This game is not for the faint of heart. If you're here reading this guide, then you probably already know this from personal experience. This game is a daunting, discouraging, "war is hell" kind of experience. At every turn, this game conspires to make you quit playing it, whether that be by making you ragequit, or just be flat out discouraged and say something like "well I'm just not good enough."

This is all part of the artistic direction of this game, and your main enemy when fighting to climb the leaderboards until you get that sweet 500 seconds, will be yourself. You need to find it in yourself to keep the motivation to drudge through bad run after bad run until you get that one run that may only push your personal best by just a few seconds. At first, the challenges you face will be rather easy to overcome, but once you get to around 260 seconds you will hit a wall that seems almost impossible to surmount.

I'm someone who's been playing this game for several months, ever since I heard about an achievement that an astonishing 0.006% of the userbase of the game has actually managed to achieve (the steam stats say it's 0.1%, but that's because it rounds up and also counts people who use steam achievement manager). Recently I managed to join the ranks of those people who have reached 500 seconds legitimately, and I decided to make this guide to share my knowledge and experience with other people who have the same ambition that I set out with.

This guide will not be structured as a "walkthrough on how to get 500 seconds" because that is not a thing that can exist. The only way for a player to get 500 seconds is for them to find a playstyle that suits them and continually expand on it until they get to 500 seconds. Originally, when I started playing this, I was trying to emulate the likes of bowsr and Sojk, by taking on their strategies and trying to copy them. It was only when I started making my own strategies and farming techniques that I began to truly progress, so believe me when I say that finding your own way using the information contained in this guide is simply the best and easiest way to reach 500 seconds.

The most important thing to note before we get into this guide, is that if you decided on a whim that you wanted to get to 500 seconds, then you probably won't get there. The only way to get to 500 seconds is through hard work, perserverance, and dedication. Things that are probably better off being applied to something "productive," whatever that means. If you aren't totally willing to dedicate yourself to obtaining this achievement, then you won't get it. Period. That's just the type of game this is, where little by little you push your limits and improve at a steady pace, and these things just won't happen if you don't spend a lot of time playing this game.

So if you've gotten this far, and you want to know more about Devil Daggers and how to achieve 500 seconds, then keep reading, because I've got a lot to say about it.

So, most of this stuff is probably not news to most of you, but I decided to go ahead and write this anyway for any greenhorns who stumble upon this guide. This section will sum up all of the major and minor mechanics in Devil Daggers, and I'll also give my thoughts and advice on how to use them to your advantage.

Your only friend. The only thing standing between you and certain destruction at the hands of endless amounts of demonic entities. Well, destruction is certain either way, I guess. The properties of this weapon changes depending on how long you hold down the mouse button when you click. A short tap results in a shotgun-like blast, while holding down the mouse button results in a rapid fire stream of daggers. Shotgun blasts push gems away, while rapid fire halts their attraction to you.

Generally speaking, the shotgun blast is more useful against enemies with large health pools, because of the large burst damage caused by it, especially once you obtain the later upgrades. The rapid fire is more useful against groups of small enemies, or the centipedes. It should be pretty obvious which one you should use in just about every situation, however I still see some people using rapid fire against SPIDER II. Stop doing that.

Another useful weapon in your arsenal are the Homing Daggers. Once you get the 2nd upgrade, your hand will start flashing blue. The frequency of this flashing is what indicates how many homing daggers you have stored up. When shot, homing daggers will fly around the arena chasing down enemies at seemingly random. Homing daggers will target anything that can die, and they deal 10x as much damage as normal daggers. Homing Daggers are used by pressing right click, and firing them functions identically to normal daggers: single click for a shotgun blast, hold down for rapid fire. Now, this is just me, but personally I strongly dislike using the shotgun blast for homing daggers. It's extremely excessive, when usually only around 10-15 homing daggers are necessary, the shotgun blast uses around 30-35 in one go, which is extremely wasteful. Remember to use them wisely, do not use homing daggers when you could easily solve the problem yourself by just shooting at the things. Use them only when you feel genuinely overwhelmed and there's no possible way for you to resolve the issue using normal daggers. It's really easy to blow all your daggers, and it's really hard to build that stockpile back up once you've done it.

Your other only friend. These red octahedrons are dropped by various gem-bearing enemies, and, when collected in copious amounts, upgrade your firepower. Collecting these things is the main purpose of the first ~260 seconds or so. You want as many of these things as you possibly can, even if it only gets you an upgrade 10-20 seconds sooner. Gems are naturally attracted to you when you stop shooting daggers.

This brings us to a strategy known as "farming." Farming is, generally speaking, when Squids (spawners) are left alive intentionally, so as to harvest extra gems from the skulls that they spawn. The number of extra gems you get is based solely on the amount and type of spawners that you leave alive. At first, you should probably start off small, leaving only a few extra spawners at a time, in order to get a feel for it. You can start adding more spawners once you get more comfortable with it. To quote Sojk, learning farming in Devil Daggers is like learning an instrument. You don't start with the hard stuff right off the bat.

The main goals of many players' farming strategies is to obtain the 2nd upgrade right after killing the first centipede, and to obtain the 3rd upgrade before the first SPIDER II at around 275 seconds, though these change from player to player. Personally, I've achieved success with just a simple farm that lets me get the 3rd upgrade from scraping the gigapedes at 260 seconds.

You've probably heard of "the floor is lava," but in Devil Daggers, it's the exact opposite. If you touch anything that isn't the floor (or a gem), you die instantly. Obviously, anything that isn't the floor = all the enemies you'll be fighting (or a gem). I'm not going to go too in-depth into the various enemy types here because I'm saving that for another section, but I will go over how some of the enemies seem to work.

The "skull" type enemies all seem to have different variations of the same basic behavior. Obviously their A.I. is different in some ways, but there are some subtle similarities. For instance, when you start shooting at a skull, if they can, they will try to take evasive action. If they are moving into an area that the player is shooting at, they will make an attempt to dodge, though this becomes less of an issue once the player gets the 2rd and 3th upgrade due to the absolutely huge spread afforded by those upgrades. This can be kind of annoying sometimes, so keep it in mind.

Some enemies can only be killed by shooting their weak spot, which is always marked as a bright red gem somewhere on the body of the enemy. If the enemy doesn't have a gem on it, then you can shoot it anywhere.

Ahh, movement. The unsung hero of FPS games. So many people love to sing the praises of having great aim, but have no idea about the importance of having good movement. Devil Daggers is no different. Having a mastery over the movement in this game will allow you to live in situations where you'd otherwise die if you didn't know about things like "bunnyhopping."

So, there are two basic parts of moving in Devil Daggers: bhopping, and strafing. Bhopping is what allows you to gain speed, strafing is what allows you to control yourself while bhopping, so that you can change directions. Bhopping is simple in this game, you merely press space at the correct intervals. If you do it right, you should hear a clearly audible sound when you jump, accompanied by a brief increase in your FOV.

Strafing is a little bit more complicated, especially since the strafing in this game differs in some ways to that of games like Quake. Strafing is performed by moving your mouse either left or right, and pressing down the strafe key that corresponds with that direction. So, for instance, if you want to strafe right, then you press down the D key while moving your mouse to the right. Now, this mode of transportation isn't perfect. You can't turn on a dime, and it also seems to be kind of unresponsive at times. This is probably due to limitations in the engine, but what would I know.

An important thing to note that I see a good bit of confusion about is where the speed comes from in this game. In games like Quake or Reflex, the speed comes from strafing, and the speed is retained by bhopping. In Devil Daggers, the speed comes solely from bhopping. Hitting jump at the correct intervals is what makes you speed up, and strafing does not affect your speed in any way, unless you try to turn too fast.

Another movement element that's just barely worth mentioning is Dagger Jumping. It's functionally identical to rocket jumping in Quake, kind of. It's extremely situational, and I find that it's really only useful for when you get bound up by the gigapedes at around 260 seconds. You can also do a second dagger jump in midair if you time it right.

This is one of the more subtle mechanics of Devil Daggers that is easy to miss if you aren't paying close attention. In Devil Daggers, you fight in an abyssal arena made out of stone blocks surrounded by a bottomless pit. At around 200-230 seconds, the arena begins to slowly shrink, because individual stone blocks begin falling into the pit around the arena. This happens very slowly and very subtly, but over time it adds up in a big way. If you watch Sojk's current world record video, at around 1000 seconds the arena is quite literally a fraction of the size that it started at.

There are 15 enemies in total in Devil Daggers. It may not seem like a lot, but each enemy fulfills their role so perfectly that adding any more would be completely superfluous. Enemies in this game tend to fall under two categories: offensive, and supportive. Offensive enemies chase you down aggressively, while supportive enemies play a more passive role. Supportive enemies exist to act as an obstacle, or to support their allies. For instance, THORN and GHOSTPEDE are both support enemies, because THORN is an obstacle that restricts your movement, and GHOSTPEDE helps its buddies by rendering homing daggers completely useless. Knowing the difference between offensive and supportive enemies could save your life. Or not, it doesn't really matter that much.

The first enemy that spawns in a regular run. Dealing with these guys is pretty easy, just shoot the gem on their backside and they die. They spawn a group of SKULL I and one SKULL II at regular intervals, making these guys the heart of any healthy farm.
This squid has two gems on it, instead of one. It's also noticeably larger than SQUID I. Spawns a group of SKULL I and one SKULL III, farm these guys at your own risk. When farming them, I strongly suggest taking off one of their gems to make your life easier down the road.
The big one. These things tower over most other enemies in the game, and have three gems on them. It's also very worth noting that the gems on this towering monstrosity have much more health than it's tinier squid brothers. Spawns a group of SKULL I and one SKULL IV, one of the most aggressive and dangerous enemies in the game. DO NOT try to farm these things unless you're an absolute madman.

The weakest, most worthless enemy in the game on it's own, and would be nice and easy to deal with if it ever was on it's own. These things always spawn in packs, and, when farming, can easily create swarms of several hundred SKULL I floating at you. They move relatively quickly, and can catch up to a player who isn't bunnyhopping. Extremely low health, can be killed with 1-2 daggers. This enemy is considered by many to be, ironically, one of the most dangerous. This is because it is so low on a player's priority that they are literally protected by the fact that the player has bigger problems to deal with than shooting at some tiny skulls. This can cause some rather infuriating deaths as the player gets blindsided while shooting at more important things. Always try to keep tabs on where the swarm is at all times.
SKULL II are a rather unique enemy type in that, while most enemies are hell-bent on ending the player's life as fast as possible, this enemy is content to wander about randomly throughout the arena without a care in the world. This makes SKULL II dangerous because it is unpredictable. While SKULL I or SKULL III will always follow the player, SKULL II just kind of does it's own thing, which can lead to some rather frustrating deaths where one of them just so happens to run into you by accident. Drops a gem upon death.
Basically, a better version of SKULL I. It follows the player in the same way, although it accelerates faster and has a much higher max speed than SKULL I. If left unattended to, you will die. This enemy's main weakness is the incessant laughter that it constantly emits, which gives away the fact that you're being chased by something that isn't SKULL I. Drops a gem upon death.
The most dangerous SKULL-type enemy, and one of the most dangerous enemies overall. It accelerates extremely quickly and has a max speed that outdoes even the SKULL III. On top of all of this, it has an absolutely ridiculous amount of health, requiring 3 full shotgun blasts to kill with the 2nd upgrade. This enemy must be dealt with promptly. It is worth noting that this enemy does not float like other SKULL-type enemies, but instead slides along the ground. This is important because it's movement can be blocked completely by GIGAPEDE. This SKULL-type is very peculiar in that it does not drop a gem upon death. This means that you're able to kill a SQUID III before it spawns anything, and you won't lose any gems by doing so.

The least occuring enemy type in the entire game. You only fight two of these in the entire run, once at 117 seconds and another at 173 seconds. Killing them is simple, just shoot off all of the gems on the underbelly of the CENTIPEDE. Their behavior is rather simple, at first they will emerge from the ground and then float around aimlessly for about 2-3 seconds, and then they will begin to close in on the player. Once the player is below the CENTIPEDE, it will then dive downwards and burrow into the arena. It takes about ten seconds for it to come back up out of the ground.
Another extremely dangerous enemy. Is extremely long, and has 50 gems that you have to shoot off of it, and won't die until all of them are gone. It is worth noting that GIGAPEDE do not burrow into the ground like CENTIPEDE do, meaning that they will be a constant threat as they aggressively pursue you. They move about as fast as a walking player. Also worth noting that whenever a GIGAPEDE spawns, it is always accompanied by 2 SPIDER I and 1 SPIDER II. GIGAPEDE and SPIDER go hand in hand.
Your worst nightmare if you're trigger happy with your homing daggers. These detestable beings conspire to make sure everything you do while they're around takes as much skill and luck as possible, with no homing-dagger-hand-holding involved. These guys are what prevent people from just spamming homing daggers after killing the LEVIATHAN and the ORB until they get to 500 seconds. They do not attack in any form, however while they are alive, any homing daggers that are released by the player get instantly sucked up into it's mouth. It's segments are much harder to destroy than it's CENTIPEDE-type brothers, and it also has less gems. A high priority target if you use homing daggers alot during the 400-500 second range.

A type of enemy designed not to attack, but to cut off your flow of resources temporarily. Toward the late game these enemies can become a real nuisance when they staunch the flow of precious gems to restock your supply of homing daggers. During the early game however, these enemies are rather weak because they usually appear on their own or with low priority enemies until about 210 seconds. While they are alive, they will constantly attract all gems in the arena towards them. Once the gems have reached them, they convert the gems into these gross egg sac things that spawn a bunch of tiny spiders. Don't let that happen, because not only is it gross, but losing gems is detrimental to your homing dagger economy and upgrade progression.
A much bigger, much badder, much healthier version of SPIDER I. These hulking monstrosities can take up to EIGHT SHOTGUN BLASTS from the 2nd upgrade. Once you get the third upgrade they become much more manageable, only requiring about 4-5 shotgun blasts to kill. They function identically to SPIDER I, in that they attract gems and convert them into eggs. SPIDER II eggs are much, much larger, however. An odd thing worth noting, though, is that SPIDER II eggs and SPIDER I eggs both spawn 4 SPIDERLING each, despite being very different in size. Fun Fact: When you die by touching a SPIDER II egg, the cause of death says "ENVENMONATED" which isn't actually a word.
The things spawned by the egg sacs spawned by SPIDER I or II. Generally just scurry about randomly in your general direction. Like SKULL I, this enemy can be hard to deal with if in great numbers. Also like SKULL I, they die in one hit.

Hit the character limit on the last section, continuing it in this one.

This enemy kind of has it's own category. THORN is exactly what it sounds like, just a thorn sticking out of the ground that just kind of sits there and waits for you to run into it. Also acts as a sink for your homing daggers, causing them to forego more important targets to attack the stationary object that does nothing. Like most other enemies in this game, not very threatening on it's own, but if left unattended, you'll be left dealing with a great deal of these things restricting your movement in an arena that's getting smaller and smaller. They spawn in groups of three, and dust clouds appear on the ground where they're about to spring up from. Killing these things should be pretty high on your priorities

Ah, yes. The LEVIATHAN. How fast you can kill this thing determines whether or not you're going to live past 430 seconds. It has a whopping 6 gems around it's circumference, and each gem takes a whopping 6 direct shotgun blasts from the 3rd upgrade to kill. Taking this thing down in a timely manner requires a mastery of something called "Shotgun Tech" which I'll get into later. During the fight it will release red waves across the arena that mesmerize SKULL-type enemies and cause them to be taken up into the body of the LEVIATHAN. From this point, those SKULL-type enemies are transmuted, having a much, much higher amount of health. I'd wager to say that it's somewhere around three times as much health, and that's based on the fact that a transmuted SKULL IV takes 6 shotgun blasts to kill, while a normal one only takes 2 shotgun blasts to kill. During the fight, several SQUID of different denominations will spawn around the outside of the arena
Just killing the LEVIATHAN isn't enough, you also have to destroy the thing responsible for transmuting the SKULL-type enemies. Once you kill the LEVIATHAN, a giant, strange looking ORB will take it's place in the center of the arena. it releases the same red waves at a much faster interval, though it seems that attacking it causes it to stop releasing the waves. Need confirmation on this. In any case, the thing has an absolutely ungodly amount of health. It takes, no joke, FIFTEEN STRAIGHT SECONDS of non-stop wailing on it with 3rd upgrade shotgun blasts to finally destroy it. If you let this thing transmute too many SKULL-type enemies, you can consider the run to be dead at that point. They just have way too much health to deal with in a timely manner, and in this game, time is everything. The safest way to deal with this is to kill the LEVIATHAN by around 380 seconds, and have all the spawners dead by 385 seconds. This will give you the 15 seconds necessary to kill the ORB without it being able to transmute any skulls.

Fun Fact: Something cool happens if you walk directly under the LEVIATHAN

This is something that I have yet to see in any other Devil Daggers steam guide, despite it being one of the most important things to learn for improving your time once you get around the 350 second mark. The rate at which you fire shotgun blasts can ultimately decide the difference between getting a good cycle on the LEVIATHAN, or killing the first SPIDER II fast enough to kill one of the GIGAPEDE before the next one spawns, etc. It's important, is my point.

So, this begs the question: "but how do we speed up our rate of fire?" The most obvious answer is just to click the mouse button really fast and hope you dont click during the recovery frames. However, there is a better way. Shotgun Tech.

So basically, bowsr made a video on this a really long time ago, and I'm honestly surprised more people don't know about it. I'm even more surprised that people would try to write guides on this game without knowing about it. Here's the video:

Now, bowsr does state in the video that spam clicking is still viable in comparison to Shotgun Tech, however I actually disagree with him on that statement. Shotgun Tech has a much more consistent speed to it, and is much less random, while also providing the fastest speed possible if you're well versed with Shotgun Tech. The main difference between click spamming and Shotgun Tech, in my opinion, is that you can get better at Shotgun Tech, but you can't get better at randomly mashing left click.

Learning how to utilize this technique to kill high-health enemies very quickly can and will improve your times.

So by now you're probably wondering "how does all of this information help me to get 500 seconds??" Well, my main purpose when making this guide was just to put up all my knowledge and experience about this game onto a guide so that other people wouldn't have to spend 160 hours like i did figuring all this stuff out. I got to 500 seconds using all of the knowledge contained inside of this guide, and you can too.

The amount of "walkthrough" type guides on this hub is pretty ridiculous in my honest opinion. This game isn't a game that you can just be "walked through." This game is based on the concept of pure trial and error, and if you came to this guide looking for the definitive answer on how to get to 500 seconds, you're going to get it right here and now: you have to sit down, and play the game and die over and over and over and over and over until you have enough experience to take on the big challenges, and then the challenges that come after those challenges, and the challenges after that, and so on. This game is something that requires genuine effort and perserverance to succeed in, and the best thing a guide can do to help you in a game like this is to provide you with pieces of the puzzle that you might be missing.

The purpose of this guide is to be a reference for anyone trying to get to 500 seconds, and to help anyone who might read it by possibly giving them insight into a problem, or helping them identify an issue they've been having in their runs. There is not a single guide that can be made for this game that is the definitive "correct way" to get to 500 seconds, you have to sit down and figure out for yourself how all of these puzzle pieces fit together, because that's just the type of game Devil Daggers is, and if you don't like that then go play Overwatch or something else that's blissfully non-threatening and takes 0 effort to succeed in.

My point is, that the only "correct way" to get 500 seconds is to sit down, and play the game. Develop a personal style that suits your needs as a player, using the knowledge and experience gained from playing the game, or anything you may have learned while reading this guide, or from watching high level replays. From there, you can start building strategies around your personal playstyle, and put those strategies into practice, and if they don't work, scrap them and start over. The main thing is that you should just never give up if you really want to get to 500 seconds, it sure as hell worked for me, and it'll work for you too.

Thanks for reading my massive text-wall guide with zero visuals whatsoever. I just felt like sharing my knowledge and experience with this game, since I just recently hit 647 seconds after months of trying to get there. You can find me on the 53rd place on the global leaderboard if you ever want to watch my replay lol.
EDIT: Recently got my 1010 run, up to #17 global.
Everything not covered in this guide can be found here:
http://devildaggers.info
This website is probably one of the greatest compilations of video game data I've ever seen. It has information on all of the enemies, information on the specific differences between dagger upgrades, information on all of the spawns throughout the run, a realtime leaderboard that marks cheaters and alt accounts, you get the idea. It's a great website for when you need some data to back up a theory or strat.