
You have good weapons, but you need a better shotgun, Adamantium Claws, Worpal Blade, Lightning Sword (any strong melee weapon) and another efficient energy weapon to finish off enemies (bots may drop Enduro Carbine or Rifle). At this point pretty much your only source of new weapons are Weapon Vaults, which may contain unusable PBA-only weapon or some junk (mine, bio mod, fuel cell). You still have the chance of finding Medium weapons lockers in Hiver queen's rooms up to floor 33 when they stop spawn. In later floors there are more rooms - more chance to get cooker, your Bio Blaster may become useful. Floors 33-36 have nothing useful in them, you may consider using wormhole traps. When possible, craft Pheromone Baits and Cyber Scramblers. Since you have Rosetta Brain, you can use Meditation chambers to heal to full health, some Meditation chambers can be used twice. If you don't have psi Manipulation, it's worth to invest into.
There is one trick - if robot room have no Master Mind and there are some Ravenous Zuulings, you can throw Pheromon Bait on Ravenous Zuulings, they'll go berserk and attack robots, their attack will cause robots to go berserk too and clean the room for you. Sometimes Pheromon Bait affects robots (obviously a game glitch).

[TheDevastatingDenis]

i know it's not great but as i said and as you can see i just drag my ♥♥♥♥ across the floor. i'm not proud of it either! but hey, it works))
(although the fact that i have over 2 inventories of stuff and no good inventory storage uprade doesn't help the food situation at all, but it's probably not taking as much of a tol on my food supply as the sleeping and resting. still though sots is a game of min-maxing and it deffinitly hurts my soul to run through each floor two extra times to move all my ♥♥♥♥)

traps i just try to remember as is and on one occasion i actually wrote down that there was a 4D coppier on floor 22 in an irl note pad, lol

Originally posted by Azulavis:

It is also a good idea to take notes about useful objects on previous floors and good doors reacharge delay (good doors 200 moments, bad doors 30 moments). You can open steam browser in-game and write down all that information if you put this code in the address bar of the browser:

data:text/html, <html contenteditable style='background: rgb(51,51,51); color: rgb(102,102,102); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px;'>

Adjust font size, font family and colors as needed. (I'm currently using Linux Libertine font as my favorite).
More about it in guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1465244827

[Azulavis]

Star spear - Starlance?
I was looking at your screenshot and thinking it's a regular spear.

[TheDevastatingDenis]

Yea, Starlance, my mistake
Imagine that many biomod slots on a regular spear)

Originally posted by Azulavis:

Star spear - Starlance?
I was looking at your screenshot and thinking it's a regular spear.

[Azulavis]

Originally posted by TheDevastatingDenis:

Yea, Starlance, my mistake
Imagine that many biomod slots on a regular spear)

I was using tablet computer with small screen and the spear has red background.
Starlance is really good weapon, 80 Penetration is kind of low, but you can always put Nano Edge bio-mods it it. Drop Starlance before you open ammo lockers, to prevent Fuel Cells to drop as bonus ammo from crate.

[TheDevastatingDenis]

Yea, i know that trick, however i forget to drop it time to time because in my head it's a melee weapon that doesn't use ammo

Originally posted by Azulavis:

Originally posted by TheDevastatingDenis:

Yea, Starlance, my mistake
Imagine that many biomod slots on a regular spear)

I was using tablet computer with small screen and the spear has red background.
Starlance is really good weapon, 80 Penetration is kind of low, but you can always put Nano Edge bio-mods it it. Drop Starlance before you open ammo lockers, to prevent Fuel Cells to drop as bonus ammo from crate.

[TheDevastatingDenis]

well it happened... despite having 80 brains i still stepped into a wormhole somehow. All the things i was dragging along were on floor 28 and i got teleported from 29 to 32 so i'm pretty sure whatever was on floor 28 is now lost.

this is all i have now:
https://sun1-85.userapi.com/GQc2pPl2c_SO8WSIijQdVFZwcFml5WbRRnvwsQ/5jinDfcGako.jpg

Floor 33 is ahead. Not sure if it's possible to finish the game from here but "die trying" is pretty much the name of the game. wish me luck

(p.s. the stuff next to me in the screenshot are all of the new drops i got on floors 31 and 32)

[Azulavis]

80 Brains is like bare minimum you need to detect traps frequently, 100 Brains will make you detect them almost all the time. If you're on floor 32, floor 28 is locked, all your stuff there is lost.
You have good gear, you will be able to clear floor 40, just avoid all rooms with Rocket Launcher enemies, at floor 40 Insane they will have +40 Penetration and they will shoot rockets at you simultaneously - a certain death.
Vkontakte and all related websites are blocked on my network, I have to view your screenshots on a mobile device with small screen, but from what I've seen, you have a high chance of succeeding at this run. But still you have a chance to descent into a bad room like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836623762
I survived that room, but died on floor 38: I descended into a relatively easy room, but it had an open door, I didn't pay attention to that door, and in the next turn a Pain Herald threw KO Grenade off-screen from another room through that open door, and I went unconscious for more than 6 turns and died. Be careful about any open doors.

[TheDevastatingDenis]

So i'm at the end of floor 34 at the moment
Here's the load out: https://i.imgur.com/vUZXRFj.jpg
The food situation is way too dire but i have 1 wormhole trap, so as a last ditch effort i think i'll just go to floor 35 and wormhole right from there, if i'm lucky it'll take me straight to floor 39 and with +2 movement speed, chrono displacers and a bit of luck i should be able to make my way to the last floor pretty easly.

I could just keep playing normally, my computer, foraging and biotech i really high and i have digital assistant and bordeaux bot, but i really don't like just hoping for ultra med stations, protean baths, 4D-coppyers and more food. If i find any of these i'm almost garanteed to use them successfully but that just seems like a very unreliable plan to me. I'm really currious to hear what your take on the situation would be.

p.s. sorry for the vkontakte issue, i'm from Russia and i use vkontakte a lot so it was just convinient for me at the moment. Hopefully imigur is better. I just really dislike the steam screenshot system and as far as i know it's impossible to just straight out attach an image.

Originally posted by Azulavis:

80 Brains is like bare minimum you need to detect traps frequently, 100 Brains will make you detect them almost all the time. If you're on floor 32, floor 28 is locked, all your stuff there is lost.
You have good gear, you will be able to clear floor 40, just avoid all rooms with Rocket Launcher enemies, at floor 40 Insane they will have +40 Penetration and they will shoot rockets at you simultaneously - a certain death.
Vkontakte and all related websites are blocked on my network, I have to view your screenshots on a mobile device with small screen, but from what I've seen, you have a high chance of succeeding at this run. But still you have a chance to descent into a bad room like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836623762
I survived that room, but died on floor 38: I descended into a relatively easy room, but it had an open door, I didn't pay attention to that door, and in the next turn a Pain Herald threw KO Grenade off-screen from another room through that open door, and I went unconscious for more than 6 turns and died. Be careful about any open doors.

[Azulavis]

The reason Vkontakte is blocked is this[www.gnu.org]. imgur is fine. Also steam accepts images as 'artwork'.
On your screenshot:
1) I see no Blunderbuss - is it destroyed? Having no shotgun is inconvenient.
2) Maybe drop crowbar and pick up Hiver Multi-tool?
3) Lightning Grenades are almost useless.
4) Exotic Proteins are part of many food ingredients, maybe pick them up.
5) Floors 37-39 will have more Raw Meat drops and often Moldy Bread and Rotten Cheese. Blandwich is a decent craft there.
6) From floor 35, the maximum wormhole distance will be floor 38. You better have another wormhole in case you teleport into a dangerous room.
7) If you start to use wormholes at floor 36, you have a chance to land at Floor 39, from floor 37 you can get to Floor 40, but if you teleport to a bad room there - it will be game over.
8) Steroidal Venom with each use will have more severe side effects, be careful.
9) You can unload Liquidator when it has 1 shot left and get 1 Acid Sack back, load that Acid Sack into the Liquidator and get 4 shots out of it, repeat when you have 1 shot left for infinite Liquidator ammo. (I'm not using this glich, because I consider it cheating)

[TheDevastatingDenis]

Originally posted by Azulavis:

The reason Vkontakte is blocked is this[www.gnu.org]. imgur is fine. Also steam accepts images as 'artwork'.
On your screenshot:
1) I see no Blunderbuss - is it destroyed? Having no shotgun is inconvenient.
2) Maybe drop crowbar and pick up Hiver Multi-tool?
3) Lightning Grenades are almost useless.
4) Exotic Proteins are part of many food ingredients, maybe pick them up.
5) Floors 37-39 will have more Raw Meat drops and often Moldy Bread and Rotten Cheese. Blandwich is a decent craft there.
6) From floor 35, the maximum wormhole distance will be floor 38. You better have another wormhole in case you teleport into a dangerous room.
7) If you start to use wormholes at floor 36, you have a chance to land at Floor 39, from floor 37 you can get to Floor 40, but if you teleport to a bad room there - it will be game over.
8) Steroidal Venom with each use will have more severe side effects, be careful.
9) You can unload Liquidator when it has 1 shot left and get 1 Acid Sack back, load that Acid Sack into the Liquidator and get 4 shots out of it, repeat when you have 1 shot left for infinite Liquidator ammo. (I'm not using this glich, because I consider it cheating)

1) yup, fixed it 3 times. Had to break eventually with 15 max durability and 500+ ammo, got a lot of use out of it though, so it's ok.
2) i have another multi-tool in my inventory, the one on the ground is empty.
6) oh yea, damn, silly miscalculation on my part, 38 is exactly where i ended up.
8) i had no idea, i thought the side effects were random every time (it's not like i get to use too many of them in each run) so thanks for the heads up. In this run though i have max might and a lot of items to deal with status effects, so i'm not worried about it.
9) yea, that definitely sounds like cheating to me, infinite ammo on th liquidator with 3 shots at a time sounds op as hell.

So i did jump down, ended up in the hallway close to the entrance on floor 38 (pretty lucky actually), got out of it just fine, made my way to the tha hatch to floor 39 just fine. Picked up another wormhole on the way, might use it on floor 39 if things don't look so good.
here's my stuff, found a rocket launcher and a pepper box on floor 38: https://i.imgur.com/k8s1J5N.png
Late game insane is pretty wierd. Most of the rooms on floor 38 have pain heralds and rippers which is bad on one hand, but on the other hand you can just skip a lot of them since they don't leave their rooms so it works out pretty nicely. if i were to actually fight and kill them my armor would surely lose pretty much all of is armor points.

As for the vk thing... well yea... same goes for facebook, twitter, steam for that matter or any other social media, messenger or bulletin board, the only diffrence is that they are controlled by different governments and companies. i don't use vk for everything obviously, i do switch to something a bit more secure if there is a need for it. But as for my pit screenshots - the government can have them any day of the week :D