Turbo Pudding
Drum Cave is the fifth station in Loudnik: a hollow asteroid that serves as the station’s treasury. It’s the game’s breather, and almost everything in it pays. It’s Tuesday, so here are its secrets.
The picture at the top is a stash that has just opened. A drum skin sits in the wall at the bottom left, a capsule glows in a green ring, and a spray of guitar picks bursts out around it, just below Volta’s ship.
A breather that pays
Drum Cave comes right after Speaker Canyon, and we made it a breather on purpose: fewer bullets, and capsule boxes come twice as often. Enemies here get at most 20 percent tougher than in the station before, so if you spent your picks on a Sleeve or a spare ship instead of more firepower, you won’t run into a wall. Every pick that drops here is worth 30 percent more, too.
The station’s song is our drums of the deep: taiko drums under a koto, in D minor, at 144 beats a minute. It suits the place, because the cave walls are set with drums.
The drums on the walls
Three times during the station, a set of three drum skins comes down the cave walls, zigzagging left, right, left or the other way around. They’re scenery. They don’t shoot, they don’t count as kills, and they can’t be broken. But they answer. Shoot a skin, and it booms and drops two or three picks, up to four times per skin.
Once all three skins of a set are on screen, a light runs across them: one, two, three. Then it rests for a moment and runs again.
How a stash opens
Hit the skins in the order they light up, and the stash opens: a capsule and a big pile of picks spill out next to the last skin. Hitting the same skin twice in a row is fine, but a wrong skin sends the count back to the start. A bomb won’t do it for you either. It hits all three skins at once, and the cave counts that as a single hit.
Opening all three stashes is Drum Cave’s own star, the one goal that belongs to this station alone. It’s the one star in the game that asks you to watch the walls.
Who else lives in the cave
Reverbs drift down with a wobble and split when you shoot them: one becomes two, and two become four. Only the four smallest pieces carry picks, so a Reverb pays only if you finish the job.
Stereos come apart into a left half and a right half. Each half is thrown out to its own side, then turns and dives at your ship on a slant. They aim once and never follow, so a small step to the side is enough.
Beat droppers leave beats hanging in the air. A beat ticks faster and glows brighter as its moment comes, and two and a half seconds later, it pops into a ring of dots, unless you shoot it first. We made sure a beat never pops right at the nose of your ship.
Loose rocks drift through, too. They take a lot of hits, and when one finally breaks, it leaves three live chunks of rubble behind.
The Stone Gong
About 80 seconds in, the Stone Gong rolls out: a stone disc that bounces off the walls of the cave. Every bounce lets out a ring of bullets, so watch where it’s about to hit, not just where it is. The weak spot is its glowing center. Chips break off its stone rim as it takes damage, and at half health, it speeds up and starts aiming shots at you between bounces.
The Muffled Drum
At the end of the cave waits the Muffled Drum: a huge drum wrapped in felt, its face turned down toward your ship, with two mallets above it. Its weak spot is bare drumskin: wherever a piece of felt has just torn off, under a mallet while it’s raised, and everywhere once the felt is gone. Four tension lugs pop off its rim as the fight goes on, and the two lower ones can be shot off for extra picks before they fall on their own.
The first three stations are free to play in your browser at loudnik.com. Drum Cave is part of the full game, all ten stations, for $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Loudnik page.
