Spells To Death Crosses
Spells to Death Crosses is a utility Spell that transforms all active projectiles into a random Death Cross.
Unlike other spells in the Spells to Spells series, this spell features a unique risk: save file corruption due to forced quit due to lag from endless recursion.
Endless Death Cross Recursion
Just like its description says this spell converts all projectiles to a random Death Cross. It does however exclude Death Crosses
When Giga Death Cross detonates, it spawns 16 projectiles in sets of 4 in the direction of a cross. These projectiles are not Death Crosses and can be converted to Death Crosses. Since half of these new Death Crosses will be Giga Death Cross this will lead to exponential numbers if repeated.
Safety Concerns
This behaviour allows Spells to Death Crosses to convert 1 projectile into a Death Cross, after which the player may wait until that Death Cross enters the phase when it creates or has created the 16 child projectiles. These child projectiles may then be converted again, yielding 16 Death Crosses. The player may then wait again, until these crosses detonate. This will produce 256 child projectiles (again possible to convert). There is no restriction, other than frame rate and player survivability, for how long this cycle may be continued. The next cycle will feature 256 base projectiles and 4096 children. After that, 16,000+ children. And so forth.
This spell is dangerous to use on rapid-firing wands for this reason. If the number of projectiles simply doubled, it may be possible to stop, but worst case scaling (the slowest it grows bigger) typically has at least 6 projectiles from a given cross converted. This leads to growth that occurs too rapidly for a player to cease firing before the game has slowed to the point that it no longer registers input via normal means.
Steps to Take in High Lag Scenarios
There are three or four resorts if the game is already lagging to a high degree. If you are reading this after lag has begun, seeking a resolution, some of these are already nonviable. You will want to read items 3 and 4 at this moment, keeping 1 and 2 in mind for future issues. Otherwise, 1 and 2 are most important as they are your options for early intervention.
- The scroll wheel of the mouse or equivalent bind. it is not recommended to rebind this entirely - the input update seems to have a higher priority via scroll wheel than all other methods - i.e. faster turnover, more successful. Reliable at speeds above 4 frames per minute, may take up to a quarter of an hour or longer for the game to process the aftermath.
- The game may fully freeze even after you succeed in ceasing to fire the spell due to the game being fast enough to stop the process, but the process terminating too late (i.e., there is a near-freezing number of base projectiles, the game registers your stop command, but then the near freezing number of base projectiles create child projectiles, and the number of projectiles is suddenly sixteen times higher than the number needed for a total game lock.).
- You can use your scroll wheel to select a safe to fire wand or safe to hold item by only moving it once. Moving it at all is enough. Continuing to move it will do absolutely nothing to improve success rate, because moving the scroll wheel once is equivalent to holding down a key forever until the game updates its state. It may actually be harmful to move the scroll wheel more than once if it you move it enough to return to the original position. Simply move it once and then switch to a different program to prevent further movement from being caught by Noita.
- Holding a key that places any item in the inventory, wand or otherwise, without Spells to Death Crosses into use as the used item. Often requires up to 15 minutes of holding the key to execute successfully on a midrange computer as of 2024. Unreliable unless done very early, inferior to 1 in all regards.
- If not using through a Greek spell or other source of infinite cast: wait it out. If 1 or 2 succeed, you also need to do this. This step can take long enough that Noita may unfreeze while the player is asleep. Enabling auto pause is useful if one anticipates an issue of this sort, so the player can leave the game in a state where it will auto pause on unfreeze. Variable Reliability: sometimes the game will entirely freeze.
- Auto pause is not itself a mitigation strategy by itself - it does not tell the game that you have stopped pressing fire, and neither will resuming. It is only a source of false hope. If it ever seems to work, something else worked instead, simultaneous to it. If you do succeed, it may be worth saving and quitting, however.
- Manual quit after auto pause has been tested as a loop break method. It will work, but creates a unique risk. See the Lag Mines heading.
- Holding Escape to manual pause will work as a variant of option 2. The difference is that the key press initiating manual pause will also send a signal to the game to update your button press state to have you not firing. Auto pause sends nothing of the sort.
- Auto pause is not itself a mitigation strategy by itself - it does not tell the game that you have stopped pressing fire, and neither will resuming. It is only a source of false hope. If it ever seems to work, something else worked instead, simultaneous to it. If you do succeed, it may be worth saving and quitting, however.
- Force-exiting the game and either restoring from backup or relying on an auto save. Variable reliability: sometimes the game cannot finish writing important data. More reliable than the prior option in a vacuum. If the game (somehow) successfully autosaved during the lag spike, refer to the discussion of lag mines.
If any of these methods work, it is ideal to make a proper backup of the save before further experimenting with this spell's recursion speed, unless you should consider this manner of "death" to be legitimate, in which case the next section may be more useful if the game has already slowed.
If none of these work, the run has ended.
Continuing to hold the "fire wand" keybind will never make the problem better, and in general will make the above steps impossible more rapidly. Regardless of if the game registers your choice, you should always disengage from doing so as soon as you notice lag spiking in an uncontrolled and unpredicted fashion.
Lag Mines
If the game is quit from to change player state from uncontrollably firing to nonfiring, on reloading the game, not all converted projectiles are necessarily loaded back in depending on where they were. This occurs exclusively with offscreen projectiles that cannot be seen by the player at the time of quitting the game. When a projectile is in an unloaded state, all processing on it is frozen, so unloaded projectiles that have not expired will not expire until loaded back in, and will furthermore proceed through their normal behaviour before expiring - in the case of Death Crosses, detonating with their 16 projectile fusillade.
This results in "mines" in the form of Spells to Death Crosses projectiles that are frozen (and will not ever despawn or complete their behaviour) until the chunk they are in is loaded. When their chunk is loaded, these projectiles spawn back in and finish their process of existence, detonating with player-harmful projectiles as usual. This loading, and the accompanying detonations, will (without a fast method of travel that just happens to head to where they are located) always conclude offscreen, at which point depending on where the death crosses were, their child projectiles may rapidly travel on screen and possibly even towards the player's current location. This situation, where tens or hundreds of fast-moving and high-damaging projectiles are suddenly shot onscreen without notice or ability to prevent such an outcome (as the location of undetonated Death Crosses is unknown), can be incredibly lethal. There is a video below showing this behaviour from an actual (modded) run. No mods used in the run influence any relevant behaviours.
It is possible to produce a similar behaviour as can be seen from attempting quit-based recursive loop resolution if you are rapidly using Spells to Death Crosses when also travelling rapidly, as fast travel methods can allow a chunk with living death cross projectiles (or projectiles in general) to be unloaded, rendering them immortal until your characters returns to a proximity that brings them back to a loaded state. Doing so requires relatively far more exotic circumstances than simply saving and quitting, however, as practically, one must be using a method of travel immune to Spells to Death Crosses' conversion effect, such as recoil-based fast travel.
In any case, should one quit out, it is advisable to proceed carefully until all mines from projectiles loading back in have been either detonated, or confirmed not to exist. It is also possibly lethal to carry a Kuu or to use other sources of projectile gravity near one's person until one does so.
Safe Use
There is a grace period before recursion begins in the time it takes for the first Death Cross to detonate, and a short while afterwards that is only long due to sheer lag. This grace period recurs with each new loop - since all child projectiles and all unrelated convertible projectiles become death crosses at the same time, this grace period is always the same length (in frames, not real time) in any given loop.
As the number of projectiles exponentiates, the grace period also becomes longer in real time (not frames), since Noita is a framerate-dependent game. This should be recognised for what it is - not a true lengthening of the period in game terms, but more real-world time to break the loop while it is still easier to do so. If the game is in a frames-per-minute speed regime, it is likely already too late to easily do (though you could sit with the game holding a key and watching a movie or some similar activity to make a desperation attempt less tedious).
Note that with rapid-firing wands, it is possible to "break" the grace period if you are using a wand that provides a "fodder" projectile for Spells to Death Crosses to convert as well as having Spells to Death Crosses itself. This breakage occurs if the wand is capable of rapid fire - a primary risk to everything discussed in these sections. In such a case, then a player can create a scenario where they have a death cross that exits its conversion immune grace period and creates its convertible child projectiles while other Death Crosses are still in their respective grace periods all of which are desynchronised.
This is unideal, because at the point this begins, lag is increasing as fast as the wand fires instead of in a discontinuous staircase-like manner where each new "plateau" of lag can be evaluated for danger before a reasoned decision as to whether the risk of even greater lag is worth the greater power entailed may then be made. Not only is the risk of things getting out of control uncontrollably far greater, but with discontinuous, staircase-style lag increase, the game is much more likely to register your ceasing to fire, as you will be letting go of fire during the grace period before projectile count is multiplied by 16 via child projectile birth. Essentially, with staircase-style projectile count growth, the game will always register both your choice to fire and your choice to cease firing at the same speed. This is not the case with continuous growth, where the game will always register your decision to cease firing in much worse lag conditions, possibly being unable to detect it due to those self-same conditions.
At 10 frames per second, it is ideal to use mitigations discussed above, with options 1 or 2 as your priority. Below that, 3 and 4 become more likely to succeed.
Finally, note that recursively created death crosses (but not their child projectiles) have a "free" boomerang style modifier that seems to function as something intermediate between homing and short range homing. With sufficient distance of good cover, this is no threat; without it, it can be lethal.
Benefits
The recursive property of this spell can be made useful, like any dangerous mechanic in Noita. It is a source of tremendous firepower in a short time period (measured in frames), and with adequate shielding (such as a holy mountain exit shaft) can be used to completely clear the initial area of many biomes with good trigger discipline and careful timing, creating a safe zone. This is because death crosses dig decently, and a chain of death crosses such as this spell creates can navigate to anywhere currently loaded that can be reached by a combination of its digging and a series of linear or staircase-shaped paths.
A secondary benefit (in some runs, primary in others) is that the child projectiles trick kill.
So long as a wand built to use the recursion effect of this spell is used with all of the above in mind, there is no reason it cannot be helpful to one's run. It merely presents a unique risk of a run-ending issue, as many spells do. This information is offered in such detail primarily due to the unusual nature of the risk particular to this spell and the fact that it usually takes more than a single spell on a wand to cause this sort of threat.
Gallery
Tips
- Non-recursively converted projectiles immediately stop when they are transformed.
- Recursively converted projectiles immediately act as if they have homing focused on the player when transformed.
- Recursively created projectiles in post-detonation state trick kill.
- Can be incredibly lethal when combined with spells with multiple projectiles, such as Triplicate Bolt or Infestation. This is a decent way to get firepower near to the recursive effect without the homing behaviour associated therewith.
- Prevents projectiles (in a very general sense, including, e.g., "projectiles" from Sea of spells and Notes) added after it in the same casting state from firing. They are still drawn as normal and any associated modifiers to cast delay, spread, etc., are still applied. Expiration Trigger projectiles removed in this manner will not release their payload.
- Does not convert Mists, or Death Crosses not created by itself, allowing these projectiles to be used for offense while converting other projectiles for defense, or selective elimination of long-lasting projectiles.
- Spells with limited uses
- Spells with positive cast delay
- Spells related to recharge time
- Spells with positive recharge time
- Spells with unlock conditions
- Spells tagged with triggerfail
- Spells tagged with neverunlimited
- Spells tagged with projkiller
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- Spells
- Spells of type Utility