Upgrades

world 2 start: health(200) + health(300) = 500
world 3 start: health(400) + sword(300) + sword(400) = 1100
world 4 start: sword(500) + sand(200) + sand(300) = 1000

Sand is for safety only and is optional.

Rationale

• Going to the shop and back wastes about 10 seconds (excluding the purchase itself), so we want to minimise the number of shop visits
• Getting through world 1 without health upgrades is easy
• In world 2, health upgrades save lots of time by allowing damage boosting through traps and also provide a lot of safety
• The first sword upgrade either does nothing or is barely noticeable
• The second sword upgrade saves a lot of time in combat during world 3
• The final sword upgrade saves minimal time on most enemies but saves a lot of time on the final boss as we can reduce the number of knockdowns needed to kill the boss
• World map dialogue skips work best when we get upgrades at the start of each world

Other Notes

• Following this route, we should have enough gems for each upgrade without going out of our way to collect gems, while at the same time without going out of our way to avoid them.
• There is a bit of leeway so in general faster movement is preferred over collecting a few extra gems.
• Some enemies/vases drop health/sand if we are low on those, and gems otherwise. So if we find ourselves short on gems it is plausible that it is because we are constantly lacking in health/sand, however this hasn't been observed to be an issue so far.
• In level 2-2, we collect this chest to get 50 extra gems. This is optional but provides safety in case we skip some other gems by accident.
• We don't go out of our way to get any other chest, except for ones directly in our way. (If it costs even an extra second, we don't get the chest, except for the one in 2-2.)
• Each gem colour gives a number of gems as follows: green - 1; blue - 20; red - 50