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So You Want To Go Fast? (an Intro to KOL Speedrunning)

July 29, 2026 // guide

Foreword from the Editor

Scotch here! Everyone’s favorite friend, Phillammon, has decided to write up a rousing introduction to speedrunning in the Kingdom of Loathing. Unlike our monthly IOTM reviews, this is going to be a bit more “back to the basics.” Much less focused on specific shiny strategies, much more focused on how someone goes from playing KOL as an idle game into playing KOL as an evermore-optimal speed focused experience. Please enjoy!

It happens to all of us. You’re playing a silly stick figure game on the internet, chuckling at the jokes (Boxen, classic! What will these jokers think of next?), vaguely bash your way through all of the quests, maybe thwart a Naughty Sorceress, and all is well. And then you made a critical error. You found a discord server full of other Kingdom of Loathing players, and they were all talking complete nonsense about speedrunning.

Well, worry not! This less-than-brief guide will hopefully help you understand the key concepts of speed ascension in Kingdom of Loathing. It’s not going to get you going fast on its own, but in theory it will never go out of date and will teach you what you need to know in order to start learning from those people talking complete nonsense, until you too are talking the same kind of nonsense!1

The Basics

First, a spoiler. When you defeat the Naughty Sorceress, who lives in that big tower on the right hand side of the map, you’ll then break a Prism, and an Astral Rift will open up, allowing you to “Ascend”. When you do so, you get to restart the game, returning to level 1 with all of your stuff reset (until you break the prism again), and you can do it all over again. Sorry if you didn’t know that yet. It’s kind of vital to what we’re going to get into here.

Speedrunning a (nominal) MMO is a bit of a weird concept, but fortunately in Kingdom of Loathing it’s well defined. Just like how in a normal game, a speedrun time would be measured as the time taken between starting the game and reaching the credits; a Kingdom of Loathing speedrun is measured in terms of the days taken and turns played (or adventures spent, the two are interchangeable) at the moment that you smash the Prism. When you’re going fast, you want to be getting both of those numbers as low as possible, prioritising days over turns- a speedrun that takes 3 days and 400 turns (3/400) would be considered slower than a run that took 2 days and 500 turns (2/500)2.

As a result of that, there are two primary things you want to keep in mind: turn-bloat, and turn-cutting.

Turn-bloat is what helps you take as few days as possible to finish your run (or “make daycount”). The general idea of turnbloat is generating as many adventures as possible each day: eating high quality food, drinking high quality booze, using Milk of Magnesium, using The Ode to Booze, equipping gear that gives you more adventures over rollover; anything that lets you play more turns in a day is turnbloat.

Turn-cutting is the other side of the same coin- completing the main quest of the game while spending as few adventures as possible. As a rule, this is a lot harder than turn-bloating, and it will rarely if ever save you entire days, but it will save you turns.

These two concepts lead us to the golden rule of speed ascension:

Every single thing you do should either save adventures, or generate adventures.

Technically, this is something of an oversimplification. It is more accurate to say that every single resource you spend should be used to either advance the main quest as fast as possible or help you to do so, or should be used to generate the turns you need to get there. With this golden rule in mind, let’s look at the resources everyone has access to.

Resources

Adventures are your first big obvious resource. You get forty-and-a-bit of them every day, and there’s thousands of foods and boozes you can use to turn your liver and stomach space into them. What do you use them for? Adventuring. As the “core” resource of the game, every adventure you spend wants to be, ideally, on the critical path of the main quest (getting you quest progress, either by completing quests or leveling up to unlock new quests) or generating adventures.3

Stomach and Liver Space are the next important resources to talk about. You can eat fifteen fullness of food per day, and drink fourteen potency-worth of booze before you become falling-down drunk. There’s no real tricks here to speak of initially, you just want to fill your stomach with the best food you can, your liver with the best booze you can, and save an extremely alcoholic nightcap to drink as the last thing you do in the day. All stuff that the Toot Oriole taught you.

What constitutes “the best food and booze you can” changes super rapidly with permanently learned (“permed”) skills (hey, surprise, every time you finish a run you get to pick a skill you learned that run and keep it for all future ascensions), so broad advice doesn’t help much here. (Although you can find more specific advice about skills in this perm list, which is kept up-to-date by Scotch and others.) Just remember that the Dry Noodles produced by the Pastamastery skill that Pastamancers can learn from the guild trainer (and then permanently learn in order to bring it into all future runs) can be cooked with a bunch of items that you’ll find lying around while going about the main quest, make sure to prioritise finding those, and you’ll be fine for the time being.

Lucky Adventures. Now we’re into the fun stuff. Every day, the Hermit who lives in the Big Mountains will sell you up to three eleven-leaf clovers in return for worthless trinkets (try using chewing gum on a string, purchased from the general store, if you want to find trinkets). When you use these clovers, the next adventure you go on will be guaranteed to be a “Lucky Adventure”, a special kind of adventure unique to the location you adventured in.

Lucky Adventures are important to think about and plan around because you (usually) only have three of them available per day, and they are extremely powerful and flexible. For a brief selection, depending on where you adventure, you can use lucky adventures to


Determining how you use your limited supply of clovers is a huge part of turn cutting when you’re learning the game, and it will remain a powerful tool as you develop, so getting a handle on it early is very worthwhile.

You might ask yourself why that last bullet point is there- after all, potions of cold damage or hot resistance neither generate turns nor save them, so why would you spend resources on them? Well


Quests and Modifier Pumping

As a rule, nearly every quest in KoL boils down to “Adventure in a zone until something happens”. Sometimes, this is extremely direct- the game says “You have to spend N turns here, then the quest is completed”. One example of this kind of quest is decoding the map to Cobb’s Knob. You spend ten turns there, then you find the code. Easy enough.

Usually, though, it’s slightly more subtle than that, and in those situations there’s usually a modifier (the little blue text you can find when you click on equipment and effects) you can try to get as high as possible to speed it up and cut turns. By way of example, one of the most common quest types in KoL is “adventure in this zone until you get a non-combat adventure”. If you want to speed that up, you want to get as many effects and equips with blue text on them that says “Monsters are less attracted to you”, in order to get that non-combat adventure as fast as possible. The next most common is “adventure here until a specific item drops”- so in that case, you want to get your item drop bonus as high as possible.

Between them, the noncombat rate (what speedrunners call “monsters are less attracted to you”) and item drop modifiers account for most of the quests in the game, and you’ll rarely go wrong getting them as high as possible at all times, but some specific steps of other quests have slightly weirder modifiers that make them go faster, and knowing what those are helps a lot for (among other things) determining which Lucky Adventures you want to prioritise.

A good example for this early on is the Haunted Kitchen. In the Haunted Kitchen, you’re searching for the key to the Haunted Billiards Room. Once you’ve opened 21 drawers in the Haunted Kitchen, the next time you win a fight in the kitchen, you’ll find the key you’re looking for. So far so good. Ordinarily, you open one drawer every time you win a fight in the Haunted Kitchen, so that’s 21 adventures to open the drawers and 1 to find the key, for a total of 22 adventures spent.

However, you can speed that up. Every fight you win in the kitchen, the game flips a coin. Heads, it looks at your hot resistance. Tails, it looks at your stench resistance. Up to +9 resistance, for every +3 resistance you have to the element it chose, you search an extra drawer, up to a maximum of four drawers searched per fight. That means if you have nine hot resistance and nine stench resistance, you’re searching four drawers per adventure- 6 adventures to open drawers and 1 to find a key, for a total of seven. Much better.

There’s quite a few quests like this, wanting you to pump up an attribute other than item drop or noncombat rate. An incomplete list of the zones, and the attributes they’re looking for, follows:


and finally, there are three Naughty Sorceress Contests, which are randomly determined. The first one requires Combat Initiative, the second requires you to pump up one of your “offstats” (out of Moxie, Muscle and Mysticality- for example, if you’re a Moxie class, it will either be Mysticality or Muscle), and the third requires Elemental Damage and Spell Damage of a specific random element.

Additionally, while item drop is always good, there’s a few places where it’s extra good- The Haunted Laundry Room, Haunted Wine Cellar, the Hippy Orchard, the Middle Chamber of the Pyramid, the Cyrpt Nook and the Penultimate Fantasy Airship all respond very well to a little extra item drop if you can spare it.

There is one more modifier that is almost always good: Familiar Weight. However, we’re out of time for today, and if I go on much longer this article will be absurdly long, so in lieu of talking about that right now, we’ll pick up with why familiar weight is great next time. Until then, adieu!

Backword [sic] from the Editor

Scotch here, again! Forewords are a common thing that exist, and Backwords aren’t. But I’ve always thought that’s a real bummer, so I’m adding a backword anyway. I’m the editor here! I can do what I want! Big thanks to Phillammon for contributing this piece. There will be a second part arriving in the coming months that goes into more detail and perhaps introduces a handful of special concepts that can improve your game even more than the items noted here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the aforementioned KoL Discord server.

Footnotes

  1. If you are a KoL veteran, you may have noticed that in several places in this article I have elided the precise truth in favour of clarity. Feel free to chastise me for them in the comments below! You may say, “Phillammon, my writerly friend, there are no comments below.” That is correct! You have fallen into my trap, there is no way for you to chastise me! Certainly not by tagging me on the Discord linked multiple times in this article. That is simply unthinkable. ↩

  2. This is even the case if you didn’t do anything on one of the days- it’s the number of “rollovers” that have passed plus one, not the number of days you logged on and did something. ↩

  3. As you advance, generating turns becomes less valuable- there is an aphorism you may have heard that states “You should never spend turns to make turns”. This is very accurate at higher tier play, but if you’re just starting out, spending turns to make turns is just fine. Just don’t spend too many turns doing that. ↩

  4. Technically, the increased monster level doesn’t help the tavern basement itself, but makes a later zone faster if you increased your monster level in the basement. Additionally, both combat rate and noncombat rate benefit the tavern basement in different ways, depending on what you’re doing. The Tavern Basement is a complicated zone. This is a complicated game. ↩

  5. And also noncombat rate, for reasons that make sense. ↩

  6. And also noncombat rate, for reasons that don’t make sense. ↩

Article contributed by Phillammon