Picayune Dreams – How to Achieve the Flawless Run

A bit of a repost of a guide I already posted in discussions, but I hope this’ll help some of you in getting pointers on how to achieve the Flawless run. By no means a pro guide, but if I managed to get it with this, so can you!

As far as difficulty go, ironically, Overdrive 5 is a lot easier than Overdrive 0. That 200% XP modifier more than makes up for the increased horde, HP, and enemy speed. It’s the difference between getting rammed into by a fish (screw them) and sitting in the middle of the screen firing more missiles than a whole season of mecha anime.

Of course the loadout is going to be important, but quite frankly, only a few skills are necessary to give you a good chance of getting a Flawless run. Here’s my recommended loadout, and the reasoning behind it.

RGB Genetics: You’re kind of forced to pick this one if you want everything else.

Spaghettification: Gives you back one black hole after a boss is defeated. Since black holes are going to be very important to keep ourselves safe, it’s better.

Salt The Wound: 10% damage on anything under an elemental effect. This’ll come in very handy, as elemental effects (read: shock) will be crucial in making the run a lot easier.

Battery Lick: One of the mandatory skills, in my opinion. Shock is by far the best elemental effect in the game, able to freeze enemies in place and deal high damage at the same time. It may only be 1%, but since we’ll be firing tons of projectiles at once, it’ll make a difference.

Remnants of What Was: Statues are not really useful in our run, in fact some of them are actively detrimental if they raise Curse, same if you blow them up with a Grenade for a free level up, but we need this skill to get the drills. Curse is to avoid at all costs, so refer to this guide for a list of existing statues and their effects:

Driller Enhancements: An excellent skill that’ll go a long way in helping you getting that Flawless. Prioritize things that increase your potential while not sacrificing your other useful stats. Crit drills are by far the best ones, but Blackhole or XP drills are good too.

Marathon: Temporary movespeed on kills. This’ll save you a lot of close calls during levels, as movespeed is going to make the difference here. Even without Overcharged Engine, this alone really helps keeping you ahead.

Gaiden: Not mandatory by any means. Don’t rely on it; you shouldn’t get hit AT ALL, but it’s the best one to get to what we actually want. Could potentially save you from a lucky shot.

Exponential Expedition: Movespeed based on Mortality. That’s good, we want movespeed.

Confidence: One of the MVPs of the skill tree. I didn’t even use any Overcharged Engine in my last Flawless playthrough because that’s how good it is, and it plays right into what we want; not get hit. You can run laps around bosses with this.

Bullet Time: A bit of a crutch if some patterns stress you out, but it can come in handy if things get too hot. Remember that while it slows everything down, enemies and projectiles included, the amount of movespeed you lose is greater than the slowdown on enemies. Use with moderation.

Exponential Experience: Pickup Radius will make it a lot easier to level up while you’re being chased down. It’s guaranteed increase as the game goes on, so you don’t have to spend a lot into Pleoxenic Crown to get a decent pickup radius size.

Experienced Handler: Easier to grab Magnets, Grenades, and Black Holes. Be mindful not to accidentally grab a Black Hole while your stocks are full, or you’ll end up wasting one when it could’ve been more useful later, or to keep for a boss fight.

Shocking Results: Free upgrade at the start of the run and after every boss.

Fifth Generation Network: Not mandatory. I just find it better to not have to worry about breaking satellites and rocks and focus on enemies instead.

Connect Call: Extremely useful skill that’ll act as a free Magnet before the boss starts. That way, we don’t need to worry about planning routes around enemies and focus on survival.

Backwards Core: Fires an extra bullet behind you. This bullet does not scale with CORE upgrades, no matter the CORE level you’ll still fire a single bullet behind you, but it’ll come in handy with Reversal Core.

Fast Core: Makes your CORE bullet go faster, and thus more accurate in autoaim.

Reversal Core: More useful than it sounds, it basically means your bullets get a 2nd chance at hitting something. Scales well with Core upgrades.

Stack Overflow: A guaranteed “crit” every 100 kills. Sometimes trigger even if you didn’t kill anything so I don’t know what’s going on there, but hey it’s guaranteed kills.

Skull Crushing Distance: A somewhat low damage AoE. But extra damage is always welcome.

Hunting Season: Another mandatory one. Less Boss HP, I don’t need to explain further.

Nitrous: More firepower. +1 May sound awful, but it quickly adds up with enough weapons on you.

Feeling Lucky: 1% of crit makes a lot of difference. It simply chews up hordes when you have fast-firing weapons triggering crits over and over.

Rainbowsplosion: A guaranteed chain grenade on an Elite kill. Excellent for wiping out a horde, and clear a path toward whatever the Elite left behind.

Dumb Luck: Guaranteed crits for 5s after killing an Elite. This, combined with Rainbowsplosion, means you’ll keep your screen completely clear for a few seconds, giving you a lot of time to pick up XP and items.

Critsplosion: Free AoE damage for every crit, which helps a lot in softening up enemies.

Flamethrower: One of the best weapon IMO. Guaranteed Fire status and high damage means it melts whatever you point this thing at. Combined with Battery Lick and other potential electric upgrades like the Eel or Plasma Lamp, you can get a potentially disgusting combo of having enemies frozen in place and getting hit extra hard.

Angel Wings: The absolute MVP. Don’t be fooled by the low damage, as the knockback more than makes up for it. This thing, with enough upgrades, can keep hordes at bay on its own. Combine it with CD% and you can just go make coffee while Cyl takes out the trash.

Slime Spike: Excellent crowd control. Combine that with Projectile Size and Speed, and this’ll not only deal decent damage but also keep enemies at bay with its decent knockback. In combination with Angel Wings, it’ll keep anything that gets too close out of your personal space.

Ultrabuster: Weirdly enough it looks like it takes advantage of the CORE upgrades I mentioned earlier, but I need to check on that. Overall, this is a pretty good weapon that doesn’t do anything fancy besides being a good burst damage.

CORE: To take advantage of the CORE upgrades mentioned in the Loadout segment, CORE can do quite a lot of work for you. Think of it as a shotgun, as anything with a large enough hitbox can get hit by multiple bullets at once. In that aspect, Weapon Size will help a lot.

Chain Belt: Another solid pick. Has an extremely short range in the beginning, so prioritize getting a couple of upgrades in it early on. After a while, with Slime Spike and enough Weapon Size upgrades, you make a wall of death.

Plasma Lamp: Makes sure that anything that comes too close will be frozen. This acts as an extra security for when Angel Wings doesn’t have enough upgrades to keep you safe on its own.

Leg Saw: Excellent horde-clearing weapon, taking good advantage of Weapon Size% and able to go through everything on the screen. It’s main goal is to trigger Crits and Shock across the screen.

Eye2 An amazing weapon that goes through anything it hits. It works great with elemental damage, capable of triggering it through a bunch of enemies, as well as Crits.

Digiwatch: Cooldown reduction for making your weapons fire faster. Prioritize this above the other until you’re in the 150-200% range so Angel Wings becomes an unstoppable force.

Injection: Weapon Size% that’ll make Slime Spike, Core, Chain Belt and Leg Saw a force to be reckoned with. Also means a lot of projectiles that are usually inaccurate in Autoaim mode (like Flamethrower) will actually hit the target.

Battery: Projectile Speed to make Slime Spike spin faster, and hit more enemies more frequently. Also makes your other projectile-based weapons more accurate in Autoaim, like Core and Flamethrower.

Other honorable mentions:

• Pleoxenic Crown: Makes it easier to pick XP and items. No need to explain it further than that.
• Missile Rack: Excellent AoE weapon, scales greatly with weapon size.
• Hunter’s Bow: The recent changes have made it a bit better at boss killing, and the guaranteed poison is sure to trigger Salt the Wound, which means 10% more damage.
• Overcharged Engine: Move speed is the difference between sweating and making a joke out of bosses. Enougn Movespeed can completely trivialize some of them.
• Electric Eel: Did I mention Shock is the best elemental effect?
• Snow Globe: While Freeze is less useful than Shock, the Nova’s huge AoE can quickly cover a lot of the screen with Weapon Size% and thus trigger a lot of other things, like Shock and Crits on top of Freeze.

• Don’t rely too much on autoaim! While having to focus only on dodging is fine, it can work against you. Around mid-game (mortality 5-10) you’ll often find yourself completely surrounded. Instead of letting autoaim brainlessly fire at the closest enemy and let them close in on you, carve yourself a path! Fire forward and move away from them. You’ve got upgrades and Connect Call to get that XP later. TL:DR; play like a coward. We’re here to not get hit, not getting a medal of bravery, folks.
• When fleeing from enemies, try to make a big circling path around them so you can go around and pick up the XP you left behind. Use the level landmark if you need to as a guide (the space station, planet, whatever you got). With Connect Call and the XP radius increase from your Loadout, this becomes a lot easier.
• Don’t be greedy with black holes! While they’re necessary against bosses (especially Picayune’s wall of death), using one is better than restarting a run. Not to mention you can rather easily find some in floating debris, or left over by sparkling elites. Remember that you’ll always get one back after every boss, and Picayune drops one after every phase.
• Pick your routes well. You’ll want to avoid Modified areas when possible, and pick your battles. Remember that enemy types are added to the pool of spawned enemies, so pick those you know you can deal with. Anything with high movespeed are the biggest threat, so avoid thing like Whiskers, Warpers, or Wibblers.
• On that same note: be careful with statues! Some might raise your curse. Sure, a Berserk or XP statue may be nice, but that might also mean you’ll have to stare straight at a Curseformed fish. And fishes are the BANE of your existence. Whenever possible, do not raise your curse to avoid Curseformed enemies! Don’t blow up any statues either, that raises your Curse too.
• Speaking of fish: prioritize them when possible. Due to their extremely high movespeed when dashing, they can completely ruin your run when one of them decides to dash out of a horde and right into your face if you’ve let them come too close. Don’t trust any fish you find, no matter how funny it looks.

Rabbit
The easiest of the bunch. Rabbit doesn’t require a lot of strategy, simply focus on dodging and the boss will go down rather quickly, even before it can loop around its bullet patterns.

The big rings are easily avoided by going in the gaps between them. Moving away from Rabbit while aligning yourself vertically can make it a breeze.

The pattern of vertical bullets is also easily avoided if you go slightly left or right from the center, there’s a very obvious gap where you can stay and avoid getting hit. Feel free to use Bullet Time (sneak) if it’s too fast.

The “labyrinth” is also an easy one, extra easy if you’re playing on a controller since you can adapt your movespeed to the bullets.

Worm
Worm will start to test your mettle a little bit, but not too big of a challenge. With your movespeed upgrades, you can easily avoid the charges. If possible, try not to break it apart and focus on the head, as it’ll be more easily manageable this way. Don’t use autoaim. Remember that Shock will freeze the whole boss if any part is hit by it, giving you an easy way to maneuver around it.

Be careful of where the boss drops the static green bullets, you don’t want to get caged in when it fires the homing yellow ones, or the burst of blue ones. Keep your distance and enough space for you to maneuver.

Biker
Biker is the first real “build check”. If you’ve been able to defeat Rabbit and Worm with ease so far, Biker shouldn’t be too much of a problem as long as you have enough move speed. Even without Overcharged Engines, you can flee from Biker forever with all the loadout upgrades! Simply go for a diagonal direction (to avoid the cross-shaped bullets) and stick to it, pay attention when you hear Biker rev up as that means he’ll go for the charge, which can potentially catch up with you.

Demon
Ironically, the boss with the lowest self-esteem is also the biggest threat of your run. With fast, intimidating patterns and the ability to teleport, this can ruin your run if you don’t pay attention. We want to get rid of her as fast as humanly possible to avoid the more problematic patterns or worse yet, let her loop around them.

Unfortunately, movespeed won’t let us cheese the boss like Biker. It’s the opposite, in fact; going too far will make the boss teleport to you while she keeps firing, which will definitely put you in a bad spot. You have to stay far enough away that you can easily dodge her bullets without triggering a teleport.

Bullet Time will come in very handy here, especially with the grid-like bullet patterns, or the very first pattern she fires, allowing you to tap-dodge while sticking to the outer rings of her bullets, much easier to handle. Be careful when you see her fire a ton of bullets in two directions; stick as close to her as possible so you can avoid the wall of death, and watch when her bullets curve around to come back to her. She also has a wave of slightly homing yellow projectiles like Worm, but her bullets spread across the whole screen. Bullet Time is your friend here, or a Black Hole if you miscalculated.

Picayune
The home stretch. Three phases, and thankfully we get a Black Hole pickup after phase 1 and 2.

Phase 1 and 2 are not too different from one another, as they’re basically the same patterns you’ve seen from previous bosses. Picayune also follows you around, so don’t be afraid to keep moving and run away from her bullets. By now, you should have enough move speed to run circles around Picayune and her bullets.

Phase 3 is where you should keep a couple of Black Holes in your pocket. Most patterns are easily avoided, but one where she laughs and sends you walls of bullets from your left and ring is where you NEED a Black Hole to avoid getting hit. Thankfully, that also gives us a ton of extra bullets to fire in her face.

If you’ve managed to get your hands on some Black Hole drills, this boss should be pretty easy. Try to maximize your damage whenever you get a window of opportunity, so we don’t let her loop around her pattern too much, you don’t want to get caught in a Wall of Death with no Black Holes left.

That’s about it for how I managed to get the Flawless achievement. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s doable if you keep those things in mind. Let me know what you think!