Bloons Tower Defense / Guide Dang It

This is a BIG plane.

Bloons TD 6, Flying Fortress upgrade description. Note that the description does not tell you how its attacks work.

The Bloons Tower Defense series has several instances of Guide Dang It!, mostly consisting of upgrade descriptions omitting major properties of the upgrades, such as camo detection and lead popping power, or in several extreme cases, what the upgrades even do at all. Several challenges in Bloons Tower Defense 5 and Bloons TD 6 may require the use of these unstated abilities to complete them.

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Camo detection

Several upgrades throughout the series grant innate camo detection to the tower despite the the upgrade descriptions never telling you they would.

Inferno Ring's meteors have innate camo detection while the rest of the 5-0-0 tower's attacks don't. There was one Advanced Challenge that required players to use this property, along with boosting its pierce with a Stronger Stimulant, to eliminate all the camo ceramics on Round 51.
The Glaive Lord's glaive ring can hit camo in Bloons TD 6, when its regular boomerangs cannot. Its Bloons Tower Defense 5 version could hit camo with any attacks. In neither case does the upgrade description inform you of this.
MOAB Assassin abilities could hit any camo bloon in Bloons Tower Defense 5 and Bloons Monkey City, from regular camos to DDTs. It is nigh-impossible to beat a certain Daily Challenge in the former and high rounds of desert-based Contested Territory in the latter without knowing this property. Nowhere in those games is this camo detection even hinted at.
Before it was patched out, the Wizard Monkey's middle-path Fireball attack in Bloons TD 6 could apparently innately hit camos with its explosion, even if it hit a non-camo bloon. Nothing in the game tells you this, and there was one custom challenge that relied on this trick to beat it.
- The Shimmer bottom path upgrade can decamo Purple Bloons even though the Wizard Monkey cannot damage them unless it gets further bottom path upgrades.
The Glue Striker ability in Bloons Tower Defense 5 also has completely unannounced camo detection.
The Temple of the Monkey God has innate camo detection in the fifth generation, one Daily Challenge (Consecrated Territory) relying on this property to beat. The game otherwise never informs you of its camo detection. Its sixth-generation counterparts Sun Temple, True Sun God, and Avatar of the Vengeful Monkey do not have innate camo detection however.
Ice Shards can hit camo bloons even if the ice tower itself doesn't have camo detection.
Before it was nerfed to no longer do so, Embrittlement top-path upgrade for the Ice Monkey removed Camo from White or Zebra Bloons even though it couldn't damage them. Similarly, they used to be slowed down by Permafrost even though it can't damage them without a Monkey Intelligence Bureau nearby.
Before a certain update, Relentless Glue (and later on top path Glue Gunners) causes popped Bloons to leave Glue residue on the track, slowing down Bloons that run over them. That's all the description states, for it does not mention that Glue residue can stick to Camo Bloons even if the Glue Gunner itself cannot fire at them. Though in an update they nerfed it by making camo bloons immune to said residue unless the Glue Gunner has camo detection itself.
Plasma pools, enabled by a Monkey Knowledge upgrade (Cross the Streams) combined with having two laser dartlings cross their lasers, can hit Camo bloons even if the dartlings themselves cannot.
The First Strike Capability ability and the Pre-Emptive Strike 750-damage anti-blimp missiles have innate camo detection, even if the subs' other attacks lack it.
Gwendolin's abilities Cocktail of Fire and Firestorm can always hit camo bloons when activated. The May 9, 2022 daily challenge irritated many new players since the Cocktail of Fire was the only attack available that could hit camo white bloons.

Lead popping ability

Several towers can pop lead bloons despite neither the descriptions nor attack animations indicating that this is possible.

Robo-Monkey (a tier 3 upgrade for the Super Monkey) can pop leads without the plasma upgrade in Bloons Tower Defense 5, despite it still shooting darts, which couldn't pop lead in its previous upgrades. The description also neglects to inform the player of this. Bloons TD 6 removes this capability altogether.
Similarly to Robo-Monkey, the Tier 3 Sniper Monkey upgrade Semi-Automatic Rifle had an ability to pop leads without assistance or Full Metal Jacket, the upgrade that usually grants lead popping power to snipers. However, this only happened in BTD5, as in BTD6, the ability was moved to the next tier, Full Auto Rifle (whose Frozen and Lead popping attack remained untold until patch 24.0).
Carrier Flagship (before an update) and Sky Shredder pop lead and frozen despite shooting mainly darts, and their anti-MOAB rocket explosions also affect DDTs (if visible). This is in stark contrast with the upgrades immediately before, which have similar attacks but cannot pop Leads, frozen, or DDTs.
Special Poperations, the Tier 5 middle path Heli Pilot upgrade in Bloons TD 6, drops a marine that can pop leads despite shooting darts, which generally don't pop leads for the towers that use them.
Before version 26.0, Glaive Lord's ring glaives could also hit lead, despite no other Boomerang Thrower upgrade being stated to grant lead popping power to boomerangs or glaives other than Red Hot Rangs. Version 26.0 removed this ability.
At one point, all three Tier 5 Tack Shooter upgrades (Inferno Ring, Super Maelstrom, and The Tack Zone) used to pop lead bloons despite the latter two shooting blades and tacks respectively, which are projectiles that normally cannot pop leads without these upgrades. Patch 25.0 eventually removed Tack Zone's ability to pop lead without assistance.
The Glue Gunner's middle path allows Lead Bloons that have been glued by the Glue Strike and Glue Storm abilities to be popped by any kind of tower, regardless of crosspathing. The upgrade descriptions only mention the Damage-Increasing Debuff and that it pelts all Bloons in the screen with glue.

Bloons TD 6 Tier 5 upgrade descriptions

Some of the upgrade descriptions for the Tier 5 upgrades in Bloons TD 6 say little to nothing on what the upgrade does. This may have possibly been done for dramatic efffect.

The Flying Fortress is the tier 5 upgrade for the bottom path Monkey Ace, which produces three streams of darts and bombs with twice the attack speed of a Spectre, with one stream targeted on First, the second one on Last, and a third on Close. The description mentions none of these mechanics, instead only calling it a "big plane".
The Description of the Sky Shredder only declares that "The bloons will wish they had never come" without informing the player that the main dart attack now has 32 projectiles instead of 16 and is now twice as fast, and that all of its attacks gain a major damage increase and now bypass all damage type immunities.
The description for the Tsar Bomba is only slightly better than the other T5 aces as while the description of "A really really large bomb. Someone put a stop to this craziness" at least implies that the nuke ability gets stronger, nowhere does it mention the ability to now stun MOAB class bloons with said nuke as well as the reduced cooldown the ability gets.
The description for the Avatar of Wrath, the bottom-path Tier 5 upgrade for the Druids increases the literary style, and length, by using Anaphora. "The more bloons there are, the more damage it does!" This does not come even close to describing the actual mechanics of the upgrade. The upgrade's power is governed by RBE, a measurement of how many attacks would it take to pop the bloon and all its children if those attacks only did 1 damage and had 1 pierce. For example, a single ZOMG contains 16656 RBE, which is higher than any ceramic rush in the game (a single ceramic has merely 104 RBE), and thus Round 80 will trigger the Avatar of Wrath to do more damage than the 70+-bloon-long ceramic rushes of Round 78 would trigger, despite the ZOMG being only one bloon. Nowhere in Bloons TD 6 is RBE even mentioned or explained, nor that it ties into the mechanics of the Avatar of Wrath. (Its predecessors Bloons Tower Defense 4 and Bloons Tower Defense 5 did tell you what RBE was and how much RBE each round had, ironically.)
Bomb Blitz's description only mentions its ability that destroys most bloon types if a bloon leaks, and not its other far more useful properties of being able to create a Recursive Cluster (its corresponding Tier 4 upgrade) for every bomb shot instead of every two shots as well as the additional damage buff it gains.
The Bloon Solver, the top path tier 5 Glue Gunner upgrade, joins the ranks of Flying Fortress in terms of the lack of information about its mechanics in the game itself. It gives the normally 1-pierce glue gunner 6 pierce, quadruples its attack speed and makes glue dissolve three times faster. The Guide Dang It! aspect that really trips up new users of the upgrade is its pierce - the game does not make it clear that it gains even more pierce, leading to new users to get more pierce via the middle path, while the bottom path has more beneficial effects such as making the glue last much longer (helpful for damaging blimps on long tracks) and increasing the slowdown the bloons receive when glued. Nor, indeed, does the game say anything about the upgrade it received in Version 35 that creates corrosive glue pools on popping glued Bloons (receiving this from xx4, which had this altered to a stun for balance reasons).
Similarly, Super Glue, the bottom path Glue Gunner Tier 5 upgrade, while mentioning the significantly more powerful effect on MOAB-Class bloons, omits the fact that it increases the Glue Gunner's pierce (get as much pierce as The Bloon Solver), that it applies Corrosive Glue on all affected Bloons, and that every Glue hit on MOAB-Class bloons deals 50 damage.
Banana Central, the top path tier 5 upgrade for the Banana Farm, ranks amongst the league of the Flying Fortress in that nowhere in the game are even its basic mechanics mentioned. The description given to an upgrade that makes the Bannana Farm generate $6000 per round along with increasing the value of Banana Research Facility crates by 25%? "You want Banana? We have Banana!"
Monkey-Nomics is as bad if not worse than Banana Central at describing what it does as its description is only "For when you're too big to fail." This is especially egregious in the case of this tower upgrade as all it does is make it so that you get the same loan as the Tier 4 but you don't have to pay the loan back, which isn't that hard to describe.
Monkey Wall Street is thankfully better than its fellow Tier 5 Bannana Farm Upgrades at describing what it does, as it mentions a lot of its new mechanics in a reasonable way, but it neglects to mention that it now gains a 50% range boost to improve its new ability to auto collect bananas.
Perma-Spike has a completely Non-Indicative Name, since its spikes are in fact not near-permanent at all - they disappear after four rounds, merely a round or two longer than the previous bottom path upgrades. As usual, the game never informs you of the Perma-Spike's round limit. And of course, the description doesn't mention the damage buff (500 damage per pile!) that actually makes it worth buying.
The True Sun God sacrifices other towers to boost its own power, just like the Sun Temple, and is not worth anywhere near its cost without them. The upgrade's description says nothing about this, and although there is a pop-up asking you to confirm your purchase, it doesn't specifically warn you that nearby towers will be sacrificed. Woe betide a player who spent all of their money on a True Sun God, lost their supporting towers in the process, and the sacrifices aren't enough for it to singlehandedly win the next round.
The Anti-Bloon upgrade improves its Bloon Annihilation ability by increasing the range it has and also quadrupling the damage it deals as well as improving the damage and critical hit chance that its main attacks have along with allowing them to hit purple Bloons. The description does not mention any of this instead going with the very vague "<Program Directive> <Eradicate Bloons> <INITIATE>"
While The True Sun God and Anti-Bloon upgrades can rely on essentially being stronger versions of their Tier 4s to attempt to handwave their vague descriptions, The Legend Of The Night's description of "We turn to him, when all hope is lost..." does not have this excuse. This is because in addition to the standard damage and pierce increases the Legend Of The Night gains a very significant ability in the form of a Black Hole that can instakill any Bloon (including the normally instakill immune BADs) that leaks for a total of 8 seconds and then takes 3 minutes to recharge.
The Ray of Doom's description just says that it creates a solid line of annihilation that can wipe out Bloons at your leisure. Obviously, this doesn't really explain much. It does 25 damage per every 0.20 seconds and gives a laser shock effect that deals 20 damage per second for five seconds. The first Bloon the Ray of Doom hits is also dealt an additional 80 damage. Also, it actually has a pierce limit, set at 1000 (although in most cases this will be more than enough pierce needed). Last but not least, it can pop Purple Bloons, which is never implied anywhere, and goes completely against the intuition instilled by the Laser Cannon and Plasma Accelerator upgrades before it, which can't pop purples.
The Tack Zone's description is "Many Many Tacks", and while the description can be a simple way of saying that it now shoots 32 tacks instead of 16 tacks and it gets a significant attack speed boost, this description doesn't even remotely hint about the notable range boost as well as the increased MOAB damage that it also gets.

Temple sacrifice mechanics

The mechanics of how sacrificing other towers boosts the Game-Breaker temples is generally never explained in any of the games. Obtaining a desirable temple will inevitably require a guide - the kinds of sacrifices and the amount sacrificed makes a very large difference between the temple mauling hordes of ZOMGs in Freeplay and struggling against them.

In Bloons TD 6, there are three kinds of temples - the tier 4 Sun Temple, the tier 5 True Sun God, and the alternate Tier 5 Avatar of the Vengeful Monkey. All three of them rely on mechanics completely unexplained in the game itself.
- The Sun Temple, unlike its Bloons Tower Defense 5 counterpart, is maxed out by only three tower categories (in Bloons TD 6, there are four of them: Primary, Military, Magic, and Support. Thankfully these are clearly delineated in-game). The fourth category you sacrifice will do nothing at all. There are five or six tiers of sacrifices, each tower sacrifice category having different tier boundaries and benefits per level.
  - Primary sacrifices: $1000 gives the Temple eight circle saw blades. If you sacrifice $5000, these blades have a faster attack rate. $10,000 will give you a glaive, $20,000 makes this glaive get thrown faster, and $50,000 gets the glaive thrown even faster.
  - Military sacrifices: $2005 adds a missile, $4005 adds a Spectre plane along with the missile, $7505 makes the missile shoot faster, $15,005 makes the missile shoot even faster, and $50,005 adds a second Spectre.
  - Magic sacrifices: $1000 adds three homing shots, $5000 adds a forcefield that knocks back non-blimps, $10,000 adds a fourth homing shot and three anti-blimp shots, $20,000 gives one more extra shot for all magic attacks and allows the forcefield to knock back blimps, $30,000 adds yet another shot for each magic attack and $50,000 spawns miniature Sun Avatars near the temple.
  - Support sacrifices: $1000 increases the range of the temple and any towers in its radius, $5000 gives $500 income per round, buffs the attack speeds of nearby towers, and makes all those towers' upgrades cheaper. $7500 increases the income to $2500 per round and adds an additional pierce and range buff to nearby towers. $10,000 adds 1 extra damage to nearby towers. $25,000 increases the per-round income to $10,000, doubles the upgrade price discounts, and doubles the attack speed buff. $50,000 additionally doubles the damage buff.
- The True Sun God's sacrifices stack on top of the Sun Temple sacrifices, and can accept all four sacrifice categories simultaneously.
- Obtaining the Avatar of the Vengeful Monkey is pretty much impossible without being told by a walkthrough beforehand. You need to unlock a specific Monkey Knowledge perk in the Magic Monkeys section called "There Can Only Be One", with no indication that it has anything to do with temples. Then you must max out the sacrifices of three tower categories for the Sun Temple, and then place another $50,000 worth of towers in all four tower categories in the Temple's radius as if you were maxing a True Sun God. That's not all - two more Super Monkeys must also be sacrificed on top of these, one of them being an Anti-Bloon (middle path Tier 5 upgrade), and the other one being a Legend of the Night (bottom path Tier 5 upgrade). Even these extra sacrifices have hidden stipulations: the two extra Super Monkeys cannot be placed in the radius of the temple! Finally, pay for the True Sun God upgrade and you will then receive the Avatar of the Vengeful Monkey at last. This complicated series of steps is explained nowhere in the game, and is almost impossible to find by accident since this costs over a million in-game money to construct and is completely disabled in Sandbox mode.
- Not only are the sacrifice mechanics unexplained, but there are no visual indicators about the sacrifices either. Of all the sacrifices in BTD6, the only categories with clear signs of being maxed out are Magic (as mini-Sun Avatars start spawning) and Support (as it gives $5000 at the end of each round), but Primary and Military are very difficult to notice if you've spent enough money on sacrifices. Unless you overspend, it can be surprisingly easy to barely miss out on a maxed category, being especially annoying if you were trying to get an Avatar of the Vengeful Monkey.

Other examples

In Bloons TD 6, middle-path Ice Monkey upgrades Arctic Wind, Snowstorm, and Absolute Zero have the ability to freeze any rivers, ponds, or other bodies of water, allowing land-based towers to be placed on top of the frozen water. The game never informs you of the water-freezing ability (until at least update 38.0 where they changed Arctic Wind's description to now include said ability). Furthermore, the game does not state that the freezing aura can slow down Lead Bloons even without the Metal Freeze upgrade (although it remains unable to pop them), nor it states that Snowstorm greatly increases the radius of the freezing aura.
The Carrier Flagship upgrade boosts the attack speed of "water-based Monkeys". You would assume that this would only apply to other Buccaneers, submarines, Admiral Brickell, and Pat Fusty, the only towers that can be placed directly on water, would be the only ones affected by the Flagship. But apparently, Sun Temples, True Sun Gods, and Vengeful True Sun Gods created from upgrading a Sun Avatar placed on ice-frozen water also count as "water-based Monkeys" and are also boosted by the Flagship. Nothing in the game ever indicates that such temples would count. Brickell's Naval Tactics ability has the same caveat.
The MOAB Assassin in Bloons Tower Defense 5, which does 750 damage to a targeted blimp, not the 1000 said by the description.
Getting a black border surrounding a track in the track selection menu requires you to beat CHIMPS in one sitting and then getting all rest of the medals for the track. Absolutely nothing in the game tells you this.
The Glaive Lord's purple ring attack in Bloons TD 6, formerly was one of the few non-ability attacks in the entire series whose damage, pierce, range, and/or attack speed cannot be boosted by any means (thankfully, it is now buffable). Of course, nothing in the games told you this.
One of Adora’s mechanics, getting stronger after placing a True Sun God, is never mentioned in game, despite being one of the most notable parts about her.
Adora's Blood Sacrifice ability was buffed in version 22.0 to also boost top-path Super Monkeys when a tower is sacrificed. Too bad nothing in the game tells you that Blood Sacrifices affect anyone else but Adora herself!
All of the hidden achievements are abound with this, but we’ll go over the highlights:
- Alchermistman and Bloonacle Boy requires you to get over 600,000 damage with the bloon master alchemist before round 100. Not an easy task, especially with affording it and shoving enough bloons in its face to get to that amount.
- Snap of the Fingers is probably the worst of them all: you need to end a game exactly half of your starting cash and lives. It’s not easy unless you have set up a daily challenge just for it, and even then it’s not a cakewalk.
- Golden Ticket requires you to click on specific spots in Candy Falls in an exact order, with no hints whatsoever on what you're supposed to do. Also, if you get the order wrong or spend more than one second hitting the next spot, you have to repeat the sequence from the beginning. What makes it even worse for some mobile players is that depending on the platform, one of the spots is located right next to the "hide abilities" button, making it harder to tap on time.
Daily and Advanced Challenges cannot be played if the track they are hosted on is not already unlocked by the player. Otherwise, the challenges are locked and unplayable. The game neglects to inform you of how to unlock such challenges and the official subreddit's daily challenge threads are constantly visited by newbies struggling with this restriction.
The Super Monkey's upgrades are generally very vague, boasting their power but generally not saying how they exactly work. It's easier to list those that DO describe what they really improve in BTD6: Robo Monkey and the Path 3 upgrades (except for Legend of the Night).
It is never stated that the Ballistic Missile upgrade for a Monkey Sub can target bloons outside of its normal attack's range. Before Version 27.0 nerfed it, Advanced Intel even used to allow ballistic missiles to target any bloon on the map!
The descriptions of the Paragon Towers don't explain a single thing about what they do (outside of the Apex Plasma Master, which at least explains it fires plasma juggernaut balls and the Master Builder, which mentions the Mega Sentries it can now build), let alone how the Paragon level system works.
The Druid of the Jungle upgrade does not mention that the Druid's automatic ability to crush Bloons has infinite range, or that the vines pop Bloons that run through it.
For Banana Farms:
- The IMF Loan upgrade does not mention that the Monkey Bank's capacity is increased by $3000, which gives a reason to purchase the upgrade even if you don't intend to use the Loan ability.
- The Marketplace upgrade merely states that bananas are automatically added instead of the player (or a Banana Farmer) having to collect them. It does not mention that it actually increases production to 16 bananas per round - actually the same as the Banana Plantation upgrade (though crosspathing with the top path is still viable in boss runs if you cannot afford Marketplaces in one go. In this case, you get 18 and 20 brunches per round).
BTD5 and 6 provide a confusing concept in that identical-looking (and sometimes identically-named) projectiles from different towers or upgrades don't behave the same way:
- In 5, Robo Monkeys could fire darts, which looked exactly like the Dart Monkey and base Super Monkey's, that had the ability to pop Lead Bloons while the other two couldn't.
- Both Dart Monkeys and Super Monkeys fire darts as their base projectile but, starting in 6, their darts have different pierce, with Dart Monkeys being able to pop two (three with Monkey Knowledge) Bloons with the same dart while the Super Monkey can only pop one (factoring in Monkey knowledge, Super Monkeys need the Plasma Blasts upgrade to get the same pierce as a base Dart Monkey). This is a holdover from earlier games where both monkeys fire darts that could only pop one Bloon unupgraded.
- In 5, upgrading a Bomb Shooter from Frag Bombs to Cluster Bombs would predictably remove its ability to pop Black and Zebra Bloons as it replaces piercing fragments with regular explosions (which Black and Zebra Bloons are immune to). In 6, however, and starting from Version 28.0, Cluster Bombs can still pop them even though a regular bomb cannot. However, Version 40.0 made it so that Cluster Bombs can no longer pop Black and Zebra bloons unaided.

Guide Dang It / Bloons Tower Defense

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