After uncountable attempts, I was lucky enough to get the right combo of gear for the selected challenges and was able to survive long enough to use it and make it back out alive!

Of course, next I immediately looked to see how close I was to also gaining the final badge: Grandmaster Score Chaser.

The score was: 957,600

What's a simple thing I could have done throughout that run (other than additional challenges) to eek out a cool million?

Also, I'm so happy to have found this community here on Lemmy after hearing it mentioned in an old audio q&a episode (I'm going through the backlog).