User:Stupac2/advanced

Stat days

We’re finally starting to get into some more advanced strategy. Stat days, if you don’t know, are days where the moons align to grant a certain stat 25% more substats. You want to time stat days in a certain way in order to maximize how effectively you level. For a 3-day run that means putting them on days 2 and 3 for moxie and muscle, and just day 2 for myst, since that’s when the bulk of you leveling is going to be. But if you’re unsure of your ability to hit consumption milestones on day 1 then you should consider having a stat day on day 1, to help speed things up.

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

Moon signs

Before you ascend, you’ll need to know which Moon sign you’re going to pick. There are really only six you’ll be deciding between: The Mongoose, The Opossum, The Platypus, The Wombat, The Vole, and The Blender. These fall into three categories, the signs that add bonus adventures to consumables, the ones that occasionally give extra stats after combat, and Vole, which gives extra critical hits.

• Stats after combat: The Mongoose, The Platypus and The Wombat give an average of .4 substats after combat. If you guess 800 combat turns per ascension, that’s an extra 320 substat points.
• Extra turns from food/booze: The Opossum and The Blender give an extra 0-3 adv to each item consumed. The exact method isn’t know (or isn’t listed on the wiki), so it’s difficult to say when this beats the substat ones. A rough guess says you’d need to be averaging about 10 substat points per combat to make this make sense, which is entirely achievable.
• The Vole gives you an average of .5X extra chance for critical hit, along with reducing fumbling.

The other thing to consider is what the signs give you access to. Myst signs give the MCD, which can be set immediately. Moxie signs give the Annoy-o-Tron 5000, which must be set after completing the meatcar quest. But they also have the gnomes, and Fragnk’s skills can be helpful (the +item one in particular), as well as the microbrewery, which could give useful booze, and the Gno-Mart sells every item that’s needed for Gate 2, saving you a pull. Muscle signs give you the inside Degrassi Knoll once you get the meatcar quest. From there you can buy the Detuned Radio, as well as all the parts of the meatcar (except the rims), the bugbear bakery items, and a frilly skirt (saves a pull for Cap’m Caronch since you’ll almost always get 3 hot wings). They also let you find the untinker’s screwdriver in 0 turns.

Which sign you pick is up to you, consider the trade-offs, try them, and see which one you like. However, all speed ascensions pick either Blender or a muscle sign, and most pick muscle signs. I still suggest trying each.

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 pilling on as much ML as you can get.

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, and on lazy runs I sometimes won’t bother to track semirares. 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, 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:

• Knob Goblin Elite Guard Captain: Provides the entire KGE outfit, which lets you shop in the Laboratory, giving access to lots of useful goodies.
• Some Bad ASCII Art: Drops all 4 needed scrolls.
• Knob Goblin lunchbox: Gives you 3 items, 1-2 thermos full of Knob coffee and 1-2 Knob pasty. Some of the best food/booze in the game, useful for generating turns.
• Inhaler: +200% meat for 10 turns. Good for doing the nuns sidequest during the war.
• Cyclops eyedrops: +100% items for 10 turns. Good for the filthworms sidequest during the war as well as tomb rats.

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? Oxygenarians, because of their disadvantages elsewhere, get a much quicker and narrower semirare counter that runs 100-120 turns. So a common strategy is to ascend as an Oxygenarian, adventure to set the counter, then drop the path in the account menu. Your semirare counter is still set, but now you’ll get it in 100-120 turns instead of 160-200, and for no cost. Whether or not to oxydrop is a big undecided question in the SC speed community, but for longer runs it’s a good idea.

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.

• Blooper: A great day-1 target. You’ll need some stats to hit 6, and the digital realm needs to get done at some point. Puttying a blooper lets you get 18 white pixels (3 from the first, 15 from copies), leaving you 12 short of the key. One strategy I’ve employed is to save the last copy for the following day, and then copy it again for 21 pixels, giving a single pie a 2/3 chance of finishing the key (possibly 100% if you got even one pixel).
• Some 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.

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.

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 and bandersnatch, as well as tattered scraps (which you won’t have many of). 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).

Two recent (as of this writing) changes increased the number of runaways during a run, the bandersnatch (providing an additional 4-7 per day), and making the lab key drop from the Knob Goblin King (freeing 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. There are also some tricks, such as banishing the Beefy bodyguard bats to fight the Boss Bat immediately. 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.

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

Olfaction

Don’t got it, can’t write about it. Shit.

Roadmap

The guide continues with the Roadmap