Some tips for newer hardcore teetotalers

Newer hardcore ascenders sometimes ask me for advice on speeding up their hardcore ascensions, especially if they are interested in the teetotaler path and want teet-specific information. There are a lot of fast hardcore players in KoL, and there is a lot of information available on the subject. I’ve decided to write a bit about how to ascend quickly from my perspective as a teetotaler, so that hopefully it will be of some use to others in similar circumstances. I've included some good links to other people's websites because there is already a lot of good information out there and I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Before I begin, I’d like to mention a couple of the resources that have been most helpful to me. The Hardcore Oxygenation clan forums have a lot of useful information, such as the Monster Survival Guide. I recommend keeping that guide handy whenever you are adventuring. Although the Monster Survival Guide is what initially drew me into the HCO/NH forums, it is only the tip of the iceberg. There are quite a few very fast ascenders who post there regularly, and you can learn a lot by reading the threads and asking questions. You do not need to be a member of Hardcore Oxygenation or Hardcore Nation to enjoy the forums. In addition to the Monster Survival Guide, the Hardcore OxygeNation Daily News is a helpful reference that is updated daily which gives information on the availability of clovers, what’s in each room of the daily dungeon, what blood of the wereseal will do, etc.

Another useful resource is The KoL Wiki. The information on the wiki is well organized and searchable, which makes it easy to do things like compare foods to decide which is better to eat in a certain situation, or to find out how to maximize your moxie or melee damage. Since anyone can edit the wiki, the information on it is occasionally innacurate or out-of-date, but it's still a good reference.

I’m going to give information in this essay for people who are about to do their first hardcore ascension, as well as for people who are already in hardcore and want to ascend faster. If you're already in hardcore and want to skip past the information for people who are about to ascend into hardcore for the first time, click here.

How to prepare for your first hardcore ascension

I. Familiars

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the essential familiars. You need either a blood-faced volleyball or a cymbal playing monkey/Cheshire bat (the monkey and bat both give stats and meat, so it doesn’t matter which of the two you have). I highly recommend getting a cymbal playing monkey if you do not already have the monkey/bat. It is the most useful Mr Store familiar for hardcore. Your stat gain familiar (volleyball or monkey) should be the familiar you ascend with, and most of your adventuring should be done with your stat gain familiar. You may also want to get a hovering sombrero familiar, but in general, you should only use it in the NS tower if your offstats are too low (there is a requirement that you have at least 70 in each stat to access the NS chamber, and if you are below that requirement when you get to the tower, you should bring a sombrero into the tower.) Speed softcore ascenders use sombreros for their ascensions because the sombrero gives more stat gains for tougher monsters, and those people are often using equipment that gives a massive boost to monster level that is not possible (or very difficult) to achieve in hardcore, which makes the sombrero a better familiar for their purposes.

Other essential familiars are those that increase the meat drop rate, those that increase the item drop rate, combat familiars, and tower familiars. If you have a monkey/bat, then you already have the meat aspect covered and do not need a leprechaun. If you are using a blood-faced volleyball, you should probably have a leprechaun in your terrarium, although you should use it as infrequently as possible. I don’t know if it’s ever a good idea to use a leprechaun in hardcore when you don’t have a monkey/bat, but I can’t anticipate every circumstance you may find yourself in, and I know that it sucks to find yourself in hardcore without a familiar that you need that would be easy to obtain in a softcore situation.

There will be times when you will need to use a familiar that increases the item drop rate. The basic familiar for this is the baby gravy fairy. An elemental gravy fairy could be slightly more useful, although I don’t think it’s worthwhile to go out of your way to get one if you don’t already have one. An attention defecit demon would also be more helpful than a baby gravy fairy, but if you’re considering buying one, I’d recommend that you think twice about it. You will not be using your item drop familiar very often, and the meat the attention defecit demon gives in comparison to the baby gravy fairy is going to be rather small due to the fact that you’re hardly ever using it. It usually will not gain much weight, and if it does, you will be losing out on a lot of stats. There is also a familiar called the pygmy bugbear shaman which was a Mr Store item of the month at some point in the past. That familiar gives stats and items, but drains some of your MP at the end of fights. It used to be inexpensive, but the price has gone up quite a lot recently, making it unaffordable for many people. It's only important to get one if you want to try to ascend fast enough to get onto the leaderboards. Otherwise, one of the other gravy fairys is just fine for ascending very quickly. If you decide to get a pygmy bugbear shaman but not an attention defecit demon, then make sure you have a baby gravy fairy (or elemental gravy fairy) in your terrarium in case you find yourself badly in need of items but so strapped for MP/meat that you can’t afford to feed the pygmy bugbear shaman. Neither the ADDemon nor the pygmy bugbear shaman is necessary. They’ll speed things up a little bit, but they’re expensive.

A good combat familiar is essential for hardcore. When you get more skills and have fought the naughty sorceress a lot, your combat familiar will become much less important, but when you’re starting out, you need a good combat familiar. I highly recommend getting a ghost pickle on a stick if you do not already have a good combat familiar. It is one of the best familiars for fighting the naughty sorceress with, and it is considerably less expensive than some of the other really good combat familiars. The dodecapede is a combat familiar that some fast ascenders have (I don’t) and that I’ve heard is better than the ghost pickle on a stick. Unless you are extremely wealthy in game, I don’t recommend buying a dodecapede. You don’t need one now, and you will not need one in the future.

There are 5 more essential familiars that you should have before you begin a hardcore ascension, or any ascension for that matter: mosquito, saber-toothed lime, levitating potato, barrrnacle, and angry goat. You will need two of these, chosen randomly by the RNG each ascension, when you get to the naughty sorceress’ familiars. You cannot know in advance which two you will need, so get all 5.

II. Choosing a character class, sign, and path

If you’re going to do teetotaler or no path hardcore ascensions, the 3 most important skills to get permanently are pastamastery, advanced saucecrafting, and amphibian sympathy. To get these skills you will need to do hardcore ascensions as a pastamancer, sauceror, and turtle tamer, respectively. Pastamastery will allow you to conjure and cook with dry noodles, and will allow you to eat better foods than you would otherwise. Advanced saucecrafting will allow you to conjure and cook with scrumptious reagents. You can use the reagents to make potions that will give massive stat boosts and thus will make it much easier to adventure in harder areas (like the hedge maze). You will eventually use few or no reagents for adventuring in harder areas, but reagents will always be important because they are used to make the best foods for hardcore ascensions, which are the reagent pastas. Amphibian sympathy is a passive skill that gives +5 to familiar weight. It is a very important skill because a heavier volleyball will allow you to level up faster, a heavier item drop familiar will allow you to get the items you need faster, a heavier combat familiar will make it easier to fight the naughty sorceress, and you will spend less time leveling up familiars when you get to the NS familiars in the lair once you have this skill.

I’m not going to tell you which order to get those 3 skills in. One reason that I’m not telling you this is that I don’t know for sure which order is most helpful. The other reason is that I think that the helpfulness of each skill depends on your particular circumstances. For example, if you are comfortable with playing as a sauceror but have never played as a pastamancer before, and you’re going to do your first hardcore ascension, then I would recommend being a sauceror first, because your knowledge of sauceror strategies will speed up your sauceror ascension, and your reagents will make your subsequent ascensions easier. Pastamancer or turtle tamer could also be good as a first character class for similar reasons. Pick what feels right for you.

If you’re unsure of which sign to pick, I would recommend looking them all up on the wiki and deciding which you think is best in your circumstances. If you’re a teetotaler and you have pastamastery and saucecrafting, then I think a mysticality sign is best. Being able to access the mind control device will allow you to get good equipment from the bosses (like the boss bat britches, which give +5 moxie and are very good pants). A mysticality sign will also allow you to make jewelery from the gems you get in your pork elf goodies sacks, and will give you access to chez snootee. The food at chez snootee generally sucks, but even with pastamastery and saucecrafting, you’ll still occasionally eat there (for example, if you eat 3 reagent pastas as a teetotaler with the stomach of steel, you will have a fullness of 18, so you’ll be able to eat for 2 more fullness. Chez snootee occasionally has 2-fullness stir-frys that are much better than the hot wings and other junk that’s likely to be in your inventory). If you don’t have pastamastery and saucecrating, Chez Snootee is probably even more important. Since the mind control device will increase your stat gains if it’s turned up, it can be very important for speed ascensions, although at first you probably won’t be able to use it much. Still, it will always have some use early on. It’s possible that by the time you get to the 8-bit realm to get your pixels, you will sometimes be so strong that you’ll want to turn up the MCD. You might also turn it up when you’re fighting monsters in the daily dungeon. Even if you don’t use the MCD much in your early ascensions, it’s good to have it available so that you can learn how to use it properly. If you’re resourceful, you’ll have the MCD at 11 in difficult areas sooner than you will expect to. If you are doing no-path ascensions, you may want to choose a moxie sign for easy access to booze. I can’t really comment on this because I’ve never done a no-path hardcore ascension.

Choosing which path to take (no-path, teetotaler, booze, or oxy) is a personal decision that should be based on how much time you have available to play and your personal preferences. That said, if you want to ascend quickly, I think starting with oxy is a bad idea. Everyone starts slowly, due to a lack of permanent skills, and oxy ascensions could take a very long time to complete. No-path ascensions are probably a bit faster than teetotaler ascensions, but there are benefits to being a teetotaler. The foods that you get as a teetotaler reward can be eaten at the beginning of your next ascension, which will get you to level 3 (if it’s not your main stat day stat day) before you even use adventures, as well as giving you a lot of starting adventures. I find this to be a really nice way to kick off an ascension. Another benefit to being a teetotaler is the stomach of steel. One of my favorite benefits of the stomach in my early ascensions was the fact that the stomach makes the chronic indigestion skill more useful. Chronic indigestion is a skill that can be obtained by eating an insanely spicy enchanted bean burrito, and any character class can use it. It does a minimum of 5-10 points of damage, with an extra point added for each fullness point if you’ve eaten already on the day you use the skill. If you’re completely full and have the stomach of steel, it will do 25-30 points of damage with each hit. That may not seem like a lot, but it only costs 5 mp per hit, and the skill does double damage to spooky and cold monsters, so it can be especially useful in the crypt or on the icy peak. If you happen to be a teetotaler with the stomach of steel on the feast of boris (which would allow you to eat to 35 fullness), chronic indigestion will be insanely useful due to the massive amount of damage it will do when you’re full of food. One of the benefits of using chronic indigestion as a combat skill in some circumstances is that it’s often easier to eat a burrito than it is to spend thousands of meat on combat skills early in the game. The combat skills you can buy from your guild are often better, but if you have no permanent combat skills and you’re broke, chronic indigestion can save your butt. If you use it, you also don’t need to worry about boosting its damage in ways that may be expensive. If you’re a seal clubber with no permanent combat skills, for example, you may find yourself buying the claws skills in addition to thrust smack and eye of the stoat, which is unaffordable if you’re going fast. If you’re a myst class, you might want cookbooks to boost your damage, and cookbooks are pretty damn expensive when you’ve already bought a combat skill for use in your current ascension. Something important to remember is that chronic indigestion doesn’t work in the copse of the deep fat friars. You’ll probably get beaten up if you try to use it there, because the monsters there are resistant to heat damage, which is the only type of damage chronic does.

Speeding up your early hardcore runs

I. Where you should be adventuring

If you want to ascend quickly, the most important things to remember are that you should do your required quests as early and as efficiently as possible, and that if you need to level up because you’ve finished all the quests assigned so far, you want to go to the area where you will get the most stats. You need to do all the quests that are assigned by the council of loathing except for the dark and dank and sinister cave. If you want your epic hat, you may want to do that quest (your choice, of course), but if you decide to do that quest, you might spend an enormous amount of time in low-stat areas like the haiku dungeon trying to gather the items required to complete that quest. In addition to quests assigned by the council of loathing, you are required to build a meat car (assigned by your guild), and this should be done early on, since digrassi knoll is an easy area to adventure in. You are also going to need to get the screwdriver for the untinkerer, since you’ll need to untinker the dictionary on level 9, so you should visit the untinkerer before you adventure in digrassi knoll for car parts. You also need to get pixels so that you can make the digital key for the lair and red pixel potions to beat your shadow (RPP’s are not required if you have funkslinging). It’s generally best to get pixels early on, because the stat gains you get in the 8-bit realm will be more helpful early in the game. In some situations this may not be possible because there’s no meat in the 8-bit realm and you might be so low on meat that you find it best to save that area for later. Another area you need to adventure, but that the council won’t tell you to adventure in, is the daily dungeon. You’ll need the keys for all 3 legends (Boris, Jarlsberg, and Sneaky Pete), although if you get a zapping wand from the dungeons of doom, you will only need 2 of those keys, and then will need to zap one of your keys after using it when you’re in the lair. Be careful not to blow up your wand when you may still need it (one safe zap per day, after that only use your wand if you don’t need it for anything else). It’s a good idea to stop by the beanbat chamber when working on the boss bat quest on level 4 so that you can get an enchanted bean (which you’ll need for your level 10 quest). If you have enough meat to take vacations early, it can often be good to do so. The noncombat vacation adventures aren’t good for stats (especially if you take moxie vacations when you aren’t a moxie class), so it’s good to arrange to take your vacations on days that are not your primary stat days if it’s possible to do so. Takeing vacations early will also allow you to access the island early, which is helpful if you decide you want to get the hippy outfit (not required, possibly helpful). It can be good to get the pirate outfit before you actually need it, too. You’ll need the pirate outfit to do your level 9 quest, but the pirate’s cove is similar in difficulty to the goatlet, and can often be handled on level 7 or 8, or earlier if you have more skills. Just make sure that you don’t adventure in the pirate’s cove in disguise before you get the level 9 quest assigned to you by the council, because you will not get the dictionary until the quest has been assigned! ;)

II. Eating well in hardcore

Hardcore players who have pastamastery and saucecrating usually eat reagent pastas as the staple of their diets. You can conjure 3 noodles and 3 reagents per day with just those two skills, and thus all you need to make a tasty dish like hell ramen is one more ingredient. You can get knob sausages and knob mushrooms from adventuring in the cobb’s knob kitchens (or from opening a grab bag that you get from going to the kitchens with a clover), hellion cubes from the dark neck of the woods or the deep fat friars gate (which is available after you’ve finished the friars quest. farming hellion cubes after completeing the ritual is not recommended. if you disagree, kmail me), and goat cheese from the goatlet. Any of those 4 ingredients can be used to make tasty reagent pastas. If you have pastamastery and saucecrafting, eating well is easy, and will be even easier when you get skills that increase the item drop rate (the most important skill for increasing the item drop rate is mad looting skillz, which is a passive disco bandit skill).

If you don’t have pastamastery and saucecrafting yet, you’ll need to be creative. You’ll eat burritos, pizzas, pies, or whatever you get your hands on. If you have access to chez snootee, check their menu daily. If they have something good like stir-fries, eat it! If you run out of food in your inventory and you’re in a pickle, you might want to eat a chez snootee even if they aren’t offering anything good. If you have the ingredients for a lihc eye pie (which gives spooky resistance for 5 adventures), you might want to save it to eat right before you fight the bonerdagon or right before you do a room or the daily dungeon where spooky resistance would help, or both, especially if you don’t have any elemental resistance skills yet.

III. Banking adventures for stat days

Once you have pastamastery and saucecrafting, saveing up adventures to use on your stat days is easy and will help you speed up your runs, if you do it right. If you're a hardcore teetotaler, then two days before your stat day, eat and adventure normally, but make sure that you have at least enough ingredients to make food the next day without using adventures to get food. What you need is 3 items like knob mushrooms so that you can make reagent pastas the next day. You don't need noodles or reagents in advance, since you can conjure those without using adventures. Stop adventuring when you have about 40 adventures left, or maybe more. The next day (which is the day before your stat day), conjure your noodles and reagents, do your cooking, and eat your 3 reagent pastas and whatever you have available to you for your last 2 fullness (hot wings or whatever). Once you're full, if you have more than 160 adventures, adventure normally until you have 160 adventures remaining (or less if you have rollover gear or a meat maid, obviously), then stop adventuring. When you log in on your stat day, you will have 200 adventures. Make sure you don't try to save too many adventures, because you'll lose anything beyond 200 during rollover. If you don't have pastamastery and saucecrafting yet, it can be harder to save adventures because you might not have much food and it's important to eat as well as possible. There are some situations wherein a person who does have pastamastery and saucecrafting would not want to save up the maximum number of adventures, or save adventures at all, but the only situation I'll mention is if you think you might be able to ascend before the stat day if you use the adventures rather than saving them. There's no reason to add an extra day or two onto your run if you don't think it'll last that long anyway, although if the RNG screws you and you realize that you aren't going to ascend before the stat day after all, then start banking with whatever you have left.

IV. Planning future hardcore runs

Once you have the most important skills for hardcore (for a teetotaler, that’s pastamastery, saucecrafting, and sympathy), then unless you are in a big hurry to get a certain skill, you’re probably best off paying attention to the moons when choosing what class to ascend into. Although you may think your ascensions are too long for this to be important, making good use of the moon phases will help you speed up. It’s generally recommended by speedy hardcore ascenders to plan your runs so that your primary stat days are near the end of the run. For example, if you’re doing (or hope to be doing) 7 day runs, you’ll want your main stat days around day 6. If you’re ascending on a stat day and there is not a good stat day configuration for the having stat days at the end of your run, it may be good to ascend into a class that has the main stat coninciding with the stat day you’re ascending on. I don’t recommend that newer ascenders try starting out on stat days in general, although it will be somewhat more desireable when you have more skills. If you’re new to hardcore and you’re doing a teetotaler or boozetafarian run that you expect will take 9 days or longer, and you need a myst class skill, it could be good to ascend on a myst day so that you’ll have your main stat days on day 1 and on day 9, thus getting the best of both worlds with a stat day at the beginning and at the end. If you try to do this, though, be aware that you may ascend faster than you think you will. I planned one of my early runs that way, but I ended up finishing the run before the day 9 myst day happened. Since you’re hopefully paying attention to the moons, I cannot give a strict list of which skills to get in which order, but I’ll list some of the skills that I think are good choices to get from early runs, once you have the 3 best skills for a teetotaler (already mentioned). Other good skills are leash of linguini (pastamancer), mad looting skillz (disco bandit), moxious madrigal (accordion thief), empathy of the newt (turtle tamer), and the seal clubber combat skills (generally a person gets eye of the stoat permanently in their first seal clubber run, then gets LTS or TS in their next seal clubber run). These are basic skills that are extremely useful as all classes. The order in which you pick them up should depend on the moons and on your personal preferences. I use a spreadsheet to plan the order in which I'm going to get skills, and I have found that doing so is helpful. I have created a sample spreadsheet for people who are relatively new to hardcore, with sample rankings of skills. You can download the sample spreadsheet, save it to your computer, and change the rankings and comments to fit your own needs, if you think a spreadsheet would help you. The spreadsheet is an excel file, click here to download it. I got the idea for the skill spreadsheet from a pvp spreadsheet that DerMagus made.

V. Other good resources

There are other good resources which I haven’t mentioned yet in this essay. I should mention that all the links I give in this essay (except the link back to my own index page) are links to information that other people provide. I am not responsible for their content or accuracy, and cannot take credit for the useful information contained in them. Duh. Anyway, here are some good links that I haven’t already mentioned:

Mack’s Hardcore Booze Guide
Hardcore Strategy on the wiki

If you’ve read this far into this essay, then I hope you got some useful information out of it. If you disagree with anything I’ve said here or if there’s something you think I should add, feel free to kmail me or send me a forum pm on the Hardcore Oxygenation forums or the main KoL forums. Kmail is the best way to contact me.

Done reading this page? Here’s a link to return to my index page.