Advanced Gameplay

These are random tricks that can help improve your efficiency at playing Creeper World 4. They're not required to play the game but they can make harder levels much easier and improve your times.

• Balance your energy generation/usage. If you start to see your storage filling up with energy, find a way to spend it. It's better to be in a small deficit than to have maxed energy storage because this means you're always using all of your energy. Being topped off blinds you to how much you are really wasting every second.
• Build energy infrastructure (Towers/Miners) for as long as you can before building anything else. More energy generation early means more energy for other activities than you would otherwise have.
• If you have immediate access to an ERN at the start of the level, it can be very efficient to build 3 towers, and then focus only on building a single miner and ERNing it. An ERNed miner gives 5 energy generation which will kickstart your energy generation, and subsequently your initial tower buildout, faster than just building towers will do. Note that you can ERN a miner immediately after starting to build it. That way the ERN will arrive to it and improve it immediately by the time the build actually happens.
• Trees quintuple the energy generation of soylent (tower green area), towers in heavily forested areas are even more efficient to build than ERNed miners.

• ERN miners should be a top priority in the early game.
• ERN refinery doubles greenar production, which can be critical if you need early beacons, platorms, or are simply aiming for a totem speedrun. For increasing greenar production an ERN refinery is generally better than ERNing Mine Production in the ERN portal in either short runs or maps where a single refinery can keep up with greenar crystal spawns.
• ERN cannons are extremely good if you would otherwise need multiple cannons very early, but should be switched elsewhere once you stabilize.
• Portal: Even after the ERN Portal is built and an ERN is slotted into it, the effect takes 2 minutes to charge up to its maximum effect. Because of this an ERN Portal is often not used in vey short runs.
• Portal: In general: Energy production » Weapon range/firing rate » Move speed>build speed, however different maps may have different priorities. Mine production is so map dependent that it is not listed above; in some maps it is practically required and in others it is completely useless.
• Increased range on a beacon/pylon can really make a difference in some maps, but is typically not useful.
• Don't be afraid to move them around once the problems they were solving are dealt with.

• Cannons are by far the most effective unit you have for doing the objectives. What's important to understand about them is that a bunch of pre-loaded cannons can effectively land in the middle of up to 6-7 levels of creeper and clear up enough landing space for a porter container or a tower. When they do - it immediately becomes a new frontline pushing outpost for you allowing you to go straight for remote objectives without clearing the creeper all the way from your base. This allows you to shut down some remote objectives way before creeper levels there accumulate to present a problem.

• In this game, the base does not need to be landed to generate energy. Moving your lab closer to areas that need packets will reduce packet travel time to these areas at no cost¹⁾.
• You can get a speed improvement to initial tower build out by hovering your lab closer towards unbuilt towers after the few initial towers are finished.
• Flying the lab directly above the last totem/nullifier will reduce travel time of the last packet, saving a few game frames.
• The lab can survive for almost a full minute in creeper. Having your lab landed inside a bunch of creeper is not a bad thing unless it dies, and it can help extend your network to a crucial area.
• The lab has a very long connection range to units, which includes totems. Moving your lab just in range of a totem can help extend your reach to it and charge it, even if the position is completely filled with creeper.

• Miner bluite production tends to vastly underperform in terms of damage output. A miner on 15 tiles of resource terrain produces 0.3 bluite packets per second; this corresponds to 2.7 units of anticreeper on the map which will cancel 2.7 units of creeper. A miner on energy can provide ammo for one mortar, which will do 60 damage per second.
• Anticreeper slows mesh growth by 90% and makes an amazing support unit for pushes into areas with a lot of mesh.
• Destroying sprayers will deposit all of their ammo as anticreeper on whatever map tile they were centered on. This can be used as a one off AC bomb to activate breeder terrain, including void breeder.

• Expensive defensive units are not always needed. Most maps are best completed with Cannons/Mortars.
• Skimmers can be dodged by moving units around before the stun ball hits the ground.
• Blobs will destroy themselves and the first object they hit. They can be defended by building towers in their movement path. You must use snipers if there are eggs at the blob nest, as otherwise the blobs will carry them into your base, leading to a potentially dangerous situation.
• For most maps, a missile launcher can be replaced by 2 cannons. Just move them to the spots the spore will hit.
• Eggs don't drop creeper if popped when they are on top of/inside of a shield. If pushing into dense eggs, 1-2 shields will significantly ease the process.
• Forbs (square things coming from skimmer nests on mesh) shoot a lot more after being damaged. Only attack them if you have enough snipers to kill them fairly quickly.
• Air sacs slowly drop the balls, which must be dealt with by snipers or cannons. They can only by killed by missiles, at which point they drop all remaining balls.

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