BlaDe
Farmer
Are you dragging the mouse when you do it?
Skull cavern dives and loot
- Thread starter Pangaearocks
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- skull cavern
Pangaearocks
Planter
Okay, can the game somehow start lagging like a mo-fo for some reason? I'm finally back and trying the same technique as before, but without the mines being invaded this time, and it's lagging rather brutally. Takes a little half-second each time before a staircase is created and I'm going down, despite having the cursor over a valid tile and holding down the mouse buttons. This is much, much slower than it was before. Looking at the notes from before, I was going down more than twice as fast then, and I reckon it must be due to this lag on each floor.
Have others experienced this, and know what can cause it? Nothing is different on my computer. Confused.
Edit: Yeah, this is totally pathetic. May as well walk around with a wooden pickaxe.
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New attempt on a different day, and this is really quite frustrating. No idea what I was doing before, or if the game is borked. But I keep falling further and further behind. At 9:00 now, and I'm at floor 606, while in the previous attempt I was at floor 733 at 9 o'clock. That is a huge difference!
Feels like the timing is good and I'm not making too many mistakes, but something is clearly off.
Have others experienced this, and know what can cause it? Nothing is different on my computer. Confused.
As for this, think so? Not used it for a while now and don't have it for the current run. Thought it was in the chest in the dungeon but it must be somewhere else. From how I remember it, I start with the mouse cursor a fair bit behind the farmer, and then need to drag a little further so the slingshot activates (sorta). Otherwise he's just standing there with nothing happening. Seems like it needs to have that dragback sound playing. So again, I don't understand how the pros can pull it off so extremely quickly, in what looks like half a frame.
Edit: Yeah, this is totally pathetic. May as well walk around with a wooden pickaxe.
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New attempt on a different day, and this is really quite frustrating. No idea what I was doing before, or if the game is borked. But I keep falling further and further behind. At 9:00 now, and I'm at floor 606, while in the previous attempt I was at floor 733 at 9 o'clock. That is a huge difference!
Feels like the timing is good and I'm not making too many mistakes, but something is clearly off.
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Pangaearocks
Planter
Oh well. It ended up going rather well after all, despite the slow descent. Started mining around floor 1050 (around 11:00, which was considerably slower than before), and fell asleep on 1398. Didn't have a whole lotta bombs, so tried to use the slingshot instead. Feels slow at times and I couldn't pull off hitting enemies for nodes in the middle of rooms very often, and kept missing at walls too, but the haul is the most I've gotten, iirc.
Almost 3 stacks of iridium ore, over 1 stack of gold, and 32 prismatic shards. Looks like I went through around 250 ammo too, but iron isn't a bottleneck yet.
Almost 3 stacks of iridium ore, over 1 stack of gold, and 32 prismatic shards. Looks like I went through around 250 ammo too, but iron isn't a bottleneck yet.
Pangaearocks
Planter
Oh FFS. Why isn't there a GIGANTIC WARNING when you go up the bloody stairs from the cavern? Once again the utter crap happened. It's only 6PM and I even had a really nice pace going there. Am on floor 1200 or something, with one and a half stack of ore, and BAM, the stupid turd is back up on top for some reason. I took a sidestep to jump into a hole, and POOF, the hole went up. CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP 
SnoozlyKitsune
Cowpoke
I am in awe of your Skull Cavern adventures, guys. How do you even get to floor 400 and even by the thousands when I could only manage is at level 104? I am a Mobile Player by the way. 
Lew Zealand
Helper
Hi SnoozlyKitsune and Welcome to the Forums!I am in awe of your Skull Cavern adventures, guys. How do you even get to floor 400 and even by the thousands when I could only manage is at level 104? I am a Mobile Player by the way.
I play on Switch and you can get to Level 200 pretty easily before starting carpet bombing. Start on a high Luck day and get to the Desert early thanks to a Warp Totem or Desert Obelisk, and then just put down Staircases as quickly as you can (the slow time tricks they do on PC don't work as well on mobile/Switch controls).
You'll need to practice a bit before it becomes easy to view and manage your surroundings while putting those Stairs down. On my 3rd run it went smoothly, just target Level 100 for starters and see how long in the day it takes you. Once you're at 100, start the Bombing to get your loot! And don't worry about getting back home as passing out at 2am is just fine. When you get better at it, try for level 150 or 200.
Bring your favorite Weapon, lots of healing food (many people like Iridium quality Cheese, I do), lots of Staircases (Jade into Crystalariums and trade on Sundays at Desert Trader for Stairs). Highly recommended to take Luck buff food like Lucky Lunch or Spicy Eel, as well as Ginger Ale, but different people have different favorites for this.
Actually I don't know how easy that actually goes with the touchscreen! I use the Switch Joycons.
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SurprisedPikachuBob3
Farmer
Challange expected
Lew Zealand
Helper
Yay!
I got to ~165 on Switch recently on a Co-op world where there is zero pausing at all anytime in the game. Co-op days seem to last about half as long as single player days and not quite 100% of that can be attributed to vibing with the cool person you're playing with. 200 should be reasonable with pausing to gather nerves (which is what I need in SC).
Elenna101
Farmer
In Skull Caverns they actually are shorter (and not just because of the pausing)! Each 10-minute interval is normally ~7 seconds, but in singleplayer it's lengthened to ~9 seconds in Skull Caverns.
Also in single player time pauses when you eat, but not in multiplayer.
SnoozlyKitsune
Cowpoke
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply to my query. And thanks for the tips. I will definitely try this method once I am out of office. :D
Pangaearocks
Planter
Good point. I wouldn't recommend to try this technique in the office, and thereby prolong the day :P
Pangaearocks
Planter
Trying another run again, and good Yoba, hope I don't screw up again and take the ladder UP by accident. That was PAINFUL after spending probably two real-life hours on it 
Think I found out why the game was seemingly lagging before. Suspect I was simply going through the motions too quickly, i.e. pause->unpause, so my fairly old computer didn't have time to load in the room properly. Difficult to get into the mindset of trying to wait, because your mind is fixed on trying to do everything as quickly as possible. Only just got started, but had a really nice run between 6:30 and 6:40. Managed 59 floors (63 to 122). And I had to hack away a rock twice, hack a barrel once, plus had a couple missed pauses (pause too quickly). If I could stabilise at 50+ floors per tick, that would be very nice pace compared to my earlier attempts.
People probably differ here, but I've found it better to use default zoom settings when descending floors. Yeah, can't see anything around me really, but the pointer is a little bigger, so it's somewhat easier to see whether the tile is outlined in red (invalid) or green. However, if you nail the timing pretty much perfectly, I really can't tell either way.
Haven't tried the stairs trick in the desert, Emily and Sandy will probably mess it up anyway on Sandy's birthday. But if I don't misclick too badly, I can get to the chest by the farmhouse bed, drop tools and pick up a desert totem, use the totem (need to sidestep a little or the idiot keeps opening the chest again), then eat spicy eel + espresso, run to the cavern and do some more changes in the chest there, and get inside the cavern at some point during the 6:10 tick. Which on this occasion meant I was able to get to floor 63 by 6:30. Couldn't have been much left of the 6:10 tick, but if all the stars align, there is the full 6:20 tick.
Plan is to get to floor 1000+ before starting to use the slingshot/mining, as I'm trying to get better at that. Prismatic shards basically don't matter any more as I have almost 20 candies in the cavern chest and over 100 shards left on the farm, but hopefully I can get a full stack of gold and at least two stacks of iridium ore. That should set me up for a while with crystalarium production (and money for bars).
Once I'm ready to start mining, will change zoom settings to 75% for a better view (although it makes using stairs more awkward).
Another small thing, that @FilthyGorilla touched upon before iirc: I prefer to have the pointer left or right of the character when descending floors. The main reason is that there are quite a lot of floors with stone tiles on the floor, which distorts where your ladder is placed if you try to place it on top of those tiles. But left/right is usually safe. Treasure floors for example often have this crap going on. Monster invasion floors are fantastic, because there are usually no obstacles there, so you are safe to place a ladder almost anywhere.
(Gosh, looking at that picture again, hope I didn't bring too little food. Low on sashimi I see.)
PS: I'd love to see runs from other people too
Edit: What the deepest of hells?!? Got 75 floors between 7:50 and 8:00 (from 515 to 590)
Kept making a lot of mistakes, think my head was fatigued. Too quick and you miss the pause, and that's probably 5 floors 'lost'. Took a little break and made another cup of tea :D
Overall had "only" 54 floors per tick between 8 and 9 o'clock, but the last tick was rather good at 69. When you are fortunate and don't need to move the mouse pointer much, and aren't locked in between rocks, nodes, tiled floor, etc, it can get quite nice. But the timing is sooo, soooo important. If you "see" the floor loading before reacting, you are too slow. Gotta get a feel for it, yet not do it too soon either. When everything is pretty much perfect for a tick, I can pull off ~70 or even 70+ that one time. It has ticked over to 9:00 and the dude is on floor 914. Faster than the 2-3 other dives I've noted down times for, because the average is faster, and the peaks a little higher too. Haven't written down for all ticks this time, but going back to 6:30, the pace is slightly under 57 floors per tick, so the worst ticks probably aren't all that bad. 40-ish maybe?
Sorry for all the pictures here, but I felt forced to start looking around, because some of the floors I auto-descended were simply too good to pass up. Naturally the pace is much slower when you move around and use bombs and stuff, but at 10:00 I'm at floor 1165, which is considerably faster than the attempt that went to **** via the ladder at 6 PM. In that one it was floor 1017 at 10:00, and don't think I looked much around by then either, but can't recall 100%. Shall try to pick the floors carefully to not waste too much time, but when you see 10+ nodes around, it's kinda nuts to just keep putting down stairs on auto.
Think I found out why the game was seemingly lagging before. Suspect I was simply going through the motions too quickly, i.e. pause->unpause, so my fairly old computer didn't have time to load in the room properly. Difficult to get into the mindset of trying to wait, because your mind is fixed on trying to do everything as quickly as possible. Only just got started, but had a really nice run between 6:30 and 6:40. Managed 59 floors (63 to 122). And I had to hack away a rock twice, hack a barrel once, plus had a couple missed pauses (pause too quickly). If I could stabilise at 50+ floors per tick, that would be very nice pace compared to my earlier attempts.
People probably differ here, but I've found it better to use default zoom settings when descending floors. Yeah, can't see anything around me really, but the pointer is a little bigger, so it's somewhat easier to see whether the tile is outlined in red (invalid) or green. However, if you nail the timing pretty much perfectly, I really can't tell either way.
Haven't tried the stairs trick in the desert, Emily and Sandy will probably mess it up anyway on Sandy's birthday. But if I don't misclick too badly, I can get to the chest by the farmhouse bed, drop tools and pick up a desert totem, use the totem (need to sidestep a little or the idiot keeps opening the chest again), then eat spicy eel + espresso, run to the cavern and do some more changes in the chest there, and get inside the cavern at some point during the 6:10 tick. Which on this occasion meant I was able to get to floor 63 by 6:30. Couldn't have been much left of the 6:10 tick, but if all the stars align, there is the full 6:20 tick.
Plan is to get to floor 1000+ before starting to use the slingshot/mining, as I'm trying to get better at that. Prismatic shards basically don't matter any more as I have almost 20 candies in the cavern chest and over 100 shards left on the farm, but hopefully I can get a full stack of gold and at least two stacks of iridium ore. That should set me up for a while with crystalarium production (and money for bars).
Another small thing, that @FilthyGorilla touched upon before iirc: I prefer to have the pointer left or right of the character when descending floors. The main reason is that there are quite a lot of floors with stone tiles on the floor, which distorts where your ladder is placed if you try to place it on top of those tiles. But left/right is usually safe. Treasure floors for example often have this crap going on. Monster invasion floors are fantastic, because there are usually no obstacles there, so you are safe to place a ladder almost anywhere.
(Gosh, looking at that picture again, hope I didn't bring too little food. Low on sashimi I see.)
PS: I'd love to see runs from other people too
Edit: What the deepest of hells?!? Got 75 floors between 7:50 and 8:00 (from 515 to 590)
Kept making a lot of mistakes, think my head was fatigued. Too quick and you miss the pause, and that's probably 5 floors 'lost'. Took a little break and made another cup of tea :D
Overall had "only" 54 floors per tick between 8 and 9 o'clock, but the last tick was rather good at 69. When you are fortunate and don't need to move the mouse pointer much, and aren't locked in between rocks, nodes, tiled floor, etc, it can get quite nice. But the timing is sooo, soooo important. If you "see" the floor loading before reacting, you are too slow. Gotta get a feel for it, yet not do it too soon either. When everything is pretty much perfect for a tick, I can pull off ~70 or even 70+ that one time. It has ticked over to 9:00 and the dude is on floor 914. Faster than the 2-3 other dives I've noted down times for, because the average is faster, and the peaks a little higher too. Haven't written down for all ticks this time, but going back to 6:30, the pace is slightly under 57 floors per tick, so the worst ticks probably aren't all that bad. 40-ish maybe?
Sorry for all the pictures here, but I felt forced to start looking around, because some of the floors I auto-descended were simply too good to pass up. Naturally the pace is much slower when you move around and use bombs and stuff, but at 10:00 I'm at floor 1165, which is considerably faster than the attempt that went to **** via the ladder at 6 PM. In that one it was floor 1017 at 10:00, and don't think I looked much around by then either, but can't recall 100%. Shall try to pick the floors carefully to not waste too much time, but when you see 10+ nodes around, it's kinda nuts to just keep putting down stairs on auto.
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Lew Zealand
Helper
When you have a moment to think, after your run is done (posting here during the run??!?), what are your Rings? You've probably posted this already so sorry to ask again but I'm kind of at a loss for what constitutes good Rings now that I actually have a lot of Prizzies to spend.Trying another run again, and good Yoba, hope I don't screw up again and take the ladder UP by accident. That was PAINFUL after spending probably two real-life hours on it
Think I found out why the game was seemingly lagging before. Suspect I was simply going through the motions too quickly, i.e. pause->unpause, so my fairly old computer didn't have time to load in the room properly. Difficult to get into the mindset of trying to wait, because your mind is fixed on trying to do everything as quickly as possible. Only just got started, but had a really nice run between 6:30 and 6:40. Managed 59 floors (63 to 122). And I had to hack away a rock twice, hack a barrel once, plus had a couple missed pauses (pause too quickly). If I could stabilise at 50+ floors per tick, that would be very nice pace compared to my earlier attempts.
People probably differ here, but I've found it better to use default zoom settings when descending floors. Yeah, can't see anything around me really, but the pointer is a little bigger, so it's somewhat easier to see whether the tile is outlined in red (invalid) or green. However, if you nail the timing pretty much perfectly, I really can't tell either way.
Haven't tried the stairs trick in the desert, Emily and Sandy will probably mess it up anyway on Sandy's birthday. But if I don't misclick too badly, I can get to the chest by the farmhouse bed, drop tools and pick up a desert totem, use the totem (need to sidestep a little or the idiot keeps opening the chest again), then eat spicy eel + espresso, run to the cavern and do some more changes in the chest there, and get inside the cavern at some point during the 6:10 tick. Which on this occasion meant I was able to get to floor 63 by 6:30. Couldn't have been much left of the 6:10 tick, but if all the stars align, there is the full 6:20 tick.
Plan is to get to floor 1000+ before starting to use the slingshot/mining, as I'm trying to get better at that. Prismatic shards basically don't matter any more as I have almost 20 candies in the cavern chest and over 100 shards left on the farm, but hopefully I can get a full stack of gold and at least two stacks of iridium ore. That should set me up for a while with crystalarium production (and money for bars).
Once I'm ready to start mining, will change zoom settings to 75% for a better view (although it makes using stairs more awkward).
Another small thing, that @FilthyGorilla touched upon before iirc: I prefer to have the pointer left or right of the character when descending floors. The main reason is that there are quite a lot of floors with stone tiles on the floor, which distorts where your ladder is placed if you try to place it on top of those tiles. But left/right is usually safe. Treasure floors for example often have this crap going on. Monster invasion floors are fantastic, because there are usually no obstacles there, so you are safe to place a ladder almost anywhere.
(Gosh, looking at that picture again, hope I didn't bring too little food. Low on sashimi I see.)
PS: I'd love to see runs from other people too
Edit: What the deepest of hells?!? Got 75 floors between 7:50 and 8:00 (from 515 to 590)
Kept making a lot of mistakes, think my head was fatigued. Too quick and you miss the pause, and that's probably 5 floors 'lost'. Took a little break and made another cup of tea :D
Overall had "only" 54 floors per tick between 8 and 9 o'clock, but the last tick was rather good at 69. When you are fortunate and don't need to move the mouse pointer much, and aren't locked in between rocks, nodes, tiled floor, etc, it can get quite nice. But the timing is sooo, soooo important. If you "see" the floor loading before reacting, you are too slow. Gotta get a feel for it, yet not do it too soon either. When everything is pretty much perfect for a tick, I can pull off ~70 or even 70+ that one time. It has ticked over to 9:00 and the dude is on floor 914. Faster than the 2-3 other dives I've noted down times for, because the average is faster, and the peaks a little higher too. Haven't written down for all ticks this time, but going back to 6:30, the pace is slightly under 57 floors per tick, so the worst ticks probably aren't all that bad. 40-ish maybe?
Pangaearocks
Planter
I'm using two rings that are Luck+Iridium Band. Did actually make another pair that are Iridium Band+Glowstone ring, so 4x extra magnetism, but haven't used them yet as ring swapping seems a bit much, and I preferred to have extra inventory space instead. So they are stuck in the chest way above, heh. But the extra magnetism and luck from the two rings I'm currently wearing is good IMO.
Lew Zealand
Helper
Cool that makes total sense: double stacked Luck for more drops, Magnetism to collect the drops more efficiently. Thanks!
Pangaearocks
Planter
The dive is done, looks like it took something like 3 real-life hours! 
Got to floor 1601, and overall got several personal records.
Good haul too!
Almost 4.5 stacks of ore is kinda nuts. Looks like I made around 50 mega bombs, and went through almost 500 ammo as well. Oh, and ~1500 stairs. But the return was definitely worth it :)
Edit: Raw value of 617,344g, which excludes the food and essences that I brought with, plus the stairs ofc. Turn all the ore into bars, and it's worth almost 1.3 million gold. Quite nice. These deep dives are a lot of fun. It's such a different type of challenge than anything else the game offers.
Got to floor 1601, and overall got several personal records.
Good haul too!
Almost 4.5 stacks of ore is kinda nuts. Looks like I made around 50 mega bombs, and went through almost 500 ammo as well. Oh, and ~1500 stairs. But the return was definitely worth it :)
Edit: Raw value of 617,344g, which excludes the food and essences that I brought with, plus the stairs ofc. Turn all the ore into bars, and it's worth almost 1.3 million gold. Quite nice. These deep dives are a lot of fun. It's such a different type of challenge than anything else the game offers.
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Pangaearocks
Planter
Yeah, I like that setup a lot. Much better than napalm ring or burglar's ring combos, because ideally you barely kill any enemies down there. Add Magic rock candy on top and espresso for both speed and luck, and you can gain a lot of resources. However, espresso + spicy eel is great too. The extra speed is worth much more than the luck from ginger ale in my opinion.
FilthyGorilla
Local Legend
Wow that totally crushes my record, half of me wants to go for it again but the other half knows it’s better to do my own thing and focus on my own challenges.The dive is done, looks like it took something like 3 real-life hours!
Got to floor 1601, and overall got several personal records.
Good haul too!
View attachment 11543
Almost 4.5 stacks of ore is kinda nuts. Looks like I made around 50 mega bombs, and went through almost 500 ammo as well. Oh, and ~1500 stairs. But the return was definitely worth it :)
Edit: Raw value of 617,344g, which excludes the food and essences that I brought with, plus the stairs ofc. Turn all the ore into bars, and it's worth almost 1.3 million gold. Quite nice. These deep dives are a lot of fun. It's such a different type of challenge than anything else the game offers.
Pangaearocks
Planter
Oh. What was your best run?
You know better than me how much extra ore a little extra luck can bring, but I'd rather have more speed when running back and forth on a floor you want to practically clear out. Different if you just shoot some ammo right at the entrance, but on "bomb floors" it's more imperative to move around, and then it's nice to have that extra movement speed.