These are things that helped me personally, so if these don't help you, or if anything I said wasn't accurate or "the best way of doing it," don't get too mad, as at the end of the day I'm just some person who took time out of their day to tell random strangers cool tips about a game made of tiny spots of light.

The first 4 builds may be outdated or have major improvements available as they were added before the most recent update, so double check things work or try things out with the build before blindly following my advice.

This combo helped me get most of the Ataraxia achievements.

It works by taking a powerful upgrade (Barrage - A super mod that can be taken once you take the Rapid Fire -> Burst fire mods, and the Volley -> Focus Fire mods) and slapping on the very powerful effects of Ataraxia on top of that (Ataraxia is used by not using the upgrades you get and instead stockpiling them. This lets you get marginal bonuses per unspent upgrade, but you get really nice bonuses when passing the 5, 10, and 20 mark.), you get an amazing combo. You should probably take Fusillade with it too (Can only be taken after Focus Fire or Firing Array, but to get Barrage you need one of the two anyway so it should be easy enough.), because Barrage fires all of your projectiles in a row in front of you, with the effect getting better with more projectiles.

I'd also use the 'Flak' with it because it starts with 12 projectiles and doubles the projectile gain of Fusillade and Volley, getting more gain per downside (as Volley and Fusillade have big downsides). You can use any shield and any ship, but I'd recommend Assault as the ship for more bullet upsides, and AMP if you can deal with the low defences, as you can gain a ridiculous amount of damage, being able to take down most bosses in around 10 - 15 seconds each.

This isn't the kind of build you take to a 1mil score run, but it takes you decently far, around 250k score when I did only the upgrades listed above, but if you add maybe a few more defensive upgrades you could maybe make it further. Or just not have a skill issue like me ig.

This, like the other build above, I found, and then realised later that you get an achievement for doing it, but for this one I figured out the strategy, then they made an achievement for it!
It was very funny when I saw, trust me.

I'm talking about the divide by 0 achievement, and it requires 40 warp explosions to go off at the same time.

So you get it by taking the Drones mod and then the Assault Drones mod. You can go further, but that is the bare minimum. Then you want to get Elegant Construction and then Shielded Constructs, and probably Overseer, but, again, that is the bare minimum. Finally your shield has to be the Warp shield, although there is one exception which I'll get into a bit later. (I'm realising now when editing I forgot to mention the Engineer as the ship, as it increases the amount of drones by a lot, and decreases shields, so it is also a requirement.)

How it works is that you press the tab button to make your drones go into pursuit mode. They then run right near enemies and take lots of damage, all done to the shield, and then the shield promptly explodes, making all enemies near the explosion very dead.

That was all just the bare minimum, so to improve it you want to take any mod that:
- Decreases shield health (Makes the shield blow up quicker)
- Increases shield recovery speed (Makes the shield blow up more often)
- Increases shield damage or area of effect (Makes the shield kill enemies more reliably)
- Increases the amount of drones (Just gives more of all the above)
Some favourites are:
- Flash Shielding (Does two of the above and lets you get Tempest Break)
- Drone Specialist (You'll need lots of luck and wild mods enabled, but it's worth it)
- Tempest Break (Super mod that needs Flash Shielding and Deadly Wake, does most of the things we want, even stopping the shield from recovering before it gets completely destroyed)
- And many more

One last thing, using Shockwave shield and Polar Inversion (a wild mod that makes knockback's direction reversed), and Volatile Shields to make the shields still explode, you get drones that move to enemies and suck them in, for more shield damage. This reduces the power of the blast, as you don't have a natural explosion, but the sheer potential of simply having the enemies sucked away from you with large force and then grouped up for a massive explosion of 15+ drones is just too good to pass up.

A comment has pointed this one out as being a good one, and it has given me some high scores that have stayed on my leader board for ages.

The premise is simple, use the Battery body to give yourself two cannons, then use Saturated Fire to eject as many rockets out of your ship as possible, making sure they have maximum homing and projectile speed. Normally the downside of the Battery doubling your firepower is that the cannons face in awkward directions, but the homing nature of the Calibrated Salvo rockets fixes the issue, and just lets you flood the screen with missiles.

This build is best paired with the Rapid Regeneration mod to do the best you can at mitigating the massive self damage Saturated Fire causes to your hull if you're not careful, and increasing homing, damage, projectile velocity, projectiles and survivability. The best mod trees for this are:
- Magnitude (just don't take Charged Shot, it'll ruin Saturated Fire)
- Velocity (leave out the final upgrade if you're short on points)
- Targeting
- Volley (leave out Focus Fire if you're short on points)
- Improved Thrusters

A very good super mod with this build is Warp Strike. This allows any stray Salvo rockets that went off screen due to the oddly placed cannons on the Battery to loop back round and find a new target. The price of Screen Warping costing hull points may be annoying, but it'll be alright if you can get used to the new handicap.

All in all, this is a solid build that can carry you to a new high score in the millions, just make sure you take breaks when firing every so often, as the most common death with this build is death to self damage!

This is my magnum opus. My highest score of almost 2 million was made with this build. This build was engineered to be the closest to immortal I could theorise, so lets see what it is.

The core premise is that you have Apotheosis to protect you from crash damage, defensive drones to block incoming projectiles, and defensive allies using Decoy Signal to distract any bullets or problematic enemies away from the player. This would give the best shot at not taking any damage from any source, allowing points to be farmed.

There were only two problems, how to kill the enemies (a good offence contributes to a good defence, but they also hold precious orbs to actually give score), and the problem enemies.

Killing the enemies couldn't be done with a weapon, because Overseer is required for the defence to work well, but it disables all weapons used by you. I ended up deciding on turrets, because they do lots of damage and they have an upgrade (Counter Artillery) that lets them destroy enemy projectiles with their own, increasing survivability. Using Vital Bond also allows the turrets and all the other constructs regenerate health, so they won't get destroyed by self damage for the turrets and enemy attacks for the drones and allies.

Next up were the enemies that caused problems, like ones that use explosions or lasers to attack the player, as those attacks aren't avoided by Apotheosis nor blocked by drones. The solution is that you have to dodge; I used Strafe in my record game, but Blink or just using the Screen Warp can help too. The main strategy is to stick by the turrets (preferably using Overclock and Point Defence to power them up) and stay away from the allies (as they will lead enemy fire to you).

This build has great potential if made and executed correctly, and still has lots of room for improvement, like bulk, Ally Specialist (that one is the only one of those four wild mods I've checked, but those who like experimenting with instead of copying builds could try a different speciality and see if it has a better effect), and various other mods that help the cause. Tell me if this one gives you a new high score, and if you can beat my 1.9 mil score!

A note from the future:
Almost 3 million. I think that the limits to this build is mostly up to how well you can dodge, along with staying awake the whole time. My next highest score is the 1.9 mil mentioned above, showing how it's really up to how well you play.

This build may not be as good as the last, but it is still very potent, as the first time I tried it out I got 1.7 mil in score, and I could've gone further if I had strafe to avoid scion's thermal lance.

This build involves, as previously stated, Flak with many projectile upgrades and Infuse along with Omni Shield, Purification, and Splinter.
Lets break down how this all works together:

The keystone of the build is Flak + Infuse. The many projectiles combined with the discharge ability creates lots of crowd control that deletes all group enemies. Combining this with extra projectiles in Fusillade and Splinter, along with Convergence for homing, this results in firing once and the whole screen clearing. The whole Candescence tree greatly increases burn damage, which causes this build to stack burn damage on the larger enemies, killing them with massive 15k+ damage ticks. Taking any and all shield effect and radius modifiers will help with Infuse damage too, further increasing the burn damage inflicted.

Now that the enemies are dead, how do we survive those who persist in the later rounds? Because we have to have a shield to deal our damage due to Infuse, we take Omni Shield and Regenerative Shields, along with an optional Gemini Protocol and Conversion, like normal. You can also add in Sanctuary, but this does mean you have to play a little minigame where you need to stay in the Sanctuary shield to allow the Infuse effects to trigger, which is manageable but Regenerative Shields should be enough healing, and you can have your shield effects trigger at your position. Taking the Sentinel body will not only give enhanced defence, but also add more shield effect modifiers, so that is the recommended choice. It doesn't matter too much which shield you pick, but I find that Siphon strikes a good balance between recharge time, shield HP, and regenerating your shield can never be a bad thing.

Now you know how the build works, lets know how to use it.

Once the build is fully set up, which shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, the main dangers to you are enemies that don't die too quickly after you press fire 3 times. This build isn't the weakest of builds defensively, but situations can turn sour very quickly if you let enemies live too long. This build is weak to Scion, as I mentioned at the start, and also other tanky enemies like the final boss.

This build is incredibly strong and I wish you luck on your next run with it!

This section will include smaller combos that usually won't cause an entire build, but are powerful and should be kept in mind:


Homing Strike

Homing Strike is a very unusual upgrade, as it gives you extra projectiles that don't count as extra projectiles when firing, which creates some powerful effects when combined with some upgrades.

The first is Single Strike. Single strike combines all of your projectiles into one big one, but the buffs still apply to the homing strikes, giving you extra damage without sacrificing as many projectiles (as the amount of homing strikes increase every 5 projectiles you have). This combo isn't a game changer, but is potent, and gives way more extra damage than was likely intended

The second is the Blade weapon-construct. The Blade fires as fast as you have created constructs, and if a Blade construct doesn't get destroyed after it was fired, it comes back to you like a boomerang, ready to be fired again. When you combine this weapon with Homing Strike, the Homing Strike doesn't count as a projectile, and is added to the shot when fired. With one construct, this works quite normally, but when you add more things get more complicated.
If there are multiple constructed blades ready to fire, they all get released in one go, along with one pair of Homing Strike projectiles, but when you only have one ready to fire and you fire it, it comes out with it's own pair of Homing Strike projectiles, effectively getting more value out of the upgrade the more projectiles you have. If you hold fire with a multi projectile Blade weapon, this effect will start to happen as some projectiles come back quicker than others, and they will get desynced, firing one at a time.
Basically, if you are using Blade constructs, bear in mind that the Targeting tree gives you many, many more projectiles with Homing Strike and Convergence.


Vital Bond

Vital Bond gives your regeneration to your constructs too, which is extremely useful for constructs that take lots of self-damage to make them disappear after a while, such as Turrets and especially Swarm Constructs. Turrets become permanent, which is useful and definitely worth doing as they take a while to make, but Swarm Constructs created by the Spontaneous Generation wild mod or the Carrier body are amazing with them, especially when generated by Spontaneous Generation. This causes you to get billions of these guys, as their whole point is to be a temporary extra damage source, which has now been turned into a permanent one.

This guide is still work in progress, so a bit more content will come soon. (If you see this after April 29 2025, there is I high chance I forgot about this, so commenting will remind me with a notification, thanks!)