Bean unlocks when you finish the game with under one hour of playtime on the save; only 3.2% of players have it. The clock is save playtime, so you can save, quit and come back without losing time. A focused glitchless run lands around 32 minutes, which leaves almost half an hour for mistakes. The route below merges three successful runs.
Before you start
Start a fresh save. Easy difficulty lowers creature health and makes every fight shorter; Bean does not require Normal. In co-op, turn off friendly fire in the settings so a stray shot cannot end the run. Skip the grill, the optional bosses and every collection goal.
Island 1: out in about two minutes
Grab clams from the shoreline and throw them at the lighthouse keeper; you can carry four at a time. At $60, buy the Knife ($45), a Beer ($12) and the Crab-Fishing Rod ($3). Give the Beer to the keeper, fish up the Spider Crab with the Empty Beer Can, and kill it by stabbing it in the back whenever it gets dizzy after a charge.
Some runners save a few minutes by hooking the crab next to the boat so it gets stuck inside the hull, where it cannot charge; if it breaks loose, just fight it normally.
Hand the shell to the keeper, pick up the meat chunks to sell later, and take the keys. You do not need the Radar here: aim the boat at the sun and Island 2 comes into view about a minute later. Every stop to check a Radar kills your boat's momentum and costs around ten seconds.
Island 2: Pistol and Dynamite
Leeches sell for about $4 each, so pick up five or more: three for the quest, the rest for cash. Buy a Pistol ($50); there is no need to upgrade it. If you have a little more, throw Dynamite ($25) into the water and sell the fish it kills. Buy the extra inventory slot as soon as you can on each island.
For the Giant Piranha, one route sets a pile of Dynamite behind the slot machine, fishes the boss up, stands on the pile and shoots it when the boss is on top. That takes about half its health, and the Pistol finishes the rest. Focus the big fish and ignore the small ones; at half health it rises into the air and cannot be hurt for a few seconds.
Grab the meat chunks and the skeleton, hand the skeleton in, and sail off. The small piranhas left behind despawn once you leave. A good run reaches Island 3 around the eleven-minute mark.
Island 3: the endangered catch, then the Pufferfish
Buy Standard Lures and fish until you land an endangered creature. If you catch two, sell the valuable one and trade the cheaper one to the tourist for the Carrot. Skip the grill quest. If a Blue Shark bites by accident, kill it and sell it, or let it go if it costs too much time.
The Pufferfish needs real damage. Either buy the SMG ($650) and circle the trees while hip-firing, or skip the gun and build two Dynamite piles of 10 to 12 sticks each, one behind the slot machine and one under a coconut palm, setting off one per phase. Watch the poison trail in the second phase.
Keep a meat chunk from the last boss to eat: chunks refill hunger and health completely.
Island 4: money first, then two traps
Target about 16 minutes on arrival. Buy Professional Lures and fish for roughly $1,200 to $3,000. Red Snapper, Tigerfish and Parrotfish are good picks because they rarely jump back into the water. Buy the SMG here if you skipped it.
There are two ways to fund the late game. The steady way is to keep fishing. The gamble is to bet a catch worth about $1,200 on green at the roulette table: a win pays 35 times, enough to buy everything you need for the rest of the run, but most attempts lose and cost the catch.
Then buy the Professional Boss Lure ($1,200) and set two traps: about $750 of Dynamite inside the shop you bought the lure from, for the Tuna, and another $750 in the middle of the front lawn, for the Albatross. Drag the hooked Tuna into the shop and blow it up. Drop the dead Tuna on the lawn pile; the Albatross always arrives from the sky on the side away from the casino, so watch that way and shoot the pile as it lands. If the bird survives, fight from inside the shop's covered porch.
Island 5: five Beers, then both whales
Aim to land around the 25-minute mark. Instead of fishing for the scientist, buy five Beers and give her those; any five items count. Stack about $1,000 of Dynamite near the shop, get the first whale to land on it, and finish it with the SMG or Assault Rifle. Cook fish in the lava for food.
Carry the whale up the volcano, throw it in, and fight the mutated whale back down on open ground, steering it onto more Dynamite piles when you can. After it starts its triple bounce, wait out all three landings, then turn and empty a full magazine. Hand the fin to the scientist, take the boat keys and leave.
Patch 1.0.5 removed the trick of sailing to islands before unlocking them, so older videos that skip islands no longer work. Any route you copy has to visit all five islands in order.
Source video
Some numbers in this guide come only from player videos and are not officially verified.