User:Strongbadfanex

Hi. I'm StrongbadfanEX (#752518) in the Kingdom of Loathing. I've been a long time player of seven years. I would describe myself as a journeyman speed ascender. I'm currently working on a basic Softcore speed guide. I've noticed that no one has comprehensively made one in the years since NS-13.

Introduction

Speed ascension's core is right there in the name- speed. The goal: cutting both day and turn count in order to ascend more often and efficiently. Your personal goals may differ, and it's important to define them. Do you want to accrue lots of karma in the after-life to perm skills? Are you trying to acquire trophies or fill out your Collector's Score at a faster pace? Or are you merely looking for recognition and e-peen? No matter your long term goals, however, this guide will help you to achieve them by giving you a detailed instruction of the so-called “speed game.”

Make no mistake: competitive speed play is expensive. Perhaps excessively so. A lot of cutting-edge speed strategy relies on a massive toolbox of past Mr. Store familiars, summons, and items that can take literally years to acquire through pure meat farming. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, most players who contemplate the speed game drop a lot of real world currency into the game through donations, in order to sell them off for meat. Not all of these items are strictly necessary, but almost all of them help cut turns, even if it’s just one or two turns per run!

However, I'll try my best in this guide to keep the "fundamentals" of speed ascension as basic as possible. The early focus of this guide, at least, is to get the reader into the general ideas and flow of speed ascending, and even the most basic approaches to adventure and item management can ensure some extra speed. But to achieve leaderboard quality runs takes meat, money, or connections, or some combination thereof. However, no amount of meat can buy long term experience, and a deep understanding of game mechanics. But, of course, it’s a game in the end. So don’t forget to have fun. Don’t let the relentless pursuit of speed burn you out; rather, try to approach it with patience and an understanding that with knowledge comes power!

Two Differing Philosophies

There are two differing philosophies at play in softcore, no-path speed ascension: turn generation and turn cutting. Both naturally effect the other, but in general, depending on what you're trying to do to slim down your runs, you'll use different approaches as you develop a skill set.

Turn Generation

Turn generation is usually a fledgling speed ascender's first goal. By carefully engineering a highly effective food, booze and spleen diet, you can generate a lot of adventures each day, easily in excess of 200. Thus diet is one of the key fundamentals of turn generation strategy. This is arguably the easiest approach to shaving days off a run.

Turn Cutting

Turn cutting is a more advanced strategy concerned with spending as few turns as possible, and focusing on pulls from Hagnk's that reduce the time spent in zones. Stocking Hangks carefully, and to the brim, is key to this philosophy. Therefore, pulls are the key focus of this speed strategy.

Hangks, His Blowgn Off Arm, And You

Pulls used for turn cutting can generally be classified a few different ways: "direct" turn cutting (such as pulling the ores for the Trapper Quest) ensures that you spend fewer or no turns in specific areas. "Diffuse" turn cutting is more interesting and far more complicated; by using certain game mechanics, you can reduce the time spent in any zone. These types of pulls include the concepts of free runaways, banishing, "yellow raying", and olfaction.

Equipment is Everything

Adventuring isn’t just about location, location, location: it’s also about gear, gear, gear. This emphasis is important. Picking effective gear matters, and as you acquire more of it, so does knowing when to use what gear when.

Having an Effective Buff Strategy

There’s a reason that early skill-picking is an important part of the speed game: permed skills, passives, and buffs are fundamental to picking up speed in your runs. A Level 1, first ascension Pastamancer is an entirely different beast than one with even just ten ascensions under their belt.

Semi-Rare Planning and You

! Oxygenarians, due to their reduced turn count, are able to get a semi-rare every 100 to 120 turns instead of the normal 160 to 200. Speed players used to exploit this difference by starting their runs as Oxygenarians and then dropping the restriction, keeping their increased semi-rare occurrence in the process. However, TPTB removed this strategy by changing frequency when the dietary restriction is dropped.

One of the arguably most finicky ways to shave turns is through the careful planning of your semi-rares. Semi-rare adventures are special adventures that occur on a “semi-random” timer: they occur within 70 to 80 turns of your first day, then every 160 to 200 after that. This variance means that, realistically, most speedy players encounter only three semi-rares per run, but they plan their adventuring carefully around these events. The question is, why? And how can you reliably ensure that you pick up these special adventures in the course of your run?

Most players can agree on three fundamentally useful semi-rares worth finding in any speed run: the Bad ASCII Art in the Valley Beyond The Orc Chasm, the Baa'baa'bu'ran in the Hidden Temple. Luckily, there exists a fool-proof predictor of semi-rare occurrence: the fortune cookie, courtesy of the General Store. One of the “lucky numbers” given by the cookie is always the difference between your current turn in-run and the “value” at which your semi-rare will occur. However, the fortune cookie is food- therefore, it has to be fit into a regular speed ascender’s diet, often more than once.

Clovers, Or “Getting Lucky”

! Prior to NS-13, clovers were limitless, making strategies like this pointless!

The precursor to the semi-rare adventure, clovers, obtainable from the Hermitage in the mountains, are one of the easiest ways to acquire extremely helpful adventures and items. Here are some uses for clovers in run to improve your speed: The Skeleton Normally, this dice-rolling game in the Naughty Sorceress quest is frustratingly difficult, but by having a clover on hand, you can easily skip waiting for the dice roll and avoid taking damage. Blessed box By pasting a ten-leaf clover to a large box, you get a blessed box: a large box with every single potion inside of it. This makes one of the Naughty Sorceress’s gates trivial, as long as you carefully avoid the drunkenness potion invariably contained within.