UFO 50: Playing Pilot Quest for NG+ Loops

Each time you complete the game by collecting the three ship parts, researching Ship Fuel, and leaving, you get one upgrade token to spend on these statues in the top right of your home base. From left to right:

Productivity. Reduces the number of time ticks needed to collect more resources(across all your resource generating units). This one has obvious potential for the longer-term player since it means you have less downtime. I believe it becomes relatively more powerful as you add more upgrades, too.

Defense. Each point of this reduces damage per hit by 2, linearly. That is, the -10 damage enemies will now do -8 with one point, while -30 damage will become -28. This means that if you go all the way to level 5, minor enemies will never damage you. This is probably the least attractive upgrade to invest in because it doesn’t really do enough to impact the higher tiers of damage.

Metabolism. Each point increases the time value of each point of food by an additional 20 seconds. This upgrade is great to take a point in because it massively reduces your risks early on in the run, before you’ve built any silos and can only hold 5 food. Once you’re regularly getting 15 food every time you go into the Wilds, sheer experience with the combat mechanics will mean that you essentially never have an encounter you can’t recover from.

So, my thoughts on upgrade order if you want to get everything is probably:

Productivity (1 point)
Metabolism (1 point)
Then max out Productivity
Then max out Metabolism
Then max out Defense

If you just want a somewhat easier Nozzlo fight, taking two points each of Metabolism and Defense is probably fine, even though you’ll have more early-game downtime.

The map is slightly randomized every time you start a new game of Pilot Quest. This means that some areas are blocked off in different sections, and the locations of dungeons and NPCs are shuffled.

The strategy I eventually adopted was to copy the maps from LowPinnacle’s guide, open them up in Inkscape, and then add these lines of text to help me understand my routes :

Dungeons

• Red
• Green
• Yellow

Overworld NPCs

• Sis (two chests)
• Gamb (gambling game)

Letter for gun

• Ltr1 (receive letter)
• Ltr2 (deliver letter)

Dungeon NPCs

• En3 (3 coins for energy)
• En2 (2 coins for energy)
• Sci (3 coins for 10 science)
• Silk (5 coins for 15 silk)

The location of the gear also changes every time (either on the chest in the central ruins, or the chest at the end of the northeast peninsula) but since there are only two places, I don’t mark it. Likewise I don’t bother marking all the barriers on the map.

What’s most important in the early game map routing is to get the free chests and then to spend any additional money you’ve gained on the gambling game because it is a chance at buying ingots, sometimes a lot of them. This can make it much, much faster to get your first Friends.

Later on, you can switch from buying ingots to buying silk and science. What tends to happen after you’ve gotten used to the gameplay and how to handle each boss fight is that you are easily able to go out and get all three spaceship parts, but you have a huge gap between getting the parts and getting the ship fuel. Earnings from the Wilds are the only way to speed that up, and it’s actually by quite a large amount.

When you’re looping the game, the additional yo-yo options become mostly redundant. They do speed up kills in some cases, but the bread and butter of your combat is going to be the gun. When you are shooting at melee range you can do two hits per shot, making it more effective than the default yo-yo.

For similar reasons, while fertilizer and stamina pills are nice(and I usually take them), repeatedly going into the Wilds to buy resources is still going to be faster than trying to rely on base production, at least until you’ve pumped several points into the Productivity upgrade. And in that case, you might still want fertilizer as a way to recover more easily if you didn’t get enough food to be able to re-enter the Wilds again immediately.

After you’ve collected enough ship parts, Nozzlo spawns in a random place on the overworld each time you go out. He’s a pain to fight because he just spams all sorts of stuff and takes, if my count is correct, 100 hits from the default yo-yo or gun. If you aren’t going to commit to fighting him 6 times in a row for Cherry, you should probably just run away.

If you are, though, there are three good preparatory steps:

• Stockpile a huge number of coins, like 100-150
• Spend them all on the 2-coin energy vendor so that you have the time to spare to do 600 hits worth of damage.
• Go around the Wilds and eliminate all other life forms so that you don’t have to deal with them at the same time as Nozzlo. Use your yo-yo while doing this so that you stockpile crystals.

Once you commit, you should probably also start marking locations you’ve already been on your map so that you don’t waste time on routing. Good luck!