Thunderhead

Boss
Thunderhead
Location	Stable Pi entrance

“	This is a huge flyin' fortress. With a bunch of guns, a landin' party and a protective shield. We've only been fightin' the landin' party, because they intended to capture your Stable instead of bombing it, that's why the Thunderhead itself didn't show up. But as long as it's hangin' out there in the sky, we ain't gonna win.	”
–Calamity

The Thunderhead is a massive flying airship under the control of the Grand Pegasus Enclave and is the final boss of the game. It's being used to deploy countless Enclave soldiers in order to capture Stable Pi, and only in it's destruction can you ensure everyone's safety.

Behaviour

The Thunderhead is absolutely massive, surrounded by a protective shield with numerous powerful turrets and the ability to deploy large combat drones.

With the power of the Alicorn Armor and due to it's sheer size, the battle is very different from every other boss battle. The battle takes place high up in the air and is massively zoomed out, forcing you to fly around the massive battle arena in order to avoid getting hit. Every now and then the Thunderhead will change position, rotating around the screen to reveal it's front, bottom, back and top before repeating the cycle.

As the Thunderhead takes damage to it's shields, it sends out large combat drones to assist it. These drones will have similar attacks to the turrets, while also having the ability to freely move about and chase you down. Upon contact, they do massive lightning damage.

Occasionally the Thunderhead will lock you into a telekinetic beam, dragging you towards it and reducing your movement. Getting too close to the Thunderhead itself will pull you into the storm surrounding it, constantly doing a large amount of damage for as long as you are within the storm.

Turrets

All over the hull of the Thunderhead are massive turrets, with the different types of attacks varying greatly depending on the turret. Some of them have magical shields similar to the ones seen in the Gun Workshop, making them indestructible:

• Minigun Turret - simply fires a constant stream of bullets towards you. Nothing you haven't dealt with before.
• Plasma Turret - fires a burst of 3 plasma projectiles that will home in on you.
• Explosive Plasma Turret - fires a single, large ball of plasma that aggressively locks onto your position, exploding upon contact or after a certain amount of time.
• Laser Turret - shoots a single instantly hitting laser, making it hard if not impossible to dodge.
• Spread Turret - fires a spray of 5 plasma balls that must be weaved in between to avoid. Several turrets can make things difficult with the amount of projectiles.
• Fireball Turret - shoots a volley of fireballs in random directions towards you. Like the Spread Turret, can fill the air if several are shooting.

Strategy

Without access to any of your consumables or defensive spells (except the shield, teleportation and health/magic potions), things can become very hard very quickly without the ability to boost your abilities. However to compensate, you gain several powerful abilities detailed on the Alicorn Armor page.

The battle acts much like a bullet hell game, forcing you to avoid many projectiles in a large area to stay alive. Because of this, your magical shield and your teleport spell are going to be the most effective, both to absorb damage and to avoid it entirely.

Always be moving, and either stop or change directions if you think you are about to fly into something. This allows you to avoid some attacks like the miniguns or homing plasma.

Despite the Alicorn Armor's weapons having infinite ammo, it may be a good idea to use some more conventional weaponry instead, due to having higher damage potential, longer range, higher magazine capacity or faster projectiles. These weapons will still use ammo, but they will never break. Good examples are the Antidragon, Plasma minigun or Friendship cannon, especially with enhanced ammunition.

It is a good idea to destroy all of the turrets (except the indestructible ones of course) as quickly as possible. This reduces how many projectiles you must avoid, and in turn lowers the amount of damage you will take. For a similar reason, the combat drones should also be taken care of as more will spawn as the Thunderhead takes damage resulting in a dangerous swarm if you're not careful.

The telekinetic beam that the Thunderhead uses to drag you into it's storm is dangerous, as not only does it drag you into the storm and make you take damage, but it also reduces your movement speed allowing it's turrets to finish you off. The best way to deal with this is use of the teleport spell, since this allows you to move away and avoid attacks far easier.

Notes

Since there's no checkpoint and from a subtle hint in the quest for the last battle, if the player dies during the boss (Or anytime when they use the Alicorn armor), a bad ending will happen. The player will be shown imploding with the armor instead of passing out, and it will result with everyone in the wasteland defeated and eliminated by the Pegasus Enclave. They'll have to load their save file to continue then.

Gallery

Front of the Thunderhead

Below the Thunderhead

Behind the Thunderhead

Above the Thunderhead