Overview
The Weekly Challenge is one of my favorite features of Duskers, which is one of my favorite games. Looking at the leaderboards from week to week, I see a lot of good players playing, but often not getting terribly good scores. I usually wind up in the top 1 or 2, and I wanted to share some stuff about how I do that, both for regular competitors and for people who are new to the Weekly. I like to win, but more than that I like to compete, and I’m hoping this guide will help competitors up their game a bit.
Introduction
Duskers is a fantastic game, and the one game on Steam that I’ve purchased that has given me the most value. One of the lovelier (if occasionally buggy and maddening) features of the game that keep me coming back to it again and again are the Daily and Weekly Challenges. The Dailies are pretty straightforward—every day, at 5pm in my time zone, the challenge resets and you get one derelict to explore, and your score upon completion gets uploaded to an in-game leaderboard. There are plenty of YouTubers recording their Daily Challenge runs, so if you want to learn more about how to tackle those, check them out.
The Weekly Challenge, however, is a somewhat different animal. You’re playing for a score, just like in the Daily, but you’re given an entire galaxy to explore, like you get in campaign mode. The galaxy only has one jump gate, though, and your run is over when you finally get to and jump through the gate.
If you’ve ever checked out the Weekly Challenge leaderboards, you’ve probably seen me on there, usually in the top 1 or 2, and usually with a ridiculously high score. I think it’s been about three months since I scored under 10,000. You might well assume that I’m cheating somehow, but I am not. In fact, I record my Weekly Challenge runs and upload them to YouTube, so if you ever want to watch one from start to finish, you can do so. I’m actually kind of disappointed at this point at the lack of competition, which is part of why I’m writing this guide. I hope you find it helpful.
Before You Begin: Understand the Scoring!
This is a screenshot of the exit screen from the last challenge run I finished (Week 37).
Some things to take note of:
- The biggest source of points in the Weekly Challenge, by far, is drone HP. Each single unit of HP is worth 10 points; this means that a 100-hp drone, fully healed up, adds 1,000 to your final score. So it’s all about the drones you collect, and it’s all about sinking all available scrap into healing them up to full.
- Drone upgrades are only worth 3 points to your final score, which is the equivalent to what you would get if you scrapped them when they’re still functional. Drone upgrades are not meant to be hoarded—use them as long as they’re useful, but they’re worth more as scrap, because you can spend the scrap on other things.
- Propulsion and jump fuel often wind up being abundant in the Weekly Challenges. Each unit of fuel is worth some points at the end, but remember that you can’t take it with you once you jump out. The only way you can convert fuel to scrap is by selling it at autotraders, which will run out of scrap to buy fuel from you, in fairly short order. But when you’re ready to end your run, it’s worth selling as much remaining fuel as you can, and converting it into scrap.
- Unused scrap, at the end of a run, only gains you 1 point per piece of scrap. Like drone upgrades, scrap is not meant to be hoarded in a Weekly Challenge—it’s meant to be spent.
Given what I’ve been saying about how worthless scrap is to just hold onto, you might reasonably wonder what’s the point of converting everything else to scrap. Fair point. Here’s the answer: you use it to heal your drones up to full, and then to increase their maximum health. With disabled drones, it costs you 1 scrap per 10HP restored, meaning that one bit of scrap (worth 1pt in your final score if kept as scrap) is suddenly worth 100pts toward your final score. If, for instance, you managed to find a full stable of seven 130HP drones over the course of your run (unlikely, but it can happen), and healed them up to full, your score just from that would be sitting at 9,100 points.
But why stop there?
Maybe you’ve used this in campaign mode—I never did, for whatever reason—but there is an option in the Drone Modification screen to increase a drone’s max HP by 10, at a cost of 5 scrap. Happily for our purposes, when you use that option, not only does the drone’s max HP go up by 10, but the drone’s current HP also increases by 10. So you’re spending 5 scrap (worth 5 to your score if preserved as scrap) to increase your score by 100. Spending 20 scrap that way will bump your final score by 1,000. So you see, all of a sudden, Weekly Challenge scores upwards on 10,000 begin to seem less implausible.
Fun fact: the highest you can get a drone’s HP is 500. You have to spend a lot of scrap to do it, but it’ll get there. If, somehow, you managed to get all seven drones in your stable up to their maximum, you’re looking at a Weekly Challenge score somewhere north of 35,000. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to find enough scrap in one galaxy to achieve that, but it is a unicorn that I continue to chase. I’ve broken 15,000 once, and that was very difficult to do. But it’s good to keep in mind. The main point: the best score value you’re going to get in a Weekly Challenge is by increasing the health and max health of your drones. Nothing else even comes close.
Step 1: Getting Started
When you start a new run, you’re always going to start with 3 drones (random HP), and you’re guaranteed to begin with a Tow, a Generator, a Gather, and an Interface. In addition, you’ll start with one “explore” module (Motion, Sensor, Stealth, or Lure—again, it seems to be randomly determined). That’s not great, especially if it’s a nasty galaxy, but it’s good enough for starters, anyway.
The first thing you should probably do is have a look at all the derelicts in the starting system, as well as all the derelicts in all the other systems you can see in the Galaxy view. What you want to keep an eye out for are:
- Space stations and fuel depots, and especially systems that have concentrations of them. Fuel is often hard to come by very early on in a Weekly Challenge, and getting the fuel situation under control quickly, or having a plan to do so as soon as possible, allows for greater strategic flexibility as you decide where to go next.
- Autotraders. Know where they are, and plan your initial routes accordingly. Scan and Probe are drone upgrades whose value is vastly increased the sooner you can find them, and if you have the scrap (drone upgrades only cost 3 scrap apiece, so it doesn’t take much), it’s worth buying one (or more, because backups never hurt) ASAP.
- Outposts and quarantined derelicts. If you see outposts, you know you need to find a Transporter ship upgrade before you can visit them. If you see quarantined vessels or outposts, you know you need to find a Quarantine Bypass. The goal for the run should be to visit every derelict in every system, and to pick them all clean. To achieve that, you need to know what tools are required to make that possible.
- Capital ships. Take note of any A-class ships you find, because they’re the most likely to have ship upgrades and disabled drones that you will be able to salvage, as well as ships that might be worth commandeering. In my experience, a Muteki A, Military A, or Barge A is typically the most desirable for commandeering, because they sometimes have three or four ship upgrade slots, and occasionally they have a propulsion fuel capacity of 7 (rather than the standard 6, which over time makes a big difference).
- Military ships and military outposts. If the Challenge for a given week has outposts, check to see if any of the outposts are military. Military outposts are particularly inconvenient, because not only do you need a Transporter to visit them, you also need to have military clearance, which means you need to be flying a military ship. If you find military outposts, make sure as well to check what type of ship the Justice Ryder happens to be for your run—sometimes it’s a military ship, in which case you already have that part taken care of.
- The jump gate. It’s your exit point from the galaxy, and jumping through the gate gets you a 1,000 point completion bonus to your score. If things go well, wherever the system where the jump gate is will be the last place you visit. Thus, as you think about what routes to take and the order in which you explore the various systems, it’s worth keeping in mind that you’re going to want to end up back there eventually, and even though jump fuel and prop fuel aren’t worth that much in terms of scoring, every little bit does help, and so preserving it as much as possible is worth doing.
Step 2: Back Up Your Starting Save File
Once you’re done looking at the lay of the land, I’d recommend quitting to main or exiting, and then backing up your weekly challenge save files. I do this because, like the rest of the game, the Weekly Challenges can be incredibly buggy, and if you hit a bug that breaks your run, it’s nice to have a baseline save from which you can try to repair it.
I’m on a Windows system, so that’s the only thing I can speak to. But if you want to back up your starting save file, here’s the steps I would recommend:
1. Start the Challenge, and immediately quit, before you’ve run any of the derelicts.
2. Go to the place where your Duskers saves live…in my case, it’s C:/Documents/My Games/Duskers/
3. Back up the “gamesave_ch_wkly.txt” file in the main directory, as well as the entire contents of the “CHALLENGE_WKLY” subdirectory in the /data/udata/ subdirectory.
Step 3: The Early Stages
As noted above, one of the very first things you want to do is find a Scan or Probe upgrade. This often isn’t possible, but it should be a priority. The reason for this is simple: with a Scan or a Probe, YOU WILL GET TONS MORE SCRAP OFF OF EVERY DERELICT YOU VISIT. I’ve played this game a lot, in all modes, and especially on the tiniest ships or stations or fuel depots, you stand a good chance of doubling your scrap take if you have and employ scan and probe. On most C or D-class ships and stations, you will tend to find something like three scrap if you explore the whole thing. If you explore with Scan or Probe, you will typically wind up with 7 or more scrap. Those upgrades are worth getting, and worth spending the scrap to keep in good repair…they pay for themselves. And until you find one, you’re probably leaving a bunch of scrap on the table on each derelict you visit, because once you’ve been there you can’t visit it again. So find one early, and take good care of it.
Beyond that, I prefer to find and build up a reserve of jump fuel as quickly as possible. Propulsion fuel, too, but mainly jump fuel. The reason for this is that, you only start with two jump fuel, and if that runs out, you’re dead in space. Each jump replenishes your prop fuel, but if you’re out of jump fuel, you’re screwed.
Also, you definitely want to keep an eye out for offensive drone upgrades—Trap, Mine, or Turret. You can’t kill anything, except with ship defenses, until you have one of those, and killing infestations is both necessary (if you want to commandeer) and lucrative (in the case of sentry bots, anyway, which drop scrap if you murder them). Until you find one, though, and even after, I find it to be worthwhile to take good care of your Interface upgrade. If a ship has defenses, use them. If you haven’t found Scan or Probe yet, the Interface may also give you a Shipscan option, which is the next best thing. I’m not entirely sure that it pays for itself in the long run to keep it intact, but in the early game, it’s often your only chance of collecting sentry scrap or scanning a ship.
Keep in mind what sorts of upgrades and/or ships you need to find, given the galaxy you find yourself exploring, and be prepared to make less-than-ideal short-term choices in support of the long-term goal. If there are a bunch of quarantined derelicts, you need to prioritize finding a Quarantine Bypass; you may find a firmly-installed Quarantine Bypass on a Medical C with rotten scrap capacity and/or below-average prop fuel capacity. It might be worth commandeering it just to get the upgrade. If you’re in a galaxy with a lot of outposts, and you find a firmly-installed Transporter on an otherwise crappy ship, think seriously about taking it. You might find another Transporter down the line, but it’s very possible that you won’t, and if you don’t commandeer the ship that has it, you’ve given up the opportunity to visit any of those for the rest of your run. And outposts, while they’re scary and often brutal, are big money.
Find yourself some more drones. The best places to look, as mentioned above, are A and B class ships and stations. You don’t necessarily need to heal them up right away, but getting them is helpful because they always carry some sort of upgrade or upgrades, and it’s always good to have backup. Also, just having a disabled drone sitting in your boarding craft means that you have more storage slots for drone upgrades that you salvage off destroyed drones, and it also means that you have a camera that you can use if you need to temporarily route pesky infestations into your boarding craft and then relocate them later.
Don’t worry too much about spending scrap to keep crucial drone (and ship) upgrades in good repair. It costs a lot, but a Weekly Challenge is the long game, and there are essential upgrades that you don’t want to lose, once you’re lucky enough to find them. Tow, Gather, and Generator are not in that category, because you can always make a new one in the Modifications menu. Scan and/or Probe are DEFINITELY in that category, especially if you only have one. For me, as well, I will almost always repair Stealth and Teleport. Depending on what I’ve got and how things are going, I will also spend to reload/repair a Turret (the best and cheapest upgrade for murdering sentry bots), or Mine/Trap (if I don’t have a Turret).
Prioritize stations, especially A and B class stations. They’re more likely to have fuel, and also drones you can salvage. They don’t have ship upgrades, which is a bummer in some ways, but also good because you don’t have to worry about finding a ship upgrade that you need that might require you to try to commandeer an otherwise crappy ship.
Be prepared to scrap underpowered drones. In almost every type of galaxy you’re going to find in a Weekly Challenge (the exception possibly being the rare example where every derelict has 4 infestation types and a Fatal age), there will be a lot of drones that you’ll have the opportunity to salvage. My general rule, in the early part of a run, is to try to keep a stable of 4 or 5, and to scrap any drone I salvage that has a max HP of less than 110. You get 7 scrap from doing that, which can help to keep you flying, and you clear out space in your stable for a drone you might find later that might have 4 upgrade slots and/or 120 or 130 max HP. Doing this pays for itself in the long run, up to a point.
If you are in a galaxy with outposts, there are two additional essentials you want to find before you begin visiting them: Teleport and Ship Surveyor. Outposts are pesky for a number of reasons, foremost among them being that there is no guarantee (as there is with ships and stations) that the generators you have available to you at the outset will provide the access to you that you will need to reach the next generator. Also, if you run out of Transporter signals on an outpost and you still have drones on board, they are lost, along with all of their upgrades. If you have a Teleport upgrade for one of your drones, that drone can always escape the ship. Also, that drone can teleport into any room, and find the next generator even if you can’t get to it by utilizing the generators you can get to.
If you find a Long Range Scanner at an autotrader, I would strongly recommend that you buy it, use it, and then immediately sell it back. In a Weekly Challenge run, it’s useful only once, because just about every galaxy is small enough that all of the systems will be revealed by one use. Uninstall it immediately after use, too, because those things break very quickly.
Step 4: The Middle of the Run
At this point you’ve probably explored a third or more of the available systems and derelicts. You’ve been able to at least look at all the systems in the galaxy, so you have a complete picture of what you’re working with, and what tools you need to visit all of the places. With any luck, you also have found at least some of those tools. If you’ve found them all, that’s awesome. You should also have your fuel situation pretty much under control, or at least you’re not running on fumes (yet).
If there are outposts, and you haven’t found a Transporter yet, you really want to find one. My suggestions:
- Plan a route to visit any autotraders you haven’t yet visited. On the way, so as not to waste the free prop fuel that you get every time you jump into a system, target ships that might have upgrades, and Transporters specifically. It’s been my experience that Mutekis are usually the most likely to be carrying a Transporter (I have no idea why, in terms of game lore). Mutekis actually tend to have all the ship upgrades.
- If there are military outposts, and/or you haven’t found a Transporter, prioritize Military A ships next. Not only can they be good for commandeering, you will find a Transporter on them from time to time. Don’t bother with Military B ships unless you absolutely have to—often they only have one ship slot, and that ship slot is filled with a Cannon, which you can’t get rid of.
- Failing that, check the other capital ships, of any description. Again, in my experience, which is by no means authoritative (though it is extensive), Barges might be best, followed by Government, followed by Salvage, followed by Medical. Of course, it also depends on what’s nearby that you can jump to at minimal fuel cost, because it’s still important to make sure you can keep flying.
- Don’t just jump from capital ship to capital ship, if there are tinier ships or stations you could visit on the way…little ships sometimes have lots of scrap, and very occasionally they might have a useful upgrade you can obtain somehow. Don’t waste prop fuel; explore everything.
- If there are quarantined ships and you don’t yet have a Quarantine Bypass, ditto the above, but prioritize Medical ships of all types before the others, followed by Government, Military, and then the rest.
If you’re in a galaxy with outposts, and especially if you have at least found a Transporter and a Teleport, it’s probably still safe to keep scrapping substandard drones (100HP or less). Keep your five highest, with either three or four of them fully healed. If you begin to run low on scrap capacity, it might be worth starting to bump up max HP on your fully-healed drones. If you find yourself running low on scrap (or have accumulated a few 120 or 130HP disabled drones, but you’re still flying around with <110 drones that you began with), start scrapping the lower-HP drones, even if they’re fully healed. You will get 9 scrap for a fully-healed 90HP drone, so you’re not losing anything by scrapping it. Scrap it, pour the 9 scrap into healing 90 on one of your higher-HP drones, and it comes out even. I find that hard to do, especially given that I get sentimental about drones that have been with me from the beginning, but the math makes sense. And you’re going to find plenty more drones on the outposts you explore. Really, you will.
If, on the other hand, you’re in a galaxy without outposts, you need to keep track of how many A and B-class ships and stations you have left to visit. Occasionally you’ll find a disabled drone on a Barge C or something, but A and B-class derelicts are your best shot for finding drones you can salvage. The closer you get to running out of big ships and stations, the more wary you need to be about scrapping drones, regardless of their max HP. Even a 70HP disabled drone is better than ending your run with one spot empty in your drone stable. So if you don’t have outposts to explore, it’s probably time to start conserving drones and letting the 7-scrap-per-disabled-drone thing go by the wayside.
Step 5: Endgame
If you had outposts, and managed to explore most of them, you’re probably in good shape with the drone stable. Stop scrapping drones when you’re down to three or four decent-sized outposts (research and military tend to be the biggest; medical outposts can only be three or four rooms) left. Obviously, if you don’t have outposts, you probably should have stopped scrapping drones awhile back, unless (and, really, even if) all you have left are capital ships and A-class stations.
Make the rounds, if you haven’t already, to the autotraders that still have scrap left to buy things you want to sell. Ship upgrades and drone upgrades that have broken will only be worth 4 scrap and 1 scrap, respectively, if you scrap them yourself; autotraders will buy them for full price (6 scrap/3 scrap), even if they’re broken. Beyond that, sell all the fuel you can that you don’t need, even if you have to buy autotrader stuff that you don’t want or need so that the autotrader will have enough scrap to buy your fuel. Remember, with fuel, you can’t take it with you. With ship and drone upgrades, as long as they’re not broken, you can scrap them yourself for full value.
Clear out whatever derelicts you have left, but once you’ve drained all the scrap and stock from the autotraders, shift stuff around so that you avoid using any upgrades that are likely to break. At this point it’s probably not worth the scrap to repair things, so let things degrade and, when it feels too risky, switch to something else. By this point, you should be close to full-up on drone upgrades, and perhaps on ship upgrades, so choose a loadout for your last derelict or two that minimizes the chance of upgrade breakage, while still allowing you to safely run whatever you have left to run.
Step 6: Cashing Out
Judging from my experience of playing the Weekly Challenges, I’d say the likelihood is good that your galaxy map and system maps might be getting right buggy by this stage. It may be that the jump gate that is your exit point for the challenge might have disappeared, or that the entire system that contains the jump gate has completely borked, or something. It’s not the end of the world, or at least not necessarily. Here’s what I do, every time now, before I try to complete a Weekly Challenge run by jumping out through the designated jump gate (i.e. the one in the system that has the little ring around it indicating that a jump gate should be there):
- Scrap everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, that you have in your ship and drone upgrade inventory. Keep an eye on your scrap capacity, because depending on what ship you’re flying at this point, it may fill up very quickly.
- When it fills up, spend all of that scrap healing up your drones and bumping up their max HP. Then do it again, with the scrapping, and with the healing, until you have no ship upgrades left, and no drone upgrades left, and no spare scrap left that you could possibly spend on increasing your drone health.
- Then, and only then, quit to Main, or exit and restart. Even if the galaxy and system maps have borked out, doing this has a fair-to-middling chance of restoring things to a playable state, at least for long enough that you can get to the gate and jump out, thus completing the challenge and getting the 1,000 point completion bonus.
- Restart, and if you can, proceed directly to the jump gate (without side trips or looking at other systems, because even when the restart works, it can start breaking again very quickly). Go there, jump out, and end your run.
- If that doesn’t work, and you can’t jump out, and the Weekly Challenge is completely broken, your score after scrapping everything and bumping up your drone HP should still register on the leaderboard, though without the extra 1,000pts.
- If that happens, you can send me a PM via Steam, and I can maybe offer some suggestions for fixing the save file (or get in touch with/put you in touch with people who can), at least enough that you can jump out successfully and get the completion bonus and have the leaderboard register your run as finished.
APPENDIX: Possibly Useful Links
Currently, LB and I are the only ones who are recording our Weekly Challenge runs for YouTube. LB is kind of busy right now, so he hasn’t played the Weekly the last couple of weeks, but here is the link to his playlist for his Weekly runs, as well as the link to my Week 37 run for 2017:
LB’s Weekly Challenges:
My current run:
Daily Challenge playthrough video playlists for various players, many of whom are far better than I am at the Daily Challenge, and who are all pretty excellent folks:
JuryRigged: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzVn0i-RHiSmUiIcSIxw_tQ
Matthias W:
LB:
NOCKSCITNEY:
Copper:
Phaxtolgia:
And some Duskers research videos that I and others have recorded as we’ve tried to puzzle out how various of the game mechanics function in Duskers, which can be found in the Duskers Brain Trust Test Kitchen playlist: