Min/max challenges

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by squigglyruth, Dec 23, 2018.

  1. squigglyruth

    squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

    I just did exactly the same thing! It didn't occur to me that Sandy would close for a festival, since she isn't in town. Luckily though I do have the oak resin, so I'll just have to skip the luau to pick up the coral. (I had spare coral in a chest until a couple of days ago - how annoying!)
     
    • One More Day

      One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

      OK, I did have a single oak tree tapped, for the oak resin for the wizard bundle. It happened to be near the greenhouse, and it popped again in time for me to be able to do one craft of 5 DSG on summer 12. I already have the mushroom, the winter root and the crystal fruit, so I only need another 5 of the 8 forageables across the two seasons. I need 5 perfect rolls of the dice and I can still save Summer 17. Won't know for 5 days...........................
       
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      • squigglyruth

        squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

        Did it! Not sure what happened to the 6th star, but the centre is definitely complete.
        upload_2019-4-18_15-25-48.png
         
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        • Elenna101

          Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

          Nice! (I saw someone complete the community center a few days ago on Twitch, and I seem to recall that the sixth star doesn't show up until you walk out and walk back in. I guess because there's no more hut so it can't do the animation where the Junimo walks out with the star.)
           
          • One More Day

            One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

            My 1% chance did not come off, I only got 3 of the 5 missing forageables, so I had to settle for Summer 18. Maybe I'll replay from Summer 4 onwards in a day or two, just to claim Summer 17, but I'll do it speedrun style, just sleeping through most days.

            I think it might be if you finish the bulletin board last that you don't get the 6th star. I finished the crafts room last and I did get the star before leaving
             
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            • squigglyruth

              squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

              I'm sure I've had the 6th star before when I completed the bulletin board last, and I think this time I completed the craft room last, though I wouldn't absolutely swear to it - I did three rooms the same day because I was lazy about making trips there beforehand. In fact I think the star that didn't get put up was my third star, when I completed the pantry and vault in the same day. That has happened to me once before when completing multiple rooms, and the star never showed that time, even after the ceremony.
               
              • Elenna101

                Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                I guess it's just a random glitch, then. IDK.

                Also, my first run ended on Spring 12 without enough money for the strawberries I wanted or for the traveling cart on the 14th. Didn't get down to the mines fast enough. I'm debating between redoing from the 11th (when I only got down 5 levels due to too many enemies and not enough food) versus going back further and trying to get 2000G at some point for the copper pickaxe.
                 
                • squigglyruth

                  squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

                  Are you aiming to get the money for the strawberries from mushrooms? I wondered if that would be possible - it could prove really powerful if you pull it off. I didn't quite get there myself - I funded my strawberries from a crop of potatoes and day 2-4 fishing, plus selling gems. Planting enough potatoes on 6th is quite a reliable method for getting money for the egg festival. This save file is definitely trickier because of the expensive cart items early on, though. Good luck!

                  In other news, I did a quick run-through to mining level 10 in a very unplanned way as a change from all the scheduling. I got it on Tuesday 23rd near the end of the day, but I think it could be possible to shave something off this by making more use of bombs. Also, whilst the hilltop farm was handy, unlocking the quarry through Joja was completely not worth it so I would skip that on a future attempt.
                  upload_2019-4-20_19-16-37.png
                   
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                  • Elenna101

                    Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                    Yeah, I didn't get enough money from fishing to plant enough potatoes (as it is, farming 10 is going to be a struggle), so i was aiming to get to 91 on the 12th. Thinking about it, a few extra hours isn't going to be enough time. I should probably take another look at my scheduling.
                     
                    • One More Day

                      One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                      I don't think it's necessary until you start mining gold ore for the sprinklers, and you certainly don't need it on the descent to floor 80, the basic pickaxe is fine.

                      How do you only get one elevator level in a day? Perhaps you need to practice your mining and combat techniques before attempting this, because there's absolutely no way you should ever take all day to get just five floors. Ever!

                      Even with a basic pickaxe, and only starting at 12 noon because of watering, you need to be looking at descending 10 - 15 per day. If you're running out of food you might be wasting energy getting distracted by shiny stuff. Just take the ladder as soon as you see it; the elevator means you can always come back for shiny another time. The only time I divert is for a diamond node, or a huge splash of ore nodes, and that's as much for the quick boost to mining XP as it for the goodies I get. And even then I use a cherry bomb, which is fast and costs no energy.

                      Tricky to balance it with all the farming taking up several hours each morning, when you would also like to be descending. The mushroom floor schedule for 118078988 is good, but it isn't quite that accommodating. The really good floor in the first two weeks is floor 89 on day 14, far too late for buying strawberries. That's where I targeted starting farming for the cash to repair the bus on day 17, but I had an extra four days to assemble what I needed.

                      Again, how? If we assume that the money from day 2 fishing is only used to buy the fiberglass rod and bait first thing on day 3, you then have three days to catch the approximately 10k you need for enough spuds to get Farming 6, which shouldn't be difficult at all.

                      Nice.
                      I'm trying something similarly mining themed, getting to floor 100 of skull cavern as fast as possible. I don't have a target as such, just somewhere mid to late spring.
                       
                      • Elenna101

                        Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                        Yeah I kind of figured mining would be my big roadblock in this - I'm used to doing 10 floors at most in a day, and the earliest I'd reached level 80 in the past was summer 3 or so. But then, trying and failing is good practice, eh? :p
                        Although in my defense, I was making 10 floors a day in iron levels all the other days, just that one day I guess I got unlucky with ladder drops. I took all the ladders as soon as I saw them. In retrospect, I should have brought more stone, and probably should have crafted more cherry bombs.

                        Floor 91 on the 12th seems nice if you can make it (which I evidently couldn't :p )

                        Any particular reason you're repairing the bus on the 17th and not the 24th? I feel like there's probably something I'm missing here, because I've scheduled it for the 24th.

                        I kind of assumed (admittedly without calculating) that three days of fishing wasn't long enough for the fiberglass rod to pay for itself. I guess I was wrong :p
                         
                        • One More Day

                          One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                          That's not even close to good enough. You should probably just start a few farms, fish for three or four days to practise that, then eat the fish as you prioritise getting down the mines as fast as possible, regardless of the daily luck, until you can consistently hit floor 80 in four days of mining. Obviously it'll take an extra day or two when you have to water 200 potatoes in a "real" farm, but do that a few times, to see how much you can improve.

                          Cherry bombs are an essential part of your strategy for finding ladders below floor 40 when you only have the basic pickaxe. If you hit the ladder then great, down you go, but if you miss, you still get some stone without much effort, for ladders when necessary. I'd recommend staircases for the spiral floors, and all but the smallest monster floors. I don't bring "more stone" as such; I never split my stack of stone and leave some somewhere else, I just carry the whole lot, and I always acquire it at a faster rate than I use it. Even when building a deluxe barn and big coop by the end of spring, I didn't have to buy a single stone, although I did buy almost all the wood.

                          It's small, it's a horrible shape (like a double U-bend), and there's a huge sand pit in the middle, as well as smaller sand pits near the entrance, where no mushrooms can spawn. The biggest open space for them to spawn is the farthest corner from the exit, which will waste huge amounts of time, particularly if you run into monsters at the two bottlenecks. The best rooms for farming mushrooms are big and roughly circular, with little to no sand, such as 89, 96 and 118. You might be able to top up your money from spuds with a few extra thousand gold from floor 91, but not much more than that.

                          Also, you'll need the backpack upgrade for mushroom farming; until you get Foraging 10 and iridium quality, you'll need six slots just for mushrooms. On top of that you'll need pickaxe, weapon, food, coal, stones and several slots for ore and shiny stuff; in particular, you'll pick up plenty of fire quartz for refining to craft your sprinklers (saves a lot of coal vs ordinary quartz), but diamond, emerald and ruby in particular will mount up to a tidy amount of cash too. If it comes down to a choice between the backpack and the copper pick, get the extra space.

                          Bus doesn't run on day 25, because Pam is at the doctor. If you want to buy DSG then you need to go on day 18, which means repairing the bus on day 17. Similarly, if you want to buy DSG for your fall and winter forage crops in the greenhouse, you need to buy on Summer 4, because Oasis is closed on Summer 11 (I made this mistake)

                          It probably pays for itself by the end of day 3, and certainly by day 4. The bait attracts more fish, which not only means more money, but also faster progression through the Fishing skill levels, which means faster access to gold quality fish, and they're easier to get perfects because the green bar is bigger, and that means even more money and XP..... and so on. It snowballs very fast, and you can easily hit Fishing 6 by the end of day 4 and haul in 6k per day, not including what you get in treasure chests.
                           
                          • Elenna101

                            Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                            To some extent, that's made up for by the fact that, unlike 89, you don't have to make your way down 3 levels every time you go there. (Unless there's a better way to grind that I'm not aware of, I guess.)But okay, point taken.

                            Ugh, yeah, I missed that. Pam just couldn't pick any other day of the year for her appointment, could she? :p

                            Okay, so at some point I'm definitely starting over from the start and doing more fishing and bomb making. I don't think I need to practice fishing per se, I can catch basically all the relevant fish except the catfish and eel at level 0, but not getting the fiberglass rod was obviously a mistake. But for now there's this thing called Real Life that I have to deal with for some reason. :D
                             
                            • One More Day

                              One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                              You don't need to make your way down 3 levels every time. Well, you do, but you don't need to find ladders every time, you just use the same ladders.

                              Let's say you're farming on 89. When you have finished gathering the mushrooms, you head to the ladder to go back up, but you wait for the clock to tick over. When it ticks, you immediately exit, dash across the mines entry floor to the elevator and head straight back down to 85. The ladder you used last time will still be there, so head straight down to 86, where you'll find your old ladder to 87, and again to 88. Once you're on 88, you wait again for the next tick of the clock before you go back down to 89, which will then have refreshed. But the ladders above will still remain in place. Every ten minutes, it only refreshes the floors below you, not the ones above you. For this to work, to have enough time to dash across to the elevator, then descend and dash down three more ladders, you need those ladders to be quite close to the entry point to each level, so if you don't get one spawn you'll need to craft them. You do need to be very aware of the time, all the time. If you go up just before a tick, or if you don't get back to the floor above your target floor within ten minutes, you lose all (or some) of your ladders, and you need to find or craft them again. The closer your target floor is to the elevator above, the more time you have, which is why 96 is probably my absolute favourite for its combination of proximity, size and shape.

                              You're right to an extent though, that 81, 91, 101 and 111 do score a little better than they otherwise would, because you never have to find ladders, and you don't have to wait for the clock to tick over to exit them, you just go up, and only have to wait for the next tick to refresh the floor, before you go back down.

                              Grinding back down to the other floors every time would be really painful and probably not worth it, you'd almost be better off going fishing. But using the above method, you can pick up mushrooms worth tens of thousands every day. In my own attempt at 118078988, I got over 100k in mushrooms in four days, from day 14 to 17, including on day 16 spending a fair amount of time descending down from 90 to 95 to open up the dream floor 96 for day 17, followed by a visit to the CC to buy the bus bundles, and then going to Gus to buy a stack of coffee, all before I even got started on mushrooms that day. BTW, chugging down coffee all day makes mushroom floors even more profitable, even though it costs 3k per day. The savage ring is also a good idea, once you've slaughtered enough void spirits.

                              And the time/ladder trick works just as well when you want to farm blue slimes for winter roots. I chose floor 53 on day 18 for this - terrible layout for mushrooms, because of the sand, but great for monsters, and there wasn't a good mushroom floor available that day

                              You won't be at level 0 on day 3. You can afford to miss the catfish, it'll be available in the secret woods on Summer 13, a guaranteed rainy day. You need to go there anyway, for the woodskip and the fiddlehead fern, and that's plenty of time to work your fishing skill up. But you really should make the effort to get the eel - you might not get another chance and it's not really that difficult. You should be at least fishing 3, and probably fishing 4, by the time it first appears at 4pm on day 3, and it's a very smooth movement. It shoots up fast about 3/4 of the way to the top, then waits a bit before dropping down, but as long as you can catch up to it when it stops climbing, you should be able to get it fine.
                               
                                Last edited: Apr 21, 2019
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                              • Elenna101

                                Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                                Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks for the tips!

                                And yeah, I caught the eel at my first try at it on level 3, I agree it's really not that hard. The comment about level 0 was more a response to
                                as opposed to a specific comment about my plans.

                                I didn't know summer 13 was guaranteed to be rainy, though, if I'd known that I would have spent less time trying to catch a catfish. (I got it on level 4 fishing after about 6 tries.) Any idea why that's the case?
                                 
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                                • squigglyruth

                                  squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

                                  I agree. I actually still had the basic pickaxe at the end of my run, on Summer 16 - though I could have upgraded it in the summer, there seemed no big need for this run.

                                  I think getting to 101 by day 12 would be interesting. Probably only manageable without any potatoes planted, though, so it would be a risky trade-off. If not, I agree with Elenna that 91 on day 12 would be worth hitting. I know the shape is annoying, but I have still got really good mushroom hauls from it in the past. It would give a nice extra bonus to the potato money.
                                  I see your point about the shape of 89, but doing a run to that floor does need preparation, which doesn't work so well with going to the egg festival.

                                  This is why I chose to craft my DSG for spring instead of buying it. On my run, I didn't unlock the bus until the same time as the greenhouse (summer 10). Instead I put a bunch of tappers up on Monday 8th on pine trees (to make speed gro for strawberries), moved all but one of them to oak trees on the Saturday after harvesting them, and added enough extra oak tappers later in the month to get me 18 oak resin by the end of the month. That gave me enough to plant 50 corn, 5 blueberries and 35 melons with DSG, and I planted a further 15 melons with basic SG. I ended up with more than twice as many gold melons and corn as I needed, so you could safely cut back the number of tappers.

                                  This is interesting to read - your mining strategy is quite different from mine. I save cherry bombs for the end of the day if timing is looking tight to the next elevator. I don't bother with ladders except occasionally on large monster floors, so I don't carry my stone into the mine with me when my backpack space is tight. Sometimes I choose to throw stone away to fit in more valuable items. I've rarely had a problem getting a staircase early on on the spiral floor, so I don't miss the ladders.

                                  I bought 4 stone I think, but only about 450 wood in total, even with making the tappers and opening the beach bridge. I must have spent a lot more time than you chopping wood, though it didn't feel like a lot - it fit in around other things.

                                  That's my next one to try - probably combined with getting combat 10.
                                   
                                  • One More Day

                                    One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                                    Fair enough, but I don't think it wouldn't hurt to repeat day 1 to about day 12 two or three times anyway, including the fishing. In addition to honing your skills with bombs, weapons and pickaxes, it'll give you a feel for how many chub you need to set aside for food during your descent in the mines, and how much you'll earn from selling all the other fish. If you're going to attempt to complete the CC in near record time, the first two weeks or so are going to be fairly heavy on min-max tactics, whichever route you take, and it looks like your mining/combat game needs some work before it's good enough.

                                    Watch some of this guy's speedruns to see how fast mining can be done, it really made me realise how much better I could do, although I struggle to match his speed -


                                    I don't know why, but it's useful to know for speed runs. It's a guaranteed day for getting the red snapper too, and as it's a Saturday, that's the full week for the fiddlehead fern to spawn in the secret woods too, so you'd be ridiculously unlucky to not to get everything you need there in a single visit, when you go for the woodskip.



                                    Getting skull cavern unlocked quickly is easy, but getting down to floor 100 with only Combat 5 and Obsidian Edge is not so easy, even on a star luck day. Had several attempts at my "dive day", most recent one I got down to floor 84 before I got stiffed by an iridium bat because you can't eat next to a wall

                                    Of course, I tried all it on a save that turned out not to have any mushroom floors at all until day 18, but I didn't realise that until day 9 when I hit up the predictor to look up if I could farm them day 10, so instead of just resetting, I funded it all with Level 10 fishing, which was even more grindy, and also meant no purple mushrooms for skull food.
                                     
                                    • Elenna101

                                      Elenna101 Scruffy Nerf-Herder

                                      Look what I just got (for the first time ever, too) while fishing day 3! :D
                                      upload_2019-4-22_18-21-0.png

                                      EDIT: Also, the two artifacts I've found so far (the bone flute in that picture, and the prehistoric vertebra I dug up day 1) are the very last two I found in the one file where I've completed the museum. Ah, the joys of RNG...
                                       
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                                      • One More Day

                                        One More Day Cosmic Narwhal

                                        An opening offering of 11.30pm on day 19 - https://upload.farm/1HjqrH


                                        2019-04-22 (1).png


                                        At the sixth or seventh attempt, I finally managed to avoid getting stomped by bad guys, or as was the case on one attempt, accidentally closing the window

                                        I got down to floor 85 in the mines by end of day 9, and donated the boiler room bundles for the minecarts the following day. That in itself is a non-Joja PB for me, because my second bundle to unlock the boiler room is always the spring crops, which take to day 13. But I didn't even get a single chance to farm mushroom floors after that, so this was all paid for by fishing. Mushrooms are obviously a much faster way to get the money to repair the bus (40k+) and buy the explosive ammo (30k+) and coffee (3k), because fishing for it takes forever. Also, slowly topping up HP by eating salmonberries is fine when there are no monsters about, but I also had to spend another few k on salads so I had some food that could heal big chunks in an emergency. So, add all that up, and this could clearly be done a few days earlier on a save ID which offers mushrooms


                                        And here's the haul of goodies, worth considerably less than what it cost me

                                        2019-04-22 (3).png



                                        I only got one spicy eel as a serpent drop, otherwise had to make do with crab cakes for a buff, and I eventually got down to floor 113 by the end of the day. Which isn't bad with only the obsidian edge, but even with the inferior weapon and combat skill, I'm still disappointed it took me so many attempts.

                                        Going to do this again from scratch, there's plenty of room for improvement
                                         
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                                        • squigglyruth

                                          squigglyruth Pangalactic Porcupine

                                          Congratulations! - That should make a big difference to your speed down the mines. For the first 40 levels you'll be able to kill most monsters in one hit, which spawns ladders quite often. It will also really increase your speed in the levels with ghosts.

                                          I also just hit a personal best in my game, having fished up a Neptune's Glave on day 4. I reached 85 in the mines on day 8, and 100 on day 9. Unfortunately (!) it has rained on days 8, 9 and 10, and I hadn't unlocked the community centre, so no minecarts for me yet :( Wishing I had planted my parsnips on day 3, they'd be ready now with no watering...
                                           

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