It nearly worked out for korbanoes today, he had a run with it die to 1/3 at 14 min with 209 block stronghold

@ahmed54g you don’t need to kill any of the elder guardians. If done right, a monument can be raided in less than half a minute, with nothing but an iron pickaxe and doors (and maybe a cow, or one or two milk buckets). This is because the elder guardian doesn’t dong you immediately.

@SprinkzMC you don’t need two monuments to get enough gold for the regular village + monument strat. Instead you can trade with other villagers (I’ve tried this out and the best options are farmers’ wheat trade and fletchers’ stick trade) for the extra emeralds. If done right, you will end up with enough pearls (assuming you can triangulate well and don’t need like 20 or something silly). One time-saving strat I’ve tried successfully for village + monument runs is collecting tnt from buried treasure and using it to explode wood or hay bales while trading with the cleric.

It's been a known strategy called pirate starts and it was popularized by a fellow named T_Wagz. His 26:xx run has not been verified yet or idk, but I'd keep an eye out on it if I were you. It is definitely a nice strategy to learn.

@benchbotch the extra pearls would be used for travel, they're maybe the fastest way to move (other than nether travel and depth strider III/dolphin)

@SprinkzMC you don’t need pearls for ocean travel

abdron always gets like 24 pearls sooooo