Avatar of Sneaky Pete/Strategy

This page contains tips and tricks for the Avatar of Sneaky Pete special challenge path.

Mr. Store Items

With Sneaky Pete not allowing Your Mystical Bookshelf skills and familiars, a large number of Mr. Store items are unusable in Hardcore that otherwise usually are.

Here is a complete list of Items of the Month which can be used in Hardcore Avatar of Sneaky Pete:

• Clan VIP Lounge key: A Fax Machine is unavailable, but all other furnishings are as usable as ever. The familiar weight billiards table buff is fairly useless of course. The Hot Dog Stand is able to fill up the vast majority of your available stomach space by itself.
• A Pumpkin Patch, A Peppermint Patch, A Bone Garden, A Beer Garden or A Winter Garden: Mutually exclusive with each other. See below for further analysis.
• My Own Pen Pal kit or GameInformPowerDailyPro subscription card: Can be swapped daily if needed. The GameInform subscription is significantly more useful of the two, getting you elemental resistance for Guano Junction, A-boo Peak and Mt. McLargeHuge, as well as an HP buff that can come in useful for fighting tough enemies and A-Boo Peak. It can also be used as an alternative for getting fat loot tokens, although whether this is worth it is questionable. The Pen Pal kit's rubber band gun is inferior to Sneaky Pete's basket, making it a poor day 1 choice, but the sticky gloves that drop from level 10 onwards can be useful.
• Camp Scout backpack: Sneaky Pete's giant liver can be grown large enough to easily accommodate all of the booze that drops from the backpack even after drinking lots of improved cocktails, making the boozes the backpack drops arguably more useful than their usual status as potential filler. The HP and MP regen from the fire-starting kit is also particularly helpful as Pete's skills can be rather expensive. Does not need to be pulled to drop items in Hardcore.
• Florist Friar: These plants are as useful as always.

Normal runs can also pull Mr. Store items. Remember that skillbooks, familiars and familiar equipment are unavailable, but the shirt slot is still usable. The Crown of Thrones and Buddy Bjorn are useless as they cannot be occupied.

Garden comparison

In order from best to worst, roughly:

• A Winter Garden offers the most utility in this path. There are lots of options and Pete can find use for most of them.
  • The snow boards are the main attraction, saving many turns in The Orc Chasm.
  • An unfinished ice sculpture can save turns at Sonofa Beach in Hardcore. If you split Sonofa over two days, you can even use two of them.
  • Low-skill Petes may enjoy the extra +item from the ice bucket.
  • The Ice Island Long Tea is handy in the early days for smoothing over RNG screw on Throw Party ingredients.
  • The snow cleats can get you the last bit of non-combat you need to cap out at 25% -combat.
  • Snow crabs offer some filler food.
  • If you don't need any of the above (or if you can delay them), you can leave the garden unharvested until the third day to get a frost flower, to make the nuns worth doing (in conjunction with a bunch of other +meat sources).
  • The snow machine workshed item can combo well with this garden, as always.
• A Pumpkin Patch has one significant benefit over the other gardens: access to a yellow-ray function via the pumpkin bomb. However, you may have to farm up extra knob goblin firecrackers to get them. While Pete can access a 100-turn cooldown yellow ray via a motorbike upgrade, it requires a lot of skill points to get the Flash Headlight skill. Alternatively, this garden provides very easy food via pumpkin pie for those without access to the Hot Dog Stand. This garden's utility drops to last place once Pete has the skill points to pick up Flash Headlight for the Filthy Hippy Disguise and the Frat Warrior Fatigues.
• A Peppermint Patch is mostly used for its high-turngen booze, which Pete can mix for free with Cocktail Magic. However, Petes with access to Throw Party but not Hard Drinker will have no issues filling up most of their liver, making the additional drunkenness of the peppermint booze unnecessary, and those with Hard Drinker can likely hit their target daycount anyway. The booze also requires 3 extra base booze bottles per day, which you might be able to spare (especially post-Pirates), but are trickier to get in the early part of the run. This garden can also provide free runaways with the peppermint parasol, but a high-skill Pete has access to so many free runaways anyway that you won't need them after your low-skill runs. It can also give single-turn filthworm glands via the peppermint crook, which could save many turns if you aren't getting Natural Dancer.
• A Bone Garden is traditionally used for free island access, but the most useful gas tank upgrade already gives free island access, so that feature is unnecessary. That still leaves a few nice options:
  • Skeleton skis give +init, which is handy before you have the skill points for Live Fast, and a bit of elemental damage.
  • Crystal skeleton vodka is very strong, giving adventures, +item and +ML.
  • Skeleton quiche is nice filler food.
  • You can get a small stats-per-combat boost from a Skeletal Buddy.
• A Beer Garden is only useful for booze, a use that all of the other gardens share, but it also gets you tin cups which can provide a very minor boost at no opportunity cost, and the tin tam can be helpful for A-Boo Peak or accessing Groar.

Astral Consumables

• With only 5 stomach capacity, astral hot dogs are a poor choice as you can only eat one per day and it's not hard to fill up your stomach with other great alternatives, especially if you have access to the Hot Dog Stand.
• Unlike other Avatar classes where the astral energy drinks are a no-brainer, Sneaky Pete can actually generate adventure-yielding spleen items via Incite Riot. It also shouldn't be too hard to fit in astral pilsners if you're able to expand your liver capacity to the max.
• Therefore the energy drinks are great for low skill runs that don't plan on exploring much of the Dangerous Rebel skill tree, but those that are able to go deep into the tree and get Hard Drinker could find the pilsners as a competitive option. More analysis is needed on this.

Astral Gear

• Pete can wear shirts thanks to Best Dressed, so the astral shirt is a viable option, and a great option for low-skill runs, providing lots of easy stat gains in an otherwise under-utilised slot. Note that you need to have permed Torso Awaregness to be allowed to take the astral shirt in valhalla.
• The astral mask offers a range of useful benefits, however the item drop bonus is less useful than usual if you are able to get Natural Dancer because your available item drop is so huge anyway, and you can gain access to the yellow ray effect via Flash Headlight with the appropriate motorbike upgrade. If you're not planning on going all the way through the Loveable Rogue tree, then the astral mask should be very strongly considered in hardcore, but it is a toss-up between this and the shirt.
• Those who have most of the skills might want to consider the astral belt for even more stats than the shirt, a lot of powerlevelling needs doing in this path and high-skill Pete can tackle lots of ML, but doesn't have access to much.

Workshed Items

• As this avatar, you get free access to Nash Crosby's Still in your workshed. This is in addition to your normal workshed item.
• As you will be crafting a lot of cocktails, the warbear high-efficiency still can help smooth over Throw Party RNG screw, and those with the Hard Drinker skill may find this helps to fill out their gigantic liver space.
• The snow machine is very useful if you have A Winter Garden, and even if you don't, can still be used for a snow cleats each day and an ice harvest that can be eaten as filler food, or an unfinished ice sculpture by day 3.
• The warbear induction oven is not as useful as other paths, but can still duplicate your grue egg omelette, which is nice for filling your stomach if you lack a VIP key. People doing leaderboard Pete runs in Hardcore looking to save as many turns as possible might want to consider the slightly bizarre strategy of getting a lime on day 2 and cooking it with your Sneaky Pete's key to duplicate the key (so all 3 keys can be gotten via zapping) and avoid the Daily Dungeon entirely. This doesn't really save many turns overall depending on how quickly you can open the menagerie. However it does make it better to go for a frost flower as you're not using the snow machine. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of eating hot dogs on two days, and the extra winter garden items, so may not actually be worth it. An alternative source of a lime is a lucky jumbo olive zap, which you can get from The Palindome.

Skill Analysis

Every time you complete a Avatar of Sneaky Pete ascension you will begin the next one with more skill points available to invest in the skill trees. During the time when you don't have enough skill points available to get all of them you'll need to make some decisions about which skills to take and in what order. What follows is an analysis of the most important skills in each tree.

Lovable Rogue Tree

• Mixologist and Throw Party at positions 2 and 3 in this tree are pretty much a necessity for Hardcore. Without these skills you will really struggle to fill your liver with high quality booze and your adventure generation will be atrocious. Mixologist lets you make Disco Bandit cocktails and superhuman cocktails (you will find Nash Crosby's Still in your Workshed to make the latter) and Throw Party gives you the ingredients to make them. Don't forget that the amount of ingredients you get with Throw Party depends on the amount of audience love you have, so will want to focus on raising it at the start of your ascension by using Mug for the Audience whenever possible. Disco Bandit cocktails have a level requirement of 4 and superhuman cocktails a level requirement of 6, so you ideally want to invest at least three points into the Lovable Rogue tree by the time you reach level 4, ideally before drinking on day 1. Watch out, it costs 1 turn to craft a Disco Bandit cocktail, and 2 turns to craft a Superhuman cocktail, so make sure you have enough adventures spare. Unfortunately it is possible to get RNG screwed on the ingredients you receive as there is no guarantee you will be able to mix them together effectively, so choose which drinks to make and which ingredients to distil with care.
• Fix Jukebox at position 4 can be thought of as a partial yellow ray with no cooldown, as the skill allows you to get a single-turn +300% item drop buff in the middle of combat, three times a day. Unlike Yellow rays, it also works on conditional items so items such as The F'c'le quest drops are good targets. See Yellow ray strategy for some ideas on the sorts of items that make good targets for this skill, although this skill can only guarantee the drops on items with a 25% base drop rate or higher. Using this skill also gets you a big chunk of audience love, which can help max out your approval for Throw Party, but in practice concentrating on the item drop bonus is going to be a better idea. Note that trying to get the Filthy Hippy Disguise using this skill is a bad idea and you should just wait until level 9 and then boost non-combats, due to the staggeringly low base drop rate on the outfit pieces.
• Check Hair at position 7 gets you a buff that gives +100% item drops for 10 turns at the cost of 30MP. It may be too expensive to run all the time (depending on which MP-generating IOTMs you've got), but running it whenever you need item drops for a quest that cannot be guaranteed via Fix Jukebox (or you've already used up your 3 uses of that for the day) should be perfectly manageable even without IOTMs. It's worth noting that if you don't make it this far along this tree, Sneaky Pete's general-purpose item drop access is atrocious, with limited access to other significant item drops bonuses, barring the occasional 10%-25% buff here and there from various sources and pickpocket. In hardcore during low-skill runs that do not plan to at least pick up this skill, the astral mask comes highly recommended. Check Hair really helps for The Defiled Nook, The 8-Bit Realm, The Hole in the Sky and getting the steel margarita, making it more valuable in hardcore.
• Make Friends at position 9 is believed to be similar to Transcendent Olfaction and has a minimum audience love requirement before it can be used. More information is needed before this can be analysed further; watch this space.
• Natural Dancer. This skill. This skill! Good grief! A passive +200% item drops is absolutely gigantic and combined with Check Hair, which is a prerequisite, lets you trivially cap any item drop with a base rate of 25% or higher. Incredibly powerful, especially in hardcore, but can save some pulls in softcore too. Some yellow ray or Fix Jukebox targets typically have base drop rates around 30%, they can be capped naturally when you get to the bottom of this skill tree, thereby allowing you to save those limited resources for other things. Here's a list of quest relevant item drop targets that can't be capped with 300% but can be capped with 600% by using Fix Jukebox, (in rough appearance order):

• • sonar-in-a-biscuit (Batrat and Ratbat Burrow) (15%)
  • Knob Goblin Harem Girl Disguise pieces (20%)
  • bus pass and imp air (15%-25%)
  • frigid ninja stars (20%)
  • large box (mind flayer) (20%)
  • A-boo clue (15%)
  • rusty hedge trimmers (15%)
  • One of the oil cartel bubblin' crudes (15%)
  • super-spiky hair gel (20%)
  • chaos butterfly and plot hole (20%)
  • Black No. 2 (20%)
  • black picnic basket (15%)
  • bronzed locust (20%)
  • dusty bottle of wine (20%)
  • book of matches (20%)
  • tomb ratchet (20%)

And here's a list of item drops with lower than 15% base drop rate, being good targets for yellow rays:

• • sonar-in-a-biscuit (beanbat) (10%)
  • disease (10%)
  • killing jar (10%)
  • Mt. McLargeHuge outfit pieces (10%)
  • Swashbuckling Getup pieces (~10%)
  • Filthy Hippy Disguise pieces (~5%)
  • Mohawk wig (10%)
  • amulet of extreme plot significance (10%)
  • war outfit pieces (5%-10%)
  • filthworm glands (10%)
  • gremlin juice (~3%)

Motorcycle Guy Tree

• Rev Engine at position 1 initially gives a buff of +10 to all stats for 5MP, with the length of the buff scaling to your audience Love or Hate, which is pretty nice early on, but not major. However, by upgrading your motorbike's muffler you can make this skill also give 10 turns of a +combat or -combat buff (the exact strength of each still needs to be confirmed). Note that the +combat upgrade is Pete's only source of +combat, and Sonofa Beach is incredibly painful in Hardcore without it. Choosing one of those two upgrades means giving up letting Peel Out banish enemies, which is also very powerful. Those in low-skill runs not planning to access Peel Out or upgrade it to 30 peel outs a day should probably take the non-combat buff if they are not also going down the Dangerous Rebel tree, or +combat if they are. A small thing to consider, if you do upgrade this skill: it's possible to end up in a situation where you run out of the +stat buff but don't want to cast it due to not wanting the combat modifer buff at that time.
• Pop Wheelie at position 3 is a large delevelling skill that is very useful for Softcore where you have access to more ML. It also helps you survive in the Haunted Ballroom if you're setting the song early.
• Rowdy Drinker at position 4 is essentially a passive Ode to Booze. With Pete's liver potentially getting very large this is a very strong skill, easily generating between 23-38 adventures per day. For Hardcore, Throw Party on the Lovable Rogue tree is arguably higher priority, but ideally you want both. A very strong 0-skill hardcore skill selection is to pick up Throw Party and then immediately beeline for this skill in time for level 7.
• Peel Out at position 5 is initially 10 free runaways per day. That's already really good. It has two motorcycle upgrades available for it that make it even better: you can upgrade your tires to increase the limit to 30 peel outs a day (at the cost of not being able to skip Mt. McLargeHuge), and you can upgrade your muffler to make peel outs also banish (at the cost of not making Rev Engine give combat modifiers). 30 banishes per day that are also free runaways is immensely powerful and turns this into one of Pete's most powerful skills, although the opportunity costs offset this somewhat and all that running away hurts your levelling up. The skill costs 10 MP to use each time, so it can get very expensive overall if you upgrade your usage limit.
• Easy Riding at position 6 is very useful. Pete doesn't naturally have access to much ML, yet can easily access a lot of turncutting abilities via his motorbike and skills. This can leave him needing quite a lot of powerlevelling, so a passive +5 moxie stats per fight is a pretty big deal -- the same amount as you'd get from +40 ML. Do watch out for your offstats though -- you also need 62 muscle for the antique machete and 70 mysticality to equip the war outfit. Obviously this skill is more useful the earlier you can pick it up.
• Check Mirror at position 7 lets you spend an adventure to set or swap one of 4 mutually exclusive intrinsic abilities: +3 to all elemental resistance, +3 stats per fight, +50% meat or +50% initiative. +3 stats per fight is the obvious winner in hardcore, with initiative possibly being better in softcore. The elemental resistance helps for A-boo clues and/or if you're skipping Mt. McLargeHuge via the motorbike tire upgrade (as you still need fight to Groar which requires 5 cold resistance), while getting the outfit is likely the better route for those that go for more peel outs.
• Biker Swagger at position 9 gives 10 turns of +30 ML for 30 MP. Easy to survive thanks to Rev Engine, Born Showman, Pop Wheelie and Riding Tall, all of which are prerequisites for this skill. Can be tough to afford, but will cut out a fair amount of powerlevelling.
• Flash Headlight at position 10 isn't great unless you use your motorbike headlight upgrade to turn it into an 100-turn cooldown yellow ray (at the cost of not getting the extra desert exploration upgrade). Despite Pete having easy access to 300% item drops on the Lovable Rogue tree, yellow rays are still useful and the short cooldown time means you can fit them in more easily. See either Yellow ray strategy or the list above in the Natural Dancer analysis for good ways to use these. If you're not planning on getting the upgrade, you can ignore getting this skill.

Ascension Strategy
Rankings:	HC Skills - HC Familiars - HC IotMs
General:	Class selection - Familiar usage - Lucky adventures
Paths:	BHY - Fist - AoB - BI - ZS - AoJ - BIG! - KOLHS - CA2 - AoSP - SS - HR - Picky - Ed - Random - AoWoL - Source - NA - GN - LtA - L.A.R. - PF - G-Lover - DD
Additional Paths:	DG - 2CRS - KoE - PotP - LKS - GG - Y,Robot - QT - WF - GY - JM - FotD
IotMs:	Tomes - Faxing - Copying - YR - Garden - Correspondent - Workshed - Tea party - Florist