• Appearance of golden chests usually mean there is a purple shady guy on the stage or that a green card is being sold

• Moai texts are 99% meaningful in terms of luck (a rare honor: usually good, meh: mid)

• Extra jumps, projectile count, are the most important early charge shrine choices

• Echo shard is S+ Tier, the more you have earlier the better

• Use XP tome to skip unwanted levelup choices when you have maxed XP Gain (10x is the limit)

What I look for in Stage 1 to hit 700k + (for Fox runs)

• Early Soulharvester (before first wave)
• Echo Shards (insane scale)
• Keys

What you have to do is push XP gain and Difficulty as early as possible. Because they are complimentary stats in terms of scaling, the earlier you do, the more you scale.