Teleport Bolt
Teleport Bolt is a projectile type spell, often sought in the early stages of the game. The translucent white projectile it produces flies in a gentle arc, and upon expiring, and provided there is sufficient space, teleports the caster to that location.
If the space is too small, or the nearest valid space is too far away, the teleport fails. Small Teleport Bolt differs mainly in distance and speed from the normal variant. The projectile itself deals no damage to creatures, but can damage and destroy fragile objects such as lanterns as well as cause ice to crack. The two varieties of teleport bolt are commonly referred to as 'long tele' and 'short tele'.
Safe Teleporting
It's well worth practicing teleporting as it makes the game a lot easier. Spend some time just teleporting around in a safe area. In particular, get a feel for the trajectory of the teleport bolt, the time it takes to trigger teleportation, and the speed with which you fall afterwards.
Teleport spells can greatly improve your rate of travel while exploring, especially above ground where there are large distances to cover. They also increase your survival greatly if used to avoid projectiles, enemies, and other hazards. They have their own dangers, however.
While you cannot use either version of Teleport Bolt to teleport into solid rock (normally), it is possible to teleport into a space and then be unable to leave. Teleport bolts can be fired upward through thin platforms, but will not necessarily fly back down again through the same thickness of material. If you teleport into a metal box, and can't teleport out again, you may be waiting a long time for a worm to happen by to free you.
Teleporting into a space you can't see is reckless, and to be avoided, but it can be easy to do by accident with unmodified teleport bolts as they fly a long distance. Try to aim for a wall nearby, to make the travel time short, and your escape swift.
If you are traveling fast enough to engage fast movement, this can present hazards of its own. If you impact a thin enough wall, you can fly through it without breaking it. You could then possibly be trapped in an enclosed area. If that area contains something that could kill you, this may spell the end of your run. In particular, the Watchtower presents a genuine flight hazard. You can impact the wall and be enclosed in a chamber of lava (see gallery). Without some means of escape, this is very deadly.
At least in The Work (Hell) with a fast enough wand setup, it seems readily possible to indeed teleport directly into solid terrain, and not necessarily at high speed (see gallery). Being that a trip to Hell typically requires some form of infinite digging, this may not be such a hazard for most players; but if you lack some means of escape, you would be trapped.
Line of Sight
Tele and Short Tele both require a clean line of sight between you and the target destination. If a wall is in the way, you will only teleport as far as the obstruction. Terrain Interaction and Path modifiers work on teleport bolts, with varying levels of usefulness. For example, Drilling Shot combined with Accelerating Shot) will let the projectile fly slowly through terrain, as will Phasing Arc.
Long-Distance Cast will allow you to teleport past walls, or fire from behind them. Luminous Drill With Timer can be used similarly, but has to dig through the wall first and costs (a lot of) mana to use.
Range, Speed & Lifetime
Regular Teleport bolt ('long tele') is slow moving and has a long lifetime. Short Teleport bolt ('short tele') is fast moving and has a short lifetime. Other than that they are almost identical, and using modifiers you improve the performance of both. The Short version does cost half as much mana though, making it far better for building rapid fire teleport wands.
You can boost the teleport distance of long-tele using Speed Up, Increase Duration, Accelerating Shot, or other lifetime/speed boosting modifiers. Teleport bolts can also be used in the payload of spells with Triggers. Increased range is generally not desirable - a teleport bolt flying too far from you can despawn without activating the teleport, and also increases your chance of teleporting into dangers that were previously off-screen (such as Polymorphine).
It is counterintuitive, but ideally you want as short a hop distance as possible, and to hop as rapidly as possible. Teleporting involves a delay between firing the wand and the teleport actually happening - the teleport's latency. This is mostly the time it takes for the teleport bolt to move to the target location. During that period you are vulnerable (and if airborne, falling).[1] Usually escaping from danger is very time-sensitive. If you fall into a pool of acid, you don't want to be waiting for the teleport bolt you fired to hit something.
Rapid firing alone causes another issue - firing more teleport bolts while earlier ones are still in flight doesn't disable the earlier ones, and they don't necessarily go off in the order they are fired - whichever bolt hits something (or runs out of lifetime) first will teleport you first. Even short tele's 8 frame lifetime is enough to cause chaotic zig-zagging motion when rapid cast.
Camera Following lag
The game's camera can take some time to catch up with you when accelerating quickly, or jumping a long distance in one hop. This can mean that you teleport past the position of the mouse cursor on the screen. Since spells are aimed in the direction of the cursor, the next teleport bolt gets fired somewhat backwards compared to the direction you are trying to move. This is the main source of 'zig-zagging' in tele flight.[2]
Shorter hop lengths avoid this effect, since you aren't ever jumping very far past the cursor. A good measure of a teleport wand is its station-keeping performance, i.e. how tightly you can maintain a position while hovering - see Shortest Tele below for some examples of this.
The zig-zagging effect under acceleration can be mitigated by keeping the mouse cursor as close to the edge of the screen (in the direction you want to travel ) as you can. Once the camera catches up it tends not to be an issue in flight when using Teleport Bolt due to the fast camera movement system.
Fast Movement
Traveling incredibly quickly causes a few effects depending on the speed. At initial high speeds, Minä will have motion lines coming off of them. The size and intensity of them is determined by the amount of speed Minä has. This effect is caused by low-enough speeds to be observable while free-falling. At higher speeds, Minä will begin to cause explosions upon impact with surfaces. The camera's behavior will also adjust to keep Minä on screen more reliably. Finally, at even higher speeds, a loud jet-engine or train-like noise will come from Minä, with its volume and pitch being determined by speed.
The higher speed effects can be achieved either by using Recoil from spells for propulsion, or rapid casting of either variety of Teleport Bolt. The teleport or recoil impulse needs to happen at least once every 5 frames (12 times per second) to enable the effect. Fast Movement is not enabled by Swapper or Homebringer based teleportation, and is disabled while the effect of Circle of Buoyancy is active.
This state of fast movement has been referred to as "meteoring", "supersonic", or "zooming", and is technically PLAYER_FAST_MOVEMENT.
Precision & Mana
If you tune your wand so that the delay between bolts is around the same as the time it takes each one to teleport you then, even with a high teleport latency, you can hop around precisely. This also saves mana - firing 10 teleport bolts to get you to the same place that one would have is a waste of mana, and potentially frees up an Add Mana for use elsewhere.
Shortest Tele
Teleport latency is the sum of the time taken to fire the teleport bolt (wand cycle time), and the time the teleport bolt takes to expire (the shorter of either the projectile's lifetime, or the time it takes it to hit something). Small Teleport Bolt starts off flying at 'terminal velocity', so you can't make it fly faster using speed modifiers - so reducing its lifetime is the best option.
Nolla reduces Short Teleport's lifetime to 2 frames. Reduce Lifetime is even better, reducing it to 1 frame, but costs more mana. You won't teleport very far for each 'hop', but if you fire at a high enough rate, you can still move very fast. This also gives you excellent control over your positioning.
For even greater precision (at the cost of flying speed) you can also slow the teleport bolts down so that they cover less distance for each 'hop'. At the extreme, you can make them stationary, at which point the teleport hop distance is determined by how long your wand is. To go shorter than that, you can use Inner Spell to have the bolts spawn on top of you. Return is also an option for very short teleporting as it has no initial speed by default.
Use of Reduce Lifetime with the regular (long) tele bolt can produce projectiles with infinite lifetime[3] These can fly a very long distance before teleporting you, which can be dangerous, but will SPOILER: be impressive .
Notes:
- ↑ If the time between teleport bolts is too high, you may find it impossible to maintain consistent flight.
- ↑ If you use a controller instead of keyboard/mouse then you will have less benefit from using a Nolla as the cursor will always stay in the same direction as the right thumbstick; this is one of the few advantages of using a controller in Noita. However, as Nolla gives you much more control over the teleport bolt it still provides some benefit.
- ↑ The game engine considers any projectile with a lifetime of -1 to have unlimited lifetime.
Tips
- A teleport bolt is used as one of the quickest and safest ways to escape the Holy Mountain, allowing you to come back to edit wands. This does require some practice to do reliably. A Long Distance Cast makes this even more easy and safe/reliable.
- Combining the (Small) Teleport Bolt with Nolla and Speed Up on an already fast wand produces a very fast teleport wand that you can use to fly around the world with relative ease.
- If trying to make an incredibly fast teleport wand, a simple Wand Refresh at the end can lower your rate of travel by half. Leave it off for maximum speeds.
Gallery
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