Can I Prove ConcernedApe Wrong?

I've gotten many chances to disprove a community myth or sometimes even the Stardy Valley wiki, but it's not that often that I get to disprove Concerned Ape himself. Maybe. Today's mission brings us to the newly added desert festival.

There's a lot of neat features here, but the part that we're focused on is the Skull Cavern. First off, if you don't know, normally you need to reach the bottom of the mines to enter the Skull Cavern. But if it's the desert festival, you can enter for free because there's a whole extra challenge there to collect as many calico egg points as you can.

Calico eggs are a special currency just for the desert festival. And the best way to get them is in the skull cavern. In the cavern, every five floors gives you a calico point.

And every time you interact with these statues, it also gives you a point, as well as a random buff or debuff. And once you're done, you can turn these points into gil to get your reward. These rewards are separated into tiers.

The lowest being one to four calico points, giving you one calico egg and a minor street, all the way to the highest reward at 55 or more points, netting you 500 calico eggs and a magic rock candy. Well, it's the highest tier except for one. If you manage to reach 1,000 points, the game accuses you of cheating.

quote, "It would be dishonorable to submit an egg rating acquired through the use of cheat code software. " So, supposedly there's absolutely no way you could legitimately reach that many points, but I'm not so sure. I'm going to be giving this challenge three different attempts, each with a different strategy.

For the first attempt, I'm just going to be going through as normal. I have pretty much all of the regular things you'd need going through. It is a lot and not everything is required, but everything here is going to help.

So, let's get ready to start. You can't use a tent here. So, even if we wanted to start as close to the skull cavern as possible, there's no way to place it within the skull cavern itself.

And you can't even place it here before the desert festival starts. You actually do have to either sleep at the bus stop or what I'll be doing is using a desert warp totem. All right, before I get started here, I'm going to get everything set up the way that I want it to.

So, let's set up our wakeup inventory. All right, let's go to sleep. All right, waste no time.

Statue of the dwarf king. Uh, this could have been better. It could have given us a larger chance for staircases.

I'm actually going to sleep again just to see if we can get it. Let's see. There we go.

Another thing I want to check is the daily luck. If it's particularly bad, this might not be a good idea. And I'll have to try again.

Yeah. Okay. Let's uh let's change our date here real quick.

Ladder. There we go. That's beautiful.

Okay, teleport as quick as we can. We can't waste any time here. And also before I get moving, I'm going to go ahead and drink and have a magic rock candy to get both of my speed upgrades.

That's just going to increase or decrease our time walking to the skull cavern. And on the way up, we're hitting up the chef here. Notice how the time is paused while we go through all of this dialogue.

So, we don't need to worry about that. So, the two options I'm going to choose here, I believe I want the rare fruit for plus three luck. And then for the second one, the uncomfortably hot sauce gives us plus one speed.

And this is kind of the best combination we can get. And these buffs operate outside of our regular food buffs. So everything here stacks.

You'll notice I'm now running three speed buffs. This is kind of as fast as you can get. Okay, this is the inventory just for another check.

This should be everything I need going down. My goal is basically to find ladders as quick as I can. And with no other no other distractions, I'm not going to go for any ore.

I'm just going to zoom. Look at that hole already. So, this is one advantage that this particular run's going to have.

There's another advantage. Every time we activate those statues, we're going to get a point. Every time we go down five floors, we'll get another point.

I do have uh swift enchanted onto my pickaxe. There's a ladder over there. Honestly, I might have not given myself enough explosive ammo, so I'm kind of going through it pretty quick here.

I do have my Infinity Gavl, so I can basically kill anything at any point. Also, I am running two rings here as well. Two Aridium bands, one with a lucky ring, one with a savage ring.

Savage ring gives me a speed buff every time I knock out an enemy. I don't need to tell you why that's good. Oh my gosh, there's a ladder here this whole time.

See, this is uh one of the potential downsides of this type of run. You can overlook things. The other two are kind of uh overlook things proof.

Uh I'm going to do something I don't usually do. I'm changing my slingshot fire mode. If I pull in the opposite direction, that allows me to fire much quicker than I normally would be able to.

And I don't prefer that, but it's the way I'm going to be doing this. Okay, this is going really quick. You might be wondering why I have the staircases.

Those are basically just for if I find a infested floor because I I do always recommend having just a couple of staircases to get you through. I'll take that speed buff. Thank you very much.

Uh, see, normally I would skip these floors, but not really too much of a reason to for this for floor specifically. There we go. Mummies have become angry now.

Yeah, that's one danger of this type of run. Things are going to get much more difficult than they normally would. Beautiful.

Oh my goodness, dude. Okay. Okay.

I don't like that. Eat the cheese. Yeah, I'm encountering a lot of enemies that you normally wouldn't encounter down here because of those statues there.

Full refresh. I'm getting a lot of full heals. This isn't as dangerous as I've been kind of making it out to be.

I fell one level. Oh, that's cuz that's floor 100. It forces you to stop there.

Okay. See, this is a type of floor that I'm going to skip with a staircase. So, I'm not going to bother with the winding room.

All right, we're getting kind of close to the halfway point here, I believe. It's at 2:50 p. m.

Uh, it's kind of clear that we're not going to quite make an unprecedented run here, but it is impressive. I'm using another staircase there, even though one spawned right in front of me. Whoops.

One funny little advantage of the slingshot ammo is if I hit myself with it, it gives me invincibility frames from all of these monsters that would hit much higher numbers than my slingshot does. Nope. No way.

Not doing that. Oh yeah. Yep.

Let's not die. That would have sucked. I would have had to re-record all of that.

I've hit 99. I don't know if it stopped counting after 99. It seems to have stopped counting.

I'll have to keep an eye out for when we hit floor 255. [Music] Oh, no, it's still counting. I just happened to look up exactly at that floor number.

[Music] Oh, my first time getting slimed. Yeah, I don't have perfect immunity. Okay, I just got the Z's over my head.

It's at midnight right now. So, I've got Here's the thing. I do need to leave here with enough time to go and see Gil because I mean that's part of the challenge.

I need to see his reaction. So, I'm probably going to leave with maybe Oh gosh, how quick do I think I can get? Maybe like 20 minutes to go.

We have hit floor 300 just raw. I've got about 40 minutes in game left to burn. Okay, I'm going to leave there.

We hit 315. We've got an egg score of 120, which seems way off, but that's over 10% of the way to supposedly cheating. And just so we can see the result.

120. Great. Googly moogly.

1,561. We got 500 calico eggs and a free magic rock candy. So, that was attempt number one.

I'll meet you tomorrow for attempt number two. What could be better than that? That was fully decked out.

I had so many bombs. Maybe not quite as many as I should have had, but that's all right. What beats that?

You probably already know. It's 6,000 staircases. Now, doing the math, you'll notice, well, actually, to get to 1,000 points, you only need 5,000 staircases.

I have 6,000 here because I'm going to be misplacing staircases all the time, and I don't want to be like 20 hours into a run and just die because of that. So, let's go to sleep. All right.

Upon waking up, I'm just teleporting straight to the desert. I'm going to eat my magic rock candy and triple shot espresso. This time it's not even for the luck buff, just for the speed buff of getting over to the skull cavern.

All right, strategy is pretty simple. Just start staircasing down. Don't stop until the end of the day.

Although, of course, if I see a if I see a statue that close to me, I'm going to hit it. I just I have to like think of the time lost just walking to the statue like that compared to putting down five staircases. And it's probably faster just to go ahead and grab the statue.

Now, you will notice even while we're going uh like in the transition down to each floor. We are still time is still passing. It's never blinking.

It's running as usual. And if you didn't know, actually in the Skull Cavern, as opposed to the what 14 1/2 minutes you usually get in a normal Stardy Valley day, time is longer. You get about 17 minutes with some change in a Skull Cavern day.

So, we have a little more time to work with here. Oh, if you're wondering how I'm like going down this the ladder so quickly, what I'm doing is I'm pressing uh left click to place the staircase and then kind of like rolling I'm rolling my hand across the mouse to do left click, right click really quick. And it just kind of results in placing the staircase and going down the staircase being in the same action essentially.

[Music] Okay, floor 202. Man, I'm going to be hearing that staircase noise in my dreams. Uh, we're at 59 egg points right now.

So, you can see we've hit I guess we've hit nine Calico statues. You can pretty easily keep track of that. Okay, let's continue.

I am missing a lot of Calico statues that I should be hitting just because I'm like auto clicking. I'm just moving, not thinking about it. [Music] Oh, that was floor 300.

That's right. There's three treasure chests on floor 300 now. I completely forgot about that update because who reaches floor 300?

Oh. Oh, that is not good. Oh my lord.

I'm going to be honest. I've always wondered how deep you could go if you were just spamming staircases. And I've never really had a reason to find out.

And this has given me an excuse to do it. I had actually searched around online to see if anyone's like done a video just staircasing all the way down for a full day just to see how deep they can go. And from what I can tell, no one's just gone and done it.

So here you here you go. Uh I'm one hit from death. Oh lord.

I mean, at the very least, at this point, the writing is on the raw wall. We're not getting to a thousand points because we're a little bit past the halfway point of our day, and we've just now we're closing in on 200 points. And that was really bad.

I'm dead. I died. Well, that'll do it.

Uh, I do keep my calico egg score, though. Oh, right. Yeah, 194.

Okay, so let's see. Let me do a quick little math here. We had an egg score of 194.

We ended at about 6 p. m. We had 8 hours left.

We should have 1. 5 times as many eggs as this by the end of this. So, that would put us at 291 eggs.

If we really pushed it, we could have gotten to uh 300. But I mean, I I died and I Here's my thing. I don't want to do that again.

So, we're going to move on to our third phase, which has the best chance of working out. What do we What do we want to guess is in this chest? That's right.

It's 6,000 more staircases. So, this method is going to be very similar to the previous. I'm going to go to sleep.

I'm not going to worry about my luck this day or anything. I'm just teleporting immediately. Just like before, I'm going to get my speed buffs as soon as possible.

I did bring cheese this time. So, there's just one difference here, and that is every time I go down a floor. Oop, hitting that.

Pause. I did it kind of bad there. So, whenever you're paused, time won't pass.

This will basically guarantee that I get about double my time here because half the time we're paused during the screen transition where I normally can't place down a staircase anyway. And here's the thing about it. I'm not perfect at this.

So, there is a skill to this. It's just, you know, it's not the most complicated skill. Ideally, I think I pause just late enough to where I can scout the area around me and see if there's any statues nearby.

Oh, see, I didn't even see that statue until the frame. I was already going down the staircase. Okay, there's also, you know, a theoretical run where what happened on the last two floors there happens on every floor.

And so every floor you're gaining an entire calico egg point and every five floors you're gaining another. Unlikely, yes. Plausible also, yes.

That's floor 300. It's 8:30 a. m.

Oh my goodness. 79 egg points. We're already It's been 2 hours, a little more than 2 hours in the day, and we've already passed the highest tier.

I think there's I think there's a possibility. I hate to say it. I'm also I also think I'm going to have to take a break at some point cuz this is driving me insane.

You might think I would be missing a lot more calico statues like this. But if I pause like properly, like giving myself just half a second to see the floor before I unpause, it gives me more time to think about going for the statue, whether it's going to be worth it or not. So, I'm kind of like I think I'm getting more than usual.

Oh my god. I spawned with a hole right next to me. I wonder how that looks in terms of time lost cuz I mean that was seven floors.

It's not bad. Where can I place a staircase? What do you mean?

That was insane. I'm going to do something here. I'm going to zoom in, which might sound weird, but it's going to allow me to see like this.

While I'm paused, I can perfectly see that calico statue easily. Click it. I don't know.

It's just giving me more real real estate on the screen to notice things that are like very close to me. Does that make any sense at all? Actually, can't I uh make the UI smaller?

Oh, this is so stupid. That'll make sure that it doesn't block anything that I need to see. Oh, I wish I could move the UI to like the edge.

Huh. Well, if you're wondering how much this extends your trips, I've been doing this for about 30 minutes now, and it's about to be noon. Oh my lord.

I'm going to need those like anti-carpal tunnel gloves or something. 200 eggs. That's 1/if of the way there.

That's feels good to know. Um, there's not really much of a reason of doing like the math of how many hours I've spent because like it varies so much on how well I'm doing on my pausing. And I feel like regardless of where I end up, I feel like someone who's really good at this technique could absolutely do this.

Oh my god, my game is actually really starting to lag. So, they thought it was impossible. We are reaching 500 eggs.

That's the halfway point. It's 8:00 p. m.

Um, I know you're doing math in your head right now. I I'm probably most likely not going to make it, but here's the thing. There's been a lot of floors so far where I spawn with a calico statue right next to me.

And in that case, it's almost zero time lost to hit it and move on to the next floor. Imagine if that was like every floor. Not It doesn't even have to be every floor.

If it was like every other floor, I mean, that would be 2,000 more points right now. So, something to consider. If I were to zoom out, one must wonder how many Don't exit the game.

One must wonder exactly how many enemies there are flying around. Now, this is a treasure room floor. Yeah, I noticed they like converge on me real quickly here.

Look at that. Yeah, a lot of floors are like that. I notice it's gotten very dangerous very quickly.

And it's not just because more monsters spawn the deeper you get in. That's actually not the case. It's because hitting these calico statues every now and again you'll get a debuff that's more monsters or the bats are angry or the mummies are angry at you and it just causes more and more enemy spawns every single floor.

So yeah, it gets pretty dangerous pretty quick in here. Another thing to consider, maybe there's going to be so many enemies that I'm not going to be able to walk over to these statues anymore without getting absolutely destroyed by them because you can't place a staircase down where an enemy is. And my game is running so much worse now.

That room was so laggy. I could not pause for a good two seconds. It's getting worse.

It's getting so much worse as we get deeper. I'm worried I'm going to crash before we reach the end of this. I'm so afraid that I'm going to go down a floor.

I'm not going to be able to control my character for like 10 seconds and I'm going to die. And I know I keep saying it, but every every couple dozen floors, it gets closer to being reality. I I genuinely think my game's going to crash.

I think it's going to happen. And here's the thing. Okay, I got I'm going to pause my recording real quick and I'm going to start it back up again so that when it crashes, it doesn't like I don't lose the footage.

Things you learn to do. I can't I'm not able to hit the timing for the pause. This is not good, y'all.

I'm going to keep going. Now, here's the weird part. Enemies really aren't hitting me that much.

And I wonder if it's a case of they can't with this this frame rate. I'm trying so hard to not click the ladder. I'm so afraid I'm going to do it on accident.

Oh no. Oh, I thought it crashed. I thought it was over.

Nope. No. No.

There's no way I can go deeper. I'm going to die. It is nearly 1:00 a.

m. I think I have to call it there. I want to zoom out.

I want to It'll be a lengthy process here, but I want I want to see if I can zoom out. Oh boy. So, you may be getting a glimpse of why the game's running so slowly right now.

Wow. Okay, I need to exit out of this menu and click on that ladder very quickly. I did it.

I'm not dead somehow. And we're out of there. And immediately it's buttery smooth.

That's actually insane. Well, I I believe we've answered two questions here. How deep can you go in the skull cavern being uh 2,500 whatever it was?

And can you beat that egg rating score? I don't think you can, cuz we're still going to get a legitimate answer here. 638 and we still get our 500 calico eggs, which is kind of funny that it's less than how many points we got, but uh we weren't even able to come close.

I feel like if it hadn't started lagging, I probably could have pushed to 750. But the question is, is all of that lag caused by the calico egg score going up and getting more monsters, or is it caused by how deep we were? Because if if it's just depth, you could still theoretically get those calico egg statues to spawn on nearly every single floor right next to you and hit 1,000 before you even get close to floor 2,000 in the mines.

So, I'm still going to leave it as applausible. Me, on the other hand, I need to rest my hands. So, thank you all for watching.

I'll see you all in the next one and good night.