To confound us minmaxers: on the other hand, Tauntimps are a significant boost in population, and they reward you for getting a high max population earlier rather than later. On the gripping hand, because of compounding most things you do early are mostly irrelevant 50 levels later.
All right, I managed to tighten up my game considerably and got Imploding Star down to 2:06 which is probably about the best I can get. I can’t even see how it is remotely possible to do it under 50 minutes, by that point I wasn’t even at zone 100 and that was with overkill on every single attack.
Theoretical minimum time to reach zone 170, assuming all relevant masteries, is 42 minutes and 15 seconds. Of course, you don’t actually have to reach zone 170 to beat Imploding Star. 
Right, Blacksmithery should speed things up quite considerably. Although considering I’m still some 7 masteries away from being able to unlock that, I may well be able to overkill every square on Watch before that point. (Also of course, reaching level 330 is going to take a good long while.)
Also, doesn’t clearing out Bionic Wonderland open up all the unique maps along the way? So you could theoretically beat Imploding Star on zone 125.
I feel like I’ve been stuck in the late early game (or early middle game?) for a couple weeks. I can zoom up to around Z80, but it take days to get up and past Z100. Any advice on how to speed things up here? There doesn’t seem to be too many exciting upgrades or new perks until I’m way past Z120 which is not feasible for me now.
I’ve got a total of 722K He, is it simply a matter of portalling a bunch of times until I can get enough perks to get me over the hump?
That’s not even close to the late game - or even the middle game. I’m in the middle game. I have 410m He, and can clear Lead in 2 hours. I get my ass kicked in the Spire. Cell 38 is as far as I’m getting.
Now, I’ve been running AutoTrimps for several weeks now. It’s a far different game than just running vanilla Trimps. I like it far far better. I was getting a little too obsessive about the vanilla game, and was micromanaging it too much during the week. This automates as much as I want, and the progress is more palpable and real to me. And if you really don’t like the idea of automating it, I’d recommend downloading the script just to gain access to the graphs and things - it’s a very cool way to keep track of your progress.
I didn’t say I was in late game, and I have no idea what the rest of that post means! 
Can you elaborate or give me some direction to help me progress?
I think the biggest thing you can do right now is keep an eye on your helium for our numbers. Find out at what point it starts dropping, and just portal at that point. ( assuming, of course, that you’re done with any challenge that you signed up for. ) The daily challenges really are a great source of helium, regardless of how hard they look.
Ok, so the idea is to collect more helium to boost my perks up a bunch?
Also, what is this script you mentioned?
Yes - helium collection is your primary goal right now. Make sure you’re completing all the challenges you have access to in order to have all the perks available.
AutoTrimps is a script available here. If you’re uncomfortable with scripts (I’m not all that familiar with them), there are instructions at the bottom of the page on what to do.
So, one and a half months later, I’m not sure I can claim doing the Challenges[sup]2[/sup] as thoroughly as I did was worth it, but I am sure I can claim that +488% damage and health is pretty awesome.
I’ve been holding off on those because of the no helium thing. I’ve got to have my helium, there are so many upgrades I still don’t have. I just got Motivation II a while back.
Like a lot of bonuses, there are diminishing returns on challenge2. I’d strongly recommend doing it at least half-assed quick runs for the low hanging fruit bonuses. One hour runs would give you most of the bonus that a day run would, for example.
That being said, I was one of the people who spent weeks on them and am at +407% HP,atk / +40.7% He.
One relevant thing for me was that after a while I was comfortable running void maps at zone 201, so since I was doing the runs to 200 I was pulling in about 2.5M from spire + void maps + a few post spire levels. So they weren’t zero helium runs.
Yeah - there are so many challenges that you can’t get past lvl100 with (or face extremely diminishing returns), the helium lost from those zones is irrelevant. You end the challenge, and advance to whatever zone you typically go to.
I actually didn’t even know it was even possible to end those challenges, putting that function under Perks is just bad interface design. Since there’s nothing under portals and there’s nothing in the space where you usually end Dailies, I expected they would just go on until I tapped out.
Yeah, the Portal/Perks thing is stupid. At least with Daily challenges, thy put a button on the main screen to end it. Sofis - do you think you bet more helium doing voids at 201, rather than the last zone of your challenge? I’ve been doing Corrupted runs, and do voids at 190. I guess I could look it up…
You get way more from 190 corrupted. Keep in mind all that extra corruption boosts the value of the map (you get twice what you get from the entire zone, not twice of what you get from the improbability), and then that gets doubled on top of that.
I didn’t write it down, but I believe I was getting 340k per map I did on 190 during my current run (before doubling from ending the challenge, so 680k after), and the value I would currently get (from zone 207) is 320k, so even this late I would get less than half of what I got from zone 190.
Yeah - just looked at my charts. So why voids at 201? Just the extra chance at an ethereal?
I’m currently pushing towards 230 to get those rewards. I’m curious about the dimensional generator…