Hi everyone,

I've started running this game recently for fun, however I constatly get wrecked by the scorpion on phleebut when playing at max speed. How do you avoid the scorpion at that speed?

The scorpazoid does not follow Roger across screen boundaries, and since it only generates on screen transitions, whenever it appears you will always have a screen boundary handy to escape to. You will also always get a warning message the first time the scorpazoid generates; if you get it, assess which boundary to run for and then dismiss the message. (Back the way you came is the safest, but if the scorpazoid's out of the way, you can just keep going in your intended direction.) Subsequent appearances from the scorpazoid are more dangerous since there's no warning message, so good eyes and quick reaction times are needed; but you need to be unlucky to generate the scorpazoid more than once or twice.

If you look at the current Any% WR you'll notice it hugs screen boundaries even when not transitioning, largely to stay safe from the scorpazoid. The WR actually has quite bad luck with scorpazoid generation, and almost dies to it 3:30 in (3:38 in the video, as the run starts 8 seconds in), but is saved by the warning message. A couple seconds later, the scorpazoid puts in another appearance, but Roger's placement near the corner keeps him relatively safe. At 3:35/3:43, there's a weird zigzag caused by scorpazoid paranoia. Even with the bad RNG and the unnecessary zigzag, the run still lived and lost no more than about 2 seconds.

There is a non-zero chance that you will die through no fault of your own to extremely unlucky scorpazoid RNG; but if you die to it more than about 5% of the time you're either doing something wrong or taking extra risks to save time (or playing some unusual game version with different mechanics I'm not aware of). If you start really pushing for an optimized time, the main run-killer on Phleebhut will be losing time to bad Arnoid RNG on the screen with the pod creatures.

Thanks for that explanation! I'll give hugging the boundarys a try and just get a time up and see if I can actually improve.