Shooting

There are a few forms of shooting. Holding down the left mouse button releases a dagger stream. Fast tapping of the left mouse button causes a shotgun blast.
Shooting is randomized, meaning that daggers don't always come out at a constant speed or emerge from the same position.
This can be noticed when perfectly scraping a CENTIPEDE without the CENTIPEDE dying: a few gems simply didn't get hit due to the randomness of the dagger stream.

Further, there are homing daggers you can use by pressing the right mouse button. Same mechanics with holding down creating a stream, and fast clicking a shotgun blast. You can safely fire a short stream of homing daggers if you, while streaming daggers (left mouse), press the right mouse button. This will prevent a shotgun blast of homing daggers from being released, and allows you to better control where your homing daggers go. Note that you don't get homing daggers until you get the level 3 hand, and you want to avoid using them as much as possible, as you need to save up 150 homing daggers (220 gems if you don't use any homing daggers) to get the level 4 hand, which is the most powerful upgrade in the game.

Aiming is very imprecise in this game. Not even the top players in the world can achieve an accuracy of >40%. Learning to aim is very important. Think of your stream as something of a "whip", if that helps. Also note that SKULL's actively dodge your daggers, making it even harder to hit them.

## Prefiring

Since the daggers have travel time, its useful to prefire enemies. This can include predicting the enemies path but in this case, it refers to firing at an enemy early to get the jump on them. You can prefire SQUID's, SPIDER's (when they spawn their weak point is hidden, therefore you can simply shoot the center of the SPIDERs head and once it looks up the dagger stream will already hit the SPIDERs weakpoint) , CENTIPEDE's and GIGAPEDE's. Good players also prefire the LEVIATHAN shortly before its spawn animation ends.

## Shotgun tech

There is a way to make the shotgun shoot a lot faster than normal. This requires you to shoot the first shotgun blast normally with a single click and release. After that you click a second time as the hand comes back and hold this time a little longer. When you release this second click you automatically shoot another shotgun blast. After this repeat the holding clicks and you should shoot a lot faster.

**Videos for better understanding:**

It's important not to use this technique too much in the early/mid game, especially when there are gems on the arena. You need every gem you can get, and shotgun blasts actually move gems AWAY from you. Although you can make an exception when fighting the Leviathan or the Ghostpede. By the time you're fighting them, you'll have the maximum upgrade and their yield is so small (6 for Leviathan, 10 for Ghostpede) that it's not worth it.

The enemies you want to use this against the most are:

* LEVIATHAN / ORB
* GHOSTPEDE
* SPIDER II
* SKULL IV
* THORN

## Combining Stream + Shotgun

This is really effective against a lot of enemies. You can lead a stream into a shotgun blast.

* SKULL II's - at Level 1
* SQUID I's at Level 1
* SKULL III's at Level 1
* SQUID III's at Level 3
* SPIDER I's at Level 2 and 3
* etc.

## Stream Shaking

I've seen Bintr do this in his runs. It's actually pretty effective at taking out large swarms of SKULL's. Once the player has obtained the first upgrade or above, the dagger stream is very dense. This means that most daggers go to waste since the SKULL's already die from the first few daggers of the dagger stream. The daggers comming after those first few fly into the void without hitting anything. When you spread the daggers out by steam shaking, you basically create a thin wall of daggers that kills almost all SKULL's in its way.

Like the name suggests, simply aim at the swarm and rapidly move your mouse from side to side while holding down left click.

## Shotgunning the floor

You can shotgun the floor in front of you to make the daggers bounce off into an even wider spread. Varying the distance varies the angle and spread, so it's worth experimenting with. Sadly there are only rare use cases for this but it delivers an amazing sound.