User:Stupac2/advanced

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Stat days

Stat days do not exist any more (during Ronin)! Shocking. The stat bonus depends on your moon sign now, so this will be covered down there.

How do you know when there’s a stat day coming? Check the calendar.

Moon signs

Moon signs are a lot different now, in that the main thing to consider is which class you're ascending as. You want to pick a sign that matches your mainstat, and each old "stat sign" has one that gives a bonus to each class. I'll go through them below, ranking in order of preference. But first, a bit about the general zones:

  • Degrassi Knoll: Able to buy meatcar, able to turn NPZR head into a clockwork maid easily, free skirt for infiltrationist. Able to buy mushroom plot for 5k that generates mushrooms (useful for grue egg, pasta dishes). The free untinkerer isn't very useful because you're pulling the Legion Knife anyway.
  • Little Canadia: Not much. The food store is almost never useful, and the extra 1 ML on the MCD isn't really meaningful. Need to pay 5k for bus pass. Needs a pull to pass infiltrationist easily (usually clockwork maid).
  • The Gnomish Gnomads' Camp: Instantly passes middle gate, saving a pull. However, like myst sign needs a pull for infiltrationist. So pulls are a wash. Need 5k before you can set MCD (or maybe a pumpkin).

Muscle

None of these are inspiring at all. Just warning you.

  • The Mongoose: 20% weapon damage isn't very useful, but the Knoll is generally the best and no other sign comes close to overcoming that.
  • The Wombat: If you can't ascend into a Knoll sign for some reason, 20% meat is somewhat useful, but not enough to overcome the Gnome's disadvantages.
  • The Platypus: While +5 familiar weight may be useful, it's not worth a pull, which is what myst sign costs you.

Myst

  • The Blender: +5 turns is a bunch of turngen, and Gnome sign only costs 5k versus Knoll sign. Except perhaps in challenges, which will move this down.
  • Wallaby: Again, 20% spell damage isn't very useful, but Knoll signs are generally the best.
  • The Opossum: +5 turns is a bunch of turngen, but why would you go Opossum instead of Blender? No reason, that's why (unless you're teet, I guess this could be best for SCT, but I'd expect Wallaby to win).

Moxie

Finally, a really interesting one. For some reason moxie signs got the really good ones.

  • The Vole: Starting with 50 MP is sweet (that's what you get with a full suite of +MP stuff). But the main draw is still the Knoll sign.
  • The Marmot: An extra clover per day. In longer runs (3+ days) this is almost certainly a clear winner. Sure, it costs you a pull and 5k, but you're probably pulling those clovers anyway. Whether this is better than Vole in 2-days (or challenges) is really, really debatable.
  • The Packrat: 10% items, while useful, isn't super useful. There's not really any time when you'd go Packrat instead of Marmot.

Combat Modifiers

Combat modifiers are anything that affect the appearance rate of non-combats. They exist in two types:

  • -Combat: These increase the rate of non-combats (decrease the rate of combats).
  • +Combat: These increase the rate of combats (decrease the rate of non-combats).

Combat modifiers are a tricky beast (for reasons we’ll get to shortly), and probably deserve their own page. But since this is an ascension guide and not a guide to the detailed mechanics of KoL, I’m going to pass the buck and link to the Combat Frequency page, and let a spade explain it here. Instead I’ll focus on when to use them.

The important stuff to note for an ascender is that there are some encounters that appear to be non-combats, but that are actually in a separate class called “superlikelies”. The superlikely mechanic is used when a non-combat wouldn’t work for some reason, and most of them aren’t affected by combat modifiers (though some are). For example, the quest “non-combats” in The Oasis and The Arid, Extra-Dry Desert are actually flat-rate superlikelies, so running -combat here is a total waste of resources. To that end, you should go to the link above and see which adventures are superlikelies that are unaffected by combat modifiers, and not run them during those times.

In short, you want to run -combat in any zone that has a non-combat you want to get and they’ll actually help you get. There are plenty of places, some include The Middle Chamber or The Cyrpt. You want to run +combat in any zone that has non-combats you want to avoid, but you still need to adventure in. Examples include the Harem, The F'c'le, and Sonofa Beach.

Delay() makes this even more problematic, however (if you don’t know, delay() is the name of the function that makes certain encounters unavailable for 5 turns). There are places with non-combats you want as well as some you don’t want, and the ones you want have a delay on them, so running -combat will, for an amount of time that you can’t determine, only get you more of the ones you don't want. One example of this is searching for the wheel in the Castle. What you do in those situations is to not run -combat, or even to run +combat, for the 5 turns).

Again, you should go to the AFH forum link and read that list to understand what adventures can’t be affected by +/-combat. And if this all seems confusing, it’s because it is confusing. But following the general rule of thumb of, “Use -combat in any zone with a non-combat you want that’s not a superlikely” is pretty close to optimal.

Combat modifiers are an extremely important part of speed ascending. You should always pull a ring of conflict and also a NPZR chemistry set if you can afford it. The NPZR set provides potions that increase and decrease combat frequency at 20 turns apiece. Since they are not shruggable (except through sgeeas), you should try to group together locations where you want +combat and others where you want -combat. Furthermore, the set also provides irritability potions, which increase monster level...

Monster Level and You

On its face Monster Level is pretty easy to understand, it defines how hard monsters are to fight. Increasing monster level through equipment or buffs will cause the monsters you fight to be harder. The upside to this is that harder monsters give more stats, 1 extra stat for every 4 extra ML. So by wearing as much ML as possible, you will level faster.

The difficulty here is the difficulty, increasing ML makes fights significantly harder. There are three main components of surviving high ML, getting the jump, killing the monster, and healing afterward (at very high ML you won’t even get the jump, ever). Getting the jump is a function of unbuffed mainstat and initiative modifiers, such as Fusilli and Self Preservation. Killing the monster only requires noodles and shieldbutt, and healing is basically just cocoon. However, there are a lot of ancillary skills that help. Fortitude and power ballad give extra HP, the shells provide DA/ER, salve lets you take a bit more damage in combat, and of course Aria actually boosts ML.

A modest amount of ML, around 25 or so (sickle and MCD) is fairly easy to survive with just noodles and shieldbutt. Increasing it more and more will require a bit more experience and skill, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it it stops being terribly difficult (combat at ~70 ML is trivial for high-skill players). Try some out and see how you do with it, and as you get more skills throw more and more on. You’ll find your progress speeding up appreciably once you’re piling on as much ML as you can get.

Juju Mojo Mask

The Juju Mojo Mask isn't that complicated, but here's how to use it. On your first combat you want to summon your mainstat god to get the proper intrinsic effect. The easiest way to do this is with your class's 0-MP combat skill. If you're moxie you can also use a combat item, and as myst you can use entangling noodles. After you've summoned your mainstat one, just keep it on for the majority of the run. If you're muscle or myst you can use the skill in combat to take down a hard monster or a boss, but you usually shouldn't need to.

The only thing to really note about the skills is that the moxie one, Gaze of the Trickster god, can let you kill tower monsters pretty easily. Here's how. Get a heavy potato (bugbear with balaclava and hatrack with spangly sombrero both act as potatoes), a navel ring (don't worry if you pulled GAP instead, that has its own advantage), and a blocking familiar in the CoT (I use the spooky pirate skeleton). That should give you a 97.5% block rate (provided the potato is 60 lbs, which it should be if you're using a bugbear). Go into combat with the trickster god active. First round cast noodles, second cast wrath of the trickster. If you're unsure of your blocking you get some finger cuffs, one game grid token gets 10 of them. Use finger cuffs after casting trickster, which will likely reactivate Gaze of the Trickster in case you have to kill another tower monster. You should not have to worry about being hit because finger cuffs give a warning the turn before the monster is able to attack (tears the finger cuffs to pieces). Therefore, you have time to use another set of finger cuffs. Other stuns can prolong your noodles and finger cuffs (wrath of the lightning god, boomboxes from the war). Your bigger worry should be killing the monster within the 30 round limit.

After casting trickster you just need to wait until round 24 or so, then start doing damage. The easiest way is with hobo spells, but saucegeyser or some other big spell can work too. If you're doing that pump up spell damage as much as possible, you should be able to do a lot per hit just with things on hand (foldable staff, navel ring, Tobiko marble soda, etc). If you don't have a big spell you'll need to figure out how much damage you can do per round, and then when you need to start doing it (remember that the remaining HP in round N will be 100,000*.85^(N-1), so it's easy to figure out from there). If you're using GAP and have a leftover charge, you can use super skill so that you can immediately start spamming hobo spells after using the finger cuffs. This will cut down the number of rounds per combat.

A more detailed description of tower killing can be found here.

VCrisis

VCrisis stands for "V for Vivala mask critical hit stasis", and is a way of attempting to maximize your stat gain per combat. The V mask provides 1-3 substats per combat, plus an additional 4 substats if you kill the monster with a critical hit. So the idea is to boost ML as high as you can, so that normal attacks will never hit the monster, then use auto-hit attacks (such as shieldbutt or spells) to weaken it until a single critical hit will kill, then keep attacking with your weapon until you get a critical. The difficulty is that monsters will be hitting you the whole time, so if the RNG is fickle and takes a long time to give a critical, you can take quite a bit of damage. The navel ring mitigates that somewhat, but doesn’t provide enough stats to justify wearing if you’re going all-out (which you have to be to justify using Vcrisis).

However, beginning players don’t need to worry about doing this, it’s a strategy only used by players truly attempting to eke out every last stat from every combat.

Additionally, this strategy was deprecated with the juju mojo mask. The juju provides more stats/turn and allows you to kill tower monsters (saving pulls). However, certain runs will benefit from still using the Vivala mask extensively, generally for the turngen (it's +10 turns/day if you can actually manage to crisis out all the turns) and the pickpocketing (this is worth a few turns at the filthworms alone). Note that the +1 turn and pickpocket effects will not occur if the critical kills the monster, since the +stat effect takes precedence. Again, these things only really matter at the margins, so unless you're attempting an all-out speed run it's not generally worth doing.

Semirares

Semirares are adventures that trigger at a specific time and override (nearly) every other type of encounter. They provide items that are among the best in their class, there’s no food better than a knob pasty. They’re often overlooked by newer players, and for good reason. It takes 1 fullness to eat a fortune cookie, then you have to track all those numbers to make sure you’re in the right area at the right time. Besides, you can just pull most of them, and in four days there are plenty of spare pulls.

All of those points are valid, but Mafia makes it easy to track semirares, and I always do it. However, semirares are expensive to buy, learning how to deal with them is good practice for actual speed runs, and saving pulls is always a good idea. So once your runs start to regularly last under 1000 turns, you should be tracking and getting your semirares.

How? It’s simple, eat the damn cookie. Each fortune cookie you eat gives 3 numbers, one of which is the number of turns until your next semirare. You can eat another cookie and learn for sure, or use your outside knowledge to narrow down the possibilities. Semirares in a no-path run occur 160-200 adventures apart after the very fist, and the first one occurs 70-80 turns after ascending, so any numbers outside that range can be excluded. Frequently this will leave only one left, but if it leaves more just try them all. The one word of warning is that the semirare counter has to be set by adventuring somewhere that uses adventure.php before cookies will give a sensible reading. That means you shouldn’t eat a cookie at turn 0, or immediately after getting a semirare. Adventure a few times to make sure the counter got set.

Which semirares should I get? The following are the most worth getting:

Which you get depends on how many total semirares you’ll get and what your most pressing needs are. I usually get Ascii and an inhaler or eyedrops, but with 3 or 4 I’d get KGE, Ascii, and inhaler/eyedrops.

What’s an oxydrop? A totally outdated strategy that was based on a bug. You used to be able to start a run as an Oxy sign, then drop Oxy after hitting adventure.php to get the 100-120 semirare range. Now all paths start with the same 70-80.

Spooky Putty

Few IOTMs change the game as much as the spooky putty sheet did. It allows you to, five times per day, make a copy of a monster to fight again later. This is an incredibly powerful tool that needs to be used as well as possible. I’m going to list the monsters you would generally target in a 3-day run before explaining what makes a good target and what doesn’t.

  • Ghost: A great day-1 target on a 3-day run. If you fax in a ghost, putty it 5 times and have +150% item drops throughout, you'll get the digital key without even having to equip the continuum transfunctioner. However, if you pull the Antique 8-Bit Power magazine and have Olfaction and/or banishers, you should putty something else.
  • Bad ASCII Art: A semirare adventure that drops all 4 orc chasm scrolls, puttying this guy a few times lets you collect several sets of scrolls, which allows you to build 31337 scrolls for stats, clovers, and trinkets.
  • Rampaging adding machine: If you’re making more than a few scrolls, odds are you’ll need more than one adding machine. Save a putty use for the a machine and you only need to find one, rather than two.
  • Skeletal sommelier/Possessed wine rack: When puttied these guys can drop all six bottles of wine rather than just 3. It can potentially save a few turns if you have a huge +item percentage (300% is enough to guarantee they all drop).
  • Lobsterfrogman: Everyone’s least favorite part of the game is Sonofa Beach, but save four putty uses and you’ll only need to find 1 lobsterfrogman, rather than all 5.
  • Dirty thieving brigand: If you collect enough meat from the nuns as a hippy for one more turn to finish the sidequest, then fight the last brigand from the putty dressed as a frat, you can get credit for the nuns before fighting a turn on the battlefield. This saves you 8 turns compared to doing the nuns on time as a frat.
  • BRICKO bat/Mini-Hipster combat: the idea here is that these fights don't take a turn, so they're basically free stats. On longer runs (>3-day) or when you're playing a very short day there might be no better targets some days. Go for these.

From those examples you can see that there are basically two times you want to use the putty, when you want a monster with a small chance of appearing, or when you’re fighting monsters in a way the game typically doesn’t allow. Dairy goats or tomb rats, on the other hand, are a bad use of a putty, as they have a 33% chance of appearing, and with olfaction are basically guaranteed to appear. Or you can use other manipulators, like Creepy Grin or a Divine champagne popper, to get the rate up. And monsters like the Gaudy pirate are also typically a poor choice, as you only need to encounter it once after the initial encounter, so the putty will only save a small number of turns.

However, in a four-day run you have five additional uses, and so may use some marginal ones without worrying about not being able to use it more efficiently. One of these marginal uses is to collect lucre, the sheet makes many of the lucre assignments much easier.

Fax Machine

Crimbo 2010's most loved and loathed item is A Fax Machine. The mechanic, simultaneously insanely powerful, incredibly interesting, and intensely frustrating is the biggest game-changer since the he-boulder. It allows you to fight any copyable monster in the game once/day (I'm not going to explain how it works, if you don't know look here. The frustrating part is that you need to get that monster into a fax machine you can access, which is highly nontrivial. Fortunately some handsome and briliant dudes made faxbot, which will send you any relevant monster.

Okay, so how do you use it? The list of targets (in softcore, at least) is basically the same as the list of monsters to putty. ASCII (if for some reason you can't putty it), adding machine, ghost, lobsterfrogman, etc. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that lobsterfrogman, which saves you 3 turns (the first one, at least). Since in softcore you have +20% combat max, but generally don't unset the song, that means 4 turns to get 1 frogman, compared to 1 from the fax. So generally you want to look for uses that save more than 3 turns.

The difficulty here is that each run is going to be incredibly different. Ghosts make a lot of sense on day 1 of a 3-day, but do they make sense on a 2-day? It saves a pull and couple of turns, but ASCII would give you a bunch of clovers, each of which save 2 turns. Comparing the two is tricky, since ASCII is dependent on your adding machine arrival. You could use a fax on an adding machine day 2, and sniff it so it'll show up somewhat faster, or you could only copy ascii enough to make all your scrolls with 1 machine, but then you're using two faxes on this.

See what I mean? It's pretty complicated. After people get a chance to do some runs we'll have a better idea of what works and what doesn't, so hopefully in a little while we'll have a better idea of what you should do.

Free runaways and Banishers

Free runaways, if you have access to them, are another resource that must be used judiciously to get as much value as possible from them. There are a few things that give free runaways, the Navel ring, Greatest American Pants, Bandersnatch, and Stomping boots, as well as tattered scraps (which you won’t have many of), and Bottle of Blank-Out, which you'd need to pull. The Navel ring and GAP share a free runaway counter: 100% chance that the first three runaways of each day will be free, 80% chance of successfully getting free runaways #4-6, 50% chance of successfully getting free runaways #7-9, and a 20% chance of a free runaway on any future combats. Therefore, you should only pull one of these, and the GAP is recommended because it has useful buffs, such as +item drop and works nicely with the bander. Similarly, the bander and the stomping boots share a runaway counter: one free runaway for every 5 pounds of weight on the familiar (rounded down). The key to using these effectively is to use them in an area that has weak monsters you don’t want to fight, but where you still need to adventure. Good examples are The Spooky Forest (mosquito and hidden temple parts), Degrassi Knoll (screwdriver), and The Haunted Pantry (manor unlock).

The bander, combined with GAP, can quickly reach 20 pounds of unbuffed weight. By using Super Skill, element tuning from Flavour of Magic, and an elemental monster, you can spend 29 rounds firing off 1 damage Stuffed Mortar Shells, with the bander gaining 2 exp each time, before finishing it off on round 30. This means the bander should be your runaway familiar of choice later in the day.

However, the Stomping Boots are very useful for areas where you want to run away from most monsters but need an item drop from the monster that you're looking for. An example of this is the Goatlet, where you want guarantee goat cheeses from the Dairy goats, but runaway from the other two monsters. You can also stomp the other monsters for Beastly paste, which will let you fill you spleen and also get a nice +3 familiar weight buff. Note that Stomping does take an adventure and the monster won't give any items or stats, but there are plenty of monsters who drop items you don't need, and the pastes themselves give stats to compensate.

Runaways are pretty plentiful nowadays, and making the lab key drop from the Knob Goblin King frees up a day’s uses. This means that you’re free to focus your runaways on places that were less valuable previously. Low-level places such as The Inexplicable Door and The Haunted Billiards Room now may make good targets, and possibly some higher-level but annoying places (The Orc Chasm, The F'c'le) as well. Another good use for runaways is extending buffs by running from monsters you don’t want to fight with those buffs, for instance Tomb asps or tomb servants.

Similar to free runaways are banishers, items that prevent a monster from appearing in a zone for several turns. These are Creepy Grin, divine champagne poppers, and Harold's Bell, (though you never get Harold’s bell in an ascension, and it costs a turn to use). You generally want to use these in places with few monsters, but only one (or two) you want to fight repeatedly. Examples are the sabre-toothed goat, tomb asps and tomb servants, the A.M.C. gremlin, and others. Also, olfaction helps tremendously, as it’s what you want to be using in some of these scenarios, freeing up the banishing items to be used in situations where you don’t want to fight a monster, such as the aforementioned A.M.C. gremlin, or a War Hippy (space) cadet, to make getting the War Hippy Fatigues more likely. Note that banishing a monster will not make non-combats more likely, because the game first decides if your adventure will be a combat or non-combat, then picks from the list of available monsters if combat is chosen.

There are undoubtedly other equally good or better uses for these resources, but any use will be along these lines.

Olfaction

Transcendent Olfaction is probably the most powerful skill in the game. Using it against a given monster in combats provides the effect On the Trail, drastically increasing the chances of encounter that monster in that zone (the way it works is by adding 15 or 16 copies of the monster to the zone, see here for details). The one difficulty with it is it’s unshruggable and lasts for 40 turns, meaning you need to plan out when you use it early in a run. This becomes less of a problem after the airship, when the soft green echo eyedrop antidotes from the Quiet Healer let you remove the effect at will.

The monsters you generally want to target for olfaction are ones that you’d like to see again multiple times. There’s some overlap here with putty, but olfactions is much more flexible as you don’t have to fight the monster again, meaning you can use it on monsters that you want to see again, but don’t absolutely need to. It’s also useful for monsters you need to see several times, such as dairy goats, but that make poor targets for the limited-use putty. The list below should give you some idea of the types of monsters you want to sniff.

Mafia

KoL Mafia is an incredibly useful tool for playing KoL. It has a huge number of features, including logging, automation, and enchanced gameplay, so I’m just going to mention a few here.

Relay Browser: The relay browser is basically the same as normal KoL, but with tons of enhancements, including choice adventure spoilers, semirare logging, quest completion tracking (flyered ML, item numbers, etc), and more. Plus all greasemonkey scripts still work, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Counters: By using the CLI command "counters add X name", where X is the turn duration, mafia will add a counter to remind you to do something at that time. Useful for counting turns until liver, shore trips, and others, I find that feature to be very helpful.

Logging: By default mafia saves session logs, which you can go back and look through at later times to figure out how you’ve improved, or you can use it to look at other people’s logs to see what they do differently. You want to use Flolle’s ascension log visualizer, an incredibly impressive tool for examining these logs. To make it work check every option except "Log adventures left instead of adventures used" in the "Session Log" section of mafia’s preferences.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but mafia is such a powerful tool that I highly recommend using it.

Roadmap

The guide continues with the Roadmap.

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