Whisker Squadron: Survivor is a rail-shooter roguelite where the main gameplay is clearly inspired by a certain other franchise where barrel-rolling fighter ships piloted by anthropomorphic animals blast through various stages to rack up high scores. What this guide is meant to do is to inform you of the various tips and tricks I’ve found for getting the most out of the roguelite elements, including leveling up and power scaling, and a few related tips on target priority. What I can’t do is make you better at flying your ship, aiming your shots, or dodging incoming enemy fire - as roguelites go, this one is highly dependent on your ability to pilot your ship, and no amount of information or deliberate strategy in picking your targets or powerups will make you better at surviving when the game decides you will be fighting several tanky enemies at once.

This guide is a work in progress, currently all text. In the future I'll add screenshots and accompanying images to each section to help illustrate the points. This guide was written on version 0.69.

Perhaps you are new to the genre, or haven’t thought about it much, but typically roguelites offer two different tiers of progression - one for individual runs, permanently lost upon death or success, and one applying to all runs. In Slay the Spire, the former is the cards in your deck, your relics, your potions, and your gold, while the latter are the extra card and character unlocks you get from your first few runs. In The Binding of Isaac, the former are the coins and items you find to boost your stats, while the latter are more items, characters, modes, and bosses. Similarly, in WS:S, each run has you buffing your ship’s weapons or adding augment abilities, but also unlocking VP to buy permanent ship improvements, new ships, new weapons, etc.

It is generally true of roguelites that within individual runs, the best way to maximize your chances of winning is to see as many rewards as possible. In Loop Hero, you want to fight as many enemies as you can early on to get more equipment and card rewards. In The Binding of Isaac, you want to get as many passive items as you can, encouraging you to seek out the devil/angel rooms. This is also part of why the D20 is so broken in Greed mode, as it can result in a near endless loop of getting more energy, generating more items, gaining more money, and being able to buy more from the shop. Early in Slay the Spire, you want to fight enemies for card rewards to improve your attack power. So, if your way of getting stronger here in WS:S is to level up and select a new perk, it follows that you want to maximize your scrap rewards.

Most enemies drop 5 scrap, with spike heads dropping 2 or 3. However, this is not the end of the story - some enemies are stationary, some will fly along with you a certain distance before stopping (allowing you to fly past them and not see them anymore), some will basically fly with you forever until they run afoul of their AI running them into a wall (happens a couple times in a run), and some will basically fly forever with you but force you to regularly use your shield to deal with their regular, hard to dodge fire. Levels won’t actually end until you’ve shot down or passed the last of the spawned enemies. So the trick, then, is to gain target priorities.

Let’s start with Act 1. The first enemies you meet in the entire game are Scarabs, which will fly along in front of you pretty much endlessly, occasionally turning around to shoot (easily dodged) laser fire at you. These are the lowest priority enemies - if you ignore them for other targets, chances are they will still be there when you are done. Pulsewave Casters, similarly, will keep flying as long as they don’t hit a wall, and are simple enough to dodge. On the other hand are the Spike Heads, which fly along in a line 10 at a time and after flying long enough will split up, stop, and shoot lasers back at you. Once these guys stop to shoot lasers, they aren’t moving anymore, so any you miss is scrap you’re missing out on. Taken collectively, they’re actually pretty great for building up both your combo multiplier and gaining quite a bit of scrap. Similarly, Swarm Turrets are glued in place, so any one of them you see should be a higher priority target than the Scarabs or even Spike Heads flying above them. With the exact same logic, Larva Bombs are on a similar priority level to Swarm Turrets.

Then there are the Cyclops Drones, which charge up and shoot a laser at you that, if it hits, caps off 50% of your hull. Yeesh. Something that dangerous shoots to the top of your priority list, with some exceptions. As of version 0.69, the chargeup is interrupted any time they lose line of sight on you, such as when you put a building between you and them, meaning that you can temporarily shift their priority down and shoot at any turrets or bombs you can see while they can’t see you.

To summarize, targets should be picked in order of danger level, then availability. Take out the enemies that hit hardest or are most difficult to avoid damage from first, then prioritize the enemies that will disappear or will be passed by you, then finally the enemies that fly along with you indefinitely barring an act of RNG. This advice applies across every act.

Further breakdowns of the other acts will be added later.

Ok, great, now that we’re prioritizing targets better, we’re getting more levels than ever! I’ve even managed with some luck to get to level 6 on the very first action zone! Of course, with each level you pick a perk, so we have a few things to consider.

1) Am I doing enough damage to the bosses and enemies to kill them before they can kill me?

2) Do I have enough sustain to make up for the hits I will almost inevitably take?

3) How easily will I be able to pick up enough scrap to reach the next level up?

Every run will continuously tangle with each of these questions, and my experience has narrowed down some perks I will almost *always* take in a run specifically to address these questions. Note that these are not listed in order of priority, as your priority should be shifting based on what your results are after the first action zone. However, here are the main perks I prioritize when playing to win:

1) For damage, upgrades to your laser damage or rate of fire should always be taken in the first action zone if they are offered to you. More laser power means killing enemies faster with your main weapon which means more scrap to level up more. Other powerups along these lines are a periodic pulse, a proximity zap, a chain death lightning, missile powerups, piercing, roll deflection, and drones. The drones vary in usefulness depending on your weapon loadout - I can’t in good conscience recommend the laser drone with the pulse laser, but it’s pretty good with the gatling gun and default laser. Piercing and chain death lightning are particularly nice for Spike Heads, but sometimes in Acts 2 and 3 the enemies start to pile together enough for piercing to be relevant as well. Roll Deflection by Act 3 is also extremely nice to grab. As long as you get your laser DPS upgraded, any of these others are good enough ways to bump up your damage output.

2) For scrap collecting, I almost always take Magnet. Not only does it remove the need to fly into the middle of the scrap left behind by your target, it also enables some fun interactions like absorbing scrap from the other side of a wall or being able to collect scrap from enemies destroyed by black holes. The freedom of movement this perk gives you while continuing to level up is incredibly important, and unlike the roll magnet ability is a passive effect that doesn’t operate on a cooldown. You can win without it, but my experience is that levels come slower and I always end up missing it.

3) For sustain, it depends on if you are using the pulse laser or not. If not, hull recovery on crits can be fantastic, especially if paired with the corresponding energy on crit perk. If you are using the pulse laser, it is probably better to completely ignore the energy and hull crit perks and instead focus on the combo focused perks, which includes a chance to outright full heal you when your combo gets high enough or one that causes hull recovery pickups to drop. I don’t typically touch the hull reinforcement perk because the gain in max hull and 10 recovery pales in comparison to actual sustain granted by the other perks, and seldom will a zone be such that that 10 extra hull mattered more than having the ability to heal myself.

So let’s take a typical run with any of the pilots. Between targeting priority and RNG, you can expect to be at minimum level 4 by the end of the first action zone. Act 1 really only has one threat in the Cyclops Drones that may or may not show up in a given action zone, so you should expect to be relatively healthy through most of the act. Given this, I would prioritize picking up DPS upgrades first, grabbing Magnet if it shows up and shifting to grabbing sustain only if I start taking hull damage or if there are no better options. By the end of Act 1, you should be level 10+, likely hitting 13 or 14 at the end of the act boss, and this is usually plenty to have upgraded the laser to near max and grabbed quite a few more goodies along the way.