Vampire Survivors Notes

Mini-Review

Vampire Survivors appeals if you enjoy:

making your own fun with:
- sandbox gameplay and ridiculous gamebreaking (e.g. shooting absurd numbers of projectiles at enemies), and
- challenge runs with self-imposed handicaps (e.g. completing a certain level with only one weapon),
exploring the charming aesthetic design, and
hunting for achievements or unlocks.

There isn’t really a structure with the game, there isn’t much of a story, and unless you intentionally handicap yourself, the game becomes too easy very quickly.

The game engine feels like it’s made to challenge you to break the game as hard as you can. It’s very well-optimized for absurdly huge enemy hordes, absurdly-upgraded weapons, and absurd numbers.

The game’s charm is not to be underestimated. It is intentionally janky, weird, and random. It’s fun to explore the levels, it’s fun to see what happens when you push weapons as far as they can go, it’s fun to unlock characters, it’s fun to see what happens on screen when you discover unlocks/secrets. If the sandbox gameplay doesn’t appeal to you, you can still get a lot out of the game this way.

References

Early/Mid-Game Progression

Generally, you progress by going through:

the unlocks menu,
the secret unlocks (you can unlock the menu for it to make it easier to track), and
relics.

If you’re an extreme min-maxer who’s looking for the most optimal path through the game, I’m not too sure what the exact optimal path is since I went into this game very blind and just stumbled upon everything, or learnt of things through a friend.

But here’s a rough list of key things that I think you should look into, roughly in chronological order (but I could be wrong on the order), and assuming you own all DLC:

You should be aware that weapons can be evolved.
- There’s a lot of text on that wiki page, but all you need to know to start out is that most base weapons need a certain passive item to allow it to evolve into a new stronger weapon.
Relic: Randomazzo (Unlocks Arcanas)
Weapon: Santa Javelin
- A really strong weapon.
Weapon: Phas3r
- A really strong weapon that attacks the whole screen.
Weapon: Four Seasons
- A really strong weapon that attacks the whole screen.
Relic: Yellow Sign
- Treasure chests that can contain evolutions now appear silver. Very useful for planning your build during a run.
- It’s also required to see certain secrets/events. May as well get it early.
Character: missingN▯
- There is a cool “exploit” where if you get greed to under -100% and you collect a coin, it will give you a ridiculous amount of gold. Once you pull off this trick, gold should no longer be a problem for all practical purposes.
- I recommend spending your excess gold on Golden Eggs for some of your favourite characters. You’ll probably want an auto-clicker until you have access to Eggman.
Eggman and Healer
- Eggman and Healer aren’t really unlocks, but they appear in Moongolow under certain circumstances.
- Eggman will allow you to convert all your gold into golden eggs in a single click.
- Healer notably lets you remove all movement speed buffs provided by golden eggs. This is important because you’ll literally make the character unplayable if it has too much movement speed.
- If you use the missingN▯ gold trick once and you convert all of it into golden eggs, you’ll probably end up with around 10,000,000,000 golden eggs. (BEWARE: You might need a beefy computer. 10 billion eggs is no joke.)
Relic: Great Gospel (Unlocks Limit Break)
- Limit Break lets you continue to upgrade weapons beyond the normal cap.
Relic: Seventh Trumpet (Unlocks Endless Mode)
- Stops the reaper from coming after you when the stage timer ends.
- Some things must be unlocked by going beyond the stage timer.
Relic: Gracia’s Mirror (Unlocks Inverse Mode)
- It inverts the map layout and makes the stage harder.
- Some things can only be unlocked with Inverse Mode.
Character: Megalo Menya Moonspell
- This character is invulnerable but cannot be used beyond the time limit. It’s very useful for cheesing your way through a lot of unlocks.
Relic: Darkasso (Unlocks Darkanas)
- Darkanas are essentially just more Arcanas.
- Some of these Darkanas can be quite game-breaking.
Darkana: Moonlight Bolero (VI)
- You get a lot of chests very quickly, allowing you to quickly upgrade/evolve your weapons.
- It also keeps giving you Arcana chests and Black chests, allowing you to obtain all the Arcana and Passives in a single run.
Darkana: Hail from the Future (X)
- Among other things, this gives you a bunch of Candyboxes and Arma Dios (not infinite though), allowing you to either get a lot of weapons/passives quickly, or get more weapons/passives than the 6 slots can usually allow.
Beyond this point, you’re basically at end-game! Just go and explore and unlock everything else! It’s a fun game!

I won’t tell you how you should unlock those or carry out certain tricks. All the information for that is on the wiki or by Googling.

There’s a lot that I’m leaving out here because you’ll probably end up running into things yourself, or you’ll find builds on the internet and you’ll look up the unlocks for them yourself.

End-Game Gold Farming

Starting Off

Do the missingN▯ gold trick. This will get you an absolutely absurd amount of gold to start your gold farming journey with, and it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort.

Unfortunately, the missingN▯ gold trick isn’t something you can use to get even more gold. You’ll need to move on to…

Main Gold Farming Strategy

Put all your gold into golden eggs for Sammy, farm gold with Sammy in Moongolow, then reinvest the gold into golden eggs for Sammy. Rinse and repeat until you’re satisfied (or you hit the golden eggs cap).

What Doesn’t Work

My earliest attempt at gold farming was to use Scientist Mina, set to two weapons only, and select greed to scale per level. The most effective weapon I found was Seraphic Cry. I tried putting all weapons on and this was the one that consistently did magnitudes better than any other weapon. Even with Mina at 1.5M eggs, the rate of gold earning was nothing compared to Sammy at only 0.5M eggs (and Sammy only gets so much better as you keep reinvesting the gold). Mina also seems to lag my computer and I hit a cap of about level 13000 before the gold plataued and you’d have to quit and re-enter the stage. Don’t gold farm with Mina. Just go straight to Sammy.