This guide is a complete red hive version for endgame players wanting to complete rounds of the Robo Bear Challenge covering upgrades, hive builds & more.

Message taraneu on Discord for any questions/suggestions or send a comment at the bottom of this post. You can also view his #1 RBC score at the bottom of this guide!

Table of Contents

General Information

• There are 2 ways to grind drives in RBC; drive runs and round 25 runs. Here’s how they work:
  • Drive runs:
    This is what you do to get red, white, and blue drives. Buying only cog upgrades and spending no cogs on rerolling, you spend all your cogs on buying drives directly, make sure to kill golden cogmowers in these runs. Depending on skill and if you have a fuzzy alt, you should get to round 15-20.
  • Round 25 runs:
    This is the best way to get glitched drives. Doing these requires stingers, boost materials like extracts, oil etc. And you MUST have a fuzzy alt.Using your cogs on all the useful upgrades and rerolls, you beat all the rounds to get the guaranteed glitched drive and 1/7 chance for a double glitched drop when beating all the rounds. Killing golden cogmowers can help make it easier, but are optional to save time

• When choosing bees:
  • Digital Bee takes priority over everything else 
  • Always choose precise/spicy/bear/windy/vicious bees first
  • Keep your spicy/precise ratio close to 1:1
  • Start picking vectors after ~round 12+
  • Make sure to get at least 1-2 baby love producers early on and get enough hive bonus bees (hasty, buoyant, brave, basic)
• For pollen, honey, goo or red pollen quests, go to strawberry field. Due to the shape and king beetle amulet (make sure to have strawberry pollen on it), this will be the best field; unless you have a very high level of homepage and no router upgrade, in that case go to mushroom.
• For goo quests in high rounds, using gummy baller can make the quests very much easier.
• In round 25 runs, for blue pollen quests, go to blue flower field, and for white pollen quests go to dandelion, this is why you buy homepage whenever you can and one of the reasons you need a fuzzy alt. In the rare case that your router level is higher than homepage, go to spider and bamboo instead.
• The more nectars you have the better, they will help a ton. Here’s the order of importance for nectars from most to least relevant:
  • Refreshing
  • Invigorating
  • Satisfying
  • Motivating
  • Comforting
• It’s recommended to start with getting to 500 white drives using drive runs to make rbc a lot easier. After that get to 500 red drives, and then you can start getting glitched drives by doing round 25 runs.
• For drive runs having a fuzzy alt controlled by yourself or someone else is optional, which can help make the runs faster and get you to higher rounds, however for round 25 runs as before mentioned it’s a necessity.
• Make sure not to have 5 drives when ending a round so you don’t void any, and double check if you have digital bee in your  RBC run before using drives (or else they won’t add to digital!)
• Golden Cogmowers spawn in rounds:
  • 3, 4 or 6
  • 12, 14 or 16
  • 21, 22, 23

Hive Build

Disclaimer: This isn’t a “full” RBC hive, but more a slightly smaller and cheaper version since red doesn’t necessarily need major changes to do well in RBC, this is to make it easier especially for lower level players. Everything in this guide also goes for regular red (boosting) hives, and “full” RBC hives. Check out the RBC section in Acid’s white hive guide for a full RBC hive

Cog Upgrades

Here is a list of RBC upgrades you will need throughout the challenge. You may not be able to get all but use this list to check what upgrade to select when attempting the challenge.

Each upgrade will have a priority level next to it in brackets [ ], representing its importance concerning other upgrades. Priority levels will range from 1 – 3 where 1 is you absolutely must buy and lock upgrade if you cannot afford it, and 3 is a background upgrade you can buy if you don’t have higher priority upgrades to get at the current RBC round.

Common Upgrades

• Botnet [2]
• Credit [1]
• Defragment (if you have nullify, only get level 1-2 max) [3]
• Homepage [1]
• Iterate [1]
• Overfit Red (up to 2x red pollen) [3]
• Overfit White [1]
• Sharpen (up to 2x attack) [3]

Rare Upgrades

• Crypto (low level if you want to keep it easy, only before round 15 ish) [1]
• Equalize (only if NFT) [3]
• Expansion [1]
• GPU (only round 20+) [1]
• Multithread [1]
• Nullify (not level 2 if you have crypto) [1]
• Outsource [1]
• RAM [3]
• Router [1]
• SSD: Red [1]
• Subscribe [2]
• VPN (if you die a lot) [3]

Epic Upgrades

• Bandwidth [3]
• Base-15 [3]
• Client Side (only if stack overflow) [3]
• Demarcate [1]
• F5 (only if round 20+) [1]
• FOV [1]
• NFT [1]
• Refractor [1]
• Torrent [1]
• Virtual Pet [2]

Legendary Upgrades

• Bruteforce [1]
• Corrupt [1]
• Fluid Simulation [1]
• Optimize [1]
• Overclock [1]
• Pseudo RNG [1]
• Reboot [1]
• Stack Overflow (if before round 15 ish) [1]
• The Cloud [1]
• Codec [1]

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