The Great Wireworm

#Overview

The Great Wireworm is the seventh boss. It arrives at 10:00 on the wave schedule, alongside a Golden Scarab. It has 4200 base HP: about 2730 on Normal (boss HP ×0.65, see Modes) and 3990 on Nightmare before curse. Nightmare starts every run with one curse, which adds 10% to boss HP, so there it actually has about 4389.^[1][2] At speed 40 it is the fastest boss in the game, but still slower than Tibo's base 62. Its contact damage is 26.

It is not in the post-20:00 rotation; a Boss Lair can wake it. It drops an XP gem worth 120, a 25-gold coin and a chest (Chests).

Measured (headless tools/play.mjs, build main-B2gf34bA, seed wiki, standard mode, --god; the clock warped to 2 s before each minute and stepped across it; level-up offers taken first-in-order except Rotten Spud, so curse stays at the difficulty's start value): it spawned at exactly 10:00 on all four difficulties, with 2100 HP on Easy, 2730 on Normal, 2940 on Hard and 4389 on Nightmare. Seeds s1 to s4 gave the same Normal times and HP.

#Fight

The Wireworm crawls towards Tibo and fires a beetle-shaped fan between dives. Every 4 s it burrows and bursts up under where Tibo was. Its fan timer is paused for the whole dive.^[3] Its first dive comes about 2.4 s after it appears.

#Burrow

When the dive starts, the game marks a circle of radius 40 on Tibo's position, and the Wireworm goes underground at once. It travels under the ground to the mark and erupts 2.2 s later (1 s warning plus 1.2 s underground), dealing its contact damage to Tibo if he is inside the circle.^[4]

While it is underground, the Wireworm is out of reach: it is left out of the lookup weapons use to find targets, it deals no contact damage, and any bullet pattern it was still winding up is cancelled.^[5] A full cycle is 6.2 s, so it spends about a third of the fight underground.

#Click-beetle fan

Every 3 s at base, the Wireworm aims at Tibo. After 0.7 s it fires five shots spread over 1.3 radians (about 74°) at speed 90, 12 damage each. The shots fly out, nearly stop, re-aim once at Tibo's position at that moment, and then shoot off faster than they started. The exact timings, and the earlier Nightmare timings, are under Click-beetle shots.

Enemy bullets scale with time (Enemy scaling). At 10:00 the fan has 7 shots instead of 5, launches at about 104 and repeats about every 2.3 s.

Measured (headless tools/play.mjs, build main-B2gf34bA, seed wiki, standard mode, --god, Normal; the clock warped to just before 10:00; every other boss and every pest removed each tick, so the sim's hostile-shot counter only counts this boss): 7-shot fans 2.15 s, 6.67 s and 13.50 s after it spawned (the gap is a dive).

#Tips

• The burrow circle stays where Tibo was when the dive began. Any movement takes him out of it long before the 2.2 s are up, so keep walking and do not stop on the mark.
• It surfaces on the mark itself, so getting well clear of the mark keeps its body, and its next fan, at a distance.
• The beetle shots re-aim only once, when they stop. Moving across their new line just after they lunge forward makes them miss, while standing still lets all of them converge on Tibo.
• Weapons cannot hit it underground, so the 4 s it spends on the surface between dives are the time to deal damage.
• It is the fastest boss, but Tibo still outruns it. Kiting in wide circles keeps it from reaching contact range between dives.

#Main attack

#Nightmare ground attack

Verified: Nightmare adds the serpent ground layout; other difficulties keep the ordinary attack. Its anchor captures Tibo's position when placed, rather than following him. Eleven circles of radius 8 trace a curved path of length 128 and sideways sway 20, spaced along its arc. They strike 0.12 seconds apart. The Wireworm emerges at the last circle, rather than at the centre. Distances above are raw values: multiply them by Nightmare's areaScale of 1.45, but not counts, angles, ratios or times. This does not enlarge every enemy attack.^[6][7][8]

#Bullet patterns

#Nightmare bullet patterns

Verified: on Nightmare these replace the ordinary patterns above; they use the same pattern interval. Other levels use the ordinary list.^[9]

#Click-beetle shots

Verified: one five-shot fan spans 1.3 radians and launches at speed 90. On Easy, Normal and Hard, the shots keep full speed through 0.35 s, slow to ×0.12 at 0.5 s, hold that speed until 0.9 s, then accelerate to ×1.55 by 1 s. At 0.9 s each shot aims once at Tibo's current position from its own position; it does not keep homing.^[10][11]

Nightmare keeps the same fan and launch speed, but slows earlier: ×1 at 0.3 s, ×0.12 at 0.42 s and 0.72 s, then ×1.9 at 0.8 s. It retargets once at 0.72 s. Speeds interpolate between the listed points; these are seconds since the shot launched, not fractions of its lifetime.^[12] The shots look like click beetles and flash while moving slowly.

#HP scaling

Boss HP is multiplied by a step factor depending on the run time (bosses.hpSteps), and by the difficulty's boss HP multiplier (see Modes).

The Normal column includes Normal's boss HP ×0.65, without curse. Other time scaling may also apply; see Enemy scaling.

#Names in other languages

Verified: the name the game shows when another language is selected in Settings, from its translation files.^[13] See Languages.

#Data

{
  "id": "great-wireworm",
  "hp": 4200,
  "speed": 40,
  "damage": 26,
  "radius": 14,
  "attackEvery": 4,
  "telegraph": 1,
  "attack": {
    "kind": "burrow",
    "radius": 40,
    "under": 1.2
  },
  "sharpAttack": {
    "kind": "burrow",
    "radius": 40,
    "under": 1.2,
    "layout": "serpent"
  },
  "patternEvery": 3,
  "patterns": [
    {
      "kind": "fan",
      "count": 5,
      "arc": 1.3,
      "speed": 90,
      "radius": 3,
      "damage": 12,
      "bursts": 1,
      "interval": 0.3,
      "telegraph": 0.7,
      "motion": {
        "speed": [
          {
            "at": 0.35,
            "to": 1
          },
          {
            "at": 0.5,
            "to": 0.12
          },
          {
            "at": 0.9,
            "to": 0.12
          },
          {
            "at": 1,
            "to": 1.55
          }
        ],
        "retarget": {
          "at": 0.9
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "sharpPatterns": [
    {
      "kind": "fan",
      "count": 5,
      "arc": 1.3,
      "speed": 90,
      "radius": 3,
      "damage": 12,
      "bursts": 1,
      "interval": 0.3,
      "telegraph": 0.7,
      "motion": {
        "speed": [
          {
            "at": 0.3,
            "to": 1
          },
          {
            "at": 0.42,
            "to": 0.12
          },
          {
            "at": 0.72,
            "to": 0.12
          },
          {
            "at": 0.8,
            "to": 1.9
          }
        ],
        "retarget": {
          "at": 0.72
        }
      }
    }
  ],
  "xp": 120
}