Hardcore Strategy

General Tips

• Don't rest. Heal and spend any Beaten Up turns in a low level area where you still need a drop. Alternatively, visit the "gym" or level up your familiars at the Arena. Soda water from the market is useful for restoring mp to save turns. Boost your moxie with hair spray so that you get hit less;It's definitely worth the 8 meat per turn.
• Become good friends with Doc Galaktik. His Ailment Ointment offers the best heal/value. If for some reason you cannot afford to buy healing items, spend a few turns in an easy area that you still need an item drop from with a restoring familiar (ghuol whelp, starfish, raincloud).
• Plan ahead. Keep track of what drops you need and what area they come from.
• Adventure while the area is still your level. Don't skip an area you need a drop from, or you'll be wasting turns later where you could get more stats from better monsters.
• Complete quests on stat days. Using things like the meat globe, stat script, and Chest of the Bonerdagon are best saved for a nearby stat day. (What about quests like

Defender of the Gourd and Stat boosts at the market? In softcore these are not worthwhile - what about hardcore?)

• Any stat boosts are good stat boosts. When you have next to nothing, anything helps. Assemble any stat boosting accessories you can with what parts you have. (In particular I find the item list at Coldfront [1] very helpful for giving a rundown of what items are available near my stat level that I could equip or make. In particular, items like the Knollish Autoplunger or the Dripping Meat staff are fairly easy to make at low levels but relatively powerful.
• Avoid the gym. Stats are best gained by adventuring. Using the gym doesn't give you nearly as many stat points as adventuring well.
• Befriend the autosell. As a general rule, if you have more than two of something that's not a food/booze ingredient, healing or combat item, or similarly useful, it's a good idea to autosell all but one. It's also a good idea to autosell your old weapons without stat boosts, for example the viking helmet. Also consider autoselling stat-lowering foods and drinks such as Imp Ale or ghuol guolash (this is not the time to go for a trophy).
• Be a bounty hunter. The Bounty Hunter Hunter is often overlooked, but sometimes he'll be buying items you have. Just be sure to follow the guidelines above so you don't sell something you'll need later.
• Take advantage of Clover Days. Many benefits can be gained from ten-leaf clovers. If you are in dire need of meat for a skill or item, you can use clovers at the Treasury, but this requires adventuring without stat gains. Clovers can also be used to obtain cooking ingredients including spices, can get booze, or extra stat gains. If you are going to need clovers in the next several days, stock up on them because you never know if the next day will be a clover day or not. (Also consider ascending as a Marmot where you can get free clovers sometimes).

Oxygenarian

• Autosell your food. Just be careful that you don't need it for a quest later on.
• Autosell your booze. Unless you're stocking up for some reason.
• Increase your daily turns by any means necessary. Assemble a meat maid, collect a dead guy's watch, put together your pagoda.
• Don't Adventure! Since nothing you can do will raise your number of adventures (unlike other paths that could find food or booze they can use), let them accumulate until a stat day comes. Unless you get more than 50 adventures per rollover, that means that you should never be adventuring on non-stat days.

Required Item Drop Planning

Items Required for Sorceress' Tower

Drop	Location	Level
Boris's key Jarlsberg's key Sneaky Pete's key	The Daily Dungeon	?
Gnollish pie tin	The Bugbear Bakery or Degrassi Knoll	?
ten-leaf clover	The Hermitage or The Shore, Inc.	?
digital key red pixel potion x5	The Inexplicable Door	?	(You may not need red pixel potions for the shadow if you have combat healing like lasagna bandages)
spider web	The Sleazy Back Alley	1
razor-sharp can lid	The Haunted Pantry	1
worthless trinket stolen accordion	The Sewer	1
skeleton bone loose teeth	The Misspelled Cemetary	3?
baseball sonar-in-a-biscuit	Guano Junction	3?
disease	The "Fun" House	4?
barbed-wire fence	The Shore, Inc.	4?
tambourine bells	The Hippy Camp	5?
wussiness potion ruby W	The Deep Fat Friars' Gate	7?
acoustic guitarrr	The Obligatory Pirate's Cove	8?
meat vortex lowercase N x2 Tasty Fun Good rice candy	The Valley Beyond the Orc Chasm	8?
frigid ninja stars	Lair of the Ninja Snowmen	9?
photoprotoneutron torpedo metallic A	The Penultimate Fantasy Airship	10?
thin black candle chaos butterfly original G heavy D Angry Farmer candy	The Castle in the Clouds in the Sky	10?
Richard's star key star buckler star starfish (familiar) star crossbow, staff, or sword	The Hole in the Sky	10?

The Hermit humbly requests that this page be rewritten or expanded.