Pinned Comment :) Will update this with things I forgot or changes to SoT as I see them. 1. 11:52 THE SAND PAYMENT SKIPS 2 JUMPS NOT ALL 4!! I REPEAT!! PAYING 4 SAND ONLY SKIPS HALF THE JUMPS!!! This is probably the biggest mistake I made in this video, and I'm so sorry to anyone who took my word on this. I should have double checked this rather than assuming🤦♀🤦♀ 2. If you want to go for a lava parkour then drop all your items on the floor first. That way if you die you can still get you're stuff (like sand or keys). 3. As of MCC 30 there is now infinite carpet (finally!) You should still try to be consistent and clear in marking things but you don't have to worry about saving carpet now. 4. It is polite to leave all the coins in the main room for the sand keeper, as the only way they get coins is with these (and the green vault, but that's not a guarantee.) Treat your sand keeper well peeps! :) 5. A good strat for fighting 2 block tall mobs in tight corridors (this would be zombies, skeletons and pillagers) you can place a carpet, which is 1/16th of a block, and these mobs won't be able to walk over it. Enjoy happily swinging at them from a distance. 6. I didn't emphasize this enough, PLEASE GET TARGET BLOCKS. They can drop 2 sand, 20 seconds, that's really good. Even if they drop coins or a mobs instead, you never know if you'll have missed sand, so always shoot these! I already said this in the video but kinda glossed over it. You can stay in the dungeon so much longer with that sand. Some people have come out of their pathways with 18 sand or more by doing this! You never know. (Pete in MCC 16 for instance). 7. It's been brought to my attention that I forgot to mention the tax on coins when you die. You do lose some coins when you die! 20% just like banking coins at the sphinx... so yeah, don't die. 8. Some of the comments have talked about this, another way to refer to the tunnels is again using spawn orientation and using a clock face with each tunnel being a number. 12 is the sphinx and tomb, 6 is the tunnel under spawn. Draw it out it'll make sense, I also have a community post with this concept drawn out if you want to find that instead. (from 5/4/23, or 4th of May 2023 for those of you who write dates the other way.) 9. If coins are on slabs you can stand underneath the slabs to get the coins instead or having to go up top. (This may be faster in some situations.) 10. Man I forgot to mention the health regen in this game... You don't have to eat or anything, what happens when you get hit is you basically have a timer that starts when hit, and once the timer is up you can heal again. It's about 5 seconds. So you get hit, 5 seconds later you can regen. This means things like silverfish can be dangerous. They may not do much damage, but they can constantly be resetting you're time to heal. Healing happens about as quickly as when you just filled up your hunger, or like a regen pot. Takes about 3ish seconds to fill up your hearts again.👍 11. I show a carpet strat in here to mark off trapdoors, that unfortunately doesn't work. Try putting the carpet on the side of the trapdoor area or on the log where the ladder is. (I have a short that explains this more full.) 12. As of MCC 33 there is another variation of the slab parkour for the gold key. This variation seems to have the jumps in the same place, but instead it is iron bars around a block that you have to jump around. There might be a few pov's that show it but I know for sure you can see it at the end of sapnap's run. 13. Also in MCC 33 there seems to be a countdown sound in the beginning of the game that signals when the sand timer starts going. It freaked a couple people out cause it's similar to the fake out sounds from mcc scuffed😂. 14. At the end when I mention stuff about Timmy's team and how they got so many coins without getting a vault, I failed to mention that was with a 2.5 or 3x multiplier, and throughout most of the video I am referring to coins when they are multiplied. I didn't think much of it since sands is usually played 7th or 8th in tournaments, but lately it's become popular to play sands early instead. Either way it was a short sight on my part.
Another carpet trick: Always place 1 carpet on the RIGHT when entering. If you get lost you'll know that you are going BACK when the carpets are on the LEFT of where you're going. (Handy if you can't just follow your carpets back because you see multiple directions with carpets.) I'd love to see a contestant use tip 4 to block mobs in those dangerous "outside" rooms with the hard-to-see side paths.
Great guide! I learned a few things, and I watch Hbomb’s SOT reviews! As far as marking your path: an advanced strategy is to always mark the rightmost block as you enter a room. For rooms which branch into multiple paths, this will tell you which path you came from. Most helpful if you’re running low on time as you run back, but a good practice to get into
This is AMAZING. The best MCC video Ive ever seen, covers the game so well. Even brings up a few ideas Ive had whilst watching SoT lmao. Thanks so much for making and ofc thanks to dave for sharing ;)
@@23william90 mmmm, it would have to be a pretty bare bones video, nothing highly edited cause I can't produce that in a short enough time for the event. I did just play it on stream where I was able to figure most of it out! But if there is enough interest in a guide (even if it's low quality) I might be able to make something quick where I walk through it
thank you so much, this was the most succinct and helpful video to help me work out how to play this godly confusing game. hoping to relay this info to my teammates AAAAAAAAA
Sand Keeper would seems as the best fit for me, it seems like the easiest task in the game. All you do is run around, shouting out the timer and how much sand you have left, and to not get bored pull some levers, and scout for some additional sand nearby the central room.
Omg this is so cool I’m such a sands of time nerd (I vod review and strategize so much) this was so great I’m so glad someone else cares about the game as well
Very good video! Unfortunately there wasn't much for me to take since I'm also a nerd that has watched way too much SOT for their own good, but condensing most of it down to 16 minutes is impressive. I very much agree with you on the gold key parkour; I get that event nerves and lava makes things hard but the jumps are *extremely* easy. I've only recently gotten even okay at parkour and I'd still consider myself a decent bit weaker than the average MCC player and I am entirely confident that I would never mess that up. The Timmy clip is kinda weird to me, using 3x multiplied stats when talking to new/inexperienced players who might not get that may give them an inaccurate assessment of what's good and bad in terms of scores.
Yes, the Timmy clip is my bad. In my mind sands is a game that's always played 7th or 8th so I usually look at how good scores are based off the 2.5 or 3x multiplier. And then all the sudden sands started being played early the last few events and I now realized the problem with that. So thank you for pointing that out. I should probably update the pinned comment and mention this
you should also consider e-raying as a strategy to use before the game starts. It allows the team to quickly find the red/blue paths since coins are entities!
Is this confirmed? I've never seen anyone try that, and with so many speedrunners playing in MCC I feel like one of them would have already tried that. Am I wrong?
E-raying was tried out by the Purple team in MCC Rising. Discussion about this strategy happened after and Noxcrew asked all players to not do it in the future. "I think we've said not to e-ray in SOT, but if anyone does we will change to game to make it impossible." - Daniel Aeltumn, lead dev
Hey Bliss! I have no other way of contacting you, but would you like to play a Sands of Time remake? (This is exclusively an invitation for Bliss). A friend and I started an MCC remake (but with custom maps and games eventually,) and our main points will be Meltdown and Sands of Time. Tell me if you're interested.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS VIDEO!! As a MCC Rising contestant, I had NO IDEA of how sands of time worked even thought I watched a lot of vods lol This helped me a lot to understand the game, thank you!
This video is absolutly amazing and gives a great overview of Sot. I could imagine this becoming part of the introduction for new players getting in MCC if enough people see it!
Great video! This is by far the most comprehensive guide for Sands of Time that I've seen. About your point in 5:25 about not confusing decorative blocks for vault paths, there's also this blue decorative block (the pillars in 7:45) and I've seen some players get confused on this and think it's the blue vault markings when it isn't. In 11:56, you still need to do some parkour. The four sand trade-off bypasses *half* of the jumps you need to do. Instead of 8 slab jumps in total (4 to get the key, 4 to get out), spending 4 sand makes you only have to do 4 slap jumps in total (2 to get the key, 2 to get out). In 13:44, mobs can climb ladders but they don't do it intentionally. It has something to do with their pathfinding. What's happening here is that one zombie pushed another which does result in one accidentally climbing up ladders. Here's a comment I found about it: Ladders seem to be coded to be very simplistic, probably 'if mob or player is touching it and moving towards it, elevate height'. Healing works a bit different in Sands of Time. Once a player is out of combat / doesn't take damage for a certain amount of time (I think around 5 seconds?), the player has increased natural regen and regains health quickly. This is why mobs like silverfish, while not dealing much damage, are still a problem to deal with as they reset that timer and prevent a player from healing quickly.
I’ve noticed that blue vault marking confusion as well. I’ve always wanted someone to either say “the markings always have a triangle pattern” or that the blue vault markings are a “Blue Bats” blue
Very nice and complete guide, I'll just make one small correction with the sounds from the timer. Actually, the green through orange sections (120-30s) doesn't make any difference in the sounds (sort of), it's actually 2-3 sounds picked at random to avoid to many repetitions of the same sound. It's probably just to avoid people to leave the timer alone and tell if they need to come back or not, so the different sounds actually starts at 30s when it comes in the red section (like you mentionned). Besides that, very nice video! We can see that you took a lot of time to analyse all of that so good job.
7:02 An idea: How about using the clockface to refer to the tunnels? With the Sphinx/tomb being 12 o'clock, then the first tunnel clockwise from the Sphinx would be 1 o'clock, in the corner upstairs 2 o'clock, etc. The one under the portal would be 6 o'clock of course, directly across from 12. The spacing makes sense and I think it's less likely to get the tunnels mixed up. You would have to show your teammates the layout ahead of time and have them learn it, but I think it would be a very simple way to do comms. "Back top left" is admittedly very intuitive, but I worry that it's a lot of words to process under pressure, and you might accidentally think of your left rather than left from the portal. (Yes this does technically also apply to the clockface because people do use it as a positional guide, but my hunch is that it would still be easier to externalise, or at least it would definitely be for me)
I've been seeing this idea floating around and I totally agree. As long as you can show your team before hand and everyone is comfortable with the tunnel locations this would be an amazing strat!
