Walter gaming Tips and Q&A

[Chewabacca]

27 minutes ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

aside from the obvious crafting sink that is cursed round, walter can utilize nightmare fuel just as well as any other survivor.

with how easy sanity is to manage (no sanity aura, x2 sanity food like cacti and green mush, etc.), dark sword is a really nice all-purpose weapon for walter. the slingshot is cool but it's most likely going to be cheaper to wack things with a melee weapon. i like dark sword. night armor is also cool when combined with the pinetree panache hat for good damage reduction (DR) and minimal sanity loss while staying mobile on foot, i just don't like night armor and think marble armor + riding woby is better for sanity in the long run.

nightlight. waltuh is not affected by the magical sanity aura of the nightlight so you have a big ass light source that does not generate any kind of heat, really nice for boating, and there's a new skin for it too. the sound is really obnoxious though.

waltuh can do a lot with ruins gear. thulecite suit is especially great thanks to its 90% DR and 3.3 sanity/min which waltuh does benefit from. thulecite club is self-explanatory, and the sanity aura from the tentacles doesn't affect waltuh, neither does the one spawns from cursed round.

bone armor is a really nice item if you know how to use it, i don't . refueling it takes nightmare fuel. and so is the magi and lazy forager, which are all great amulets. i especially think that the lazy explorer is underrated and i will try to use it more in my future runs.

that's all i can remember

and beard hair is butt cheeks. i never crafted a meat effigy once in my 1k hours, life giving ammy is so much better. you can use it as fire fuel though.

quick question why were you fighting shadow creatures nonstop though? unless you are in the ruins

 that got me thinking, this thread can turn into a waltuh QnA megathread too  @kroban what do you think abt changing the thread title?

Actually, I've been wondering: how much does Walter really lose from skipping out on magic altogether? Haven't set up so much as a prestihatitator my last couple of runs and haven't really missed it. Lets you skip out on the tedious rabbit-catching too.

Just going down the list of what Walter can make with the magic crafting stations (not including the ancient pseudoscience station, of course, which is great for Walter):

• Meat effigy: very much outclassed by the life-giving amulet
• Pan flute: if it's a solo world you can already get one for free from the Glommer statue
• bat bat: how often does this get used exactly
• life-giving amulet: you can get this from looting graves or fighting Klaus (I'm not being an elitist here, Walter makes Klaus pretty easy as long as you just have good winter gear and enough ammo)
• one-man band: Walter is already extremely good at getting morsels to hire pigs and you have the gramophone for the talking-to-plants function
• ice staff/freeze rounds: yeah okay, this is pretty good and hard to get outside of setpieces. Worth mentioning though that you don't need to upgrade to shadow manipulator to make it
• dark sword: you have tentacle spikes and ham bats for decent non-magic melee damage, if you're not purposefully going for a melee Walter build
• night armor: if you're using the slingshot from on top of Woby, marble is just as good
• hunger belt: actually probably pretty good on Walter with his puny little 110 hunger stat and Woby for storage
• nightmare amulet: can be replaced with sanity-manipulating foods
• fire staff: it's easy to make fire darts as Walter
• telelocator stuff: Woby is incredibly fast now, so outside of transport out to any islands this isn't useful
• slowdown rounds: handy, but again, Walter is fast enough not to need them

[_mylilsunshine_]

1 hour ago, Chewabacca said:

Actually, I've been wondering: how much does Walter really lose from skipping out on magic altogether? Haven't set up so much as a prestihatitator my last couple of runs and haven't really missed it. Lets you skip out on the tedious rabbit-catching too.

of all the craftable items, the only ones i'd say that are useful for me is,

- dark sword 3/5: i like the constant damage, i really do. if i'm fighting a lot in melee then i'll use the hambat, but dark sword is just cool. i used to keep pigskin on me as an essential resource, like twigs and grass, which i then crafted football helm and ham bat. now i use thulecite body + pinetree hat so i don't really craft football helm anymore, and i don't want to babysit 2 big meat for the hambat either. if i use a lot of dark sword then i'll have to bring living logs + nightmare fuel with me which would take the same inventory spaces, but idk i need to play more to think about it

- hunger belt 2/5: haven't used this thing once but i'm open to the possibilities

- telelocator 3/5: useful for forcing rain for pearl's quest, that's it. but it's still useful

- slow-down round 5/5: mandatory craft, allows me to fight bee queen and dragon fly without spending 3-irl hours on it

- nightlight 4/5: useful light source, will use it more than i currently do

- nightmare amulet 3/5: useful for the nightmare werepig fight and the fuelweaver fight

- one-man band 4/5: i actually like to use this thing to tend to plants, i tried the gramophone but didn't know how it work so i gave up. but now i'll try the gramophone again and maybe not use the one-man band anymore

- pan flute 4/5: really useful for the twins fight where you don't have a lot of dps window, even with fast woby. it used to be cool for melee dfly but now slow-down is better

- fire staff 3/5: it can ignite things, fire dart cannot, so this is pretty useful for the toad fight

- moon dial and ocuvigil 5/5: very useful, and looks good for base building too

[Chewabacca]

3 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

of all the craftable items, the only ones i'd say that are useful for me is,

- dark sword 3/5: i like the constant damage, i really do. if i'm fighting a lot in melee then i'll use the hambat, but dark sword is just cool. i used to keep pigskin on me as an essential resource, like twigs and grass, which i then crafted football helm and ham bat. now i use thulecite body + pinetree hat so i don't really craft football helm anymore, and i don't want to babysit 2 big meat for the hambat either. if i use a lot of dark sword then i'll have to bring living logs + nightmare fuel with me which would take the same inventory spaces, but idk i need to play more to think about it

- hunger belt 2/5: haven't used this thing once but i'm open to the possibilities

- telelocator 3/5: useful for forcing rain for pearl's quest, that's it. but it's still useful

- slow-down round 5/5: mandatory craft, allows me to fight bee queen and dragon fly without spending 3-irl hours on it

- nightlight 4/5: useful light source, will use it more than i currently do

- nightmare amulet 3/5: useful for the nightmare werepig fight and the fuelweaver fight

- one-man band 4/5: i actually like to use this thing to tend to plants, i tried the gramophone but didn't know how it work so i gave up. but now i'll try the gramophone again and maybe not use the one-man band anymore

- pan flute 4/5: really useful for the twins fight where you don't have a lot of dps window, even with fast woby. it used to be cool for melee dfly but now slow-down is better

- fire staff 3/5: it can ignite things, fire dart cannot, so this is pretty useful for the toad fight

- moon dial and ocuvigil 5/5: very useful, and looks good for base building too

I use melee on a pretty situational basis, which might be why I’m content with tentacle spike or ham bat—I don’t need to do the most damage, I just need to get rid of whatever is pestering me. Tentacle spikes are so cheap too, especially if you’re only using melee sometimes so that they last longer. For the amount of nightmare fuel 1 dark sword costs, you could make 150 cursed rounds instead.

Doing the math, the belt of hunger gives Walter an effective hunger of 183, which is pretty good but the number of situations where it would be useful enough to give up the body slot seem pretty limited. Maybe for Bee Queen, since there’s no point putting body armor on and it can be a little inconvenient to go through the eating animation with such a fast boss, or if you want to take your time in the ruins where non-sanity-damaging food is hard to come by and you have Woby and Hutch for storage. The sort of thing where if you have the resources to make it, you might as well, but you probably wouldn’t go out of your way for it.

Not trying to force the way I have fun onto you, but I really like the Bee Queen fight without slowdown rounds—it feels so good to sprint around her on Woby. Haven’t fought Dragonfly though.

On the gramophone: you need to load a record into it to get it to talk to plants, that might’ve been it.

[somethin]

5 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

i tried the gramophone but didn't know how it work so i gave up. but now i'll try the gramophone again and maybe not use the one-man band anymore

You need to also craft a record disk made from bat wing and charcoal then feed it to the gramophone, then you can right click to turn it on. If you position the gramophone well it can tend all plants in 2x2 plot tiles with just a single click.

[This14Real]

8 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

quick question why were you fighting shadow creatures nonstop though? unless you are in the ruins

 

Just dealing with the average walter noob day, some wolfgang decided to fight the eye of terror day 3 and I took a hit while looking at my map lol. It absolutely tanked my sanity with nothing to recover at the time, low sanity and low health so it was just me fighting my demons. Ended up with a bunch nightmare fuel in a single night and was wondering what it was good for. Thanks for the explanation, will definitely craft dark swords, I also prefer fighting melee against some mobs. Not being the host sucks so bad for walter with all the miss shots due to lag…

Oh forgot to ask, I had the drying rack skill on woby but I'm not sure I understood how it worked. Is there an action by the wheel or something?
Drag and dropping the meat onto the 3 slots by the rack didn’t seem to work. The meat just spoiled. I kept wondering if it was a bug or not working. Woby was small by the way.

[_mylilsunshine_]

2 hours ago, This14Real said:

Oh forgot to ask, I had the drying rack skill on woby but I'm not sure I understood how it worked. Is there an action by the wheel or something?
Drag and dropping the meat onto the 3 slots by the rack didn’t seem to work. The meat just spoiled. I kept wondering if it was a bug or not working. Woby was small by the way.

yeah woby has to be big for the drying rack to work, if she's small you're just storing meat in a chest so it'll spoil. but if she's big, the drying racks are also massive and you'll see meat dangling from there

2 hours ago, somethin said:

You need to also craft a record disk made from bat wing and charcoal then feed it to the gramophone, then you can right click to turn it on. If you position the gramophone well it can tend all plants in 2x2 plot tiles with just a single click.

4 hours ago, Chewabacca said:

On the gramophone: you need to load a record into it to get it to talk to plants, that might’ve been it.

yeah when i first used it i didn't know how to turn off the gramo, the prompt didn't show up for me. when i picked the gramo off the ground to turn it off, it didn't give me the record back so i thought the record was a consumable, not reusable, so i didn't want to deal with the cost of crafting every time i wanted to tend to my plants. now i know 

[GamePlayer42]

16 hours ago, Chewabacca said:

Actually, I've been wondering: how much does Walter really lose from skipping out on magic altogether? Haven't set up so much as a prestihatitator my last couple of runs and haven't really missed it. Lets you skip out on the tedious rabbit-catching too.

Just going down the list of what Walter can make with the magic crafting stations (not including the ancient pseudoscience station, of course, which is great for Walter):

• Meat effigy: very much outclassed by the life-giving amulet
• Pan flute: if it's a solo world you can already get one for free from the Glommer statue
• bat bat: how often does this get used exactly
• life-giving amulet: you can get this from looting graves or fighting Klaus (I'm not being an elitist here, Walter makes Klaus pretty easy as long as you just have good winter gear and enough ammo)
• one-man band: Walter is already extremely good at getting morsels to hire pigs and you have the gramophone for the talking-to-plants function
• ice staff/freeze rounds: yeah okay, this is pretty good and hard to get outside of setpieces. Worth mentioning though that you don't need to upgrade to shadow manipulator to make it
• dark sword: you have tentacle spikes and ham bats for decent non-magic melee damage, if you're not purposefully going for a melee Walter build
• night armor: if you're using the slingshot from on top of Woby, marble is just as good
• hunger belt: actually probably pretty good on Walter with his puny little 110 hunger stat and Woby for storage
• nightmare amulet: can be replaced with sanity-manipulating foods
• fire staff: it's easy to make fire darts as Walter
• telelocator stuff: Woby is incredibly fast now, so outside of transport out to any islands this isn't useful
• slowdown rounds: handy, but again, Walter is fast enough not to need them

you can omit magic entirely but youll probably want them eventually for raid bosses, nm amulet for fw, and slowdown rounds as a replacement for icker on things like dfly and bq. telelocator is really nice for getting rains in a cc rush (which leads to getting your enlightened crown)

[Cheggf]

17 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

and beard hair is butt cheeks. i never crafted a meat effigy once in my 1k hours, life giving ammy is so much better. you can use it as fire fuel though.

LGA is better overall, but meat effigies are a good safety net for if things go extremely wrong. If something terrible happens, like you die from darkness way too far from getting more light so reviving with the LGA will just kill you again, you can always teleport to the pre-made meat effigy for a guaranteed revival where you've got all your supplies and such waiting there for you.

[_mylilsunshine_]

25 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

LGA is better overall, but meat effigies are a good safety net for if things go extremely wrong. If something terrible happens, like you die from darkness way too far from getting more light so reviving with the LGA will just kill you again, you can always teleport to the pre-made meat effigy for a guaranteed revival where you've got all your supplies and such waiting there for you.

true, i've never put myself in such a situation so it didn't occur to me. i also turn the 'death timer' setting, where your world is forced to reset, to 'none', meaning i could just wait out the night.

so essentially i've diminised the use of effigy with the world setting 

[kroban]

On 2/28/2025 at 3:56 PM, Chewabacca said:

Actually, I've been wondering: how much does Walter really lose from skipping out on magic altogether? Haven't set up so much as a prestihatitator my last couple of runs and haven't really missed it. Lets you skip out on the tedious rabbit-catching too.

I always take a loooong time to craft any magic stations with Walter, but thats mostly because im too lazy to catch 4 rabbits lol, most of the time I just end up using someone else's shadow manipulator to craft the prototypes haha

But its true that Walter doesn't need to "rush" a magic station unless you want purple/freeze rounds. Other characters usually depend a lot on the dark swords, otherwise they are just stuck with hambats and tentacle spike. Dark Swords are pretty good for Walter too for sure, specially if you are going melee, but imo you don't need to desperately "rush" a shadow manipulator and living logs if you have slingshot rounds with good dps, like cursed, moonglass, gunpowder, dreadstone, shockscrap, etc.

[Cheggf]

16 minutes ago, kroban said:

I always take a loooong time to craft any magic stations with Walter, but thats mostly because im too lazy to catch 4 rabbits lol, most of the time I just end up using someone else's shadow manipulator to craft the prototypes haha

But its true that Walter doesn't need to "rush" a magic station unless you want purple/freeze rounds. Other characters usually depend a lot on the dark swords, otherwise they are just stuck with hambats and tentacle spike. Dark Swords are pretty good for Walter too for sure, specially if you are going melee, but imo you don't need to desperately "rush" a shadow manipulator and living logs if you have slingshot rounds with good dps, like cursed, moonglass, gunpowder, dreadstone, shockscrap, etc.

Even if you have a bee queen grip on your slingshot it has considerably less damage than melee weapons.

[Chewabacca]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

Even if you have a bee queen grip on your slingshot it has considerably less damage than melee weapons.

Eh, depends. Jelly grip + cursed rounds theoretically outdamage a dark sword, but only if the tentacles actually all hit. Which happens more than you’d think, I’ve seen mobs that could outrun them going back to fight the tentacles. Cursed rounds are still worse than a thulecite club damage-wise, though, just easier to make.

 

[_mylilsunshine_]

if you can animation cancel, melee is always the better choice. it takes a lot for walter's slingshot to catch up with melee's (even without anim cancel), and he still has a 1.x damage multiplier like most survivors so you might as well just wack that piece of meat.

or, if you can animation cancel jelly grip shooting, slingshot can be better, that's a level of sweat needed to make slingshot exceed melee

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

if you can animation cancel, melee is always the better choice. it takes a lot for walter's slingshot to catch up with melee's (even without anim cancel), and he still has a 1.x damage multiplier like most survivors so you might as well just wack that piece of meat.

or, if you can animation cancel jelly grip shooting, slingshot can be better, that's a level of sweat needed to make slingshot exceed melee

I never tested any animation cancelling stuff, but if you just hold the attack key normally melee will attack faster (and as such do more damage) than the slingshot regardless of the upgrades the slingshot has. Does an upgraded animation cancelled slingshot beat an animation cancelled melee? 

[Gashzer]

Jelly Slingshot has a higher dps than dark sword if using thulecite rounds/dreaded pellets if you are kiting.

Kiting with melee requires you to run back into the boss to attack. When kiting with slingshot you don't need to worry about that so you end up having a higher overall attack rate against something that isn't a training dummy.

[_mylilsunshine_]

Referencing this post, yet again. However I fear this might be outdated somewhat, without knowing what exactly made it into the live build. If anyone can conduct some tests that would be lovely.

 

[DegenerateFurry]

Does anyone know the effect chance for dreadstone and gunpowder rounds? 

[Guille6785]

18 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I never tested any animation cancelling stuff, but if you just hold the attack key normally melee will attack faster (and as such do more damage) than the slingshot regardless of the upgrades the slingshot has. Does an upgraded animation cancelled slingshot beat an animation cancelled melee? 

off the top of my head, jelly has an attack rate of 0.5666 without cancelling, melee has 0.4666, and with cancelling the former reaches 0.4333 (beating out the void grip even at max ramp-up, making it the best in slot option for grips period) and the latter reaches 0.4

in practice: with no cancelling, jelly grip with cursed rounds deals about as much sustained DPS on average as holding F with a dark sword, and with cancelling for both the gap gets tightened and it deals comparable DPS to anim cancelling with a 78 damage weapon

in the case of dreadstone, cancelling the jelly grip lets you surpass non-cancelling dark sword DPS (assuming you do it perfectly) which is more than enough to surpass all pre-rift melee weapons for consistent DPS

this is without factoring in that the slingshot lets you get more hits in while avoiding attacks and that it has excellent synergy with the enlightened crown

My recent Walter videos I've shared here show the kind of DPS you can get with good jelly cancelling if you want tangible examples:

one of the more obvious examples in the run I sent is being able to kill crab king hitless in under 2 minutes (which other characters would struggle with significantly to do consistently) thanks to the fact that the pond that crab king sits on is actually considered to be ground that tentacles can spawn in (all the fights are timestamped if you want to skip ahead)

fuelweaver also dies in under 5 minutes once you get the enlightened crown without having to tank

[aidankocherhans]

On 3/1/2025 at 4:24 AM, Cheggf said:

LGA is better overall, but meat effigies are a good safety net for if things go extremely wrong. If something terrible happens, like you die from darkness way too far from getting more light so reviving with the LGA will just kill you again, you can always teleport to the pre-made meat effigy for a guaranteed revival where you've got all your supplies and such waiting there for you.

Wait do most people keep an amulet in their inventory 24/7?

[_mylilsunshine_]

12 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

Wait do most people keep an amulet in their inventory 24/7?

if you die as often as i do, and see rollbacks as cheaty/annoying, then yeah you hold an amulet 24/7

[DegenerateFurry]

On 3/2/2025 at 5:49 PM, Guille6785 said:

off the top of my head, jelly has an attack rate of 0.5666 without cancelling, melee has 0.4666, and with cancelling the former reaches 0.4333 (beating out the void grip even at max ramp-up, making it the best in slot option for grips period) and the latter reaches 0.4

in practice: with no cancelling, jelly grip with cursed rounds deals about as much sustained DPS on average as holding F with a dark sword, and with cancelling for both the gap gets tightened and it deals comparable DPS to anim cancelling with a 78 damage weapon

in the case of dreadstone, cancelling the jelly grip lets you surpass non-cancelling dark sword DPS (assuming you do it perfectly) which is more than enough to surpass all pre-rift melee weapons for consistent DPS

this is without factoring in that the slingshot lets you get more hits in while avoiding attacks and that it has excellent synergy with the enlightened crown

My recent Walter videos I've shared here show the kind of DPS you can get with good jelly cancelling if you want tangible examples:

one of the more obvious examples in the run I sent is being able to kill crab king hitless in under 2 minutes (which other characters would struggle with significantly to do consistently) thanks to the fact that the pond that crab king sits on is actually considered to be ground that tentacles can spawn in (all the fights are timestamped if you want to skip ahead)

fuelweaver also dies in under 5 minutes once you get the enlightened crown without having to tank

Dunno how or why, or if Klei changed it since you did this, but the tentacles do not spawn for me when I use thulecite rounds on Crab King. They just don't. 

[Crimson Hollow]

18 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Dunno how or why, or if Klei changed it since you did this, but the tentacles do not spawn for me when I use thulecite rounds on Crab King. They just don't. 

they don't spawn on water... are they not spawning on ice as well?

[DegenerateFurry]

5 minutes ago, Crimson Hollow said:

they don't spawn on water... are they not spawning on ice as well?

They spawn on the ice, but it looked like they were spawning on water in Guille's video. Or maybe they were spawning on the boat?

At any rate, I found that freeze rounds are actually a game-changer in this fight since a single one will freeze a crab guard (or multiple if they're clustered), which lets you focus Crab King a lot more easily. 

[Guille6785]

4 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

They spawn on the ice, but it looked like they were spawning on water in Guille's video. Or maybe they were spawning on the boat?

you need to hug ck with the boat and align it to make the tentacles spawn during the first phase, it's part of my fight strat

[FillerText]

On 2/27/2025 at 9:00 PM, Cheggf said:

Wetness causes spoilables to spoil faster, items to slip out of your hands, fuel to burn shorter, and your temperature to lower greatly. Losing sanity is one of the least detrimental parts of it. 

While it's still just much worse than any rain gear(even without any stations you can achieve 70-100% wetness protection day 1), I would still like to say that Spoilables aren't affected inside the backpack. Most fuels can also be stored in one to prevent it from going wet. You can keep yourself above freezing With a thermal stone(and maybe insulated clothing? I have yet to test that), and I forgot Tools slipping out was a mechanic due to how rarely it happens to me. Sanity penalty is the only thing that is really at play, imo. I can see why some people find the idea convenient, even if Thermal stones still take a significant amount of time to heat up, and they still miss out on how useful body slot items are.