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Clan VIP Lounge: Overview (as of 2024)

2024-12-25 // IOTM Overview

For this article, I am going to go through every resource a player has access to in KOL's Clan VIP Lounge. There are quite a few resources, folks! There are TEN full VIP IOTMs that have been released for installation into the lounge, with a ton of neat-o value for enterprising speedsters everywhere. Given that we were given a brand-new Clan VIP item this year (October's Photo Booth Sized Crate), I'm going to start by going over the new one, then go back through the years. In order to shove ten posts in one, I'll be taking a quicker format with each -- what the item does, a bit on how you use it (and what items are needed to get the most out of it), and (finally) a quick estimate of turns saved with that particular subcomponent of the lounge... for players in the era that the room was released, AND for the modern unrestricted speedsters. (Also, a parenthetical aside on the collaborative element in each lounge item, since TPTB try to add one in almost all of them.) I hope you enjoy it! Happy new year, folks!

(IN-STANDARD) 2024: the Clan Photo Booth

The Clan Photo Booth lets you get three buffs and three items per day. The buffs are relatively simple -- there are 50 turn buffs for -com (with init), +com, and MP regen. Realistically, in ascension, it's 150 turns of -com -- not bad! The props are the more important part. There are a few minimally useful props enumerated on the wiki, but the primary props of importance are...

  • fake arrow-through-the-head (hat) -- +25% moxie, -5% combat
  • astronaut helmet (hat) -- +3 cold res, +3 stench res
  • feather boa (acc) -- +15 sleaze damage, +50% meat
  • Sheriff badge (acc) -- +50% myst, +3 spooky res, 1 of 3
  • Sheriff pistol (weap) -- +50% mus, +15 hot damage, 2 of 3
  • Sheriff moustache (acc) -- +50% mox, +25% init, 3 of 3

Most runs -- whether standard or unrestricted -- are just going to take the three Sheriff items -- if you take all three, you get three shots of the skill Assert your Authority, which is a groveling gravel-esque free kill. If you are a particularly low-shiny account, you may actually derive a tiny bit more value from the -com hat, extra T0 cold res for leveling help, and 50% meat for the tower and the Nuns quest.

Still -- in either standard or unrestricted, 2024's booth saves 3-5 turns, roughly; 3 turns from the free kills, 0-2 turns from the 150 turns of NC rate modification per day.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: The photo booth has a cute "take a photo with your clannies" feature. It's pretty fun; you can drag frames of player's custom avatars around and make everyone do silly stuff, then save it to your records forever. Extremely high quality feature! (Also, importantly, clans need to unlock most of the props by having clannies defeat certain monsters over and over again. In particular, the Sheriff items were difficult to do, as one required a Hobopolis boss, one required a Dreadsylvania boss, and one required a once-per-run Zombie Slayer wanderer. It was pretty fun coordinating that in the Ascension Speed Society discord, honestly!)

2021: the Clan Fireworks Shop

The fireworks Shop came riiight as people started thinking the VIP lounge was never going to return. The gap between Madame Zatara and fireworks remains the longest TPTB have ever had between clan VIP items. I have a soft spot for fireworks, though, even with the shop being (arguably) the least helpful among these for fully kitted out accounts in most unrestricted paths.

The fireworks shop effectively fills the gap for a yellow ray, a red ray, and a blue ray for a relatively cheap price, along with a bit of +/- combat and a free pirate outfit to boot. The key pieces are:

  • Blue Rockets, a 250 meat combat item that gives 10 turns of Glowing Blue (an unwishable 1000 MP/turn regen effect) in exchange for 100 turns of Everything Looks Blue
  • Red Rockets, a 250 meat combat item that gives 99 turns of Ready to Eat (an unwishable 5x substat gain from food effect) in exchange for 100 turns of Everything Looks Red
  • Yellow Rockets, a 250 meat combat item that gives an in-combat yellow ray in exchange for 75 turns of Everything Looks Yellow

In addition, you can grab 1 hat a day; you choose from 3 hats that give +5% combat, -5% combat, or +20 ML (atop a gob of hot damage). Then you choose between a +20% item drop club and a +100% init accessory.

While this IOTM was in-standard, it was a pretty high importance item; speedsters often downplay the importance of yellow rays, but you really feel their absence when you don't have them. The "Ready to Eat" buff was a critical part of the leveling package for about 16 months of the meta, and still mildly useful well into 2023. The blue rocket effect was great for comfort, if not particularly flashy. The +/- com hats were quite useful, and +100% init was great for capping moderns, as we hadn't quite entered the 2024 era of "every single IOTM gives massive amounts of initiative now".

Nowadays, in unrestricted, this is great if you don't have the other modern yellow ray or red ray sources (... basically, parka/candles and the dart holster) and middling if you do. The hat is still worth a small amount of turns, and is increasingly powerful the fewer -com sources you have.

While a fully decked out account may never set foot in the shop, the fireworks shop is one of the reasons that the VIP key is absolutely awesome for new players -- to me, this was the addition that turned the lounge from "nice, sort of fine" to "OK, this really is manna from heaven to new accounts". It supports leveling, item drops, MP regen for base skills, +/- combat, and lets you get the pirate outfit. (OK, you don't really need that last one, but it's funny.) Also, it has a tiny, shitty food you can eat for +10 mainstat per turn.

So, on net? 0-1 turns for a fully kitted account, probably around 10 turns for a low-shiny account. Fireworks: they're Good ™. Now I just need to go to a questionably legal tent that sells fireworks and pick up some roman candles for kicks, like any true American.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: Absolutely nothing! That is literally the only knock on this item for me. There isn't even a chat effect. What the heck!

2018: the Clan Carnival Game

The clan carnival game installs a Fortune Teller, Madame Zatara, inside the VIP lounge. There are two main functions of this -- first, you can consult with some NPCs to get 100 turns of a powerful buff. You can choose between:

  • Susie (the cake-shaped arena lass), for 100 turns of +5 familiar weight & +5 familiar experience.
  • The Meatsmith, for 100 turns of +100% meat drops (and 50% gear drops)
  • Hagnk (the betentacled storage gnome), for 100 turns of +50% item drops (and 50% booze/food as well!)
  • ... and any of the three guild leaders for effects that give +5 mus/mys/mox stats per fight and +100% to the corresponding stat

In addition to the NPC consults, you also get 3 consults with your clannies, allowing you to get 3 free items per day. (In practice, this mostly was handled by FaxBots managed by the community who immediately answered you with a set answer, like EasyFax and CheeseFax and OnlyFax.) These are a random draw, and you get items in three buckets depending on whether you and your clannies shared a "compatible" consult or not.

  • If incompatible, your first P2P consult gets you either a small size-1 food/booze (with the best one being a +5 pool skill booze, 25% of the time). If compatible, it gives you a little flavor item that adds little things to a target's profile. Cute!
  • If incompatible, your second P2P consult gets you a shitty potion. (They're all bad.) If compatible, you get a Mysterious Box of a certain color.
  • If incompatible, your third and final P2P consult gets you an item from the "genie" gear -- these are essentially all pretty bad, with the best one being a hat that gives +2 rollover adventures. If compatible, you get an item from the "psychic" gear -- these are also pretty bad, but one gives +1 prismatic resistance, which can be smashed early run for a chance at some elemental powder! (Also +20% init offhand, I guess.)

Rarely, P2P consults will also give you a skillbook. There were six, all of which were lightly useful in the 18-21 standard period:

  • Get Big is a +20% all stats buff
  • Gallapagosian Mating Call is an extremely weak sniff... but it's still a sniff!
  • Inscrutable Gaze is a +10% mysticality experience percent facial expression, which is lovely for myst classes
  • Love Mixology summons a random love potion, which is a potion with either highly negative or positive flat stat buffs and highly negative or positive HP/MP% buffs. Also, was awesome in 2CRS!
  • Acquire Rhinestones summons 23-37 rhinestones, which give 1 turn of the Rhinestoned effect, which gives +1 mox for the # of turns you have of the effect. Also, was even more awesome than love potions in 2CRS!
  • Paul's Passionate Pop Song is an accordion thief buff that regenerates 4-5 MP per adventure for a cost of 20 MP. If you do the math, that's 22.5 MP with a toy accordion and 45 MP per cast with the antique accordion; this meant that the pop song was -always- MP positive if you had the song slot open, which meant this was almost always on during ascensions from 2018-2021.

While in standard, the carnival was primarily as useful as the buffs were. It overlapped with the Pocket Professor, so there were a handful of rare occasions where +5 fam weight got you +1 copy in delay; when that didn't happen, though, for bleeding edge players the carnival was primarily useful for shaving a turn on the nuns and (perhaps) shaving a turn from your item searches. At the lower end (and in tough leveling paths), many people took the leveling NPC buffs, as +5 per fight for 100 turns was a nice flat boost, and +100% helped push your scalars significantly higher.

The P2P consults were fun, but rather inessential; the 1/4 nature of the take meant that you only got the item you cared about 25% of your runs. (Don't get me wrong, it was pretty cool to get a bustle hustler and be able to save liver space on the Haunted Billiards Room NC check. But it was more comfort than anything.) Some crazy speedsters would even "bank" consults, sending consults to fellow speedsters prior to their run, asking the others to only answer it when they were in-run, to give themselves a slightly higher shot at the items they actually wanted. (Cough cough, everyone in ASS, cough cough.) The skills were extremely cool in 2CRS and helped decide which seed combos were optimal, while generally adding some neat quality of life buffs to paths outside 2CRS.

Nowadays, in unrestricted, virtually every account just takes the Susie's buff -- if you own the Grey Goose or the Chest Mimic, familiar experience is a hot commodity, allowing you to minimize the turns spent with those familiars while also quick-leveling your freerun familiar and adding +1 run with the added familiar weight. This makes carnival (weirdly!) one of the more valuable pieces of the VIP suite for the fully-kitted speedster, and helpful in a vast quantity of paths where you don't have access to your own campsite for Taffy or access to your stomach for Cookbookbat's roasted vegetable focaccia.

Effective savings are about 1-2 turns, regardless of shiny status. Neat!

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: You are literally sending little forms to other clannies to see if you are compatible in a silly homage to the mechanical genies of eras long past, like Zoltar and Karnak and other such automatons. It's directly collaborative! In fact, as noted when I lightly jabbed myself above, speedsters would even collaborate pre-run to try and increase their shot at the few useful items. This item is so collaborative it forced speedsters to talk to each other! Incredible stuff.

2016: the Clan Floundry

The clan floundry is significantly simpler than the VIP lounge areas that came after it. Once per day, you get one of six items:

  • The Fish Hatchet is a 1-handed weapon with -10% combat frequency, +100% muscle, and +5 familiar weight. Also, once per day, you can use it for 5 planks and 5 fasteners for the smut orc bridge!
  • The Bass Clarinet is a 1-handed ranged weapon with -10% combat frequency, +100% moxie, and -3 MP for skills. Also, once per day, you can use it for 10 white pixels! (This was significantly better when the Digital Key cost 30 white pixels.)
  • The Codpiece is an accessory with -10% combat frequency and +100% mysticality. Also, you can use it once for 8 bubblin' crudes!
  • The Carpe is a back item with +50% mysticality, 5-10 MP regen, +50% meat, and +10% combat frequency.
  • The Tunac is a shirt with +50% muscle, +25 ML, +25% item drops, and +10% combat frequency.
  • The Troutsers are a pair of pants with +50% moxie, +50% pickpocket chance, +11 prismatic damage, and +5 prismatic resistance.

During the floundry's turn in standard, 1-day runs were quite rare, so most of the floundry's use had to do with exactly what your runplan was generating more easily -- bridge parts or white pixels. Sometimes, you'd dip into both, and get bridge + pixels rather than doubling your take, and you'd just pick the one that was more broadly helpful for your leveling on D1. As the floundry never overlapped with the Melodramedary or the powerful glove, it was significantly harder to generate the 30 white pixels you needed without spending some turns adventuring, so the white pixels were about 4-5 turns adventuring in the old 8-bit zone without olfaction.

The 5/5 bridge parts, similarly, were extremely valuable; generally, you weren't capping turns in the smut orc logging camp, and Blech house was only added in February 2019, so 5/5 was effectively 5 capped turns spent in the logging camp... with the additional caveat that those turns would get you closer to the Smut Orc Pervert, for an additional 5/5.

Nowadays? Just take the fish hatchet, man! The +fam weight is likely covered by another IOTM, but 5/5 slotless bridge parts are always appreciated, and a -10% combat weapon is a nice addition to your +/- combat search gear.

So... probably saves about a turn or two in unrestricted now, given Blech House and our myriad other bridge part solutions. Not too shabby!

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: I don't want to go into too much detail here, but taking one of the six items costs fish. To get fish, your clan has to have a meaningfully large stock of fish from the kingdom's many fishing holes. To fish, a member in the clan has to equip a fishin' pole and adventure in a fishin' zone. This meant that for much of the floundry's active life, users had to make little fishing expeditions to keep their clans well-stocked with the fish their gear needed. Even to this day, some clans run low on fish. I think it's cute!

2014: the Clan Speakeasy

The speakeasy gives you access to a speakeasy. What a shock! You can grab 3 drinks a day, at various meat costs. In a fully unlocked speakeasy, you get to choose from a number of nice drinks. I've roughly ordered these from the "best" to the "worst", solely for ascension purposes.

  • The Hot Socks gives you 50 turns of +2 familiar experience and +10 familiar weight (3 drunk, 4 adv/drunk)
  • The Sockdollager gives you 25 turns of +20 prismatic damage, +40 prismatic spell damage, and +50% weapon/spell damage (2 drunk, 3.5 adv/drunk)
  • The Bee's Knees gives you 25 turns of +100% stats (2 drunk, 3.5 adv/drunk)
  • The Ish Kabibble gives you 25 turns of +3 prismatic resistance (2 drunk, 3.5 adv/drunk)
  • The Sloppy Jalopy gives a non-permable skill that gives you +1 liver capacity until you ascend, but costs 100,000 meat (5 drunk, 4 adv/drunk)
  • The Flivver gives higher adventure gain than pretty much any in-run accessible drink at the time, but costs 20,000 meat (2 drunk, 6.25 adv/drunk)
  • The Lucky Lindy gives you a shot of "Lucky!" ... for 6 drunkenness at 3 adv/drunkenness.
  • The first three drinks ("milk", "tea", and "whiskey") are all low-adventure, high-stat drinks; specifically 87.5 stats and 2.5 adventures for 1 drunkenness.
  • The Phonus Balonus gives you 5 PVP fights in addition to its adventure gains (3 drunk, 4 adv/drunk)

Standard didn't even exist when the speakeasy was introduced, so it's difficult to really benchmark it. Also, I was on a hiatus from 2011 to 2016, and didn't have a VIP key until 2017, so it's (a bit) before my time. If I recall my unrestricted runs correctly, the primary use of the speakeasy was for Lindies. The Lucky Lindy was essentially a superior adventure-value way to get your semi-rare number without having to eat a fortune cookie. While the Lindy's former status as a 3 adv/drunk drink isn't very good, it's a damn sight better than 1 adv/full... and the Lindy always told you the exact number of turns until the semi-rare, whereas the fortune cookie could give an incomplete range. While some semi-rares were pretty decent, the use of Lindies and cookies by the late teens was less due to the turnsaving brilliance of semi-rares (which were mostly pretty mediocre) and more due to a desire to avoid your semi-rare coming up at a bad time and wasting a turn. When TPTB abandoned semi-rare adventures in 2022, the Lindy went from a size 1 drink to a size 6 drink, in an effort to limit the sources of lucky you could get per day. Unfortunately, this makes it exceedingly useless for most account states, and probably isn't something you'd consider.

Outside the fun historical artifact in Lucky Lindies, the major power player in the speakeasy is the Hot Socks. If you have a freerun familiar, +10 weight is 2 free runs by itself, and the +2 familiar experience is helpful for cutting turns spent on leveling your mimic/goose/freerun familiar. The Sockdollager also has a bit of use, allowing for no-effort damage for the Typical Tavern's elemental damage tests, help towards the sleaze damage check during the Red Zeppelin unlock, or a tower test in an Avatar path that has trouble amassing the right damage. There also is a small case for Flivver, if you really can't find anything better. (Realistically, if you have the meat generation going to drink a lot of Flivver in-run, you probably can get a better drink from something else. Just saying.)

Anyway. With a free-run familiar, this is worth 2-3 turns (depending on how much use you get from the familiar experience). Without one... geez, maybe 1 turn?

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: The speakeasy does not come with all of these drinks unlocked. Most of the drinks required solving community puzzles in order to figure out the codes, which are entered in the little password box underneath the speakeasy. These were relatively serious spading efforts. As an example, the password for the Sloppy Jalopy required a ton of 5-character purple strings from 64735 scrolls, where you found overlaps and pieced it all together. The Hot Socks password required resting in your campsite until you got a dream with a massive red letter in it, which then was combined with 10 other letters found by other clannies. Some very fun community spading here... worth a look if you're interested in collective puzzles, and how TPTB have seeded and dropped little puzzling hints before.

2013: the Clan Hot Dog Stand

The hot dog stand gives you a daily piece of advice, and also lets you eat a single fancy hot dog a day. The three dogs of note are:

  • The sleeping dog gives you the non-permable skill "Dog Tired", which gives you 5 free rests/day for the rest of your ascension. (2 full, 4.5 adv/full)
  • The video games hot dog gives 50 adventures of a +25% item / 25% meat buff, while also giving you 2-3 apiece of red, blue, and green pixels. (3 full, 4.33 adv/full)
  • The optimal dog gives you the Lucky! effect, and formerly just changed your semi-rare counter to the current turn... just like Lucky! does. (1 full, 4.5 adv/full)

There are also dogs for +50% mainstat, resistance, +com, and init. Realistically, all of those buffs are pretty minimal -- you're going to want one of the above three, if you choose to eat a hot dog at all. Up until the 8-bit revamp, I think the video games hot dog was a reasonably solid pick -- the Yellow Puck's shore skip required some red/blue/green pixels that you were unlikely to get early in-run. Now, you can just pick it up via 8-bit if your powerful glove doesn't finish the job in the Puck's 40-50 turn tax. Nowadays, though, most folks will probably simply take the TakerSpace as your turn 0 workshed before swapping over to the Cold Medicine Cabinet in unrestricted, as that is the simplest and easiest way to get max value from the workshed slot, turning the VGHD into a pretty middling pick.

That gives you a choice between an optimal dog and a sleeping dog. Realistically? Sleeping dog is usually going to be better, for anyone who owns a Cincho de Mayo; there are so many weird rest sources that the dog is only worth 25% cinch, which is less than half a sneak. But if it does happen to get you to the next sneak, it's definitely worth it. Optimal dog is fine, but we pretty much have all the Lucky! sources we need.

So, uh. I dunno. Less than half of one sneak as the benchmark value makes it... like, 1 turn? A little less? Alas.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: Just like the speakeasy, the hot dog stand doesn't come with most of these dogs unlocked. The unlock process involved finding items throughout the kingdom -- some of them exceedingly rare -- and spending them at the stand once found. Also, there's the general ongoing process of keeping the clan stocked so you can eat your fancy dogs. I like the puzzle-hunting of the speakeasy better, but the hot dog stand has its own charm too.

2012: the Olympic-Sized Clan Crate

Like many old IOTMs, I'd struggle to write more than about a paragraph about the Olympic-Sized Swimming Pool. In ascension, you get a 50-turn buff once a day by swimming laps in the pool. Your choices are between Lapdog, a +30% init/+20 ML boost, and Silent Running, a -5% combat frequency buff.

You can also cannonball-dive for one item. The item is random, and relatively useless; there is an extremely small chance you can get a distention or dog hair pill from this dive, but like... I have to be very clear, it is RIDICULOUSLY small. We're talking like, 0.2%. Not 2% or 20% -- 0.2%. But I guess in theory that's cool.

So, uh. That's it. Probably 0-1 turn, and only really up there if you lack NC sources. Otherwise, probably nothing.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: You can hang out in the swimming pool with your clannies. It's like Habbo Hotel, but without all the weird internet safety controversies! ... well, without some of them, at least.

2011: the Clan Shower

The shower is... a shower. You can take a shower of varying temperatures. The hottest will restore 1000 MP and (rarely) teach you a recipe. The warm/lukewarm/cool settings will give you 50 turns of a +5% mus/mys/mox experience buff. The cold setting will give you 3-4 shards of double-ice. At the time, if I recall correctly, this was largely a huge glut of MP to help support MP-starved speedsters/ Nowadays, the MP is pretty mid. In most unrestricted runs, this is just a nice little %experience buff to make leveling even easier.

In avatar paths, though, this actually serves a fun purpose. The shards of double-ice, when used in combat, deliver cold damage based on your highest stat. This can be used to great success in the Smut Orc Logging Camp to get to one Blech House. In some paths that don't have access to shinies like trainset or easy cold damage skills, this is actually a really nice little perk -- completing the bridge without cold damage can be a real pain in the ass, and even just one shot of Blech House can really change the game. (Also, in Grey Goo, they are useful for tuning the Prism to a cold elemental alignment, for more damage.)

Still. Most of the time, this will save 0 turns.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: Nothing, actually. You can pick your nose in the shower, but you can't pick your friends to shower with.

2010: the Looking Glass & the Deluxe Fax Machine

The first two years that the VIP lounge existed, TPTB released both an IOTM and a Crimbo gift that allowed clans to deck out their lounge. I'm going to group these together by year in order to try and make this post less horrifyingly long.

The actual IOTM in 2010, the Looking Glass, was an extremely high-effort IOTM with a ton of really cool elements. Gazing into the looking glass gives the player a "DRINK ME" potion, allowing access to the the "Rabbit Hole" container area. It's a cute homage to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", the famous Lewis Carroll book that spawned countless adaptations, movies, musicals, rip-offs, and pseudonyms for countless drugs. The KOL edition features three zones -- a Mad Tea Party (where you are given a 30 turn effect and a fun little story based on the number of characters in your hat), the Tweedleporium (where you can purchase jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today), and the Red Queen's Garden.

The Garden itself is quite fun. Four cute monsters, all of whom drop "reflections of a map", with one dropping per potion you use. The map can be used to collect items for the Duchess' Feast, which (when you get one of the items from each of the main 6 classes and cook together the humpty dumplings) all can be exchanged in the NC for an ittah bittah hookah, a fun familiar equip that lets your familiar give you a random effect every 5 turns. You can also play chess for a chess cookie, which is generally worth doing -- once you win 50 queen cookies from chess, you improve the effect of all the chess piece cookies, up to a bonus of +200% to each stat and +50 stats per fight. For any KOL players looking for a fun puzzle that permanently boosts your account, this one's good. Get chessboxing, folks!

That essentially summarizes the hefty content item. The other big addition this year was the Deluxe Fax Machine, purchaseable from the CRIMBCO Gift Shop during 2010's corporate crimbo. The fax machine allows players to summon up a photocopied version of the monster currently stuck in the machine. It's the first major summoner in the game! The only issue with it -- on release -- was that there wasn't really a way to select which monster you wanted to summon. Once a monster was in the machine, an infinite number of people could access a copy of that monster, so speedsters could make clans with the thing they knew they wanted to summon and just use that, but there wasn't really a way to just say "I want X monster, give me X monster".

... well, for like, a few days. Because stupac2 and the folks at the KOL Spading forums immediately went to work on solving that in one of the coolest KOL community efforts ever. Within 10 days, the first FaxBot had been developed. The principle is simple -- the FaxBot team took the universe of accessible clans with accessible machines and designated certain clans "source" clans, where the bot would always store a certain monster. Then, they'd use KOL's chat as an interface for people to message asking for a specific monster, allowing users to request any of the monsters placed in the network of source clans. The bot would then grab the monster from a source clan, place it in the requester's clan's fax machine, and let them grab it. There are a few other fun things under the hood too, but that was the basic structure. And it worked so well that the concept was continued on for decades; FaxBot eventually died out, but the Loathers collective currently oversees a FaxBot -- specifically OnlyFax -- to ensure that as long as KOL exists, there will always be a way to fax yourself Cannonfire40's butt.

Anyway. As this is largely meant to be strategy analysis, I should probably note some strategy instead of waxing about lovely community efforts. For the Mad Tea Party's garden buff, it used to be relatively hard to get the highest power buffs from the Mad Tea Party, as the character count of the hats made certain buffs extremely difficult to get in an ascension context -- for instance, there is only one hat in the game that's 5 characters for the purposes of the tea party, even now. That said, the scarcity of certain character combos isn't really a major problem anymore -- turns out that 14 years of new hats really increases your flexibility and makes it easier to access whatever buff you actually want in-run. Generally, you'll use that for +5 familiar weight (1 freerun!), +3 familiar experience (fatter mimics!), or +40% meat (perhaps a quarter of a turn on nuns!).

The fax is still very cool, though. As recently as 2022, it was the only way to actually summon Ninja Snowman Assassins in-run. While TPTB introduced monster summoning wishes with the Genie Bottle in 2017, due to some differences in how the code works, wishes are wholly unable to access monsters who have an "executeonwin" condition attached to them... and NSAs have an executeonwin in their code that gives you the next piece of their gear. (As do ghuol swarms, actually.) Nowadays, the enterprising speedster has a few different ways to access copiable but non-wishable monsters -- namely lockets and mimic eggs. But the fax is still a useful summon that's accessible even in no-familiar paths, which makes it a useful resource that gets increasingly useful the fewer summon and fax sources you have. (EDITOR'S NOTE: ...and as of 2025, you can't actually summon NSAs at all, because they were made nocopy. This is still true of other no-wish monsters like the swarm of ghuol whelps, though; faxes are still cool!)

Overall, I'd venture that you save 0-1 turns from the Looking Glass and 1-ish turn from the fax in a normal unrestricted run, with the fax increasing in value for lower-resource no-familiar paths.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: The entirety of the fax machine! Obviously.

2009: the Pool Table & the Crimbo Tree

As with 2010, this was a two-drop year.

Cartel Crimbo brought with it the Clan Crimbo Tree, which allows you to get gifts every 7 days. The tree itself is rather useless to speedruns, as no path is currently at 7 days. But one of the drops -- the Crimbo Candy Cookbook -- is moderately useful to a speedrunner, as one can use it to generate 3 complex candies on turn 0. For unrestricted runs prior to 2022, this was the first big changepoint in a run, as there were essentially zero sources of easily accessible complex candy in-run. This meant that your draw from Summon Crimbo Candy essentially defined for you exactly what buffs you could snag with Sweet Synthesis. (Nowadays, this isn't particularly relevant -- most speedruns don't use Synthesis with so much amazing stuff you can shove in your spleen, and even if we did, there are new and better ways to get more complex candy to stuff in your gullet. Still, I can attest that I made flowcharts for several of the 2020/2021 unrestricted runs I did that enumerated what I'd do dependent on the candy state after casting the skill...)

The other drop was the Pool Table, which came with the lounge itself -- it was the very first thing in the entire lounge! From an ascension standpoint, the real use of pool is to get 3 shots of a 10 turn buff. You pick between +5 familiar weight, +10% items, and +50% spell damage. Most people just pick the +5 fam weight, for obvious reasons.

So, uh... 0-1 turns for pool? I don't think we really can count crimbo candy as a major turnsave given how rarely bleeding edge runs are even using Sweet Synthesis anymore, huh.

COLLABORATIVE FEATURE: Pool is essentially a little PVP-esque battle. You have a certain amount of pool skill and your opponent has a certain amount of pool skill, and the one with more wins. Some players are extremely committed to pool -- in Bonus Adventures from Hell, for instance, Pantsless is on the precipice of having won 1 million games of pool in a row with 987,562 wins and counting.

Overall Rating

In standard, this is a tier 3 item. It saves 3-5 turns, which is pretty solid. You do need to remember to use it, but if used correctly, it's a neat benefit.

In unrestricted? Boy, this thing does a lot. Per our tier system, the VIP lounge wouldn't be a top tier IOTM, but it would be quite close. To summarize, the turns saved estimates for all of the VIP years are:

  • 2024: 3-5
  • 2021: 0-1 (but 5+ with fewer shinies)
  • 2018: 1-2
  • 2016: 1-2
  • 2014: 1-3
  • 2013: 0-1
  • 2012: 0-1
  • 2011: 0
  • 2010: 1-2
  • 2009: 0-1

Helpfully, all of these resources are effectively daily. So, you're looking at a good 7-10 turns per day on an account that isn't fully kitted (meaning 2021's fireworks shop gives a few more turns saved than normal) and 10-11 on an account that is kitted enough to have a freerun familiar. It's an impressive accumulation of years and years of experiments, good ideas, and community togetherness. I'd say there's a whole lot of heart in this amalgamation of IOTMs. Turns out that this whole time, the true VIP was the community itself.

... Ow! Ooof! Stop throwing tomatoes! STOP THROWING CANS OF TOMATO SOUP! Ouch!!!

Article contributed by Captain Scotch