Plague Inc. Parasite Normal Guide – Tips on How to Complete!

Parasite is a unique type of plague in Plague Inc., in that it starts with a much higher Severity statistic and cannot gain passive DNA points. The higher Severity both helps it to spread faster and slows down a cure, but can also result in it being caught by a government faster, so managing that is key. In this guide, we’re going to help you beat Parasite on normal difficulty by providing you with a bunch of tips and tricks, and an overall strategy you can follow.

How Does Parasite Work?

Parasite is a unique type of plague in Plague Inc. that starts with a higher Severity statistic and cannot gain DNA points passively through spreading the infection. It also has a unique Symbiosis Ability that allows you to reduce its Severity while increasing its infectivity.

Unlike the other types of plague, you’ll get most of your DNA points from popping orange bubbles. This is both due to the fact you don’t pick up any passively, but also because you get more points from bursting orange bubbles with Parasite.

Challenges

The unique challenges of Parasite are in allowing it to spread without getting noticed, and managing your initially low number of DNA points. It differs from the other types in that the beginning of the game is often more challenging than the endgame.

Also, while it isn’t really a challenge, it is one of the slowest types of plague to get going. It can take a while to infect the whole world and you won’t have a whole load of DNA points to play with until the end, meaning patience is pretty much a requirement.

Parasite Strategy: The Safest

So you want to beat Parasite on normal but are struggling with its unique characteristics? Well, we can help you with that. We found during our play throughs that the Parasite type is pretty easy to beat on normal, but is a lot slower than the other types and that’s largely down to its starting Severity, which you have to reduce as first order of business. That means that your infectivity stays lower than usual until you’ve achieved this.

Here’s our strategy in bullets:

• Start in a central country – preferably a cold one but it doesn’t really matter
• Get Symbiosis 1 and 2
• Get Air 1 and 2, and Water 1 and 2
• Get Extreme Bioaerosol
• Get Cold Resistance 1 and 2 and Drug Resistance 1 and 2
• Wait until the entire world is infected – this can take some time so you’ll have to be patient.
• Pop all bubbles and devolve all mutations immediately while you wait
• When the world is 100% infected, devolve everything except Drug Resistance 1
• Get Total Organ Failure by following a Symptoms tree to the middle. We prefer going the Insomnia route as it has the biggest impact on productivity, slowing down the cure
• Watch as the world crumbles. Spend the rest of your DNA points on all tiers of Genetic Hardening and Genetic Reshuffle to slow down the cure

That is the absolute safest and most foolproof method of beating Parasite on normal difficulty, but it isn’t the only method. If you’re looking for something faster, look below.

Parasite Strategy: The Fastest

If going the safe route doesn’t interest you, then we do have a faster alternative strategy to provide instead. It’s not quite as foolproof, and there is a margin for error, but we’ve managed to beat it following this strategy with relative ease.

Here’s the strategy in bullets:

• Start in a central cold country, like Finland
• Get Air 1 and 2, and Water 1 and 2
• Get Extreme Bioaerosol
• Get Heat Resistance 1 and 2 and Drug Resistance 1 and 2
• Get Bird 1 and 2
• Get Cold Resistance 1
• Get Symbiosis 1, 2, and 3 – expensive but will help it to spread faster and go undetected
• Wait until the entire world is infected and pop all of the bubbles in the meantime. The world is likely to detect the disease before it’s entirely infected
• Devolve everything
• Get Total Organ Failure by following any of the Symptoms traits to the middle
• As the world dies off, spend any excess points on Hemorrhagic Shock, Necrosis, Dysentery, Internal Hemorrhaging, and Systemic Infection in that order of priority

General Tips

If you prefer to develop your own strategy rather than follow one, or you simply want further information on what we posted above, this is the section for you. We’re going to riff off a few tips that we picked up while strategizing for this type of plague.

• Spreading the infection is challenging and expensive. Starting in a hot, poor country will spread it around fastest, but you’ll struggle to penetrate the likes of Greenland later in the game.
• Symbiosis 1 and 2 can help you go completely undetected, while giving you a small bonus to the infection spread rate. From our experience though, it’s a largely unnecessary trait in normal. You can easily destroy humanity before they find a cure without it, but you will have to manage your strategy on the fly.
• Devolve any symptoms as soon as they appear if you use Symbiosis. Level 1 Symptoms aren’t going to have a huge impact on your game, and many can help to spread infections faster, but this increases the chance that you’ll get spotted, which defeats the purpose of getting Symbiosis.
• Devolve all Transmissions and Abilities besides Drug Resistance 1 as soon as the entire world is infected. You can even devolve Drug Resistance 1 if you’d rather spend on more lethal symptoms instead of focusing on slowing down the cure.
• If you start in a hot country, prioritize cold resistance and vice versa. These can seriously hamper your ability to spread the plague. We also recommend starting in a poorer country while you focus on Transmissions, as it will spread faster. That way you’ll get points faster to get yourself Drug Resistance 1 and 2 so you can penetrate rich countries.
• Once the infection starts to spread, you can rack up some serious DNA points by popping bubbles. Bear this in mind: the Parasite type is not a plague type that you’ll be happy missing bubbles with. They’re your lifeblood for DNA points.