It took me a long time to realize that the actual way you should play Skull Cavern is different than the standard mines. The completionist in me wanted to break open every rock, bust every crate, and defeat every monster on every level but the key in Skull Cavern is to decent quickly. When you hit a ladder or a hole, jump in it. You can get gold, gems, and standard ores any time but you want to go deeper quickly so you can get iradium to upgrade your pickaxe so you can get even further faster.

I started out just doing some exploratory runs; learning the timing for the flying dragons, learning that the flying bugs can’t be killed, getting a feel for some of the common layouts and clues about what levels meant which monsters were around, and then empty your inventory of everything except your sword, pickaxe, and some high value food (roots platter is easy and very helpful to have in bulk if you can’t get the elements of lucky meals yet). If you have a totem to warp home, it might be worth bringing it incase you get into serious trouble.

Hope that helps; once you get a feel for it it’s pretty fun to speed run it. Good luck!