I'm not a big fan of speedrunning. To me, it's just so impractical to destroy all your world resources just to get an early milestone. Sure they're impressive to watch, but really not that useful unless it's showcasing a specific tactic or for bragging rights. I prefer doing rushes over speedrunning; that is, going for an early milestone that's practical, and being able to pull it off consistently, like rushing the ruins for example. However, there is one exception for me, because I know a secret technique that will guarantee I will beat any other speedrunner who doesn't use the same strategy; and that technique is for speedrunning the Ancient Fuelweaver.
Most people believe it's impossible to speedrun the Ancient Fuelweaver in under 21 days since in order to obtain the Shadow Atrium needed to spawn him, you first have to slay the Shadow Pieces which can only spawn on a new moon which is on day 21. However, the first new moon is in fact on day 1.
However, it seems impossible to spawn the Shadow Pieces on day 1 right?
That's half true. Your chances of spawning all three Shadow Pieces required to drop the Shadow Atrium are abysmally low, and that's not mentioning slaying them in time. However, the Shadow Pieces do have a very neat mechanic that many people overlook. All Shadow Pieces can break nearby statues to spawn more Shadow Pieces, even if it's not a new moon. This means you can spawn a Shadow Piece on day 1, and have it spawn other Shadow Pieces later on.
And that's exactly what I did.
This run took me several attempts to finally get right. The hardest part of the run is simply finding a marble set piece and and assembling one sculpture before the end of day 1. Past that, it's really RNG which determines how fast the run is. I got really lucky with finding the other missing marble pieces and the finding the correct Tentapillar quickly. On one of my failed ruins, I spent 10 days searching for the correct Tentapillar and ended up dying to freezing in winter.
It would be much easier if you could seed the perfect map for the run, but I couldn't get my seeds to work. Every time I generated a seeded world, it would contain the same biomes, but with a completely different map layout. Rolling back doesn't seem to work either. Whenever I tried rolling back my server, the suspicious marbles would oddly rearrange around the map. This run was a bit messy, mainly because I was pretty nervous through the whole thing. I didn't want to have had such good world generation just to choke during the final battle or anything (which is why I brought more than twice the amount of sanity restoration I would normally bring for Weaver). I definitely could've had a cleaner run, but I'm quite happy with it, and it turned out pretty nice. The frame rate might look a bit choppy; I don't have a proper set up for streaming gameplay or gaming in general, but DST is relatively easy to run (especially on the GPU).
And now, without further ado, I give you my Day 17 - Ancient Fuelweaver Speedrun.
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