Gameplay Info Plus
Waffles' General Modifications

Containing 100 health points, it can be used multiple times to replenish your health without discarding the excess.

The original depictions of this and other health pick-ups carried the red-plus-on-white which has for decades been recognized as a universal indication of emergency medical assistance.  However, this symbol is actually protected by the Geneva Conventions, and apparantly using it outside of actual real-life instances of the International Committee of the Red Cross is a war crime, so modern re-releases of this game have substituted the image.

Steroids make Duke move faster, kick harder, and more resistant to damage.  They can also restore him to full size when he's been shrunk.  (In v1.3D you could kick with both feet simultaneously; it was always fun to trample my opponents to death while on steroids!)

Duration is for less than 15 seconds.

While your opponents fire harmlessly at your decoy you can shoot them from a hiding spot!  It's so effective that some players end up shooting at their own holoduke!

The holoduke lasts about 80 seconds.

For those hard-to-reach places.  The jetpack has less than a minute of fuel, so it's easy to forget that you're running out when flying high.  Conserve jetpack fuel by letting yourself fall when you want to go down a great distance, then reactivate before hitting the ground.

In my mods, there's a slight chance of your opponent dropping his Jetpack if you kill him in flight.

Put these on and anything with a pulse is lit up in day-glo green.  They can also be used to discover messages hidden on darkened walls.

Lasts for only 40 seconds.

Duke can only hold his breath for a few seconds underwater.  If he has scuba gear he'll put it on automatically when submersing.

The air tank contains about 3½ minutes of air.

These boots automatically protect you from foot hazards (electricity, slime, lava, etc.) but last less than a minute.  The more you move the faster they're used up too.

This is just an ordinary sprite now, but it was an inventory item that got taken out late in development.  Even though the space suit is long gone, the environmental effects that were designed for it are still there.  That's why those pesky space-sky textures tend to make Duke explode if the sector palette hasn't been changed to a non-zero value.

If you want to play around with the space suit (like I did once) you can recompile the shareware v1.1 DUKE3D.GRP so that it includes the registered art and maps.  (Do this and you can also pick up registered weapons, but they won't work of course.)  Use the episode parameter (/V2) to start on episode 2.

These are found in 3 different colors:  Blue, Red, and Yellow.  (Unfortunately, trying to implement other colors on user maps doesn't work.)

Armor splits damage between itself and the player's health, allowing the player to take more damage.  It can be found in several places, and sometimes Pig Cops will drop used armor when they die.

I created this primarily for levels converted from games that had two classes of armor.  (What I actually wanted to do was have a “super armor” that goes up to 200 points, but in the vanilla build of v1.5, maximum armor uses the same variable as the lower maximum player health (100) and increasing this variable to 200 then enforcing the lower limits of 100 would have required some wastefully superfluous code in the game script's instructionally limited language.)

I created this small bonus which dead enemies might drop on occasion.

Atomic health can boost a player's health up to 200 points!

Frozen Dukes spawn Atomic Health when shattered.

In my add-ons, exploding an enemy may result in a heart that can be collected for bonus health points.  It can boost a player's health up to 200 points.

This was created solely for the Random Respawn Pack.  It helps to balance out the health power-ups.

Power-up on steroids and Duke kicks even harder!  The alternate kick is also a great tactic for extra offense when someone gets in your face while you're busy reloading!

The mighty foot can also be used to activate all types of switches.

This is Duke's starting gun.  It shoots at a moderate rate, but has to be reloaded after every 12 shots.

Max capacity:  200 cartridges.

The shotgun has always been my all-around favorite weapon.  It repeats slowly but packs a powerful punch!

Max capacity:  50 shells.

I created some small ammo types for levels converted from games that had small and large ammo types, then added them to all of my add-ons as random drops from monsters.

Shoots fast, but has loose aim and chews up ammo.

Max capacity:  200 rounds.

The RPG fires slowly but is great for clearing rooms.  If you're the recipient of an RPG, you can survive a direct hit if you're up around 200 health with full armor.  With numbers like that, a fun insult is to run up to opponent's face and hit him at point blank with an RPG!

Max capacity:  50 rockets.

This is awesome for setting traps that can be detonated by remote.  One problem though, is if you wait too long to blow your trap, your intended victim can pick up your bombs and disarm them.

Secret tip:  If you die in multiplayer but still “own” some unexploded pipebombs when you respawn, you can still select the remote detonator and explode them.

Max capacity:  50 bombs.

Shrink your enemies and step on them!  Or use steroids to return to normal if you're the one who got shrunk.

The shrinker does zero damage, and it has no effect on regular Bosses other than to make them superficially bleed a little.  Mini bosses (except for the Queen) can be shrunk, but you have to hit them just right.  I've found that crouching and hitting them at a low angle increases your chances of that.  (I think it has something to do with the shrinker having an extremely small blast radius, and the bosses having a very large radius which prevents the shrink spark from hitting their center of mass.)

Max capacity:  50 crystals.

Jam a modkit into the Shrinker and its properties are reversed!  Sizzle an enemey with this and he'll expand until his head pops!

Ordinarily, the Expander only comes with the Shrinker, but in my add-ons I've made it also an individually collectible weapon.  This however has the unfortunate effect of the expander on rare occasions not being accessable after switching to another weapon if you don't have the shrinker, but there is a workaround:  Hit the NEXT_WEAPON key while firing another weapon and you'll switch to the expander.

Max capacity:  50 units.

These crystals are already reverse-polarized and ready for the expander!

Send out a swarm of super-fast mini missiles!  This is more suited for close combat than the RPG as it has poor aim and a smaller blast radius, but it's still easy to get caught in the explosions if your target is too close.

Max capacity: 99 rockets.

Attatch it to a wall, around a corner, in a hole, or behind a maskwall, and wait for an unwitting victim to run into the triplaser.

In my Zusätzen I set the tripbomblasermode to transluscence (50% transparent).

Max capacity:  10 bombs.

Extra parts for building Tripbombs!  This was originally created for my Random Respawn Pack, but it's also implimented in some of my other add-ons as salvageable Drone scraps.

Nice for putting baddies on ice.  Bust a frozen Duke and he'll drop an Atomic Health.  (The “thrower” bit comes from the fact that 3D Realms originally intended for it to be a flamethrower.)

Max capacity: 99 cells.

The 20th Anniversary World Tour edition put out by Gearbox introduced new enemies and weapons, all with a fire-theme.  Duke Nukem 3D finally got an actual flamethrower, but it was probably too complicated to make it player-usable without the player accidentally killing himself too easily, so only monsters use it.  Instead the player gets a rubbish gun that tosses lava a short distance which can set enemies on fire, or spawn lava pools on the ground.  It somehow manages to be overpowered against enemies (and the player) while being totally ineffectual aginst boss monsters.  (I call it “the lava gun.”)

The lava gun cannot be fired underwater.  Any player who catches fire can find relief by stepping onto a body of water.

Max capacity: 99 cells.

If you're more of a DukeMatch gamer, this will be your number one enemy.

The green troopers are the basic infantrymen.  The Assault Captains, the orange ones, have twice as much health as the normal troopers and are alse equipped with personal teleportational devices.

These Troopers clad in gray uniforms are tougher than the others and may even fire off rockets from afar.

In addition to teleporters, the Elite Troopers are also equipped with personal cloaking devices which makes them partially invisible.  However, the two devices cannot be used simultaneously; a cloaked Trooper will have to decloak before teleporting.

These are two new variation actors that allow you to start a Trooper in it's “about to” teleport- or cloak-AI.

Additional palette swaps may be used to create troopers that fire alternate weapons.

The LAPD has been mutated into shotgun-wielding Pigs, now known as the LARD.

These Pig Cop's are out to sizzle Duke's hide, as they are armed with Expander-shotguns.  (Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but it's a cool effect!)

These pigs patrol the skys and swoop down on their prey.  There's a chance of the pigcop surviving the crash after his skiff gets shot down.

These Pig Cops roam the streets in armored tanks.  If you're swift enough you can set the self-destruct on the back and get out of the blast zone … and hopefully the Pig won't survive the blast.

There's an alternate set of graphics for the tank which was never actually put into production.  Some people might put it in their add-ons, but there was never any original code to make it do anything.  My brother swears however that the first time he installed the Plutonium Pak on his computer he had this alternate tank flying around, shooting freeze blasts at him.

These critters mainly just get in they way, and have an annoying tendency to bite your bumb at the most inconvienient times.

These annoying little things squiggle all over the place, devouring the dead.  Get too close and they'll liplock with you.  If you're sly enough, you can use them to your advantage by drawing them toward your enemies.

This is where the slime hatches from.  If you bust it before it can hatch, that's one less slime you'll have to put up with.

In some of my add-ons, you might come across an occasional exploding egg, so kicking them isn't always a good idea.

These guys leap around a lot, each with a ripper chaingun cybernetically attatched to its arm.

In my add-ons I've made it possible to impliment “ghost” monsters, by setting the spritepal to 3 (no color change) or 18 (blue->gray).

These brainy air bags attack with blasts of mental energy.  If they get close to you they might simply bite your face off.

These sentry drones are intellegent bombs.  If they get too close to the player they go BOOM!

A reincarnation of the turrets from Duke Nukem II, these automatic laser cannons are temporarily confused when hit.

The Organic Turret was cut from the game, but it's art and dysfunctional code are still in there.  This is a popular jib item in user maps.

These big, bloated baddies fly around and shoot “butt missiles.”  If they get too close to you they'll spin around and cut you with their edged butts.

These are the Queen's special spawn.  They run amok in the episode The Birth, and if they can't get close enough to scratch your eyes out, they spit out shrinkrays.

Normally they're totally immune to the shrinkray, but in my mods they recieve a random amount of damage when hit by one.  (There's not much more annoying than a pile-up of protector drones in a hole, shooting each other and not dying.)

Gearbox introduced this new, poorly-coded minion monster in their 20th Anniversary World Tour edition.  It uses both the flamethrower and the lava gun, that is when not constantly shrinking and flying around.  The firefly trooper can be stomped while shrunken, but 99.99% of the time it just unshrinks itself and sets the player on fire.

*Gearbox surprisingly didn't raise the script limits on the World Tour edition, so user-modified scripts tend to be too large for the game to compile.  To get around this, I gutted the firefly trooper code and have it switch to a regular trooper.

This is the first boss you come up against.  Later on he becomes a regular mini boss.

This guy's totally missile-happy, but he's easy to evade in large areas.

This was the head honcho of the original 3-episode version of the game.  Now he's just another one-eyed freak.

Introduced with the Plutonium Pak, this is the mother of the new aliens.  She pretty much just tromps around dropping spawns, occasionally stopping to electrify the water.

For Episode 5 of the World Tour edition, Gearbox basically copy-pasta'd the Cycloid Emperor, then change his breath attack to spawn firefly troopers and replaced his rocket attack with the flamethrower and the lava gun.  To beat him, you just have to keep your distance and you don't have to do much dodging.

*Gearbox surprisingly didn't raise the script limits on the World Tour edition, so user-modified scripts tend to be too large for the game to compile.  To get around this, I gutted the Flaming Cycloid Emperor code and have it switch to the regular Cycloid Emperor.

Originally, only the Battlelord could be properly used as a mini boss (by setting a non-zero sprite palette) because the others were coded with only 1 hit point (and the Queen always ended the game when she died).  In my add-ons I've fixed it so that all 4 of the v1.5 bosses can now be used as mini bosses, and they're susceptible to all the special weapon effects (except the Queen still can't be shrunk).

Mash the USE button while facing the Nuke Button to arm the area's self-destruct sequence and end the level.  In some of my add-ons, I've made a “fake” Nuke Button that allows you to end the episode without having to kill a boss.

I've made these things a little tougher, and added the random chance of a stray shot igniting them a little early.

Be careful when shooting these; they usually set off chain-reactions!

If you destroy the blimp, it will shower the area with random items!

*The blimp had a bug that caused it so that it couldn't be destroyed again after respawning (wasn't hitscanned).  In my add-on you can destroy it again and again!  Plus, it now drops a few extra goodies that weren't in v1.3D.

In some of my add-ons you may come across a chest containing a random item.

Action-tracking demo cameras make recording demos a lot of fun.

Keep a tab on your enemies with the surveillance system.  (If you edit USER.CON, you can make cameras destructable.)

Bust these things and take a look behind them.  You'll usually find hidden paths and items.

If you see a weak spot in a wall, blow it up for a shortcut or secret area.

These things always get a little bent out of shape when shot.  *In my Add-On's I've made it so that bullets tend to richochet off of them.

Some of these contain goodies.  Be careful though, sometimes monsters like to hide in trashcans.

Watch out for the alien's acidic blood if you're not wearing boots.

If the lava gun fireball hits the floor instead of a vertical surface, it spawns a temporary pool of lava.  Any victims who walk on it are set on fire—except for firefly troopers and bosses.

The aliens have abducted several of Earth's women!  If any of them get hurt, additional monsters may be summoned.

Mash the USE button to make the cannon fire more.  If you want to redirect the cannon, just give it a good kick … and it'll face you!

This is just like the floor flames from Rise of The Triad, except it doesn't wander.  It was never actually implimented in the regular game, but I do put it in some of my user levels.  I also imported the original flame sound from Rise of The Triad.

In the World Tour edition, developer commentary icons have been sprinkled throughout the levels.  You will need to enable them in the game's options, then mash the USE button while facing one to listen to the commentary.