As you can see, this run chooses not to save everyone, and instead attempts to go for pure speed. Still, this chapter was rather tricky to route efficiently, as there's so many different ways you can do things. Just because you can get more than one thing done in each day doesn't necessarily mean that it's faster to do so.

My timings indicate that an optimized route that saves the Hobblepots (this one, as best I can tell) is roughly half a minute faster than one that lets them get carted off, and saves Amaya instead. Amaya ends up being slower mostly because of the extra backtracking due to needing to use the broom, meaning that 2 trips to the rat are necessary to hide the bomb and bolt cutters, or the chopsticks must be bought to recover them (the faster option, I believe). As for the Feys (bakers) route, I'm almost 100% certain that saving them is too inefficient, as it means an early trip to the merchant to buy the cure-all, then probably another one later on to buy the branberry porridge; like the Hobblepots, they must be at 5 hearts before the last requirement to free them.

While we still don't know the consequences of the various choices going into chapters 4 and 5, this route also keeps Amaya from getting carted off (since she has so much health, she's the hardest to get rid of). This is important going into chapter 3, because if I was forced to enter the Hobblepots' shop to help one of the sisters, it'd be slower than Amaya or the Feys by about a minute (for some reason, there's unskippable dialogue at the end of that conversation, while the other two shops let you skip pretty much all of it). Fortunately, I can simply enter Amaya's shop instead.