User:Stupac2/advanced roadmap

Speed (3 day)

Previously I said I didn’t have the sanity to do a proper 3-day walkthrough. It’s been many months since that writing, and I’m going to give it a shot now. Pull list is here. I’m assuming that you have lots of useful skills, as well as any equipment. This is how I typically play, not everything is guaranteed to be good decisions, and not everything is going to be helpful or possible for you. This is for ideas mostly. I’m totally omitting things like casting buffs and summoning items, unless it’s particularly relevant. You know when to do that. I also assume you know what everything I’m saying means, so no wiki links or outside references (unless they haven’t been linked before). This is intended for people who know the game really well but aren’t sure how to do a real speed run.

Before you run

• There are some critical decisions to make pre-run, one of the main ones is whether to use a haiku katana or an ice sickle. My personal preference is the sickle for myst runs and the katana otherwise, although muscle runs suffer from a dearth of ML (no gown, which is sad because they can equip it early).
• Another is whether or not to pull quadroculars. I’m not a fan of that pull on 3-day runs, since it increases your number of rays from 5 to 7 (or so), and the utility of the 6th and 7th rays is pretty marginal.
• Check the BHH every day. If there’s an airship bounty on days 1 or 2, that’s free lucre, which is free good food or booze with good side effects.

Day 1

• The first thing is to pull your gear and a crimbo rations. Use the rations, see what they yield. I typically pull another one if I get two food, and am hesitant to if I get two booze, but frequently do anyway. The buff is insanely helpful.
• Time to do some buffering. This is doing anything that doesn't use adventure.php in order to avoid setting your semirare counter. Hitting ascii in time for your first semirare is hugely important, we want to maximize the odds of that.
  • Hit the lucky sewer, then your guild. If you’re particularly uncertain about hitting it in time shore 4 times, saving the last one in order to get whatever shore item you need (since your perfect scope tells you).
• Buy some spleen items from the market, use them to hit level 2. Burn through runaways (bander as well as navel, if you have to) in the spooky forest until you get the mosquito.
  • Eat/drink rations as it fits into your diet. Drinking 2 booze works well, then you can drink 2 tavern booze for 14, and have one tavern left as a nightcap. Eating works best with either 1 or 2, 1 + 3 pies or 2 + 2 pies + 1 cookie. 2 pies shifts a pull to day 2 or 3, which can be helpful (day 1 is the tightest).
  • You should be level 4 now. Buff up, before this it would have been a waste of MP. Typically I use dictionary meat for this, although katana MP gotten during runaways is also good.
    • What buffs do you cast? Ur-kel’s and antiphon are generally musts. I also cast leash, empathy, power ballad (shrugged for phat loot or whatever as it comes up), rage, springy, fortitude, and astral. The more marginal the skill the more questionable or unnecessary casting it is, use your discression.
• Hit the tavern, do it.
• Once you finish hit guano junction, get your sonars. Grin the bodyguards, fight the boss bat with radio at 4 for the britches.
• Burn more runaways opening the knob, ray the harem girl, kill the king.
• Putty some bloopers. You can also sniff if you want to farm the whole key (or just get to 22 pixels so one pie finishes, you only get 18 from the putty).
• At this point you’re probably level 6, but if not start opening the manor. If you have runaways left burn them in the pantry, after they’re gone just fight.
• Once you’re level 6 stop everything, pull and eat your pies, and drink the tavern nightcap. If you have any remaining pulls use them, and wait for tomorrow.
  • Eat the offstat pies, the mainstat ones are for stat days.

Day 2

• The goal of day 2 is to hit level 9 in time for ascii art. That’s basically it, anything else is gravy.
• Now seems like a good time to talk about cocktailcrafting stuff. You want to making all your own booze (bartender is a day-1 pull, after all), but sometimes exactly how is questionable. Bungles are really nice because you get 4-6 from a single pull, they give truly crazy stats, and they’re made with rum, which is super-easy to get from the barrr. However, LPU screw is very common and sometimes you just don’t have the LPUs to make pulling bananas worthwhile. If you’re moxie class just ray a hippy immediately on day 2 and you’ll be fine, since rum can make SHCs with coconuts or ice cubes (which you obviously have since you don’t have LPUs). If you’re not moxie the decision is a bit more complicated since you’re stuck with ACs, and one rum AC needs an LPU anyway (so if you get only coconuts you’re screwed). Exactly what to do in that position is an interesting question that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader (speed runs are typically moxie anyway).
• Day 2 starts with opening the ballroom (and the gallery if you’re muscle). You want to do this asap so you can have the –combat song on for the friars and the cyrpt.
  • How the crap do you get into the bedroom at level 6? If you rayed a hippy it’s damn near trivial, since that gives +150% mainstat (not like you’re using those reagents for anything, certainly not 15 milks). Otherwise try to get a tomato from the pantry, use that with scope buff and market buff, plus whatever hearts you have, and any other +stat gear you can throw on (jrs or jeks work in a pinch). This is easiest as muscle since V and haiku give 45% on their own, and hardest as moxie since moxie gets nothing.
    • You may have to burn some runaways if you don’t have the hippy stand open, since you NEED to open this once you use those buffs, and they run out in 10 turns. If you get to 5 turns left and haven’t hit the wooden nightstand once, start using them.
• Once you open the ballroom set the song (this is pretty easy after the bedroom). If you’re moxie feel free to sniff waltzers while you’re there, and taking the noncoms isn’t a bad idea either (although they’d give more stats later). Don’t use dance cards though.
• Once you get that set do the friars, then the cyrpt.
• Pay attention to your offstats (or mainstat as they case may be). At 35 myst pull the hockey stick (or two), and at 40 muscle pull the gown (unless it’s a muscle run, gowns are 0-10 ML on muscle).
• Also pay attention to your semirare counter. Make sure to continuously monitor how many stats/turn you need to hit level 9 in time and that you’re getting them, make sure you have the dictionary (you should, since you shored day 1).
  • If you’re not going to hit it, break away from the cyrpt to powerlevel. If you’re lucky enough to have the LPUs for bungles hit the barrr for 3 rum or so and chug those bungles, that’s better than a clover at this point and should only take a few turns. If you get desperate you can eat without milk (if you rayed a hippy you probably can’t ray a miner yet, unless you pulled quadroculars), but food won’t get you a ton of stats (a couple of combats worth).
  • If things get truly desperate pull a clover or two. See why opening your leveling zone early was so important?
• Once you’re level 9 putty ascii 4 times, saving one for an adding machine. This means you’ll have 5 of each scroll (10 334s). Running +item while hunting for the machine is at your discretion, it might be useful for the lowercase n and the chance at another 31337 scroll. But the two +item familiars you’d be using (pixie or slimeling) both attack, and can kill your machine before you’re ready. Plus running +item means less +ML, which means fewer scrolls made as well.
• After finishing the valley go back and finish the goatlet, make milk, eat (3 pies, cookie, filler is reasonable, 3 cookies, a ration food, and being careful about remembering to eat the cookie tomorrow is too).
• After that powerlevel until 10, then do the airship and castle. No tricks here except be careful about sniffing. I tend to sniff the healer since the random encounters doesn’t actually drop sgeeas (I’ve heard myths that they do, but I’ll be damned if I ever get more than 3 from sniffing them). The extra 50% native drop rate helps one hell of a lot more than the few extra substats, since you need to run a lot less +item to get reasonable rates.
  • Be careful about this, however, because you might need an NS item here. It always sucks to see one of those in your scope, think, “well that’s trivial to get” and then not get it because you never fought the monster. Especially if the rest of your tower sucks.
  • Don’t do the HitS. Get out of the castle after the first wheel.
  • Try to get 3 candles for the +meat demon, but if you don’t there are worse things. Don’t hunt for them. Although if they’re all you need from the castle sniffing a goth giant might be a good plan (after you get a D, assuming you got the rest of the wand).
• After the castle finish up the barrr, and the f’c’le if you’re so inclined.
• Do as much of the MacGuffin as you can, I usually finish right as I’m done with the black forest.

Day 3

• Day 3 is really boring. I’m not joking, I could just write “Finish the MacGuffin, do the war, kill the NS.” There aren’t many, if any, tricks that a player of even moderate experience doesn’t know.
• The MacGuffin is entirely straightforward. There aren’t many real decisions here except timing on things. I don’t ever bother spending turns to get things like the ketchup hound, stunt nuts, or drum machine, just pull them if they don’t drop naturally.
  • I usually save the bosses for fliering.
• Once you’re “done” with the macguffin (the Pyramid is visible and all bosses are up) break out those clovers and hit level 12. Start the war however you choose to do it (by which I mean pull the frat suit or ray for it, if you fight as a hippy on a 3-day run I’ll smack you). Grab fliers, do the sidequests blah blah blah.
  • One thing to note is that creepy grining the cadet hippy is a decent idea to get some hippy outfit pieces for the nuns, the officer has twice the drop rate.
  • You probably want to do the interspersed filthworm/tomb rat trick. Kill the MacGuffin bosses, pull/use a ratchet, sniff a rat, do the filthworms (use the mega +item stuff like eyedrops only after the first gland is in-hand), then got back to get your ratchets.
  • Kill Ed, do the junkyard, do the beach. Make sure not to screw up your puttying, many an ascender have paid for that.
  • Do the nuns immediately, as long as you have the pulls or have the outfit already (you really should be able to). Make sure to use all the +meat you can, don’t forget stuff like winklered or polka or the meat demon or cranberry cordial or foldables or lab stuff or corsican’s etc.
  • I usually kill the queen right after finishing the nuns, for extra meat (not that you need it, it just seems such a waste to let those buffs rot in the battlefield).
• No tricks from here on out, if you’ve made it you know it.
  • Do remember to do things like check ! potions ahead of time though, saves a few turns. Also note that the ring of teleportitis does work at that gate, so 1/5 chance you only need 1 pull for that infuriating gate.
  • Also remember that with a 60% drop rate mazes are very easy to pickpocket or cracker. Try to PP them as often as you can and burn runaways. The closer you can get your tower to 10 turns (the minimum) the better.
• That’s about it. Like I said, day 3 is boring.

Old 3-Day

I want to give a sample 3-day roadmap, but don't have the sanity to do a proper one. So instead I'm posting my handwritten notes for my 3/570, as well as my parsed log, and the raw logs (first file, second). You should check out the Ascension log visualizer for parsing those logs and providing lots of useful data. Also check out AFH's public logs section for several speed run logs.

Day 1

Hogs contest AT run, woo! Pull gear, equip. Use ration, 2 beans. Damn. Sell dictionary and gem. Lucky sewer, grab trinket, totem, spices. Buy meatcar, wig, 2 skirts, and radio. Set radio to 10. Cast madrigal, open guild.

Shore, barbed wire fence on first go. That means I can shore three times today, only twice tomorrow. Two more shores give basically nothing.

Buy 9 moxie weeds to hit level 2, eat the two giant weeds. Make 10 tonic waters.

Summons: 2 unicorns. Good. Garnishes: 2 cubes and 1 LPU. Decent. Hearts: 2 white, awesome.

Still unbuffed, hit forest. 4 free runaways and I've got my larva.

Casting buffs, 50 turns of all them.

Eat a cookie (two rations means one free full), semirare's at turn 192.

Paste/use maid, buy hammer, pulverize glowing eye. Nuggets, no wad.

Scope: pygment, disease, leftovers, plot hole. I'll probably need to pull at least 2 of those.

Damn, must be overleveled, a regular hit connected. 10 myst, time to put on 2 carnivores. That over-leveled problem is gone... Ugh, didn't have enough MP to noodle and shieldbutt, didn't get a crit so I ran away, no navel ring means it cost a turn. Mistake number 1! Also this HP isn't working out, a shieldbutt would kill in 1 but 1 crit won't. Putting the ring back on. Finally, a gong.

Bat hole - everything's going ok, except making a few mistakes involving underestimating my MP needs in comat. Everything else runs smoothly, able to crisis for the most part (although with the ring).

Outskirts - Got a fire ant from a BBQ team. Only 4 more for a phoenix feather.

Harem - Non-combat gives one outfit piece, I'd like another. Also, not paying attention to my healt gets me beaten up. Time to go open spookyraven. Navel ring is dry, put it off for tomorrow. GRRRRR, 4 non-combats in the harem in a row, moving on from here. Well, one more combat got me veil (already had it), disease (needed for tower) and perfume, so I'll take it.

I need to hit six, and need to do the digital realm, so go there. use creepy grin on a bullet, get a blooper decently fast. I gathered enough other whites for 1 digital pie to absolutely get me there.

Crap, had the MCD on 4 since the boss bat. That's at least 30 lost stats. Bugger.

Pull another crimbo ration, 2 booze 1 food. Drink the booze and the 2 ACs I can make, hit level 6. Pull the off-stat pies and eat. The extra ration cost me a pull, but the good pixel luck gained me one, and since my turn generation is looking iffy (everything's come in under par so far) I pull the corpsetini anyway. That's all 20 pulls. 58 turns played, 45 since buffing. Not too bad considering I only need 2 more shore trips. I'll call this day 1 good, could be better. Several mistakes (beaten up twice, the MCD thing) is what kept it from being very good. Making ASCII will be tight, but if I play it right I should manage, might need some absinthe or a clover or two, but it'll be doable.

Mistakes: - Running out of MP and getting beaten up (or running away for a turn loss) 3 times. - Not using Pickpocket, virtually at all. - Spending a lot of time in the harem when the 8-bit wasn't done. - Not resetting MCD after beating boss bat.

Day 2

I'm really bad at keeping written logs. Which is why I'm writing this after banking turns for the day. But here's the summary:

Today went pretty well. My phoenix feather plan totally worked, until I did 15 slashes and got a roc instead (it goes by most recent). So that was disappointing. But I got some good RNG, quick billiards room, fast AFUE scroll, decent bookshelf, 4-turn bedroom, 5 turns (at most) to song with 2 noncombats first. Getting to nine in time was pretty tough, I was able to crisis with 2 carnivores (for the most part), but the goatlet totally screwed me (0 milks) even though it went pretty fast, and it took me forever to get 3 bottles of rum from the pirates. At that point I was expecting to be screwed.

But once it was clear I'd easily get there I finished up the Friars, then hit the chasm to burn some delay, and got 4 puttied asciis, then didn't have enough HP fighting my first machine and only made 1 scroll. The puttied one wasn't enough so I had to find another. It went pretty quick though. By the time I was done with that (and the random level 9 stat boosters) I was nearly 10, just finished up the cyrpt, killed the bonerdagon, hit the barrr. Barrr was really good to me, a bunch of the stat non-combats got me to 10. Got the 6 insults, beer-pong in one turn.

Then I decided to dry out the navel ring (which I hadn't really yet used). Got the lab key in 1 runaway and the map and sapling with 1 failed and 1 other noncombat. The RNG was being so nice I decided to bank for FoJ rather than tempt its wrath.

Oh, then I used a spare 668 scroll I had and saw, "You lose 168 Cheek." Yeah, don't do that. Basically a negative clover. Sweet!

All in all a great day 2, I hit 10 14 turns later than Kujjie and have basically everything done (need to do F'c'le, but that's it). I only need two pies tomorrow, but unfortunately no spooky mushrooms means no grue egg omlette.

Mistakes: - Using 668 scroll - Almost losing to Adding machine costing me turns (or another 31337 from stuff that had dropped) - Not getting the phoenix feather.

Day 3

Time to cruise. FoJ means fast leveling. 3 Clovers means I have 8 total. hit the airship, doing 1-absinthe the whole time. Takes 30 turns. Castle goes fast, too fast, only 2 candles. Spend 8 more turns looking for another, one stat non-combat probably means it wasn't totally stupid (did this before I saw the clovers). Got plot hole and wand, two fewer pulls. Hit level 11 around turn 300.

F'c'le goes fast. 20-turn poop deck, suck. Did get the "clover" adventure though. Fast belowdeck, no guitar. Decently quick palindome but no hound (did get a stunt). After pulling hound got shelves. Two runaways spent in lab (glad I thought of that before equipping). Fast Oasis unlock.

Took a few turns to get basement, but got to switch song and one stat noncombat. Fast cellar, 4 turns.

Hidden temple goes quick, not too bad (not great either). Find all 5 spirits in first 10 squares, find everything but temple in next 7, temple takes another 6. 24 turns isn't terrible.

Clover for ultrahydrated. UGH, gnassir is taking forever. 18 turns. I love superlikelies. Hit level 12 at turn 421. 2 remaining turns of ultrahydrated yield nothing.

Hippy camp, pickpocket sunglasses. Headband drops. Early nuns guaranteed. Pants dropped, saved pull. Started the war in 8 turns, decent.

Clover oasis again, get rose before I see a blur. Pulling drum. The two Desert ones come decently fast. Pages come fast. Hooks come fast, temple is open.

I've been busy. War was incredibly tight, I had to pull an air. But a luck Hippy food thing and a few frat food things got kabobs, and with 2 feathers that was enough. I got zim merman too, meaning no guitar pull.

NS was clockwork. One minor fuckup was using a stick of dynamite against the pianist (it looks like the firecracker!) and then, of course, getting the mineshaft at number 6. Fortunately I had two scraps and scrapped out, and thanks to mermin and a great tower (2 unknowns I had) I had the spare pull, so it cost me no turns. I even got to pull my whackin' stick for a trivial NS.

3/570, 53 turns better than my previous best. I knew I could do better.