I was wrong about a few things in the guide. I have corrected the mistakes. Information that is irrelevant in light of my new findings will be crossed out, but not removed from the guide altogether.

Most significantly, I found out that the default fists you spawn with regardless of your choice of melee weapon are actually the strongest melee weapon in the game! This will be discussed further in the Fury section.

Also, it turns out that Efficiency can affect the recoil recovery of not just automatic or semi-automatic weapons, but other slow firing weapons, like the lever action shotgun. This will be described further in the Efficiency section of the guide.

In Invasion, you play as a survivor whose goal it is to fight off wave after wave of "Loonies" while
surviving. A wave is passed by killing the quota of loonies, all while at least one player is alive from the beginning to the end of the wave. When players die during a wave, they don't respawn until it's over. This means that survival during a wave is important. Players win if they beat 10 waves, and lose if they are all dead at the same time (wiped out by loonies).

This gamemode can be played in single player or multiplayer. The rules of gameplay actually change between singleplayer and multiplayer, so this guide will focus on multiplayer play.

Yes, you read that correctly!

If you navigate into "Singleplayer" then "Skirmish", it'll allow you to start a singleplayer, offline Invasion match. If you navigate into "Multiplayer", then "Create", it'll allow you to start an invasion match that runs on either a Fragnet server or your local machine, depending on your personal preference.


However, these are not the same!

• Singleplayer mode doesn't allow you to pick any attributes in the Loadout menu, and will force you to play as a character with 0 in every attribute (yeah, that's right, not even the attributes you set up for your singleplayer character!). Multiplayer mode will default to the attributes you set in the customize submenu of multiplayer, and will also allow you to set your attributes in the loadout menu per usual. This is significant because it means that in Singleplayer, you'll move the slowest that you can, experience the most recoil from guns, and take the most damage that you can.
  
• In Singleplayer mode, important recovery pickup items like the medkit and armor do not respawn after you consume them, meaning you can run out if you consume too many! In multiplayer, these items respawn after a 30 second delay, making them renewable.
  
  

The rest of this guide will be written with Multiplayer in mind. However, Singleplayer invasion is nowhere near impossible, and can actually be quite fun because of how tense it is as your character isn't very strong and your resources slowly dwindle.

Loonies are a humanoid non-player-character. They run straight at players, swing a melee weapon of some kind at them (such as a hammer, or a machete), and occasionally throw a weapon through the air that does damage if it hits a player. They never carry firearms and can be outpaced by sprinting. However, there may be a lot of them during a wave.


When shooting at a loony with a firearm, note that they take the most damage when shot in the head. However, unlike most games, where aiming for the temple of the head is advised, The Wastes 1.3 seems to really like it when you shoot around the chin or neck area. I never seem to hit a headshot when aiming for the cranium, but always hit the headshot when I'm going for an upper body shot. This is important because with a headshot, even the humble Kolt Enforcer pistol can kill a loony with just one bullet, but few weapons can kill a loony with just one bodyshot. So, try to aim for the neck if you're going for that headshot.

EDIT: Actually, this depends on which weapon you are using and what Efficiency stat you have! I'll describe this further in the Efficiency section, but for now, just know that if you have 0 efficiency and you're using a powerful single-shot weapon that isn't the hunting rifle, you should aim for the neck, whereas if you have 10 efficiency, it's safe to aim for the center of the loony's head (such as where the nose is).

Early waves spawn less loonies total, while later waves spawn more. Spawn mechanics of loonies are particularly strange; loonies will quickly despawn altogether if a player gets far enough away from them and isn't looking at them, even without breaking line of sight. The loony will then be respawned closer to you. The despawning is very aggressive, to the point that you can hear a loonie scream behind you as you're sprinting forward, but then turn around to face them only to see that no one is there because they despawned! The strength of this feature is that it means a loonie will never get stuck on a corner of the map and be unable to pathfind you because they'll despawn long before they even have a chance to screw up and get stuck. If there's one loony left for a wave, you need only to stand still and give the game about a dozen seconds to spawn him within your vicinity. However, it'll make you feel like you're going crazy when loonies disappear outright if you choose to run away from one around the corner.

When you first spawn into a match to start the first wave, you get a warning that the loonies are coming and about 5 seconds to move around before the first wave begins.


When you successfully complete a wave by eliminating all of the loonies, you enter the intermission phase between waves. During this phase, dead players will respawn, living players may occasionally be rewarded with powerful Primary weapons, and no Loonies will be respawned. This lasts about 15 seconds. Sometimes it'll just congratulate you on surviving so far, while other times it may occasionally award you with a powerful primary weapon.


Normally, to change your loadout in a multiplayer match of The Wastes 1.3, you need to go into the loadout menu, select what you want, hit "Join", and then your new items won't be applied until you respawn. This creates complications during Invasion because respawning requires you to die, you're not allowed to respawn until the intermission, and dying can lose the game if every player is dead during a wave. Also, dying causes you to lose all primary weapons you've earned up to this point in the game.

That being said, if you really hate your weapons or attributes, you can set a new loadout, and then die during an intermission and respawn right away. You can accomplish this best by picking your loadout during the later part of the wave when there's only a few loonies left, and then finding a way to die during the intermission (such as by your own explosive, or by falling to your death). The most straightforward way is to use one of your explosives, but if you don't have explosives, you can also allow a loony to damage you to low health on purpose, finish him off to complete the wave, and then leap off a tall ledge.

This trick even works fine in single player, or if you're the only player on the server. I tested it to it's absolute limits, and it seems to work as long as you die during the intermission. It takes a couple of seconds to respawn. Once during my solo testing, I even died so late in the intermission that the next wave started a good 3 or 4 seconds before I respawned. However, I respawned anyways and the game kept going like normal. Therefore, it seems that the only danger is that with very poor timing, you might die right after the intermission is over and then not be allowed to respawn. However, you have a fifteen second time window to die during the intermission, so it should be a reasonably safe strategy to apply a loadout change mid-game.

Attributes are stats that modify things about your character, giving you different advantages and disadvantages in combat. There are 4 to choose from, each one can accept up to 10 points of investment, and you only ever get 20 points total. You can reallocate and rearrange points in the loadout menu or multiplayer customize menu freely.

Because these attributes were designed primarily for PVP gameplay, some of them don't hold as much use when fighting Loonies as they do when fighting other players, so some are less useful than others in Invasion mode.


Fury is an attribute that affects your damage with melee weapons (also called "Handheld weapons" by some; They're the type you hold in your hand and hit people with, such as spears and sledgehammers). The higher your fury is, the more damage you inflict. In this section, I will analyze Fury and the game's melee weapons to figure out which ones are the best options for what your preference in this stat is, and how it'll affect your overall playstyle.

The short answer: Grab a spear, set Fury to 0, and spend those points elsewhere! Melee is a losing game against the Loonies, but the spear frees you from melee combat because you can right click to throw it, and this doesn't require any Fury at all to be effective.

Seriously, Fury is so irrelevant in Invasion for The Wastes 1.3 that you can just skip it and go on to the rest of the sections.

Efficiency is described in the game's flavor text roughly as "How effective your character is with firearms". However, this flavor text is vague, so I set out to test it with a wide variety of firearms and movement with 0 and 10 efficiency. Here's what I actually found:

Efficiency seems to govern the recoil severity of high caliber and/or high firerate firearms. That's
it.

So, how does this affect your playstyle, and should you prioritize this stat?
The Short Answer: If your playstyle revolves around slow firing precision weapons like the hunting rifle or pistols, the shotguns, the flamethrower, or the lasersight weapons, you will see low to moderate benefit from high efficiency at best. However, if you like using automatic sub machine guns and rifles, you may benefit greatly from the recoil reduction associated with Efficiency.

Low caliber weapons seem to be quite accurate and low on recoil even with low efficiency. However, high caliber weapons, even slow-firing ones like the Lever Action Slug Shotgun, do experience recoil between shots, which is amplified further by how much you're moving around. Sometimes your first shot will fly a little above your crosshair! Shotguns aren't affected at all by efficiency. Also, some weapons (the M&K 9 and handcannon) have laser sights you can toggle on with right click. These reduce your fire rate, but cut out almost all the recoil inaccuracy.

Here's the results of a test between 0 and 10 efficiency on the Winston 1884 lever action slug shotgun.


With most firearms, you can shoot a loony in the head to deal a headshot. Many powerful manually operated weapons or semi-automatic weapons can kill in one shot with a headshot, regardless of efficiency level. This, combined with the first-shot accuracy of most weapons, means that there's a multitude of powerful single-shot weapons that can be used effectively even with an efficiency rating of 0. These include:

• Most pistols
  
• Any shotgun
  
• The hunting rifle (suffers NO inaccuracy if you look through the scope and stay still, regardless of efficiency)
  
• The lever action winston 1884
  
• The M & K SMG-9 (has a laser to fire a powerful 3-round burst)

"Yeah, but what about those automatic weapons you talked about? Should I dump my points into efficiency to use SMGs and Rifles?"
Honestly, probably! It's up to personal preference though, and the best way for you to decide is to understand how the recoil in The Wastes 1.3 works.

While the first shot of an automatic weapon is almost always accurate, the follow up shots are subject to a predictable recoil pattern, sort of like Counter Strike. The severity of this pattern is proportional to movement speed, whether you're touching the ground or not (jumping around makes recoil bigger), fire rate, the power of the cartridge your weapon uses (SMGs firing a pistol caliber don't kick so hard while rifles firing an intermediate or rifle cartridge do!), and inversely proportional to your efficiency level (more efficiency means less recoil). You can tap or burst fire to minimize recoil, or pull your mouse to counter the pattern to hit accurate shots anyways.

It should be noted that it's not EXACTLY like counterstrike. Namely, your view-punch when firing an automatic weapon is NOT tied to the recoil the weapon experiences. This means that sometimes the viewpunch will push your view high even when you're actually experiencing very little recoil, causing the bullets to land BELOW your crosshair. You should expect this to happen if you have a high efficiency stat. By contrast, sometimes your recoil is so high that the bullets will land way ABOVE the crosshair! Very occasionally, it'll be balanced out and they'll land in the crosshair. It varies from weapon to weapon and one efficiency stat to the next.

Here's a comparison test I did using the map Mahlstrom as a sort of firing range. I would first stand completely still while shooting, and then try strafe jumping while shooting, and I would do this with both 0 and 10 efficiency using the UK stanley SMG.


The recoil from this SMG is notably worse without efficiency, but honestly, I could counter that fairly effectively just by pulling down the mouse. I could also avoid the worst of it by firing in bursts, a sound strategy to take out the loonies one at a time.This is an example where efficiency does make life a little easier, but isn't so severe.

Here's that same test again, but on The Dunes with the FR FAL (I couldn't use Mahlstrom because the FR FAL doesn't spawn on Mahlstrom). I tried to establish roughly similar shooting range distance.


I can also kinda counter the recoil pattern of the FR FAL without efficiency, but it's much more of a pain to do, and I have no chance of hitting what I'm shooting at if I spray while moving, By contrast, a high efficiency stat makes even run and gun look practical at close range. If I want to make the most of this powerful weapon, I really want a high efficiency rating! The same kinda goes for the R16 and the Chicago Typewriter.

However, if you're dead set on saving those points but still want to use primary weapons, do not despair. The Jackhammer shotgun is a very effective power weapon that doesn't require a good efficiency to use well, and the flamethrower is a really good run and gun tool for managing crowds as you flee from them, and it doesn't require any efficiency at all because it has no recoil!

To summarize, Efficiency is important for automatic and helpful for non-shotgun firearms. If you're happy enough playing the game like it's counter-strike, stopping and counter-strafing to control recoil as you shoot and relying on short bursts or powerful headshots, you'll do fine with 0 efficiency. If you want to run and gun and reduce your recoil, put points in it!

Agility directly controls how fast your character runs, how fast your character sprints, and how high your character jumps. How does it affect your playstyle, and how should you use it?

Short answer: Personal preference! You'll use roughly the same movement tactics regardless of your agility level because increasing it or decreasing it doesn't break any thresholds in comparison to Loony movement speed. However, having a high agility will make evasive maneuvers more effective, allow you to run around the map grabbing pickups faster, and will open interesting parkour maneuvers via the higher jump height. You can totally do without, especially on smaller maps, but it's fun to have.

Here's a couple of pointers about movement in general to get you started:

• Because movement input isn't normalized, you can move faster by walking diagonally (hold down W and A or W and D) rather than just straight forward.
  
• Because this game is built on a fork of the QuakeWorld engine (from 1996, the same game engine that Half-Life and Counterstrike would later soup up), you can bunny hop to gain and maintain speed. I like to diagonally sprint, jump, and then lead that into a bunny hop.
  
• Unlike Half Life, Counterstrike, or classic Quake, bunny hopping is very easy in this game. If you hold down jump in mid air, you will jump the next time you touch the ground, making the bunny hop very easy and essentially stripping away the need for very precise timing.
  
• Walking backwards in this game isn't affected by your agility stat! Only walking forwards is. This means that backpedaling away from a source of danger is slower than turning around and properly running away if you have ANY agility above 0.

I tested agility by walking directly away from Loonies with my agility set to 0, then 10. I found that even with agility maxed out, you cannot outrun a Loonie without holding shift to sprint, bunny hopping, or moving diagonally to abuse the un-normalized movement. This means there aren't any special or obvious combat tactics enabled by having a higher agility (for example, you're always too slow for backpedaling and shooting to ever become truly fool proof), but you can still maneuver around maps significantly faster with a high agility and put more distance between you and a threat in a shorter time when you do decide to sprint or bunnyhop.

I would base your choice on how much of a lead you need to feel safe, on how much ground you wish to cover in a short time as you run for supplies, or whether you wish to do parkour to get to unique places to fight off the Loonies (for instance, The Dunes is a great parkour map because you can find armor and other supplies on the rooftop of a building).

Resilience directly modifies how much damage you take from any source, including the Loonies. How does this affect your playstyle, and which option should you pick?
Short answer: a high resilience stat allows you to sustain more hits, and makes armor more effective. If you're worried about getting hit a bunch, accept no substitute!

I tested resilience by taking damage from loonies with it set to 0, 5, and 10 respectively.
First, I did it without any bodyarmor at all. From what I could tell, every single Loonie does the same amount of damage and has the same swing speed regardless of what melee weapon they appear to carry.

• With 0 points in resilience, the Loony deals 19 damage per swing, killing the player in 6 hits.
  
• With 5 points in resilience, the Loony deals 15 damage per swing, killing the player in 7 hits.
  
• With all 10 points in resilience, the Loony deals 12 damage per swing, killing the player in 9 hits.

The 10 resilience point threshold is really notable because you gain exactly 25 health from picking up a medkit. With a low resilience stat, a medkit can't cover much more than the damage you would take from one hit from a loony. With a 10 points in resilience, a medkit covers the amount of damage you take from 2 Loony swings and still has 1 point left over! This means you really get way more bang from your buck with medkits if you're running a high resilience stat.

This isn't the end of the analysis though. My next test was to put on armor before allowing a loony to swing at me. It seems that armor benefits from having a resilience stat, as if resilience takes a little off the damage before applying it to the armor.


The way armor seems to work is that it absorbs a portion of the damage the player is supposed to take until it breaks. This greatly reduces health damage and can allow a player to survive otherwise lethal situations.

• With 0 res points, the health took 4 damage per armored hit, the armor broke on the 4th hit, and it took 8 hits to kill the player (compared to 6 without any armor).
  
• With 5 res points, the health took 3 damage per armored hit, the armor broke on the 5th hit, and it took 10 hits to kill the player (compared to 7 without any armor).
  
• With all 10 res points, the health took just 2 damage per armored hit, the armor broke on the 6th hit, and it took 13 hits to kill the player (compared to 9 without armor).

This gets even better for Resilience when you take it out of the vacuum and apply it to gameplay. Typically, a good player will take some damage while wearing the armor, but will be able to find another armor pickup to replenish their armor before the original set is even broken. Having a high resilience stat increases your time window to find new armor before it breaks, and increases your ability to pull through tough situations where you get surrounded and take a lot of damage. It also increases your effective recovery speed, as picking up a medkit will effectively restore 2 hits worth of health instead of just a little over one, and picking up armor will drastically swell your effective health even higher than with a low resilience stat.

EDIT: Originally, I didn't even test the brass knuckles because I thought they would be the weakest one. I mean, they're the melee weapon you don't pick in the menu and you just get for free, just in case you lose your spears. How can they be any good? Well, I tried them today, and it turns out they're much power powerful than I thought! They punch at a moderate rate and can kill a loony in 2 punches with 0 fury, and 1 punch with 10 fury. There's no non-throwable melee weapon that can actually beat them at 10 efficiency, and thus no reason to equip the katana or machete.
Honestly though, melee isn't super meta to begin with, and life is short. If you want to use a katana to hack apart loonies or a sledge hammer to smash them all because it looks cool, just pick whatever makes your heart happy.

The long answer to "How Fury affects your Invasion gameplay and how to use it effectively":

Melee combat is interesting and effective against human players in PvP because you can take humans by surprise, attempt to juke out blows or fake out humans, and engage in all sorts of mind-games against an intelligent foe. However, loonies lack both the intelligence and basic limitations of human intelligence. Loonies will run straight at you, and will hit you the moment you enter mutual melee range of them. You cannot consistently parry or dodge oncoming melee attacks in any way, they'll simply always hit you. This means that using a melee weapon against a loony is always a losing proposition because you'll sustain at least one blow from the loony. However, while melee combat is consistently detrimental, it is not useless because it may be your only option if all of your firearms run out of ammo and you're backed into a corner by an attacker. In such a scenario, your only choices are the bad choice of fighting back with melee or the worse choice of doing nothing and dying.

With a truly good melee weapon, you will sustain exactly one blow because you'll kill the loony before they can deliver the second. This gives us a good metric for an effective melee weapon: time to kill.

I analyzed the various melee weapons available to the player both with Fury maxed out at 10 points and set to 0 points, and recorded the number of hits and rough amount of time to kill a loony, measured in the amount of times the loony was able to hit me back. The summary of my findings are condensed to this list.

Findings that apply regardless of your Fury level:

• The knuckles are a backup melee weapon you spawn with regardless of which main melee weapon you pick. Ironically, they're just as powerful against the loonies as all of the other options which you can pick. This means your choice of melee weapon proper almost doesn't matter at all because you're always guaranteed to spawn with a good one that can 2 or 1 shot enemies.
  
• As good as the knuckles are, the Spear is the best all-around melee weapon in part unlike your fists, you can throw the spear. They can be thrown to instantly kill one loony, bypassing melee altogether. You can carry up to 3 of them by using an ammo box while you have at least one in your inventory. You can farm them by throwing them at the walls while using the ammo box. You (or a friend) can pick them up after throwing them.
  
• The machete can also be thrown like the Spear, but you can only carry one, and can't carry more than one using an ammo box, so it's non-farmable.
  
• The slugger baseball bat is the worst melee weapon against loonies in every situation. You can get hit by a loony anywhere between 3 and 5 times trying to use this against them! Don't ever pick it.
  
• The cattle prod is the second worst. This is because it has a mechanic where it can attack very rapidly for the first 3 strikes, but then attacks much slower until you let off the attack button and wait a few seconds, mimicking the idea that it runs off a power source that can get drained and needs to charge. Also, the spear seems to do about the same amount of damage at the same attack speed, has no weird attack speed gimmicks, and can be thrown with right click. The cattle prod sure looks cool though!

If you have 10 fury, your best melee weapons are the Knuckles, Spear, Machete, and Katana in that order. Here's a summary:

• You don't have to choose the knuckles at all because you spawn with them regardless of what you choose. You can always fall back on them regardless of which melee weapon is actually your favorite, and they're just as powerful as even the likes of the Katana and Sledge hammer! With 10 efficiency, they 1-shot enemies and swing at a medium pace, so they don't have any weakness apart from not being throwable like the spear.
  
• On top of it's throwing ability, the spear can quickly stab. Hitting a stab allows you to attack repeatedly very quickly! With 10 fury, it takes 2 blows to kill a Loony, and you can do it so fast that you'll only take 1 blow from the loony. The fast attack rate can also allow you to switch targets very quickly when facing multiple aggressors. The only downside is that because it's a 2-shot weapon, you can hypothetically whiff the second blow, buying more time for your attackers to do harm to you. Also, you stab twice as slowly if your swing hits nothing but air, emphasizing the need to hit what you're aiming for.
  
• The machete swings slower than the spear, but kills in one blow, negating the "potential to miss" downside I mentioned with the spear. It also swings just as fast for a miss and a hit. However, while you can throw it like a spear, it's worse at that job because you can only carry one and you can't farm it. If you for some reason can't find or pick up your machete after throwing it, it's gone unless you choose to die and respawn during an intermission.
  
• With 10 fury, the Katana is a 1 hit kill against loonies in either swing mode (overhead or underhanded), and swings just as fast as the machete when used underhanded. You can't throw it. In theory, this is a downside over the Machete. In practice, it ensures that, unlike the machete, you will never throw your weapon away to an area where you lose it or can't retrieve it. If you like the 1 shot of the machete but are willing to trade range for piece of mind that you don't accidentally chuck it away, the Katana is an acceptable substitute.

[/strike]
[/list]

If you have 0 points in fury, the list shifts in some ways.

• The knuckles now 2-shot loonies. You'll juuuust barely get hit twice, meaning sometimes you'll only take 1 hit as a millisecond timing fluke. Don't count on it.
  
• The spear now takes 3 stabs to down a Loony. This gives them enough time to inflict a second blow, lowering the weapon's status as a melee weapon proper. However, the spear is still the best because you can farm them from ammo boxes, carry 3 of them, and throw them around from a distance.
  
• The Machete also takes 2 hits instead of 1, and is even worse because it swings slower. Combined with the inferior throwing capability, there's now no good reason to take this over the spear. Avoid it.
  
• If you still want a melee 1-shot despite having 0 fury, the Sledgehammer is the best melee weapon for the job. It is powerful enough at base to 1-shot loonies regardless of the fury of the character using it. It also swings quickly when you miss, and swings more slowly when you hit your target, making it forgiving if you miss the first swing. However, you can't throw it, so you lose the versatility of the spear.
  
• The katana can't 1 shot an enemy with the rapid-fire underhand, but can 1-shot with the overhead swing. However, the overhead attack swings just as slowly as a sledge hammer for both hits and misses, making it a slight downgrade from the sledge hammer.

"Ok, so how do I use all that?"
Great question! Here's a summary!

• Efficiency makes it easier to run and gun with rifles and SMGs, and lessens recoil with high-caliber weapons that kick hard. If you're running a low efficiency and a precision weapon, try shooting the wall at the start of the round while stood still and then while moving to gauge first-shot accuracy; if the bullet consistently goes the slightest bit above your crosshair, you'll need to aim for loony necks to hit head shots. Otherwise, you can aim directly at the center of their head!
  
• Agility gives you the power to maneuver the map quickly, the leeway to put distance between yourself and loonies more quickly, and the freedom to take parkour paths that demand lots of climbing.
  
• Resilience allows you to survive extreme situations you otherwise wouldn't be able to, and to make the most of health and armor items, recovering from harm more quickly and in bigger chunks as you pick these items up and are able to make the most of them. However, in theory, it's useless if you never get hit and thus never need the armor or health pickups.
  
• Fury wastes your points by min-maxing for unrealistic absurdly hyperdesperate disadvantageous scenarios that you're never gonna get yourself into if you're playing the game right anyways! That said, if you do use it, you can 1-shot loonies with your knuckles and throw spears around in order to meta-slave, or you can just use whatever melee weapon you think looks the coolest (except for the slugger, that one is just awful).

So, if you like running and gunning and trust your ability to avoid harm, go for Efficiency and Agility.
If you want to roam the map quickly but also soak up hits and you're not so attached to hitting every shot perfectly, go for Agility and Resilience.
You can also choose in-betweens for multiple categories while maxxing another; putting 10 points into resilience allows you to make the most of medkits and armor while also having reasonable movement ability and manageable recoil with firearms. None of it is "Meta" and all of it is quite fun to play around with.

There are very few wrong choices to be made in this mode (and ignoring Fury altogether pretty much eliminates all of them).

Thank you for reading my guide! I hope you found it helpful and entertaining. I had some fun writing it even though I spent a few hours of my life writing about melee mechanics in a game mode where melee is just gonna get you killed if it's used as anything other than a last resort. I hope you're able to understand and appreciate the information I gathered here nonetheless.

If I missed anything important, please let me know in the comments section!