I consider coda no return to be the hardest "challenging but fair" vanilla mode among modes of Necrodancer. Actually, across all games I've ever played. This is because, unlike other special modes, it adds no additional reliance on luck, and requires significant new strategies for all enemies. I'm one of very few people to have cleared coda no return - according to the Amplified pre-Synchrony leaderboards there were three full clears (from Amplified's release, on 25 January 2017 to 4 August 2022), and on the Synchrony pre-v4 leaderboards (i.e. 5 August 2022 to 13 March 2022) there were five full clears with me being one of them. There is no in-depth coda-specific guide I could find, but I want more people to bask in the glory that is The Red Tile That Follows You, so please enjoy my guide c:

The first thing I will say, is to think of Necrodancer as a real time strategy game when playing coda no return. Why is that? Well, think of the goal to this game this way: there are two goals, to not die and to kill all the minibosses and bosses, plus any regular enemies in the way. Everything else is optional, and in low% everything else will get you killed.

Think of necrodancer this way: the player can be killed for one of two general reasons, either (1) because they didn't know and execute a key combo to kill a group of enemies, or (2) because some RNG aspect of the game surprised the player enough (e.g. to miss a beat, die to a bat or a swarm of enemies).

For example, if you only just started playing the game, most deaths would be to (1) because you wouldn't know what most of the enemies do. If you play Cadence or Bard for a while, in theory this will happen less often. But if you switch to a character like Monk or Aria, some key combos won't work any more, because they might involve missing beat or touching gold. So you have to learn more complicated key combos to stay alive while the enemies die. Coda no return is much the same.

Similarly, you need to both know a good key combo and be physically capable of executing it, which is made harder in double tempo. In other words, you can die to a jumpscare twice as fast, which requires both faster reaction speed and grants less time to figure out the inputs to survive. Bard is like a puzzle character, but coda is a real time trategy character because the puzzle has a tempo time limit.

You're basically playing starcraft 2. Your goal in Necrodancer playing coda is to get roughly 6 key presses a minute for most songs, i.e. 360 actions per minute (APM). In starcraft 2, there's a decent correlation between high APM and winrate, and it tops off at about 250. While it should be noted just having high APM doesn't make you a good player, it's certainly a factor to consider in how starcraft 2 and necrodancer are similar in this sense of real time strategy, rapidly forming plans and rapidly executing them.
(source. I really don't like reddit, but I couldn't find a better source. This is just meant to be an example for comparison.)

Eventually, as a player learns how to fight enemies effectively in Necrodancer, most deaths will be due to surprise or some other RNG. As it turns out, while this random element cannot be entirely eliminated, there is a lot you can do to mitigate this which I write about in the 'mitigating randomness' section. However, playing coda no return imposes many restrictions on how the player can move safely, so knowing effective key combos to kill groups of enemies is what most of the guide is dedicated to, even though some of it may seem obvious, there is value in making the implicit explicit.

Ultimately, both random aspects of Necrodancer (bats and level generation) affect zone 1 the most, as that is where coda starts, zone 1 is the only zone which regular rooms can spawn as tier 3 walls, and the highest percentage (33% of minibosses) are direbats. The player also has the fewest items to deal with this compared to other zones. This means that at a high skill level, zone 1 is in practice the hardest zone, with the flipside being that getting past zone 1 significantly improves the chances of full clearing.

The guide is structured roughly that the most important gameplay strategies start at the top, and the niche strategies appear further down. There are many small techniques which each make gameplay slightly more manageable, but some techniques and strategies have a bigger effect than others.

This is the #1 first goal as a starting player. The goal is, with practice, to keep tempo on death metal (350 BPM) for at least 30 seconds, and on 4-3 (the wight to remain, 320 BPM) for the full song duration of 2 minutes 43 seconds. While death metal is slightly faster, 4-3 is arguably the bigger challenge as death metal can usually be killed in 30 seconds or less, but it is difficult to quickly clear 4-3. 3-3 and 5-3 also have high BPMs which are worth practicing.
There is more information about the music on the Miraheze wiki: https://necrodancer.miraheze.org/wiki/Music

Even though the differences in BPM at the higher end are small, it's difficult to make small improvements like going from 5 inputs per second to 6, so it is worth practicing for all the harder songs.

The simplest way to practice is to just try and move back and forth on the level. Using the level editor any song can be practiced in an empty arena. It can also help starting out to use one of the bolt metronome soundtracks, which play a note on the beat to make it clear when to press a key. Playing bolt as practice is an option, but remember that the spear is much easier to use than the dagger, the priority at this stage is just to keep beat. Once you are able to keep tempo moving back and forth, get used to keeping tempo doing more complicated movement cycles, like moving in a 2x2 circle (which is an important way to stall movement in coda no return), in zig zag patterns and so on. Ideally, with enough practice keeping tempo becomes mostly subconscious, since this will give more mental power for figuring out key combos to attack enemies in double time.

With no return mode off, aligning with most enemies is relatively simple; move back and forth until they are ready to be attacked. This works for any enemy that moves every 2, 3 or 4 beats, but enemies that move every beat like monkeys and skeleton knights will be unaligned roughly half of the time and require spending one beat doing "something else" to align. Likewise, armored skeletons, wind mages and liches are generally better off attacked from the side to avoid their special abilities.

In no return, the basic gameplay mechanic of aligning becomes perhaps the single most difficult one. Moving in a 2x2 loop is the smallest repeatable movement that coda no return can do with no items, and convoluted movements are often required to both align and attack from the side.

Somewhat paradoxically, enemies that move every beat are not the biggest challenge in no return mode. The only challenge is counting the parity of squares between you and the enemy; if it is odd, then you are unaligned and need to spend a beat digging or doing something similar, and if it is even then you are aligned. Of course, enemies that move every beat can jumpscare more easily, but if you see them coming they are often less of a threat.
The first enemy to practice aligning with in practice mode should be the black skeleton. You want to end up in this position to attack them:

Sometimes, the direction the headless body moves in will be bad for you. It might be moving to block an exit, or running for a bounce trap, or to attack another player. With one extra key press you can change the direction the headless body runs in by 90 degrees:

The next step up is the black armored skeleton. I'm not joking, this is harder than 90% of all regular enemies on no return, especially with only 1 damage. Getting more than 1 damage is a big help but it is never guaranteed in a run, so it is important to know how to kill these things effectively.

There are two general strategies for attacking them. The first one is to align with them so that you can hit them from the side twice:
This is very situational, depending on when they are about to move, how much terrain is nearby, and other enemies. In the worst case, if there are no walls to dig to spend beats on, it can take a lot of space and many beats to align with them properly.

The second method is very reliable as you don't have to align with their side, and it doesn't matter if the black skeleton is about to move or not. It has a good average case, taking a short time to align and only five tiles of empty space to execute. However, if you are already aligned the first method can be faster and use less space in the best case.
If you have two damage, the modified attack combo of the second method is generally easier:
Two damage and piercing trivialises this enemy. While ring of piercing can easily get you killed if you forget you have it, it saves significant time in fighting enemies, so it is quite strong for speedrunning too.

The wind mages in zone 2, which also appear on KC2 and FM2 also deserve practicing. Their attack has two special dangers in coda no return; firstly, it can pull you onto gold and kill you. Second, the no return tile is positioned behind you when they pull you. This means that running away after getting pulled in is often fatal. The wind mage's biggest strength is therefore being able to catch you by surprise.



The flipside is that the wind mage is also most vulnerable when they have just used their wind attack, as it perfectly aligns you for a kill:

The other main way to kill wind mages is to align with them from the side like with the armored skeleton. But because their spells can be hard to predict, these mages are often prime targets to use spells, bombs and items against, especially if they are approaching in a large group or with a miniboss.

The liches in zone 4, DM4 and KC4 are both easier and harder than wind mages. They are easier because by this point (if you're not playing on low%) you generally have a good form of vision, which protects against your greatest weaknesses as a player, the surprise attack and swarms. You'll also be more likely to have 2 or 3 damage. They are harder because, basically, unless you are a superhuman you will die when hit by a confuse spell. Even on normal coda these confuse spells are often a death sentence, but on coda no return it is incredibly difficult to survive it. And that is assuming you see it coming - you will die basically 100% of the time if the confuse catches you off guard. There are some ways to survive getting hit by this spell, like using a shield spell, earth spell and so on, but it is truly difficult to kill a lich and survive while confusion is wearing off.

There is a useful but difficult tool in no return that also helps aligning, especially when there aren't many tier 1 walls nearby to spend beats on. This is throwing your dagger. Don't forget it as an option if you run into a dead end or otherwise difficult corridor, but also make sure not to throw your dagger on gold.

Remembering what items you have may sound simple, but it's both very important and easy to forget. For coda, there are a large number of items which can simply kill you if you forget you have. For example, you are attacking a black skeleton and forget you have two damage. Thinking you have one, you move towards it three times to kill them against a wall, but end up running into gold. This is more common than it sounds.

Paying attention to items means counting how much damage you have to not overshoot (i.e. walk onto gold) or undershoot (i.e. die to enemy attack). It also means remembering that you have consumables and spells so you can use them to make your life easier, remembering what keybinds those consumables are on. Remembering that you have a ring of piercing to attack skeleton knights. Remembering that you have an ice spirit familiar active, and mentally predicting how enemies will move differently as a result. Remembering you have lucky charm so you don't need to play so cautiously around bats. And so on.

The only way to mitigate this difficulty is by picking up less items. Unless you really intend to get a low% clear by picking up no items at all, it's a bad idea to avoid items simply due to the difficulty of remembering them. Many of them can greatly increase survivability and speed when used correctly, for example, the ring of piercing is a great item.

The mighty red dragon. It is perhaps the most common run ender. It and the minotaur are the only minibosses that can spawn on any floor, so 2-3 or more are typical to encounter in a full clear. It's important to be able to kill them reliably, even with 1 damage. There are many ways to kill them with items or bombs, but I won't cover that because it isn't affected muhch by no return.

Without NR, you can do the normal 2x2 dragon dance. If the dragon is about to move:

With NR, there are three main ways to kill a red dragon without using items, and a few special strategies with them. These are 2x3, 3x2 and 1x6 (or vertical).
1x6 is the preferred approach, but about half the time there may not be enough empty space, or traveling too far vertically might pull aggro from too many enemies. 3x2 is like 2x2 except you alternate moving left and right around the dragon:

The 2x3 pattern moves in a C shape around the dragon, then back down.


Aligning with the dragon can be a bit difficult, but if you have the space, moving in a 3 wide snake away from them guarantees you'll align with the red dragon before they will attack you:


If the dragon spawns with a swarm or near crates, their fire breath can help you out too. One reliable way to get them breathing the same spots is moving in a 2x4 loop:




Note that this will only work if the dragon is moving vertically, as they remember whether they were moving vertically or horizontally before the fire breath.

Since the blue dragon only appears in zones 3,4 and 5, and those zones have a large miniboss pool, they are not nearly as common as red dragons. Especially on zone 3, getting hit by their frost breath can be game over if the dragon is approaching with a swarm. On their own however, the blue dragon is easier than the red dragon, because they are so kind that they will forcibly align you with their ice breath. In other words, as long as you aren't right next to them as they frost breath, you'll have an easy time killing them.

Because Coda can't touch gold, in single player coda has more limited ways to kill leprechauns and get their luck charm, since when the leprechaun moves it leaves gold on the tile it moves to. This means if you kill it after it's moved, the lucky charm will be dropped on a tile with gold, which can't be picked up unless you use an earth spell to remove the gold or are playing in multiplayer where one of the other players can eat the gold.

Like Monk, the leprechaun is most often encountered in zone 1, as a 3x gold multiplier red dragon kill will drop enough gold. The large gold piles can also be obtained from killing a black minotaur (45 gold on 3x multiplier) plus another enemy, or killing a gigantic enemy (which can drop either the large gold pile or a gigantism scroll). And unlike for Monk, the luck charm is one of the strongest items to collect as it provides a powerful bonus against common and challenging enemies on coda, bats and direbats. The leprechaun spawns on a gold pile that stays empty for seven consecutive beats. On coda, especially coda no return, the leprechaun's lucky charm is far from a guaranteed item, so knowing the several ways to kill the leprechaun can improve your odds.

Without using additional items, there are two ways to kill lep and get the lucky charm. The first is to lure the lep into a corner like so:

If the corner is in a tunnel of 2 depth, then the lep can't escape if you approach from the side. If it is a shallow hole of 1 depth, the lep will walk out if you approach from an incline greater than 45 degrees:

The second method is if the gold pile is next to a wall. You spend 6 beats moving in a loop, and one beat doing some extra action like attacking an enemy, digging a wall or using a disposable or toggleable item like boots of levitation, war drum, or cookies. On that seventh beat the leprechaun spawns, and if you hit them so they are pushed into the wall, they won't move. Keep in mind, it takes four hits with one damage to kill them, so you would need to send five inputs in their direction, and if they are pushed against a t2 wall and you only have the base t1 shovel to avoid the extra dig input that would kill you to a missed beat.


This is the most reliable method, and should generally be used if there is no other option to kill. A bomb takes 3 beats to detonate, so if you move 4 beats, then place a bomb adjacent to gold, then move away from the bomb, the leprechaun will die. This method has the advantage of not relying on terrain preparation, but bombs can be quite valuable for coda no return as they are needed for a number of boss quick kills. It can be thought of as "paying" a bomb in exchange for the luck charm, so if you are on 1-3 and already have strong items to fight against bats (shield spell, war drum, levitation boots, fireball spell) keeping the bomb is an option.


There are a few other items or item combinations which can kill the leprechaun. First is if you have 2 or more damage, using sub-beat inputs (see that section for details on what it is and how).


If you have pulse, you can also use pulse, but keep in mind that being diagonally adjacent to the leprechaun when they spawn requires you to spend seven beats moving. (assuming you were adjacent to the enemy that dropped gold when it died). You could also spend five beats moving and 2 beats doing a static action, or 3 and 4, etc. Grenades and shurikens can also be used; the leprechaun will only drop gold if they make a non-knockback move.

For coda there are two relevant uses for sub-beat inputs, that being the trapdoor and the leprechaun. A sub-beat input is where two inputs are pressed in quick succession but still both within the on-beat window, to take advantage of a game mechanic with a fixed time or beat duration.

If you have 2 or more damage, if you attack the leprechaun as soon as it spawns, you can send a sub-beat input to attack the leprechaun again before it drops a gold pile. (Note that it will still drop a gold pile by this method on characters other than coda or monk.) Getting sub beat inputs takes some practice, but it is easier on double tempo since there is a shorter permitted time for rapidly doing a double tap. This method still requires you to align to the gold pile on the 7th beat, however.

Specifically, the sub-beat window for leprechauns in Synchrony v4.0.0 is 0.25 seconds. That means that you need to send two inputs within 0.25 seconds, and the second input needs to kill the leprechaun or else their dissapear spell will resolve. The relevant code is:
In this example, inputs 2 and 3 are done within 0.25 seconds of each other.

If you only have 1 damage but you have the war drum item, it's also possible to kill the leprechaun this way. If you spend at least 5 beats using the drum, you gain +2 damage on coda, so the first hit can deal 3 and the sub-beat hit can deal 1 to finish them. In this case, beats 1-5 are using a drum, and beats 7 and 8 are within 0.25s of each other.
The tier 1 fireball spell can also be used in a similar way to this drum attack, albeit only horizontally.


This took me a while to figure out, there are a few ways in which coda can enter a trapdoor and survive. Normally, if you go into one, you'll miss a beat, then take damage and die. There are some ways to avoid this damage however. The first method is a sub-beat input after moving onto the trapdoor. This means you move onto the trapdoor, and within 0.2 seconds you press another valid input which grants you healing, the trapdoor will not hurt you.

This is specifically only the kind of invincibility granted by healing items, which includes all food, heal spell, and holy water if it hits an enemy. You cannot do directional inputs after landing in the trapdoor, only items/spells, so a heal from a blood weapon is not an option on other characters.

The second method is using an item which grants protection, then taking damage and moving into the trapdoor that same beat or the beat after. This can be a shield spell, or a physical shield. The reason this works is because for all characters, if you take damage one beat you are invulnerable the next beat. Rather than providing invincibility (through the event "supressed" flag), shield spells and shields simply reduce damage taken to 0, which allows this extra invincibility to be granted. There is no sub beat timing required with this method as the invulnerability period is beat based. This is the relevant check:
Here are two examples, one taking damage after moving onto the trapdoor with shield, and one by having taken it before:



You cannot use the invulnerability granted by blast helm to enter normal trapdoors, as they blow up the trapdoor in addition to granting invulnerability. However, you can use a blast helm to blow up the trapdoor cracks, and if you are standing on top of it you will immediately fall through. One cracked trapdoor spawns every level,

Beware that it takes two full seconds to fall through the trap after the animation starts, or 2.2 seconds from moving onto the tile in total. If you take damage during the 2 seconds after the trap damage check, you will die. So if enemies are chasing you, you either need to eat multiple food items as you are falling, or you need to use a shield spell just as you enter. As this is a fixed time, the number of beats is song-dependent, so this is less of an issue on songs with high tempo.

Also note that on double tempo it is easier to hit the sub beat window because it is easier to time two inputs within 0.2 or 0.25 seconds of each other.

Bats are the only enemy in vanilla Necrodancer with random movement. The only other random behavior in runs is level generation, and for this reason these are often the two main reasons for losing a run. But there are several ways to greatly mitigate the dangers of bats.

The single biggest advantage is the lucky charm, which prevents bats from attacking you unless it is their only valid move. Even with lucky charm, bats can be dangerous in narrow corridors and the gold they leave behind can disrupt other fights. Thanks in part to coda's starting nazar charm, direbats can only spawn in zones 1-3, regular bats don't spawn at all in zone 2, and they only spawn in batcaves in zones 3 and 5. Due to the large enemy pool, bats tend to spawn infrequently in zone 4 with the exception of batcaves. What this means in practice is zone 1 has by far the most bats, and unless you get unlucky with a golem or miniboss opening a bat cave later on, they can generally be avoided in other zones. This should be a factor to consider whether to spend resources on obtaining a lucky charm if the leprechaun does not spawn in zone 1.

The second biggest advantage against bats is knowing where they are and choosing to avoid them. Getting good vision like a glass torch is inconsistent in zone 1, but a good torch can help avoid most or all bats in zones 3,4 and 5.

Nonetheless, as coda starts in zone 1, and direbats can spawn as early as 1-1, strategies without items are needed too. The goal is to minimise the ability of the bat's random movements to hurt you.

When attacking regular bats, there is one simple technique to follow: If you never move the same direction twice in a row, then you will never immediately walk on gold from killing a bat. This technique can make killing batcaves much easier.

While this technique helps, it doesn't exactly spell out a precise strategy of how to move around bats, so I will do that now.
Let's say you've just met your friendly neighborhood bat, and they are about to move.

Since we can't move onto one of those tiles, we're safe from this distance. Of course, we can't kill them either from here, but let's just watch their movement. Two more beats pass, and even if I close my eyes, I know the bat is about to move to one of these green squares:


Then two beats later, the bat will be in one of the green squares and will be about to move to one of the pink squares. We can extrapolate this checkerboard to the whole room, and what this means is:
- During beats 1,3,5,7, ... the bat is standing still.
- During beats 2, 6, 10, 14, ... the bat is moving to a pink square
- During beats 4, 8, 12, 16, ... the bat is moving to a green square

In other words, as long as we do not "spend" beats standing still, we will always be safe from the bat if we stand in a pink square on beats 4, 8, 12, ... and on a green square on beats 2, 6, 10, and so on.

Well, that seems technically true, but how can we use this information to our advantage? If we are in a green square, and we don't spend beats, we will be in a green square four beats from now too. What this means is that the bat can only threaten to actually hit us once every four beats. During beat 4 we are vulnerable, but during beats 1, 2 and 3 we can do whatever we want.

Basically, we want to prevent this situation from happening:
In this situation, if we move backwards we die, and if we move into a green square we risk dying. They really aren't good odds. We should really treat this situation in the worst case and assume it's a skeleton ready to pounce.
This is a very common situation to be in, not just with bats, so I will describe it in detail. In this situation, there are three options to survive. I will rank them based on how often you might use them:

1. Throw dagger. Throwing the dagger makes you stand still for two beats, giving you time to run away from the skeleton, and it will make the no return tile go away. The risk of throwing your dagger is, if it lands on gold and you're in singleplayer without earth spell, the run is basically over. Unless you have a dozen bombs and are in zone 5, or something similarly amazing, you've got no chance to win without a dagger. If you throw towards the skeleton, then without knowing what other tiles are (since we will assume you won't have time to analyse this in one double tempo beat), it's probably more likely to land on an enemy since the skeleton probably has friends behind them. If we throw towards the wall we can't break, it will land where we are standing and we will need to loop around the skeleton to get the dagger back, which may not be possible if the skeleton has friends in a swarm coming for us. So throwing backwards is almost always the best choice. Note that you can be more liberal with throwing daggers in multiplayer, since if you die you respawn with a dagger, so the other players can help you recover.

2. Get a better shovel beforehand. In practice it's usually easy to avoid fighting normal enemies next to shop walls. This is the main reason why the shovel improves survivability, because it gives you extra ways to "spend" beats standing still. As we can see in this situation that's a very useful option indeed, since it costs us no resources to use a shovel we already have, compared to the potential cost of losing a dagger (option 1) or using up an item (option 3). Shovels should be prioritised in no return mode! Even having 2 damage, 3 damage or 10 damage could not save me in this situation, when a shovel might.

3. Use an item. It really sucks to use a bomb for a basic enemy, but it it is still better than dying to that basic enemy. If you have a tome or something, maybe you can get value from it with a nearby swarm. If you have a war drum then this is much easier too. But, we can never guarantee getting any item because Necrodancer is a roguelike, so this should always be a backup option compared to using our dagger we are guaranteed to start with.


Returning to the bat strategies. We don't want to be standing next to a wall next to a green tile where a bat is about to move, it might mean game over. Well, that is a bit of a problem, because there's a different reason we want to fight bats near walls: They become more predictable. In a corner, we have double the chance of guessing their movement compared to in an open space. This probability also works against us in the likelihood of the bat attacking us among its options, but since we are assuming it will behave like a skeleton and always hit us, that's not a major consideration.

In other words, if we can fight bats near tier 1 walls when we have a tier 1 shovel, that's great. But bats go up massively in difficulty if they are hanging around higher tier walls than we can mine. In that case, it is generally easier to bomb the walls and kill them in the open if it is a very enclosed space.

I mentioned earlier that outside of that one beat the bat is moving to a green tile, it can't hurt us. So, if we move next to the bat on beat 1, 2 or 3 and hit it on beat 2, 3 or 4 then we win. All you have to do is figure out which of those 4 beats is the "danger beat" while playing, and make sure to move away during that beat.

Ideally, we kill the bat on beat 1, just after it moved right next to us. For the songs in earlier zones, that might be doable to react in time. But for the harder songs with higher tempo, that requires us reacting in basically half a beat which is pretty much impossible to do for a human, at 350 BPM that would be asking to react in about 85 milliseconds (170 ms is the rough time between beats at 350 bpm). According to a 2009 literature review, the accepted mean reaction time for "college-age individuals" is 190 ms. (source[web.archive.org]: A Literature Review on Reaction Time by Robert J. Kosinski Clemson University, August 2009), so really, it just isn't possible. That means that our movement on beat 1 may help us or hurt us but isn't really in control. Now, on beat 2, we have roughly 85 + 170 = 255 ms to react. That's doable, still challenging but doable. And moving on beat 3 to attack on beat 4 is again, more doable. As long as we can 1 shot the bat, all three of these are options.

Why do I say half a beat, and not one full beat? Well, enemies have movement animations, and when you play on double tempo, those animations don't speed up very much. (They speed up on boltolt, though.) If you pay attention to it, you may even notice enemies spend more time moving in animations than they do standing still! Because humans are not supercomputers, we can't instantly tell which direction the bats are moving until the animation is mostly done. I don't know exactly how long the enemy movement animation lasts, but I think a reasonable estimate is that it takes roughly half a beat for the player to actually figure out where the bat is moving to. This is only an issue for bats, not really for other enemies, since they have deterministic movement so we can perfectly predict where they will move and the visual indicator just helps. Perhaps the accurate time it takes for me to detect a bat movement is closer to one quarter of a beat, which would give me three quarters to react, but remember the mean reaction time is 190 ms, and even if I had the full beat to react, I would only have 170 ms and wouldn't have time. For slower songs, maybe I am just past the threshold, but it is still very very hard to react in time reliably in a game like Necrodancer when there is so many other things going on to pay attention to too, it's not just a dot on a white screen.

This strategy is reliable if we have large open spaces we are free to move around, and are dealing with only one bat. For these bats which we can 1-shot, there is nothing else to worry about in those conditions. But we are playing coda, and we have to deal with the gold obstacle course. If we touch the gold tiles we die, but the bat can walk on them just fine. To make matters worse, we need to react quite quickly to actually kill the bat in our 3-beat window and not walk onto its leftover gold. Batcaves have 4-9 bats, so if they get opened, we have to deal with either a bat swarm or more gold obstacles. While both options are not ideal, the gold piles is much less dangerous as it will stay still for the rest of the level, unless the Necrodancer gets a degree in Batmancy. (I think we should be safe, he is getting killed by Cadence and Melody players over and over, I can't imagine he has time to study a new field of necromancy.)

One step at a time. How do we behave differently when there is gold to avoid near the bat? We have two options really, we can try hitting the bat even if that means risking walking onto the gold tile, or we can treat any time the bat is on a gold tile as though it's invulnerable. The first option will get faster bat kills on average, but the second option will have a lower mortality rate. Unless you are trying hard to speedrun, I think the second option is better, in part because there is no method in the game which makes Coda truly safe from gold other than by blowing it up.

Next, if there are multiple enemies. It can be hard to pick out one bat of many to be the first to kill, and it can be difficult to track which bat has which "4th danger beat" if they are not all moving in synchronization. One trick is that the beat immediately after you open a batcave, you are always guaranteed to hit a bat if you try moving into the batcave one more time:

In this example, I could then dig down and try to react to see if another one exits for me to kill.


For direbats it is a bit more complicated. Either we react in half a beat when we both happen to move next to each other (which is generally impossible), or we react in 3/2 of a beat, but we could die if we try to attack the direbat in that situation, because we would be standing still and now on a pink square when it is trying to move to a pink square. WTF?

I know it seems impossible, but the simple fact is we can't use the same strategy for both regular bats and direbats. For regular bats, because we can 1-shot them we can kill them on roughly 3/4 of the beats, but for direbats we have much worse odds, and for the brown direbat we have to go through this process twice before they are finally on 1 health and we can treat them like a normal blue bat.

Case 1 is the only way we can safely damage dire bats, and we can't react in time. But I say I can kill direbats reliably. How? We plan our movement on beat 1 as though case 1 occurred, even if it didn't. So, I moved up and the direbat moved left on beat 4, and now on beat 1 I move right even if the direbat didn't move there. Then, still assuming I hit the direbat, I move up or down. I plan ahead not to move left, because if I moved right and then left and I missed the direbat, I would die to the no return tile. After we do these three beats, we then have time to review what happened: Did we hit the direbat? Can we switch to the blue bat strategy? Or do we need to realign and try again? It can be slow, but it is a reliable method. The key element of this strategy is we are guaranteed to not die if we do those three beats worth of movements then back away.

Because we can't really use reaction times to kill direbats, this planned movement works, but it fails completely if we plan to move on a gold tile. In other words, direbats are much more dangerous near gold tiles compared to blue bats. Finally, this strategy is much more difficult to execute in narrow passageways; we either have to wait for the bat to leave, or use the "brute force" strategy and hope we get lucky.

Sometimes there is a second method to use this strategy of "planned safe moves". The requirement is the direbat is near a row of walls that you can dig with your shovel. First position yourself diagonally adjacent, then on the beat 4 when the direbat is about to move, dig the wall next to you. Then, assuming the direbat moved next to you, you move to hitt it then run away.

It still relies on random chance, it's still a 25% chance to hit the direbat in open space. The reason this second method is preferable to both of you dancing in open space, is that it's got a 50% chance to realign for a followup hit if the first hit misses. Let's say I dug left and instead assumed the direbat moved left instead of down. Then, it turned out the direbat moved up instead. I would end up in this situation:

The great thing is I can dig this wall to my left again and I've got another 25% chance for the direbat to move left if I repeat the same (left, up) combo. So while this doesn't improve my chance of hitting the direbat above 25% per beat, it gives me a bonus 25% chance the direbat moves up and I can try again. In other words, let's say the overall chance of hitting direbat moving up an infinite length segment of vertical wall like this is X. Then,

X = 0.25 * (0.25 + 0.25 * ( 0.25 + ...
X = 0.25 + 0.25^2 + 0.25^3 + ...
This is a well known convergent series and its sum is 1/3. (source[en.wikipedia.org])
In other words, I improved my chances from 25% to a bit less than 33% (since we don't actually have an infinite vertical wall, but it gets very close to convergence at just 4 iterations), an overall improvement of 9% or a relative improvement of (33 - 25)/25 = ~32%. Kill bats 32% faster? Yes please, it's not much but take what we can get.

This wall hugging strategy can also be used with stationary objects like green slimes, barrels, crates and so on. It can help to bring them closer to the miniboss room! It also works if the walls are not perfectly straight, this was more just for sake of example estimating the rough improvement overall.

Plus, these numbers are all assuming the worst case that the direbat has four tiles to move to. If it's also next to a wall (perhaps on a 2 wide corridor with you and the direbat on either end), and it has only three tiles to move to, then the chances go even further up.

Generally it is easiest to kill or weaken the fastest moving enemies first - ghosts, skeleton knights, followed by the slower enemies. Unless the gold is important or they are blocking something, it's generally not worth trying to kill stationary sentry enemies like slimes and mushrooms which can be walked around.
Zone 2 is notable that it's the only zone where there are no regular enemies which move every beat without provocation - you have to move next to wall mimics or in the line of an armadillo for them to charge you.

Single tempo character speedruns play out very differently to double tempo. In single tempo, there is generally always enough time to react to any kind of jumpscare, and putting more thought into each move means that less moves and "wasted" by making each move more efficient. It is very difficult to match the same kind of planning in double tempo, and this makes some resources very challenging to use on coda. This includes miner's cap, boots of leaping and lunging (if you find it), dove charm, miniboss trapdoor rooms, arenas, and it also complicates planning for killing most bosses which can each spawn in many different configurations.

Trying to speedrun on no return can often leave you in a position like this:


This kind of minotaur jumpscare is almost certain death, and it happens fairly often. With minotaurs this tradeoff is especially obvious: Go faster and your mortality rate skyrockets, especially without vision. This is why good vision (with glass torch being #1) is so important to speedrunning, but often that won't be found on zone 1. In other words, for both regular gameplay and speedrunning, zone 1 is often the hardest zone, dealing with high risk situations and the player is often encouraged to take more risky decisions like taking arena items to keep time. This issue is only amplified by the fact that zone 1 has the slowest BPM songs, meaning that every beat trying to get items for a good build costs more time overall compared to doing so in zone 2.

This may mean more liberal consumable use to compensate for lack of vision or protection in zone 1. All items have their uses on Coda, even the humble cheese. When the player has fewer items, it's more essential to survival to use each one to maximum effectiveness, so efficient item usage is a priority early game which becomes less important later on with a full build.

A side effect of this dichotomy is that playing cautiously and playing to speedrun end up being very different playstyles in practice, and it's not always easy to mentally switch between the two. This is something to keep in mind; what is more important, getting a clear even if it is slow, or getting a fast clear even if it means it might take many more attempts?

Generally, active items and spells are best used on bosses, minibosses (direbats and dragons if they surprise you), and swarms, since they are the things which will kill you the most. If after a while you notice you're dying a lot to a particular enemy, then it's probably best to save more active items or spell charges for that enemy.

Death metal is the least different on coda versus coda no return. There are two hard parts for doing DM on coda:
- Keeping the tempo
- Killing the beetles on DM3. DM3 is arguably the hardest because it's hard to tell whether you're aligned with them on a high tempo. DM3 also summons skeleton knights at low health, and there are no walls to "spend" beats on in the boss room, which makes them considerably more threatening.

Otherwise, everything is pretty much identical to cadence. There's the "fast bomb" strategy, where you hit DM 4 times and then with a bomb. It requires some precise inputs, you can see this video for a demonstration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaz_dN03Lak
The main advantage is so that DM goes down to 2 hearts, which skips their 3-6 heart phase where they can summon dangerous enemies.

Then there is just hitting death metal two or three times then they get hit by a bomb. It's a bit riskier in that the summons might spawn if you get unlucky with where DM teleports to, but it's easier to execute.

For DM2 and DM3, if you keep 3 of the initial enemies alive, DM will fail to summon enemies during their 3-6 health phase. It takes a bit longer but can be a safer option.
For KC1, there are two possible heights the conga line can spawn from. Aligning to kill the conga line is simple in both cases. Do one 2x2 loop once before you horizontally meet the conga line, then if you need to do a second 2x2 loop parallel to the conga line:

This doesn't work for any other KC. For the other ones, it's easiest to just bomb the throne then quickly kill the ape, with throw or items or normal attacks. It is technically also faster to bomb KC1 too if you are going for a speedrun. Quake scroll is great here too. If you have potion or multiplayer you can do Ozuma, which is putting a bomb diagonally to the right of the throne, then intentionally missing a beat before it explodes, the bomb will kill the throne first then KC. It only works for KC1, 2, 3 because KC4 has 5 health. but I prefer not to on Coda since the potion is quite useful as a general defensive tool, meaning it would be best used on KC5 but KC5 has too much health to die to one bomb.

It can help to prune some of the enemies first, too. For KC4 especially both the goblin sappers should be killed, and for KC3 the hellhound, yeti and elementals can be hard to deal with. Items should be used liberally to make the boss easier.

There are three main options: bomb kill (which only works on CR 1 and 2), spell kill and normal kill. Killing coral riff normally is simple; kill the tentacles, try not to block a path with gold drops.
One strategy that helps more reliably avoid gold is to move 2 tiles up the water and then back down. It helps keep more of the gold in the middle rows, which makes the bottom rows safer to move around when all the instruments are dead.

The quick kill for CR1 and CR2 is very simple. Enter the arena, throw, then based on where CR spawns do one of two movements then place a bomb and move away to kill. This specific movement pattern is my preference because it guarantees that gold won't cover your dagger, although with no return off you can do a combo in a couple fewer beats.


You want to quick kill this one if possible. It takes a lot of practice to kill deep blues on Coda, but practicing on Monk is a good idea. No return does not make it significantly harder, since you spend a lot of beats standing still attacking to reset the red tile. There are some other guides on deep blues specifically too on steam and youtube demonstrations which are easy to find, like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4qknqn7lr4. Remember that DB2-5 are functionally equivalent to DB1 if you have two damage, the only difference being how many times you need to hit the king, but if you get to the point of killing the king you've generally won. What I do on a pawn opening is move up on the third row, kill a few pieces in the top left region, prioritise the knights and queen, then retreat to the right side to kill the pawn row. If you can get into the back row, past the pawns you can kill DB1 and 2 with a bomb, or a pulse spell or earth. Or just throw dagger with enough damage to kill in multiplayer. Using bombs when starting the fight can also make it much easier.

On the knight opening I don't go in the third row, instead in the middle rows, focussed on killing the knights and the queen first.

The quick kills are fairly simple: Walk up and use grenade, use two shurikens on DB1 and 2, throw freeze bomb, throw fireball on third row, etc. There are plenty of ways to, but it is probably the hardest single challenge to do for coda low%, no return or otherwise. Especially the higher tier DB bosses are a big challenge to do with one damage, so it's definitely a viable strategy to restart spam to get DB1.

Fortissimiole is by far the most complicated boss for coda no return due to the large number of strategies.
The following is a quick kill for FM 1, 2 and 3 which involves using a bomb. You enter the arena, immediately throw, walk up, drop a bomb and back away. FM will jump into the gap made by the dagger, cover it with earth to remove the gold from the dead skeletons, and start moving towards you. If you throw on the beat you enter the arena, and target one of the three middle columns, then you are always aligned with an even distance to them by doing this, meaning you need to walk up to the fifth row from the bottom to place a bomb and then run away from the ghosts and the bomb.

Look for where FM is walking to, not where they currently are. If FM is walking into the center column, the kill works no matter what:

If FM is walking into the second column from the centre, the same strategy works unless the ghost on that side spawned on the fourth row from the stage. If they do, you have to modify your movements slightly:


If FM is moving to the third stage column from the centre, then you can kill them if there are no ghouls on the fifth column from the centre. However, you will be odd aligned with FM, and you need to bomb on the fourth column instead of the fifth.

If FM is moving to one of the columns on the end, the fourth column from the centre, you can also only kill them by this method if there are no ghouls in that column. In this method you will be odd aligned, but you still bomb on the fifth row from the bottom:


For FM2, there are three possible outcomes, keeping in mind you need 2 damage for it to woork when you throw to target FM's moving column in the same way as above:

1: The wind mage will attack you on the approach.
2: The wind mage won't bother you.
3: The windmage will block the vertical path to the stage as you approach.
4: The windmage will end up behind you when you reach the stage, either blocking your move or ready to attack you if you move down. It is okay as long as you have space to move sideways after the bomb.
5: The wind mage will cast a horizontal wind spell as you approach the stage. If both wind mages do this, you'll end up moving left - it depends on which one was created first to decide priority in tiebreakers like this, and the left one is created first in level generation.
6: The wind mage will die to your throw and leave gold. If it's gold on the second row it's really hard to recover from, but gold on the fourth row you can still kill FM by moving to the side first, as long as the other wind mage isn't interfering.

(Assuming a right approach, flip for left approach.)
It's not so important to know what each option is, so much as which configurations you can do the quick kill for or not. So I will colour each outcome with red, green or yellow based on whether it will work for approaches from the first, second, and third column approaches from the centre. If FM is going to move to the third or fourth columns, the 3rd column approach applies to both of those cases.

So for any configuration, both the left and right skeleton mages need to be either green or yellow for it to be safe. If they are both green you don't need to modify the strategy at all compared to for FM1. If one or both are yellow you will need to move differently and plan it out - it's up to personal preference whether to go for it or do the "regular" strategy.

For FM3 determining whether it's safe is more simple, but it is only doable about 30% of the time. Is the hellhound going to catch up to you? And did the elementals spawn in the fourth column from the centre? If the hellhound will catch up before you can place a bomb, it's impossible. And if the elementals are in the fourth column, it's doable but harder, you need to move around them in an L-shape facing away from the hellhound, moving right once then up twice. Generally, to be successful, you want to approach FM from either the centre or the left, the hellhound is in the left side, and the yeti is on the right side.

The normal non-quick kill, which always works for FM1-4, is by killing the spawns, then killing the skeletons on spots on the stage, then doing 2x2 loops to kill. The nooks stop the speaker spawns from hurting you.


If you accidentally drop gold on this 2x2 square, or are having a hard time dealing with the spawns, keep in mind you can use bombs to clear gold or the speakers. If you bomb the main stage, FM will climb down.

The one drawback is this doesn't work for FM5. On FM5 the devils will diagonally move around the stage to you, so you need some other way to kill FM5. One option is to bombing the two speakers, one is using another item like earth spell which can fairly easily 1-shot FM. If you have two damage you can also do the following strategy after getting FM5 in a nook, killing the other enemies, and clearing the gold in the vertical path:

You can do the 2x2 loop on either the bottom 2 rows, or one row higher. In this case, I could have done one row higher by doing a 2x2 loop towards the right side. But if there is gold in those spots, we can dig out the dirt below to do the 2x2 loop on the bottom two rows instead.

There is a third method, particularly useful on FM5 low% involving standing on top of the speaker spawn location when FM resurfaces, which prevents the spawn. You start off as normal, making sure to dig out at least the two opposite dirt blocks on the rows with the stage (the third one below doesn't need to be dug), then pull FM out while staying odd aligned while all enemies are dead:

Then you get the kill like so:


Step 1 is preparing the stage, step 2 is setting up the loop on the two stage rows, and step 3 is doing the loop. There are a couple of different ways to execute step 2 to set up the loop, but step 3 will always be the same.
But this is also difficult because the speaker spawns may be chasing you during this.
A fourth method is to lure all the normal enemies (or kill the normal enemies and lure the speaker spawns) to one corner, dig behind the stage, not move below the stage, dig out skeletons and fight FM here. But it doesn't work on no return, so I recommend against it. It looks something like this when set up.

There is also a fifth option, which is to lure the speaker spawns behind the stage before dethroning FM. It's possible but rather difficult to do this lure for FM5 due to the devil diagonal movement, it's both easier and better used for the other variants as a backup strategy. For example, if you are getting cornered by the normal enemies while trying to clear them, you can escape behind the stage and sometimes pull this off. After lured, you can do the "normal" strategy of a 2x2 loop next to the stage. This is what it looks like after it's set up, where you can proceed to kill the black skeleton at the front and do the 2x2 loop to kill:

Items can broadly be categorised into three types:
- items that directly increase player progression speed. e.g. moving faster, digging walls to get shorter paths, quick or quicker kills on minibosses and bosses.
- items which make it harder to die, which indirectly allows the player to progress faster by surviving more risky decisions. e.g. glass/heavy glass/potion,
- Items that do both of these things. Increasing damage from all sources does both of these things, which is why damage is a very high priority. This also includes items like blast helm which function as both a quick kill and a panic button.

The general rule for prioritizing items is to have a mix of all three types, but items which both increase progression speed and reduce risk are the best especially early on. There is also a point when the player might have many items on zone 3 or so, that getting a new item doesn't meaningfully contribute to survivability or speed. Knowing when to stop hoarding items is essential to getting good speedrun times, and it is something that comes both by practice and by watching other experienced players.

3 damage is enough to 1-shot most enemies, and 2-shot everything except dark golems, death metal, coral riff 5, and earth dragons. For this reason 3 damage greatly simplifies killing enemies and can be a huge speed and safety boost, and likewise, getting above 3 damage is not very useful, as the main benefit is the potential to 1-shot minibosses which may only save a couple of beats per floor. Similarly, vision reduces risk (i.e. increasing survivability) and is a top priority, especially for speedrunning. For zone 1 especially, a shovel is also a priority as it greatly reduces the chance to both miss beats accidentally and die to narrow paths.

Often, having more than one "panic button" consumable or spell diminishes their value, because it increases the mental effort for the player by forcing them to decide which consumable to use in a situation. This might mean making a mistake in planning, it can also mean simply misclicking on which spell to use, since deciding which spell to use also means thinking about which button to press. While it can be played effectively, it does increase the risk of dying, which is the opposite of what we want items to do. One strategy if you do have many active items, is to mentally note down only 1-2 of them that are available for use, and updating this mental list when you have some downtime after killing enemies with whatever you have left over. This also helps reduce the risk of pressing the wrong input, since you can mentally note down which button to press as a panic button.

It is worth mentioning every run starts with one panic button: the bomb. The problem is bombs, especially without upgrades, are somewhat unreliable to use as panic buttons as they require a few turns ahead of planning, but it is better than nothing. The way I think about it, dying with bombs still in your inventory is a sign that you should of used a bomb to prolong survival. Especially if you get a lot of bombs (which most commonly spawn in zone 2), don't feel bad about using lots of them, especially on hard levels. It can be good to save 1 or 2 for bosses, but don't fall into the classic gaming trap of not using the healing potion and dying because you wanted to save it for later. (Not that bombs are healing potions, but the concept is ubiqutious.)


The single hardest aspect of no return is aligning with enemies without getting hit. War drum greatly simplifies this challenge almost to the point of removing it, although it introduces two new challenges:
- Performing the timing to kill enemies when mostly standing still.
- Getting used to pressing the "item use" button at double tempo. For me, I use arrow keys to move and ZXCASD for items and spells, meaning it's on my opposite hand, which is used to correctly timing inputs, but that hand is not as used to keeping tempo reliably.

As mentioned at the start of the guide, keeping tempo is the #1 priority, so it is worth practicing spamming inputs on the other hand if you use both hands to play with similar keybindings. If you use multi-key inputs and do all key presses with one hand, likewise, it is worth practicing, although personally in my experience timing multi-key inputs is noticeably harder on double tempo.

Ultimately, the most important factor in keybindings is muscle memory to do it subconsciously - if you have practiced doing multi key inputs, then it may be better to just stay with it, since it could take time to learn the other method. Likewise, the specific keybindings are not important as long as you can mentally associate each button with each item.

But about war drum. Most boss kills become easier. All normal enemies and minibosses become easier. For this reason, while it is undeniably a strong item, I personally view it as a bit of a crutch item. Unless you spam restarting and checking the 1-1 shop, you generally can't guarantee to get any specific item in an unseeded run. To me since it removes most of the challenge, I think it's good to know how to play both with and without relying on the item.

While war drum is the best option, there are a few other items which can be repeatably used to stand still without missing beat, and all of the other options have drawbacks - some severe. The other options include boots of leaping, boots of levitation, and cookies and other food as a "budget" version which also grants invulnerability but comes at limited supply.

The issue with boots of levitation is not only does it remove the ability to throw without throwing charm, using it freely like war drum risks dying to unpredictable terrain/trap disruption. Best to only activate it when away from terrain hazards.

The boots of leaping can only really be used to stall beats in pairs, otherwise you end up leaping some beats which just makes it harder to align with enemies in the long run. But it is a great item for speedrunning and showing off if you're confident on it.

Among coda players, I am a bit of an outlier because I love miner's cap. In multiplayer lobbies it can create great chaos. But in coda no return miner's cap is not as much of a "junk" item as it usually is for coda. Since it adds +1 dig strength, it can act as the critical shovel item for a build, but more importantly, it makes extra room for the player to maneuver and avoid returning.
Its strength falls off later in a run. Miner's cap combined with any coda shovel upgrade allows the player to break tier 3 walls, and zone 1 is the only zone where tier 3 walls can spawn in rooms forcing the player to go through. In zone 2, it can help significantly by expanding narrow corridors to mostly empty terrain, which simplifies dealing with both clones and armadillos. In general, because no return limits movement, it is easier to survive if you have more area to move around in, and zone 1 and 2 have the worst enclosed spaces.

Zone 3 is generally very open, so miner's cap is not very useful as by this point it a shovel upgrade is only a minor benefit. On zone 4, miner's cap can be a liability because it can accidentally open rooms. It's important to open as few rooms as possible on zone 4 to minimise risk, keeping in mind that goolems can break walls, so if they start moving towards you the wall may get broken.

It is also great for speedrunning.

You may know by trying no return on other characters, it normally only deals half a heart of damage. In necrodancer, there are different damage types: normal, phasing and piercing damage types are directly communicated to the player through the ring of piercing and the dagger of phasing. But there are actually many more types of damage not directly visible to the player hidden in the source code: special, indirect, magic, suicide damage, and each type defines flags to determine what effects that damage has. It turns out that entities other than the player use these damage types - if you use a mirror shrine while holding a ring of piercing and heavy glass armor, the clone can hit and kill you piercing the heavy glass. Did you know that you can be damaged by a clone by a dagger of phasing, even with a shield spell active?

Well, what damage type is the no return tile? It's the "special" type. ...Okay, that doesn't really sound useful at first, until noticing that the special damage type does not have damage flags to bypass protection. In other words, while shield spell is active, the no return tile can't damage you!

This makes the shield spell vitally useful for some bosses, minibosses and swarms, as you can use the normal, "return safe" strategies to kill them in the short time the shield spell is active. Remember that this is a bonus in addition to the normal protection shield spell grants, which makes it comparatively a very strong spell. Just like normal coda, the main risk of shield spell is accidentally walking onto gold of killed enemies, so it's still important to count your damage and think about every movement.

Since we are playing no return mode, shield items are great because they reward us for charigng directly into enemies even if we aren't aligned with them. The reward is free invincibility frames every floor! They are very versatile, and great for swarms like on zone 3, because using a shield to take damage means aligning correctly with an enemy in one beat. Like with the shield spell, be cautious not to run onto gold, as long as you predict ahead of time what will happen it will be fine.

The shield of strength is one of the worse shields because you're encouraged to use it opposite of the other shields; you don't want it to take damage. Keep in mind being above 3 damage is not that useful, but being above 1 is a huge help, so it can be swapped off. And shield of strength is the best shield to use with ring of shielding if you do find it.

The reflective shield is marginally more difficult to use. While it will protect you from enemy attacks very effectively, it also leaves gold and can easily kill you if you forget about it or stop paying attention. The best way to avoid walking on gold dropped from a reflection kill is to make sure to not move in long straight lines, instead making many 90 degree turns. Remember, it can deflect fire dragon fireballs, and it's very strong as a dragon killer. Red and blue dragons and the fireball deal 5 damage, and the earth dragon deals 6 damage, so you do need to finish off the dragons with a hit from elsewhere. The reflective shield is also very strong against direbats.

Do not sell torch, chest, shield or shovel here! Unless you have an item to sell to the left or right, you will die exiting. No return makes the pawnbroker significantly worse. Although, if you can sell five items, the pawnbroker starts selling just one item from a special pool of unique items, one of which is the infinite bombs item. Each additional sell after five items rerolls this one item choice. A popular strategy for normal coda is to collect a few over five disposable items, then ideally with bomb charm or blast helm use the infinite bombs to mostly trivialise a run.

I do consider this fairly cheaty though.

The shriner has a slightly higher "priority" weight than other rune teleports, but I think the priority affects the order they are assigned to levels in the dungeon rather than generating it sooner in the dungeon. In any case, bombing the shriner is usually a bad idea unless you're in multiplayer and the exit is safe, in which case it's three free items. Using a strong spell like greater freeze is an option, but usually using the shrines themselves will be of more value.

In the shriner room, it's a bit tricky but you can always align yourself with the shrine of duplication clone to throw and kill them. Keep in mind throwing pierces heavy glass but does not bypass potion, freeze charm or ring of shielding - it really sucks to have freeze charm used against you. If you have one of these items, and there are no damage traps on the floor, then there's no practical way to kill the clone alone without losing your potion too. Other players can help though.

There is a quick kill with one bomb and a dagger:
Then leave and reenter to collect your transmute scroll.

There's also an easy way to kill with 3 damage (enter, move up, throw up, move down, re-enter, move up, collect dagger, finish them off) and with a few other items like pulse spell.
Don't underestimate the transmute scroll. Transmute scroll with a shrine of duplication can produce so many items in multiplayer, it is often more valuable to a run than even a ring of wonder on its own.

With Amplified enabled, on Coda there are only three armor slots, that being the gi, glass and heavy glass. Even if you can't afford two transmutes on a chest armor for the heavy glass, it's still a good idea to transmute the chest piece as this removes it from the item pool, greatly increasing the chance of finding heavy glass armor in the next black chest pools.


It's entirely optional. Best used early in a run when the risk of dying is greatly offset by the low time investment. There are three spawn configurations, and the main hard one is with the banshee, I tend to use a bomb on that one. They are made much easier with two damage or an earth, shield or freeze spell - if I see those items offered I almost always take it even on later zones.

Outside of which of the three enemy configurations you get, the only random element is the bat movement. So technically you can mostly play them deterministically, but I never had a good success rate trying that.

The glass shopkeeper (or "glop") gives some great items for Coda - if a glass shovel hasn't spawned as an item yet, it's always one of the options. Keep in mind, the only cracked t2 wall spawns are transmogrifier and glass shopkeeper, which virtually guarantees you the choice of a shovel upgrade if you bomb that cracked wall. And killing them grants the glass jaw, making it one of the most reliable items to get in a run. But how do you kill the glass shopkeeper safely? It turns out there is a strategy that works 100% of the time, using two bombs, and I personally recommend doing so unless you don't have the bombs or have another headgear you'd prefer to keep. First, you enter the shop, then place a bomb and walk down to leave. Then wait a few beats outside, the teleport spawns in the top left above the map, so he tries to move to the bottom right corner. Then you do this:
It's important to place the bomb AFTER you teleport in, otherwise the bomb will get placed outside the shop. You have to wait for the second half of the beat.

War shrine can be bombed for the ring of war, which is somewhat of a controversial item on coda no return. On regular coda, moving back and forth is easy to mitigate the knockback ring of war provides, but we can't do that with no return. There are three main options for using it:
- Take it in order to get closer to 1-shotting more enemies, which makes those enemies easier to manage
- Push enemies into walls to stunlock them while attacking with war
- Hit a high health enemy once, then walk away and re-align. This can be slow.
The most common enemy, skeletons, certainly become easier with ring of war. It is often difficult to weigh up whether that is worth the expense of complicating key combos for other enemies, like wind mages and minibosses. In my experience I will take ring of war if I have 1 or 2 damage beforehand, as 3 damage is generally the most needed. Ring of war is also very strong against brown direbats, as the knockback makes it safe to charge in and hit them without fear of retaliation.

Activating shrine of war especially in zone 1 is a viable strategy, since outside of bosses and purple mushrooms, it only raises enemy health, which except for dark golems is fully compensated for by having three damage. Since one of which can come from the ring of war by bombing the shrine, you only need +1 damage from another source, which offers a reliable way to offset one of the two main disadvantages from activation. It does make zone 5 harder though, and it undoubtedly makes the game harder in multiplayer when not everyone has 3 damage. It actually makes FM1 easier to clear with one or two damage, as the skeletons from the speaker spawns will become headless and won't respawn if the headless body is left alive. For the other bosses, the increased difficulty is mitigated by having increased damage or quick kills, and activating shrine of war can help sett up those critical quick kill items for a build.

The main benefit of activating shrine of war is that circlet of telepathy is arguably a top-tier vision item, since it provides full enemy vision without the normal downside of spawning more spirits - this downside is removed due to Coda's innate Nazar charm. It also has a distinct advantage compared to the other top tier vision item, glass torch, in that it does not increase enemy aggro radius compared to glass torch which does. Reducing this radius greatly reduces the chances of being swarmed, and a careful player can choose to pick off enemies one at a time on a difficult level. While it's only a 50/50 chance whether you get telepathy or monocle, monocle is certainly not bad either, with its strongest use being seeing what is inside perfect boss clear reward chests.

The gigantism scroll is also particularly useful in zone 1 where having even a temporary higher tier shovel can greatly mitigate bad level generation elsewhere in the zone, and also provides the opportunity to dig the valuable tier 2 cracked walls without spending a bomb if the player doesn't have a normal shovel upgrade by that point. If you have a glass shovel, with gigantism you can mine gold blocks and they won't break the shovel, meaning you can also spend gigantism in place of one of the two bombs to open a locked shop. Overall, the value of gigantism is slightly higher than a single bomb for all of these reasons, and many other active items do outclass it which should play a factor in considering whether to activate this shrine.

The shrine also greatly increases gold gains, which is useful not just for score runs but for getting more transmogrifier and conjurer uses, and it can also help in affording the pawnbroker infinite bombs item if you try to obtain it.

Shrine of space is usually a win-win pick. You get an obsidian shovel (you should pick the obsidian shovel), and it makes each level generate one more room, which means more space to maneuver. It does generate more enemies too, but I do think it's a net positive especially if found in zone 1. If you already have a shovel, bombing it for a map is great too.

Shrine of glass is good to both bomb and use depending on your items. Keep in mind the spiked ears are usually better than the glass jaw, considering how above 3 damage is not that useful.

Unless you're like me, boss shrine should only be used if you have ring of peace. The minibosses are often the run enders, but that being said, sometimes the minibosses are a bit dumb and kill eachother in the process of trying to get to the player. The strength charm from bombing an activated boss shrine is very useful because it doesn't use an item slot, comparable in power only to the legendary risk charm.

Shrine of luck should always be bombed if you have bombs, trading one bomb for a random item is a very good deal, Generally it's best to use three times, gold can also be used for the conjurer and transmogrifier which are useful at any point a run. If you find conjurer early on, there are many good options for which item slot to buy, most often I go shovel for reliability but the ring, head and chest slots are very good too. It's great to get early on in a multiplayer lobby as everyone can get items for free.

The shrine of duplication only appears in multiplayer, but it is very strong. If found in normal level generation it can be bombed for the coveted reflective shield. If used, it can duplicate all the items of a player to give to others, and bombing the shrine after use drops a scroll of duplication which doubles all items in a 9 tile square centered around the player, and the doubled items try to get pushed away from the center. The two main things to remember is how to kill the clone, and how to use the duplication scroll effectively - i.e., in multiplayer, it's best to wait for duplication shrine before picking up any items from it unless no one has a bomb to use on the shrine. Unlike zone 2 clones, this one gets all the benefit of player items (although it does NOT detonate blast helm bombs instantly, but this has been confirmed a bug)

If you don't plan on transmuting the items, you can get an easy kill by throwing your dagger before activating the shrine, that way the clone won't have a dagger to attack with. Just make sure you pick up the dagger you left behind first.

- Earth can kill frozen enemies even if they aren't against walls! Very strong to have earth + freeze for this reason, either in spell, scroll or tome combinations. Even independently, freeze and earth are top tier spells, but fireball can be a big help too. It's up to personal preference what spells to keep for the later zones, although dash objectively sucks, and transmute should be swapped out for combat spells later on. The only good thing dash is for is jumping over gold. Keep in mind the direction of dash spell is affected by bounce traps.
- Bomb charm + blast helm is the definitive panic button. It's usually best to press it twice, to avoid both stragglers and the risk of immediately walking on gold. Keep in mind blast helm grants invulnerability during the turn which you use it, which makes it possible to kill a red dragon with one bomb without moving at all (although you need to be aligned first).
- Heavy effects, like from heavy glass armor, protect against traps but not ice. I always seem to forget this.
- To use war drum with throwing charm, press the throw key, then the drum key, then the direction to throw. You have to beat the drum after you press the throw button for the damage bonus.

I wrote a mod to extend the joy of no return mode to new heights. Rather than tolerating a short, stubby, lizard-like tail of the no return tile, I made Snake Mode, which makes the tile instead become a long and gracious rainbow. It defaults to three tiles, but it has a lot of settings. I tried to keep it as close to the original no return mode as possible, but to keep it balanced I added a decay mechanic, so that certain actions like using war drum won't make the snake shorter, but attacking and digging will. This is all customizable too.

https://mod.io/g/crypt/m/looplessmode

No one has cleared Coda 3 Snake yet, but I am hoping to be the first one day c: My PB is 4-1.

It's also quite a fun mod to do on bard with infinite snake mode and decay turned off. It turns the Crypt into a new kind of puzzle. I'm hoping it gets featured as a weekly challenge mode one day, since it is much more Cadence-level difficulty compared to Coda 3 Snake or Coda no return.

I made the images in here using a mod I wrote, called "combo guide maker" which is here on mod.io: https://mod.io/g/crypt/m/cghelp
I also made a mod to help practicing no return mode, it is called "no return tracker", here on mod.io: https://mod.io/g/crypt/m/nrcount

It can help a lot with practicing, rather than dying, it just tells you when you return with a score. NR-lite, basically. Remember that turning on mods disables leaderboards.

Technical information is based on Synchrony v4.0.0. I don't believe the Miku patch changed anything relevant here, so it is up to date as of 8 April 2024.