Farthest I've been so far is the vault, those robot dudes with shields are invincible to me, have no idea what kind of wand I'm supposed to bring to fight them. I had a glowing lance + missile + ping pong wand that run, thought it would wreck the robots but they just laughed at me.

mild spoiler if you haven't explored outside the mine

Also I have explored a little bit, died instantly in the pyramid, I made it to the ??? in the east side of the map and died to essence of earth (twice), made it to the orb room with the 3x gold curse and promptly died, haven't made it past the giant tree and have no real plan on how to do that. Also I know that you can backtrack to the mines through the tunnel in snowy depths.

I have a feeling I should probably explore Fungal Caverns more since it seems to have pretty good loot, but I get clapped by all the mobs there with 3x the hp of the mobs in the coal pits. Are there any tricks to getting somewhat decent wands by then? I've been doing collapsed mines and the best wands I find there are barely any better than the other ones you find in regular mines.

I guess I could always go directly through coal pit and use the polymorphine holy mountain skip, speedrun snowy depths so I can go back up to floor one, full clear collapsed mines, use holy mountain again to improve the wands I get in collapsed mines, do fungal caverns (I suspect fungal caverns has a way to connect to floor 5, but I've only been to floor 5 once so this is mostly unfounded), and continue normally. But this also sounds incredibly boring and requires too much back tracking.