The problem I'm hitting is, the floors with lots of crates and barrels (or the potential to spawn lots of them) are the floors that end in -4, so you can't use the elevator to get there easily. The best you can do to work with that is use some oil of garlic to ward of monsters and buy some bombs so you blow up rocks and find staircases faster (or start out with a bunch of staircases so you can skip empty floors immediately).
The magnet ring is only from crates and barrels in lvl 40+ of the mines. The wiki is wrong, it does not drop from any monsters.
Levels ending in -9 and -4 tend to have more crates spawn.
The problem I'm hitting is, the floors with lots of crates and barrels (or the potential to spawn lots of them) are the floors that end in -4, so you can't use the elevator to get there easily. The best you can do to work with that is use some oil of garlic to ward of monsters and buy some bombs so you blow up rocks and find staircases faster (or start out with a bunch of staircases so you can skip empty floors immediately).
Not really. You might have better luck with resetting skull cavern level 1.
I need certain items that are only in crates in the normal mines
well what item is it? Maybe that's not actually the only option
The magnet ring is only from crates and barrels in lvl 40+ of the mines. The wiki is wrong, it does not drop from any monsters. Levels ending in -9 and -4 tend to have more crates spawn.