Slime Time

in the cave: he uses the excuse of being confused/in awe of the trees to pause and listen for footsteps.

the excuse of collecting torches to backtrack and try to see who's following him.

and of course noticing the lack of ore.

in the first forest: he keeps looking around I'm sure that part of that is genuine awe but i wouldn't be surprised if its again to see who's following.

he gathers supplies and collects the ones he leaves behind.

hes also noticing anything out of the ordinary within the strangeness like when he notices a lone dirt block among the grass and mines it and the stone beneath. noticing again that theres still no ore.

he looks around the trees to see how their built.

at the first hallway he stops and backtracks to press the buttons he notices to see if they do anything.

the true beauty of the traps are that he narrates them in chat as he already suspects they are reading them so in truth its more like 3 traps.

during the second forest after swimming up from the lake i'm not sure if people realize how fast he moves through that. like hes switching his perspective and running through the trees when hes looking at the signs and during that its clear he already suspects that they are reading his chat messages because when he points the signs out he doesn't send it in chat.

also after setting the traps are when he turns on the direction and coordinates in the top corner.

the signs he has also clearly memorized where they are as after seeing the third he places a sand block next to it (which is a drastically different colour from the stone floor and oak trees) before backtracking to one of the other signs and from that one to the last.

i think he bought himself time by not immediately pointing out the signs in chat and instead only remarking on it once he solved their purpose. that way his return to the traps were ambiguous while not stopping his talking completely.

then of course theres turning the difficulty to peaceful to not starve.

also his return to the traps, the first thing he sees are the grass blocks. and i believe that he places the extra sand around those blocks to disguise the grass blocks too so that they aren't just the only "pointless" blocks he placed. he sees the grass blocks first but doesn't stop and doesn't comment till he looks at the other trap.

afterwards he looks at one sign before immediately heading to where they were pointing and looking for clues.

it also isn't shown in the youtube video but he blocks up the hole under the tree.

once he realizes its a labyrinth (pretty quickly too) he marks off the entrance. i don't know exactly what his strategy is for solving just that he does it quite fast by jump running through and marking his path and it takes him about 7 minutes.

from there he enters the cipher room and fiddles with switches (starting, of course, with the far left before moving to the other 2) and when nothing happens he turns his attention to the cipher on the wall.

after saying hes getting paper/pen he walls off the entrance before moving back to the cipher and the video ends.

footage 2 starts like wifies says with D3rlord3 just staring and presumably working on the cipher for 17:10 minutes. (6:18 he comments "this isn't trivial" and "you really put in effort here didn't you") once he mines through he also walls the gate back up to how it was before and then moving on.

in the village my best guess for his strategy is to search the buildings of interest first and look through all of the chest and storage pieces. he also closes almost every door behind him when he enters and exits, i assume so his movements are harder to track and so that he can hear if he's being followed.

through the last hallway, while he doesn't wall it off he does continue to glance behind and to pause at random moments i assume to listen for footsteps behind him.

47:32-48:05 these are the time stamps of when he stares through the door and the censor bar appears. so ik alot of people are saying he tanked 15 seconds but in reality he tanked about 33 seconds.

and finally the code he leaves for Avery in the notebook. i forgot to count exactly but he only looked at the new inventory he got about 4-5 times. and only REALLY looked at it that final time for about 10 seconds before typing the code. and he typed that code without another look at his inventory.

So! those are all my observations and moments i believe really show his intelligence. i'm sure not many people will see it but i just had to post this lol i couldn't stand by and watch ppl slander my dudes name.

i really recommend you go and watch the drive footage for yourself! the link is https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Zv7eBKziKf5Rb_IhlFNFxMizdhn3lYwk and if you're having the same problem i was where it was giving me an error of it being viewed and downloaded too many times i recommend following the instructions of this article

also small sidenote, in my humble opinion i do believe he was compelled to keep searching and to keep going. as while searching the village he often pauses to stare at the statue like ALOT. sometimes it felt like instead of moving to investigate the statue he was moving to simply get a better view, it was very strange for a character who very rarely simply stops for no reason especially for the lengths of time he would with the statue.

i also recommend you read the original king in yellow stories by Robert W. Chambers which can be found on the internet archive here (recommended by @lilydykisms ) becuz it might (and i hope) give some insight into where wifies takes the story and D3rLord3's fate after he saw beyond the gold gates!!