I have just completed this run and boy was that intense. I was correct I think about the points and rank adding the difficulty as it took a long time before the black balls were inserted into the game by me doing my best not to collect gems. Once the black balls were in, I started collecting gems as I needed to get 15,000,000 points to unlock everything in the store. On reflection, because I had to grind points at the end, I should have started using the bonus levels once I reached this point, but I used them as a breather. I was lucky that a handy glitch meant every time I clicked continue adventure at the end, it put me into a bonus level, so I only needed to run that a handful of times to get to 15,000,000 points. The other handy trick which I'll definitely use in the future is that if you don't like a classic level, you can exit to the menu and reload and it will change the level (most of the time, just do it twice if it doesn't). This only works on normal levels I believe and not city levels, but will be handy as I lost so much time having to repeat one level 3 times. Unfortunately, I imagine if you play True 100% on the other difficulty levels, you will not be able to hold back on the points for as long, as the scoring bonus is higher. Which means the amounts of colours used will increase very quickly. The only benefit will be in hard and insane that you'll get the colour sort power up quicker. Either way a very good learning curve doing this run, as I'm hoping it will help me with running on Any% a bit better.

Agreed. I was using Mind the Queue puzzle. If you're willing to advise a different one, i'd be grateful. Took about 1 hour 30/40 minutes to accumulate 2995 coins having already had to upgrade fireball to complete ready aim puzzle. I think I'll try again tomorrow(today) with the tactic, adventure, puzzles, coins, shop, hotan and see if that works. Collecting as few gems as possible throughout whilst collecting coins. This will slow it slightly as avoiding gems means waiting until they've fallen after every chain, but i do think will overall save time if i can avoid the levels adding more colours and chains. Also, light blue isn't available on easy annoyingly.

I'm desperately trying to work out the optimal way of getting this. I thought I had it and just lost 2 hours 28 minutes of my time before having to abandon a run. I worked out getting coins in puzzle mode is good way to raise coins quickly. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware that the more points you accumulate and the higher the rank is what increases the difficulty in the adventure. I was expecting to return to the adventure with the same level of difficulty reached so far in the adventure with a full upgrade of powerups, and instead ended up returning to an adventure that needed the majority completed with it giving me 11 chains per level and a full range of colours (except for orange and light blue), which meant I would have had to play almost the entire adventure with full difficulty. I'm thinking the next thing to try, when I have the enthusiasm to try again, is to get the Coin Scarab artifact as quick as possible, and try to avoid collecting gems, but get as many coins as possible, and complete everything apart from Hotan, then go over to the store and buy the fireball upgrades to be able to complete the puzzle mode in one go, and then use the puzzle mode to gain all the coins needed to upgrade and buy everything, and then go and finish Hotan.