How to Plan a Route Under a Clock

Every timed adventure game on this site asks the same question and most players answer it by improvising. There is a method that works, it takes about two seconds to apply at the start of a level, and it is worth more than any amount of reflex improvement.

Step one: read the layout before you move

In the open-field games the whole space is visible from the entrance. Two seconds spent looking at it is the highest-value time in the run.

What you are looking for is structure rather than items. Treasure here is laid out in recognisable patterns - clusters, rings, trails, zigzags - so a vault with twenty pieces of treasure in it is really three or four groups, and three or four groups is a problem you can hold in your head while moving.

The instinct to start moving immediately is strong and it is wrong. A run that begins with two seconds of reading and then executes beats a run that begins immediately and improvises, in every timed game on the site.

Step two: price the expensive item and decide now

Every level in this category has one item worth substantially more than the others, and it is always guarded or distant. In Treasure Hunt it is a chest ringed by four spike plates; in Dungeon Tunnel it is a chest on the furthest cell in the maze.

The arithmetic is fixed and knowable: a chest is 250, which is twenty-five coins or five crystals. If the detour costs more than five crystals' worth of time, it does not pay.

The important part is deciding early. A guarded chest taken in the first fifteen seconds is taken with a healthy clock that can absorb a mistake; the same chest at the end of a vault is taken with no margin, and that is when players lose runs.

Step three: plan a loop, not a fan

The natural way to collect several distant things is to go out to each and come back - a fan. It is also close to the worst possible route, because every item is paid for twice.

A loop visits everything once and returns to the exit, and in a space of any size it is dramatically cheaper. This matters most in Dungeon Tunnel, where three keys are deliberately placed on the three cells furthest off the direct route: three separate trips is roughly double the distance of one circuit.

The loop also has a second advantage in games with collection combos. A continuous route keeps treasure flowing, and in a timer-chain game that is worth more than the distance saved.

Step four: set a leaving point before you need one

This is the step that decides most runs, and it has to be done while the decision is easy.

A rule like 'I leave when the clock reaches twelve' or 'I leave once I have the quota plus three' can be made calmly at thirty seconds. The same decision made at thirteen seconds, with two chests visible, is not a decision at all - it is an impulse.

The exit bonuses in these games pay per unit of remaining resource: eighteen points a second in Treasure Hunt, twenty-five per second of lantern in Dungeon Tunnel, thirty per second of air in Underwater Kingdom Quest. Leaving with a margin is not caution, it is scoring.

Runs in this category end from collecting one more chest, almost never from leaving one behind. That sentence is worth remembering before it happens to you four times.

Pricing a hazard in the same currency

The cleanest games here price every cost in the same unit, which makes the routing arithmetic possible rather than intuitive.

In Treasure Hunt a spike plate costs three seconds, a dart runner four and a grasping vine three. A coin is worth ten points and a second of clock is worth eighteen at the exit, so a three-second hit costs roughly five coins - and walking two seconds out of your way to avoid it is cheaper than taking it.

That is not an intuition you can develop by feel, and it is why knowing the numbers matters. Most players over-avoid cheap hazards and under-avoid expensive ones, because both feel equally bad in the moment.

When the space is not visible

In Dungeon Tunnel you can see a radius and nothing else, which changes the method rather than replacing it.

Reading the layout becomes reading the junctions: remember the branch points you have not taken rather than the shape of the corridors. Because the maze is perfect - exactly one route between any two cells - a dead end is always genuinely a dead end, so backtracking is a decision rather than a doubt.

Planning a loop becomes planning an order. You cannot see the three keys, but you know they are on the three cells furthest off the direct route, which means they are spread out and a circuit is almost certainly better than three sorties.

And the leaving point becomes a lantern figure rather than a clock figure. The descent bonus pays twenty-five per second of lantern remaining and carries eighteen seconds into the next maze, so leaving early compounds twice.

The three routing mistakes that cost most

Worth naming because they are all correctable by decision rather than by skill.

• Improvising from the entrance, which averages roughly half the achievable score.
• Taking the expensive item last, when there is no margin for the mistake it invites.
• Deciding when to leave at the moment you need to leave.

There is a fourth that is less obvious: going back for something after the exit has opened. The exit bonus is usually worth more than anything left on the floor, and the walk back is paid twice.

Frequently asked questions