I'm in shock! I followed your strat (doing Pendant the whole way) and did it after 3 tries with 15 stacks to spare! I'm so excited!!! :DD
I had super good RNG: good early stacks in in gravel layer and timely restore cells in Umbra and Void. Also the occasional Mageflare Rune. I was very lucky that my two flasks saved me with zero blocks to spare, like I was on the skin of my teeth. (I was also careless and had to use 3 ladders lol) I forgot the shield stack would also work on the core layers so I was panicking about my stamina but Nix just... went through lol.
I feel the real challenge is collecting enough stamina and shield stacks from Shimmera to go to Umbra, since the high visibility of the Void makes stuff easy to spot. Mageflare Runes are a must for Umbra, your strat of using them every 3-4 digs is very solid. You also have to be lucky with restore cells to counter Wither, so Ironhide Greaves is probably the optimal choice for deepwater dives.
I'm still in shock omg. That was so fun!! Thank you for the strats and this absolute gem of a game :DD
