GUILT - Pempti [Armoured Bacteria]
This advice applies to all Operations that involve Pempti.
Pempti is essentially a side-scroller, meaning there is only so much time-save you can squeeze out of this strain. The main improvements you can make is to ensure you do not let this strain get out of control.
Core Types
There are three mini-cores that go alongside the main core of Pempti itself. Each one has a unique attack and approach to deal with them. If controlled correctly, you will rarely have to handle multiple cores at once.
After dealing the first point of damage to Pempti’s core, it will always show you the three cores in order.
Red Cores create lacerations. There are five in total, all with individual paths that they will take. They will never go the same path that another red core has gone to. There is a delay to when these cores will cut across the organ, meaning you can laser them before they go to cut. The final core will always go towards the bottom right of the organ.
Blue Cores create polyps/tumours. There are five that come out. On Normal difficulty, it is possible to laser all five of these before the Pempti membrane expands up the organ. However, if you must let one move, it should always be the far right one. This has the shortest path, and therefore creates the least amount of tumours. While the core is moving up the organ with the membrane, you cannot kill it. That being said, you can laser it down to 1 HP. As such, you should laser it while they create the tumours, that way you clean the mess up while bringing it down to low health. After the cycle, you can just laser it and it should die immediately. If you do not kill all the cores as the cycle ends, the empty slots will fill with new cores. If this is happening, you need to kill off all the cores sooner.
Grey Cores cause vital damage. They come out in fives, swirling around the core. As long as you have your laser on the main core as the wave starts, you can kill these rather quickly. If you don’t aim to kill these quickly as to prevent the vitals from plummeting. These are the easiest to deal with, given their lack of action other than swirling around the main core.
When you reach the halfway point of Pempti’s health (four hits) or the final hit (eight hits), all cores that are out will die regardless of what animation they are doing.
Healing Touch
It may come as no surprise that we aim not to use Derek’s Healing Touch in either operation during a speedrun. Pempti is purely cycle based, meaning if we delay these cycles, we cause the entire operation to drag on.
However, if everything is falling apart, popping HT is faster than having to redo the entire operation. The only times you should activate Healing Touch is when you have lots of polyps on screen, and lacerations that need to be sutured, and the vitals are dropping too quickly for you to catch up. This is called a clean-up loop and the main gimmick of Pempti.
Laser
Despite having a specialised laser which you can’t burn out, it’s important to understand the better way to laser each ore. Each cores hitboxes match closely to their sprite, but there is also an overlap where you can laser between cores and still hit them.
90% of the time, you should aim to laser the main core. This is especially true while you are idling and waiting for cores, continue to laser at the main core as you wait given the mini-cores will spawn from here. The faster this is killed, the earlier the operation ends. Depending on the exact cycles, you can let a laceration core or two get through and make cuts if the main core itself is ready to be damaged.
There are a total of 8 health points for the main core for Pempti, at the fourth hit, the mini-cores are killed off and the existing cycle is reset.
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