Mods
For the purposes of high-scoring a quantity of mods are used, here are those mods and their use cases. If for some reason you are unable or unwilling to use mods, this section also has the alternative method, or “long method” of achieving the same results.
To first understand why we do what we do, it’s good to take a look at seeds. The total amount of seeds in the game can found with the following calculations:
A seed has 7 slots with any of the characters “abcdefghkmnpqrstwxyz2345689”.
This gives us 10,460,353,203 total seeds.
This sounds like a lot! But consider what we are rolling into. If we assume we are trying for maximum score, the seed must contain:
All rare nodes spawning (ten total. 0.1% chance)
All combats be extreme corruptors (25 total. 9E-14% chance)
All enemies spawn at maximum or near maximum XP (100 enemies. 1E-50% Chance)
The chance of any one of these happening is already extremely slim. The first two alone is a 1 in 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 chance, before we even account for random combat XP.
”But wait, that’s more seeds than we have?” I hear you say. This is the main justification for mods. Even if the best seed does exist (we haven’t found it), people would generally prefer to not play the same seed every single run. Modding gives everyone the ability to replay the game, while being competitive for the Highscore, without forcing people into exactly the same lines.
Additionally, seed hunting is excruciatingly boring. Before mods were considered acceptable, players would spend days looking through seeds to try and find one that has a higher maximum and the more time went on, the worse it got. Eventually it became a lot less about playing the game, and more about who could find the best seed. The use of mods keeps us from slipping into a forever escalating game of seed searching.
Quick_Save by Binbin allows us to take savestates of the game at any point, and load those savestates quickly and cleanly. This has historically been done manually through file manipulation, and was rather tedious.
Even if you are not using the mod, it is recommended that you keep a comprehensive log of your run. We are playing extremely fast and loose with the game, and there are many reasons why someone might want to go back more than one node, or even back to the act town. Just to list a few:
You forgot to add a card in town you needed.
Event manipulation to take card rewards.
Certain items or card removes ended up being mistakes.
Additionally, people enjoy recreating your run, comparing notes and generally sharing in the love. You should make a habit of keeping saves, if not for yourself, then for others.
More_Scarabs by Binbin increases the chance of (or guarentees) a scarab spawning at appropriate timing. Jade scarabs specifically and jades only are worth XP, and so are worth farming every combat where applicable. Other scarabs are not worth XP, so we will not be talking about them here. When I say “Scarabs” I mean jades exclusively.
If you are manually farming scarabs, you will use mid combat save states and resets to change the order of cards played and health totals until you get a scarab to spawn. Using the More_Scarabs mod will save us massive amounts of time in spawning scarabs. If you want the authentic experience, buy Scaraby in the act 2 shop.
Scarabs can only spawn under certain factors.
1: It is Act 2 or Act 3 (not 1 or 4)
2: It is the start of turn 2
3: It is a non-event based combat, these are almost always corruptor fights.
4: There is room to spawn an enemy. (3 or less enemies.)
Killing scarabs is extremely challenging and deserves its own page. Not only do we have to get to turn 2, which lets enemies attack us, but also scarabs spawn with 6-7 stacks of evasive and buffer, as well as extremely high base resistances. OTK comps in particular struggle to deal with scarabs consistently, so it’s worth adding solutions exclusively for scarab killing. Throw bola’s and Rifty pet have historically been good solutions, but get creative and explore interesting methods for yourself.
Challenging_Corruptors by Meds changes all corruptors to their maximum difficulty. Previous highscorers would use seed checkers to find maps that have high or best possible corruptors, a process which was extremely lengthy.
We are very thankful that we no longer have to spend hours of our life searching through seeds to find one that has enough high difficulty corruptors to beat our previous highscore.
This is both a curse, and a blessing, as an unexpected consequence of this mod is it limits our corruptor pool. Although they are considered harder difficulty, we will dodge some of the corruptors that might prove even more difficult for an OTK comp, the most noteworthy being Upwind. We can more reasonably predict what kind of problems we will encounter and build answers in our decks for them. Thorns Proliferation and Heavenly Armaments in particular are dastardly corruptors under certain circumstances, and you can be sure you will see at least 1 of each of them at some point during every run.
Optimal_Paths by Binbin spawns specific nodes, and increases the rarity of certain nodes, creating an optimal path for highscoring on every seed. These nodes are necessary not just for max scoring, but also certain pathing requirements, as some rare spawning nodes, like the Rift in act 1, are required to path around in an optimal way. Without them, we cannot make certain pathing decisions and the entire path would change.
XP_Normaliser by Binbin is a mod that maximises XP gains from randomized combat nodes. Because XP affects score, and enemies have wildly differing XP values, in order to maximize XP gains, highscorers would either do seed hunting or use a seed changer to get maximum XP from random combats. Due to there being so many combats, this was a virtually impossible task to optimise correctly. With this mod, we no longer have to use seed changing to maximise XP, and when combined with every other mod on this list, every single seed can achieve the maximum score!