It has been a while, sorry about that. I’ll try to do better in the future.
The last time I posted, it was a short update on the results of my channel’s format change, the results were inconclusive, overall not the pick up in audience I was after, but ceasing trying to put up videos every day reduced pressure and stress. To this day I haven’t received any comments asking for the let’s plays to return.
That said, roughly two weeks after that fateful post in September, I went back to daily or near daily uploads. Why? Because the Suspicious Developments released the Space Birthday update for Heat Signature. I love that game, I already had been planning to do tip videos for the update (and I did, Heat Signature Hot Tips received 15 new installments), but more importantly they added a Daily Challenge mode. Suddenly a game I enjoy and am quite good at had a daily competitive element and inspired by Tom Francis putting his challenge runs up online I followed suit.
I have been releasing Heat Signature Daily Challenge videos nearly every day with only the occasional break due to minor things like travel, getting married, honeymoon, guests, technical difficulties and laziness. It turns out I am an above average Heat Signature player. I am perhaps quite good at this game. Over the course of the last 5 months I have obtained what I believe are two world records in Heat Signature daily challenges.
Before I show these off I want to delve into exactly how the Heat Signature Daily Challenge works, because unlike Spelunky or Crypt of the Necrodancer this isn’t just a set daily seed for the regular game mode. Heat Signature was not initially designed to have a Daily Challenge so they had to figure out what the challenge would mean and how to implement it.
The Daily Challenge can only be started in galaxies where no faction has been eliminated, each challenge consists of the following:
- 3 linked missions of escalating difficulty and point value
- A random character with up to 4 traits, negative or positive
- A load out consisting of 1 melee weapon or gun, 1 self-charging item, 1 disposable item, 1 random pod
- A clause, you lose points each time you break it
Each mission is an increasing number of points, 100, 150 and 250. So completing all three with no penalty earns you 500 points. However for those players are then graded on style. The theoretical maximum style bonus is 100, but for every 16 seconds they spend near mission ships, or aboard any ship they lose 1 point. It generally takes 5-6 seconds to dock to a ship and 5-6 seconds to pick a character from the cold void of space after they crash through a window, so needless to say it is very difficult to get those highest scores.
Which is why first I want to present my world record for the highest number of points earned in any Heat Signature Daily Challenge
This was the perfect storm of gear. We have a character with a concussion hammer, which lets us dash up to guards but does not kill them which would violate our clause, we have a Glitch Tick which means that docking is instant as we just teleport to their airlock and we have a self-charging slipstream, meaning that we move 5 times faster than normal and finally we just have to steal an item, so we don’t need to work out how to deal with armour, shields or having to pick up an extra body from space. With this loadout we can literally teleport on the target ships, run through them stealing from guards on the way, grab our item and tail it. The biggest risks were having a guard shoot another or having a guard sitting in a window room on our way out. We are blamed for any deaths no matter who actually causes them.
The aggregate mission time for this run was 35 seconds, leaving me with the first (and to my knowledge only) 599 score on any Heat Signature Daily Challenge leaderboard, the game’s lead developer actually commented on Discord that he did not expect that score to be possible.
The second world record is somewhat more niche. The Speed clause daily challenge is somewhat unique in that it is nearly impossible to avoid a penalty, as you get a 5 point penalty for every 10 seconds you spend aboard a ship. The record setting run can be found below:
The score for this run has been equalled, back on the 28th of October, a player by the name of Terin got a 490 score in a Speed daily, but they took 40 seconds, where I took a total of 38. Ultimately this run is very similar to the other world record run. We have a glitch tick cutting roughly 5 seconds off of every dock time and we have the amazing early game loot of a rechargable slipstream and once again we just have to steal things. In some ways this is easier than the other run in this post because I simply do not care what happens to the guards I interact with. If it is more convenient to just shoot someone from across the room I can with no score impact at all.
I am particularly proud of the third ship on this run, I manage to get through the larget ship in the least time through good use of slipstreams and swappers, for many of these guards I was merely a very loud breeze and then I was gone.
That’s all I have time to post about today, next time I will give an update on the other videos I have been doing. Hopefully I will get it out much faster than this post.