So, here I am. I am a cheater. I needed to do this in order to prove to myself that I could play the game as intended. No portals and permadeath are just my self inflicted punishment for my first two toons cheese.

Hey, whatever makes the game fun for you, right? Reading yours and others posts have actually made me thinking about exploring each biome and the world at least to 33-50%...

...WITHOUT killing one single boss.

And of course completely without cheese and cheats. So no chair cheat to get into crypts. Not sure if this is doable. But I'd like to see this as a challenge to me.

Copper and tin can be farmed by exploiting trolls (I wouldn't count that as cheese, since trolls, I mean they DO hit very hard). I never tried that on purpose, even though I did get the odd nugget from trolls smashing things.

Iron is more or less almost impossible, that means no iron armor, padded armor, iron weapons and the biggest problem, no iron shield.

Swamps can be tamed with troll armor and a bronze buckler, but then there's the abominations. You need to kill quite a lot of them to get the full lvl 3 root set. Not sure I can make this work just with fire arrows, because I don't think the buckler will be able to block them.

Mountains with root armor and bronze weapons? Going to be tough. Silver is technically out of the question, since I probably won't be able to use the Stagbreaker to smash rocks to pieces, since that would count as cheese.

So, root armor the whole way through? Well, at least you wouldn't need to worry so much about Deathsquitos... :P

Thinking about it...

Edit: Maybe I should just go for the Fenris set, it doesn't protect me from skeeters, but it will give me a running boost. So maybe a combo of root chest and Fenris hood and leggings, or something like that.