Slow and Steady/Strategy

This page describes ascension strategies for a Slow and Steady run.

Because turn generation is completely disallowed in this path, all strategies will necessarily focus on turn savings.

Astral Gear/Consumables

The jury is still out on astral gear choices. In a nutshell:

• The astral belt gives lots of stats, and +ML helps you in the Tavern, Oil Peak and Defiled Cranny. However, with the volleyball, sombrero and ML revamps that rolled out at the same time as S&S, you may not need the stats from the belt. This is going to need some time to investigate.
• The astral mask is never a bad choice. Everyone needs +item.
• The astral pet sweater could be a reasonable choice for boosting your fairies, since you cannot use a Fancypants Scarecrow. (If there were a runaway familiar, this would be a top contender, but as of May 2014 there is not a runaway familiar that can be used on this path. With the introduction of the Frumious Bandersnatch and the Pair of Stomping boots, the sweater is an excellent choice for this run.)

For consumables, it seems clear you want the astral hot dogs. They give the best stats, which are all you care about in astral consumables. The energy drinks are clearly the worst choice, since they give no stats at all. The pilsners are in between. This is not the case now as astral drinks no longer exist.

Your Bookshelf

Tomes: You can use the Smithsness and Rad Libs tomes. The 100 turn smithsness buff consumables are a very useful use of your otherwise useless fullness. Once you have enough pieces of Smith gear, you should spend your other summons on Rad Libs if you have them.

• Disagree! I'd rather use the extra summons on more Smithereens to make Louder Than Bombs. For the summon cost of a single papier-mâché toothpicks (2 tome summons) you get four Bombs. Or, you could use one of those Smithereens on a Golden Light to free up the nanorhino for something other than yellow-raying. (Or to get a second YR in a single day, with turn-banking.) Smithsness is just vastly better than Rad Libs.

Librams: You can use Taffy and Resolution tomes in this path. Resolutions will probably be more useful in general.

Grimoires: You only have access to the Thinknerd's Geeky Gifts.

Your Workshed

Since you probably aren't cooking/mixing a lot of things, the still and the oven seem to be pretty poor choices (unless you have no Garden or Workshed IOTMs at all). That leaves:

• Little Geneticist DNA-Splicing Lab: Allows you to extract monster DNA to make various potions and intrinsics. Without the fax machine, you lose some options (no first-day Fish or Mer-kin in Hardcore). You can still get first-turn Weird from Spring Break Beach if you have it, or Construct from The Haunted Library after a dozen or so turns. (Alas, no BRICKO monsters while it's in season!) Other targets include a Demon (for Hot damage to optimize the tavern), some Pirates (+50% booze/gear drop helps in several places), and a Constellation (meat drop for nuns).
• snow machine: Gives you free snow berries and ice harvests when harvesting any IOTM Garden. Over the course of a long S&S run, you are probably harvesting a garden 5-6 or more times, so these can really add up. The extras can be used for ice sculptures, bod-ices, snow cleats (super cheap -combat potions), or even extra snow boards to shave off that last turn + clover in the Smut Orcs.
• warbear jackhammer drill press: A very distant third choice, but perhaps the best choice for players who have no usable IOTM Garden or Workshed, but who do have Pulverize. Smashing extra gear for wads can be a decent source of stats, so a chance of extra wads (or the elusive rare antimatter wad) is better than nothing.

Ascension Strategy
Rankings:	HC Skills - HC Familiars - HC IotMs
General:	Class selection - Familiar usage - Lucky adventures
Paths:	BHY - Fist - AoB - BI - ZS - AoJ - BIG! - KOLHS - CA2 - AoSP - SS - HR - Picky - Ed - Random - AoWoL - Source - NA - GN - LtA - L.A.R. - PF - G-Lover - DD
Additional Paths:	DG - 2CRS - KoE - PotP - LKS - GG - Y,Robot - QT - WF - GY - JM - FotD
IotMs:	Tomes - Faxing - Copying - YR - Garden - Correspondent - Workshed - Tea party - Florist