Just a compact guide for miners and other lavaland dwellers who are too intimidated to fight bosses. Just like learning any other job in ss13 fighting these guys is easy once you know it.
The guide will assume you use an accelerator, but every boss will have a crusher addendum. I also advise you to take triple damage on your accelerator purely due to how bosses work - namely, you want to make the most use out of any openings. Crusher’s validity is further discussed in the first section.
Why the Crusher Sucks
- It’s big and two-handed.
- You can’t carry it unless you sacrifice your bag.
- It’s DPS is low and inconsistent. The damage is improved by upgrades but consistency is not.
- Boss melee timer exists.
- Cleaving Saw Exists
About 'Boss melee timer'
Every simplemob entity in the game has an inbuilt timer that determines when it makes a melee attack. Typically, an enemy’s opening is right after it moves, allowing you to quickly get in, melee, and get out without taking a hit.
For bosses, this is far more unreasonable. You must time your hit not only after the boss moves, but also when it’s actual attacks leave an opening. The boss’ melee attack is already devastating for most cases, and if you get hit with a regular attack you might be dead anyway. It will take you a long time to consistently learn this timing for very little gain beyond bragging rights, which are useless.
About Cleaving Saw
The cleaving saw does more damage than the crusher, fits in your belt slot, and hits in a radius with its open mode. It is simply better. (The Cleaving Saw is obtained from the Blood-Drunk Miner) Regular mode does almost no damage, but marks an enemy with bleed, which both modes will stack, and a fully stacked bleed detonates dealing stupid damage. The open mode absolutely decimates both mobs and bosses. It two-hits watchers and three-hits goliaths, killing legions instantly. Unless you have a rare tank build with insane healing, I advise simply using single open mode hits against everything, as it is enough to decimate your opponents. You can apply the same strategy as crushing against bosses, only you are walking in just for a single open mode hit, and not giving a fuck about backstabs. For the one exception look at Ash Drake’s cheese section.
On challenge and bragging rights + "optimal strategy"
I will keep this extremely simple. As a miner, your job isn’t just to play a challenging game. You have to get supplies to the station, and beyond that, plants, artifacts and artifacts to people who benefit from them, with various opportunities to majorly impact the round for everyone with what you find. If you want to fight every boss in hard mode, do it in a local instance. On a server with people on it, I thereby conclude that the only purpose of the crusher is to use it once on each boss for achievement collection’s sake, since it actively slows you down and endangers you.
Thus, here is the optimal strategy for getting those achievements over with:
- Wait for a round with good sci on it.
- Walk up to sci and ask for god nanites, explain you’re crushing megafauna for reasoning. It’s perfectly legitimate.
- KIll a drake normally. Or gum if you’re willing to crush him another round. Get the armor.
- Get like 5 cores and pens.
- Outheal the bosses’ melee hits.
- Hit the bosses until they die.
- Congratulations. Get your beecoins and never use the crusher again.
Coremaxxing, or how I learned to love the Necropolis
Using two legion cores in succession is not a true death sentence. Doing it inflicts you with a disease. The final symptom of the disease turns you into a legion, from which there is no recovery. The cure for the disease is right there on lavaland. You can spam cores on yourself to your heart’s content if you are losing a fight hard, as long as you are ready to eat fruiting cactus and leafy mushrooms like a pig afterwards. Vitrium Froth, the reagent inside these, will cause the disease’s stages to lower and finally cure it.
If you cannot find these plants for the love of you, drop a pod, buckle yourself to the stasis unit inside, and start yelling. Preferrably at other miners, cargo, and paramedics in that order. Once they arrive, get them to kill you before transporting to the station so you don’t become a legion on the way, then get cloned or brain-transplanted. For obvious reasons this is a last resort, since it means you not only had to use multiple cores, but also failed at curing yourself fast enough.
If you are getting rescued by someone particularly willing, you can give them a quest to gather cactus and leafy shrooms to cure you instead.
Hierophant
The Hierophant is designed to be fought immediately without upgrades. It deals mostly low damage and you can dodge all attacks without much bullshit. It gives you a great mining tool and perfect ores for starting out. I typically start with a fulton just to get the chest, ore box, and myself up after killing it. The hierophant deals burn damage.
Prep + General Plan
No prep beyond bringing heals if you care. Just get to its arena. General Plan includes simply dodging and shooting from a distance. That’s it.
Attacks
- It slowly moves towards you and never melees you. If you come too close, it releases a radial pulse. If you see a pulse coming, always run back.
- Chasers only vaguely track you. If you hate them, just run around/away. If you’re good, just dodge on reaction and ignore them unless they threaten your tile specifically.
- If it starts doing spawning crosses on you, you do not have to react based on the type of cross, moving one tile left/right and simply holding up/down will dodge both.
- The teleport attack does a lot more damage than anything else. If you have to choose between getting hit by it and a chaser, choose the chaser. Don’t lose a leg.
- If it is releasing a radial pulse without you triggering it by being close, it tends to release more than one. Wait them all out and don’t be baited to run back in.
- The teleport spam attack is the easiest attack for damaging the hierophant, as you simply dodge it by moving. If you are worried about its attacks, you can simply run from them and wait for the teleport attack, use it to smack hiero around, and repeat.
- If not confident, bring a core or a pen or even a burn patch. Since I actually hate tryharding I tend to always use my starter pen here just to have more breathing room.
Crusher
- Crushing the Hierophant is effectively the same exact fight, only with stricter timing, as you must wait out radial pulses fully unless willing to tank hits.
- If the hierophant is aligned to you vertically/horizontally, and you move one tile horizontally/vertically, it will move so that it is aligned to you again. You can then attack it from the side it moved from and get the backstab every time. This is easily repeatable once you get the timing.
- Hierophant’s last moved direction persists during teleport spam and triple chaser. Use it to get rapid backstabs in.
Player Cheese
- Hierophant’s huge radial attacks mean that it can be lured around lavaland to effectively mine for you. Just don’t get gibtonited.
- Hierophant’s attacks will aggro other entities that aren’t bosses. You can get it to fight goliaths and watchers, farm tendrils and purge swarmer nests among other things. You will have to lure it so that it hits them with an attack though.
- Just upgrade your accelerator before you fight it and it’ll take a comedically short amount of time to kill it. Same goes for having the saw.
Boss Cheese
- Hierophant’s attacks will briefly restrain you. This is normally of no consequence, only lasting a split second, but if you are stuck inside a chaser combined with another attack, you might just get stunlocked and die. Your one goal is to minimize successive hits. Do not tank the Hierophant.
- If there’s gibtonite around the arena, Hierophant’s attacks might detonate it and knock you down if you are too close. This usually also requires the gibtonite to be both extremely close and high-powered.
Blood-Drunk Miner
The BDM, for short, is a glass cannon enemy that chases you around very quickly. Notorious for being incredibly easy to cheese once you have some upgrades, but able to be killed immediately as well with a little preparation.
Prep + General Plan
If fighting normally, create a 1x1 tunnel with several loops. A loop is simply a square that goes around four rocks in the middle. Make a few of these.
If cheesing, have a core and pen ready in case of cheese backfire (more info in appropriate section).
Upgrade your armor or get boss armor. Craft a talisman or codpiece as well as bone bracers from the tribal tab and equip those.
If fighting normally, aggro him and run through the tunnel with loops. Bait him to go around the loops chasing after you, and hit him immediately after he fires his accelerator, then go back to running. If he teleports, just change direction. Taking a few hits is perfectly fine as long as you dodge most.
If cheesing, walk up to him, smack him, and tank it out, healing if necessary. Note that if using an accelerator, you can get two melee hits in between shots.
Attacks
BDM shoots his accelerator at you from a distance while constantly chasing you. He can teleport to catch you off-guard, and he can saw you in melee range. His closed saw does almost no damage. Usually, anyway. Note that you can, in fact, dodge his accelerator, and should always try to.
Crusher
This is the exact same fight in both cases, only with stricter timing if fighting normally as you have to walk up to him between his accelerator shots.
Player Cheese
What BDM is notorious for. If you walk up to this guy and hit him, he just starts sawing you for almost no damage, so if your accelerator is upgraded (or if you are crushing with a legion skull attached), you should simply kill him before he kills you. He might teleport a few times, only to go back to sawing.
This can, however, backfire, as noted in the Player Cheese section. This is why I suggest having upgraded armor and/or heals ready.
Boss Cheese
Ocassionally, he will not, in fact, saw you for no damage, and instead deal extremely formidable damage which will knock you out first unless your armor is good and/or you have cores/pens/nanites/whatever. Simply look at your health and you will be able to tell if he’s in “serious mode” after you take a few hits. You can cheese normally if prepared, otherwise it’s okay to start running and convert into a clutched regular fight, especially if your armor sucks. You can also just use a jaunter and say no to him immediately.
Ash Drake
Statstick boss. Extremely easy attacks that hit like a truck. Fireproof armor or extinguisher required unless you plan to dodge perfectly. Kills new players, gets laughed at otherwise. Can cheese you slightly.
Prep + General Plan
Have a large, open area ready, enough to walk around the drake and change directions without getting melee’d by it. Hiero arena works as long as you don’t get cornered, which might take getting used to.
You will be keeping your distance and taking potshots between the drake’s attacks. Simply knowing how to dodge its attacks is all it takes.
If you get set on fire and aren’t fireproof, use an extinguisher aimed at a wall/rock and stand next to it for a moment for consistent extinguishing. A legion core also instantly extinguishes, even if you won’t heal from it.
Attacks
- Drake will fire three-way flames towards you. The middle flame always aims at you, two others go to its diagonals in that direction. This attack is easiest to dodge if the drake is horizontally/vertically aligned to you, since you only take one step away to the side, and that’s it.
- Drake will cause fire to rain down combined with the attack above. This is clearly marked on the ground. Just don’t stand in the crosshairs. Might catch you off-guard with bad RNG.
- Drake will vanish and its shadow will appear over you. Lava will spawn under you after a small delay, then drake will land and immediately do the three-way flame attack. To dodge this, simply move, avoiding areas you moved in already. Do the simple sidestep once it lands.
- For its first phase 2 attack, the drake can fire radially in all directions. It will do this thrice. The first time, it might hit you by surprise. Keep away from the drake and simply stand aligned to it for the first and third burst of flames, as they will split and not hit you. The second flame will go straight for you if aligned, so do a simple sidestep, just like with three-way flames.
- For its second phase 2 attack, drake will appear over you again and trap you in an arena. It then marks a square you have to move in, covering other squares with lava. You can survive this attack if fireproof or fast on the healing and extinguishing, so don’t be too scared, just be ready to react if hit. It will do this thrice before landing on your location, which you simply move away from to dodge.
- Note: After either phase 2 attack, drake will follow you without attacking or meleeing for a short while. Typically enough to get four shots in.
Crusher
You are moving in immediately after the triple flames, getting a hit in right after the drake itself moves, and rushing back to get into position to dodge its next attack. You are probably going to get hit by radial flames at least once. Be prepared. Upgraded armor helps a lot against its melee attack, which is ridiculous. Overall, this is still the same fight, just with much tighter timing.
Player Cheese
No real cheese. Even if fireproofed, the fire still damages you on hit. Even if flying or lavaproofed, the arena still hurts when it appears. The most you can do is lure it to ashwalker ruins or the hierophant arena and kite it around indestructible walls, which will block flames for you and might make things easier. However, unlike a certain other boss, drake’s attacks are easily dodgable, so this is unecessary.
You can skip the last phase of the boss if you have the cleaving saw. After the drake does one of its phase 2 attacks, and starts walking toward you while not attacking, spam the saw on it while opening/closing. You will have enough DPS to straight-up kill it with two bleed detonations.
Boss Cheese
The drake can sometimes fire off double flame attacks, which might ruin your strategy if you don’t have heals or extinguisher ready. So uh…have them ready.
It also sometimes enters an enraged state which rapidly chases you. This is a death sentence and the trigger is convoluted/unknown. The drake originally had this mechanic tied to gibbing corpses, but gibbing is no longer a thing. You may now encounter this state at random with a miniscule chance if the planets align. How to survive? Have a core ready for the damage you’ll inevitably take when it rushes you, then run the fuck away until it cools off.
Bubblegum
Big numbers, challenging attacks, but very straightforward and a fun fight with no gimmicks. Has a deadly but rare bug.
Prep + General Plan
- Have a big area ready to run through. Not necessarily an “arena”, just lots of space to move through. Clear the space of gibtonite and avoid single-tile passages as they might kill you.
- Bring heals if you care.
- If you are an actual crazy person, bring a janicart with a buffer and speed potion applied. I have never seen this done but it’s simply an incredible thing to do.
Your plan is simple. Hit Bubblegum during its charges. When it’s between attacks, align yourself to it horizontally/vertically so it moves away instead of dodging diagonally, making it easier to hit during this as well. Make good use of your openings, memorize its attacks, don’t get cornered. If you’re standing on blood, keep moving. That’s it.
Attacks
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For its first phase 1 attack, Bubblegum spawns slaughterlings, potentially teleporting as he does so. Instead of fighting them, simply run away so they are off-screen, and they will not pursue you. Wait for Bubblegum to approach you and then continue the fight. If you trigger the slaughterlings, melee them as they die in 1 hit. Generally avoid actually dealing with this attack and always try to just avoid it by stepping back.
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For its second phase 1 attack, Bubblegum will mark your location, then dash towards it. It repeats this three times. You can easily hit gum during this attack if you aren’t in a tight situation.
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For its first phase 2 attack, Bubblegum will spawn three clones around you, then all of them move towards the marked location in the center. Bubblegum will repeat this attack a few times. Simply move to a direction not occupied by a clone. If you are in a single-tile tunnel, this attack might be undodgable. Don’t trap yourself.
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For its second phase 2 attack, Bubblegum will spawn a lot of clones in a large circle around you, then they all move towards the center. This is basically a quick time event and requires a quick and precise dodge to an unoccupied space that isn’t in a clone’s path.
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For its third phase 2 attack, Bubblegum performs its regular charge while some clones perform their own, with their own paths, usually from the sides. Simply run away from the marked areas towards a space with no clones in it. You can still hit gum easily during this attack if you are focused enough.
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Bubblegum’s first universal mechanic is becoming enraged. While enraged Bubblegum chases after you instead of retreating between attacks, moves faster, and takes no damage. All you have to do is keep your distance when this happens. He can be enraged during regular attacks, in which case it simply makes him invincible and doesn’t otherwise change them.
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Bubblegum’s second universal mechanic periodically tries to attack anyone standing on blood remotely. If you keep moving, this attack will always miss you. This means that if you are fighting gum in one set location instead of running through lavaland, you will also have to add constant movement to your strategy.
Crusher
Bubblegum’s melee timing is notoriously difficult. He will get hits on you seemingly at random when you approach to melee him. I advise stocking up on a large amount of healing items if you intend to fight Bubblegum with a Crusher. The fight is otherwise unchanged, the only difference being that you are risking a hit every time you try to damage him.
Player Cheese
None.
Boss Cheese
A bug can make Bubblegum’s charges cover a potentially infinite distance, making him run away from the fight in an instant while also essentially making the dash undodgable. You WILL take a shitton of damage to the face and potentially die, and there is no way to know if this bug is active until it happens. If you see him do this, just give up on the fight unless you have good armor and like…10 cores or something, and even then you gotta be ready to chase him across all of lavaland, and he might destroy everything on it, including your base.
Colossus
Fun fight, until he gets on low health, then he just instakills you, and you cannot fight him ever again if you reach this point unless you have a mech or range accelerator. Luckily, we can be devious about this. Player Cheese section will be excluded, as it is simply the go-to strategy. Boss Cheese explains why you do not want to fight this guy normally.
Prep + General Plan
Lure him to Hierophant’s arena and get him to go next to one of the 4x4 square walls. Keep a very large distance between yourself and him and habitually take cover behind rocks as you lure him away. Hierophant and mech plasma cutter are great ways to aggro him from far away. Slowly lure him around the 4x4 wall and take a shot every time he peeks through, immediately retreating behind the wall to lure him towards you again. Since his attacks have travel distance, you will never get hit, and he will die without posing any threat.
Attacks
Colossus announces his attacks before doing them. This is actually quite problematic as you’ll read about later.
- Lament fires off crosses, aimed in cardinal directions and diagonally, alternating between the two. This is the attack you are supposed to abuse to get easy hits on him.
- Retribution fires a shotgun attack in your direction. This will almost certainly instakill you if you are near him, and is hard to fully dodge even from far away without cover. So uh, use cover.
- Wrath fires shots all around him. RNG attack with random openings. Just be very far away and again, use cover.
- Judgment fires off shots in all directions in a spiral pattern. In phase 2 he does two spirals at the same time. This attack is actually very easy to dodge from a distance since you simply take single steps to the side every time a bolt appears.
- Die. This attack will spam bolts everywhere and kill you. You will die and be dead in the grave. Deceased. It lasts for a very long time and leaves him open afterwards…but you aren’t dodging this. If you see him even say “Die”, you are running away, waiting a minute, and never touching the colossus again unless you are in the Hierophant arena or have a mech. For more info see the cheese section.
Crusher
Identical strategy, however you now have to actually step up, which means you are also waiting for moments in-between his attacks. Basically immediately after he performs them. You also cannot hit him during “Die” at all anymore, and will have to wait it out. Annoying. Also, you risk melee attacks as usual so bring extra heals.
Boss Cheese
Okay. There are two problems here. The first problem is this: Colossus will let you know when he does the final attack by saying “Die”. However, you always want to run away from the Colossus, and he will do double spirals before this since he’s in phase 2. There’s a good chance you will simply not hear him say it, then, he will do what looks like Wrath, except twice (and then a lot more), and you’ll get hit when you approach him and die. So, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to medbay and get a health display thingy? Are you going to start counting the damage you’re doing? Are you going to stick uncomfortably close to the colossus just to hear him say it? What if you don’t have enough DPS to finish him off before he fires? Then the fight is over forever unless you have a mech anyway.
The second problem. If Colossus has entered his last phase where he exclusively performs “Die”, he will perform it immediately when aggro’d. Yes. You can walk in, and get die’d to the face before you even shoot. And yes, you can get obliterated as soon as you shoot him after you return, presumably from retreating from the last “Die” attack. You have three options here.
- Use a mech plasma cutter to hit him from a long-enough distance to safely run away from “Die”, then wait a minute and repeat.
- Go all the way to the station, put triple range on your accelerator, and use THAT to hit him from a long distance before running away, and repeat.
- Give up and leave him.
Of course, if you are in the Hierophant arena, and have lured him to a 4x wall, you can now avoid “Die” by simply kiting him around the wall, get hits in during his cooldown, and not worry about distance or even environment destruction.
TLDR, don’t fight Colossus normally.
Legion
Currently affected by a bug that makes it invisible and separates its sprites from the entity. In other words, you can only see the real legions on the GPS, while giant skulls that do absolutely nothing will clutter your screen. Do not fight unless over-prepared, as you cannot melee the legion since there is no sprite to target, and as mentioned, have to use your GPS instead of your eyes. You WILL get hit “randomly”.
Prep + General Plan
Have a huge part of lavaland clear. Bugged or not, legion is fought by luring skulls away from each other and dealing with each one separately. This is a fight of atricion.
The strategy is simple. Constantly run into, then away from the legion, and every time it starts chasing you, shoot it as it won’t spawn skulls to block shots with. Clear any skulls it spawns when it retreats. Easy but boring. Since Legion is invisible now, you will have to identify what it’s currently doing by seeing if skulls are spawning and when its location is getting closer to yours.
Attacks
- Retreats and spawns skulls. Legion does this when you approach.
- Spins and chases you, meleeing if it reaches you. Legion does this when you retreat.
Crusher
Actually impossible until the bug is fixed. But otherwise the same fight almost completely. Legion chases you anyway which means you will easily melee it during this. Of course, it’s less safe and legion’s bites are ridiculous. Bring heals. Yeah. That’s it.
Player Cheese
Just separate the skulls and don’t fight them together. Be patient. Is this even cheese?
Boss Cheese
The entire invisibility bug. Also, don’t get cornered.
Swarmer Beacon
The strongest entity on Lavaland. Continually spawns swarmers that retreat while firing laser or disabler shots at you, as well as yellow swarmers. Yellow swarmers have no slowdown on diagonal movement, meaning that if you are slowed (such as from the laser shots) they will catch you in any uneven terrain. A single melee hit from a yellow swarmer stuns you. Then you get teleported or killed. Even if teleported, you might end up in the spider room, where you get killed, or in the Syndicate base, where…fun rp might happen? Or you’ll get killed.
Swarmers will passively destroy stuff, including tendrils, and mine ores, potentially gettng stuck on gibtonite which is funny. On the upside, they will also bridge lava, but the lava bridge will slow you when walked on, so be careful about yellows and bridges. They might also destroy walls of structures like the arctic base and clown temple, which can be useful.
Prep + General Plan
Put cooldown on your accelerator instead of damage for once. Bring lots of heals. KEEP YOUR DISTANCE. One regular accelerator hit kills a blue/red swarmer. Three kill a yellow. Two upgraded hits kill a yellow. It’s better to have rapid fire and deal with them quickly.
Alternatively, get a mech. While inside a mech you cannot get attacked by yellow swarmers. Proceed to obliterate them with your plasma cutter.
Attacks
- Yellow swarmers have fast diagonal movement and rush you, instantly defeating you if they reach you.
- Blue and red swarmers shoot you with disablers and lasers. They can shoot their comrades by mistake.
- The swarmer beacon alerts all swarmers to go to its location once hit, and periodically spawns them. Do not be next to it, as it can spawn a yellow that immediately owns you.
Crusher
No. There isn’t even an achievement, last I checked.
Player Cheese
Bring a mech. Get help from security. Order guns from cargo. Fire bluespace artillery at them. Send slimes in to kill them. Start a crusade. Teleport bombs into the swarmer beacon.
On a serious note. You can lure Hierophant or Colossus into them, the former will kill swarmers en-masse, the latter will outright destroy the beacon if you get it to do a few attacks around it. Glorious and deserved.
Boss Cheese
One hit kill. Enough said.