Ascension Strategy

From A KoL Wiki
Revision as of 02:06, 17 May 2009 by imported>Lol wut (so pretty.... now it's not yours anymore! I didn't read all of what was here before)

Stocking Hagnks

The first thing you need to do is prep the ascension. If you’re anything like me when I started ascending, exactly what to stock is something of a mystery. Sure, you know you’ll need equipment, food, and the NS items, but what specifically? And what else? Luckily for you lots of people have thought through this problem and made lists, one of which is here. If you use mafia (which I recommend), there’s even a stocking script available here (note that it contains some expensive things, you can edit those out, or tell mafia not to purchase anything worth over a few k).

You’ll notice that the kinds of things on the list/script are consumables, gear, and some weird stuff (who uses a clockwork pirate head?). All of those things will be explained in the next section on pull strategy.

Pulls

Pulls are what separates HC from SC (well, besides being able to break Ronin). You get 20 per day, and how you use them is what separates a terrible from a good from a great ascender. So, how should you use them?

In general you want to pull things that either save or generate turns. Different people have different yardsticks for when a pull is "worth it", but I find it easier to just go with your gut versus calculating it all out. For instance, is a bartender-in-a-box worth it? If you have Inigo's then it doesn't save you anything, if you don't it could save a considerable number of turns, but only if you're crafting booze in-run. Whether it's a good pull depends heavily on your conditions.

A good yardstick for measuring whether or not a pull is "worth it" is comparing it to a clover or a lunchbox. This only really works for pulls that are directly generating turns or stats, but that's a good number of pulls. The clover generates about 300 stats for 1 turn, and the lunchbox gives you about 25 turns. When discussing potential consumable or stat pulls, speed ascenders usually compare to those metrics. The final metric would be "turns saved", but there's no real hard and fast rule saying "4 turns saved is the minimum" or anything like that. You can simply figure out how many turns your different choices will save, and pull the ones that save the most turns. Those are the three basic types of pulls: generating stats, generating turns, and saving turns. Balancing them against each other is the entirety of pull strategy.

Another example is outfits, there are at least 4 outfits you’ll want over the course of an ascension (harem, mining, pirate, war). Which do you farm and which do you pull? Because the drop rates on these are so low, you want to pull as many as possible. But if you’re just starting out and are pulling lots of food, you might not have room. Which do you give up first? There’s no hard and fast rules, you have to draw your own lines and decide which is more useful to your situation. (Admittedly with the advent of the He-Boulder this is a lot less of an issue with these specific outfits, since you simply ray them. But the general point still stands.)

Unfortunately there’s no magic list of 80 items you should always pull in a 4-day run (or even 60 in a 3-day run), you have to make your own decisions. An example 4-day pull list is available here. Experience is the best teacher, start from there and build your own list.

Looking through that list you’ll see that a lot of it taken up with quest items. The aforementioned outfits, ore for the trapzor, NS items, MacGuffin items, those items will be saving you turns. These items are annoying to farm for some reason or another (not getting stats while you do it, low drop rate, the monster has a low appearance rate, etc), so pulling them to save yourself that time is immensely helpful. What’s the general dividing line between a good pull candidate and a poor one? The ones listed are a good start and are items I always pull, but some of the spare pulls are for items that just won’t drop. Harem stuff, Orc Chasm scrolls, Spooky-Gro fertilizer, items like those that you typically get but sometimes don’t. After a few runs you’ll begin to develop an intuition for what makes a good pull, but the important thing is not to be overwhelmed with the seemingly infinite options. Just pull what feels right. You’ll probably make some mistakes, but that’s how you learn.

The rest of the list is consumables and gear, both of which are discussed in detail later.

Since all ascensions begin with 5 pork gems and you can also sell Crimbo Tree gifts, it is no longer necessary to begin runs by pulling a high autosell item. However, if you are very low skill, you may wish to purchase skills from your guild trainer in-run.

Oh, why do I pull a clockwork pirate skull? Untinker it to get an eyepatch and a clockwork sphere, which can be made into a clockwork maid trivially under a muscle sign. One pull gives an outfit item and at least 16 turns in a 3-day run. If you have a Zombie pineal gland, you can make a Ninja pirate zombie robot head instead, since it gives you a few additional items that you can pulverize or autosell. The pineal gland is reusable, so it is just a one-time cost.

Consumables strategy

KoL is built so that turns are the precious limiting factor. So how do you generate them? That’s a tricky question and varies based on experience and budget. Let’s look at some cases now.

Breaking Ronin

The easiest thing to do as a beginner is to pull a bunch of turncount-generating consumables and try to break Ronin in 4 or 5 days. You don’t need to do this, but it’s simple and effective.

If you go this route you’re definitely going to want Hi meins and SHCs for the later days of the ascension, as well as not-a-pipes or glimmering roc feathers throughout. Pick the Hi mein and SHC that gives the correct mainstat substats, you will gain several stat points from your consumables, and every point is important. You’ll also want to pick your nightcap (the one you overdrink with), personally I use the corpse drinks, as they’re cheap, have high adv/drunk and 6 drunk, and only need to be level 5 in order to use (whereas other good ones are either ridiculously expensive (TPS drinks) or prohibitively high-level (Jar of squeeze, although it could be used after day 1)). And you can’t forget a milk of magnesium, at least until you can make it yourself.

The difficulty here is that this is a lot of pulls per day: 3 meins, 1 milk, 3-4 SHCs, 3 spleen, and 1 nightcap for 11-12 pulls, over half your daily pulls. This constrains you in other ways. Plus figuring out how to whittle down turncount is part of the fun of ascension. I’d recommend running this route initially, at least until you’re comfortable enough with your game plan to start ascending in <900 turns.

Saving turns/pulls

So what do you eat when you’re trying to ascend fast? Some of the food is expensive and you don’t want to pull regularly, things like Uncle Crimbo's Rations and bunch of bananas (for bungle in the jungles). Fortunately, the bulk of your food is key lime pies, which are quite cheap. You always want to eat the Legend key lime pies (to avoid the Daily Dungeon and getting a wand), but the star and digital key lime pies are useful as well. A fast run will want to avoid unnecessary places as much as possible, so definitely eat the star ones. The digital is trickier, and I’ll talk about that in the Spooky Putty section (if you don’t have a putty and go this way just eat enough to get your pixels).

We’ve got your stomach covered, but you still have to pull those pies. Where you reduce pulls is the booze and spleen items. Spleen you can make yourself if you own a spleen familiar (which will be discussed in detail later), and drinks you can make yourself once you perm SHC and AC. However, because booze ingredients are hard to come by, you’re forced to either pull the pre-made booze, or pull/ray a hippy outfit to use the store.

Depending on how you do it (and luck) you might now be using as few as 6 total pulls on consumables, and only on Key Lime Pies (3 legend pies, 3 star), which is a huge improvement from 12 per day.

Astral Consumables

With the bonestar's destruction over Valhalla, everything changed. Now there are three options for consumables on every run (you can also opt to not take a consumable, but at 1 karma/run you may as well). Astral consumables are unlike other consumables in that their turns generated and stats given increase with level. The exact formulas are available on their respective pages, but they all cap at level 11 and I'll assume you wait until then to use them. They are:

  • Astral hot dog: You get 3 per ascension, 3 fullness. Low adv/fullness compared to the others (22 total, 7.33/full), but very high stat gains (198 total, 66/full). Useful if turngen isn't an issue, saves ~2 powerleveling turns each, equivalent to a clover pull. Generates ~32 turns over Key Lime Pies, saves ~6 turns through stats.
  • Astral pilsner: 6 per ascension, 1 fullness. High adv/full and no variance (exactly level turns, for 11 at level 11), but low stats (average is level as well). Useful for higher-turncount runs. Generates 42 turns over SHC, saves ~0 turns through stats.
  • Astral energy drink: 3 per ascension, 8 fullness. The very high fullness on these is a blessing and a curse. Blessing because it means they can generate a lot of turns, curse because you can't actually get all of them at the max level without pulls. On a 3-day run hitting level 11 on day 2 is pretty easy, so you can have them all at max level, but you'll need to pull a mojo filter at some point. The adventure gain isn't spaded, but it's around 4 turns/full (32 total). Generates ~64 turns over feathers at the cost of a pull, saves 0 through stats.

As you can see which of these you choose will depend on your goals, pilsners should be the most common, hot dogs least common.

Budget

Running on a budget is considerably more difficult that running without one. Even if you’re willing to shell out ~100k per run on consumables, without good gear (which we’ll talk about later) you’re likely to be totally stuck on day 1, sitting at level 3, unable to eat, drink, or spleen, just because you couldn’t gain the substats (not being able to run ML, fewer stats/fight from gear, etc). There are some ways around this. The glimmering phoenix feather provides 6 substats/turn for 20 turns, the same as a 36-lb volleyball or several pieces of Mr. Gear. The Crimbo Nostalgia effect from a can of franks 'n' beans or a bottle of peppermint schnapps provides 5 substats/turn for 50 turns, and while the Uncle Crimbo's Rations that speed runners pull are quite expensive, the individual components aren’t as bad. While those will cost you some day 1 pulls, they provide massive stat gain and have no level requirement, which is quite useful if you have trouble hitting those early benchmarks.

Other than that the diet is largely the same. ACs could be substituted for SHCs, Chow meins or the burrito family (Insanely spicy bean burrito, Insanely spicy enchanted bean burrito, and Insanely spicy jumping bean burrito) for Hi meins. You could even perm the crafting skills (Advanced Saucecrafting, Pastamastery, Advanced Cocktailcrafting, and their level-15 improvements) and make food in-run, essentially playing Softcore like hardcore with pulls for quest items. There are people who play that way and consistently run 4 days and under 800 turns.

Liver?

This subject is a bit out of place here, but there’s nowhere better to address so here it shall stay. Should you get Liver of Steel (increases drunk limit from 15 to 20)? If you’re doing the strategy of breaking Ronin, then yes. If you’re not, then no (at least, not in SCNP). It basically comes down to whether or not you’ll need the extra turns it provides to finish, and if the ~30 turns it costs to get will be recouped later. I got liver on all my early runs, and no longer do. If you’re not sure about hitting your daycount goal without it, then get it. If not, then don’t. That’s about all the help I can be here.

Run Planning Sheet

Part of my run planning sheet is a consumption calculator, that gives you an estimate of how many turns a meal plan will generate. You list the items you're going to eat, the average adventure gain (including ode if you have it, not including it if you don’t, and not including milk), and how much organ it takes, if any (rollover and maids obviously don't take any). Then you can specify on which days you'll be using milk, and it'll calculate that for you (approximately, for some foods it will be off).

A few notes:

  • It's not the easiest thing to use, I assume everyone using it is somewhat competent with spreadsheets.
  • I didn't feel like making separate pages for the 4 and 5 day run tools (since I won't actually use either of them), so if you're doing a 4-day just leave day 5 blank (or delete it, watevs).
  • Follow the instructions for use on the front page.

This is a useful tool to easily see if your planned diet will get you the turns you’ll need, but is by no means necessary to use.

Gear

Best Gear

This the list of gear that is generally the best for its slot.

Hats

  • Jewel-eyed wizard hat: regenerates MP, reduces MP cost of skills, and increases buff duration. Now typically pulled for the buff-increasing and not worn, on lazier runs can make things easier.
  • Crown of thrones: Now the best ascension hat, for detailed use see this page
  • Ice pick: Another form of the Ice Sickle, gives +15% items. Note that having Xenomorph in the CoT also provides +15% items.

Shirts

  • Flaming pink shirt: +15% items. Decent pull, but not great. Helpful if you don't have much +item.
  • Goth kid t-shirt: +5 ML. You'll almost always get it from the Castle, useful if you don't have anything else in the slot.
  • Hipposkin poncho: +10 ML. You can always get a hipposkin from the trapper, if you have Inigo's and Armorcraftiness you can craft it for free.
  • Moonthril Cuirass: A copy of the Grimacite gown, but that disappears after an ascension, letting ascenders use the gown who might not otherwise be able to. Be cautious, the high ML boost may hurt more than it helps, if you're unable to handle it.

Weapons

  • Ice sickle: +15 ML means 3.75 stats/combat. Fights are harder, but with a basic skillset not much harder. Best ascension weapon.
  • Haiku katana: A good choice for your first few ascensions, its special skills make life easier (summer siesta is auto-hit, and spring raindrop gives back HP and MP).
  • Flaming juggler's balls: Another form of the Flaming shirt, these are good for moxie classes without an auto-hit attack (such as shieldbutt).

Off-Hands

  • Pilgrim shield: +3 stats/combat, HP regen, and +HP make this an excellent ascension offhand. Also enables use of shieldbutt, the best combat skill.
  • Bag o' Tricks: Extra spell damage, +items, MP regen, and 20-60 turns of 3 different buffs. A useful pull if you don't have a pilgrim shield, especially with a spell-slinging skillset. Worth considering as a pull for the buffs alone on longer (>2-day) runs.
  • Crimboff: These are the gifts from Crimbo 2007. They give 15-25 mainstat once per day and +2 mainstat/combat. Strictly speaking they're the optimal offhands, but they're generally a pain to use. Make sure to pull the right one.
  • Operation Patriot Shield:+3 stats/combat, and various increases depending on your class, the ability to stun an enemy by throwing your shield, giving your next attack an instant critical, and HP/MP +20. Preferable over a Pilgrim Shield in most cases, just be aware that shieldbutts will do less damage with the OPS.

Pants

  • Greatest American Pants: The Navel Ring replacement. They share a runaway counter, so the most useful feature of the Navel Ring is replicated. In addition they give some skills, the most useful of which are Super Vision, which gives +25% items for 20 turns, and Super Skill, which causes all combat skills/spells to cost 0 MP for 5 turns. Super Skill is great for easily leveling the bander, simply cast Flavour of Magic to tune pasta spells (works best in spookyraven or the friars), then cast Stuffed Mortar Shell a bunch. You should be able to level the bander to 20 lbs in <10 turns.
  • Stinky cheese diaper: This IotM is interesting in how it charges up. Wear the diaper when not wearing the GAP to charge it up for 100 combats, use the Stinky cheese eye when you need +item/meat, use its banishing skill Give Your Opponent the Stinkeye as needed.
  • Bounty-hunting pants: +15% items. Decent pull if you're short on +item and doing longer daycounts.
  • Liar's pants: Another form of the Flaming shirt, +5 all stats, and hot damage, good for taking out physically-resistant monsters.
  • Spooky Putty leotard: +15% meat, can be useful in some areas.
  • Boss bat britches: Setting the MCD to 4 makes these drop, worth doing if you don’t pull pants. Wear them until you pull the mining gear, those pants are a bit better.
  • Brimstone Boxers: A Pantsless personal recommendation, "The additional +moxie makes survival that much easier (saving meat on healing and allowing more Vcrisis) and allows moxie classes earlier access to the bedroom. The +init means more chances to pickpocket as a moxie class (especially if running high +ML) and more chances to get the jump in general, again helping with survival."

Accessories

  • Juju Mojo Mask: +2 stats, and summons gods that can do a lot of stuff. See here for more
  • V for Vivala mask: +1-3 stats/combat, +30% muscle, Creepy Grin, extra crits, and combat effects on criticals make this a very powerful accessory. See the VCrisis section for more.
  • Navel ring of navel gazing: The big draw here is Omphaloskepsis, the intrinsic that allows you 3 free runaways per day, plus a (90-successful) percent chance after that, down to 20%. Also -1 MP to use skills, and 50% of enemy attacks miss. The last is very helpful for low-skill. Strictly speaking obsoleted for speed by the Greatest American Pants, but great for lazy play.
  • Loathing Legion necktie: 4 stats/turn make this a good pull. Also gives +4 adv/day (moondial), free untinkering (screwdriver, good for non-Knoll paths), and more. See here for a complete list.
  • Stinky cheese eye: Good for when you need +item/meat (gives +20% to both when fully charged), use its banishing skill Give Your Opponent the Stinkeye as needed.
  • C.A.R.N.I.V.O.R.E. button: +15 ML means 3.75 stats/combat. Once you can run ML these guys are your best friend.
  • Stainless steel scarf: The draw here is the +20 ML, the problem is it equips a lot later than the carnivore (30 myst versus 10). I wouldn’t pull it, but useful if you did a HC lead-in as a Sauceror.
  • Mr. Accessory Jr.: +25% items is pretty useful, can be donated for in-run, saving a pull or two (I’ve done that trick several times).
  • Jekyllin hide belt: Varies with moon, but usually more +item than a Jr.
  • Ring of conflict: -5% combats is quite useful.
  • Monster bait: +5% combats is also useful, until you get the +combat skills permed.

Familiar

  • Little box of fireworks: +5 lbs, sometimes wins initiative or delevels or deals damage, and gives +12.5% item and +1.5 stats. Quite good all-around, but slightly worse than the feast.
  • Moveable feast: +5 lbs, +1 familiar experience/combat, and gives a +10 lb buff for 20 combats to 5 different familiars per day. This can be used for 2 extra bander runaways per day, gives ~20% item drops with a hound (~30% counting the 5 lbs it gives), gives ~17% items on a normal fairy (~25% counting its 5 lbs), and the extra experience makes up for switching familiars more frequently. Hard to compare, but generally considered better than the LBoF for softcore ascension.

Astral Gear

As mentioned above, gear is now available in every softcore run. The cost is 10 karma per piece. A full list is available here, but I'll discuss the most generally useful (I'll only mention the relevant bonuses, they do other things as well).

In softcore the two most useful pieces are the astral belt (+20 ML accessory) and the astral shirt (+3 stats shirt). Generally speaking the belt is more useful. However, given the proliferation of +stat accessories and the relative rarity of +stat shirts, it's conceivable that the shirt could be better for your circumstances.

There are a couple of other pieces that are worthy of mention, the astral mask (20% item accessory) and the astral pet sweater (+10 lbs fam equip). Generally speaking these are easily replaceable with items already being pulled (stinky cheese, moveable feast) or items made in-run (sugar shield, Jr's if you donate) so they won't be useful often. However, it's conceivable that your circumstances could make them better than the gear above, so they are worthy of mention.

Finally, there are some other items that could be useful for budgetcore or very low-skill runs (astral shield). I'll leave it up to you to figure out when the rest are good.

VIP Lounge Items

  • Clan VIP Lounge key: For want of a better place I'll put this here. In a clan with a pool table (if you need such a clan see here) the VIP Lounge key gives you access to a A Relaxing Hot Tub that can, five times per day, fully heal you and remove all negative status effects. Use it after getting accidentally beaten up, or to get rid of annoying affects like Temporary Amnesia or the The Arid, Extra-Dry Desert effects.
  • A Pool Table: This can give you three buffs per day. I typically get Billiards Belligerence once for an extra bander runaway, and Mental A-cue-ity twice for the MP. Hustlin' can also be useful for the +item, choose them based on your needs.
  • A Looking Glass: Once a day will give you a "DRINK ME" potion, which allows you to adventure in The Rabbit Hole. The only ascension-relevant thing down here is A Mad Tea Party, where you get one buff per day depending on the number of non-whitespace characters in your hat (a list is available here). A number of these buffs you're virtually guaranteed to have access to, including the 40% meat (use for the nuns, from the filthy knitted dread sack), +10 Moxie (for earlier bedroom access, from the ice pick or snorkel), as well as others. Get one based on what you'll need, but those two are going to be the most common uses, I believe.

One note, you might be tempted to get the +20 ML from the pail, but the turn cost of getting the pail is quite high, and this is only beneficial on very long runs (for instance in HCO). The same goes for Baron von Ratsworth's tophat, those extra stats look very good, but they're not worth the cost of hunting him down unless you have a very long (~23-turn) tavern.

Really rich stuff

On a Budget

As with diet, your gear on a budget is going to be significantly worse than it is with a large bankroll. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to slow you down too much. Unfortunately, it gets a bit more complicated, since you have to wrestle with stat requirements. If you're interested in budgetcore, check out the budgetcore compendium thread on the KoL forums.

AFH has been experimenting with this lately, and produced two logs, (here and here). They both used the Toy mercenary pretty heavily. According to one runner (So Very Invisible), “I didn't do anything groundbreaking. Get noodles early, toy mercs when they can still kill in two hits, Chronic Indigestion for any spookies you encounter, then hobble through until you can get a viable class-based combat rhythm.” Catatonicmonkey also has a log with commentary and cost analysis here (registration required) that could be elucidating, although it made heavy use of the bandersnatch.

As I mentioned in the budget consumables section, low-skill budgetcore can play a lot like easier HC. For this reason, you might want to consider a few HC ascensions to pick up the crafting skills and some rewards. Brimstone gear can seriously help, as the full set gives +60% all stats, +64 ML, items, and meat, and the gear has bonuses so good you’re basically invincible. Spending a few months in a bad moon loop picking up some good skills (even a SC player needs to do HC lead-ins if they’re serious) and grabbing this gear might be a great idea (if you’re interested, see the Hogs of Destiny BM guide.

Because budgetcore runs will usually be longer (5 days until you can get a decent number of skills), this frees up more pulls to work with. By the time noodles and mercenaries starts to break down, a lot of windows will open up in terms of good gear, especially with the addition of the sea content. Plus with Armorcraftiness and Super-Advanced Meatsmithing you can make additional weapons in-run. I’ll list some things to look at in addition to the purchase lists above.

Familiars and Skills

The guide continues at Familiars and Skills. <-- outfit stuff goes where? here. it goes right here --/>

Familiars

Non-Mr. Store

Don’t have any Mr. Store familiars? Think you can’t ascend? Well sure you can! Mr. Store stuff helps, but isn’t totally necessary.

Blood-faced volleyball - The volley is your general go-to familiar. It gives extra stats, and that’s it. But stats are always needed, so you’ll basically always want this guy out.

Hovering sombrero - Gives stats based on weight and ML.

Baby Gravy Fairy - The exception is when you want items. When you want items, take the fairy. If you’ve previously ascended muscle sign and done the Summon a Mushroom Familiar quest, you may want to use your elemental fairy, as it will help during combat.

Leprechaun - There are a few times you’ll want extra meat, such as against the bodyguard bats, or during the nuns sidequest in the war. You’ll want a leprechaun for those times.

Jumpsuited Hound Dog - The reward for collecting 100 filthy lucre, the hound dog acts as a 1.25*weight fairy, and provides +floor(weight/6)% combats (up to 5%). You want to use him wherever you need items and aren’t using -combat (for more on +/-combat, see the Combat Modifiers part of the guide).

Star Starfish - Useful for MP, you can get large amounts by using the starfish for one combat, doing little damage yourself (using spices, for example), and letting the starfish convert all the enemy HP into MP. This is called the Star Starfish Trick. You also need the starfish in the Naughty Sorceress Quest.

Sorceress familiars - These familiars are the Sabre-Toothed Lime, Barrrnacle, Levitating Potato, Mosquito, and the Angry Goat. You won’t really be using these in combat, but you need one of each to ensure getting past the NS.

That’s basically it. When you want items, take the fairy, when you don’t take the volley. Early on you won’t be running enough ML to make the sombrero worth it. Once you are (if you’re running ~70 it starts to be worth using in the cyrpt) whip the sombrero out.

Sandworm/Llama/Pixie/Program

These four are generally grouped together, because they let you effectively use your spleen, along with other benefits.

Baby Sandworm - As years go by spleen familiars give you your spleen more and more easily. The pixie requires a bunch of turns and switching between zones, and the llama requires forgoing certain abilities and using others a number of times in a short timeframe. But the sandworm has no hassle, the agua de vida it drops simply gives you 5-10 adventures for 4 spleen. However, there are a couple of caveats. When it drops agua the sandworm (which is normally a sombrero) gives you no stats. Additionally, the agua itself gives no stats, and the 7.5 turns/4 spleen is a worse average than either !pipes or roc feathers. This means that roc feathers are still optimal in turns of stats. But many people (including myself) consider the ease of use to make them far superior.

Llama Lama - The llama is a half-weight volleyball (which means it provides 70% as many stats) that will delevel during combat. Those things are pretty underwhelming, the joy of the llama comes from the gongs. The main use of these is birdform. Birdform gives you Talon slash, an instant-hit attack that does ~80% of muscle in damage for 5 MP, as well as allows all classes to pickpocket, which can be quite valuable. Birdform lasts 15 turns, and allows you to get several feathers, the most useful of which is the glimmering roc feather, which is 6-10 adv for 4 spleen. It’s one of the four ways to fill your spleen in-run (the other three being !pipes, agua de vida and wads, although canned air is a potential (expensive) option). The nice thing about getting these feathers is that if you play your cards right it costs you 0 adv, so they’re effectively free. Gongs are also useful for Path of the Roach, which gives stats and 20 turns of a special effect (+ML, +item, or +%stats). The gongs are very versatile and incredibly useful.

Because you cannot use combat items or non-birdform skills while in birdform, it takes some thinking to time correctly (incidentally, you *can* use combat skills granted by items and familiars in birdform). You don't want to be in birdform when you need to use rock band fliers, or pirate insults, or olfaction. Additionally, needing to get 15 talon slashes in 15 turns means you need to be careful about adventuring someplace that has many noncombat adventures (such as spookyraven, or the desert/oasis). When getting feathers I usually make sure to use multiple talon slashes per combat, ensuring that I get my feather. Talon slash is a rather good combat skill (especially before you have shieldbutt), so using it 20-30 times isn't too bad (if you can't afford the MP, try getting the Mental A-cue-ity buff from A Pool Table. However, given the ease of acquiring agua from the sandworm, my llama has been effectively retired in Softcore (although it still is very useful in hardcore).

Green Pixie - The pixie is a full-weight fairy that attacks. Again this is pretty underwhelming, the main draw of the pixie is the absinthe it drops. Absinthe opens up The Worm Wood and provides lots of options. The first of which is the not-a-pipe, which gives 4-12 adv for 4 spleen. The problem with the !pipe is that they take 3 adv to get, meaning on average you only gain 5. On the other hand you do get a ton of MP from getting it, which is useful. Still, this drawback is why most speedy players use absinthe exclusively for stats, in what’s called 5/1 or just 1. This comes from the fact that the non-combats that grant you things in the Worm Wood only happen on certain intervals, with 9-7, 5-4, and 1 turn of the Absinthe-Minded effect left. Knowing this means you only have to spend turns then when it’s most advantageous, and depending on how much you need the stats, one or two is almost always enough. If you’re curious and want to see all that Worm Wood has to offer, and how to get it, see Worm Wood Done Quickly. The one thing to note is that if you’re doing 5/1 or 1, you’ll have to anticipate how many stats you need way ahead of time, since you have to play all 10 turns of Absinthe Minded.

Rogue Program - The program is a simple starfish, so it only attacks and restores MP. It seems to drop the first Game Grid token faster than other familiars drop their first item, but the others are the same. Each token can be traded for 10 Game Grid tickets at the The Game Grid Arcade by using the broken skeeball machine, or up to 30 tickets for a token and 5 adv from one of the other games (you should basically never do this). You can trade those tickets for a few things, the ones that matter are the coffee pixie sticks (which are equivalent to agua) and the finger cuffs (which can help kill tower monsters, see here.

How to use these four: the pixie is easy, if you don’t have a hound dog use the pixie every time you want +item. You’ll get enough absinthe from using it this way to meet all your uses. The rest you just juggle until you get whatever spleen you need, generally getting as few from an individual familiar as you can. You generally prefer the sandworm, since the sombrero gives decent stats late in the game and agua are easy to use, but the program is also good early. The llama is slightly better given that the feathers give good stats, but they're a pain in the ass to get.

GGG/Hobo

The GGG and Spirit Hobo are both volleyballs that act like starfish when fed. The hobo takes booze and the GGG takes food, and they give you a number of “blasts” of MP equivalent to the adventure gain of the food/booze. That’s the starfish part of their name. They’re both pretty fun to use, and once you have some buffs to fuel very handy as well, keeping one out as your primary familiar makes fueling your buffs a piece of cake. When not going terribly fast using them as a primary stat familiar is feasible, but on fast runs they’re only occasionally used for MP. If you’re in dire MP straights you can bring them out and use the Star Starfish Trick to get a ton of MP from the combat.

Slimeling

The Slimeling is the most useful non-Mr Store familiar. By far. It's not even close. The slimeling is basically a GGG/Hobo that eats equipment and gives +item instead of +stats. As such you can use it whenever you would typically use some other fairy (hound dog or pixie, most likely) and get massive amounts of MP. The slimeling should be your primary fairy once you get one (at least in the places where running a hound dog is bad/unnecessary), the MP is really that good. The slimeling also gives you an extra chance for equipment drops, so be sure to use it when you're hunting for outfit pieces.

Bander

The Frumious Bandersnatch is quite the impressive familiar. A full volley whose equipment sends all stats to the chosen stat, it also improves combat skills and grants free runaways with Ode to Booze active. I’ll talk about the runaways later, and I’m not going to go into detail on the combat skills (their utility is obvious and they’re listed on the familiar page), what’s game-changing about this familiar is the stat distribution. If you don’t care about offstats (which we don’t) this makes the bander into a quadruple-weight volleyball. This makes it much more effective than other volleys, and more effective than a hovering sombrero for almost all realistic scenarios. For the math behind this, see: here.

He-Boulder

The He-Boulder is the most powerful mechanic out of the Mr. Store since the bandersnatch. The boulder itself is a leprechaun/whelp, but that's largely irrelevant. The reason for its awesomeness is its rays: yellow, red, and blue. There are two types of each ray, major and minor. The major rays are very powerful, especially the yellow ray, which instantly kills an enemy and gives you all of its non-Conditional Drops (this does not work against any boss monster). The major red ray gives you some amount of substats (based on boulder weight). The major blue ray stuns an enemy for 3 rounds. In order to use these abilities you must use the skill Point at your opponent immediately after seeing the combat message indicating which ray is primed. You can only use major rays so often, they recharge at a rate of 150 adventure normally, and 101 adventures with the Quadroculars equipped. Each ray type is independent, using a major red ray will not affect the counter for the major yellow or blue.

The main use of the boulder is the yellow ray, which has huge strategy implications. Pulling the Knob Goblin Harem Girl Disguise, Knob Goblin perfume, and Mining Gear is a thing of the past. There are plenty of other good targets for the ray as well, including the Filthy Hippy Disguise (which also gets you a reodorant for Sonofa Beach, and either war hippy while starting the war (for the War Hippy Fatigues in order to do the putty nuns trick, mentioned later), or the Knob Goblin Elite Guard Uniform for lab access (depending on your other semirares). Other potential uses are for mojo filters, tower items, and any other item that might not drop and you'd have to pull. For a discussion on the yellow ray, see here.

Baby Bugged Bugbear

The Baby Bugged Bugbear is the most interesting familiar to come out of the Mr. Store since the He-Boulder. It's always a full-weight potato, and without an equipment (or with the bugged beanie, which you get for free by visiting the arena) it acts as a ghuol/volleyball/fairy/leprechaun randomly at the end of combat. But that's not what's important. With the bugged balaclava (which you get for free by using the beanie) on it always acts as a volleyball, and the balaclava gives +20 ML. This means that, for equal weights, it gives more stats than a bander until 25 lbs, afterward it's not beaten too badly, and it gives a lot more offstats. Additionally the potato makes handling the ML significantly easier.

So which is better? It's a tough comparison. First off, the jubs all have +5 lbs and the balaclava doesn't, so the equal weight comparison isn't apt. It turns out that a tuned bander is giving more mainstat at +15 non-equipment lbs, which is to say immediately. Additionally, leveling the bander is incredibly easy, using a skill such as Cannelloni Cannon (+1 fam weight/cast) to damage monsters before VCrisis and using Curiosity of Br'er Tarrypin, you can be getting more than 3 experience/combat.

But this works both ways, you can put loads of weight on the bander (without pulling the jub) to still get runaways, and use the BBB as your primary stat familiar. The thing is that splitting like that will lose you stats (although not many), and getting the bander heavy will take a lot of MP, and combat without the bander will also take a lot of MP. With the advent of the crown of thrones (see below) the MP needed to run the BBB and level the bander for runaways is a lot less of an issue, and the ability to run sickle/pilgrim shield makes the lost stats a lot less of an issue. Thanks to the crown the BBB is more compelling for 2-day SC.

So what's the takeaway? If you don't have and can't afford the bander using the BBB means you're not missing out on a lot of stat gain. But at the same time the bander is significantly better if you just want easy combat, and its runaways can't be replicated.

Mini-Hipster

The Mini-Hipster is a tricky familiar. It's tricky because of the free fights it provides, which start at 50% chance and decrease to 10%, capped at 7 total. The ML of the monsters scales with moxie, and +ML and +stat work against them. This means they provide nice stats, and for those first 7 fights (which should come in about 40 turns) it's the optimal stat familiar. This is helped because it gives a 2-3 stat bonus to one stat during each fight, and has a +3 stat equipment. Finally, it also gives a decent amount of HP and MP and its attack is extremely powerful, doing most of your combat damage for you.

None of that is particularly tricky on its own, you'd just use it for those turns and be done with it. However, the fights trigger after a call to adventure.php, and because of this any counters in the zone will be decremented without taking a turn (similar to a free runaway). This means that any floors or delay() will be decremented. Additionally, the fights don't trigger before superlikelies, only before the combat/noncombat roll, so they effectively allow you to turn a failed superlikely roll into a reroll. And because they take place before both combats and noncombats, you can use it in zones like the hidden temple.

So how should you use it? It's complicated. Because delay isn't transparent, and the runaways are more useful while delay is active (see here if you're confused on this) you generally want to try to concentrate your hipster use in the first few turns in zones with delay(). You also want to use it in zones where you're going for superlikelies and the monsters are weak or it's mostly bad noncombats. Functionally using it mostly in the forest (for the first 5 turns), knob, pantry, Mr. Alarm, opening the Oasis, and temple will get you most of the way to optimal without having to worry too much. Basically, if you're out of runaways and would want to use some, use the hipster.

Obtuse Angel

The Obtuse Angel is basically another putty, but in a weird way. It gives you 4 skills, but only one of those concerns us, Fire a badly romantic arrow (the others basically just aid survival in combat, you can look at their pages to see if they'll be helpful for you). The BRA can be used once per day, and it causes whatever monster it's used against to become a wandering monster. It'll show up 15-25 turns after you arrow it, and again 15-25 turns after that (if equipped with the quake of arrows there will be a third reappearance). This is a very big deal for hardcore, but in softcore the usefulness is mitigated somewhat by the existence of spooky putty.

So, which monsters should you target? For starters you can only arrow monsters that you could also putty. Rampaging adding machine, Bad ASCII Art, lobsterfrogman, and BRICKO bat are the targets I like most, for various reasons. Which of those is the best will depend greatly upon the run type, for instance in a 3-day run there are so many putty uses that the arrow is a relatively minor addition, and I usually arrow bats in mine. In a 2-day run there's more pressure on the decision, but significantly more options with no clear winner. Think about different combinations of faxes, putties, and arrows, and go with whichever seems best.

An advanced tactic is using the arrowed monsters to burn off a turn of delay. Once it has been 15 turns since you arrowed the monster, go to a place with delay, such as the Orc chasm or the castle. Remember that delay is now a constant 5 turns, so go to another delayed area if the arrowed monster hasn't shown up yet. If you spend adventures in a non-adventure.php location (such as shoring, spending turns crafting, mining) and the arrowed monster was supposed to appear during those turns, it will instead appear the next time you go to an adventure.php location. By doing this, you can narrow down the range of turns for when the arrowed monster can reappear.

Others

There are a few other familiars worth using in the course of an ascension, but mostly for niche stuff.

Volleychaun - The volleychaun is one of the two 2-Mr-A familiars available year-round. It acts simultaneously as a full-weight volleyball and leprechaun. The current example is the rehearsing dramatic hedgehog. They’re useful early in the game against bosses that drop a lot of meat, mostly the bodyguard bats and boss bat. Those few combats are the only time that I use mine, but there are potentially others (such as the nuns).

Hobo monkey - Speaking of the nuns, the best familiar for that side-quest is the hobo monkey. A 1.25*lep, no other fam will get you as much meat drop (at least without farming/pulling a hat for the hatrack).

Stocking mimic - Different from other familiars in that it must have its personal equipment equipped in order to gain weight (just win a combat with no familiar equipment and the mimic will create one). It does useful things in combat, such as restoring your HP and MP, giving you meat, and dealing damage. After victorious combats, it has a chance to drop useful potions, all of which gain effectiveness as you level up: Polka pops give a ton of item and meat drop, BitterSweetTarts provide nice stat gains, and Piddles are the least useful, but can help you reach 20 elemental damage in the Tavern Cellar or just make combat against physical immunes easier.

Crimbo P. R. E. S. S. I. E. - A great familiar for low-skill runs if you don’t have something better. Few other familiars are as fun to play with or do as much, and you can seamlessly convert between volley and sombrero using its equipment (however, a pressie in sombrero mode is basically a sombrero with fireworks equipped).

Knob Goblin Organ Grinder - The badass pies look like they could be useful, but the math works out so that they're only marginally better, if they're better at all, than candy canes from the CoT. So while this may have some SC applications, it's not incredibly useful as long as you can get those candy canes.

Crown of Thrones

The crown of thrones is a weird beast, since it's a hat that acts like a familiar slot. Because it's not easy to summarize what it does and how to use it quickly I'm giving it its own section here. First, the basics. You can enthrone any of your familiars upon the crown, and that familiar will gain 1 experience per combat as though it were your active familiar. In addition it provides the crown with some enchantment, such as +10 ML or +10 to all stats. In even further addition that familiar will act during combat, doing things like giving MP or HP, attacking, or giving items.

The familiar that will be in the crown most often is the El Vibrato Megadrone. The reason is simple, it gives +10 ML as its enchantment (which is only 0.5 stats worse than the previous best hat, the spooky putty mitre) and it also gives 10-15 MP per round for the first 3 combat rounds. That's an enormous amount of MP, enough to run basically any buff you want.

The second most useful familiar is the Mariachi Chihuahua. It gives +2 moxie stats/combat (which is 0.5 mainstat more than the mitre on a moxie run), as well as providing a 50% block rate. This is phenomenal for crisis. Any time you don't need MP, run the chihuahua.

There are some other more niche uses, such as the Green Pixie for tequila (~20% drop rate, once/combat), the Sweet Nutcracker or the Ancient Yuletide Troll for a gingerbread bugbear or candy cane if you need some decent filler food, the Astral Badger if you need a spooky mushroom, as well as others (including non-moxie +2 mainstat ones, see the CoT's page for those).

Combat

About 70% of the game is combat, so it’s important that you have a way to kill stuff. Fortunately, there’s an incredibly powerful duo of skills that let you kill all monster and adventure way above your level with ease.

Shieldbutt/Noodles

With NS13 every dominant strategy was nerfed into oblivion, and from their ashes rose noodlebutt. It’s incredibly simple, entangling noodles makes your foe unable to attack for several rounds of combat, and shieldbutt allows you to hit with both your weapon and your shield, and causes extra damage (and a chance to delevel/stun). These two together are so powerful that they’re all you need to wear over 100 ML and still survive (although you’ll get hit a lot). Combined with a navel ring (on lazier runs) and you’ll nearly never need to heal. Together these two are all you need, but some +initiative skills (Springy Fusilli, Cletus's Canticle of Celerity, and Overdeveloped Sense of Self Preservation) help too. If this sounds too simple or good to be true it’s because it really is just that good and simple.

Spell-Slinging

While shieldbutt is still the combat method of choice for most situations, thanks to recent game changes spell-slinging is a potential combat strategy again. Unfortunately, it works best as a sauceror, but with a Bag o' Tricks can potentially rival shieldbutt in damage/MP.

The necessary perms are any spell (sauceror spells are best, Stream of Sauce, Saucestorm, Wave of Sauce, and Saucegeyser), as well as Entangling Noodles (always need noodles), Intrinsic Spiciness, Flavour of Magic, Immaculate Seasoning, Jabañero Saucesphere (skill), Jalapeño Saucesphere (skill) and potentially Jackasses' Symphony of Destruction. The idea is for the Saucespheres to return HP and MP from each spell cast, to get the synergies with the bandersnatch, and (as a sauceror) to use splashbacks to get massive amounts of MP restored (see here for full details, the whole thread has important info).

As you can see the downside of spell-slinging is that it requires a lot of skills, most of which are only useful for that skillset. However, with the bag o' tricks and a bandersnatch, noodles and stream will probably be enough to handle enemies without much trouble. Adding on the extras just makes you more effective (similar to how shiledbutt gets more effective with +damage skills). Nonetheless, if you want to be able to play as a sauceror and have every combat be MP-positive and have a full-weight bandersnatch at level 6, you'll need most of those perms.

Toy Mercs

If for some reason you really don’t want to shieldbutt or spellsling, there’s also the Toy Merc strategy, due entirely to IstariAsuka (as far as I know). It requires only a few permed skills, and very little investment (although the V mask would be very helpful, as it gives +50% damage to combat items). Anyway, the skill list is basically the same as shieldbutt, you just replace shieldbutt with Ambidextrous Funkslinging. Just make sure not to use the mercs against the NS or the Bonerdagon, as you can lose them.

Skills

One of the most frequently-asked questions is what order to get skills in, or which skills to get next. In my view the order doesn’t actually matter so much (outside of a few). But there’s a huge list of skills to get, look through them all, decide which ones sound the most helpful to you, and perm them. Then move on to the ones that are less helpful, and keep going until you’ve got everything you could ever want. That’s my strategy.

Noodles/butt

But you definitely want to take shieldbutt and entangling noodles first. My inclination is to get shieldbutt first, as a low-skill muscle class ascension without noodles is easier than a low-skill myst ascension without shieldbutt. You also get entangling noodles very early in an ascension, meaning you’d only be doing one ascension without both, whereas getting noodles first you wouldn’t get shieldbutt until the tail end of your second. But it’s a small difference, and not terribly important.

Guild Skills

My suggestion for your third perm is Ode to booze. Previously I said that order doesn’t really matter, and that’s true, but ode is the only skill that generates turns without anything else. It’s quite useful, because generating 1000 turns in four days (breaking Ronin in four days) is tricky without ode, but much simpler with it.

After that things are up in the air, I’ll talk about each class’s best skills below.

Seal Clubber - Pulverize, Rage of the Reindeer, Musk of the Moose, Eye of the Stoat, and Double-Fisted Skull Smashing are the most useful skills, approximately in order. None of them are terribly high priority, if you wait until ascension 20 or 30 to grab one, you won’t suffer for it.

Turtle Tamer - Shieldbutt, Amphibian Sympathy, Empathy of the Newt, Tao of the Terrapin, Hero of the Half-Shell, Wisdom of the Elder Tortoises, and Astral Shell are all top-notch skills. If that seems like a huge list it’s because TT’s have some of the best in the game. Even ones not listed there (Reptilian Fortitude, Ghostly Shell) are worth perming, but of lower priority.

Pastamancer - Entangling Noodles, Leash of Linguini, Springy Fusilli, Cannelloni Cocoon, and Pastamastery are all good perms, the remaining skills are more marginal.

Sauceror - Advanced Saucecrafting, The Way of Sauce, Impetuous Sauciness, and Saucy Salve are my picks here, though the latter two aren’t high priority (Sauciness is nice for basement runs and when you use potions, salve helps with Vcrisis, and with the bandersnatch heals negative status effects). Stream of Sauce is useful for taking down physically-resistant monsters, and Expert Panhandling can give you an extra bit of meat.

Disco Bandit - Mad Looting Skillz, SHC, AC, Smooth Movement, and Ambidextrous Funkslinging are the top picks here, and Overdeveloped Sense of Self Preservation, Disco Power Nap, and Nimble Fingers are useful but not necessary.

Accordion Thief - Damn near everything. The Ode to Booze, Fat Leon's Phat Loot Lyric, Ur-Kel's Aria of Annoyance, The Sonata of Sneakiness, Carlweather's Cantata of Confrontation, Aloysius' Antiphon of Aptitude, The Moxious Madrigal, The Power Ballad of the Arrowsmith, The Magical Mojomuscular Melody, and The Polka of Plenty all merit some consideration. Actual order is tricky, the earlier skills (Madrigal in particular) are usually permed pretty early in HC, but can be put off in SC. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to get when.

Other Skills

Natural Born Scrabbler, Torso Awaregness, Powers of Observatiogn, and Transcendent Olfaction are the most pressing non-guild skills. Olfaction isn’t a perm, but is listed to remind you to get your lucre. You want that skill, it’s among the best in the game.

Traveling Trader skills: In 2010 the traveling trader returned and brought with him several skills. The first, Käsesoßesturm, is not particularly noteworthy. The second, Inigo's Incantation of Inspiration (skill), is very much noteworthy. It is an AT buff that costs 100 MP/cast and allows you to craft without using turns, instead 5 turns of the effect disappear. This is very powerful, as it allows you to craft food and booze without needing to pull a bartender or chef or wasting turns. Now, because it's an AT buff you get more crafts/cast if you use better accordions or the JEW Hat. Now while this mechanic is very powerful and is heavily used on speed runs, if your runs are 4 days or longer it won't be very useful for you. Using Inigo's well is rather fiddly, and unless saving the two pulls is vital you shouldn't really bother. But if you're doing a speed run absolutely use it.

The third skill is Curiosity of Br'er Tarrypin (skill), which gives you a TT buff that gives +1 fam experience/combat for 10 MP. This is a desirable skill, but not hugely important.

Mr. Store Skills

For tomes (three casts a day in any combation), there are Summon Stickers, Summon Snowcones, Summon Sugar Sheets and Summon Clip Art. Most likely you won’t have Snowcones, which means choosing between summoning stickers, sheets, and clip art. Outside of a leaderboard run the general advice is to summon a sugar shirt on day 1 (provided you have torso) as well as a sugar shield, use the shield for extra +item as well as runaways, and use the shirt until it breaks for an extra 90 stats. Clip art has the advantage of letting you choose exactly what item you want, rather than leaving it up to luck with stickers. Most of the powerful clip art equipment can only be used if you are unarmed (no weapon or off-hand/shield). The food and booze you can summon is pretty good, but you may wish to just pull better food/key lime pies instead. Unbearable light replicates the boulder's yellow ray, and borrowed time is a great item for the last day of your run, since you don't lose any rollover adventures if you ascend that day. For longer runs, try to get 3 unicorn and 3 UPC stickers for the filthworms and Nuns, respectively. (if you're doing them), so keep that goal in mind as you summon.

You get to cast each Grimoire you own once per day, so if you have Summon "Tasteful" Gifts and/or Summon Alice's Army Cards summon them daily. A few tasteful gifts are useful (though they become much more useful with Disco Power Nap permed, since they activate when you rest at your campground). While the Alice's Army cards are not useful in-run, the snack voucher that comes with them is. The food and booze you can get is mediocre but do provide nice buffs (the sodas also provide the buffs without taking up any organ space). Overall, grimoires have little effect on ascension speed and should be far, far down the list of items a speed ascender is trying to acquire.

Finally, the 4 Libram skills (Summon Party Favor, Summon Love Song, Summon Candy Heart, Summon BRICKOs) are tricky. If you only have one just summon those, a decent number per day, and use them as needed. If you have more than one exactly what to do is nontrivial. The way party favors work means you generally want to summon a few per day until you get two rares (the odds of summoning a rare halve each time you summon one, and since with divines you’re really looking for the divine champagne popper, you don’t need a ton of summons per day). You might also want to summon brickos until you get 3 eye bricks (the max you per day) because each of those can provide a turn-free combat. If you still have MP after that, switch to the other ones. Candy hearts are great for meeting the stat requirements to enter zones, especially the bedroom on day 1. You need multiples of the same love song to get their fullest effect, so I would summon them last, if at all. Personally, I try to get 3 bricko eyes and 3 favor rares each day, then cast a few hearts and then hope for more rares if I still have MP left.

Pumpkins

I'm counting pumpkins as a skill because they basically function as one. Pumpkins are pretty straightforward to use, but I'm throwing them in here anyway. The two most useful things are the pumpkin juice and the pumpkin beer. The pumpkin pie is equivalent to the beer (and at 5.5 adv/full they're both equivalent to distilled fortified wine and tasty tarts), but the pie is less useful because at 3 full it's harder to fit into a softcore diet. So which do you use when? That depends on your needs. If you need turns use the consumables, if you don't use the +item and ML. Most people should probably be using the consumables most of the time. A pumpkin bomb also gives a yellow ray, but it's probably better to use a Clip Art summon on it so that you don't have to farm a firecracker. The pumpkin carriage is an option for non-knoll signs, but there are better things to do with the pumpkin.

Advanced Strategy

The guide continues at Advanced Strategy.

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.

Roadmap

If you’ve gotten through the entire guide, you have a very good idea of what’s going on in an ascension, and what you need to do. But you might have lost the forest for the trees, not quite seeing how to put everything together to actually go about an ascension. That’s what this section is for, to give you an idea of what to actually do.

A few notes:

  • I’m going to assume blender (or other moxie) on the 4-5-day map, and muscle on the 3-day. If you want to play a muscle sign on a 4-day run, just copy the sign-specific advice from the 3-day (this is done so I don’t go even more insane with if clauses).
  • I’ll also be assuming an ideal set of gear, if you don’t have it you’ll just have to ignore those parts.
  • I’ll also assume you have a llama or a sandworm, so you generate spleen items in-run.
  • I’ll be assuming 0 skills, but that you can handle combat.
  • There are a lot of things I went over in previous sections, like runaways or spooky putty or combat modifiers, that I will either totally omit or mention only briefly. This is also for my sanity, applying that stuff is left as an exercise for the reader.
  • This roadmap will be harder for your earlier ascensions, but as you pick up skills quickly get trivial. My goal here isn’t to aim for a 5-day, it’s to aim for a 4-day that might get pushed an extra day. It’s also to aim sub-Ronin. Keep that in mind.

Budgetcore

For some reason I've never really gotten into budgetcore, always hoping someone would do it for me. I still haven't done the work to reproduce the following roadmap for those on a budget (the rest of the guide remains basically the same, although some strategies are obviously missing). However, I have made a compilation of budgetcore logs and tips from budgetcore runners in this thread: Budgetcore Compendium thread. There are some very good logs in there which will hopefully provide the ascender on a budget with inspiration. And if anyone gets inspired to do a real treatment of budgetcore, please tell me so I can link it here.

Non-speed (4-5 day)

  • Remember to stock Hagnk’s!
  • Before you ascend, picking up the meat demon name from Hoom Hah is a good idea.
  • Here’s a sample pull list for guidance.

Day 1

You’ve started a new ascension, hooray! Now what?

  • First, pull your gear and put it on (including familiar gear!).
  • If you have a llama, take him with you, and keep him out until you get 2-3 gongs. As soon as you get a gong, use it (keeping in mind the recommendations of the llama section). If you don’t have a llama, take your sandworm until you get 2-3 agua and use them. If you have neither, take your best volleyball.
  • Go to the toot oriole and grab your clover and pork elf gem. Autosell the gem, and you’ll have 500 meat.
  • Assemble the clover, buy a hermit permit and a chewing gum on a string, then hit the sewer. **Grab a worthless trinket and anything you need to cast buffs, if you don’t need something just take the spices.
  • Adventure in the Outskirts of Cobb's Knob until you hit level 2 or find the Knob Goblin encryption key.
    • If you are planning to oxydrop, drop oxy now and eat a cookie. If you’re not (you should though), eat the cookie now that you’ve set the counter. Get KGE as your first semirare, after that I’m leaving it up to you to follow the advice in the semirare section of the guide (there’s room for one cookie per day).
    • If you find the key first go to the Haunted Pantry until you hit level 2.
  • When you hit 2 go see the council, then adventure in the Spooky forest until you get the mosquito.
    • If you’re not level 3 when you find it, go back to the Knob/Pantry until you are.
      • If you find the key and open the manor, go back to the spooky forest to find the hidden temple parts.
  • When you hit three go to the council, then do the Typical Tavern Quest.
    • This is a good time to open your guild. You pass the first two tests with ease, which you need to do. After passing them, visit the untinker, find his screwdriver, return it to him. Pull a clockwork or meat maid, untinker to get a meat engine, pull dope wheels and paste them into meatcar. Open the beach, and set the Annoy-o-Tron 5000 to 10 (or lower, if you can’t handle 10). Untinker the car, and remake and use the maid. You’ll need to pull another skirt tomorrow, but that’s 4 or 8 extra turns, worth a pull.
  • By the time you’re done with tavern you should be level 4.
    • If you’re not, go back to aforementioned places.
  • From here on out it’s “eat as you go”.
    • First fill spleen, preferably with roc feathers generated in-run (if you have to, pull them).
    • Second fill your liver. If you need turns at level 4, use an AC. If you need them at 5, use a corpse drink.
    • Last fill your stomach. If you need turns before 6 from your stomach, you’ve failed day 1! Eat insanely-spicy bean burritos.
  • Back to level 4, you can put off the Boss Bat Quest until you get a Knob Goblin harem veil, or you can farm a Pine-Fresh air freshener, or you can pull one of them. Your best course of action is probably to wait, or use a skill to get the resistance, as you can yellow ray the harem girl.
  • After getting stench resistance, fight in guano junction until you get 3 sonar-in-a-biscuits.
    • Make sure you’re using a fairy while fighting, as well as whatever +item you have.
  • Now fight the bodyguard bats, generally using a leprechaun-type familiar (to get more meat).
    • If you have the V mask you can Creepy Grin the bodyguards to fight the boss right away, but you’ll likely need the experience and meat they provide for this trick you'll get an error message, it's ok just keep clicking the zone, you'll get the Boss Bat eventually. Also, Jick is aware of this trick and wants to patch it, but as of this writing hasn't. Get it while the getting's good.
  • You should be level 5 by now, so go to the council then open the Knob.
    • Yellow ray the harem girl, you’ll get the full outfit and some other stuff that may or may not be useful.
    • You want to run +combat in the harem, once you have it.
    • You will be underleveled here, so go to the digital realm and try to putty a blooper. Do not fight the last putty, save it for tomorrow.
    • If you run out of things to do before hitting level 6, go to the haunted billiards room.
  • Once you hit level 6 you should pull your remaining booze and drink it.
    • You can do the Deep Fat Friars' Gate Quest and the Azazel, Ma Belle quest (if you’re getting liver, which you should on ascension 1), or you can bank for a stat day. You probably won’t be banking.
      • Run -combat (which means the Ring of Conflict) during the Friar’s quest, but not Azazel’s.
    • At some point during these quests you’ll hit level 7, when you pull a milk of mag and 3 hi meins. If you hit this, you’ll get day 1 liver.
  • After getting liver, continue on to the Undefile the Cyrpt Quest, or bank, your choice.
    • During the Cyrpt quest you should be running -combat. The cyrpt is a real mess, you need to get the non-combat in each zone before the boss will appear. There’s delay() on the boss, plus another countdown phase, and then it’s a superlikely with weird conditionals. Just run -combat the whole way through and you’ll be fine.
  • Don’t forget to pull and drink your corpse nightcap.

Condensed Day 1

  • Hit level 4 without consuming while doing early quests
  • Hit level 6 while still doing quests, and without drinking anything but a corpse drink.
  • Hit level 7 without eating.
  • If getting liver: get liver.

Day 2

  • From here on out things are pretty rote, you’ve hit your consumption goals (or easily can) and are just plugging away at quests.
    • Familiar strategy remains the same: llama/sandworm for spleen, fairy for drops, some other volley the rest of the time.
  • Start by finishing up Friar’s/Cyrpt.
  • You will basically never be underleveled after finishing those two, so head to the Mt. McLargeHuge Quest. You want to yellow ray the miner and pull the ore, then farm the cheese (use olfaction/creepy grin as appropriate).
  • You will basically never be appropriately leveled after finishing the trapzor, so now is time for Spookyraven
    • Use a fairy until you have the parts for an entire scroll of ancient forbidden unspeakable evil. You’ll want it later.
    • If you’re a muscle class, open The Haunted Gallery.
    • Nightstands are really hard. You might want to put them off until you’re higher level.
    • Do this before level 10, as you want the ballroom song set before the level 10 quest, and you need to open the ballroom before you can set it.
  • Once you hit level 9 do the Strange Leaflet Quest, (including spoiler that can’t be spoiled, ask someone in a non-public channel about it if you want to know), and the Orc Chasm Quest.
    • Mafia can do the entire leaflet in about 5 seconds.
    • Make sure to grab the Grue egg, so you can make a Grue egg omelette, which you’ll be eating on day 3 or 4.
    • You need to pull the pirate gear here, but don’t do the pirate’s quest yet.
      • NOTE: You might want to yellow ray the pirates, but none drop the whole outfit and some don’t even drop a given part. Just pull it.
    • There’s a semirare here that makes a great putty target. Consider modifying your diet to eat 2 meins, 1 key pie, and 1 fortune cookie so you can know when to get it.
    • Without the semirare, just keep your fairy out and farm the scrolls.
    • Try to make at least 1 31337 scroll, they’re pretty helpful.
    • If you’re not level 10 yet, finish spookyraven and set the ballroom song to -combat, then start the pirates.
  • When you hit level 10, do the Giant Trash Quest.
    • Run -combat through the whole quest. There are a bunch of drops here you want, but you should get all of them since you’ll be fighting so many of each monster.
    • Opening up the The Hole in the Sky is optional, but it’ll reduce pulls (not that you’ll really need more) and give you some extra stats, plus it’s a good place to flier (if you do the arena). The fights are tough though, come back here later.
  • Do the pirates quest to get to level 11.
  • You’ll probably run out of turns somewhere in here, if so pull your nightcap and bank (don’t forget to fill the remaining liver with something that dropped).
    • Also note that by using the milk of magnesium and eating at the end of the day, banking turns, you can save a pull (if you can do this on day 1, but you’ll likely need those turns to get liver).

Stat Grinding

  • Unless you’re quite good and adventuring on stat days, there will come a point where you have nothing left to do and aren’t leveled enough to move on to the next quest. This is where stat-grinding comes in.
  • Grinding is just adventuring over and over hoping to hit a non-combat that gives a lot of stats.
    • Moxie classes want to adventure using a fairy in the ballroom (fairy is for dance cards).
    • Muscle classes want to adventure using a bander, other volley, or sombrero (if you have enough ML) in the gallery, and need to map the Louvre It or Leave It adventure.
    • Myst classes want to adventure using a volley/sombrero in the bathroom.
  • Other options:
    • Clovers can provide huge stat gain for only one adventure, and if you have spare pulls or trinkets (from 31337’s), you want to use the clovers for leveling (class zones are the same).
    • As explained in the section on the Green Pixie, absinthe can be used for powerleveling.

Day 3

  • Days 3 and 4 are even more rote than 2. By now you’ve got pretty much everything done, just the MacGuffin, War, and Tower left.
  • Day 3 is just the Quest for the Holy MacGuffin
    • You’ve already prepped a lot of this stuff. After getting the diary you should only need to do The Poop Deck, Belowdecks, The Palindome, The Haunted Ballroom, the Wine Racks, The Hidden Temple, The Hidden City, the adventures in The Oasis and The Arid, Extra-Dry Desert, and the Ancient Buried Pyramid left. It sounds like a huge list, but it’s a lot less huge than it would be if you had to do everything.
    • Order doesn’t matter, except that you want to generally unlock the Oasis before doing the hidden temple, so you can burn off all those crappy desert effects with the 100% non-combat zone.
    • Pull the items you need, but that might drop, as you need them (they’re on the pull list). Don’t pull before you need them, while they still might drop.
    • You’ll probably want to use Brother Smothers's Blessing in the Cellar.
    • You want to pull and use a tomb ratchet to avoid having to find and place the wheel in the pyramid.
    • The pyramid is pretty interesting, if you have olfaction you want to olfact a tomb rat and farm ratchets, without olfaction you generally want to turn the wheel.
      • Fred Nefler has made a spreadsheet to assist with this decision.
    • If you’re doing the war as a Frat (the fastest, though not necessarily easiest way), you want to get the fliers ASAP, even if some MacGuffin stuff is undone, so you can collect the additional ML.

Day 4

  • Day 4 (and possibly part of Day 3) is dedicated to the Mysterious Island Quest (also the NS).
  • You want to pull the uniform of whichever side you’ll be fighting on.
  • I recommend using mafia or a helper GM script here, there’s a lot to keep track of, and mafia tracks it all (flyered ML, meat, gremlins, kills, etc).
  • If you’re curious about the best way to do it with your resources, see the level 12 optimizer.
    • I recommend doing it as a Frat, as that way is faster. However, without +combat skills the beach can take ages, and I found gremlins a bit tricky (but doable). So I recommend going frat (and doing every sidequest but ducks), but I’ll outline how to do all sidequests.
    • Yellow rays can be helpful for getting the uniforms. If you do the nuns trick as a frat you can ray the war hippy to guarantee the outfit. Or you can ray a normal hippy sometime around level 9-10 or so, then ray a war frat for the entire outfit. Filthworms also make good ray targets, so there are lots of options here.
    • Sidequests stategies:
      • With the arena just grab the fliers and flier everything. Noodles helps a lot. Saving things (like the upper chamber, Ed, other MacGuffin bosses, or the HitS) is helpful, especially without lots of +ML.
      • The Gremlins are a pain, boost DA, DR, moxie, and muscle as much as possible. With Tao and sauceror potions this becomes a lot easier. Keep in mind that this is a good place to use banishers.
      • The Lighthouse also sucks, but a lot less with spooky putty. Boost +combat as much as possible (pull a monster bait if you need to). Probably not worth doing without the putty and/or +combat skills.
        • You may want to go back and turn off the ballroom song at some point, but it might save you more turns in the middle chamber and starting the war than you lose here with spooky putty.
      • The Filthworms are pretty easy, just boost +item as much as possible. Generally you use you sticker sword ASAP, take your fairy, and use any other easy +item boosts (such as Knob Goblin eyedrops and Knob Goblin pet-buffing spray, if you get the KGE semirare), and once you get the first gland use the Cyclops eyedrops. After you get the Royal Gland DO NOT fight the queen, go to the upper chamber and fight rats (you want to olfact one before you start the worms, if you have olfactions). This is also a good place for banishers.
      • The nuns are also good to do with the spooky putty, as you can get the from turn 0 (saving 8 turns compared to no putty). UPC stickers, Mick's IcyVapoHotness Inhalers, Preternatural Greed, the hobo monkey, Knob Goblin nasal spray, and any other +meat or +fam weight is what you want to use. Just make sure to fight the copy on the last turn, if you have to shrug some buffs or put away the leprechaun, it’s worth the extra turn to not do it as a hippy.
      • The farm is only worth doing if you do the war as a hippy. Don’t bother as a frat. It’s totally straightforward, but do the shortcut (follow the wiki’s instructions).
    • Once you’ve figured it out, the war is pretty straightforward. Your first time you won’t really know what you can do, so just go for it. After a few ascensions you’ll get the hang of it, especially with more skills.
  • Don’t forget to cash in the battlefield drops to the store. I turn everything into nickels and then grab a bunch of gauze garters for the shadow, as well as some Monstar energy beverages for MP (you can probably skip the monstars). Garters are also useful for the skeleton key test, if you don’t have a clover or a good healing skill.

The NS

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