Defeating the Moon Lord and Duke Fishron with boulders

Mille Marteaux

Empress of Light
I'm not going to talk your ears off with boring stuff that doesn't matter, so I'll just cut right to the chase.

One of my personal goals was defeating the Moon Lord by damaging it primarily through boulders. Moon Leech Clots were fair game since they don't contribute to the main HP pool. Here is the arena, both without and with wires. It is very tall, so I will use spoiler tags out of respect:

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The dummy teleporter engine repeatedly actuates and de-actuates three small platforms which are aligned to roll boulders into the Moon Lord's hands and core, respectively. Damage is done to the forehead with what I call the Orbital Boulder Cannon, which is the huge stack of boulders above the player. It is activated by running a boulder down the track path. It activates the switches, de-acutating blocks and releasing boulders to do damage to the forehead. Upon releasing all boulders, another one is rolled down to reset the actuated blocks, and the player teleports up to the main payload chamber to re-load the cannon. At the top, another teleporter brings the player back into the main chamber.

Heart statues along with a Heartreach Potion are used to keep the player alive, outhealing any damage they may take at any point due to supplying a constant stream. Moon Leech Clots are destroyed through player intervention. To assure minimal shenanigans, a Golem Fist is used.

Finally, this is done on normal mode. The only functional differences between normal and expert mode for this setup are:

1) The Moon Lord takes less damage from the boulders due to defense scaling
2) The Moon Lord has more HP to chew through due to HP scaling

The constant stream of hearts is enough to outheal even expert damage, so normal mode is chosen to save time. This is doable on expert, but it would take exponentially longer.



For Fishron, see this post further into the thread.
 
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Wow, that's, really... Awesome! I can't believe how boulders that strong, but either I don't fight a single target over 30mins. Anyways, great work.
 
I saw someone doing mechanic class gameplay with only pickaxe dmg and dmg from traps (boulders, too)
This actually brings up an idea of making a boulder only challange when you can only use boulders to dmg bosses
 
What's in those chests @Agastya?... ALL the boulders! :D

Great concept and detail in execution, not to mention determination to beat him, however many times it took to refine this! And for those who thought killing Skeletron with boulders was a feat, hah.

I was wondering, at first, if it was going to be 'rubber-band AFK' - continually dropping down the length of your 'orbital canon' trying to continually place boulders to your left... Could be integrated with a fall based damage blocking system then... But the ML would follow you up, of course, so harder to get the boulders to hit.

Have you tried using boulder hoiks to fire up at the head instead? Also, could you use a slightly more complex launching mechanism to fire alternate boulders left and right simultaneously? (Could be boulder powered.) And separate question, might that actually help with the kill?

I think the current setup it more fun, letting you feel like you really in a proper fight, but it's the engineer's obsession to minimise user input, you understand. ;)
 
I can't believe how boulders that strong, but either I don't fight a single target over 30mins
They were better on Plantera, honestly.

a fall based damage blocking system
The Moon Lord's attacks have their own invincibility windows separate from other damage sources. Heart Statue tanking is the only viable method of just sitting there and not dying, next to actually moving around.

I think the current setup it more fun
Nothing about this was fun outside of the building process, and even then wiring was a chore. You can see the part where I messed up the wiring for one of the switches on the track, I just never fixed it because I didn't care enough.

Have you tried using boulder hoiks to fire up at the head instead?
I.. I had no idea these existed. I should not have been given such power.
 
Fishron was pretty simple. At first I was attempting to use a simple dummy invulnerability machine, but it wasn't working for me for some reason or another, so I had to get creative (by which, I mean "I needed more dummies").

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Three dummy ghosts are stacked on top of a fourth dummy to ensure I get full invincibility. The same teleporter engine is used to repeatedly actuate blocks, and boulders rolled from the platform roll into a hoik that launches them high enough in the air to hit Duke Fishron during detonating bubble attacks.

 
Question, I suppose you'd have tried this already, but it isn't possible to hoik boulders in a loop, is it?
 
Just revisiting this thread since boulders just came up here.

You shouldn't need an actively actuated first up-hoik tooth, like that. A ghost wall, with a sloped platform (or sloped actuated block) should do the trick passively, and be more reliable. (Right?) Also, the left-right orientation of the slopes need not be exactly as shown, either way works, once the boulders are going up, I believe.

You can also go up multiple hoiks, but they must be allowed to keep rolling in their initial horizontal direction the whole time. (As has been said.)
 
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