This guide focuses on quality of life tips and tricks that I have found while playing Downpour. These can vary from crafts and playstyles to less annoying routes in certain areas. This guide contains spoilers for Downpour!
Contents
Quality of Life Tips for Each Downpour Slugcat
Table of Contents
Gourmand
Artificer
Rivulet
Spearmaster
Saint
Gourmand
Most Important Gourmand Crafts
1 – General Utility Crafts
- Rock + Batfly = Mushroom | My #1 Gourmand Item Craft
- Rock + Mushroom = Spore Puff | My #2 Gourmand Item Craft
- Rock + Cherrybomb = Grenade
- Batnip + Cherrybomb = Beehive
- Batnip + Unpopped Bubble Fruit = Bubbleweed
- Cherrybomb + Unpopped Bubble Fruit = Bubbleweed
- Flashbang + Noodlefly Egg = Vulture Grub
- Vulture Grub + Karma Flower = Vulture Mask
- Beehive + Baby Centipede = Grapple Grub
2 – Dark Area Crafts
- Rock + Danglefruit = Flashbang
- Rock + Flashbang = Lantern
- Rock + Slime Mold = Lantern
- Overseer Eye + Karma Flower = Neuron
3 – Meme Crafts
- Grenade + Karma Flower = Firebug Egg
- Firebug Egg + Karma Flower = Singularity Bomb
Gourmand Slide
4 – Slow but Fast
Gourmand is canonically a slowpoke. This can be a major downside of playing the character. However, to make him easier to play, the game devs tripled his slide speed and distance compared to the Survivor. This makes him go really fast when he isn’t tuckered. Also, if you get the extended slide timing right (his slide tech requires later inputs), he can move faster than the Rivulet for a short amount of time.
5 – Slide Ramming
Slide ramming is another useful piece of tech that Gourmand has. If he slides into creatures it does a small amount of damage and stuns them (the highest amount I got from a slide was roughly 0.5 damage). I assume the damage scales with how long the slide has gone on for. This isn’t a huge amount of damage, but I find that it’s useful for stunning lizards when I don’t have a rock. If anyone knows the statistics for this, please let me know.
Gourmand Spear Throw
6 – Spear Damage
Gourmand gets instantly tuckered when he throws a spear. As we all know, this can be really annoying for dealing with enemies. There is a trade-off though. Every spear the Gourmand throws while not tuckered does three damage. That is enough damage to instantly kill pink lizards, blue lizards, white lizards, moles, oranges, cyans, salamanders, eels, all spider variants, and small and medium sized centipedes. The point where this knowledge falls apart is if you get swarmed. If there is more than two enemies aggroed on to you, it will be difficult to defend yourself.
7 – Spear Movement
For being as big as Gourmand is, it’s surprising how fast he can move in certain situations. For instance, if he throw boosts with a spear, he gets sent flying forward. I have accidentally overshot landing points when doing this. Using this tech along with a mushroom can help with jumping the big gap in Outer Expanse to get to Journey’s End. The video below shows the jump.
Artificer
1 – Double Jump Efficiency
Artificer can double jump in five directions: left, right, up, and diagonally left and right. When trying to get the farthest distance, you need to double jump left or right. The diagonals don’t yield as much. Another thing to take note of is that Artificer can’t perform a double jump when upside down. So, when trying to jump up walls, you need to perform a diagonal double jump close to the wall so she doesn’t flip over.
2 – Melee Parrying
Artificer’s parry is the second best tool in her arsenal in my opinion (the first being the double jump), but not in the way you might think. In the Downpour trailers, it looked like the parry was strictly for defense against ranged weaponry like spears and lizard tongues, but that’s not the case. You can use the parry as a melee weapon and stun every creature within a five-foot radius of you. This helps when you get surrounded or are in a tight space with a scav and don’t have a spear. Just don’t do this in multiplayer. You WILL stun your whole party.
3 – Not Dropping Items when Parrying
Parrying can be a useful tool, but it can hinder you as well. Since the drop item and parry inputs overlap (down + grab for dropping items and down + grab + jump for parrying), Artificer can sometimes drop the item she’s holding when parrying. This really sucks when you’re in the middle of a fight. To combat this, if you press the jump button before down + grab you can’t drop items. This is because you can’t go into a crouch state while in the air.
4 – Braids Shelter
If you’re anything like me, you couldn’t find a single shelter in the middle portion of Metropolis. After 30 minutes of searching, I found one right outside of the House of Braids when a centiwing decided to fly down there. The video below shows the exact location.
Rivulet
1 – Movement when Dealing with Enemies
In the later campaigns, namely Rivulet and Saint, orange lizards are EVERYWHERE. From a game design perspective, I assume this is because both characters have insane movement. When playing against lizards in a normal scenario, you would just jump over them, but adding the oranges makes it so you can get flanked or cornered. My point is that standard techniques like stealth and slow play don’t work because of the low time limits and sheer quantity of coordinating enemies. The later slugcats benefit from quick decisive movement and using open spaces to your advantage.
2 – Rarefaction Cell Swim Speed
Using Five Pebbles’ rarefaction cell makes swimming underwater extremely fast for Rivulet. This makes carrying it around slightly more beneficial and helps with navigating Shoreline and Submerged Superstructure.
3 – Farm Arrays Deer Skip
There is an underwater section on the Sky Islands side of Farm Arrays that skips the deer on the way to Subterranean. The video below shows the route.
Spearmaster
1 – Instant Chieftain Strategy
Since Spearmaster doesn’t have a mouth, he can’t hold items in his stomach. Initially, I thought that if you wanted to be friends with scavs, you would need to nerf yourself by holding a pearl in one hand. That is annoying to say the least, especially because his campaign is already centered around doing that. But then I realized that spears are also something you can trade to the scavs. Of course they aren’t worth as much, but you can make an infinite amount of them. For reference, a pearl is ten points while a spear is two points. This means that you can pass a toll if you give the scavs five spears. You should still spawn spears until they wave you through though.
2 – Double Spearing
If you find yourself running low on food often as Spearmaster, you can spear 1 hp enemies twice and sneak in an extra pip of food. For instance, enemies like blue lizards, dropwigs, and spiders all have roughly 1 hp. You don’t need to use two spears to kill them, but you can get more food if you do.
3 – Spearable Items
To compensate for having no mouth, Spearmaster can spear some items to gain their effect. Karma flowers, mushrooms, and neurons all work in this way.
Saint
1 – Grapple Momentum
To start off, Saint can grapple in three ways: diagonally left, diagonally right, and up. To get a diagonal grapple, you can only hold left or right. Holding diagonal inputs will result in an up grapple for some reason. If you want to go fast when grappling, you need to use the diagonals and then jump directly before becoming perpendicular to the ground. You can grapple again to chain more speed. This can be finicky in rooms with lower ceilings.
2 – Lantern Usage
Lanterns provide heat and make it so that you get cold slower. These can be held lanterns or scavenger lanterns in the background. Sitting next to more than one lantern warms up Saint faster. I don’t know how effective a held lantern is yet.
3 – Quick Five Pebbles Route
Five Pebbles’ ruins are massive. So, it is understandable that it could take 20 to 30 minutes to get to him. The video below shows quickest route from the Shoreline side of the Five Pebbles structure.
4 – Farm Arrays Deer Skip
Since the yeek (frogs) are prevalent in Farm Arrays during Saint’s campaign, you can use them to skip the deer sections. The fastest method is going to the Outskirts side of Farm Arrays getting a yeek and then jumping through the worm grass to the left. I wouldn’t recommend going to Subterranean through the Sky Islands side because you need to get through a scav toll while juggling the yeek. The video below shows the route.
5 – Popping Popcorn Plants
This a very small quality of life tip, but you might need it on return trips to Five Pebbles and Moon. With Saint’s ascension powers you can open popcorn plants.
More Guides:
- Rain World – Detailed Region Maps
- Rain World – A Spoiler-Free Primer
- Rain World – Large Creatures Guide
- Rain World – How to Escape Predators
- Rain World – Tips and Tricks for Getting Started
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