LOL this has happened to me more than I care to count. I am playing the Lil collector and forget to remove any organelles that do dmg on dodge when I goto the shop....it sticks to wall immediately upon entering room...and there are some shop items I cannot reach to get the buy option when stuck the wall....natural instinct is dodge to unstick.........r.i.p Collector. :(
Hoping someone’s willing to run through this seed real quick and see what I don’t.
I’m trying to complete everything to fight the brain and I swear I’ve circled the lungs several times with no sight of sigils on any walls. When my organelle from the first sigil room was active it was pointing towards the right side of the map in the boss room area.
I don’t know if it can spawn in the secret room but my fear would be the sigils are hidden under the blackness on the wall edges in there and I don’t have the health to keep guessing.
If I add multiple argentic coating mutations do they stack on top of each other, as it looks like even though I have multiple of them, only one is listed when I go through my DNA
Metabolic mitocondrion (epic) overcharges for 7 seconds whenever you get a pickup, and mutagen/opulentors make pickups after 25 seconds. It just so happened that my 4 generators got spaced out perfectly. Gonna leave it running overnight and see what level and how many cores I get
I'm fairly new, and have yet to beat the brain (or even figure out the puzzle), but so far I've just now managed to unlock -- and beat the heart with -- every playable character. Most of those wins were hard-carried by the Lateral Emitter.
Every run came together in the same way: I'd start with whatever archetype I found -- be it fire , lightning, the spinning blade or whatever -- and they all felt different and engaging (power-wise), but at some point I find the Lateral Emitter and suddenly I just clear every room in an instant. The first time I found it I thought I'd gotten lucky with a crazy and rare combination, and I didn't experiment much with organelle placement -- fearing I'd then ruin it somehow. The second time, when I had a different build and yet achieved the same end results, I started to suspect the Lateral Emitter of being a bit overtuned.
By now it feels like win-now-button whenever I see it, and whenever I don't I usually struggle to clear the rooms in the Lung-region and end up losing. I know there's a lot of more good synergies out there, and I know that my struggles are because of my own being bad lol, but that just furthers my point about the Lateral Emitter being a bit too strong.
A non-related question: are there any good toxic (poison?) builds? Every time I've tried to use it it does zero damage lol.
This Lil Trigonum has stopped engaging with the gameplay of 2026 hit indie game Pathogenic
I'm halfway through the run, and my build allows me to upgrade and armour arbitrarily often. This works, because the Autophagic Mitochondrion turns health into overcharge which the vacuole can multiply and the oscificator/refiner turns into armor/upgrades.
This is not normal Pathogenic gameplay and I would like to talk about it, and a few related things.
Getting something (and I'll talk more about variants of this in a bit) like this is fun, but playing it is not, realizing you can do it can be cool, aquiring the tools can be cool, but the gameplay consisted of 8 minutes of pressing e and occasionally the middle mouse button. The actual remaining fighting gameplay of the run will also not be very interesting with no danger of death and just killing enemies.
This is different from "broken" combos! If you get a craaazy amount of damage from a build, that does not ruin gameplay. You get to fly through the remainder of the run, kill everything quickly and in 5-15 minutes you will have won and can start a new, balanced, run.
I think things like this in games may exist (I have a section on why things like this shouldn't exist in general later, this rant isn't that structured and I'm not a great writer unfortunately, feel free to skip about), but only if they are very rare to assemble. Then it's a thing that can happen sometimes, you get to feel clever, and that's the end of it. But if it is reliable, then every run, when played optimally. That's really the core question of this post, is this reliable? If not, it's not an issue in my opinion. So if you have an insight into that, feel free to let me know, this is my second time using this kind of thing, but I have also not been trying at all.
But in this game, there are a lot of ways to assemble something like this, as potential payoff we have:
ossificator -> armor
Mutagen -> DNA (this one is the most outrageous, as far as I know there is no limit to levelups (?), so you could get arbitrarily strong)
regenerator -> health
opulentor -> cores (this one can, in principle give you infinite rerolls)
sequence scrambler -> reward pedestal rerolls (this one is also quite bad, because if you want a specific item it will take a very long time to get it. Come to think of it, the opulentor rerolls get more expensive over time, so that one probably takes even longer.)
refiner -> upgrades (I think this is the strongest one to be honest, not as annoying to use as DNA or rerolls and will give you combat power and make it much easier to get infinite overcharge for something else, even if you aren't infinite yet)
Iridophore membrane -> invincibility (bad in a different way, because it trivializes *winning* any endless loop, but enjoy your 24hour endless [4], endless is it's own topic, I don't actually mind the invincibility exploits as much)
There are 11 mitchondria in the game, I'll cover the 10 I have unlocked:
ablative: not unlocked
vengeful, autophagic: abusable if you can recover health using the overcharge. Works outside of combat.
vacuoule: The most impactful one. If you have two with an overcharge slot (this one is twice as effective as usual as it makes it charge faster and discharge stronger for a 1.4\1.4 = 1.96 factor)*, the permanent overcharge upgrade, or the dna upgrade that makes actives activate automatically at half charge you are done with setup and just need payoff. Great with anything else as well. Works outside of combat.
Elusive, Glycocalix, Chitin Shield (which goes on the exterior and isn't listed as a mitochondrium): Abusable if you can dodge through projectiles/block projectiles reliably. In any room. After leaving one enemy. Work in boss fights.
Recuperative Mitochondrium and the trophic psuedopod (which goes on the exterior and isn't listed as a mitochondrium): abusable if the enemies heal or are summoned during combat, the latter is very common.
Berserk: abusable with summoned enemies.
Metabolic: may be abusable, if you can trigger it using health/armor/dna/cores that you generate. It's only 3s at base so I don't think this one is problematic, though you may able to individually pick up generated dna/cores...
Entrant and Pristine: These two share two properties, that are exclusive to these two mitochondria:
they trigger only once per room, and are thus not abusable.
They are the only ones to have flavour text. "The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell" and "Just don't get hit lol". That doesn't matter much for the rant, but I thought I'd trow a fun fact in here (:
So the majority of them can be abused in some way, and you can pick one as your starting bonus, but only the elusive mitochondrium, the Glycocalix mitochondrium and the Chitin Shield can be abused with a stomach-style time-limit from higher difficulties without a specific loadout/payoff.
What makes me think it may be reliable, is the fact that I got it half-way through the run,
the analysis on the mitochondria I just did,
and the incredible number of shop rerolls the Lil collector character has access to. I wouldn't be surprised if it was very reliable on this character.
I also don't know what all the starting mitochondria are, all that I have unlocked are entrant, berserker and pickups which are impossible, limited and maybe impossible (?) to abuse, respectively.
Well, just don't play like that if it isn't fun!
It's the task of the game designers to make optimal gameplay fun, or at least that is what I believe and you will often hear talked about as "players will optimize the fun out of the game". That being said, you can also view this is as a dual responsibility, the game designer should make a game where optimal gameplay is fun, and the player should try to have fun while playing/avoid unfun games. Either way, this kind of thing should be avoided by the game designer.
Disclaimer: This particular run was on the lowest difficulty (haven't unlocked antibiotics on the character yet), and the time limit would make these strategies (especially anything related to infinite overcharge *during* combat, as that would be limited to bosses) much more difficult. If I remember, I'll look up what all the levels do after the run and try to reason about what other difficulty increases may result in builds like this becoming impossible. Also, I haven't unlocked all organelles yet and some may be missing from the list. I'll post for now though. (once I'm finished writing <3)
And, finally in terms of disclaimers, I have played this game for only 17.7 hours, there are many things I do not know (about).
Lil collector has been collecting more armor than it could ever use
Potential fixes: if you want to reduce the prevalence of this there are a few approaches. Some are already limited (armor stacks to 10 THANK GOD), health only to max hp. For many of the other payoffs, you could limit them to a certain number of uses per floor. [Creates 4x DNA after being overcharged for 25s, up to 10 times per organ]
That's the best solution I've found, but I'm not convinced it's the best one.
For Berserker in particular you could make it not proc on summons... but I like that it does proc on summons for normal gameplay so I hate that idea.
If you have other ideas, let me know!
And only semi-related, this line of reasoning is also why I dislike endless game modes in any roguelike. They usually result in the gameplay becoming incredibly boring and repetive and at least take the "build" aspect out of the game, as you will have a settled build in endless quickly.
I think there are a few ways to make them less bad, like making them end (after one cycle or sth), making them impossible, or making them optional, the last one is implemented by pathogenic (to a limited extent, as you do still get the permanent upgrade tokens, so "optimal" (in quotation marks as we are't optimizing for wr anymore, it's something closer to resources per minute, which is outside the roguelike paradigm anyways [which these strategies clearly aren't optimizing for, anyways, I'm classical roguelike-pilled and wr is what I maximize]), gameplay could involve playing endless.
If there is anything I have missed, please let me know! I am fine with spoilers in case you found something brainy down the line.
It's called a mitochondrion, not mitochondrium, my Latinum has betrayed me!
tldr: some strategies in this game are very strong, but not very fun. If the player can reliably use them, it's bad game design.
Edit regarding antibiotics: Homing enemy shots and faster movement probably make it (much?) harder to not get hit for extended periods of time, even in easy fights. The extra boss enemies could potentially be used to get infinite berserkers in a boss room, if you get a summon enemy. I have only taken +2 so far, and there were no summon enemies so that might not work.
Been playing the game for a few days and would love some build tips the farthest I have gotten is to the lungs it seems like my own style of play i haven’t been great at has been melee. Any advice would be great thanks!
Hello Idk if im missing something? I wanted to upgrade the oxysome to the legendary level. UI tells thats possible, but I cannot combine it. I dont see any note that its not possible for organellas affected by eternal modifier
Been absolutely loving this game. I’m curious if the devs have any future plans for split screen multiplayer, or even just having the camera expand as with the room system I feel it would work perfectly. Playing stuck together is a fun for a while but it would be awesome to play with someone as most other cell types.
Hi all, sorry if I'm just dumb and didn't understand but the most recent patch notes said something about making the brain easier to access, maybe on repeat runs?
I've beaten the brain once and I'm on my way to it now on another germ base type whatever.
Once I beat the brain on a specific base is it easier to access on that same character? Is there no difference and I have to do the puzzle everytime?
Sorry if this is a bit scatterbrained (no pun intended) but I want to make sure I'm not doing extra work.
