Eggplant Runs Explained
One of the most popular runs in Spelunky is the Eggplant Run. The eggplant is acquired by sacrificing a mystery box on one of Kali's altars, while having positive favour with her. She will then give you the eggplant, which you then need to transport all the way to Yama if it's going to be of any use to you. This is a tricky thing to do, because as you may be aware, you cannot carry an item with you when you are resurrected inside the Moai Head, and you must carry Anubis' Scepter in order to enter the City of Gold and collect the Necronomicon - but these are obstacles soon overcome by a skilled Spelunker.
The eggplant is a fragile item, similar to a skull or a pot - if you drop it more than a single tile, it will break and be useless. Assuming you are able to safely transport it to Yama, you may then throw it at his face to transform him into a giant eggplant as well. This giant eggplant Yama only has one health, so he may be easily killed by whipping him once.
Eggplant runs were originally meant as a multiplayer challenge, since under multiplayer mode all items purchased from a shop take the form of a gift box. As well, when you have more than one player, one can enter the Moai Head while the other holds onto the eggplant. However, on November 10, 2013, the first solo eggplant run was completed by Bananasaurus Rex (because of course it was him), thus cementing the Eggplant Run as a single player challenge for the ages. You may view his run embedded below. He completed it in almost 77 minutes, but the runs have gotten faster since then.
If you want to increase your odds for completing an eggplant run quickly, here is an optimized savefile for you to use. The savefile was created by redditor cconnett at the request of Pibonacci, and the Reddit thread where it was generated may be found here (new tab).