Thanks for playing and for the thoughtful comment! Getting to the shore as quickly as possible is definitely a meta strat for orienting yourself. We discussed something like getting exhausted by sun exposure if you move through too many shore tiles in a row, but didn't end up actually implementing it.
Re: the expert explorer scoring - the threshold is the shortest path length from player spawn location to treasure location plus a number of steps of padding to allow for determining your location. The padding number was tricky to tune properly, but we tried to account for finding your location while moving away from the treasure while still being able to get the best ending. Maybe a better version would determine that padding number more dynamically based on the map configuration and the player spawn location.
There is definitely luck in terms of the map configuration, the treasure location, and your spawn location. We tried to smooth that out by having the map generation and player spawner make some guarantees about the player's initial location (not too close to the treasure or a sudden death tile, on a shore, or on a landmark) and the map (landmarks should be reasonably evenly spaced out). But even still, some map + spawn combos are going to be way easier than others. If I had another week of jam to work on the game, I probably would have spent a lot of it on map generation and player spawning.
Thanks again!