Fractal Block World Madness Hardcore Guide

(This guide is for 1.01.32 of Fractal Block World, an update which most notably for the purposes of this guide added Beta Cubes: information in this guide may be outdated in future versions.)

If you looked this guide up, you know what the game is. You solve mazes from coloring books for 9 year olds and run around shooting stationary balls that mostly attack with invisible hitscan bullets and then the story is lame at first and then turns into some insane esoteric fractal conspiracy shit. You’ve already made up your mind on this game, and since you’re reading this, you're not normal and you agree with me that this is the literal coolest thing ever.

So here’s how I did the hardest challenge for which any steam achievements exist. I'm not making a guide for the pacifist version of Madness Hardcore, because there's no achievement and also the sole advice I have for that on top of this is "Just grab whatever the most efficient source of EMP upgrades is".

Before I continue, know that by virtue of there being no other real guides to pull from, something in this guide is likely suboptimal or outright incorrect; apologies in advance. I also only have partial information and rough guesses on which grinding locations have the best return on time investment, and someone may look at this guide and go “ugh, I know this crap way better than this guide does, im gonna make a REAL guide”; in that case, I’m happy to have inspired a better guide.

Finally, sorry for inconsistently capitalizing area/enemy/feature names. I don’t feel like putting in the effort to make them consistent.

1: Why would anyone do Madness Hardcore?

Steam achievements, pride, and clout. That’s why.

2: How do I win Madness Hardcore?

This is what the bulk of this guide is going to be about: it will consist of practical strategies and routes you can take. There are playthroughs on youtube of Madness Hardcore, but I haven’t watched them, nor did I find any actual guides.

Remember: to get the achievement, Madness must be your lowest tracked difficulty, and you must be in hardcore, and then you must grab a key to the universe and press enter to win the game, then you’ll get the achievements on steam a few seconds later.

Most of the rest of this guide will consist of loosely connected tips, arranged in order of "general stuff" and then some tips that apply more to later areas.

I: Options

Make sure to enable hardcore immediately upon spawning (you can’t enable it once 5 mins have passed, you do NOT want to panic and realize you forgot this an hour in), and enable any other save-specific settings you want, like difficulties and the camera and true up/down related settings.

Additionally, you should customize your UI to display any useful information you want, like look chunk/block, current chunk/kchunk/mchunk/gchunk, and I also prefer speed and game time as well. Look/current chunk can be very useful for scanning areas for secrets quickly, because the word “SECRET” will usually be in the chunk name, and it’s also useful if you forget what a single block contains and want to check before you shrink. If you consider this cheating, that is understandable and perfectly fine, this guide doesn’t have any strategies that make use of those features.

You can also cheese and temporarily activate Tranquility for the double upgrades (it is not tracked until you leave the tutorial by growing out of the blue cube and flying a few blocks past the gray pedestal, or until you enter the ying forest via the black cubes in the tutorial, or until you attempt to escape to the emergency waypoint via the anti plug). Disable Tranquility before then or else you’ll be punished for your greed. If you consider this cheating, that’s also fine. If not, know that this may or may not be patched out in the future.

II: Mechanical Knowledge & Playstyle

First, you should complete regular Madness mode at least once. I mean, that should be obvious. I also recommend the Madness Pacifist achievement first, since you have to do that one at some point for the achievement, and it helps you learn how lethal things are when you don't kill them immediately, as well as routes to take that dont involve hard fights. My guide for that is just “do the obvious things like have a good EMP, make sure you track kill count with the “peace” difficulty code, and skip I2 via the unremembered tower rainbow flower secret or Burlington because I2 fucking sucks in pacifist”.

Back to Hardcore strategy, you should be the biggest coward imaginable; you should only take fights you are 100% guaranteed to win, and you should be as unfair as possible to your enemies. Do not let yourself be tempted by risky strategies, because doing anything risky has a huge chance to kill you.

For example, do not use nine black holes and a nuke to harmlessly launch yourself through the SYF blue ring lampreys unless you are so consistent at this strategy (and don’t require the dark hole drag reduction unlocks you’re used to having in other difficulties to pull it off) that it’s a guaranteed success. If you are not consistent at this, you have two options: do something else, or go to another non-hardcore save and practice, ideally with gear as close to what you will have in the hardcore playthrough. I’m not consistent enough at the SYF lamprey blue ring bypass for this to be a good idea for me, especially when I already have 3+ hours in the playthrough, so I don’t do it. If you can pull it off twenty times in a row without dying, I guess go nuts.

Some more tips:

• Armor will save your life countless times. You should never be without armor, and if you are more than an hour in, you should never be without at least some pink in the armor bar, and ideally with purple overheal health stacked on top as well. If you lack good armor and you aren’t in the literal safest areas you could be in, stop what you’re doing and go find a treasure room with 600-1000% like a ying tree or a small white flower or something.

• Keep track of your weapon and health upgrades. You will likely require multiple attempts to beat Hardcore Madness, and while bouncing from playthrough to playthrough and resetting every time, your intuitive grasp of what you’re capable of could be out of date. For example, you may have an EMP early on and not use it, and then pick up upgrades for it, and then eventually not use it because you still believe it’s useless even though it could be a game-changer for you. Alternatively, you could fly into an area thinking you can instakill those enemies, and then very quickly get beaten to death after you do not in fact instakill those enemies. Also, you do not have the black hole drive/quasar drive, and the fire rate of some of your recoil weapons is slower, so if there is a dangerous room you normally bypass entirely with quasar drive and vampire railgun spam, you cannot do the same thing with a slow firing vampire railgun and no quasar.

• Always have money for telekinesis, especially when you are flying through places with both high damage enemies and abundant health/armor pickups meant to keep you alive. Running out of money when you need to slurp up pickups will often kill you.

• Damage upgrades you find in the world mostly only matter early on. Later on, your levels will provide the bulk of your damage upgrades; although milestones will provide other weapon-buffing upgrades too, stuff like fire rate and radius upgrades and freeze time are far more important in the midgame and beyond.

• Do not wander around and explore without a purpose. You should have specific goals in mind, such as “upgrade this weapon” or “get experience” or “unlock a waypoint to this location” or “acquire more nuke ammo”.

• You should have an in-depth knowledge of every single area you could possibly want to go through, as well as knowledge of which areas are deadly or which ones are hard to escape. You do not want to enter a dungeon and then realize “Oh, I can’t leave except through the exit, and the exit is past insanely deadly enemies. Fuck.”

• If you use respawns as a form of teleportation in normal playthroughs, break that habit immediately because attempting to respawn, even via the paying gold option, will in fact kill you in a hardcore playthrough.

• Most enemies can only damage you if their exact center has line of sight to you, so corner peeking them to expose only their edges and then firing at them will protect you so long as nothing goes wrong, and as long as you aren’t fighting something that can kill you via non-hitscan means, you'll be fine.

• Enemy behavior is one of the most important things to know: your regular Madness playthrough should have hopefully reinforced this, but here’s some information if you don’t know all the exact mechanics of enemy hitscan. Most hitscan enemies have a grace period where their shots over the first second or two of their attacks will be white on your hud and do no damage, meaning you can peek out of cover to attack them, and then if you linger behind cover and wait a while (the pink ring in the center of your hud tells you if you are being attacked/your grace period is still cooling down for any enemy, if it vanishes then your grace periods are all gone), that grace period will instantly regenerate for that enemy and then you can repeat. You will only start taking real damage once pink circles begin to appear, which will do real damage a few moments after they appear on your hud.

• However, some enemies are part of what’s called “the hive mind”, meaning they all share a time-based grace period with each other. The green bar next to your shield is a meter indicating hive mind aggression: once it’s fully red, everything in the hive mind will instantly shoot damaging hitscan at you upon rendering with line of sight or upon its attack coming off cooldown, so coming fully out of cover to attack and then retreating will require you to break line of sight with all hive mind-linked enemies before you can restore your grace period.

• RESPECT THE MARINES!!! THEY GIVE THEIR LIVES TO PROTECT MYLANTIS!!! Marines are part of the hive mind, and hordes of them can deal incredible damage in madness mode. They're one of the deadliest enemies in the earlygame and even midgame. If you fly through a cloud of them, newly rendered ones will attack you instantly with invisible hitscan with full hive mind aggression and usually kill you, so you need to stun or kill them before flying through their spaces, unless you are so absurdly tanky that the specific horde is you're dealing with is guaranteed to no longer be a threat. In general, do not take on large hordes of any enemy unless you are following a pre-planned procedure to deal with them.

• Scourges will generally respawn after 60 seconds. If you kill them, they can pop in suddenly and kill you instantly if you’re surrounded by the now rematerialized horde. Be afraid of scourges whether they’re alive or dead. Every space where a scourge was is a bomb that will go off in 60 seconds. I don’t know if a respawning scourge is affected by the area of an EMP before or after it fires its instant high damage shot at you, and frankly, I’m too scared to check, and I especially don’t want to say anything about this in case it’s inconsistent due to jank. Just do not be in spaces where scourges were a minute ago. Do not.

• Many enemies also attack through other means, like goblins and blue abominations with their projectiles, and some enemies will ignore the hitscan grace period entirely: scourge-type enemies and the collapsed enemies guarding some cities are a prominent example. If you accidentally fly too close to some scourges while you’re trying to get as close as possible to deploy an EMP or some nukes, you can die virtually instantly from that. You have to be deeply afraid of any enemy that can attack you with no grace period, any enemy that can attack through walls, or which attacks you when you’re a smaller size.

• Respawning times for items are also worth knowing. Most good loot is non-respawning, including all upgrades, but some ammo, some gold, and some armor will respawn after 1 hour. Using a bedroom’s Sleep Cube, usually first found in Richmond, for 1 hour will respawn these items, allowing for farming if the rewards are more valuable than your gold expenditures. You can also pick them up by just playing the game for 1 hour and then coming back later.

• Movement is normally extremely desirable, and it still is, but you should not sacrifice scarce resources to get small movement boosts unless it's necessary or those resources will be refilled soon (nukes, railgun shots, armor, etc). You want to save your nuke ammo for nuking things or for traveling through a dangerous area quickly, instead of saving 5 seconds climbing a health tower, and you should almost never let your black hole charge/ammo generator eat away at your valuable pink shields or purple health.

• I genuinely can’t tell if minigun poison damage is affected by difficulty or not, but it’s insanely good compared to other damage options early on if the enemy is close enough to hit and you’re patient. Spam poison on everything. The damage doesn’t stack, but the duration does, so you can afk for 5 minutes for free Collapsed Archangel kills in Jumbo Yellow Flowers given enough stacks. Just don’t afk where any enemy can see you or you will die.

• Charging too many black holes instakills you, so like, don’t charge it near the limit unless you’re aware of those limits and are so consistent and error-free with black holes that you know it’s guaranteed to be safe.

III: The Very Start & Basic Traversal

In the tutorial, there’s not much to do except grab the secret laser freeze time/nuke max ammo upgrades (doubled in tranquility if you use that cheese!) and then leave. Rocket mode alone is enough to use the 40 second yellow key to grab these upgrades; no weapon knockback needed. If you can’t do this, your traversal/routing skills probably aren’t refined enough to do Madness Hardcore.

If you can’t live without plasma velocity, I guess you can grind up some of those in Happy Land, but I don’t think you should bother since you won't be using your plasma much and its velocity isn't that important.

Once you leave the tutorial, your next priority should be to grab the few free health upgrades underneath the starting island, and then to grab all the various types of weapons as early as possible, ideally without leveling up too much; more on this.

Survival even in basic ying air/ying forest is difficult this early on, because your shield can’t regenerate fast enough to tank stray hits. Overseers have a weak sight-based hitscan attack even when you’re the same size as them, and this can easily kill you early on in Madness! Minimize your exposure time in the open air, keep moving to avoid goblin hits, and remember that laser hits will refill your shield, so a clip of 32 laser ammo is actually a clip of 32 shield refills (and using a laser disco burns 8 of them). Note the earlygame places with laser ammo, like most treasure rooms and various flowers.

Every level up gives you a damage upgrade for weapons you already own, but this doesn’t apply retroactively if you get a new weapon, so you lose out on upgrades if you level up. This is not worth worrying about unless you intend to farm or you delay getting weapons a lot, because almost no madness playthroughs will live or die based on a few damage upgrades for a small handful of weapons or a small couple of max hp/regen upgrades. If it bothers you, you can resist the urge to use telekinesis in rooms with experience pickups until you get all weapons, and try not to kill enemies other than goblins and any necessary overseers.

The best ways to get weapons asap (both for level reward maximizing and just having more weapons to kill things with) in my experience:

• Laser/Nuke: You get these in the tutorial with the 40 second yellow key. If you can’t do that, don’t do Madness Hardcore.

• Cannon: Found in the first room of any black flower, some noob flowers, all cannon pyramids, and randomly while flying in a ying forest.

• Hole: Shrink in non-X quicksand grass, found under small white flowers or deep in small yellow flower cities, and then grab the purple house dark hole, then use the ying forest near the purple house's Jumbo Yellow Flower (or the waypoint inside the flower itself) to escape.

• Minigun: I usually get this in a Yellow Flower City, but you can also get these in the easy minigun tower and a small black flower maze end (specifically, the treasure at the end of the maze next to the upgrade station that you can’t get by entering through the bottom). There’s more on surviving Yellow Flowers later, if you’re interested.

• Rocket: Guaranteed in the apple tree top treasure room, and you can buy one for 100 gold at an upgrade station at the end of a small black flower maze or inside of an apple tree. Yellow Flower Cities have one in their layer 6+ treasure room as well.

• Railgun and EMP: Ying Tree treasure is the only one worth mentioning, since you should rush those early and these upgrades are otherwise more rare than other weapons early on.

• Homing: Not useful until it can start one-shotting marines, and then rendered more or less obsolete by a max radius rocket, so its the lowest priority weapon, but it’s guaranteed in the apple tree bottom treasure rooms, and I suppose also the small white flower slow mazes, but you’re probably not strong enough for those yet.

• All: Ammo boxes in Apple Trees, which I will get to in a second. Each one provides a max ammo upgrade for a random weapon, except laser, as well as some current ammo for most of your weapons.

Now, with weapons in mind, here’s the route I like to hit to get every weapon as early as possible:

• Quicksand grass under the small white flower (which also has some health upgrades) under the tutorial island for hole upgrades. Don’t forget to also take the RejuvenX behind the painting, available at the same size as the hole upgrades.

• Ying tree treasure room + beta cube for EMP + railgun, plus some RejuvenX, and finally a 1000% armor for surviving the rare heavy hit in an Apple Tree.

• Red apple tree inside beta cube for random remaining upgrades + guaranteed rocket and homing rocket, then I’ll usually leave the apple tree via a second quicksand grass underneath a small white flower. Keep moving and dont bump into walls and lose velocity or the demons will kill you, and try not to run into rats. Slurp up health upgrades from the outsides of small white flowers while you’re there.

• Yellow Flower Cities or a Small rail tower if I didn’t get a minigun yet. I should have also gotten a cannon at some point during this whole process, and I would be shocked if I somehow didn’t find one.

III: Getting Stronger

With a full arsenal and a couple of upgrades, here are places I recommend visiting next, in whatever order you prefer:

• Yellow flower treasure rooms. I mean, they don’t have much in them, but you might stop by one of these for laser ammo, so you might as well grab the upgrades too. You can reliably survive the horde of marines by simply moving fast and using telekinesis to slurp up the health at the edge while using your laser to replenish your shield or freeze marines. Do not accidentally shrink if you don’t mean to shrink, because that could lead to your death. If you reach the bottom floor and do not quickly find an exit, go to the nearest edge and refill to 200% health with telekinesis.

• A couple of cannon pyramids, ideally ones with the yellow tips for guaranteed special treasure rooms (normally a 20% chance otherwise). The blunderbuss is mostly only good early on, but it’s easy to hit the cap of 8 num shots, and doing so is a large damage buff compared to no num shots.

• Small black flowers. The minigun’s poison mode is fantastic for killing menaces early on, and an upgraded cannon will make short work of everything. It’s tedious but at least rewarding. But, if you know you are strong enough, it’s absolutely worth taking the blue ring behind the painting to the spider room. A single nuke can actually kill all the vulcans (and after a few upgrades, baby spiders too) in that room if you shrink into the spider room, immediately grow out of it once every enemy renders, and then shoot a left click nuke. Then, it’s just a matter of freezing the big spider, running up to and poisoning it, and then going back down to grow and wait for it to die. If baby spiders are alive after the nuke, kill them either with a similar method or any long-range weapon. It’s worth visiting the bottom and main treasure rooms multiple times once you can deal with the spider and friends, since you get many nuke upgrades and other miscellaneous upgrades. The maze treasure rooms have nice items too, but I don't think the time spent in the maze justifies going the main path once you're capable of skipping it.

• Jumbo yellow flowers for very early experience farming. Collapsed Archangels in the red entrance give lots of experience at low levels, and every level will net you one of every damage and health upgrade, and you’ll eventually get milestone rewards too. If you got to one via a cannon pyramid with a 60 second 5x XP pickup, figure out if expending your nukes can kill a Collapsed Archangel before the timer runs out, and if the answer is yes, then do that. If you have time left after one dies, evaluate if you have enough nukes for the next archangel, and so on. It’s still worth farming them at very low levels even without 5x XP, because you can poison them and then go afk until they die, and their health pickups give you purple health which will let you survive any unfortunate accidents so long as they’re not too horrible. Remember that archangels share a hive mind with the local marines, so break line of sight with all of them and only attack archangels while corner peeking. Finally, know that you can take detours through the yellow part of the maze to poison multiple archangels at the same time, and that some marines drop minigun ammo.

• The ying lattice is dangerous because Mylantis has decided to station their marines here. Although you don't have to fear them, you at least have to respect them. You will take damage very quickly, but slurping up the 200% health pickups inside the lattice with 600%+ armor as a backup (leaving if your armor starts to approach 200%) is the best way to travel from area to area in the ying world without growing larger, and there are even occasional plasma and health upgrades in the lattice. Try not to bump into an island which will kill your momentum, but it doesnt take too long to recover. Once you want to leave the lattice and its 200% health pickups, or your shield starts to get low, use a nuke or dark hole or vampire railgun to fling yourself out of the lattice towards whatever island you want to visit.

• Large Cannon Pyramids (the blue block tipped ones, not the yellow tipped ones with guaranteed jumbo yellow flowers) can be found in the jumbo yellow flower secret area. You should become good at navigating these, because they have lots of cannon upgrades, lots of nuke/laser/railgun ammo, multiple railgun/nuke/EMP upgrades, a 600% armor, and then a respawning 150% (for use in emergencies i guess) and lots of non-respawning nuke ammo next to the waypoint that you can pick up either now or later. Bring at least a 600% armor going in though, in case you make some mistakes.

• To navigate these pyramids, the moment you enter, immediately use your laser and take cover to avoid taking damage from the vulcans with line of sight to the entrance, then you can kill them once you have cover. For basic navigation around the area, you can use the vampire railgun’s pulling to move past vulcans in rows fast enough to take no damage, so long as you’re not too close to any of the vulcan stacks as you fly along it. Ascend to higher floors by sniping any vulcan with line of sight to your path before flying up to the next floor.

• At the very top, there is a I Am The Juggernaut, but he is actually literally completely harmless since his attack interval is so long it resets his grace period between shots, at least at this size. He’s not even worth enough experience points to kill, unless you want to poison him while you loot the white flower or something, and his only other loot is a big cannon ammo pickup.

• If an update buffs this guy to actually do damage, I am so sorry about your failed run

IV: To Midway

I don’t have a set level/upgrade number when I do this, and you should just leave when you feel like you’re ready and you think you have enough max HP and health regeneration to have a healthy armor reserve and a fast regenerating shield. Here are some ways to do it:

• Escaping the ying flower into the tau caves opens up a lot of options. My preferred way to do this is to grow and escape into shell 0 through the holes (those gremlins do surprising damage, so bring some pink armor) and then grow with the expanders. However, do not grow into shell 1: instead, remain at the size shell 0 puts you and fly upwards, because at your current size, there are abundant shield pickups that you can slurp up with telekinesis to survive in case your shield starts to run low (marine attacks get inconsistent but still can be very lethal at lower sizes).

• At the very top, then you can finally grow and take a waypoint, then go grab another 600% armor from somewhere. Go back to that waypoint, and then do the same thing as shell 1 in shell 2, and fly towards the large green island in shell 2. Maybe try to shoot some of the homing projectiles being shot by menaces before they can hit you, but if you can’t, don’t worry about it as long as you have good armor. Loot the green island of everything you want and grab some waypoints once you arrive, and then go to the bottom and shrink: it’s made of cement, and you can just travel through the small holes, take the blue ring in the center, and then exit into the tau caves. If you wish, there is a secret in the flower’s outermost waypoint past the menace: the black cube has four black health pickups for purple health, and some gold and plasma upgrades.

• You can also safely enter stoney air directly through the 121211 secret in the ying forest: see the wiki for details on that. The downside is that you don’t get any of the tau caves locations this way, and unless it’s in an alpha cube already, you don’t get the easy huntington teleport via a white flower.

• Upon emerging in the tau caves, you should laser disco any significant threats nearby or in the distance. Stoney Air is quite safe on its own because of the infinite laser ammo in the air beyond the ying flower, and the enemies are only a threat if you stand still, and laser discos of the same size as a goon will also affect its projectiles.

• Once the area is guaranteed to be safe and free of overseers and other miscellaneous nasties, you can start exploring Midway.

• Stoney Air Caves can be tedious if done the normal way, but remember: any cave that is 5 blocks in height total will let you skip to the exit without shrinking 100% of the time by taking one of the tunnels, eliminating that tedium and letting you grab some upgrades and a bunch of ammo, including a guaranteed nuke. However, pay attention and look for caves that are 6 blocks tall which have an X at the bottom, because they have waypoints in them and a Stoney Cave 2, some of which will have no dungeon or a dungeon you can slip past via a tunnel, allowing you to claim big bonus loot. I have never seen a Stoney Cave 3 be short enough to skip though, but I guess the tunnel RNG could be perfect in exceedingly rare cases.

• Richmond is worth visiting for access to a Sleep Cube as desired, as well as for its other loot. Don’t forget the tower walls are made of cement, letting you easily loot the seemingly inaccessible chamber underneath the waypoint. You can also go loot the sewers if you want; some buttercups grow down there if you want some purple health upgrades iirc. A shame there's no treasure room at the end: kind of weird for the sewers to just have nothing, but oh well. I guess they're an alternate Richmond entrance, or a way of shrinking from inside richmond to whatever's below/next to it, but... Why would you need either of those things? I don't know. I guess the sewer is just like sewers in real life: useful only for the libraries and buttercup overheal inside.

• It may be worth visiting the maze treasure room of a Small White Flower once if you are a fan of the homing weapon and want to upgrade it to kill marines, but the maze takes too long and the weapon isn’t good enough for me to want to consider farming this. However, if you can quickly kill the marines with rockets or homing left clicks, the "main" (i call them the main ones because they have more upgrades I actually want) treasure rooms beyond the maze treasure room are great, since you can get health, nuke, and rocket upgrades, as well as gold and ammo. There is additional ammo and gold if you are inside of an alpha cube, especially for your EMP and Nuke. By the way, every white flower has an alpha cube in one of the corners (front right iirc), so you can go in there for even more swag if you think you're tough enough to survive/kill the mildly tedious enemies.

• I don’t think it’s worth growing out into standard outer space, either with oak trees (tedious) or a pink ring (the lampreys in the pink trees are absurdly lethal and hard to kill/bypass on madness hardcore). If you figure out a path that involves farming in outer space, good job, but I’m not going up there, there’s a dyson swarm around the sun that’s probably gonna beat me to death. If you do choose to go into space, I recommend the oak tree method. Make sure to kill the war vulcans from outside the tree at a larger size with rockets, or if you don’t have enough radius upgrades for this, with right click nukes instead (actually if you dont have 6 radius upgrades, you probably arent strong enough to survive the brief trip to space, so dont). Then stun or kill everything in space you can and make a beeline for the nearest planet where you can grab a blue ring directly to Mylantis (watch out for the Goliath on the Mylantis surface).

• Haunted houses are fantastic sources of gold. Navigate the safe house 1 maze, then find the guaranteed house 2 maze below those two floors. In the house 2 maze, first find a path to the exit, and then slowly use telekinesis to slurp up gold not needed for you to navigate back to that path. Finish that floor by slurping up that final path, then repeat on floor 2. By the end you’ll have about 6500ish more gold, and can escape via the treasure room. Be very careful to not slurp the only gold telling you where to go though, or you may be lost in in the dark zone forever. Note that the layer 3 houses don't have great loot for you, since you rarely run out of rocket ammo and don't use your plasma, they aren't worth your time, and the Pandora's Box is especially not worth your time due to the risk of dying if you screw up your EMP usage.

• A warning about shrinking in Tweedle dee air: the outer perimeters of small laser fort and noob maze cubes are lined with arch menace females (but haunted houses are not lined with anything, they are safe). Do not shrink inside either of these and fly out when attempting to visit a nearby haunted house or you will be killed by menaces.

• Tweedle Dee caves are good for nuke, railgun, and EMP ammo if you wanted to go farm some, and their treasure rooms have a few more upgrades too. Skip the ice cubes though, they’re too deadly.

• Yellow cubes are your next destination: non-X 5 block high or 6 block X stoney air caves are good for shrinking with no risk, but grabbing a 600% armor or some purple health and going through the biblical fly shaft of a shrink box will do just fine as well. Gray corner yellow cubes are slightly better than their normal equivalents but not by much, since you don't need the dark hole upgrades in their secret room that badly.

• Stoney Sanctuaries are full of loot, but you need to be careful with the main hall with heavy marines and dragoons. Take cover and kill every marine with your poison minigun, or if it’s strong enough, your homing left click, and then advance far enough to poison the dragoons and kill them. Do not fly out into the cloud of marines and dragoons under any circumstances because I lost a promising playthrough this way. RESPECT THE MARINES! Once you are in the sanctuary, note that reaching the top of the stoney sanctuary will maximize your radius upgrades, and since rockets can easily one-shot marines, completing this dungeon allows you to easily farm the treasure rooms of small white flowers by simply blowing up all the marines from the comfort of nearby cover and then freezing/poisoning the dragoons.

• You can use waypoints to take an outside yellow key to the library, but if you’re good enough with base movement and vampire railgun usage, you can safely and reliably take the 7 second yellow key past the key guardian and get the library’s loot and the blue ring to the secret bonus loot island. If you aren’t consistent at this, don’t do it because key guardians instakill, but I did get very consistent with it so I consider it a good strategy for me.

• The Horrible Fucking Stoney Sanctuary Mega Grind Nuke Blast Method: This is bolded because it will provide most of your damage upgrades, lots of health, and countless other upgrades like special damage modifiers and fire rare bonuses, so listen up: the exeperience farming method is simple. Have reasonably good nuke max ammo, perhaps by grinding black flower or tweedle dee air treasure rooms or something else, stockpile nukes, and then do a stoney sanctuary. They are not threatening areas and your poison minigun will kill the arch menace males with ease. Proceed up the tower until you get to the treasure room (this maxes out your nuke radius instantly btw): then, grab the 180 second 5x experience and damage upgrades, grab the 100% armor, and take the pink ring out, then shrink back to the sanctuary exterior waypoint and travel to the biggest, most densely packed pile of scourges or non-piercing scourges you can find. Prior to entering I1, this will be a pre-located ying air cube’s quick passage (you should enter from the bottom, not the top, using a waypoint in a ying forest inside the cube: this makes it easier to not horribly die to unexpected lampreys), but once you enter I1, an EMP Castle or that weird pink german version is the best spot for this since there’s a much larger field of them. Health towers sorta kinda work too, but they don’t have the scourge density and scale we’re looking for. Camel’s Hump in Huntington probably also works but I haven't tested there.

• Once you are at those scourges, you nuke them with 5x damage default nukes and try not to take any damage from their super death auras, or in the case from the ying air cube, from any lampreys that could be inside. After a few nukes, the scourges will pop and you will gain 5-30 levels all at once depending on your current level and how many of these things you just slaughtered.

• Repeat until the EMP castle or ying air cube is empty. REMEMBER THAT SCOURGES RESPAWN AFTER 60 SECONDS: IF YOU FORGET THIS YOU WILL DIE INSTANTLY. If you’re too impatient to wait, you can take a quick teleport or fly to another nearby EMP castle or ying air cube.

• If you run out of nukes and still have time left on the clock, pause and evaluate how many more nukes you can use, how long it’ll take to get them, and find out if it’s enough to justify grabbing more or not: it could even be worth buying nukes for as much as 400 gold if you have no waypoints with remaining nukes next to them, just because every nuke equates to an absurd amount of experience points, and you did go through a sanctuary’s triple maze hellscape for this.

• Anyway, enjoy getting 50-150 of every damage and health upgrade in the game per run with this farming method. This will let you hit level 500 quickly. You can do this farming method with rainbow flower damage/experience pickups too, but you probably dont have those yet, and if you do, you have an I3 wig flower that you can take and just go end the game.

• You can also do a variant of this farming method where instead of doing a sanctuary, you simply figure out how to get more nukes and then you simply fire up to 5x as many nukes while using the more common lone 5x experience pickups.

• Evil farming method aside, it’s worth visiting the non-maze portions of several stoney sanctuaries for their loot and also some ammo next to a waypoint you can save in case of emergencies, even if you have max rocket radius upgrades already. There’s a lot of ammo in there and a lot of health and damage too.

• Finally, to enter I1, here’s the best method I have. First, go find an alpha cube. Then, in its health tower’s quicksand grass, or underneath a white flower inside an apple tree inside its black flower, enter the ying forest near or inside the purple house jumbo yellow flower. Take a path from there to an orange of your choosing, whether it’s from stoney air in the tau cave of a Ying Forest Deep Hanging structure at ying forest 12+, or from the 121211 combination oranges.

Then, do not enter the orange itself, but instead, enter the stoney air found in the same chunk as the orange. On top of the question mark totems are apple trees. Enter a white flower inside, loot it as desired, and then take the blue ring, which is now there because of the alpha cube.

This blue ring will take you straight to Huntington, because blue rings take you up out of stoney air, and oranges funnel you down into Huntington's secret loot room. You can loot the moon flower only if you have a decent EMP to deal with the night guards prior to using the shrink rings inside the flower, otherwise it’s suicide. Note that the 8 nuke portion of the loot respawns every hour, and that there are waypoints in the ying forest nearby.

Once you emerge onto the surface of huntington, keep an eye out for baby spiders above, as they can shoot through electric fences that haven't rendered fully and possibly damage you. Disco lasers and railgun blasts should kill and stun whichever ones are harassing you. Loot huntington and take that cannon weapon variant that turns it into a second minigun, but only loot the camel’s hump if your EMP is super powerful and you have enough ammo (if you miscalculate you die instantly, as i did once) and then proceed into the infinity flower (strongly recommend entering through the secret maze at the bottom of the flower for extra EMP upgrades). Loot the base camp inside the spider for the railgun upgrade and enter I1.

V: Dealing With I1

• You’ll notice I have less advice for I1-I3: this is because when you want to farm, unless it’s scourges, you’ll usually do it in a lot of the same places you were doing before, just faster now that you’re much more powerful, and I already mentioned EMP Castle farming earlier. Many of the new, cool, exotic dungeons in I1 and beyond, despite their immense rewards, are just too dangerous or time consuming to consider visiting, although you could take a detour to any dungeon you personally consider truly “safe”. And don’t forget that every white flower inside this place, because of the alpha cube, has bonus nuke, EMP, and a bit of railgun ammo.

• I1 has a wide assortment of things to do, but you should ignore most of them: williston for easy lazy loot, bristol for I2 access, and the EMP Castles for loot, ammo, and experience farming (see experience farming method above) are the only places you really want, though you may sometimes dunk into one of the expander mini-dungeons with the spiders inside them to replenish your ammo or escape while at low armor. If you see a purple well with no pink sphere, you can proceed to the Hidden Cave of Jerichos underneath and farm the secret rooms of Jericho for rejuvenX and railgun fire rate upgrades, but the cave is very rare, and under no circumstances whatsoever should you enter the places where the pool balls live for obvious reasons.

• Your rocket should be good enough to deal with the locusts or whatever they're called in the gray shrink tubes, so use them. If you discover it somehow isnt good, an EMP or nuke is pricey but useful for saving your life.

• The williston fields are actually a little dangerous since they have a lot of enemies, especially when juggernauts start showing up, but they aren’t so dangerous you have to outright avoid the areas: just be careful and have emergency escape routes in mind, like shrinking into a bristol or ducking into a tree. You should have learned how deadly this place was in your Pacifist playthrough.

• To leave I1, enter bristol and use the portal in the corner, or find an I2 wig flower out in the fields.

VI: Things To Do In I2

• Leave

VII: Things To Do In I3

Okay that last one was a joke. The thing is, in the hardest playthroughs i’ve ever done, I2 manages to consistently be a terrifying hellscape where it’s easy to get tricked and end up in a situation where something is trying to kill you and it’s hard to kill it back. In regular gameplay it’s fine! In hardcore madness mode though, neglecting your procedures for dealing with overlords and fanatics, or even the chunk rendering system deciding to render some a few frames before you take a shrink ring, will force you to scramble for the nearest waypoint out of there, or failing that, a grow ring so you can desperately confront and kill the thing attacking you.

Fanatics and overlords will pop in when you least expect, kick your ass, and beat you to death. So, here’s what I do in I2:

• Find an I2 library that I can enter, ideally one that’s not the one at the top of the fanatic island library shaft (fanatic islands still have other libraries on them at least), and definitely one that doesn’t have fanatics nearby.

• Go through the horrible mazes in the i2 library vault to the i3 wig flower’s chamber, and at the end, remember to take the secret grow ring in the corner so you can grab all the juicy EMP upgrades hidden in the room (dont go through the white exit shaft, it has a white box device and just leads outside the library)

• Enter i3

• That said, there are a few other small things worth doing in I2 that may nudge you into staying for a bit:

• You may attempt to find a rainbow flower in this layer, which has good respawning ammo and powerups, as well as an alternate route to I3.

• It is also worth finding a Montreal, but this is very easy, assuming you can kill any fanatics and overlords near it. There are many infinity flowers inside with laser damage upgrades, and more importantly, EMP Radius upgrades in their secret bottom entrances. It’s worth visiting multiple of these to enlarge your radius. If fanatics and overlords spawn naturally nearby, remember that they will kill you through the (often unrendered) electric fence if you return later unless the Montreal is in a safe place with none within render distance.

VII: Things To Do In I3 For Real

You’re almost at the end of the game, so you just have to find hell.

• Use an EMP one size above the normal I3 traversal size in the entrance shaft before shrinking to deal with tough balls for a while

• Locate the nearest waypoint inside I3 so you can get in and out quickly

• Use an EMP at regular I3 traversal size to deal with those little wasp assholes and keep them from doing significant damage because these will kill you over a long period of time

• Finding hell is your goal, but Colchester is also a great find because it has multiple I3s inside of it, letting you reroll I3s until you find one with a hell nearby.

• Could enter an I3 library hell portal instead if you’re confident about taking on a pink tree (there are so many heavy marines that you need one hell of an EMP and lots of ammo for this to be a good idea in my opinion)

• Enter Hell

VIII: welcome to hellllllll weather’s great here so pull up a chaiirrrrrrr and have a cold beer you can live by the sea so happy you’ll be with your cobblestone treeeee

• Before challenging Hell, you should farm levels from scourges until you’re comfortable with the upcoming challenge. You should ideally be level 500, but anything above 400 works fine in my opinion.

• Use nukes to propel yourself down the first part of hell: it’s fine, you’ll get more nukes later.

• In the massive big arcade battle shaft where you have to fly past or kill one billion guys, use an EMP just before taking the final shrink ring and entering to stun a small number of large guys, and then enter. Immediately detour into the nearest ammo cube from the top and absorb its 1000% armor, nukes, purple health, and all the other armor you can get. If you need more, there’s a miniature arcade ammo room where you can get even more nukes and health and armor.

• Propel yourself with nukes further down, then refill very soon afterwards in another cube. You move so fast that it’s probably not worth bothering with the EMP, or with manually killing anything. Just spam nuke to fly down.

• Pay close attention to your armor and health and immediately drop into the nearest ammo cube to refill it if it drops at a worrying rate. It’s better to be patient than it is to fuck up because you got stuck on a black vine for a moment or bounced off an enemy, so plan around your ammo/healing cube transits unexpectedly taking a few seconds longer than they should. You do not need to travel from every cube to the nearest cube below it, but you're at the literal end of the hardcore run, so you could do that if you felt nervous.

• Repeat until you reach the pre-final boss waypoint.

• The inner core still tries to spawn minions even if you’re at the waypoint, so immediately leave to prevent them from piling up if you need to do any last minute preparations.

• The inner core can be stunned for 1 second with a freeze ray or EMP, and the minions can be stunned for the EMP’s full duration, but can only be affected by the EMP while you’re large.

• You can kill the inner core with a bunch of nukes by simply shooting lasers at the inner core to stun it (it is stunned for 1 second at most), growing, using an EMP to stun any minions, then shrinking at a place with nuke ammo and throwing your default nuke at it while standing in a spot without line of sight to its center (the thing that does damage to you with hitscan) It’s not worth using any other weapon on the inner core. Repeat until your EMP duration gets low or until you are low on nuke ammo. This took me just over 100 nukes, but there are thousands of nukes in the arena itself, so ammo isn’t a concern.

• Optionally, a stoney sanctuary 5x damage upgrade will shred the inner core, likely without having to pick up any additional ammo if you brought even a moderate number of nukes with you.

• Once it is dead, make sure the minions are not a threat, either with an EMP or just by killing them. It would be embarrassing to die to them while celebrating.

• Pick up the Key to the Universe off the Inner Core’s drop box, or if you lose the key, proceed to the credits room where another one is waiting for you.

• steam achievement

IX: Miscellaneous Tips & Alternate Routes

• Aside from EMP castles for experience (maybe the camel’s hump too idk) for experience, I don’t actually know what the best hardcore madness farming spots for things like upgrades and gold are, whether for going down branches to do a dungeon over and over, or for farming the same respawning drops over and over with the sleep cube.

• At upgrade stations, I usually just spend all my gold on health maximum upgrades, since their benefits apply regardless of what weapon I’m currently holding and they seem good as a result. You may have other goals, like getting your weapons to certain damage thresholds, or maybe you have one weapon you rely on a lot and want it to be stronger.

• You can farm health towers to get more health and to max out your minigun fire rate, but be warned of doing this with a bad EMP: you may get too close to the scourges and be horribly murdered. I don’t know if farming health towers is worth it though, because the value of minigun fire rate is questionable when your poison darts don’t benefit from it, max ammo is harder to get than fire rate, and the health towers don’t have that many health upgrades in them.

• If you’re reliable or patient enough to get blue rings inside the quicksand grass of a joke wig flower, TON 618 does hand out a crapload of health, nuke, and minigun upgrades, as well as respawning nuke ammo. This also lets you skip I2 and I3 by just getting hell in Burlington instead, but the Great White Cavern can be extremely lethal to anyone with a bad EMP for the marines and/or the inability to easily freeze and kill those pirates and sentinels. The side entrance is actually safe because you don’t need that many EMPs to get past the lampreys; I would count on using 5-7 of them to make it through, but carry way more just in case.

• There has to be some valid reason to go to space in this game mode, but I can’t think of any. Space stuff just seems too deadly and too time consuming to reach for too little reward as far as I can tell. Maybe with a good laser, you can stun or kill the sentinels and goliaths, quickly fly over and use one of those lamprey/lighthouse blue rings on a minigun planet, and teleport to the top of mylantis? You get one good bundle of loot out of that, but unless you’re level 500 its probably better to just farm scourges, and if you are level 500, go win the game already instead of doing jackass stunts. You can go do all the jackass stunts you want after you get the achievements.

• I wrote this entire guide before realizing that the wiki’s 121211 ying forest combination doesn’t spawn in any of the monsters normally associated with going to the usual orange-spawning depths, you just get the normal monsters for your true depth. The value of this is questionable and I haven’t thought about it much, but it could be useful for something. This only sends you into huntington if you do the lighthouse or SYF lamprey trick or white flower alpha cube trick I think, and if you’re super early in the game, all three are kind of infeasible. But there’s gotta be something you can do with this at the very start, right? Maybe something good in stoney air?

• The protagonist of this game is some kind of ultra-badass scientist who goes into the spooky weird dimension and shoots up the place and never speaks in-game, so I just imagine they’re literally just Gordon Freeman.

• If you just want the steam achievements, you can infinitely respawn in hardcore mode by backing up saves, by disabling hardcore in the save file and then respawning and re-enabling it, or by doing all kinds of other cheats. I mean, most of you probably don’t want to, but if you just want only the achievements and are fine with cheating, it’s easy for you to do that.

X: Conclusion

Actually maybe a conclusion doesn’t make any sense in this context because I just kinda told you a bunch of tips and routes for the difficulty setting and that’s done now…

Someone should make a fractal block world version of that one cruelty squad meme video where it starts with a tiktok where a girl says “do you want to know how to pleasure a woman” and then it cuts to a guy going “no i dont” and then he quickly goes over a cruelty squad speedrun strategy while wearing a business suit. Like yeah the equivalent of that for fractal block would would be really funny