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If you’ve dared to venture off Noita’s main path to Kolmi and beyond you already know what waits: enemies that hit hard enough to ignore all the extra max hp pickups you’ve collected so far. One bad encounter and Mina is back at the mountain’s foot with 100 hp and the faint taste of despair.
But with the Heartache tech, that can change. This exploit allows you to boost Mina's max hp so high that most fixed-damage threats become trivial. Percentage-based damage is still terrifying but that's a horror for another day.
All you need is:
* A Heart Mage (Haavoittajamestari)
Shoots a projectile that deals low damage and inflicts the Heartache status effect. Each projectile inflicts a stack of Heartache, halving Mina's current max hp and current hp for 20 seconds. When a stack expires, Mina's current max hp and current hp at that moment are doubled. The effect stacks until Mina's max hp is less than 10 at which point further stacks don't half nor double the hp, just confetti.
* At least one 'extra max health' pickup
Since pickups raise Mina's current max hp by a fixed number even when debuffed with Heartache, upon expiring, each stack of Heartache will double Mina's current max hp, that is including the pickups max hp increment and final result is a compounded, multiplicative boost.
* Ambrosia (Optional)
The Heart Mage's projectile does do a little damage... but it's not so little when Mina's max hp has been reduced to 5. So it is of utmost importance that the mage doesn't land the finishing shot, however you can that is, even if it comes down to dodging the shots or killing the mage before they can take their shot. You gotta do what you gotta do with what you have, but with some Ambrosia you don't have to worry about taking any damage at all... the mage can just fire away.
* A spare teleport wand (Optional)
You can simplify execution by baiting the mage to follow Mina near the 'extra max health' pickup. A reliable method is to throw a teleport wand at the Heart Mage; they’ll pick it up and begin teleporting to Mina constantly. Now you can guide them to a nearby pickup with zero risk.
How It Works
The core idea is simple: get hit multiple times by the Heart Mage’s projectiles (without dying of course), then grab an 'extra max health' pickup before the Heartache debuff wears off. When it expires, Mina's max hp gets doubled, but it doubles whatever max hp value Mina is currently at, including any boosts ('extra max health' pickup) received during the debuff.
The Underground Jungle is the ideal venue in my opinion, it’s rich in 'extra max health' pickups and is the safest biome where Heart Mages spawn.
Optional Prep
You can make the process safer by clearing the enemies and terrain where the pickup is. The terrain is cleared to avoid washing off Mina's Ambrosia stain with other liquids that might be in the area when performing the tech. Also clear an entry and exit route as you might be moving through the area with less than 10 hp.
Bait the mage to a suitable location depending on your setup.
Once in position:
If you gave them a teleport wand to follow you with then kick the mage to recover your wand (the enemy goes back to firing their default projectiles).
Steps
- Get hit multiple times; stacking the debuff.
- Grab the hp pickup before the debuff expires.
- Wait and watch the numbers explode.
Example
Starting Max hp: 375
Heartache Applied: 6 Stacks
Each stack halves Mina's max hp:
- 375 → 187.5
* 187.5 → 93.75
* 93.75 → 46.875
* 46.875 → 23.4375
* 23.4375 → 11.71875
* 11.71875 → 5.859375
Step 1: Mina now has 5.86 max hp
Step 2: Grab a +25 Max hp Pickup → Total becomes 30.86
Step 3: Let the stacks expire one by one:
- 30.86 × 2 = 61.72
* 61.72 × 2 = 123.43
* 123.43 × 2 = 246.87
* 246.87 × 2 = 493.75
* 493.75 × 2 = 987.5
* 987.5 × 2 = 1,975
Final Max hp: 1,975
From just one pickup, six stacks, and some Ambrosia insurance, Mina has more than quintupled their original hp pool. If you want to keep the hp, you might want to be diligent in doing things right (feed into the paranoia, I'm not your therapist).
What did I miss?
Final Rant
I feel I've been overly redundant but I'm still not sure if I've explained the tech well enough. The wiki does a great job explaining the exploit as with everything else: Heartache
This isn’t a cheat. It’s an emergent exploit born from Noita’s systemic design. An unintentional interaction between the games systems that the community discovered and incorporated into the meta. The devs didn’t patch it out; they just nerfed it and left it, it's become canon. There is a lot of this in Noita and it's amazing.
And if you're on the fence about “exploiting”, what is it that the new gods in god runs do? well... this is Noita: the exploit simulator.
Next article: Ylialkemisti - The end of The Knower to be
credits to:
The Noita Wiki for the Haavoittajamestari image (https://noita.wiki.gg/index.php?curid=1726) under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License
com
full time NPC, part time ByteBloomer software developer
