Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24108228-20160127235200/@comment-24108228-20160128205120

Back when I was doing a timed run of this I got 16/17 minutes, spawning on canyon and following the outlined steps afterwards.

I tried this recently with a different strategy, ignoring herbal remedies and rushing to spire with 4 stone pickaxes, courtesy of my start on plateau. I made 5 chemistry levels using 6 gunpowder in 10-11 minutes, and was intending to use bombs to make the rest of the way. Unfortunately this backfired when a hacker joined and distracted me, I found bombs give absolutely pitiful amounts of chemistry xp compared to gunpowder (three bombs and the fuses bringing me about a quarter of the way through level 5), and I starved to death. Assuming these things hadn't happened and I had instead stayed on spire to make gunpowder up to level 7, I think I could beat my current record, but it might be a bit of a stretch. There's improvements to be made in both runs.

Hard to say if herbal remedies or gunpowder is the better way to get to level 7, although if someone reading this wants to know what's better if you already have decent tools (pickaxes better than stone), gunpowder wins by a long shot.

Edit: Ok, so after trying the "all gunpowder no herbs" strategy again, I found that you'll need to make 12 gunpowder to get to level 7 (or just 11 gunpowder and 2 charcoal). I got a time of 16 minutes and 18 seconds, although I did make a number of mistakes which'll have added about 2 minutes to my time, so there's plenty of room for improvement.

Edit Edit: Today I did another couple runs, and the first one failed pretty miserably (I fell off spire and had to climb back up, I needed to fight a hostile inhabitant of plateau, and I died of thirst before I got into the cave). The second one worked better, I drank some pond water from flax before I left, and that let me do the rest of the run without dehydrating. I was better practiced at quad-wielding, and I didn't forget to get sand. I made the run in 14:26, and I would have likely done it faster (at least 30 seconds) had I not forgotten to take down the glass into the mushroom cave, meaning I had to go up and get it before I could actually craft a poison.