Albino Chipmunk
Farmhand
As someone who is trying to offset the amount of hours they've been fishing in this game, I have decided to find other activities to do in this game. One of the activities that has attracted my attention were skull cavern runs and as someone who likes to make every weapon viable in any game, skull caverns is a good fit for my weapons testing. One enemy that has gained my attention were iridium red bats which were stronger with a more redder sprite compared to the normal iridium bats. These bats were good for testing my weapons since they're much stronger, but a problem was that they only spawn at floors 880+ below. Since they spawned at those floors I had to find other methods of finding them, and hence this is when I started to do pause buffering. Pause buffering at first was hard, but I was able to gain a sustainable amount of floors per tick overtime.
Although my original intention was to dive deep in the skull caverns, my interest in testing weapons started decreasing as I did more runs, and other challenges such as the most iridium ore in a run and deepest floor possible in skull caverns came into mind. I went for most iridium ore at first, but my skills at collecting ore was mediocre at best. When descending during deep dives I noticed that my pause buffering improved gradually to the point where I had a 99 floor tick. I eventually switched from ore gathering to pause buffering with stairs. This switch eventually gotten me to see how deep I could get and eventually in one run I gotten to floor 10000 in one day.
My skull cavern 10000 floor in one day took around 5-6 IRL hours to do. I started this run at around 9:30PM and stopped at 2:00AM IRL to sleep and I left my PC running overnight. I continued on from around 9AM and gotten to floor 10000 at almost 11:00AM. It takes me around 45 minutes to reach floor 1600. Honestly this run was really mind-numbingly painstaking since all I did was place staircases and paused the game. I've used more than 10000 staircases and probably paused more than 15000 times in this run. Note: Do not do this, unless you like torturing yourself. Pause buffering is exciting at the first 1000 levels, but it gets really old fast as soon as you descend at around floor 4000 and below.
Done unmodded.
What is pause buffering?
Pause buffering is the process where you use the pause menu to prevent time from continuing in order to allow yourself to think of your next move. This is useful for repositioning your mouse cursor (PC) in order to place something or aim with the slingshot and thinking of your next move as well as saving time which continues when the screen fades in. Pause buffering in this case is to place staircases on a tile.
Setup:
Note: Since ore is not in mind for this run, anything that increases luck level (Lucky rings and Magic Rock Candy) and increase item collecting range (Glowstone rings and iridium bands) are not considered into account.
Staircases - Used to descend downwards in skull cavern. In this run I brought 11 stacks and 565 with one being a backup. Trade jades during Sunday to get staircases. Jades can be produced from a crystalarium with a jade.
Master slingshot/slingshot - Used to fire explosive ammo. Either works fine.
Explosive ammo - Used to break rock nodes. Will explode when in contact with a wall/monster/ladder. Faster than pickaxe and bombs in destroying rock nodes.
Dragonscale boots
- +7 defense. Since you're not getting hit by slimes (only monster in skull caverns that can debuff you) or any monster in general dragonscale boots are used instead in order to reduce the damage received from explosive ammo slung. Immunity not useful in this scenario.
Warp Totem: Desert - Used to warp to the desert to conserve time.
Pickaxe - Generally not recommended due to slingshot, but is best used for breaking boulders if one sits on every placeable tile surrounding the exit.
A weapon used for combat (Clubs/Daggers/Swords) is VERY not recommended since slingshot breaks mining nodes quicker and fighting is best avoided.
Rings:
Two different rings are combined to make a combined ring. Two of the same ring cannot be combined.
Crabshell ring + emerald ring - Used to increase speed of slingshot projectile and give +5 defense to reduce damage taken from explosive ammo.
Emerald ring + any ring/Just an emerald ring - Another emerald ring to increase speed of slingshot projectile. Stacks with the other emerald ring to give a multiplicative 20% projectile speed increase. Combining this ring with another ring is optional, and in this case I combined it with an iridium band for the glow effect and potential use of the combined ring for other unrelated activities.
Crabshell ring + emerald ring - Used to increase speed of slingshot projectile and give +5 defense to reduce damage taken from explosive ammo.
Emerald ring + any ring/Just an emerald ring - Another emerald ring to increase speed of slingshot projectile. Stacks with the other emerald ring to give a multiplicative 20% projectile speed increase. Combining this ring with another ring is optional, and in this case I combined it with an iridium band for the glow effect and potential use of the combined ring for other unrelated activities.
Food:
Qi seasoned crab cakes - Crab cakes when qi seasoning give +2 defense and +1 speed which lasts for the whole day.
Qi seasoned triple shot expresso. Still gives +1 speed but duration is doubled. Speed stacks with crab cakes since triple shot is a drink while crab cakes are a food dish.
Qi seasoned triple shot expresso. Still gives +1 speed but duration is doubled. Speed stacks with crab cakes since triple shot is a drink while crab cakes are a food dish.
Setup should look like this (Ignore the bombs as I did not use any during this run)
Pause buffering:
General note: These tips are more oriented towards PC players. I am not sure what it is like for console/switch/mobile players.
- Have the
qi crab cakes
qi triple shot expresso
- When you start, pause the game as soon as possible to save time. Once the game screen has loaded, eat the
qi crab cakes
qi triple shot
- Have a chair train setup at the desert and skull cavern entrance cave. Sitting on a chair prevents time from advancing. Chain sitting on chairs saves time. Image of chair hopping setup below.
- When you enter a floor in the skull caverns pause the game as soon as possible to conserve time. The screen fading in consumes time which could affect your pause buffering. Do not pause the screen too early as this could delay the pause menu or too late to waste time. You want to perfectly pause the game in order to conserve time.
- Memorize the floors. Most floors have placeable tiles surrounding the exit. Some have two placeable tiles at the exit and only one has a placeable tile at the left direction of the exit. Memorizing which floors have which placeable tiles can save time and prevent you from wasting staircases.
- Holding the right click button, then left click button would help place staircases and descend downward faster.
- Two ways of determining when to pause your game:
- Item popup at the bottom right corner of your cursor (PC). When it appears you could pause the game.
- Another way is to check the staircase placing tile. If it's red, you cannot place it. If green then the staircase can be placed. Normally this cannot be seen clearly, however minimizing both the UI and Zoom level would make the highlight bright which is useful for saving time and allows you to easily know if you could place a tile in that area.
- When placing the staircase is invalid, do a double pause to see your surroundings and to conserve time. For double pause press E then F. This is faster than pressing E/escape twice. If surrounded by mining nodes, press F again then E. (PC).
- If surrounded by mining nodes, use the slingshot equipped with explosive ammo to break the nodes as explosive ammo instantly detonates when it hits a wall/enemy/ladder and breaks mining nodes instantly. This is faster than using bombs and a pickaxe.
- If you're planning to take a break, I recommend you take a break at an infested floor since those don't have mining nodes in them.
Anyways let me know if there are any errors here.
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