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To start, you should have: Almost full (G) Adamant Armour, (G) Rune Boots, Desert Wrappings, Rune 2H Sword, 70 / 70 / 70 Auto Eat - Tier II
At the end, you should have: Full (G) Adamant Armour or Full (G) Rune Armour, Paladin Gloves, Elite Amulet of Strength, 80 / 80 / 80, Sunset Rapier / Ancient Sword, Auto Eat - Tier III

The first thing you should do in this part of the story is to upgrade your Amulet of Strength into an Elite one, simply by farming more Mummies. On average you need to kill around a thousand of them.

You will next want to get the Paladin Gloves from Paladin once you have enough DR from upgrading to (G) Adamant armour. These gloves give DR, melee strength and no negative bonuses so they can be used for all styles if necessary. At this point in your progression, you will use around 6 Lobster per Paladin kill, and the chance to get them is 1/171. Not too hard.

The next step is completely optional and it is overall recommended to skip over, but it's an option for those wanting to take the slower route. (G) Adamant armour gives enough DR to safely idle Volcanic Cave with about 920 HP. This means you can skip (G) Rune armour entirely and save bars to put towards (G) Ancient armour instead, as this armour set is more important for progression and requires a tonne of bars. You won't need bars after (G) Ancient armour either. The ~92HP threshold is very manageable as well, as while preparing for Volcanic Cave you will obtain enough Hitpoints levels anyway, as you will need about 50k-100k Trout to fully complete the dungeon. Make sure to double check with Can I Idle (it is still perfectly accurate for everything before Impending Darkness Event) for your specific combination of Hitpoints and DR.

If you choose to farm the feared shiny Rune Knights and upgrade your four armor pieces into (G) Rune pieces, you will enjoy a nice total of 29% Damage Reduction with the Paladin Gloves. You will need a bunch of Gold and Silver Bars which are bwst farmed at Statue or at Purple Goo Monster to make headway towards Elite Amulet of Defence.

You should get Auto Eat - Tier III and a second Extra Equipment Set, funded largely from selling Large Horn from Raging Horned Elite. You should also consider getting the third set now, too.

The last thing to get before moving onto the next section is a better weapon. Deep Sea Ship is your next stop for a Sunset Rapier, a great upgrade that will be the primary weapon up until Darksteel Dagger from Rancora Spider. Don't bother getting any Dragon Claw Fragments from Griffin yet as it will be awhile before you can obtain the necessary Infernal Cores to make it worthwhile. If you're lucky enough to get an Ancient Sword before the Sunset Rapier, then feel free to use it, as it will drastically reduce your food consumption and the associated food farming time. You'll probably only want to use it outside of dungeons, because the high burst damage from stronger enemies heavily reduces effectiveness of the lifesteal and makes the bonus damage impossible to reliably utilise. It is very good for all things Slayer, FeZ and Raging Horned Elite farming, but the extra time spent farming Deep Sea Ship can be spent gathering Trout instead. Both approaches are about equal in overall efficiency, assuming average luck.

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