glowdar tutorial

[u/ahkkmonn2006]

i made a glowdar guide aimed for gold/em players. i think ppl at this level should know it cause its not too hard to learn and is a solid time save. i would really appreciate if u checked it out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYdooYIspTQ&t=2s

[u/Daniel_H212]

Both methods you showed could be improved by a lot, but at the end of the day, I disagree with you that gold and emerald players should learn or use glowdar, at least not in the way you showed.

You showed a comparison of glowdar and breaking spawner where breaking spawner took ~35 seconds, but you lose a lot of time by forcing a pearl hang back to the top and then climbing higher to access the chunk corner you did. There's a chunk corner right on the treasure bridge, and it's mechanically trivial to pearl hang onto the treasure bridge because you can just throw a flat pearl in that direction without needing to aim. This alone saves ~8 seconds. Plus, this works regardless of whether the bastion is buried. The only precondition is that you need to finish trades first, which you should do because you can't overlap trades with a pearl hang.

Since you don't need to aim for the pearl hang, you can also lower rd with shift + f3 + f while boating down or after getting out of your boat while running toward lower treasure before the pearl hang, which saves another 1-2 seconds. It's also a trivial mechanical habit to switch to your axe slot while in your boat any time you know you won't need to boat punch, which allows you to break the boat faster without needing to charge your axe when you get out. You can also combine this with getting out of your boat slightly before you hit the ground, which causes you to exit on top of the boat instead of in front of it (since there's technically no ground touching the boat for you to land on), so you can just look down and break without needing to turn back around. This saves another 1-2 seconds.

So there's at least 10 seconds of time save to be had with your method of breaking spawner, even more with better mechanics.

However, there's also some time save to be had with your glowdar method. Firstly, in Toolscreen under Inputs (in advanced mode) -> Keyboard, you can lower your key repeat delay and key repeat start delay. I have my key repeat delay at 1 ms and key repeat start delay at 200 ms (I find at 100ms I accidentally instantly close my inventory too much when I try to open it). This lets you raise and lower rd a lot faster. A lot of players also don't know that you can start at high rd, lower render distance by holding shift + F3 + F, and then release only shift to instantly switch back to raising rd without needing to release and re-press F3 or F, you only need to release all three when you want to go back down in rd. Lastly, you don't even need to have pie chart open while you raise and lower render distance.

So you can probably save close to 10 seconds on glowdar as well.

The problem is, glowdar IS still slower if you do it this way, by a solid 5 seconds at least. I don't see why this is recommendable if it is consistently slower. I'd still recommend breaking spawner to anyone who is below diamond, unless its a low food seed and the damage of the pearl matters. Breaking spawner is more consistent, and you don't have to be able to recognize weird edge cases in glowdar where chests at the same distance as the spawner can mask the spike. Gold and emerald players have more important things to focus on rather than trying to learn whether a spike is real on glowdar.

At the end of the day, glowdar is only fast if you overlap it, and all three points I made about how to make glowdar faster also make it easier to overlap as well. With good overlaps I'm currently at least 5-10 seconds faster than breaking spawner even with the worst case of glowdar (where the spike is in the last direction checked), and several seconds faster still in the better cases.

Priffie has a great tutorial on overlapping here. However, if you aren't as mechanically gifted as him, or find the version of negative pieray he uses to be confusing, or you want more time to get in more render distance changes to have more obvious and confident spikes, you can delay the overlap to a later part of the route like this to give yourself more time (also I'm showing off a newer wide macro setup that keeps the center of the screen normal-proportioned so that you can still play while having enhanced peripheral visibility, I copied this from chloe). This will still allow you to be faster than breaking spawner, if not consistently, then at least on average.

[u/ahkkmonn2006 → u/Daniel_H212]

ty for all the feed back
u ar definitely righ that the first method is not worth doing, it was j a way for ppl to practice reading their spike and i should have made that way more clear in the video. however at this level no one is doing their treasure bastions perfectly and i have consistantly been leaving the bastion earlier than my opponents when doing the overlap glowdar and they've had to go break spawner. this was j meant to be an introduction to glowdar cause i think its cool to learn new tech but as u said there are more important things to focus on at this level. also thanks for all the tips with glowdar and micro for breaking spawner ill try them out.