[Sticky] FAQ & Medals Info

[Pathborn]

This is compiled from questions asked on the game's old forum on the game's website. That forum no longer exists, but I figured I'd archive the old FAQ here.

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HOW DO I KILL THE FIRST BOSS, THE BROTHER BAVAKH?
Put all the Love Points around Aa's single Limited Point. Use your second cursor charging attack repeatedly on the brother Bavakh to draw the Limited Point's fire to him -- you'll have to time this carefully, because there is a rhythm to how often the directions of the bullets get diverted. If you still can't win, try setting the difficulty lower.

ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO LOSE TO THE SECOND BROTHER BAVAKH?
Yes. You *can* win, but you're not supposed to, and winning doesn't change the story. I myself have never won, and I designed it so it couldn't be won, but apparently a few hardcore players managed to kill him anyhow.

WILL THE GAME EVER BE FOR OTHER PLATFORMS (LINUX, MAC, ETC.)?
Probably. I don't know when, but it's something we'd like to do. My best guess would be early 2016.

WILL THE GAME BE TRANSLATED INTO OTHER LANGUAGES?
I want to get German and Chinese eventually. If you want to volunteer for other languages and are a native speaker, email me (rinkuhero at gmail dot com).

REPLAYING OLD LEVELS GIVES YOU MORE CACHE IN LATER LEVELS?
That's a feature, not a bug -- it's a good idea to replay old levels and do better than your old scores in order to have more cache for latter levels.

WHAT ARE GOOD POINT COMBINATIONS?
That's mainly for you to discover. A couple that I use:

Cut Point + mouse cursor charging: you can draw the Cut Point's shots with you and direct them toward the enemies if you move near them when charging up your special attacks.

Pride Point + Love Point: you'll more bang for the buck back on Love if you use it with a Pride, since Prides keep increasing their attack power when they kill and Love's help them kill and give them a larger range.

Upgraded Ortho Point + lots of weak level 1 Fear Points: grouping the enemies together and then doing damage on them all at once with a strong Ortho. Ortho Points also upgrade very well, especially at level 4 or 5, as the size of their splash damage and their attack power increase drastically at that time.

Cut Point / Courage Point / Danmaku Point / Limited Point + upgraded Strategist Point: at higher levels of upgrades, Strategists redirect fire in wider areas, so they're useful to make sure that Points that often miss don't miss as often.

Also, if you have Fear Points, you should place them near the other Points, so that it can slow them down and decrease their defense, allowing the other Points more opportunity to do damage.

IS THERE GOING TO BE A SEQUEL?
Yes. We are working on one, but it may be a while. It will probably be called Immortal Defense 2: Indra's Net.

IS IT POSSIBLE TO BEAT EVERY LEVEL ON 100% DIFFICULTY?
Yes, but only two or three people have ever done it. I haven't.

HOW DO I KILL THE PANOPTICON (EYES OF THE UNIVERSE)?
Okay -- first, destroy its shield (Points that shoot a lot of bullets quickly are useful, because the number of hits matters, not the strength of those attacks). Also use your charge attacks repeatedly, preferably the first one, to destroy its shield. After it's near the end of the path, a Strategist Point will appear, have that shoot the core (make sure there's a path to the center through the shields), then the other Points will be able to harm it.

It's not necessarily the most upgraded towers that destroy the shields the best -- look at the 'speed' number on a tower, that tells you how fast it fires. I usually figure out at which level a tower fires the fastest, and use it at that level. The Turning Points work very well, and the Courage Points at level 7, since they fire so much faster there. Fear Points at level 7 also fire very fast. The best place for the Points is near the top looping area (they won't fire unless the core of the Panopticon is in their range). Ortho Points fire the fastest at their lowest upgrade level, but they don't have much range at that level either. Limited Points fire fastest at level 7 but have too little range at that level to reach the Panopticon, so it's best to use them at level 3 because they fire relatively fast at that level and have a good range. Turning Points fire the fastest at level 7 too, and if you can afford one you can probably break his shield quite easily, but even at level 4 they're helpful.

There's another way to win -- just stand there, and wait for the time to run out, and stare at it without shooting it -- eventually it'll just die before reaching the end of the path. It won't actually move at a rate fast enough to reach the end of the path before the time runs out until parts of its shield are destroyed, because it speed is related to how much of its shield remains.

WHAT ABOUT LEVEL 77, WHERE THE ENEMIES DISABLE YOUR POINTS?
You can use weaker, level 1 points as diversions, and the enemies will cancel those, and use your stronger, long-distance ones to win from far off. Limited, Courage, or (especially) Level 7 Fear (which has infinite range) will win if you place them far enough away from the enemies so that they can't be disabled, but close enough that they are in range to fire. You can also simply use your cursor, charging up to a high charge level, and use your high-powered special attacks to destroy all the enemies. It may be possible to win without any Points at all, just using your cursor.

DEBUG/CHEAT KEYS
Use with self-restraint.

Ctrl+0 (zero, not O) skips a level. Does not work on survival levels (Raberata training grounds levels), but works on any level with a set time. Use it while playing a level, and the timer will go to near zero, so you'll be able to get through levels you can't beat this way; this is especially useful if you just want to play through the game for the story or something.

UPDATE:

- Now, to activate the debug keys, you have to press ctrl+U and then the debug keys after that; this is to prevent people accidentally using them or discovering them.

- For those record, the debug keys, after pressing Ctrl+U first, are, Ctrl+0 (instantly beat a timed level), Ctrl+2 (cache bonus, press repeatedly for more cache), Ctrl+3 (gain 1 of each type of Point, careful using this too much), and Ctrl+4 (increase the amount of time in a level, for when you want to play it longer), remember that using any of these will cause that save file to no longer be able to submit scores to the leaderboard or to register Steam achievements.

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ACHIEVEMENT REQUIREMENTS

These are the requirements for the achievements. There are some subtle clues for each in the game itself, but if you want it spelled out for you, they are here for the curious.

Aa's Charm. Awarded for Aa and his Points killing 100 enemies total in one level.
Player's cursor now fires faster.

Bavakh Claw. Awarded for killing 500 Bavakh in one level.
All Bavakh give 100 additional bonus cache.

Big Medal. Awarded for completing 50 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
Player's cursor now does 50% more damage.

Blaggenthorg's Skull. Awarded for killing 10 enemies with one Blaggenthorg.
Blaggenthorgs appear more often.

Blinding Medal. Awarded for completing a level at 100% visual blur.
All points do slightly more damage the harder it is to see.

Circuit Medal. Awarded for completing the Circuit campaign.
Circuit Points also attach to Love Points, for half damage.

:P. Awarded for killing 50 ':P' in one level.
They now spend twice as long in their vulnerable state.

Eye of Corybantes. Awarded for killing Panopticon without a Strategist Point.
Player's shots now slow enemies.

Courage Medal. Awarded for completing the Courage campaign.
Courage Point shots last twice as long.

Cut Medal. Awarded for completing the Cut campaign.
Splash radius for Cut Points is twice as large.

Danmaku Medal. Awarded for completing the Danmaku campaign.
Danmaku bullets don't disappear at the end of their path.

Ducrosh Medal. Awarded for killing Ducrosh, creating time paradox.
Charge attacks do double damage.

Dukis Medal I. Awarded for completing 10 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
All points cost 10% less to upgrade.

Dukis Medal II. Awarded for completing 20 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
Point shots can go through Aa's will (path debris).

Dukis Medal III. Awarded for completing 35 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
Cursor scares path beings at double distance.

Fear Medal. Awarded for completing the Fear campaign.
Fear points fire twice as fast.

Form Medal. Awarded for completing the 1st level at 100% challenge.
Cursor does 1% health in extra damage, except to bosses.

Gnome Medal. Awarded for completing hellspace.
Love points are twice as powerful!

Graveship Cross. Awarded for killing the Graveship in first 10% of the path.
Charge attacks charge twice as quickly.

Gutei's Finger. Awarded for 94 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
You've gained enlightenment. Infinite active Medals.

Hate Medal. Kill 30 enemies with a point weakened by a Hate Point.*
Half range for all Hate points.

*Note: the Point must also not be strengthened by a Love Point for this to work.

Dukis's Highest. Awarded for completing 65 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
Bavakh anti-shot shields last half as long.

Indra's Medal. Awarded for surviving 10 minutes in a Raberata level.
Gain more bonus points during levels.

Limited Medal. Awarded for completing the Limited campaign.
Limited Point shots gain double gravity.

Love Medal. Awarded for completing the Love campaign.
Range of Love Points increased by 30%.

Dukis Cross. Awarded for completing 80 levels with 100% success at difficulty 100.
Points are less affected by gravity vortices.

Ortho Medal. Awarded for completing the Ortho campaign.
Ortho points gain infinite range.

Oss Medal. Awarded for killing Crosh at difficulty 100.
Cursor's attack gains splash damage.

Panopticon Medal. Awarded for killing Panopticon at difficulty 100.
Code for bonus helper in Immortal Defense 2: *********. +3 active Medals.

Pathspace Defender. Awarded for killing Noyaties at difficulty 100.
Code for bonus helper in Immortal Defense 2: *********. +3 active Medals.

Pride Medal. Awarded for completing the Pride campaign.
Pride points start with double damage.

Raberata Medal. Awarded for completing the Raberata campaign.
Bavakh all have 10% less starting HP.

Small Medal. Awarded for completing the Murderer campaign.
Bavakh spawn rate decreased by 20%.

Minor Medal. Awarded for completing the game.
All points gain 20% more range.

Squalid Medal. Awarded for killing 100 Squalids in one level.
Squalids no longer heal themselves.

Strategist Medal. Awarded for completing the Strategist campaign.
Strategist Points gain a small base damage.

Triangle Medal. Collect one million cache at once.
All points can be placed for only 1 cache.

Turning Medal. Awarded for completing the Turning campaign.
Turning Point no longer has a firing delay.

Upborne Medal. Awarded for 400 Point bullets on screen at once.
All points fire 20% faster.

Valid Medal. Awarded for doing 100,000,000 damage in one level.
All points do 10% more damage.

[.//slayer]

I figure this is the best place to ask a silly story-related question. Please forgive me if I shouldn't have posted here.

So, in the Murderer campaign, do we actually play as Cosciuto destroying Bavakh ships? Or did we, as the original Path Defender, accidentally destroyed a police convoy and made Corybantes think that we are the escaped criminal? In the end, Corybantes mentions that the path space is getting closed, so does that mean that the campaign takes place after the original story that happens between the Path Defender and Corybantes?

Also, what's the significance of the final level, where an unknown red cursor helps you, but you can't attack the finger yourself and don't have any points except a single Love? The level ends before the finger has a chance to get to the end.

[Pathborn]

from what i recall, it was meant to be a 'side story', so you aren't playing as K of Dukis (the main path defender from the main game), but someone else, perhaps a bavakh named cosciuto who had entered path space. i think it was meant to be unconnected with the main story, just a side story set in the same galaxy. i will work in some tie-ins to it in ID2 that will connect it better most likely. i'm not even yet sure when or where to place it. but my guess would be that it occurs after most of ID1, but before the final level.

so i guess basically from what i remember, it would take place in a time when the bavakh control the galaxy and where the corybantes line of bavakh are emperors, and it would deal with a rogue bavakh path defender who betrayed the bavakh empire (perhaps due to personal greed or vice or bloodlust or something, or just going insane).

in ID2, the bavakh don't get path defense technology until a certain point, and they never shown having it in ID1 at all (though presumably they do get it sometime before the final level in campaign 6, but after the first level in campaign 6, because that period covers an extremely long period of time

as for the meaning of the final level, i am unsure, perhaps i just was experimenting with an interesting/weird win condition and thought it seemed cool at the time to end the level that way. perhaps it was meant to symbolize that gutei's finger eventually comes for all path defenders, or at least all insane path defenders, just as it came for Aa and K

[.//slayer]

Thank you kindly! That's a very interesting write-up, and I do appreciate that you went through such lengths to make the plot both enjoyable and mysterious enough to keep the player pondering.

So, K is actually mad, after all, and his planet has, indeed, been wiped out to oblivion? Then all his communications with his granddaughter were just a thing of imagination? I wonder how he managed to survive without a body - but then again, Aa also was capable of doing it somehow. We did destroy his Graveship, after all.

Either way, eagerly looking forward to ID2 and your other new projects - the stories you tell kept me wondering and speculating for years :)

[Pathborn]

bodies are not actually required to maintain path defenders in space -- that was just a paranoia of Aa, a mistaken belief that he and some of the other path defenders were told, to give them hope that they can return to being mortals (otherwise they never would have went into pathspace). but in reality path defenders can never return to their bodies, and their bodies are not required to exist for any reason but nostalgia or sentiment.

k's planet dukis was destroyed by the bavakh at the end of campaign 1. the granddaughter never existed, but also she wasn't entirely imagined by k either, at first. that's sort of a spoiler and will be gone into in ID2 a bit (though k is not a central character in that game, he's more of a minor character), but one way you can think of it is -- wouldn't someone on Aa's side, the alliance of planets with path defenders that were fighting against the bavakh, have motivation to keep K fighting against the bavakh, rather than have him sink into despair? if she weren't alive, he would have no reason to continue fighting. so perhaps the granddaughter was a trick someone used to keep him fighting the bavakh (i'm not saying this is true btw, just that it's one possibility besides madness and the granddaughter being real -- there are also other possibilities).

but basically path defenders are extremely powerful and it's not beyond their power to create an illusion in another path defender's mind of someone that doesn't exist, or even just to fake transmissions for ulterior motives. and there are many more path defenders than were shown in ID1 -- ID1 basically showed Aa, K, Jamesh, the old woman character in hellspace, and corscuito, but those are just a handful, there are hundreds of others in the galaxy, each with their own motivations, and that's more about what ID2 is about. ID1 also showed gutei, but it wasn't clear about what gutei was -- he could be a path defender too.

[.//slayer]

The illusion theory is something I never considered before, and so is your possible interpretation of Gutei - I can see how you could seriously expand the lore regarding the defenders in ID2. Although, considering all this, I would certainly hesitate using Pathspace at all, with the risk of being dependent on the fickle will of the all-powerful immortal beings, hah. Unless there's also a reliable way for one defender to protect their race's ships against the others...

But at least it's clear to me now that people were actually using the technology to ascend to the path all the time - it seemed a little weird to me that Corybantes mentioned how he had it available, but didn't want it. Apparently, there were plenty of those who did, which makes sense - the allure of power, worship and eternal life is hard to resist.

At the same time, impossibility of return and almost certain madness in the end make existence in the pathspace a fate for either someone duty-bound, like K, or idealistic criminals with nothing to lose, like Coscuito. If the tech is easily available, I can see how that could lead to all kinds of philosophical problems for everyone involved. Entire races disappearing from the normal Universe in the hopes of immortality in pathspace? Or people who try to escape reality by taking the offer of joining the Path? Definitely a lot to consider.

[Hazuki-chan]

At one point, I couldn't help wondering if the granddaughter (and perhaps even Aa and Corybantes as well) might have been just an abstract representation of parts of K's mind; ego, superego and id; something like that.

Since we're getting into some pretty deeply metaphysical themes here, there's all kinds of room for hypothesis; it could be that K was meant to ascend to pathspace, but in the process that killed his body (as we rather definitively learn in some narration toward the end, I think?) he was simply ripped from existence as we know it and imprisoned in a dimension shaped from his own mind or soul, where he dreams himself to be fulfilling the purpose he had when he volunteered to ascend. That would offer one explanation to a lot of the confusion going on toward the end, with the granddaughter growing increasingly abstract in how she speaks, relates and exists outside of K himself. It's as though she's a half-living memory or dream, which makes sense if his entire existence is blended together out of his inner self and some strange new plane he's been displaced to.

I suppose, in a way, that wouldn't be all that different to actually ascending into Pathspace; whether it worked or not, it would be hard for K to know one way or the other, as he can no longer speak to people back in "realspace"... so for all he knows, their one-way conversations with him are mere constructs of his crumbling sanity, an attempt to create much-needed social interaction since none is otherwise available. Similarly, the struggles against the Bavakh could be interpreted as him fighting back negative impulses like anger and despair within his own rebelling mind, or even creating threatening entities that require defeating in order to keep himself occupied through the lonely eons. Even if the Bavakh do exist in real space, there is no real way of knowing whether K is fighting them as they pass through his new home realm, or simply imagining them to exist there so that he can do what he gave his life to do. Rather a nightmarish aspect of the path defender's situation...

[Lord Of Nothing]

So... 10 minutes in a Rabetra level. Am I misunderstanding this? This is 10 minutes in an endless level, correct? Does anyone have any tips? Even with Gutei's finger active, I'm not getting even vaugely close to ten minutes on any of them, and given the scaling, I'm pretty sure i'm not dealing even a tiny fraction of the damage I would need to be doing to get to 10 minutes. I've really enjoyed the challenge of the rest of the game, but this seems so impossible that I'm wondering what I'm missing.

[Hazuki-chan]

Originally posted by Lord Of Nothing:

So... 10 minutes in a Rabetra level. Am I misunderstanding this? This is 10 minutes in an endless level, correct? Does anyone have any tips? Even with Gutei's finger active, I'm not getting even vaugely close to ten minutes on any of them, and given the scaling, I'm pretty sure i'm not dealing even a tiny fraction of the damage I would need to be doing to get to 10 minutes. I've really enjoyed the challenge of the rest of the game, but this seems so impossible that I'm wondering what I'm missing.

As best I can recall, the Raberata training grounds are pretty brutal on the scaling, yes... Assuming you're making good use of the circuit points and whatever else deals a load of damage in as short a time as possible, I'm not sure what to suggest. Some training levels may be easier than others for this task, not sure which might be best.

[Lord Of Nothing]

Originally posted by Hazukichan:

Originally posted by Lord Of Nothing:

So... 10 minutes in a Rabetra level. Am I misunderstanding this? This is 10 minutes in an endless level, correct? Does anyone have any tips? Even with Gutei's finger active, I'm not getting even vaugely close to ten minutes on any of them, and given the scaling, I'm pretty sure i'm not dealing even a tiny fraction of the damage I would need to be doing to get to 10 minutes. I've really enjoyed the challenge of the rest of the game, but this seems so impossible that I'm wondering what I'm missing.

As best I can recall, the Raberata training grounds are pretty brutal on the scaling, yes... Assuming you're making good use of the circuit points and whatever else deals a load of damage in as short a time as possible, I'm not sure what to suggest. Some training levels may be easier than others for this task, not sure which might be best.

I think so, yes- circuit points set up on the longest stretch before or at the halfway point, splash points firing perpendicular to the onslaught, limited points near the end, pride points fed on the early waves, etc, etc, etc. But my best time is still only... I think about 6 minutes? After that point even having every point maxed and used as best I can just doesn't kill anything fast enough. Thanks for the thought, though.

[айболит]

sorry
but
:D

[Halfshell]

Yeah I don't get it. I try my hardest with perfect lines everywhere, get a 6 min time no matter what. I casually threw some stuff together the other day before I knew of the 10min thing with non-optimized medals and I got a 8:40. I copy that with optimizations everywhere, a well farmed Pride and best I can do is 8 min. This game is so deep that trying to force a strat just doesn't work.

Update: Got a 10:45 on Endless 1. Rolled my defenses back around center and used a slow burning strat with nothing active until 3 min. Got a 16:04 after by stalling until 5-6 min. Just got to play the map very slowly to get the medal.