Ditching the Exit to Save the Edit: The Beginning of Creativity in Noita

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Wand editing is the bread and butter of playing Noita (Noiting). Without the 'tinker with Wands everywhere' perk however, the only way to edit your wands early game  is in a Holy Mountain. The problem here is that the gods decided to make the Holy Mountains one time use only, you get in through a portal that drops you inside and edit your wands and exit through the only way in or out, the Holy Mountain is now dececrated and crumbles behind you and you lose the ability to edit your wands in that Holy Mountain again.

With a maximum of 4 wands that Mina can carry into the Holy Mountain, any Mina will quickly realize this isn't enough. You usually will find a useful wand without any useful spells on it and a lot of useless wands with just one useful spell on them (everything is more than useful so contexual uselessness I guess), Mina would need a bag of wands to take into a Holy Mountain to get proper use out of the loot for the granted one time use, a bag you never get.

However, a Holy Mountain only gets dececrated when Mina goes through the exit (either exiting or entering). This is very important, as once you know the rules, you can work out how to work around them. The Holy Mountain exit has a square detection area that well... detects when Mina passes through it and triggers the dececration.

All Mina has to do is NEVER enter the detection area when entering or leaving and the Holy Mountain will always remain usable. But how? considering that as much as you can get in using the portals, there is only one exit and that's through the detection area. Well... this is Noita so however you can do it, do that and it will work. So let's review a few (very few of the known many) of the ways to achieve this that may be available in the early game.

• Teleport; If Mina can get their hands on a teleport spell, you can use that to teleport right past the detection area. This works since technically it's the spell that passes through the detection area, then upon expiring will instantly change the position of Mina from inside the Holy Montain to outside at the position the spell expired without Mina ever being in the detection area themself. You need good aim for this so using a wand build with low spread is best, putting the teleport bolt on a trigger is even safer but makes the wand less useful once Mina is out.

• Polymorphine; Remember the rule? desecration only occurs when Mina enters the detection area... so what if you are not Mina when you pass through the exit? With Polymorphine and it's variants, you can turn into one of the many other creatures in the world which are not Mina. In this polymorphed state you can safely pass through the detection area without triggering the desecration as it only checks if it's Mina passing through. Careful not to rush into the next biome before the Polymorphine times out as it might be exceedingly difficult to survive as a defenseless Lentolammas.

• Tunneling; Arguably the ideal method for preserving Holy Mountains, why bother with the rigged exit when you can just create your own? Saves you from the anxieties:
      "what if I miss my teleport shot"
      "I'm one shot away from the game over screen in sheep form"
  or having to deal with the intentionally high corridor on your way back into the Holy Mountain. There are a good number of spells and substances you can use to dig your way out of a Holy Mountain, the ones that are usually available in the early game are luminous drill, black holes, Earthquake spells and acid. This method is only Arguably the best because the gods don't like it when you destroy their holy brickwork and will send Steve after you forevermore, and then there is Scott.

Now that Mina can tinker with wands anywhere whenever necessary, next is actually finding the best early game wands and spells.

Next article: Fungal Gamble - Dancing With the Gods of RNG

If you'd like to know more about Holy Mountains, of which there is a lot to know, The Wiki's got you

credits to:

The Noita Wiki for the full Holy Mountain example image (https://noita.wiki.gg/index.php?curid=1682) under the  Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License