Breaking “Crypt of the Necrodancer” for profit

Crypt of the Necrodancer is an indie game that recently celebrated its 7th birthday. I have played it for several thousand hours over the past 5 years, and have a handful of world records and former world records. Most of my proudest records come from score running – a way of playing the game that tries to maximize the coin score when the run is over. The story of those records is full of wacky game mechanics and shameless glitch abuse.

This post will talk about Crypt of the Necrodancer, what it is, some of its key mechanics, and how I and others completely reimagined score competition.

Crypt of the Necrodancer

Often simply called Necrodancer, the game focuses on making decisions to the beat of the music. Now, I tend to prefer to read blog posts like this without being forced to hear what the embeds are playing. For that reason, I’ll just link the soundtrack. For the proper experience, I invite the reader to keep that on in the background. All of the embedded videos will be silent.

With only four buttons, you can express every possible decision. This allows players to use a dance pad to play the game, if they so desire. I play on my laptop, which means I’m using arrow keys, or some equivalent like numpad 1235.

Characters

Your inputs control a character who is navigating the crypt. In typical roguelike fashion, the crypt is full of enemies who want you dead, and items that help you survive. The primary character is Cadence, who is navigating the crypt to find answers about her mother’s death. Her official appearance is below, and underneath that, the pixel art representing her in game.

One run of all-zones-mode as Cadence takes you through 4 zones (5 in the DLC), and can be completed in 10-20 minutes. A zone has four floors, the last of which is a boss.

There are other playable characters besides Cadence. They all have to navigate the same crypt, though with slight modifications. An all zones mode run as Monk, for example, adds a death condition from picking up gold coins, but then gives you one item for free in each shop.

One special character is Bard. Instead of moving to the beat, Bard gets to move whenever he wants. Enemies move one frame later, and then await his next move. This turns Necrodancer into a turn-based strategy game, with no rhythm element (but still an absolutely bangin’ soundtrack). Bard will be useful later in this post.

Mechanics

The floors that comprise the crypt are procedurally generated. When playing, you are making decisions, not executing a memorized route. A floor has 6-10 rooms with enemies in them, and one of those rooms has the exit stairs. The exit stairs are guarded by a miniboss, which you have to defeat to unlock the stairs.

Example gameplay

To dive into a couple of other mechanics, let’s just look at a screenshot during gameplay.

There is a lot of information on the screen. I have:

• An obsidian shovel to break down walls
• A titanium rapier for “attack”, which is a useful weapon
• Chainmail armor for “body” which reduces damage from hits
• A monocle for “head” which shows me what items I would get from in shops and crates
• Explorer’s boots for “foot” which make it safe for me to go on certain tile types
• A torch of foresight for “torch”, which illuminates traps and other hazards
• A ring of regeneration for “ring”, which recovers one heart of health each time I exit a floor
• A handful of “charms” which don’t have an outline box, and live in between items and health
• 3 filled hearts, but 9 total hearts (I took some damage)
• 1,315 gold coins
• Two spells
• An apple for “item” which I can eat to recover health
• 5 bombs that I can use to create an instance of area of effect damage
• 9:36.46 elapsed during this speedrun
• Coin multiplier: 2, meaning that I get double gold from enemy kills. If I miss a beat, this resets to 1, if I get 5 kills it increases to 3. It caps at 3 in all-zones mode.
• My run has reached depth (zone) 4, level 2.

I am also standing a few tiles away from open exit stairs (I already defeated the miniboss), and there are scattered coins, enemies, and hazards around me. Here is me playing through the following floor using this build:

One core principle

One thing that I absolutely love about this game, is that it is designed to be completely fair. Enemy design revolves around the idea that you should be able to fight you way through any floor without missing a beat, without taking damage, and without needing any items beyond your starting build. It’s still brutally challenging and unforgiving, but not unfair.

There are also plenty of ways to play imperfectly. Because of how fast the song moves, finding the perfect move in time is a challenge. Plus, if you miss the beat, enemies will move without you and leave you a step behind. With practice though, making sense of what happens around you and making good enough decisions, comes much more automatically. And items help too, so that you are less punished for mistakes.

Useful items

There are around a hundred items in the game, and I am not going to list them. But the example above included nearly every possible equipment slot for items, excluding familiars which will come up later. Let’s focus first on score, and then particular items that help you get a good score.

I had around 1,300 gold in the clip above, and left a lot of gold behind as I cleared the floor. That gold comes from defeated enemies, or naturally spawns on the ground, or is revealed by destroying the walls of a shop. If I were trying to maximize score with this example run, I might have had around 13,000 gold, ten times higher, at this point in the run. I would also have tried to get a much different build.

Shovel

The best shovel for high score runs, is a shovel that can destroy shop walls. Most shovels just “tink” into high tier walls, causing the player to miss a beat and leaving the wall intact. But the blood shovel will dig anything, taking health from the player in exchange if it is a high tier wall. At 3 or 4 shop walls for a half of a heart, it’s a very good deal. Other comparable combinations of items exist, but the only way to get this value with a single item is with the blood shovel.

Head

Unfortunately for our dear friend the shopkeeper, there is one headgear that reigns supreme in score running. And for you to get it, the shopkeeper must die. The shopkeeper becomes aggressive as soon as the player deals any damage to it. You need a serious plan to deal 9 damage without getting hit. But if you succeed, you get the crown of greed.

The crown of greed will reduce your gold total by one on every single beat. In exchange, every gold pile you pick up while wearing it, counts double. Since you can easily gain more than one gold per beat on average throughout a run, this headgear is optimal.

Killing the shopkeeper means that every shop for the rest of the run is empty, but the gold walls still spawn. So you can get all their gold, at double the value, and the downside is that you are on your own for items.

Ring

Here is where things start to get interesting. The best shovel and the head slots have been pretty universal through the history of score running. You need to break shop walls, and you need to wear the crown of greed. But which ring is best, depends a lot on your strategy. Introducing the contenders:

From left to right:

• Ring of mana – spells have stronger effect and reduced cooldown. The heal spell pictured is supposed to recover 0.5 heart, but recovers 1 heart when paired with mana. Every enemy counts as two kills towards its cooldown. The health can be used to dig more shop walls, making this highly valuable.
• Ring of regeneration – another way to recover health consistently, without requiring a spell.
• Ring of luck – improves the contents of crates, leading to more healing items and more gold spawns. Typically better than regeneration, but with higher variance.
• Ring of gold – get an extra gold from killing an enemy, and all gold on the ground automatically goes into your inventory whenever you move.
• Ring of becoming – the item tip for this ring is ???, meant to be one of the great mysteries of the game. When wearing it, any damage will cause you to instantly die. There is no benefit. But, if you transmute that ring, it is the only way possible to get the ring of wonder. Ring of wonder is extra damage, defense, an extra heart container, strongly reduced spell cooldown, and regeneration effect. The item tip of +ALL is a decent description. However, it still lacks features of other rings, which is why it is not the one best ring.
• Ring of courage – more on this later!
• Ring of shadows – another ring whose item tip is ???, and whose effect feels only negative. More on this later as well.

When I started playing the game, the agreed upon best score rings were either ring of gold or ring of wonder. Wonder was the dominant strategy, but when the DLC was released, some of its behaviors were modified to be less powerful, leaving ring of gold the most common take.

Everything else

With blood shovel, crown of greed, and ring of (gold/wonder), you can pretty reliably get over 20,000 gold in a Cadence run. You have to full clear the floor, dig the shop, pick it all up, and work quickly to avoid losing gold to crown of greed. Additionally, you want to avoid missing any beats as it resets the coin multiplier. A gold weapon gives you better gold drops. Shrines can change the layout of future levels, providing a harder challenge with better gold reward.

Every day there is a “daily challenge” which puts every player in an identical dungeon, competing for the highest score. With one shot at the seed, top players would often get 20,000-25,000 gold, and on extremely rare seeds, 30,000.

The advent of courage

The main feature of this blog post is going to be ring of courage, and how we used it to change score running completely. The story begins way before I first played the game. A player who goes by gjchangmu built a score analyzer tool, last touched in November 2015. It probably does not work anymore. The tool determined what portion of a player’s gold in the run came from enemies, from shop walls, from lost gold in crown of greed. The tool usually worked well, but when gjchangmu played using the ring of courage, they found a strange miscount.

Gold duplication

gjchangmu posted their findings to reddit on October 19, 2015. When there is gold on the ground, an enemy on top of that gold, and you kill that enemy with courage, the pile on the ground counts double.

For example, if you have a pile of 80 gold, and you kill an enemy on top which ordinarily drops 8 gold, you end up with 168. No crown of greed involved, and in fact adding a crown of greed re-doubles it.

The difference is completely due to ring of courage, here’s the same without picking it up:

The key to understanding this behavior, is the overlapping gold flyaways. There is both an 80 and an 88 gold pickup. To the game, you picked up the 80 gold by moving into that tile. Then it updated the value of the tile to 88, because of the new kill. You earn the 88 as a separate gold pickup, which doesn’t pay attention to the fact that 80 of it is already in your pockets.

Bounce traps

In Necrodancer, you can only pick up one thing per frame. This includes piles of gold, so if you pick up two of them like in the situation above, this happens on two separate frames.

Remember how the character Bard works? Instead of caring about the beats, everything just happens a frame after he moves? That includes bounce traps, which move the player to a new tile. So as Bard, you can put gold on a bouncetrap, collect it by killing something with ring of courage, and not pick up the new pile.

Not picking up the pile, allows this to be so much more powerful. If I can have every enemy on the floor be as valuable as the sum of every enemy killed before it, that’s quadratic growth. Fortunately, there is no infinite growth mechanism hiding in this – the enemy needs to drop gold for the glitch to work and it’s already required that only finitely many things on each floor drop gold. But in a perfect floor with 50 enemies, the first one I kill counts 50 times. The second one 49, the third 48..

That is, assuming there’s any way at all to coordinate such a thing.

Practicality

A couple years went by, this glitch was never fixed. People knew it existed, but didn’t see any way to make it more worthwhile than ordinary ring of gold or ring of wonder runs. Only one person even tried to make a demo of using it in a run. That person is Grimmy.

This run took place in “seeded mode”, and Grimmy had found a seed with immediate ring of courage and boots of lunging. Grimmy put the single highest gold dropping enemy on the bounce trap first – the leprechaun. You get one of them per run under specific conditions, but the resulting gold drop can be as high as 500. I think in Grimmy’s video they get 475.

The character absolutely needs to be Bard, and not just because of the frame timing. The video above is half an hour long and all takes place on the same floor. Any other character would run out of song, at which point the game forcibly drops you to the next floor.

Grimmy gets 10,860 gold on the first floor of the game, in Bard seeded mode. Then the run ends. The game has an anti-cheat detection which assumes that this much gold involved cheating. I think Grimmy made this video primarily to show how you can break that limit with only the game’s mechanics. Setting a world record with it was not their goal.

But it was mine.

DLC

In 2017, Brace Yourself Games announced the Amplified DLC for Necrodancer, adding zone 5 and many new items. This is when I started to play the game much more seriously. I studied up on the best known strategies, and one of the first things to catch my attention was how courage duping was under-used.

Part of that is community attitude. It might be using the game’s mechanics, but it definitely isn’t the game’s intended mechanics. Games everywhere have their quirks and bugs, and people argue about what should and shouldn’t be allowed, but I really believe in having at least some runs which play by “Any%” rules. If you can do it, do it.

I wanted to see how close we could come, to this theory of quadratic growth.

Important changes

With the DLC, courage ring got a slight change. You might think “ah they changed the ring, they must have fixed the glitch”. Nice thought, but nope. The order of operations which cause the dupe glitch to exist, is more fundamental and not built into any code specific to the item. So, it stayed. Instead, they removed the +1 damage that used to accompany the ring.

The more important changes in the DLC, were the addition of zone 5, earth spell, and familiars.

Zone 5

Adding an entire zone made runs take longer, and score better. The zone itself had some key new enemies, particularly skulls. A skull is one enemy, but when attacked it splits into three independent skeletons. Perfect for quadratic growth, as you get to dupe 3 times instead of only one. There were also gold gorgons, which turned into statues that could be destroyed for a large gold pile.

Also new to zone 5, were walls that rose back up after you dug them with a weak shovel. Blood shovel counted as a weak shovel.

Earth Spell

You can carry up to two spells during a run. Using them is free if you have the required number of kills. If you don’t, you can pay health to use them anyway. Spells interact with ring of mana and ring of wonder as described above. There were 6 spells before the DLC: freeze, shield, heal, fireball, transmute, and bomb. In the DLC, we got two new ones: pulse and earth. Earth spell summons walls on the 8 tiles around your character. Any enemies on those tiles get pushed back, or if they cannot, they die.

Familiars

With the DLC, came one new way to enhance your player character, different from all the build options before. Rare items called “familiars” allowed you to put an effect permanently on one tile adjacent to your character. If you got the shopkeeper familiar, and positioned it to your left (for example), then wherever you go, the tile to your left automatically collected gold. If it collected a large enough pile of gold, it would give you a heal. The ice spirit familiar (or as we call it, snowbro), provided a short term freeze on enemies on that tile. Dove familiar teleported enemies. Rat familiar dealt a single damage.

These 4 familiars could be placed in any direction from your character, one tile away. The effect was permanent and persisted across floors. You now escorted around these incorporeal blobs adjacent to your character, in runs where you were lucky enough to get them.

Theorycrafting

Maybe it takes a mad scientist to see potential here. After all, there were dozens of changes in the DLC beyond just these. But combining these 3, with the known courage exploit, suddenly changed the quadratic growth dream from impractical, to maybe possible.

The key thing that this all enabled, was an effective quarantine. If you ever tried to do a courage run before the DLC, the place it fell apart was when every enemy on the floor wanted to chase you down. You can’t carefully line them up on the bounce trap. Nobody waits their turn. Grimmy used the obscene movement of boots of lunging to keep away from the swarm in their 1-1 demo, but even that doesn’t work in a sufficiently crowded level. The dream was to maybe find a sealed room with an orderly collection of enemies, and get them all in a row after setting up the original pile. But you couldn’t make that happen.

Now you could. Dove familiar teleported enemies to a new part of the level. If you kept (for example) the shop unopened, you could just keep teleporting everything away until every enemy was in the shop. You could create rooms of your own design as well, using earth spell. And in zone 5, you could even go in and out of those rooms without destroying the walls making them up. It was finally possible to execute the perverse dream of the Bard score runner: not killing things.

Item Farming

As is typical in roguelikes, the more “perfect” a build is, the less likely you are to ever get it when it matters. We now had a long list of things that we absolutely needed in order to pull off a specific strategy. Familiars were rare, ring of courage was rare, earth spell was rare. The final barrier to this strategy being practical, was getting the full build together.

This is where the ring of shadows comes into play. Buckle up because this broken game is about to break even harder.

Separate from the main shops on the level, are 8 kinds of secret shops. They appear once per run, as cracked walls. Breaking the wall reveals a travel rune where you are taken away to a secret shop. Killing the main shopkeeper does not remove any secret shops from the game, so a score runner will often get items from these when needed. Specifically important here is the conjurer.

Conjurer – ordinary mechanics

Breaking a dirt wall with a crack in it, may reveal the conjurer. The conjurer displays 7 item slots – head, body, feet, torch, attack, shovel, and ring. You can step on any one of the tiles to pay the listed price and get a random item of that type. 100 gold is the cheapest possible price, which happens when you get a conjurer in zone 1. Every item you buy doubles the price for the next one.

This is pretty expensive. Even if you had 10,000 gold, you could only buy 6 items from this conjurer. And you probably wouldn’t want to, as those gold coins are your score.

Ring of Shadows

What if I told you payment was optional?

The idea behind the ring of shadows is that “you can’t see me, I can’t see you”. The drawback is extreme – you’re basically playing blind. But, the shopkeepers cannot see you. And so they cannot charge you for their services.

The conjurer, for some strange reason, will still give you items. But you don’t have to pay for them. If you are Bard so that time doesn’t run out on you, you can put hundreds of items in the tiny space. After 12 items, every one of them spawns on the center tile. Here is Bard, wearing ring of shadows, conjuring many, many weapons.

Transmute

This can get you items that go in those 7 slots, but it cannot give you familiars or spells (or extra health). But no worry. If you have hundreds of items, you can cast a transmute spell/scroll/tome to turn them into hundreds of different items. The game really wasn’t prepared for the player to be doing this. Introducing the item buffet:

Obviously this was a nightmare to try to force a specific build with. Having access to nearly every item in the game is sweet, but only if you can leave the floor with the right ones. So we used a more controlled, and even more time consuming method.

Throwables

A couple of weapons can be thrown. If you throw a weapon, it ends up on the ground at the nearest wall in the direction you throw it. When you pick up an item, you put down whatever item it replaces. Combining these facts, you can throw a dagger (or any other weapon that can be thrown), go pick up a longsword (or any other weapon that cannot be thrown), and then go pick up the original dagger. The longsword is now in a specific position of your choosing.

By swapping for throwables, all weapons can be positioned anywhere, around the conjure shop and around the floor proper. With more space, you can spread out the items. The mass transmute only works if you have access to “greater transmute”, which requires either ring of mana, or a transmute scroll. This allows it to hit every item on the floor instead of the tiles around your character.

Blueprint for a Necrodancer world record

So. Pick Bard, go into all zones mode. Focus on getting ring of shadows and a transmute item. Hope that the conjurer shows up quickly after you get both of these things. Spend 45 minutes on the conjurer floor, buying free weapons and throwing them at the walls. Transmute these in bulk into other items. Pick up multiple familiars, earth spell, heal spell, ring of courage, blood shovel, plate armor. Don’t pick up heavy plate because it means you don’t bounce on bounce traps. Then play to zone 5, and make quarantine rooms. Put a lot of gold on the bounce trap, and make quadratic growth using courage duping.

Simple enough.

First records

Because all this theory developed over the course of a few months, the first people only did parts of it. The first world record to use courage was by CANCEL, with 33,811 gold in July 2017. Then I got a run with 37,030 and another with 44,134. None of these had yet optimized the quarantine process, and were making do with whatever build we found along the way.

The first shadow conjurer mega build run happened on the first of August 2017. It wasn’t even in the ordinary Bard all-zones-mode category, it was in Bard “randomizer mode”. But this is the run where, live on twitch, I figured out new and effective ways to use this build. And I came out of it with 141,937 gold. The first ever 6 digit single character score run.

Part of this score is attributable to randomizer, which tends to randomize enemies into high gold drops quite often, and can greatly increase the number of skeletons contained in a zone 5 skull. So as cool as this was, the big number might not be replicable in ordinary all zones mode. At least, that’s what we thought at the time.

The Pawnbroker

On August 27th, I had a nice run going. I got the complete build out of a zone 4 shadows conjurer with transmute. It looked like this was on track for world record. I set up the leprechaun, began the process of pulling enemies out of quarantine. Then I choked it, ate the gold pile, and lost effectively all my progress. I decided to go throw the run, world record seemed not possible anymore. There’s another secret shop called the Pawnbroker, where you can sell items. As luck would have it, the Pawnbroker was on the floor that I failed.

I sold all the items I could sell, and then tried to die to the Pawnbroker itself. But dove familiar thwarted that plan. As soon as the Pawnbroker became aggressive, it landed on dove and teleported away, into the level proper.

That was an aha moment!

After the leprechaun, the Pawnbroker is the second highest gold dropping enemy in the game. Score runs always tried to kill it when they could. But this little mistake and subsequent intentional failure, showed us that you could theoretically get its value dozens of times with courage duping. All you needed to do was send it into the level, and control it carefully along with the other quarantined enemies.

New record

I was able to put that idea together later that same day, on a new attempt. Entering the final dungeon of the seed, I had barely 10,000 gold. But I had the build, and I had not yet created a leprechaun. And since I was keeping track of secret shops, I also knew Pawnbroker had to be on that final dungeon.

First I set up the quarantine and surveyed the level for the bounce trap I would use. Next I created a leprechaun and put its gold on the bounce trap (didn’t get as much as was possible, I think only 375). Then I teleported the Pawnbroker and added its 300 gold. Finally, one enemy at a time, I grew the pile from there, taking its existing value each time. On just a single floor, I gained 98,233 gold.

That run more than doubled the world record, from 44,134 to 112,966. The second highest on the leaderboard was still 33,811. It was absolute domination. And I still kicked myself over mistakes. Mistakes that cost tens of thousands of gold, like the imperfect leprechuan.

I didn’t immediately feel the need to improve it, but eventually I wanted to try.

Running away with it

In April the following year, I updated Bard score to 146,965 with quadratic growth on all three floors of zone 5. This vod actually still lives, where some of the others are lost to the ages. The run was actually done as part of a multi-character score attempt, which you can opt into as a special mode. Each individual character counts towards all zones for that character, so it was the true Bard world record, but I got to get credit for the multi-character score world record in the same run, largely due to having an absurdly high Bard score.

Nothing specifically prevented you from doing quadratic growth on other floors. I had become comfortable doing it in zone 5, but it was time to push it further. I added in “zone 4 duping” to my plan. This required getting the build slightly earlier, and made the run longer. We are talking 3 hours for one run, long. But it worked, the first world record to get quadratic growth on all 6 floors from zones 4 and 5, was 155,114 in September 2018. And the next, in early October, broke the 200k barrier.

This is the only surviving screenshot from zone 5 of that run. I don’t even have the end screen because it was once again in multi-character mode. But it’s a beautiful sight. So many quarantined enemies to lure to the bounce trap. The final score was 209,615.

Finally, other people

I was a pioneer, in a sense. But I was also spending a lot of my time just playing Bard score. Other people did not feel interested in doing the same. These runs are all multiple hours, and the process of resetting until you have a seed with all the right criteria (some of which aren’t revealed until you see, e.g., the pawnbroker in zone 3 where it’s basically useless), is discouraging. And if you make a mistake late in the run, the effort all goes to waste.

I dropped the category at this point, basically daring others to come try and match me.

Hokuhokureiha

The first person to take me up on that challenge was Hoku, a rising Japanese player who would go on to become an absolutely dominant score runner. Hoku’s early progression was a little hidden from the English-speaking community, but when his scores would show up on the leaderboards, we would notice. In December 2018, I lost the Bard score world record.

Hoku uploaded the zone 4 and zone 5 of his run to youtube. All of the strategy from my run was present, plus a little bit of innovation. He used crates from the level to improve the bounce trap management. In his words, I taught him all of the Bard score know-how. I made a strategy and he chased it. There would be more.

seanpwolf

seanpwolf started practicing courage dupe meta for Bard score in late July 2019. They took the world record shortly afterward, with 250k. One key feature of this run was that it got the entire build in zone 1, and did quadratic growth in zone 2, in addition to zones 4 and 5. There were still some pretty fundamental barriers to effectively duping zone 3, but with a new zone of possibility, the scores climbed ever higher.

Siveure briefly, then Hoku again

Siveure improved it to 268k in August 2019, but only duping zones 4 and 5. He got fantastic enemy generation on the floor with the Pawnbroker, in zone 5. Hoku struck back though, and improved it to 284k in November. This stood as the world record for a bit, until the newest innovator and current world record holder finally showed up and started chasing perfection.

Ocre307

Ocre gets her own section in this post. Watching her play, I feel like everything I ever discovered is just obvious, as are dozens of things that I never would have considered possible, or considered at all. She has the most complete knowledge of Bard score, that I have ever encountered. And her scores show it.

The current Bard score world record is 388,518, by Ocre. Two other people have managed to break 300k, namely Hoku and Ancalagor, but the world record has been Ocre’s ever since she first took it in May 2020.

Lep delay

Possibly the most impactful strategy Ocre has developed, is “lep delay.” I’ve glossed over a little of how the leprechaun actually works, up until now. The leprechaun spawns the very first time you leave a pile of 50 gold or more, for 7 beats. Until you have seen the leprechaun, every large gold pile is at most 7 beats from turning into a leprechaun and running away.

Once you have summoned the leprechaun by leaving a gold pile, you can do various things to wrangle it and extract its full 500 gold. I’ve worked out some strategies to make the 500 gold reliable, but they still feel mathy and complex. Ocre executes them like it’s nothing.

Now, the common knowledge has been that when duping, there is a large pile of gold sitting on a bounce trap, that you do not pick up. This only works if you have already summoned the leprechaun. This in turn means that you don’t get to dupe on early zones and still get a zone 5 leprechaun, where you earn the most from it.

With lep delay, you can get the best of both. Ocre worked out that at the expense of a lot of health (but not unreasonably much), you can get away with performing quadratic growth while the pile is never uncovered for 7 consecutive beats. You can get a zone 5 leprechaun at no opportunity cost. She built other strategies around this plan, and the category evolved.

Warlocks and bombers and other troublesome enemies

Zone 4 is filled with enemies with retaliatory effects. Some of those make it hard to use them for duping. Warlocks exchange your tile with theirs when killed. Bombers drop a live bomb on the tile where they are killed. Each of these effects would ruin a gold pile on a bounce trap. I had a few theoretical ideas of how to use them in a Bard score run, Ocre had more practical ones. She uses them in runs now.

Additionally, prompted by some of Ocre’s theorycrafting about warlocks, a group including Grimmy, Ocre, lith and myself discovered a way to duplicate gold without ring of courage. It’s still subject to the same limits – you need to add gold to a pile while collecting it on the same frame. Some of the techniques are literally frame perfect, and aren’t yet used in runs. That’s a story for a different time, but you can watch a youtube video about it here.

Other characters

It’s always been possible to use some portion of the Bard score meta on Cadence. Any character that gets ring of courage, can dupe. When on a bounce trap, non-Bard characters will need proper sub-beat timing, which is a lovely feature of Necrodancer responsible for a whole mess of non-beat-related mechanics. This, plus the inherent time pressure of the fast paced beats and the finite songs, make the ceiling much lower for duping runs on Cadence, or Diamond, or Dorian, or Mary or Nocturna..

These are all characters where Ocre now holds the world record. Cadence in particular is 50,124, far higher than my pre-shadow-conjurer Bard score world record that had all the time in the world.

Final thoughts

I guess I’m in the best place a former world record holder can be. I have my name attached to this little bit of history, as the guy who took the category from where it used to be, into the new age. But I am also no longer in the spotlight, having ceded the throne to an awesome new generation.

The landscape of score running changed forever, with the advent of courage. Few characters are truly safe from courage duping, and those that are may be threatened in the future by newfangled frame-perfect dupe methods. Synchrony promises to allow a version of Necrodancer with mod support, including the option to fix bugs like courage duping. That may be nice for some, but I’ll always love the way we broke Necrodancer for profit.