New Guide on Abilities

There are three main abilities that have been used in the world's fastest runs.

• Ghost - an ability that somewhat negates the slowdown that occurs when you "bonk" into any enemy.
• Rubber Bullets - an ability that lets your missed bullets ricochet, meaning they have a chance to kill an enemy behind you or much further ahead of you. Lowers your chances of missing basically.
• Knife - the knife has a chargeup attack and aside from maybe the pistol is the best weapon in the game. The charge one shots everything in the game and the knife itself has some AOE meaning there is no need to be accurate with it. The knife provides not only a method of instakilling everything, but an easy way of gaining health since you can now much easily hit smaller enemies.

Ghost should be selected whenever possible, and the other two should only be selected depending on what weapon you like best.

Particularly, after you select one or two of the abilities in game, you should skip further ability upgrade screens by spamming the spacebar.

Outdated Guide

For the run, it's important to note the abilities that should be used for what seems to be the most optimal speed. However, this is subject to change in the future.

There are 3 abilities that you should mostly always ignore. These three are the shotgun, knife, and uzi gun swaps. Shotgun isn't horrible, however, with only two shots in the chamber and a decently long reload, you will be killing less quickly than someone with good aim and the starter pistol. The knife 1-2 shot kills mostly everything, however, with limited range. The uzi should also be steered clear of. The recoil and lack of significant damage makes this the worst weapon in the game.

However, the shotgun is special out of these three extra gun upgrades. Early game, it may prove to be one of the worst due to slow reload times and only an ammo count of 2. When in the late game, after acquiring reload speed upgrades, and ammo capacity upgrades, the shotgun starts to outclass the pistol. The meat walls are now always a one shot, even if you miss. You will obliterate entire groups of enemies in one shot, especially with the explosive ammo upgrade, and it seems that you can even shoot stuff to the side of you even if not directly looking at enemies. Can't confirm if this is a solid strat or not, but based my experiences, I'd say it is.

There are four major abilities that you should be making use of. These four are "Rubber Bullets", "Explosive Ammo", "Big Idol", and "Ghost".

Rubber bullets make any missed shots bounce of walls and ricochet. These bullets have the possibility of killing enemies around corners, which is obviously a great backup with random elements.

Explosive ammo makes enemies explode on death. While not particularly useful on early levels, starting on level 4, flying drones start to appear. These drones will chain explode on each other which means less shooting and more running.

Big idol is a simple ability. It simply upgrades your idol to hold more fluid, and this upgrade can be acquired multiple times over a single run. Of course this means in the more hectic and chaotic final levels you won't be dying after a couple of shots.

The final upgrade ability which is helpful is ghost. This is simple in nature. When an enemy hits you or you run into an enemy, you slow down to crazy low speeds. This ability negates that to an extent and can also be acquired multiple times over a single run.

The other abilities, such as more ammo, faster reloading speed, and endpoint guide are good but not totally necessary.