Hello, and welcome to my guide! I'm Sarge, and as of writing this, I hold the global high score in Endless Mode at just over 170 billion points (or 190-ish for GOTY endless). I'm writing this guide to try to help other people survive in endless mode and encourage more activity and competition. So without further ado, welcome to "How to stay alive for a very long time in endless mode so you can get a really really high score that's better than other people's scores."

This is a brief guide to staying alive in endless mode. With this method, you should be able to play indefinitely (I don't say infinitely, because there is a glitch that can crash your game, and I've had it destroy some endless attempts of mine before). I'll try to keep this guide as easy to understand and navigate as possible. This guide assumes that you have unlocked all 7 CDs and the corresponding abilities. I'd also recommend being familiar with some terms like "4-jump shuffle" (jumping 4 times to fully fill your charge meter). Alright, let's start this guide, and where better to start, than the beginning.

The major technique to surviving in endless mode is chaining together the short period of invincibility received when you use One Collective (the grab attack). However, I seriously advise against starting that immediately, since the first bit of the game isn't too difficult to handle. I find it more effective to simply rush through the first 5-6 minutes before worrying about surviving. I usually switch over when 7 wyrms appear on the screen (generally around 5:20-5:40, depending on how well you did the first part). If you destroyed all enemies and didn't get hit, you should have about a x219 multiplier when they arrive. It should go without saying that if you do get hit here, it would be best to simply start over.

If you can't last that long, then it's absolutely fine to start using One Collective sooner, it'll just take you a little bit longer to reach your target score, since your multiplier will be a little lower. However, the objective of this guide isn't to go as fast as possible or to maximize score, it's to preserve health.

Basically for this section, just fill up your charge meter, then simply stand in place and blow the crap out of your enemies. Once your overdrive level goes up to about 3, you'll be 1-hitting all enemies, and I find Savantism bursts to be a bit disorienting, so I tend to just hold the attack button.

After some practice, there shouldn't really be a reason to even leave the right platform, but the priority again is not getting hit at all here. If you start to feel overwhelmed, or once you've reached your goal for this section, it'll be time to move on to the next part.


1. The most efficient way to destroy enemies in this part is with the regular attack. Don't try anything too fancy here; it's unnecessary and you don't need the extra risk.

2. When killing Wyrms, the best strategy is to double charge-shot them at close range. Basically just stay still and wait for them to get close, aim head-on so your attack will go through the whole body, then double right click to fire two successive charge shots. The damage the first shot deals is enough to recharge for a quick second shot, and doing it fast enough will deal so much damage that the wyrm is instantly destroyed and your charge will be back at full (or at least pretty close).

3. If your charge drops below full, you can either fill it back up with Trapeze Shuffle or just let it come back slowly while killing enemies. Even without the double damage,if you have overdrive it's not too hard to keep the field clear in the beginning, so it might be best to just not worry about it.

When you start this part, you should have a full charge meter; if you don't, simply jump-shuffle to fill it up. Alright, now things get interesting. From here on, you are essentially going to be performing the same action over and over until you die. Stop shooting at everything (or really anything) and start jumping.

Like rolling, jumping charges One Collective, but jumping is just a bit faster. Two jumps is just shy of enough, so when you're in the air on the second jump just hold down to start rolling in place. You should immediately be able to use One Collective now, so aim at the center of a group of enemies you want to grab and click. All action stops (though the timer keeps going) and you drag in those enemies to you, destroying them and collecting the debris. Once the first piece is collected, you can move again, so refill your meter and let loose another super web of chains (One Collective)!

If you mess up something, or you think you're going to slowly to get to the next grab attack without getting hit, you can press Q (by default, on the keyboard, I'm not sure if there's a similar button for controllers) to grab any disc piece lying around. This should be the ONLY reason you grab a disc piece. You only have 8 of them and once they're gone, they're gone, so try as hard as you can to stay alive without them.
That's pretty much all there is to this part of the guide. Just keep going until you're dead. The next section will be about how to deal with specific threats while staying alive.


1. Early on, the primary focus should be increasing your multiplier. Priority should be given to bluebladers, since they are always in a small cluster and very easy to grab all at once.

2. One Collective has a set angular limit, but not a set range, so the further away you are from the enemies, the wider area you can cover. If the enemies you want to grab are on the left, you should be on the right.

3. Try as hard as you can not to pick up CD pieces accidentally, the easiest way to avoid this is to simply right click while using One Collective. You can't pick up CDs with the right-click, and you won't fire your charge shot if you're full charge for the grab.

4. As you last longer, the points awarded for beating fodders (and possibly wyrms, though not bluebladers or ironcopters) increases, independantly of your multiplier. If you make a mistake early on, it's not the end of the world, since even a lower multiplier will still give you more points later on than a high multiplier does now.

5. This is just personal preference, and isn't really suited for new players, but it's best to not pick up CDs when you still have an extra life left. Say you have a multiplier of 20, then get hit twice and kill 4 groups of enemies, you would end with a multiplier of 9 (20/2=10, 10/2=5, 5+4=9), but if you kill 4 monsters and then get hit twice, it's only 6 (20+4=24, 24/2=12, 12/2=6), and the extra few thousand (or hundred thousand, or ten million) points won't really make that much of a difference in the long run.

Alright, now it's time to deal with a few more specific issues that need a bit more detail than just a few sentences. Mastering these techniques is essential to getting a top score.


So, you've been around for a while and you know that if you jump 4 times in a row, your charge meter will be instantly filled. Since this comes from the ability "Trapeze Shuffle" and you jump 4 times, it's cleverly known as the 4-jump shuffle. The mechanics behind this move are a bit strange, though, working the same way that One Collective does: As you spin around, your charge builds up, but you'll also notice an aura building around the alchemist, this is the same thing that lets you know when you can use one collective, but additionally, any time the aura is fully charged (meaning it's triangular and not circular) when you land a jump, your charge meter will go to max.

If you pretend it takes 10 points to build up the aura completely, each spin gives 1 point (and yes, it does take exactly 10 spins to build the aura), and jumping gives 3 points. Using very high-level math and a bit of magic, you might be able to work out that you can do 1 spin and 3 jumps to get full aura. If your last move was a jump, you will be landing the jump with a full aura, so you'll get full charge from this too. This has been very cleverly nicknamed the "3-jump shuffle". This technique works in any order, as long as a jump is the last move, but spinning first is easiest, and you can interrupt the spin early to jump and it'll still count towards your "10 aura points". You can essentially just press the direction you want to spin and then immediately hold the jump button.

This extra fraction of a second you save by doing this technique is probably the most beneficial of all of these techniques. It gives you an extra spare moment of invincibility to use. Even that little amount is extremely helpful if you happen to make a bit of a mistake, or you need to take care of some wyrms, speaking of which...

Now that you're in the long bit, chaining One Collective constantly, you'll be gathering quite a collection of Wyrms. As time goes on, up to 10 wyrms will spawn at once, and if you don't take care of them somehow, you'll be stuck in lagtown, population: 90 trillion-thousand-billion-hundred-gazillion, and that's a lot. That much stuff on the screen at once can slow down gameplay significantly, and that's just unacceptable. It also carries the risk of crashing the game because it can't keep track of an infinite number of objects, and the wyrms will block the view of other enemies, making it more difficult to use One Collective effectively, BUT MOSTLY THE LAG THING! Anyway, we need to find a way to deal with this. Luckily, we've already discussed a method... Charge Attacks!

The damage that charge attacks can deal in just one shot is staggering, especially on a screen full of enemies, and when you're 30 minutes in, the screen is always full of enemies. All this damage will add back to the now depleted charge meter, and if you deal enough, the meter will be fully charged again, ready to be used for One Collective.

The general strategy is to find a cluster of wyrms (and possibly other enemies, but mostly focus on wyrms) and between landing with a full charge and jumping to build up your aura, fire a charge shot at the group. If it does enough damage then your charge meter will be filled again and you can continue with One collective like normal.

If you're short by just a little bit, start rolling immediately; rolling to fill up your charge meter won't deplete the aura when it's full, so you can immediately use One Collective. If you're below 3 or 4 charge, then it'll be faster to 3-jump shuffle, just be careful when building the aura for One Collective, because your invincibility will almost definitely not last the entire time. If you have the room, then no worries, but if your position is threatened, then think about taking a hit (which should give enough invincibility to finish One Collective) or grabbing a CD piece.

After playing with this technique for a little while, you'll get the hang of it, and when shooting a cluster the same direction, the wyrms will generally stay together, so you should be able to easily tell if you can shoot them. In general, it's best to only worry about the wyrms when they're causing lag, which is convenient, because that's when they're the most annoying and the safest to deal with.

As a final note, it is possible to shoot multiple charge shots at a time, but this greatly increases the risk that you will either not fully refill your charge meter or run out of invincibility while building up the next One Collective. It isn't strictly necessary to learn this, since you can easily fire off 20 charge shots one at a time between wyrm spawns, but it does help get rid of them a bit more quickly, so if you've got some free time it wouldn't hurt to practice it a little.


This was by far the most dreaded event during gameplay until recently. When you are in the long bit, enemy spawning is essentially out of your control and might as well be random. This becomes a problem when wyrms are added to the mix. As you know, when wyrms appear, all the action stops until each wyrm is announced. When action does resume, you cannot press up to jump, so if you were in the middle of filling your charge meter, you can't just hold up anymore...

For the longest time, my only remedy to this was to grab a CD piece and hope it didn't happen again, but after a bit of experimenting, a really obvious solution appeared... Keep holding up, but also hold left or right as well. You can still dodge roll left or right, and when you're holding up, you'll just jump. You won't resume exactly where you left off, but as far as I can tell, you will just need to add on an extra jump to finish filling your charge meter, and there's plenty of time to do that and still make it to One Collective before losing your invincibility. If this happens, I would advise not trying to squeeze in a charge shot. You'll be cutting it close as it is, and you can always blow stuff up after you make sure you're safe.

I've recoreded a sample run of Endless Mode for about 20 minutes (I say sample... I was going for a serious attempt and messed up really early...) that you can watch here. It shows off pretty much everything I just talked about (including how to deal with interrupting wyrms and absolutely blasting the crap out of them, starting around 9:15, my favorite part.)
The score got cut off a little bit, but I got around 7 billion points during the run. I didn't think to leave the recorder running long enough to catch the score at the end... Derp...

Well, here we are. I guess it's time for me to give my farewell speech and send you off to war. With the information in this guide, I'm sure you're prepared enough to take on even the most daunting challenge the tower can throw at you. Remember to be patient and to practice; I didn't get up one morning, turn on the game, and get the global high score(oh wait... yes I did! the previous several weeks of practice don't count, right?).

...Anyway, I think it's time we say goodbye. I wish you luck on your journey to the top! If you feel I left something out, or having anything you want to let me know, feel free to comment below; and if I managed to help you, I would appreciate a rating, though that's not really as important as just having more people play.