Guide:The Basics

Random Access Mayhem is a Roguelike, and in general, Roguelikes are incredibly difficult games. RAM especially utilizes its unique Swap System to such a degree that it can feel daunting for a new player to get their footing. This page will go into a basic playstyle guide and tips for the Swap System and the Main Hosts. If you're looking for tips on Fitness, check out the guide on Maximizing Fitness.

Swap System

The central mechanic of Random Access Mayhem is the Swap System, the ability to Swap between the game's set of Hosts at will using Swap Energy, even after the death of the current host. Holding the Swap key (Space by default) will slow the game down and allow you to swap into any bot your cursor is over when space is released. Holding the bar for 2 seconds will begin to rapidly drain it

There are two bars, the segmented bar is your Local Bar, while the longer wired bar is your Global Bar.

The Local Bar is the bar you will find yourself drawing from most of the time, swapping while still alive drains a single segment or 50% worth of the bar, while swapping post-death will take a segment and a half or 75% of the bar. There are two ways to restore this bar:

• Time
  • While in combat (and only during combat) the Local Bar will refill slowly. Despite the possibility of staying in combat as long as possible to indefinitely regain the bar, this is not recommended because the time spent here could be better spent killing enemies, although in emergencies patience is always a strong tool.
• Kills
  • Killing enemies directly fills the Local Bar, with this being the main method to regain the Local Energy required to continue swapping. This can be enhanced by certain Trickshots involving swapping, which increase the amount of Juice gained on kill, although new players may find themselves needing to play safer and getting used to the Swap System before they can fully utilize this.

If you try to swap without enough Local Energy the game will start to drain from your fallback bar, the Global Bar. This is your fallback, containing five extra swaps to be used when you're out of Local Energy at 20% each. If you find yourself dead and unable to find a new host, you will be revived for the hefty cost of 40% of your Global Energy (if you do not have enough juice you will still be revived at the cost of all of your remaining Global Energy). This bar cannot be replenished through normal means, with the only way to restore the bar being the shop, with a purchase costing 3600 Fitness Points to restore 50% of your Global Energy Bar.

General Tips

• When push comes to shove, swap. Don't stay in a bot just because you're attached, find something with more health and swap, find a safer host and swap. The lower your health, the more important it is that you SWAP.
• Reviving should always be a last resort as it uses far too much energy to be efficient, if there's a target you should always swap into it as quick as possible.
• Swap first, ask questions later. The bar drains fast when you hold to swap too long, and the extra time you take to swap is never worth the loss in drain.
• When you're new to the game you should almost always be buying Global Juice if you're low on it at the shop, as the Global Bar acts as your long-term health bar and will greatly increase your survivability in the second half of the Demo.

Main Hosts

RAM as of the current demo has 4 Main Hosts:

Steeltoe

Steeltoe is a simple host, its primary fire is a Shotgun, and its secondary fire is a melee soundblast known as the Resonance Hammer.

The Shotgun is an incredible tool to dish out large amounts of damage dispersed between targets or in a single area, and the Resonance Hammer is great for both deflecting bullets and getting targets off of you.

Steeltoe's most notable piece of basic tech is the boosted Diffraction Shot and Nail Driver, both usable by firing while the Resonance Hammer animation is playing.

Firing during the melee animation will grant you the Diffraction Shot, which will give you Green bullets that have a wider spread. Firing during a 3-frame window right at the end of the melee animation — about 1/3rd of a second after it starts — will instead perform a Nail Driver, which fires Purple bullets that have a heavily tightened spread and wildly increased speed, turning the normal Shotgun Blast into an effective sniper shot. Both of these techniques drastically increase the damage of your attack.

General Tips

• The Shotgun Blast is a powerful get-off-me tool, fire indiscriminately.
• If you want to time the Nail Driver by sight, once the Resonance Hammer's cooldown reaches the very first line of the actual icon itself, fire.
• You can use the recoil from Nail Driver for emergency movement.

Recommended Upgrades

• Steeltoe has some of the most generally useful upgrades of any host, but notably:
  • Reload Coroutine: Nullifies much of Steeltoe's downtime, allowing it to become a powerhouse.
  • Metronome Heartbeat: Increases the window of the Nail Driver by 66%. Only two frames, but a useful amount of leeway for learning.
  • Resonance: Increases the window of safety when using Resonance Hammer as a get-off-me tool by adding a strong stun effect.
  • Digitigrade Optimization: General movement upgrades help you dodge everything, but don't go overboard if you're new!

Router

Router is a devastating and speedy host who can take a bit to get used to, wielding Grenades as its primary fire and the ability to Drift boost for its secondary fire.

The Grenades are extremely powerful dealing damage both on impact and exploding after a few seconds of landing, with its projectile speed and impact damage directly proportional to your speed.

Router's Drift is an incredibly important part of its kit. After slowing briefly, It will gain a massive burst of speed alongside a brief period of invincibility to dodge through enemy attacks.

General Tips

• Aiming grenades can be difficult because of how momentum is taken into account, try to imagine you're throwing bricks that explode instead of grenades.
• Your grenades explode in an area regardless of if you hit anything with them, use this to spam out areas before making your approach.
• Even without using Drift, it's important to do a short run-up to making shots in order to get bonus impact damage.
• The speed boost and i-frames from Drift is based on the duration you've held secondary fire. Varying the length you hold secondary fire can help with controlling your speed as well as allowing you to dodge through attacks more effectively.

Recommended Upgrades

• Router has access to a variety of useful upgrades to help with its speed and damage dealing, but it also has a variety of interesting side-grades, including:
  • Careful Packing: This upgrade enhances the AOE and damage of grenades, helping you better hit grenades you miss.
  • Predictive Suspension: Just taking one Predictive Suspension can make Router get up to effective grenade throwing speed much faster.
  • Bulk Delivery: With much of the same reasoning as Careful Packing, this upgrade helps improve grenade damage not reliant on direct hits.
  • Spin Control: Once you have multiple Spin Controls you're able to simply throw your grenades at walls and let homing do the rest, useful for newer players.

Aphid

Aphid is a strong but risky Host. It's primary fire is an incredibly volatile Flamethrower, and its secondary allows it to dump Tar on the ground.

The Flamethrower grants an infinitely scaling output and incredible recoil which can be used to rapidly skate around the battlefield. Despite the infinite scaling in output, shooting the Flamethrower will overheat Aphid, with the base Aphid kit overheating and exploding from just flames after 5 seconds.

Despite the power of Flamethrower in the short range, it can struggle against faster targets. As such, it can lay down Tar on the floor to trap and torch targets in an area.

The Aphid has a unique ability known as the Self-Destruct. By opening the tar spigot while firing, Aphid will instantly Overheat and begin the explosion process. When combined with a safe host outside the blast range, this can be a useful tactic for clearing mobs of enemies, especially when combined with a Certain Upgrade.

General Tips

• An un-upgraded Aphid can only fire for five seconds before it overheats. There are two good visual indicators for this, as both the color of Aphid will begin to change as it heats up, but the primary fire icon will fill up as the heat does.
• Despite Aphid's low base mobility, utilizing the recoil to get in close to pesky targets like Steeltoe and Deadlift can be crucial to your success.
• When push comes to shove, making sure to Self-Destruct before swapping can make sure there's one less enemy for your next Host to deal with.
• Enemy Aphids have their ability to cooldown completely shutdown when affected by flames, unlike the player who will only have it shut off when firing, use this to your advantage to win encounters against them via use of tar and Flame Floors. You will almost always overheat them faster than they overheat you.

Recommended Upgrades

• Aphid has access to a variety of useful upgrades to help with managing overheat, flamethrower output, and more:
  • Laminar Outflow: This upgrade directly decreases heat buildup, allowing you to fire longer without risk to yourself.
  • Overpressure: This upgrade reduces the sputtering of Aphid's flames at the start, as well as increasing output, both useful to Aphid's success.
  • Internal Combustion: This upgrade heavily increases Aphid's range and recoil, allowing better movement from flamethrower recoil as well as helping Aphid deal with further priority targets.
  • Alternative Coolant: This upgrade effectively removes the need to manage overheat on Aphid, as you can stop firing to instantly vent all heat. Combine with Overclocked Cooling to decrease the self-damage from venting the heat!

Deadlift

Deadlift is a difficult but powerful host with a high skill ceiling, who utilizes Jabs, Charged Jabs, and it's Chain to bring targets in close and blow them away.

Deadlift's primary is split into two attacks depending on charge. When primary is tapped, it will simply Jab in the cursor direction dealing light damage and knocking away any oncoming projectiles. When primary is held for almost any amount of time, it will slow down to a crawl and ready a heavy Charged Jab in the cursor direction, which deals a solid amount of damage and also knocking away any oncoming projectiles.

Deadlift's secondary is the Chain, and is the axis on which the bot plays. Upon initial use it will launch its arm out as a chain that will grab onto the first target struck. After landing a chain, you can then hold down secondary to reel in your target. Simply jabbing your target when it comes into melee range will begin a Knockback Combo up to 3, increasing the knockback of each jab and the collision damage of the chained target. You can also break the chain and turn your target into a speeding projectile with a Charged Jab, which has damage relative to the amount of combo on the bot.

General Tips

• Every bot has a different amount of health, meaning there's only so much combo that can be built up on each, experiment to see what works best for each bot.
• Unupgraded Deadlift has quite some trouble with dealing with Aphid's as deflecting the flames don't exactly do much, to improve your encounters with Aphid there are a couple options varying in difficulty:
  • Dodge the Aphid's flames until it overheats itself and can't fire anymore, take this opportunity to build a quick combo and launch your new grenade!
  • Swap to another host, the risk of fighting sometimes isn't worth the potential loss of Global Juice.

Recommended Upgrades

• Deadlift has access to a variety of useful upgrades to help with improving juggle combos, safety, and versatility:
  • Footwork Scheduler: This upgrade increases the movement you get while charge attacking, decreasing risk to yourself.
  • Cable Management: This upgrade increases the speed Deadlift can throw out the chain and recall missed ones, this helps newer players hit more chains and lessen the penalty on missed ones.
  • Frayed Wires: This upgrade stuns every single target you chain, as well as any target that is hit with a stunned enemy. This effectively neutralizes all difficult Deadlift match-ups and heavily increases the safety of Deadlift.
  • Whiplash: This upgrade allows Deadlift to throw out ranged projectiles on swing, which not only help it deal with more difficult matchups, but due to the chain's knockback it can hit chained enemies multiple times.