[2020] PSA: Want to get a gout tuber faster? Try having a low woodcutting level and a shitty machete

tl;dr: Tai Bwo Wannai Cleanup mechanics are super weird. Gout tuber events don't depend on how much you successfully cut jungle. They depend on Woodcutting level in a very confusing way

. Your best bet is to spend as much time as possible hacking the jungle, which means you should use the worst machete and the hardest jungle.

Hi Reddit! Some wiki people recently figured out how Tai Bwo Wannai Cleanup events work. Here's the rundown:

The amount of ticks it takes to cut any jungle is equal to 17 - woodcutting_level/10. That means it takes 16 ticks at level 10-19, and 8 ticks at level 90-99.

For level 90-99, the timing is as follows:

• The first tick is the start of the interaction.
• Ticks 2 through 4 give "event rolls" (more on that later)
• On tick 5, you get an attempt at thatch spar and Woodcutting XP.
• Nothing happens on ticks 6 through 8.

There's a counter, we'll call it event_chance, that starts at 0. It goes up by 1 every time you make a woodcutting attempt (note this is every attempt, not every successful hack). It maxes out at 7. This is your chance, out of 101, to get an event from an "event roll".

If you hit that chance, then event_chance gets reset to 0 and the server picks an event for you according to this table – there's a 1% chance that the event is a gout tuber.

This is a bit hard to understand at first – your event chance keeps going up every time you try to hack jungle, and then the event rolls happen at a slightly different time. And there are multiple event rolls over the course of a chop attempt.

Here's where it gets really weird. Remember how I said a chopping action takes longer at lower Woodcutting levels? It turns out that that extra time is filled with more event roll attempts!

This means you get more event roll attempts at lower Woodcutting levels. This is (mostly) offset by the fact that quicker chops at higher levels mean event_chance gets incremented more quickly, but it's not obvious which side wins. After simulation, the end result is that getting a gout tuber is slightly easier at level 30 than it is at 99

! That's wack.

It's also clear from the mechanics that you should spend as much time as possible chopping jungle. Having to move to a different piece of jungle, or deal with an event, etc, wastes time that could be spent on getting event rolls.

To optimize for this, you should use the worst machete you can, on the highest-level jungle you can get, so it despawns less frequently. You should also try not to waste time on combat events – see this page for a couple novel approaches to avoid them.

There are some even freakier things you can do with tick manipulation to get even more event rolls, but these seem to only be around a 20% reduction in average time taken.

At the end of the day, on average it seems like you'll spend slightly over one hour getting a gout tuber.

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