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Deduce where monsters are and kill as few as possible. If you need to scout, kill weaker monsters to reveal squares over stronger ones. Learn the secrets of each of the monsters. Your first objective is to explore the full board so you know where everything is, and can secure all the loose experience, especially the gnome. You want to preserve your HP as much as possible while doing that. Calculated risk and deduction. If you play perfectly, you will end up with 13 hearts left over, which doesn't sound like a lot of wiggle room, but its only the difference of using HP scrolls sooner rather than later, so if you need to use a scroll at 6 hearts instead of 9, you're only losing on 3 hearts of that extra wiggle room. And if your only objective is to kill the Dragon, you have TONS of extra space if you're still getting the hang of the game.

Long story short, do not try to kill everything. Not right away. Start by just fully mapping the board, and it will get a lot easier for you. Find the exp chests, the egg, isolate the gnome, and hunt down the rat king, slime wizard, and eventually the mine lich. Then once you've done all that, start killing things until you're out of hearts, level up or use a scroll if you can't, and repeat until you have 13 hearts to kill the dragon with. Or more if you want to aim for the full clear.

It isn't strictly math, you can make deductions based off monster placement and behavior. Everything except the bats and the skeletons have a secret to them. From there its just about making plays that are livable that also give more information. If the total between two spaces is 14, for example, they can only either be 11 and 3, 10 and 4, 9 and 5, 8 and 6, or 7 and 7. Following the special rules of the monsters, you can reason out which is even possible to appear in those spaces, and judge if you can survive a guess or not. That's just one example, but this game is full of them, and once you figure that out, you'll be winning much more often than you lose.

Math. I went through a full clear run and counted how much exp it took to level up each time, after someone else had gone through and put in a spreadsheet where all the exp in the game was sourced from. After I had that data, I just went through level by level and calculated how to get from point A to point B.

(the autism also helps)

Level    XPBank    XPGain    Extra    XP2Lvl

1          0               +5HP                     -4

2          1               +5HP                     -5

3          1               +6HP                     -7

4          0               +6HP    +5chest    -9

5          2               +7HP                     -9

6         0               +7HP    +5chest    -10

7         2               +8HP    +5chest    -12

8         3              +8HP    +9gnome    -12

9         8             +9HP                       -12

10       5              +9HP    +9HP       -15

11       8            +10HP    +27mine    -18

12     27            +10HP                     -21

13    16            +11HP                       -21

14    6              +11HP    +11HP    -25

15    3             +12HP    +12HP    -25

16    2             +12HP    +12HP    -25

17    1             +13HP    +13HP    -25

18    2              +13HP    +13HP    -25

19    3              +14HP    +14HP    -25

20    6             +14HP                     -20(-25 to level up)

                                               Total 325

This is an example of a 325 Three Stamp Run giving as much room as possible for the chests/gnome. You see its still REALLY tight.

It is possible, and relatively frequently tackled. You have to scroll down a little to find it but we even mathed the theoretical highest score possible while also doing a three-stamp run. It's 325, but you need to not use a single health scroll until 9 hearts, and corner the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts as well as all the chests. It is very difficult, but with some luck, possible. JUST doing a three stamp run at all, though, is still hard but doable, especially if you can luck into finding Rat King early.

Oh, no no, the FULL CLEAR is possible with 13 hearts remaining. The 3 stamp clear is still 325 on the dot with no health leftover. Sorry for the confusion

Just providing proof that it is technically possible

Someone was kind enough to tell me how to activate debug mode on the current version, so I was able to test some things. First off, 325 is the max possible with 3 stamps, I can verify it. Second, for a full clear run, if you play perfectly optimally, you will end with 13 hearts remaining, so that's how much total wiggle room you have to secure a full clear. Which, honestly, feels impressive considering how doable it is amidst those with practice. Love this game, love poking around in it, thank you for putting in the hard work of breaking it over your knee.

Bless, this is very useful for testing things, thank you

How do you access debug mode in the current version? Used to be you could just hit D, but that was removed.

There is no pattern to the bats and skeletons that I've figured out so far. The gnome appears in a random blank space, and if you hit him, he teleports and hides in another one. If there are no more blank spaces, he's trapped and you "defeat" him, and can claim his 9 exp bounty

There are four Guardians, each of them have a different symbol on their shield, if that helps as a hint.

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Each Guardian exists in one of the four quadrants of the map, as indicated on their shield. So if you know where the guardian is in a quadrant, you know it is impossible to encounter another 7 there.

Couldn't have done it without you doing your own due diligence, thank you for that.

This is a very minor thing, but while the EXP math is correct to my eyes, its important to note that the 9 HP scrolls on the map include the ones in the chests. So there are 2 in the chests, and then 7 otherwise (2 of those 7 being entangled with the Lovers, of course)

Ok, I've done the math, you have EXACTLY enough health to be able to reach 325 on a three stamp run, so leaving just the walls, the rats (rat king is fine), the lovers, and the egg. You need to use your first HP scroll once you're on 9 hearts, even with perfect play that's as best as you can get. To pull that off, you also need to find the three exp chest as well as isolate the gnome BEFORE you reach 10 hearts and can pop the Lich, just to have enough EXP. Then you should be able to just spend your scrolls as needed, prioritizing level ups. You should be on track if you use your second health scroll on 11.5 hearts, and then one scroll per level before you run out.

So, to refute that point, first let's establish that, with the exception of walls, every time you spend life, you gain that much experience. Sometimes you can get experience for free, and walls are a loss on return and should always be broken last, anyway. In all other cases, you spend your HP, and if you don't die, you get that much in EXP back. Let's also understand that there is a max HP, but there is no max EXP, you can pool it as much as you want.

At the start of the game, you have 5 HP, and you need 4 EXP to level up. You spend your 5 life, and you now have 5 EXP. You now have the choice to either level up or to use a heal scroll. In the first case, your health refills back up to 5 (with half a heart towards a max of 6 next level!) and you have 1 EXP banked towards reaching the new limit of 5 EXP. If you use a health scroll, you refill your 5 hearts right away, and keep your 5 banked EXP.

Here's the crux of the matter. No matter which scenario you pick, you still have to spend 4 EXP to level up. You're not saving it for later, you STILL have to spend that 4 EXP, you're just delaying when you spend it. However, since there is a direct relationship between HP and EXP, you have assigned that scroll a worth of 5 EXP while using it while your max HP is only 5 hearts. If you waited until you had, say, 7 hearts or 10 hearts or even more, that is how much EXP that scroll would be worth. By using it early, you miss out on the potential for that scroll to be even more valuable. Meanwhile, the experience you gain by spending your health down as normal is experience you will gain one way or the other, and it will be spent on leveling up one way or the other. Scrolls are always worth more the longer you hold off of using them.

That said, unless you're aiming for something in specific, you don't have to be perfectly 100% optimal to win. It helps your odds, for sure, but if you would rather use a scroll for safety than take a gamble on something you're unsure on, its better to keep the run going than not.

It's important to get at least some of the free exp drops early so that you can save your health scrolls as long as possible. HP = EXP, but things like chests and the egg give you an advantage in that calculation. Always try to drain your HP to 0 hearts before leveling up, and if you have the choice between leveling up and using a health scroll, level up. The more health you have, the more health a scroll is "worth", so saving them as long as possible gives you more total effective health. Also, you want to kill the lich as SOON as you have 10 hearts, or as close to then as possible. That gives you a massive load of experience you can use to carry you through the next few levels without using scrolls.

This information needs leveling information to accompany to make it truly useful. Just did a quick and dirty full clear to get this data,
will analyze it in a moment to see what a "perfect run" would look like.

Edit: Level 11 is 18 for level up, not 17, I had to check again because math wasn't mathing.

Oh, I didn't know that! I'll be sure to try that on my next three-stamp attempt. Thank you!

Spoiler















There is a space next to the Dragon, randomly chosen from the 8 adjacent spaces, that contains an egg. It registers as a 0, so you have to get kind of lucky to isolate it from regular blanks near the dragon, that or you just avoid breaking 0s near the dragon entirely. If you break it, you can get a free 3 exp, but if you preserve it to the end, you get the achievement.

I have absolutely been in love with this game since I stumbled across it at 1.0. I love the challenge of it and all the secret tricks of the monsters, giving you the tools to solve otherwise impossible scenarios using logic. It's very satisfying and I keep the tab open because I want to play it again and again. Just now I finished a run, challenging myself to get three stamps in one go. Excited to see what else comes out of this game, thank you for all your hard work.