We return to Vampire Survivors with our third episode of my re-run after wiping my save file.
In this run we're looking to complete the Dairy Planet map by reaching level 60 on this map.
Character: Poe
Default Weapon: Garlic
Bonus Stat: +25% Magnet (pickup range); -30 Max Health
Default: Garlic
1: Santa Water
2: Axe
3: Rune Tracer
4: Lightning Ring
5: Magic Wand
1: Duplicator (Lightning Ring Upgrader)
2: Bracer
3: Pummarola (Garlic Upgrader)
4: Spinach
5: Candleabrador (Axe Upgrader)
6: Spellbinder
7: [Map Pickup] Attractorb (Santa Water Upgrader)
8: [Map Pickup] Armor (Rune Tracer Upgrader)
Dairy Planet is a map that is chock-full of fast-moving packs. It's a dangerous map for new players, and I remember dying on this one a lot in my first playthrough. Part of that was just how unknown most of the weapon combinations were to me, and part of it was not being able to predict the level. Having nearly 100 hours in the game now though, I've memorized a lot of that information and that makes for easier runs!
With Dairy Planet, you're really going to want to focus on knockback and bouncing weapons - as we see in my run. Rune Tracer and Axe do a lot of the heavy lifting here. Santa Water and it's upgrade La Borra are also very handy on this map, as you'll end up hitting a point near the 25 minute mark where having a zone close to you that can do stacking damage is really very useful, because the mobs in the last ten minutes are fast, damaging, and have a ton of HP... even without Curse being active.
In fact, on this run... we don't even make it to the Reaper! I die at 29:21 because I simply don't have enough damage to keep the final two minutes of mobs at bay.
I might have been able to reach 30 minutes and get smacked by the Reaper if I had remembered that Magic Wand doesn't upgrade with Spellbinder and had either chosen the appropriate secondary for that weapon, or changed the primary to King Bible, which does upgrade with Spellbinder... but oh well! The goal of course was to reach level 60 and unlock Gallow Tower, and we manage to smash that out of the PARK, reaching a total of level 109 on Poe.
I don't generally recommend Poe as a character... Garlic is clutch in the early game for his slow speed, but it really falls off mid-game and becomes nearly useless late-game. As is reinforced by the after-action stats:
We ran Garlic for a total of 13 minutes, and in that time it did a mere 25.8k damage. By far the least of any skill we had. Partly this is because things didn't get close to us... but even when we upgraded it to Soul Eater for the remaining 16 minutes of the game... it only did 383k damage. It's DPS was a shockingly low 391. Meaning... this upgraded weapon did less damage per second than the un-upgraded Magic freaking Wand did!!
Garlic is, generally, a trash weapon - but the single advantage to it here is that Dairy Planet does have a lot of traps that spawn ranged enemies, and their shots are stopped dead by Garlic/Soul Eater. So we don't have to worry about dodging ranged at all, thanks to Garlic - and because we at this point don't have manually-added Curse, tripping those traps is the best way to generate extra enemies for XP.
Which is something else to mention: The traps here will spawn a series of ranged enemies, a fast-moving pack of minotaurs, or a slow cluster of jellyfish. It's absolutely worth walking onto the traps and triggering the spawns to get a few extra XP gems at this stage of the game as a new player. If you've already got most of the unlocks... probably don't bother? But, I'm writing these guides and doing these videos from the assumption that it will largely be new players viewing them. Folks who haven't yet learned about the double-edged sword that is Curse.
Another tip I'll give is to reinforce that projectiles that can bounce are super useful in areas where you can get a smaller bounce zone.
Things like Rune Tracer will naturally bounce off of the outside of the screen, but you can force a tighter bounce by finding zones like those marked above. These in-screen areas can be used as a funnel or choke-point to maximize the number of bounces (which with NO FUTURE each cause an explosion), and ensure that the clusters of mobs closest to you in the funnels are going to receive the most damage.
It's a super useful tip that I wish I'd have known when I was first starting out. And, with that, I think we've covered everything to note about this Challenge. We'll return to this map to tackle the Coffin at a later date.
Until next time friends, Happy Gaming!
