Noita: Tips and Tricks

Noita is expansive. I think that’s safe to say. When it comes down to the interactions between all possible assets, and then you throw in player actions, it becomes downright exhaustive. There are a billion things I could say that would rightfully count as “tips and tricks.” While I do want this section to be comprehensive, I simply can’t and won’t make some gigantic Bible of all the possible various cool things you can do in Noita. I will still try to add anything that at least of middling importance or is good for general gameplay. Just wanted to point out that “you didn’t mention X” as a comment might be assuming that I did so unintentionally. I will also leave out various things that I consider too obvious or things that everyone but a complete novice already knows.

These are not listed in any particular order of importance.
Steam Guides apparently limit the character count of sections, so this list must be divided up.

• Polymorphing allows you to enter and exit Holy Mountain checkpoints without causing a collapse. This is very useful, because after a collapse, you can no longer edit wands inside the Mountain. If you don’t mind the time required to lug wands back to edit them, this saves you a perk slot from taking Edit Wands Everywhere.
• Wands have two recharges: mana, and spell cycles. Mana on a drained wand will recharge even if you don’t have it currently equipped. The spell cycle recharge (the orange bar) kicks in once every spell on that wand has been cast once; this does NOT recharge while unequipped. Keep this in mind for long recharge wands; even if it’s supremely powerful, switching to a wand that hasn’t completed its spell cycle recharge in the middle of battle can be perilous.
• Dousing a wand in pheromone will create it as a possessed allied wand.
• Right click on flasks with inventory open to empty it immediately. This is drinking, and sometimes causes effects; drinking slime will hurt you slightly, teleport and pheromones will wear off in a few moments, etc.
• Drop a flask without breaking it by equipping it and throwing it with the cursor over yourself.
• Worm blood can be consumed to see everything around you in a radius. Hold S to consume liquids or corpses to get them out of the way or apply effects.
• Chainsaws or drills will chew up corpses and create tons of blood. Especially useful for worm blood. Chainsaws are also excellent spells with which to have a trigger spell multicast, since they lower recharge times, do plenty of damage, and cost no mana.
• Purify toxic sludge by spraying some water into it.
• Concentrated spells produce high knockback from the recoil, which allows you to fly when using wands with certain spells and a high enough firerate. Even better with Low Gravity, though it becomes trickier to control.
• Experiment with wacky combos you otherwise wouldn’t. Buoyancy doesn’t seem like a particularly useful spell, and it lasts a while. Throw a duration and matter eater on it, and presto, you now have a spell that eats through anything (except cursed rock), lasts forever, and brings you with it. Easily one of the best anti-obstacle combos.
• Tap to levitate, don’t hold the key. This will get you the most bang for your buck out of the levitation bar. You can reach higher by tapping straight up than you can just holding the key down.
• Double clicking on wand spells while editing them will snap the spell to your inventory, no need to drag.
• Do not scroll through your inventory, this is bad practice. You don’t want to pull out a wand that sparks electricity passively while you’re in water, or a wand that burns passively while in flammable gas. Always use explicit keypresses to switch to items, including flasks. Personally I use Q for my water flask, and then Z X C for the other three following slots. If you’ve made scrolling a habit, disable mousewheel input in keybinds until you’ve unlearned it.
• Understand immunities. Fire immunity doesn’t protect you from lava. Electric immunity doesn’t protect you from explosions (and pretty much every electric spell is explosive). Explosive immunity doesn’t protect you from instantly igniting when caught in a blast. Most explosions have more than one damage component; don’t be near a turret tank or acid container when it blows even if you’re protected from the blast itself.
• A wand with any electric spell on it will electrocute liquids. This used to be instant, and would immediately kill you on contact; this now takes a few moments for the charge to coalesce, so you can submerge with this sort of wand equipped without being instantly killed, as long as you get out in a second or two.
• Berserkium doubles your damage and doubles explosive radius, and is one of the best liquids to have. This often causes projectiles to eat through solid material better, including chainsaws, drills, magic bolts, magic orbs, etc.
• Berserkium also causes any afflicted creature to attack anything it sees and also gets attacked by anything that sees it. A crowd of berserked enemies will kill each other either until it’s worn off or there’s only one left standing.
• The medics found in the Hiisi Base and below will heal you under one of three conditions:
  • You deal damage to them. They will shoot you twice, healing 5 health per shot, each time you hurt them. Because of this it is best to kick them, as it only deals them 1 damage. With a teleport wand, you can hit them for 0 damage and get them to heal you.
  • You spray berserk on them. Keep in mind others will attack it if they see the medic, so it’s best if it’s only you and the medic. A zerked medic heals for 10 each shot, and will constantly shoot you until your health is full or the zerk wears off.
  • You douse yourself in berserkium. This compels the medic to constantly “attack” you until your health is full or you’re no longer zerked. This will only heal for 5 health a shot, but is far more conservative with your Berserkium, since it takes an appreciable amount to stain the medic.
• Wand building is beyond scope of this guide, but general advice for getting a first good wand: build a non-shuffle wand with a trigger or timer spell, then a multicast of some kind, then a series of projectile spells. This is a general formula for building a wand with great burst damage that procs at range. Add whatever modifiers you want before the multicast so it applies to all the projectiles that the trigger spawns.
• Sometimes a no-shuffle wand’s lower mana capacity is a good thing. If you have a particular wand set up to shoot a trigger, then a multicast, then four firebolts, but it only has enough mana to cast two of the four firebolts, this will effectively double your ammo. Now, this wand will fire double firebolts 50 times instead of 25; once the first two firebolts run out of charges, it will switch to the second pair, which it never had enough mana to fire altogether previously. This does, of course, almost drain the mana of the wand every shot, but this is fine for wands you use sparingly, since mana regenerates even while the wand isn’t equipped. The multicast number is important, though; if this example wand had a double cast, then after it casts the first shot with two firebolts attached, it would proceed to fire the next firebolt after that shot, and the last firebolt after that, before recycling. If this were the case, the wand would need to be switched, then back.
• If you need to empty an area of liquid and have no means of draining it, you can fill an empty flask and right click to drink it, over and over. This is considerably faster than trying to drink away the liquid by holding down S.
• When entering a portal into the Holy Mountain and the screen flashes white, you are not safe. While the game loads the Mountain, you can still suffer the ill effects of whatever liquid lies underneath the portal. To avoid this, hold W or Spacebar immediately after entering the portal.
• Many people know this by now, but you can kill a lich in one hit by chucking an Emerald Tablet at it, assuming your throw has enough force (read: put the cursor far enough away).

• Enemies that can carry wands will automatically pick them up if it crosses their hitbox (and so will you if you chaotic polymorph into one of these enemies). If you don’t have a bouncing or boomerang spell modifier, you can heal yourself by dropping a wand with heal charges on it for an enemy to “attack” you with. Keep in mind they still use their basic attacks here and there while holding a wand, but I believe that they only do this while waiting for the wand’s cooldown. They’ll also attack you once they run out of heal charges.
• Newer players sometimes complain about “not being able” to pick up gold because it drops in hazards created by enemies, like toxic sludge or lava. Ignoring the fact you can use water to neutralize these things, Noitaguy has a small but noticeable gold pickup radius. You can pick up gold nuggets that are surrounded by a hazardous liquid just by levitating close enough to it; you won’t touch the liquid at all.
• You can easily deal with the lich by freezing it and kicking it, or constantly shocking it with electric spells, or chainsawing it in the face. Additionally, a large number of liquids can be used to deal with it too: both polymorphines, teleportatium, pheromone, making yourself invisible, etc. Stain registration on the lich can be very hit or miss, however, so you should always have a backup plan.
• Fallen concrete is very easy to get through with anything that does appreciable environment damage, like energy orbs, drills, chainsaws, magic bolts, etc. Even if the Holy Mountain chamber collapses, if you need to get back inside for any reason, it’s easy to do so (though you won’t be able to edit wands). And yes you CAN reach the top of the exit shaft by levitating; you simply need to tap at the right pace.
• You can use polymorphine to fly for an infinite amount of time; when you polymorph, spam W as fast as you can, and you fly rather quickly upwards. When you change back, your levitation bar will be full, and you can switch to your flask and repeat. Keep in mind that doing this with standard polymorphine is a bad idea, because any enemy can sneeze in your direction and kill you.
• Always have some sort of explosive or electric attack to deal with armored/metal enemies. They’re resistant to standard attacks, and very resistant to anything that does slice damage, like sawblades or arrows. Lightning bolt spells are good; they aren’t nearly as dangerous to you as they might seem without protection, so long as you don’t try using it in enclosed passages or blast something too close to you. Beware of other electric spells, though.
• In the Vault, assuming you make it that far, there is a second enemy that heals: a floating drone with three horizontal glowing green orbs.
• Spraying with a flask will not reveal you when invisible. If you want a safety net, you can bring invisiblium and teleportatium along with you; make yourself invisible, and then spray a bit of teleportatium into the air so it rains down on you. You can use this to scout if you don’t have any reveal spells/perks.
• If you are stained with oil and another liquid, you will only take damage from fire while you are in direct contact with it. As long as you are stained by a non-oil liquid like water or toxic sludge (berserkium etc. do not count), you will not catch fire and remain aflame. Being stained by a non-oil liquid by itself will naturally protect you from being hurt by fire at all.
• Noitaguy propels himself a bit faster when he’s pushing up off the ground. Because of this, you can keep tapping up while walking to “hop,” which allows you to move slightly faster than normal.

Written by Shrinkshooter