Ruins Rush Saved by Knowledge and Lichen

[Extant]

It was day 4 and I had entered the ruins. Lantern in hand, lightbulbs in stock, ham bat and football helmets made, and a pickaxe and hammer for gathering loot ready. There was but 1 item that was missing. Blue mushrooms...

This was a first for me as I had always found the blue mushtree biome before locating the ruins in all my prior runs. Of course, since I wasn't playing as WX-78, this situation did not bode well for me. It would take too much time to back-track and locate the blue mushtree biome at this point, but with no healing items this run would not yield much if anything at all.

The gears began turning in my head and I remembered that lichen restores 3HP each. Far less than the almighty blue mushrooms that give 20HP per. I started to question if I should simply regenerate and try again or press on. My curious nature got the best of me and I decided to see how badly the ruins rush would go using only lichen to heal.

At this point in the game, I was still relatively green to ruins rushing (only having successfully performed about 8 runs beforehand). However, I was very versed in ruins generation and knew about the set pieces/mob spawn locations/types. I did what I could to avoid as much damage as possible and instead focused on hammering damaged clockworks/opening ornate chests and mining any safe statues that didn't have 2 bishops guarding them.

Of course, I still ended up taking some damage from shadow/nightmare creatures and especially when trying to get the damaged clockworks from the 2 rooks/bishop set piece. But by minimizing my contact (especially with bishops) lichen was sufficient enough to keep me topped off. I eventually found the labyrinth but knew that the process of getting the Ancient Guardian stuck might cost me a lot of health.

I decided to check the ornate chests first since I hadn't gotten a yellow gem from any of the statues/damaged clockworks yet. Eventually I got 1 and went back to make a magiluminescence. I then went to find the Ancient Guardian. As I expected, there were no graves or convenient small paths around the pillars to get it stuck on. I would have to walk into one of the corners of the pillars to get it stuck.

Since I had the magiluminescence, I decided to put it on and walk into the corner instead of trying to drop the lantern down as that would get me hit for certain. It was a success and I took the Ancient Guardian down without taking a single hit. With great luck, I even got the lazy explorer from the large ornate chest. I then headed back to the surface.

It was day 8 and I had emerged with a lazy explorer, a magiluminescence, 5 gears, 5 red gems, 1 purple gem, 12 frazzled wires, 20 nightmare fuel, and 14 thulecite. It really made me realize how valuable knowledge of this game and of its items is when it comes to surviving and getting out of tough situations. Had I not known about the layouts of the set pieces in the ruins, or of the fact that lichen restores HP, that ruins rush would not have worked out for me.

I'd like to thank the community for sharing their information and knowledge of this game on the wiki, forums, and posting videos on YouTube. Since I play almost exclusively solo, I would never have delved this deep into the game and even became privy to such interesting strategies such as rushing the ruins on the 1st Autumn.