Waves

Waves is the third game mode in the Explore menu, unlocked when you first finish a Tier 400 World. When you start a Waves flight, you face repeated waves of 105 blocks, laid out in a 7x15 grid. Your ship is fixed at the bottom of the screen, and you have a short timer to clear the wave; if you succeed, your ship will automatically move forward to the next wave, which is the same grid but with slightly higher HP, and the timer resets. If you fail to clear the entire wave before the timer runs out, the flight ends, and you earn money and Red Crosses.

When doing a Waves flight, you are required to use a Custom ship. Unlocking Waves also allows you to use a Custom Ship in all other levels (but you won't want to until you've done quite a bit of Waves, as the custom ship will be substantially worse than the high-end ships purchasable with money).

You don't want to do much work in Waves until you've unlocked all three factions. This is because your Waves progress, including your RC earnings and all custom ship tiles, will be reset every time you join a faction. Once you join all three, tho, you definitely want to do Waves, as your Custom Ship can be far more powerful than any ship you can buy. (Doing *some* Waves work before joining all three can be fine, as RC can be turned into faction reputation, just don't focus on it.)

## Wave Info

At the top of the screen is information about the current wave. In order from left to right:

* The current wave number, and the HP of blocks in the wave below it.
* Your current RS earnings.
* A "Quit" button that will end the flight early. Note that doing this will reduce your RC earnings by 1.
* The total time you've spent in the current flight, with your RC/minute earnings below it. In larger teal numbers at the end of the stripe, the current wave timer. (The wave timer is also indicated by the teal bar at the right side of the screen, which in non-Wave levels indicates your forward progress.)
* The number of blocks left in the current wave. (Also indicated by the green bar on the right side, as usual.)

## General Strategy

The name of the game in Waves is *passive consistency*. You want to be able to clear waves quickly and reliably, and ideally without touching the screen at all. This is easy to do!

* Initially, buy the Block Seeker tile for your custom ship, so it can hunt down blocks for you. The AI for it is very basic; make sure you have an Ejector near the center of your ship firing straight forward without any spread or curve, or else it might position you uselessly below a block while all your shots miss.
* Later, purchase 10 Rectangle AoE items, and enough tiles to equip them all; do not use *any* Circle AoE. This gives your shots enough sideways AoE to damage an entire row at once, so you don't have to move at all, just focus on the 7 tiles directly in front of you each wave. (If you have the second Rectangle AoE skill, you only need 8 items to hit the entire field at once.)

Each wave is only created when the previous wave is cleared, so missed shots won't let you "work ahead", but bullets that are already in-flight *will* advance forward with you, and can destroy blocks from the next wave before you even reach it. Using Slow Down, Double Lifetime, and Death Pierce to give you a "cloud" of bullets you carry with you can make clearing successive waves very fast and easy, especially in early levels where you one-shot the blocks.

## Custom Ship Design Tips

The Custom Ship tiles you can buy are, mostly, difficult to work with and worthless. Several offer useful abilities for playing Waves specifically, and so can be worthwhile to use for that reason, but should be avoided when building a ship for Worlds play. Remember that, just like you can switch between A and B designs for item placement, you can switch between A and B *tile designs* for your custom ship as well, maintaining separate Waves and Worlds ships.

The best tiles to use are Faster Waves and Longer Waves. Not only are these useful abilities for clearing Waves, but they offer the best shapes of open tiles: a 2x3 and a 3x2. You should alternate buying these two as you earn RC, placing your vertical Faster Waves up the right column and the horizontal Longer Waves in a row connected to your highest Faster Wave, like this:

Basic Custom Ship Design
 Emitter

With this tile pattern, you can trace a long bullet path up, over, then back to the start, finally diverting to the emitter at the end. As you earn more RC and can afford more tiles, you can add more Longer Waves tiles to the empty spots, curving your shot path into and back out of the additional rows.

### "Fast Waves" Ship Design

Rather than using mostly Longer Waves, as above, you can use mostly Faster Waves, like this:

"Fast Waves" Ship Design
 Faster
 Faster
 Longer

This design is less efficient in its path design, resulting in more open spaces and a shorter path, but it reduces the time between waves to a tiny fraction of a second, so a high-damage design using Death Pierce can sail through the first few thousand waves extremely quickly. With active play, stopping and restarting when waves start taking more than a second or two each, this can be more effective in farming RC than the previous design.

### "Snail" Ship Design

Eventually you want to graduate to a "snail" design, using a Wide Open tile in the upper left corner:

"Snail" Custom Ship Design
 Faster
 Faster
 Longer

With this ship design (credit to MasterNO122333), termed "The Snail", you can trace a bullet path in two full spirals around the outer tiles, then do the familar "up and over" loop in the center four. This design has:

* 94 open tiles in total
* 3 empty tiles
* 13 Guide items
* ***78*** useful items, all in a single continuous path

While the Wide Open tile reduces your damage by 2/3 (and decreases your fire rate, applying an additional slight decrease to your DPS), the increased number of item tiles allows you to build up *significantly* more than 3x over other designs without it, so you come out way ahead in overall damage.

If you want to farm YS, you can slightly adjust the path in the center 4 tiles to fit in two Money Crosses, at a minor damage penalty.

### "Super Snail" Ship Design

After you've joined all the factions and bought several copies of their special multiplier items (the ones adding +160% Heat or Energy damage), you probably have enough items to fill the "Super Snail, which looks like:

"Super Snail" Ship Design
 Wide Open
 Wide Open
 Wide Open

With this design you can trace three full spirals before finally doing the "up and around" curve-back that all these designs share.

The large number of Wide Open tiles gives you a *massive* damage penalty, but in return you get:

* 120 open tiles in total
* 0 empty tiles
* 18 Guide items
* ***102*** useful items, all in a single continuous path.

If built well, this design will achieve slightly higher average damage, and *significantly* higher burst damage, over the original "Snail" design.