Hi all,

I just wanted to post because of something I've noticed, and wanted to see if it was a genuine thing or just a random coincidence.

I played a lot of Gungeon on my friend's PC, and then bought my own version on PS4. I didn't bother buying the guns from the various stores etc, and when I started speed-running I had a fairly bare-bones pool of guns that could spawn. I ended up getting the gungine surprisingly often in Rainbow runs, I'd estimate about 1 in 4 runs would spawn a gungine.

After I went on a massive spree to unload lots of credits that I'd accumulated, the spawn frequency of the gungine seemed to be surprisingly lower, more I expected. I know it's obvious that the more guns I have, the less likely the gungine is to come up, but it went from being a 1/4 spawn to much less frequent, even though I only bought ~10-15 guns. Is this just in my head, or has anyone else observed this? Is there a way to manipulate gun spawns from rainbow boxes?

Additionally, I noticed that after I achieved certain milestones, specific level layouts started appearing. For example, in some of the docs that Spleen put together, the later generations of levels never appeared when I play with the initial bare-bones version. When I unlocked characters and did the secret levels, I started getting the later generations outlined in Spleen's guide.

Is this something that people manipulate to make speedruns better? Is it better to have a more limited set of achievements and guns unlocked to get less variation on level generations and gun spawns? Or does everybody generally use the same save state with everything unlocked. Is this something that has been discussed before?

Thanks for any answers/insight.

Dimz

Hello!

in response to this:
"After I went on a massive spree to unload lots of credits that I'd accumulated, the spawn frequency of the gungine seemed to be surprisingly lower, more I expected. I know it's obvious that the more guns I have, the less likely the gungine is to come up, but it went from being a 1/4 spawn to much less frequent, even though I only bought ~10-15 guns. Is this just in my head, or has anyone else observed this? Is there a way to manipulate gun spawns from rainbow boxes?"

Yes, you are more likely to get certain weapons you have unlocked when you have less weapons unlocked in general, since the game chooses from a smaller pool of drops, you can technically utilize it in speedruns but most people just run on full save files because there's also a ton of endgame weapons that only get unlocked later into the shop pools (so you end up having to unlock a lot of garbage before them).

To clarify on this:
"Additionally, I noticed that after I achieved certain milestones, specific level layouts started appearing. For example, in some of the docs that Spleen put together, the later generations of levels never appeared when I play with the initial bare-bones version. When I unlocked characters and did the secret levels, I started getting the later generations outlined in Spleen's guide."

I do not believe unlocks and game progress have to do absolutely anything with the kind of generation blueprints you end up getting, it's all purely rng, a lot of the time you can get one generation several times in a row, while others you get different ones in a sequence. I would just say you probably got lucky (or unlucky) that you got only certain generations. However this wasn't ever researched so I don't have a concrete answer, although you just being lucky is very plausible.

"Is this something that people manipulate to make speedruns better?" - No
"Is it better to have a more limited set of achievements and guns unlocked to get less variation on level generations and gun spawns?" - As explained earlier, you kind of have to go through some crappy unlocks to get a lot of better ones, so its not necessarily better or worse.
"Or does everybody generally use the same save state with everything unlocked." - Most people just speedrun on the 100% save file that also has 50k+ hegemony credits for rainbow/blessing/boss rush resets.
"Is this something that has been discussed before?" - Yes, if you're wondering whether you have to run on the 100% file, then no, its up to you.

Thanks for the response - I guess from my first paragraph what I was saying was it felt like guns that I had purchased were spawning more frequently than the 'useful' guns I wanted in a way that didn't feel random. If it's totally random then I guess it's just in my head.

As for the level generations, that's quite interesting because it really felt like I didn't see any later generations until after I'd unlocked more characters/guns etc. Maybe it is luck, maybe I'm mis-remembering but it was over dozens of play throughs. I might wipe my save and start from scratch again just to document it and see if there's any evidence for it, by mapping out the generations I get.

Cheers!

"Thanks for the response - I guess from my first paragraph what I was saying was it felt like guns that I had purchased were spawning more frequently than the 'useful' guns I wanted in a way that didn't feel random. If it's totally random then I guess it's just in my head."
There is a mechanic in the game where you are more likely to get a gun/item that you just unlocked, but it only works for the first time of you finding said item/gun, once you find them once the odds become normal again.

"As for the level generations, that's quite interesting because it really felt like I didn't see any later generations until after I'd unlocked more characters/guns etc. Maybe it is luck, maybe I'm mis-remembering but it was over dozens of play throughs. I might wipe my save and start from scratch again just to document it and see if there's any evidence for it, by mapping out the generations I get."
Good luck on that, will be interesting to see if you find anything interesting!