Nuclear Throne Overview
This has been my main game for years, though I don't play that often anymore. This is a 2D shooter where you get to shoot a lot of mutant creatures. There's a bunch of characters to choose from, each with their own abilities, and there's some decent gun variety to play with.
Contents:
Overview
Your goal in Nuclear Throne is to reach the Nuclear Throne. I can tell where they got the inspiration for the game's name.
On your first run, you start off with two characters to choose from. You'll unlock more by reaching certain milestones, with each character having a distinct ability that gives them a unique advantage. You start off with a basic Revolver, and your task is to kill every enemy in the stage before progressing to the next one. Along the way you'll find better guns to play with.
Mutations are perhaps the most important mechanic in this game. These are essentially upgrades to your character that you get by leveling up. You level up by killing enemies and grabbing the rads they drop (little green radioactive bars), but you must grab them before they disappear. Mutations are rather simple, but they have a huge influence in the potential of a run. These range from simple things such as more player health, or less enemy health, to complete game-changers like having your guns reload almost instantly when killing enemies. Pair that with a slow but powerful weapon, and you've got a mass murder machine in your hands.
The way to the throne spans 15 stages in total, starting in 1-1 and ending in 7-3, and could take anywhere from 8 to 20 minutes, depending on your skill level. If you die along the way, you start from the beginning, with your starter weapon and no mutations. It may sound frustrating, but runs are short enough that you never lose a huge amount of progress.
This game is notorious for its difficulty. The good thing is that it mostly relies on player skill, rather than pure luck, and there's never a point where you're so overpowered that you steamroll everything in your way. One mistake is all it could take to end your run, so you gotta be on your toes at all times.
Mods I've made for Nuclear Throne
I've made a couple of mods for this game. I intend to document them all eventually, but for now, you can find downloads for them on my Itch.io page.
A lot of people ask about the custom sprites I use for Nuclear Throne, you can (hopefully) find a download here. Let me know if the link expires:
https://mega.nz/folder/dXBRkDYK#h2VPjnAQFMUDb0gCJwuLVQ
So far, I have documentation for the following mods:
My YouTube channel
I have a YouTube channel where I've mostly uploaded Nuclear Throne runs, in case you'd like to see what the fuss is all about.
Competition, and my place in the community
My role in the Nuclear Throne community nowadays is just being a name with some history attached. I learned how to make mods this year, which has been fun, I spend some time in the chat, and I very occasionally give tips to someone. I used to be way more active in that regard, but that's part of the past now.
There's a small, dwindling competitive scene for this game that I used to be part of. There's a mechanic that lets you loop the game over and over, with increasing difficulty each time. Some players try to loop as many times as possible and get as far as they can. There's two competitive aspects to this: the daily run, and the community leaderboard. If you do good enough, you can earn a spot in these leaderboards with your name on it. The daily is a different one every day, but the community leaderboard shows the top players' best runs overall, with the best runs in the world at the top.
I started playing this game casually in March 2020, when the COVID pandemic began. Grabbed this game on sale after someone recommended it to me, and then I got hooked. I got all achievements around 5 months in, and then I started playing for high scores. I had my first world record in December that year, with a Loop 10 Robot Thronesit, the best run for that character at the time.
If you look at that video, it's a whopping 4 hours of footage. Don't worry, I got a lot faster over the years, and other people got even faster. Some players can make it to Loop 12 in under 2 hours without really breaking a sweat. It's pretty awesome.
Over the years, I kept playing long runs, got more records, and eventually ended up at the top of the leaderboard, with a Fish 2-1 L21 run, the best run for this character at the time, and the 2nd best run in the world. It's been beaten recently as of writing this (September 2024), and now I'm 5th place in the global board, but I achieved something awesome.
I don't have the competitive drive anymore, or the time to play these long runs, and people have gotten insanely good as well.
The Nuclear Throne World Record, and my best attempt to explain it
The world record is a 1-1 L30 run by Master Sparky, and frankly, I don't think that's ever getting beaten. That run spanned 24 hours across 2 sessions. To explain how insane of an achievement this is, I'll try to explain some game facts, explain what a casual player can be expected to achieve, and what the previous records were:
- On average, it usually takes anywhere from 20 to 100 hours for someone to win the game for the first time.
- Once you enter the first loop, many things change. New bosses are introduced, enemies start appearing in other areas, and most importantly, elite cops start to spawn in every stage.
- Many aspects of the game scale with each loop, including but not limited to: enemy count, enemy health, amount of cops that can spawn per level. The player doesn't scale in any way to compensate, so as a result, the game becomes more difficult each loop.
- The farthest loop that most players can achieve is L2.
- L2 has a reputation for being an unforgiving, insanely difficult part of a run. Elite cops become extremely common, and due to being so dangerous and plentiful, they tend to be the most common run enders.
- In L3, the game changes on a fundamental level, by introducing a new type of enemy: the IDPD Freak.
- IDPD Freaks replace all types of cops. They were meant as run enders, but instead they allowed players to loop even further.
- This is due to a build involving two key weapons: The Ultra Shovel, and the Super Plasma Cannon.
- Combined, these weapons can plow through crowds of enemies, while handling bosses gracefully.
- The reason IDPD Freaks help this build, is because they drop rads, which normal cops don't. Rads are the ammo that the Ultra Shovel requires, and without a constant supply, it quickly runs dry, rendering it unusable.
- L6 is considered the point where "deeploop" starts. A player who reaches L3 can be expected to get here, since the difficulty between L3 and L5 is mostly the same.
- In L6, the main gameplay difference is that IDPD Freaks take 2 hits to kill with the Ultra Shovel. Bosses start ramping up in difficulty, and enemies fill the screen. The game also starts to lag consistently around this point, though with a powerful computer, you can keep full speed for a few more loops.
- Difficulty remains about the same until L10, with lag increasing steadily with each loop due to high enemy counts, and projectile counts in each level.
- L12 and further is known as "abyssal". Players who can get this far are a minority, and those who get to this point tend to get walled between here and L15, roughly.
- L18 and further are known as "master loops". Even fewer people can get here at all.
- In late 2019, Bosco set the world record at 0-1 L20, beating the previous record of 7-3 L18 by Master Sparky. This record stood for a year and a half before getting pushed again. This run took 12 hours.
- In April 2021, Gian tied this run with his own 0-1 L20, and with a higher kill count. Bosco responded by setting a new record the very next day, at 4-1 L20. This one stood until early 2022, where condiment king beat it with a 7-2 L20, falling just short of a L21 run.
- In the meantime, a meme record was set by NickNuclear in August 2021, with a 0-1 L25 as Big Dog (yeah, the Scrapyard area boss). This was done with a build that breaks the game by essentially making the player invulnerable, at the cost of sluggish, dull, monotonous gameplay, since Big Dog can only attack with very slow bullets and missiles. This was never really considered a true world record, but it's still a noteworthy run.
- Around this point in time, players have started figuring out faster gameplay, so those super deep runs no longer take the larger part of a day to achieve.
- In April 2022, Master Sparky got the fabled L21 run, being the first player to beat L20. 4 months later he went on to get a 0-1 L22 run, which wouldn't get beaten until June 2023, with a 2-1 L22.
- After a long grind, Wonderis, another excellent player who at the time had a 0-1 L21 best run, got 0-1 L25 as not Big Dog (he played Crystal, the best character). This run beat the previous record by almost 3 loops, and stood as the world record for almost 8 months.
- Before talking about the run that beat the 0-1 L25, I'll remind you that at this point in time, Master Sparky's best run is a 2-1 L22. This is the second best run in the game, with the best being the 0-1 L25. Nobody got any runs in between these.
- Before the L25 run, there was never a precedent of people skipping loops entirely in the world record progression, with the exception of L19. The L25 run skipped two loops completely. Wonderis also beat his own best run by 4 loops with this one.
- In June 9, 2024, Master Sparky set what's probably the last distance world record to be achieved in Nuclear Throne, with a 1-1 L30 run, ending in a suicide rather than a natural death.
- This run beat the previous global world record by 5 loops. Absolute insanity. But what I think is more insane is that this run also beat Master Sparky's previous best run by almost 8 loops. It's both the highest world record jump, and the highest personal best (PB) jump ever recorded.
- This run took 24 hours across 2 sessions. L29 sewers is infamous for having taken 2 hours to clear due to all the lag. This was likely the main reason Master Sparky didn't continue the run after beating Throne 2 in L30.
That's a lot of information to take in at once, and you probably won't understand everything I said. I don't expect you to, but I tried my best to explain. There's lots of game communities where legendary achievements like these happen, but I was there to see it in this particular one, and I think that's really cool. Enjoy this bit of nerding out.