Excavators on Insane Speedrun Strategy

WaffleGuy

Colony
So for the past few days, I have been doing Excavators on insane. I actually did it almost a year ago in 50 minutes, but I decided to revisit it so I can improve my speedrunning skills. Now I can do it in 35 minutes. How? Well, there's not really anything special, I just follow this page of instructions I made, describing which chambers you should strike from first to last.
  1. Excavate One Northeast.
  2. Kill the Northeast Mole Cricket.
  3. Excavate Southeast.
  4. Excavate Dirt Packs.
  5. Kill the Southeast Mole Cricket.
  6. Excavate All Wests.
  7. Excavate Whip Spiders.
  8. Kill Northwest Mole Crickets.
  9. Excavate Three Northeasts.
  10. Excavate Bush Crickets.
  11. Kill the Bush Cricket Mole Cricket.
  12. Excavate One West.
  13. Excavate One Northwest.
  14. Excavate One West.
  15. Kill the Northwest Mole Cricket.
  16. Excavate One Northwest.
  17. Excavate One Left South.
  18. Excavate One Right South.
  19. Kill the West Mole Cricket.
  20. Excavate One Very Left South.
  21. Kill the Left South Mole Cricket.
  22. Excavate One Very Right South.
  23. Kill the Right South Mole Cricket.
  24. Excavate the Middle Northwest Chamber.
  25. Kill the Northeast Mole Cricket.
  26. Kill the Western Mole Cricket.
  27. Kill the Southwest Mole Cricket.
  28. Kill the Northwest Mole Cricket.
  29. Kill the Northwest Mole Cricket.
  30. Kill the Northwest Mole Cricket.
  31. Kill the Uber Mole Cricket.
It's probably a bit unclear and I'm unfortunately too lazy to rewrite it, so in times where you don't know what to do, use common sense (for example you should be fighting devil's coach horse larvae, not hermit crabs in step 1). While this list doesn't go into much detail on how to actually survive all of these waves, it does provide a really good strategy that allows you to skip a lot of chambers (specifically the tiger beetle and bush cricket ones), and also kill many waves in quick succession (for example the northwest waves, which literally dig themselves out middle to left to right after you have performed all of the necessary previous instructions). On my latest attempt, I would have won in 35, maybe 34 minutes if my computer hadn't shut down due to overheating. But anyway, let's get into how to actually perform this strategy.
  • Any other soldier other than army ant majors aren't as cost effective. Even mortars. You should only build army ant majors.
  • At the start, you should have ended up collecting all of the food around you and building 13 workers and 2 majors before the first mole cricket arrives.
  • Spamming food stores is important, especially at the beginning of the game where you need to gather food fast. I usually make 2 per tunnel early game, and 1 per three tunnels late game.
  • Store up a bunch of food, especially for the bush crickets and tiger beetles. I suggest 400 per excavation.
  • After you have a significant amount of army ants (30 I personally like), start upgrading them all to level three. Then make more once you can't upgrade anymore.
  • Make at least 50 extra workers, 40 of them for food collection/digging and the last 10 for brood chambers and eggs.
  • At the start of the game, you can prebuild some tunnels (like those to the west and north of the map), so you don't have to waste time digging later on.
  • You should not let your 40 workers attack, they are generally meant to supply food, dig masses of land, and create eggs for challenging waves.
  • If you did the strategy correctly, you should never end up getting overwhelmed. The closest you could come to death is with the northern bush crickets.
 
Last edited:
Top