A simulation of a fruit fly’s brain beat a floor of Wuthering Waves’ hardest recurring combat mode, and the clip immediately became ammunition in the gacha community’s long-running arguments about power creep and rewards. The model, nicknamed Larpy, cleared Middle Tower Floor 1 of the Tower of Adversity inside the time limit, then got held up online as proof that complaints about balance are overblown.
Quick answer: Larpy is an open-source fruit fly brain simulation that cleared Tower of Adversity Middle Tower Floor 1 against a Level 100 Lampylumen Myriad using an unoptimized Verina and Yinlin team.
What Larpy is
Larpy runs on a connectome, a full wiring diagram of a fruit fly’s central nervous system. The map was produced by the FlyEM Project Team at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, the Cambridge Connectomics Group, and Google Research, and it covers roughly 166,000 neurons along with millions of synaptic connections between them. The data is open source, which is why hobbyists have been able to plug it into things it was never meant for.
Before it touched Wuthering Waves, the same simulated brain had been wired up to play Doom, Minecraft, and Super Mario 64. The idea each time is the same. Feed the virtual insect brain game inputs, let its neurons fire, and translate that neural activity into controller actions.
The Tower of Adversity clear
The Tower of Adversity is Wuthering Waves’ endgame combat mode, where your characters fight through timed challenges. The X user @SLUGYCS connected Larpy to the game and recorded it clearing the Middle Tower’s first floor within the required time threshold. The footage runs alongside a live neural activity monitor labeled “Larpy – neural activity,” which shows the brain’s firing counts ticking over as the fight plays out.
The team on screen was Verina and Yinlin at Level 90, fighting a Level 100 Lampylumen Myriad boss. That is a deliberately rough loadout, not a sweat-optimized meta build. The person who set it up described the composition openly as having questionable synergy, inefficient resource allocation, and a rotation “held together primarily by enthusiasm.”
The creator behind the run was clear about the limits. Larpy’s capability is tied to this one specific encounter for now, and any broader claim about it beating endgame content would need more testing. It cleared a floor. It did not conquer the mode.
How the clip became a tribalism argument
The run landed in the middle of an ongoing fight over which gacha game treats free players best. That debate pulls in Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Neverness to Everness, and Wuthering Waves, and it routinely spills into accusations about power creep, stingy rewards, and how much it costs to stay competitive.
Larpy’s clear got folded straight into that. Defenders of the game started using the clip as a one-line rebuttal to anyone complaining about balance. The shape of the argument is roughly “a fly did it, what’s your excuse?” One widely shared post put it as the game only having a power creep problem “if you allow it to happen, either by greed or stupidity.”
That framing does a lot of quiet work. It reframes a genuine discussion about account progression and the cost of keeping up as a skill issue, then dismisses it with a novelty clip. A single timed floor cleared by a simulation does not actually address whether the resource economy is generous or whether staying relevant over time is expensive.
Why the proof does not hold up
Here is the gap between what the clip shows and what people claim it proves:
- Larpy cleared one floor, not the full Tower of Adversity.
- The run used an admittedly suboptimal Verina and Yinlin team.
- The bot’s maker said its ability is limited to that single encounter.
- A floor clear says nothing about reward rates or long-term progression cost.
The fruit fly result is a fun technical curiosity. It becomes misleading only when it is treated as evidence about an entirely separate question, which is how the game’s economy and difficulty scale for real players.
What the episode really captures is how quickly the gacha space turns anything into a loyalty test. A simulated insect brain poking at an endgame boss should have been a harmless experiment. Instead it got drafted into a comparison war between fanbases, which is less a statement about Wuthering Waves than about the community arguing over it.
