This one covers the ten-floor descent as Salad in Casualties: Unknown — the fragile, plant-brained character who dies to almost everything. If you keep getting flattened on the early levels or you’re not sure what actually kills you versus what just hurts, I’ll walk you through what each stretch of the dungeon throws at you and how I approach it.
I’m writing this because Salad punishes the exact habits most players bring in from other survival games: hoarding slowly, ignoring hunger, treating combat as optional. Once I stopped fighting the character’s fragility and started planning around it, the floors stopped feeling like a wall and more like a checklist. Here’s that checklist, floor by floor.
Floor 1: A Trap Will Cost You a Leg
The first thing to internalize is that Salad is brittle — walking into a trap is not a scratch, it can take a leg outright and leave you as a crawling mess. If it happens, don’t panic-limp around bleeding out; go straight for cloth, tear up whatever grass you can reach, and get that splint wrapped immediately. Bleeding out in a puddle of your own mess is the most common early death I see, and it’s entirely avoidable if you treat the wound the second it opens.
Floor 2: Keep the Mind From Cracking
Your Salad is not some armored terminator — the mental side is as fragile as a houseplant. The deeper locations press on the character’s psyche until they’re ready to claw their own eyes out, and if you let the mental meter slip, your vegetable snaps, retreats into a corner, and rots. I keep pills on hand and treat low mood as urgently as a physical injury. A quick, shameful collapse for your whole run is what happens when you ignore it.
Floor 3: Eat and Drink Everything You Find
The caves are lean on supplies, and hunger and thirst are constant. Thirst hits harder than hunger from what I’ve seen, so don’t skip water. A radioactive mushroom? Eat it. A spoiled can of food? Shove it down right away. A starving Salad is a stupid Salad — can’t see, can’t hear, and even the worms won’t finish it off. Vacuum the map for anything edible, or something else will vacuum you.
Floor 4: Clear the Creatures Brutally
Underground monsters treat you as a light snack, and honestly, early on you are one. Grab the heaviest thing you can find and smear them across the walls. There’s no room for diplomacy or pacifism down here — a ruthless, primal clearing of the territory is the job. I don’t try to sneak past what I can flatten; leaving live threats at your back on these floors tends to come back around.
Floor 5: Grab Loot in Bulk, Not One by One
Stop dragging items across the floor one at a time like an old man whose life support just cut out. Hold Shift, grab the whole bag, and throw it into your inventory in one motion — the same way you’d sweep a shelf when the shopkeeper turns her back. Big Mama doesn’t have time for penny-ante logistics. Grab in bulk and run before the ceiling caves in and flattens you into a bloody pancake. Learning this early saved me more time than any other single habit.
Floor 6: Craft Weapons From Junk
Bare hands are only good for wiping tears. Find a rusty pipe and some tape and beat them into a deadly club — knowing full well it’ll fall apart after a few swings. You want to look scary enough that the monsters soil themselves and throw themselves off a cliff. Craft, arm up, and dominate. I treat a fresh weapon as disposable gear, not a treasure, so I’m never caught empty-handed when one breaks.
Floor 7: Manage Radiation and Mutation
Don’t assume the cave air is refreshing. These levels are hot enough that your Salad will start glowing in the dark like a cheap desk lamp. Let the infection level slip and your insides turn to mush faster than you can squeak out a groan. Hunt for antiradin, chew activated charcoal by the pack, or you’ll rot alive right inside your wool suit. Radiation is quiet — check your meters before it’s already too late.
Floor 8: The Darkness Is a Coffin
Down here it isn’t merely dark — it’s an inky, suffocating black that wants to swallow you whole. Flashlight batteries die at cosmic speed, right along with your dignity. Lose your light and you’re a blind, stupid, genetically modified vegetable with two missing front teeth in a room full of hungry monsters that want a taste. I ration every lumen and craft torches from any junk I can scrounge, because when the dark closes in, that’s the last thing you’ll never see.
Floor 9: Bosses and Elite Monsters
If the regular monsters are annoying flies, the elite mutants are walking meat grinders — they’ll press your Salad into the textures with a single hit like a plastic spare part. Don’t run like a scared rat. Set traps ahead of time, mine the corridors, and turn the passages into a little branch of hell before they get the drop on you. Playing Big Mama means showing teeth and preparing the ground, not reacting after the first hit lands.
Floor 10: Total Systems Failure
The finale is your personal apocalypse in full swing: broken leg, mental meter at zero, an empty stomach like a grave, radiation all around, and a three-meter nightmare coming out of the dark to tear you apart. That’s where the real hardcore begins, and only players who can think in fractions of a second come out the other side. Either you grit your teeth and tear this floor to pieces, or you delete the game and go cry into a pillow. The choice is yours.
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The End
That’s the whole descent — ten floors of Salad getting chewed up and spat back out. Take it slow on the early floors, keep your meters honest, and the later ones stop feeling unfair. Now go show them who’s Big Mama.