Thanks! I didn’t realize the Vagrant’s Sword would be that powerful. The Demo Lord is definitely not supposed to be beaten that easily, haha. The lemonade minigame is meant to be something you let run in the background while you do other things over the course of the game, but I guess I could try adjusting the curve a bit so there’s less downtime. As for the newspaper, I might remove it soon, it turns out to be more obscure than I thought.
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I didn't actually kill the Demo Lord (not that I was trying to; I'd be savescumming immortality if I was trying). I mostly meant you can stall for ages on the ones preceeding them for long enough to kind of just do everything on the map before fighting them. I got past IX just from doing normal exploration and not putting any thought into beating calamities (that greenhouse is expensive) just out of the fact that Vagrant's Sword allows (and encourages!) doing everything in the map to delay the calamity... and it turns out exploring the entire map actually gives you a lot of stats.
Lemonade stand being a thing you do passively makes sense. The main thing that made it tricky for me was that I only entered the lemonade stand because I wanted to get more Vagrant's Sword delay (this was an exploring run and not one I expected to make grand progress), only got my screaming mandrake late in the run, and didn't know if I'd survive the next calamity or not, so I was out of things to do.
You can get there early enough in the loop (if you do the entire shadow realm instead of going for one of the low stats actions) that it was literally the second thing I went for (after Foxified since that one's earlier in) in the loop. You just kind of have enough stats with only putting a tiny amount of effort into getting more. Obviously doing it even earlier is better, but you get it *really* early.
As I said, I think getting +1 is fine. +2 is the one that comes way too quickly for how much work it takes to get. (+3 is interesting because going for it early involves wasting the absurdly good sleep action, but it really means you should start grinding long tasks in the midst of doing it and not exploring much. It's interesting and I think this one's okay; it just feels like this is the sort of consideration you could have for +2 instead.)