Allied Radio Backpack: Overview
2025-08-13 // IOTM Overview
Another year, another edition of the Time-Twitching Tower in the books. This year's theme was the Skeleton War, a glancingly WWII themed adventure that was home to several fun puzzles, mostly based on the item we're discussing today. Usually, TTT items are pretty mediocre or bad; we didn't even cover last year's Evolving Organism, because it was so bad that there wasn't really any point to discussing it. We DID take on the Wardrobe-o-Matic, which has been marginally more useful than I originally expected. Today, though? I'm delighted to inform you that the Allied Radio Backpack is almost unquestionably the best TTT item ever. Certainly the best for speed, great for general softcore ascension over the next few years, and perhaps the best item puzzles we've seen in years. So call in some sniper support, and get ready to read a bunch of text!
General Summary
The Allied Radio Backpack is a back item. Surprise, surprise. It has some mildly useful base attributes; +30% all stats is a decent bit, 30% init is worse than bat wings but good in a bit over a year, and a piddling amount of flat HP/MP. The real power for this IOTM comes in the option to [request drop]. This is an option that gives you three entries into a small textbox a day. That's right -- you have to type things!
On release, we didn't know most of these, but over the week that the TTT graced the kingdom a bunch of spades and friends were able to crack the code. Here are the various options you can select with your three drop requests, sorted from least impactful to most impactful.
- ELLIPSOIDTINE gives you 30 adventures of "Ellipsoidtined", a bizarrely terrible effect that gives +25 MP, +50 HP, and 5-10 MP regen per adventure. Also, it heals one negative effect. Woo hoo.
- ORDNANCE gives you a "skeleton war grenade", a combat item that does 200-300 physical damage.
- SALARY gives you 15 Chroner; useful in aftercore when the TTT is in town, generally useless otherwise.
- RADIO gives you a "handheld Allied radio", which is a tradeable drop charge.
- WILDSUN BOON gives you 100 adventures of "Wildsun Boon", an effect that grants you +3 prismatic res, +5 fam weight, +75% init, +50% weapon/spell, and +200% damage-to-skeletons. (Obviously, the last one is the most important.)
- FUEL gives you a "skeleton war fuel can", a 1-drunkenness epic booze. It has a 5-7 adventure range.
- RATIONS gives you "Skeleton War rations", a 1-fullness epic food. It has a 5-7 adventure range.
- MATERIAL INTEL gives you 10 adventures of "Material Intel", a +100% item drop effect. (You can only use this one once per day!)
- SNIPER SUPPORT is a sneak; that is, it forces a noncombat to occur on your next turn in a zone with forceable non-combats.
Speedrun Applicability
Ellipsoidtine and ordnance will probably never be taken in an actual speedrun; neither do anything for you. Chroner is also unlikely to come up in a speedrun, as there's basically nothing useful you can get with just 15 Chroner (even when the TTT happens to be in session).
The tradeable radio is interesting, though not because you'll actually take it yourselves in your run -- you are able to pull one radio per day, and it's essentially the equivalent of just straight-up pulling a sneak. That's honestly quite a nice pull! I always like new softcore pulls. One thing to keep in mind: while you can use as many of these as you want (there's no limit!), using one while you still have charges in your -actual- backpack will consume the backpack charge. Not ideal! So, uh. Make sure you use your actual backpack charges -before- using your pulled radio.
Wildsun Boon is probably something you take in unrestricted (after all... +5 fam weight is +5 fam weight!), but in standard, I doubt it will beat the other contenders. Same with fuel and rations; given this year's Leprecondo, your marginal food/booze will already be around 4-5 adventures per drunk/full. That means pulling the rations and the fuel is effectively +1 turn apiece, which is less than the turns you'd save by using material intel or sniper support. (Mostly sniper support; 10 turns of item drop isn't very much, although +100% item drop is so high that it may tick you up to a guarantee on something important.)
This leads us to the final (and most important!) boon: new sneaks! Actual speedster usage of the backpack will likely just be three sneaks. We've covered other items that give sneaks, but we've never actually done a big post on how to use sneaks. And guess what: this isn't going to be that post! We have a whole new complicated IOTM to write about! But I have put that in my to-do list. I promise, it's there. Until then, I will point you to the Peace Turkey post where I listed out all the NCs you need to encounter in a run. The CliffsNotes of a larger post is essentially that the first sneak saves you something like 7 turns, the next one saves you 5, the next one saves you 3-4, and marginal ones after that save you anywhere from 1.5 on the low end to 3 on the high end, averaging out at around 2 with a lot of downside risk.
2025 In-Standard Synergies
- This is true of all sneaks, but bears special mention in this article now that we're starting to get back up to a pretty large number of sneaks in standard. If you are down to relatively marginal sneak targets, you can always use a sneak in synergy with the closed-circuit pay phone (2023) to grab an artifact by instantly generating the noncombat you'd use to find it in any available shadow rift. This can then be used to snag 30 turns of Shadow Waters, for +100% item, -10% combat, and +200% meat buff. In some cases, that is going to be pretty competitive with a 2 turn marginal sneak. And if you don't have your shadow bricks of the day and still have a forest charge remaining, it's even better, because you can use it to activate the once-per-day forest option. That gets you 2-3 of each drop in the given rift, making it worth 2.5 bricks + some amount of shadow bread or other goodies.
- Not really a synergy, but worth noting -- this IOTM gets better the fewer other sneaks we have. We are currently rich in sneaks -- the standard set currently has 7 from Cincho de Mayo, 3 from the Apriling Band Helmet, and 3 from the McHugeLarge Ski Set. Which means these sneaks get us from 13 to 16. We lose Cincho next January, and Apriling the January after that. If TPTB don't mint new sneaks until 2027, there could be some time where this IOTM is even more valuable than it is right now!
Overall Rating
We'd rate the Allied Radio Backpack a tier 2 IOTM. Three sneaks a day is a floor of about 6 turns of value. It doesn't really do anything else, and we're rich in sneaks right now. In the event that sneak sources dry up over the next few years, this could be a pretty important tier 1 IOTM in the future. Now, if I had to guess, that probably won't happen. But it's still pretty strong, and (as previously stated) wildly better than any TTT merch table item its competing against. Very fun stuff!
I also want to shout out the puzzlers and spaders in ASS. This IOTM featured no less than THREE major puzzles; one was a cryptographic three-layer puzzle to solve the Ellipsoidtine effect, one was a massive braille puzzle made up of characters stored within the ribs of TTT skeletons, and one is a player-by-player demon name puzzle using failed radio drops to generate grey text that can be patched together in a fun solver. If we didn't have another IOTM to discuss, I would probably try to write more about it. But I can't! Because we DO have another IOTM to discuss! On to the next MDX file!