Exploding Pineapple

"Drops pineapples to the ground that explode violently after a few seconds. Ace's explosive attacks are improved."

- In-game description

 is the first upgrade of Path 2 for the Monkey Ace in Bloons TD 6. It allows the Monkey Ace to drop pineapple bombs every two seconds that explode after around three seconds. Each pineapple has 20 pierce with a small blast radius (around 20 blast radius).

Starting from Version 28.0, the Exploding Pineapple upgrade also boosts the power of various explosive attacks from other paths in many different ways. It adds +2 pierce and +4.5 blast radius for all anti-MOAB missiles from Fighter Plane and above, as well as adding +15 pierce and +3 blast radius for Spectre and Flying Fortress bombs.

It costs $170 on Easy, $200 on Medium, $215 on Hard, and $240 on Impoppable.

Summary
Exploding Pineapples serves as a source of additional popping power as the Monkey Ace moves around. The greatest downside comes from the 3-second countdown timer of each pineapple, which may lead them missing bloons often. It is not the most reliable source of popping power, but it deals extra popping power nonetheless for a low price.

However, starting from Version 28.0, Exploding Pineapples makes for a viable crosspath as an alternative for other paths. For Fighter Plane and above, grouped blimp popping power is slightly improved, as opposed to higher-pierce darts as Sharper Darts specializes at. For Spectre, it makes the mid-game a fair bit easier to deal with by increasing bomb reliability. While still a very niche upgrade, the Exploding Pineapple upgrade still packs a punch when needed.

Tips

 * This upgrade is generally useless outside of Race Events and Apopalypse Mode, and even then it has minuscule popping power. However, every little extra pop does count towards obtaining the Bomber Ace much quicker on Races, and Exploding Pineapple can save a decent chunk of lives if starting with a Monkey Ace.
 * Pineapples can provide extra pops for the Monkey Aces every once in a while, but this upgrade should not be the main source of lead-popping power, due to the slow and random nature of pineapple deployment.
 * Exploding Pineapples is affected by the +33% attack speed buff from Rapid Fire, and Sharper Darts improves the pierce of pineapples from 20 to 32, but the effectiveness of the pineapples is not improved by any other upgrade.
 * Exploding Pineapples can serve as a much-needed source of lead popping power for only $200 if you can't afford stronger options, or are on a mode where some of your towers or upgrades are restricted, especially when paired with the Wingmonkey Monkey Knowledge.

Trivia

 * Exploding Pineapple is the only upgrade to be named similar to an existing road item in previous games, Exploding Pineapples.
 * The upgrade Exploding Pineapple is the only Monkey Ace upgrade where the upgrade all appeared in previous games but with a different name for the current name variant and all its predecessors.
 * Unlike in previous games, Exploding Pineapples cannot be manually placed directly on the track. Therefore, unlike in predecessors, this upgrade is the only source of Exploding Pineapples in BTD6.