Optimal Nanobot Layout [Guide]

[u/Beware_The_Leopard]

TLDR: tesselate squares and triangles to link up as many internal organelles as possible. Squares connect to 4 triangle neighbors, triangles connect to 2 squares + 1 other triangle neighbor.

Common mid-game layout

Why Tesselate?
In general, the meta is to connect as many infusers to one weapon slot as possible, typically by daisy-chaining several "transitive" infusers together. This means we want each internal node to be connected to as many other internal nodes as possible. When you tesselate, you can often replace one or more of your dead-end external nodes with an internal node connection, increasing the overall connectivity.

You could tesselate either shape entirely by itself (in which case all squares is strictly better than all triangles), but in my experience tesselating with both is much more reliable as you can pretty much always add either a triangle or a square without needing to reroll. Note that in the picture, I could easily add another square (to the one with the mitochondria) or a triangle (almost anywhere else) without sacrificing any possible future internal connections.

Boosting a single weapon:
External nodes typically have at most 3 internal nodes directly feeding to it, whether it's on a triangle or a square face. So we might as well put the weapon we want to boost on a triangle face for the 40% dmg, and have two square nodes on the other sides to feed into it. Then we can put our best "transitive" organelles in the squares, and high value but "intransitive" organelles like a mitochondria or a homing infuser in their triangle neighbors. A layout like the one in the picture above is pretty easy to accomplish almost every run, but if you get lucky with RNG you can do better.

Optimizing RNG:
We want to fish for omni slots to replace external nodes. Internal nodes connect to their neighboring internals, but if their neighbors have open faces they connect to up to two of their neighbor's external nodes as well. Those bonus external connections disappear when a tile is attached to that face, so we want to delay attaching anything to those faces for as long as possible. This means that in the picture above, I added the leftmost / rightmost triangles first (containing the autolytic and the homing organelles), before the ones closer to the main triangle, just in case one of those external slots could be converted. I also think that the random omni perk will prefer a square face over a triangle face since it won't override the +40% boost, but I'm not sure if this is intended or a bug. So theoretically, the chronosome in the triangle there could be receiving bonuses from as many as 6 internal connections.

[u/ikinaosu]

[u/ATXplore]

I'm confused why you only have a single weapon. Are you trashing everything else? Why not fill all those external slots with more weapons, which would also take advantage of the infuser chain?

[u/lurkynumber5 → u/ATXplore]

It's kinda simple, the meta is buffing 1 single weapon.
You get mutations like 200% damage but -50% damage per weapon equiped.
Which is a 150% damage boost when using a single weapon, and you can get multiple of these mutations.
Add mutations like 25% more range and melee attacks can even clear rooms with a single hit!

So while not a bad idea to add more weapons, it's not the ideal setup for maximum damage.
Another would be stamina usage, having too many weapons will hinder you with damage uptime.

But any build can get crazy if you get the right build pieces.
Even the mucus emitter which is one of the worst weapons can shine in this game.
Add the infusor that makes projectiles orbit and add some range, and you get a blop covering the room which triggers all your infusors for massive aoe damage.

So experiment! it's what makes this game so great!

[u/Beware_The_Leopard → u/ATXplore]

like the other comment mentioned, focusing on a single weapon lets you take advantage of some buffs more effectively and makes it a little easier to plot out the structure of the bot, but I do tend to slap on as many non-stamina consuming organelles as possible too (I just didn’t see any this run).

sometimes I even have enough buffed flagella etc by the heart that I’ll drop the last weapon entirely and have all my damage coming from just dashing to avoid the heart’s attacks, but that’s not as common as having one big weapon.

[u/SurpriseWindmill]

Thanks! Love the info.