Ancient Fuelweaver, no lazy explorer, no nightmare amulet, no weather pains

[Guille6785]

I've never posted anything like this here but since I put so much practice into pulling this off and because I'm sure some people here are interested in this type of runs I decided to write a forum post about it (inspired by this other post from Whoneedspacee)

here's the video:

 

The full restrictions that make this fight so complex:
-No lazy explorer, meaning I have no way to escape the bone cages
-No nightmare amulet, meaning I have to use sanity food to get the unseen hands and be susceptible to the insanity attack
-No weather pains, meaning I have to avoid the woven shadows rather than try to kill all of them
-A ham bat to attack fuelweaver and a 0.75x damage multiplier (only up to ~1500 damage per round, so phase 2 lasted 7 rounds)
-Only a magiluminescence and a thulecite club for speed (1.32x speed multiplier, much less than I'm used to for a no lazy explorer fight)

(I also played almost perfectly, fuelweaver ate 0 woven shadows and I missed none of the bone cage dodges)

Some background info and explanation:

Since the update that made the edge of the caves no longer block the bone snare from encasing the player (thread by KoreanWaffles back when the change was made), most people believe a lazy explorer is essentially required to fight the fuelweaver, and for a while this was pretty much the case; people were aware that you could occasionally escape a bone cage by standing next to a pillar (as demonstrated by don giani in this video), but this method is inconsistent and only helps to reduce lazy explorer usage but not actually skip it.

At some point around ~december last year however a few videos popped up utlizing a very risky bone cage dodge technique which consists in baiting fuelweaver into starting the bone cage attack then running out of the range at which fuelweaver can trap you quickly enough. Speed multipliers are key with this strategy and the timings are very difficult; not to mention a single failed bone cage dodge can put you back at square one since you won't be able to stop fuelweaver from eating his woven shadows if you miss.

I don't know who was the first to propose this as a viable strategy for the fight, but here's a practice fight by Third Porkus where he uses it to skip the lazy explorer as wolfgang. Around the same time, Peter Peng (a very skilled player and content creator from china) was already aware of the technique as seen in his day 17 fuelweaver speedrun as wx-78, though he didn't showcase a full fight with it at the time (and he got a lazy explorer in that run too).

In july of this year I managed to do a no lazy explorer and no nightmare amulet fight as wolfgang using sanity foods to get rid of the unseen hands, but the fight was really messy (I didn't have a set strategy for it and the entire thing was just luck based), and I needed a cane and a magiluminescence on top of wolfgang's speed to pull it off, a 1.875x total speed multiplier which was pretty absurd in hindsight.

About a month and a half later Peter Peng uploaded a full no lazy explorer fight as wendy without abigail utilizing a cane and a mag for speed as a part of his wendy playthrough (which apparently was recorded back in december of last year, just not uploaded until much later); this motivated me to reduce the speed multipliers I was using for a no nightmare amulet/no lazy explorer fight until I managed to pull it off as wormwood with a club, full bloom and a mag (1.584x multiplier, a noticeable improvement over my wolfgang fight).

More importantly though, I figured out a far more consistent strategy to skip both the lazy explorer and the nightmare amulet; by luring fuelweaver over to the right corners of the arena in order I was able to get the woven shadows in a way that allowed me to separate them from fuelweaver enough so that I could go insane, kill half of the unseen hands, and let fuelweaver use the insanity attack in a way that wouldn't let him eat any woven shadows thus making it completely safe for me to kill all the unseen hands before going sane again and then tanking before the next round.

In this most recent fight though (the one at the top), I only used a club and a mag for speed (1.32x multiplier, almost nothing compared to what I previously needed), and I got consistent enough with my strategy to be able to do it as wendy without abigail (0.75x damage multiplier) and only a ham bat as a weapon, which meant I had to endure 7 full rounds of summons before he died.

Although it's true that the fight is still somewhat RNG dependent due to the random spawns of the woven shadows/unseen hands/shadow creatures, with my strategy RNG only really makes a round harder but should never actually make it impossible. In my wendy fight I was eating 2 cooked cacti after bottoming out my sanity in order to put me at 30 sanity; enough to kill the unseen hands, but not enough for terrorbeaks or double nightmares to spawn, thereby minimizing the RNG hurdles.

I'm confident that soon enough you'll be able to see a no nightmare amulet and no lazy explorer fight in a real no-cheese fuelweaver speedrun from day 1; by skipping the nightmare amulet you bypass the need to make a prestihatitator, a shadow manipulator and the amulet itself alongside all the materials you need to gather to craft them, thereby saving a decent amount of time in a speedrun. Not to mention that a lazy explorer is impossible to obtain before winter without extremely good rng so skipping it is almost a must.

Although something like the fight in the video is too difficult for me to pull off consistently in a real playthrough (a single mistake is extremely punishing when you can't escape the bone cages and could easily delete all your progress), I've practiced enough to be able to do it as wolfgang almost every time in my practice sessions, so if I tried the speedrun myself (as wolf ofc) I'm sure I'd be able to do a day ~10 run if not even faster than that thanks to all the prep I can skip. Considering that the fuelweaver speedrun is the most popular DST speedrun and for a good reason (Joeshmo's video reached a million views not too long ago), this is pretty exciting news for me personally and I wanted to share it here.

 

Hope you enjoyed this little essay I wrote, I'm pretty passionate about pushing the boundaries of the game during a time where people have mostly lost interest in doing so, but if I've caught your attention towards the challenging side of DST then at least I'm happy with that.

PS: I didn't do it as wes because of his low max sanity since the rework making it really weird to use sanity food

[HowlVoid]

Wow what a coincidence as I had just seen this!

Really good work Guille :).

[Dextops]

k now do it with only your fist so it could actually be considered a challenge

[Duck986]

Some players like to make themselves to suffer, aren't they?

[Catchee]

Nice! 

[Terra B Welch]

and here we have someone with skill taking the wheel. :P

Great Job Guille

[Yuuko]

Great video - I typically cheese the AFW, but playing Wanda lately I've been tackling the bosses without.  I did AFW without weather pains, and getting him to not eat any woven shadows is pretty tough.  It looks like you worked out a very consistent kiting pattern for it though !  That's great tech, I'll definitely practice this for my next afw fight with Wanda.  I think with your kiting pattern I could forgo the lazy explorer, and just use her backstep watch to dodge damage.

tbh - I think its a bit crazy to put so much effort into the game.  Its really not built to be played at this level.  Very impressive work.

[Frashaw27]

A very interesting video, good job. Now the question is, could you beat him with only spears?

[KoreanWaffles]

A very well executed fight! I didn't know other people were aware of this tech as well. I remember when people discovered that the Reanimated Skeleton and Fuelweaver would not cast the bone cage on targets near the Ancient Thurible a while back, and I dove into the code and found that it was an intentional design choice where the Reanimated Skeleton / Fuelweaver would check if the target was near a Thurible before casting the bone cage. There's even a tuning value THURIBLE_AOE_RANGE that you can change to modify the safety range the Thurible grants.

Fuelweaver's bone cage cast range is 12 units (a tile is 4 units wide for reference) but the hit range is 15 units (i.e. Fuelweaver will cast the bone cage when targets as within 12 units in range, but the bone cage will hit all targets within 15 units). During the time Fuelweaver plays his casting animation, you have 3 units of space to cover to avoid the bone cage from snaring you, assuming you're already at the edge of his cast range. Alternatively, you can run up to Fuelweaver to force him to use his melee attack. If you have enough speed multipliers and Fuelweaver's bone cage cooldown comes back up during his melee animation, you can cover the entire cast range and hit range of his bone cage during his melee animation, thus dodging the bone cage. It's very doable with a Walking Cane and a Magiluminescene, and trivial with more speed multipliers. You just have to keep track of Fuelweaver's bone cage cooldown which is 10 seconds. I usually count 7 seconds from the moment Fuelweaver slams his hand on the ground before I run in to bait a melee attack to queue up a bone cage attack. The cooldown begins at the start of his cast animation, so that 3 second difference is eaten up by the bone cage cast animation, as well as the melee animation where you bait the next bone cage attack. Without speed multipliers, this is much harder, and I recommend simply staying 11-12 units away from Fuelweaver when you're letting him chase you, or running to that 12 unit cast range around 7-8 seconds after the previous bone cage if Fuelweaver's shield is down so that you can cover the 3 units of extra hit range by the time Fuelweaver casts his next bone cage (Players walk 6 units per second without speed multipliers, so having ~2 seconds of leeway will let you just barely cover those 12 units of cast range).

One thing I noticed you were doing was killing off the Unseen Hands before all the Woven Shadows despawned. I recommend killing off the Woven Shadows before killing all the Unseen Hands (either by letting them all despawn naturally, or manually killing off the stragglers). This is because the cooldowns for spawning Woven Shadows and Unseen Hands are both 20 seconds and independent of each other. The cooldown only begins once all the Woven Shadows / Unseen Hands are killed. If you kill the Unseen Hands first, then the cooldown for resummoning the Unseen Hands will count down first, meaning in the next round, Fuelweaver will summon Unseen Hands and then Woven Shadows. If you kill the Woven Shadows first, then that cooldown will count down first, so Fuelweaver will summon Woven Shadows first next round. This means you can get several extra hits on Fuelweaver during his Woven Shadows casting animation, which could add up to one less round of Woven Shadows / Unseen Hands (you can't do this if the cooldown are swapped since the Unseen Hands would make Fuelweaver invincible during his Woven Shadows casting animation).

[Guille6785]

15 minutes ago, KoreanWaffles said:

One thing I noticed you were doing was killing off the Unseen Hands before all the Woven Shadows despawned. I recommend killing off the Woven Shadows before killing all the Unseen Hands (either by letting them all despawn naturally, or manually killing off the stragglers). This is because the cooldowns for spawning Woven Shadows and Unseen Hands are both 20 seconds and independent of each other. The cooldown only begins once all the Woven Shadows / Unseen Hands are killed. If you kill the Unseen Hands first, then the cooldown for resummoning the Unseen Hands will count down first, meaning in the next round, Fuelweaver will summon Unseen Hands and then Woven Shadows. If you kill the Woven Shadows first, then that cooldown will count down first, so Fuelweaver will summon Woven Shadows first next round. This means you can get several extra hits on Fuelweaver during his Woven Shadows casting animation, which could add up to one less round of Woven Shadows / Unseen Hands (you can't do this if the cooldown are swapped since the Unseen Hands would make Fuelweaver invincible during his Woven Shadows casting animation).

I'm well aware of this but with the route I needed to use (since I had to kill the 6 unseen hands before a second insanity attack) and with the fact that I may want to stay away from fuelweaver during his summoning animations because of an upcoming bone cage anyway it's just not worth it

[Pig Princess]

Great fight and amazing skill! I enjoyed watching it, although you might want to change title because of way how youtube search works (include essentials: no lazy explorer, no nightmare amulet, after RoT).

Also:

1. Since you are not teleporting to escape bone cage, you don't encounter bug when Fuelweaver starts walking to gateway and looses interest to player after player's teleportation; 

2. Mind control attack treshold. I thought mind control attack triggers at <50% sanity, turns out triggering treshold is much lower: <=15%-17%, e.i. the same when shadows are aggressive (I have tested now, experimental tresholds are 30-34/200 sanity depending on whether player goes from being sane to insane or vise versa);

Because of these two aspects of Fuelweaver fight, not accurate information about 2nd one and lack of testing for the bone cage casting/catching conditions (I knew about the thing, but didn't think it can be done often enough to base strategy around it), I was sure that for consistent Fuelweaver fight one needs either lazy explorer and weather pain, or ridiculous amount of speed (with lazy explorer and weather pain as a backup), as well as either use nightmare amulet/bone helm or use impractical amount of food for sanity balance. I'm happy you proved otherwise, also it's a good thing my concept of reality matches actual reality better now, thank you for that.

Your method may even be better for raising consistency of the fight in both aspects (I value it a lot), since Fuelweaver doesn't loose interest to player and terrorbeaks/2nd shadow don't spawn (even with bone helm it's easy to accidently hit shadow instead of FW or wooven shadow). I may never be able to reproduce this fight myself, but nevertheless I'm full of resolve to try, both in practice fights and in actual playthrough if I succeed, and to continue practice Fuelweaver fights again in general.

Now I need Wilba in vanilla DST even more to try this fight as wereWilba (no armor, but with higher speed (1.5x) and 100 sanity (2 times less sanity/insanity food required)).

I have a question to people who know where to look in the code: what is the requirement for avoiding mind control attack if it started already? According to my testing for 200 maximum sanity character it's sometimes enough to eat 3 +33 non-meat sanity food, but sometimes 2 +50 non-meat sanity food are not enough; it seems like the earlier player starts to eat sanity food, the less sanity is required to cancel mind control, e.i. eating 3 +33 right after attack started results in cancelling it, but eating the same 3 +33 after half a second after mind control attack started is not enough; same for 2 +50, but leeway is longer (one can start raising sanity later and still avoid attack completion). Raising sanity above 50% seems to not work if fully mind-controlled state was microseconds away (I was mindcontrolled with 132/200). For 100 maximum sanity character +33 food works with much longer leeway than for 200 maximum sanity. Can it be based on % sanity gaining rate?

[thegreatJash]

Is Guille's day 13 Wortox fuelweaver speedrun technically the world record right now?

[Baark0]

bro you good? no mentally sane person would put themselves through something like this

[ArubaroBeefalo]

crazy masochist xD

[Guille6785]

2 hours ago, thegreatJash said:

Is Guille's day 13 Wortox fuelweaver speedrun technically the world record right now?

for no cheese FW yes

[Astraia]

You did really well without the main items most used for fuelweaver!
Great job!