Risk of Rain Command Engineer

Command is a fairly interesting Artifact I quite like the concept of, though I think the execution could've used some more work. In short, nearly anytime a random item would be generated, instead one of four types of Command chests spawns: Common, Uncommon, Rare, or Use, correlating to the rarity of what could have dropped. (eg mini-chests you don't spend money on can only drop Use Items, so they can only drop Use Item Command chests. Gold chests always drop a Rare item, so they'll always drop a Rare Command chest. Medium chests are forbidden from dropping Common items, so they'll never drop a Common Command chest) Then you may open the chest and pick from any item that matches that class of item -note that boss items don't fall into any of these categories, including that the Nematocyte Nozzle's status as a boss item overrules its status as a Use Item. Once you've picked your item, the item appears in front of the chest and you're now free to pick it up, as normal.

Notably, Command chests are not allowed to time out. This is particularly nice when it comes to the 56-Leaf Clover, as it means you don't have to worry about off-screen kills generating items that then fade out before you get around to finding them. By a similar token, the Glowing Meteorite is a lot more appealing -while I'm pretty sure bosses can still drop boss items, most of the time you don't have to worry about wasting the guaranteed boss item drop effect by killing them with the Glowing Meteorite. And of course the combination of the two items is a lot more appealing.

One thing about Command that makes it a bit tricky is that time continues to pass while you're browsing the list of items. Trying to gather items in the middle of combat can easily get you killed, as your character stops moving (You can still jump, but you can't move left or right and you can't use your abilities) and the only way to back out the item selection screen is to pick an item so even panicking without dying is probably still going to result in you just grabbing an item to get out instead of grabbing the item you want.

The game is also a bit silly/buggy about the whole thing; you select your item with the Interact button, but the game doesn't 'lock' the input to the item selection screen, and if you're standing in front of multiple Command chests you'll simultaneously pop into multiple item selection screens that all respond to your inputs simultaneously. You can see in this video that I end up activating Shrines while picking my item from the Command chest the shrine just generated, for example. Fortunately, in my opinion the most important item in the game to grab as soon as you can -Infusion- is one down input away from the initial position. The next-most important item to grab early, under Rare, is conveniently also one down from the initial position -The Hit List.

Do note that the 'pick one of three' item generators and the roulette item generator just generate their item directly. (Unless you pick a ? option for the 'pick one of three' -then it generates a Command chest)

The whole thing is fairly interesting and has a decent amount of thought put into it, but unfortunately it serves to illustrate what makes Risk of Rain so interesting by cutting it out.

In a normal run, what you do is quite variable, and it can generate a variety of wacky playstyles. In the extreme long haul everything is kind of homogenous, but for just trying to beat the game, maybe looping once or twice, you generally have reasonably different item distributions that lead to fairly different playstyles for the runs.

In a Command run, unless you deliberately choose to play strangely, there's a tendency toward cookie-cutter builds.

While I previously complimented the game on making it so items are largely reasonably similar in quality, there is still a range of quality, and in Command these differences show through quite strongly. Some items are not worth ever picking deliberately -for example, the Sprouting Egg makes little sense to grab more than maybe one early copy, because the Mysterious Vial's half-strength-always-on behavior will pretty much always be better than having to wait more than seven seconds after taking a hit before your extra regeneration kicks in. Other items are really really good, like Infusion, and should be grabbed as soon as possible no matter what, or at least as soon as possible for certain classes. (eg the Commando has strong incentive to just stack up 10 ATG Missile Mk 1s as the primary goal with Uncommon chests) Even small advantages can end up consigning an item to the garbage heap, even items that are quite good in a regular run -I like getting the Red Whip in normal play, but in a Command run it's difficult to justify spending an Uncommon chest on it when Paul's Goat Hoof will be easy to stack tons of because it's Common and there's not that many items under Common that are important to get, whereas Uncommon has a decent selection of high-priority items. (Always get a 56-Leaf Clover fairly early: it will literally pay for itself if even a single Uncommon or Rare chest generates, and that's not unlikely if you get it decently early)

Speaking of, the commonality classes get wonky in Command. Most of the items under Common are okay, but not exceptional. Rare has a few items you really want... but weirdly, Uncommon actually has an alarming amount of the drops that are most useful and important, to the point that how many Uncommon chests generate has a pretty clear, consistent correlation between 'good run' (Many Uncommon) and 'bad/hard run'. (Not many Uncommon chests, even if you have a large number of Rares) It's not unusual for me to have a run generate Rare chests while I'm going 'but I want Uncommon chests!'

Then there's the way item stacking usually has reduced or outright diminishing returns. While there's a few items that stack quite favorably, for most items you want to grab one, or some number like 3-5 depending on eg class (You need around 5 Soldier's Syringes if you want the Engineer's Thermal Harpoons to stop being inconveniently clunky), and spread out and grab new items instead of additional copies of the old ones. Barbed Wire, for example, does 50% base damage at the first copy, with additional copies only adding 10 (ie 50% becomes 60%, 200 becomes 210%, etc) to that number and slightly increasing the radius. A Barbed Wire is a pretty big bump to your effectiveness when being mobbed and all. Any past that first one are a dubious use of a Command chest. This applies even in a normal run, but in a normal run you don't have constant, significant control over your drops.

Between the quality unevenness and the 'better to spread out than to pick something to specialize in', Command runs tend to end up kind of same-y if you're not deliberately messing around. I always try to get three Infusions early on, then a 56-Leaf Clover, then a Smart Shopper (Assuming I'm not running Sacrifice as well), then a Guardian's Heart, and then my Uncommon order gets a bit more variable based on which class I'm playing and what my current level conditions are. I always try to spend my first Rare on The Hit List, then usually the Alien Head, then Rapid Mitosis, then the Ancient Scepter if my class is one of the ones that gets a particularly big benefit out of it, and from there my Rare picks finally get a bit more variable -assuming I got enough Rares to even complete that list, instead of confronting Providence with just The Hit List. My early Commons mostly get burned on Paul's Goat Hooves and Soldier Syringes, with Bundles of Fireworks usually grabbed fairly quickly and some healing effects once it becomes clear my current health regeneration isn't keeping up.

Oh, and the whole thing gets compounded by the fact that Command actually ignores whether you've unlocked a given item or not. So even if you unlock Command really fast, you're not going to have your Command runs evolve as you unlock new items. You'll just end up 'spoiling' yourself on a bunch of items.

There's still some room for proper randomness -for one thing, whether to bother with Arms Race depends on how many attacking Drones the game bothers to generate, something Command doesn't affect- but mostly the whole thing just ends up same-y, with a side order of occasionally frustrating due to eg getting killed by being locked into a Command chest menu and then having something hideously dangerous immediately spawn right on top of you.

That said, Command is pretty cool as a tool for checking how items scale and whatnot if you're interested in that sort of thing. 'When does this item stop scaling?' 'What exactly is this item's scaling rate?' Those kinds of questions are lot easier to check using Command.

Have a couple Glass+Command runs!

The first one is one of the things that prompted me to do videos in the first place -Glass+Command has the interesting property of taking the Commando from one of the worse classes in the game to one of the best. 10 ATG Missile launcher Mk 1s means every hit you land launches missiles at your enemies (I accidentally grabbed one more than necessary), and you output a lot of hits. Since it's just your moves that have bad modifiers, not that the Commando has bad base attack, suddenly Double Tap and Suppressive Fire are actually fantastic sources of damage-via-missile. And you can stack on still other on-hit effects! No longer are you at the mercy of the RNG, and also Glass means you just plain murder things anyway!

Glass+Command is kind of overpowered with every class, mind, but the Commando's relative position goes way up when you're talking Glass+Command.

The second Glass+Command run is a Crowbar Assassin Bandit. The idea was that I'd show off one-shotting Providence, but I didn't collect enough Crowbars and it's only 'cause of a(n admittedly decently probable) crit that the first hit nearly one-shotted him.

Still, it's amusing that you can potentially one-shot Providence, and the video shows how doing that much damage at once actually does let you basically bypass Providence's shields -he doesn't do something like force any one hit that would take him below 2/3rds HP to only set him to 2/3rds HP while triggering the shield or anything like that.