Blind playthrough of Hostile Take Over 1 & 2 - Thoughts

[Wumpair]

Hello people of the forums!

I just finished going through the Lunar questline to the end, and I wanted to share my initial thoughts.

Context:

I went into the Hostile Takeover update as blind as I could. I didn't go into beta because I was away when it happened; I didn't watch any DST YouTubers/Twitch streamers on the update for a while, and I was unspoiled on the final boss attacks. I watched the animated short and got the clue that I had to go to Crabby Island, and I did see that in the forums, people were unhappy about what we had to do to Pearl. I also got a bit spoiled that something happened to Wagstaff - It died, or it was captured, or teleported, or smt... But otherwise, I was blind going into it.

Set up:

I went with Winona and stayed with her through. Winona is nice because she is like base Wilson - No gimmick weapon/mechanic, no damage multiplier; and she has some QoL items (Teleporting through the map). I like her for that, plus I imagined that being Wagstaff and all, I would need scrap, and it was a good choice in the end (So much scrapp needed in the endgame omg). I didn't use her catapults except for Crab King. 

This was the fastest play-through for me, as I focused on going for lunar arc. I am proud that I managed to pull off a CC kill in the second autumn, a personal best for me! This allowed me to kill the mutated deerclopse in the second winter, and kill Bearger and the warg in spring! This was quite intense gameplay to reach it: Rushing pearl tasks (Getting the west, the umbrella, the chair and the lureplant - I actualy did one extra than needed), going into the ruins getting Ancient Guardian and DayWalker, going outside and killing scrappy warepig to get the new T.I.N.G.L.E. Node for the lunar event (very nice QoL item!), Crab King, the Moonstorm event, and finally Celestial Champion. Tough, fast, fun - I managed to get a personal best to finish it all before the second winter, and notably no rolebacks! (Except for when Crabking's Towers spawned on my boat on top of the catapults and the game crashed without saving, I had to restart that fight). I also never crafted a darksword, I used glass cutters through, honestly, it is nice to have them prototypable although it makes all other weapons obsolete (any nightmare fuel would be used up for the generators); I also enjoyed using the morningstarn this playtrough to test the new electric stun, it was fun.

Although challenging, I went through this quest many times already, though never as fast. The mutated bosses back to back were also more challenging as I had no planar gear for the deerclopse and limited gear for the other two (I used the opportunity to kill Bee Queen using Bearger and get myself some jelly beans for the final fight). Two days of gameplay, lead to this....

Hostile Take Over...

I got to Pearl's island, and found out that I need to map out Moon Quey Island? Okay... De-tour to get to Moon Quey Island (Which I already knew more or less where it was, as unfortunately it was next to Crab-King and during the fight I was interrupted by a raid! But I managed...). Got to the island, got cursed by another pirate raid. De-tour to get to the ruins for banas (it was summer, so the ones on the island wilted). Going back to the hermit island. Now I need lots of junk, thankfully I already have it as Winona (Not the stone though...), so the island is prepared. Now to grab gestalts using thulecite bugnets for the recepy of their trap?! 6 of them?! De-tour to go to the archive, get more thulecite (thank goodness I had salt already for the collected dust). Okay, I got the 6 gestalts. What do you mean that the 6th one is not unique? I need to get another type of gestalt?! Okay, another bugnet...

Finally, this fetch quest surprisingly took almost another year, with all these detours, ofc this was the first time going in blind, so it is expected that it would take long, I guess. With more planning, the time can be shortened, and overall, the idea of catching gestalts is cool!

Finally ready for the fight. 

Fight 1: Celectial Champion Litle-edition. No hustle, easy peasy. Didn't even get hit once. This is child's play.

Fight 2:  W.A.R.B.O.T. ... It was all going relatively ok, like I was getting hit a lot with the follow-slam attack, but getting some kites there and here, fighting with my brightshade sword and brightshade helmet and my warbiss armor (I deconstructed the crown right before the fight, I knew electric damage would be in play). And then phase 2 starts... The heat-seeking missiles kill the two morning stars I placed for light, and then they kill me in a matter of seconds, shredding through my armor... 

Unfortunately, I am leaving in two days for a 1.5-week trip, so I wanted to finish this playthrough today, as tomorrow I have to finish packing up my stuff. So I didn't have time to redo the fight an endless number of times, and accumulate resources.  So I looked into what people do in phase 2, and saw that either you put down lots of thermal-stones or freeze yourself (seeing a jazzy video using an icecristalizer). Fortunately (or unfortunately), right before I went to fight W.A.R.B.O.T., bearger spawned in my base (destroying 3 crockpots while at it; at that point I just led him away), so I went back to base and decided to ask the unwelcomed visitor to leave, killing him legit and getting a second spark arc. I used the console to just skip the archives section, and spawned in some more healing and repair kits (which, if I had more time, I would have accumulated more eventually). And with that, I went to fight W.A.R.B.O.T. again. Now that I knew about the freeze strategy, the fight was more manageable; I got hit a lot, though, and I used a lot of healing, but eventually I got through it... And then

Fight 3: Celestial Scion. I was not prepared for how brutal this fight would be - I got reminded of fighting Old Non-Reworked Crab King for the first time, killing Feulweaver for the first time, and even killing Beequeen for the first time; fights that once were super tough, but with practice, I could get a strategy to kill them. And I understood that today I would not get to learn how to beat the Celestial Scion. His permanent-curuption was insane for me, I tried a couple of times to kill him, but this is a battle for another day. I wrote c_godmode in the console, and watched as the Criptic Founder found his tragic fate (Interesting... In the intermission update, when the automatic hand threw a rock at Wagstaff, it went through him, so it makes sense that he would be shocked when Scion grabbed him, as he thought he was invincible... Maybe the shadows operating the projector decided that Wagstaff is of no use anymore now that he has done his job? This is very interesting...) But getting back to the boss fight. It is tough, super tough; I guess eventually I will figure out a proper strategy that works for me, but not today, cause like I said, I have the trip irl. In Highsight, the drop you get seems a bit lackluster, so this fight, for now, is more thematic than anything.

For now, I am content with having gotten to lunar rifts at my personal best time, with no rollbacks. Let me know what you think overall, if you have any tips about the Scion fight (I do know about the teleport technique and using mushcake to not be sleepy though). I think it was an alright update, parts I enjoyed, some nice QoL, and then other parts that, for now, are a bit too harsh. And overall I do think that the lunar questline as a whole is fun, although it is quite long to get trough irl, and I wonder jus thow many players will ever get to see the end-end-game.