Let's Talk - Spelunky 2 Spoilers Galore

Dang, that's a good point. I was confronted with the Wings/Jet Pack conundrum and debated this. I went Jet Pack last time, but this should be added to the calculus.

I think I am going to focus on just beating Tiamat. I want to get a win under my belt. Just exits and progress. No monkeying around. I don't NEED to be royal, I'm not threatening Hundun here. Just get a win and then start getting tricky.

I am also just trying to get a basic win, but I feel Excalibur’s 10 HP hits would make the fight so much easier. I can reliably get Vlad’s crown and wings, so I don’t mind doing a little extra work. I just have to get there in one piece.

It’s funny, last night I found a jetpack in the ground in a Volcana level and thought, “I know I just said I didn’t like it, but let’s try it out. I’ll be getting Vlad’s wings on the next stage and I’ll ditch it then. It’ll be fine.”
It was not fine. I randomly got hit by some ladybug fire and blew up.

Just ran the daily and beat it! I somehow managed to get Excalibur destroyed by a Neo-Babylon elevator block, but Vlad's Wings + Climbing Gloves + Paste made it fairly trivial.
(Edit - Looks like you can’t unlock characters in the daily challenge. And I wanted Spelunky Guy. Guess I wont be doing daily challenges for a while.)

Next up is to try the easy side of The Chain. I think hitting Olmec's pods will be a lot easier with the double jump of the wings. Just have to avoid hitting both pods at once and getting crushed.

My 9yo and I managed to get a Hired Hand to the shortcut builder at Ice Caves and later last night I was struggling mightily to get out of Dwelling when I had a 1-2 where I'd need to use a Rope and cook a Bomb to get the Eye. I said, "Well, this is the run," and took the key through to Ice Caves! It was amazing. I found a Jet Pack (paid for it!) in Volcana 2-2, never saw Paste or extra bombs but managed to dodge fire/magma, convinced Olmec to land over THERE, thanks, and slooooowly went through Tide Pools to get it there. I was down to two Hearts and spent my bombs to avoid some tricky spots in Tide Pools (stupid Crab guys). Finally got that shortcut open and have been able to practice Ice Caves more than once/twice a day. I think I have the hang of it now, at least enough to get through half the time.

Let's gooooo

I finally managed to make it to the Tide Pools with the Ankh and die when I was supposed to. Killed Kingu pretty quickly with Excalibur, but then a stupid elevator block in Neo-Babylon squished me. Man I hate those things so much.

Slow steps but making progress.

Ooh hey, if you've not seen it, there is an "easy" way to get the Ankh by setting some bombs off in the upper right corner to make a groove that Olmec can't get through, but he will bounce up and down in and you can ride at the corner of him to sneak in the Ankh Room exit.



Putting this here because I did not know this, but once you get the 3-1 shortcut open you can Rope in the middle of it and start jumping to wake up Olmec, who will bust down and you can get him to open the way to the Temple and/or the Ankh Room! We'd been going to Temple by just spending all our bombs to blow down there, which makes it pretty difficult, to say the least. Whole new vistas opening for us with this news.

Made it to Hundun and I think I was one bomb away from killing it but I just got cocky/careless and fell into the spikes. I got this though.

jeb wrote: Putting this here because I did not know this, but once you get the 3-1 shortcut open you can Rope in the middle of it and start jumping to wake up Olmec, who will bust down and you can get him to open the way to the Temple and/or the Ankh Room! We'd been going to Temple by just spending all our bombs to blow down there, which makes it pretty difficult, to say the least. Whole new vistas opening for us with this news.

Yeah, I used that to practice killing him. Very useful.

Still trying to get back to Hundun. Here's the story of my most recent run:

I accidentally missed my opportunity to get the ankh by being stupid, so I continued on anyway and found a teleporter and thought I might be able to get to the Sunken City by teleporting past all the lasers so I didn't bother grabbing Excalibur. But then I decided to try an ankh skip and was successful. Back on track baby! Killed Kingu with a bunch of sticky bombs. Carefully making my way through Neo Babylon where I, as they say, got Derek'd. To avoid an elevator block, I decided to bomb my way through the floor. The second I placed the bomb, an electricity ball flung an olmite corpse at me, stunning me and conveniently placing me directly on top of my bomb. EXIT GAME!

Haha, man, sometimes they don't want you to win. I watched a streamer go Jungle, rob the Black Market, use Kapala and Kali sacrifices to get north of 90 life, fully equipped, killing the whole world, but he fell a block too far, got stun-locked by a Boomerang Tiki-man and died to a chorus of ㅋㅋㅋ.

My next missions:
City of Gold
Route: Dwelling for Udjat --> Volcana with Bombs/Drill for Vlad's Crown --> Temple for Scepter --> City of Gold

Abzu
Route: Shortcut to 3-1 Olmec for Ankh --> Tide Pools for dying (LOL) --> Abzu

Duat
City of Gold route above with the addition of Olmec's Ankh --> Duat

I can arguably shortcut from 1-4 for the City of Gold, but not having Udjat makes becoming royal (needed for City of Gold gate) much tougher. Best bets are to just get lucky and find Black Market, and rob it for Hedjet (not trivial), or luck/steal my way into enough bombs to "dig" to Vlad's.

I didn’t realize Vlad’s crown opened the City of Gold, I thought it was just the Hedjet. Really good to know for when I start that route after beating Hundun at least once.

I hope I am not wrong--my assumption is that you need to be "royal," i.e., Vlad's, Hedjet, or True Crown to get in there.

I looked it up before responding. You were correct.

Here's a tip for you if you don't already know: When rolling a die in a dice shop, if you throw it up in the air and whip it before it hits the ground, it will always be a 1 or a 6. So it's pretty easy to get any dice game items or an invite to Tusk's palace by winning 5 items.

Got to Hundun again, without paste. Tried to cook and then "whip" some bombs on its head using Excalibur but I forgot to stop ducking after dropping the bomb so instead of hitting the bomb I dropped Excalibur and didn't have enough time to react before I exploded. Always learning valuable lessons. Lessons like: "I hate myself and I want to die."

Wow, you are just KILLING it, though. Keep it up.

I did make it to Abzu today and stood on Kingu's back. Unlocked Tina. I was coming from Olmec shortcut and I got the Ankh about 6 times in 50+ tries LOL. I am SO much better at it now though, I did it four of my last eight attempts. Anyone still coming here for tech? If so:

Olmec grows his little Hover Orbs on the Tide Pools level. You can just leave that way if you want. But if you want the Ankh (legit) or you want to go to Temple, you need to do a little more work. Once Olmec "grows" the Orbs, if your vertical height is below his nose or thereabouts, he will open and shoot 6 Bombs, 3 from each side. Badoomp, badoomp, badoomp. Olmec will now do this three times (ie 18 bombs total). He used to do it forever, but folks were really abusing this, so they tightened it up a little. Staying under is the safest place to be. He won't crash down until you destroy the orbs. Destroy the orbs (although watch out, Olmec's bombs sometimes destroy the orbs and he DOES crash down). Once he crashes down, he hops up, regrows the orbs and cycles the bombs again. You can milk bombs out of Olmec a few times to try and blow out chunks of the bottom level. You can Rope down and head to Temple at any point here, obviously. But for the Ankh, Knock out Olmec enough to get it down there. and now instead of bombs, Olmec is back to trying to squash you AND poops out UFOs one per side. Try to get a handle on things and get Olmec to splash into the lava, where he slowly sinks and you can enter one of the doors down there eventually and access the back layer to retrieve the Ankh and Parachute and go wherever you want.

76 hours in and took Hundun down. Patting myself on the back. Now to try and unlock the other characters and poke around some of the other areas. Found some possible seeds to get to Eggplant World. Might be too hard single player though.