Lame Space Monkey
This is great. Who needs side quests? Who needs main quests? Who needs fetch quests?
@Buzzzzy said in Cythera Speedruns:
Vineyard ask sad guy about name get kelp, shovel, grapes dig book, put in pouch
I like that you’ve cut this conversation down to the point where all you do is ask him his name, and he’s still “sad guy”.
@Wizard said in Cythera Speedruns:
What do you think about broadening the classification from True / False over to True / False (Exploits) / False (Hacks)? Despite my original uncertainty, after reviewing the latest speed runs, I agree that the ones using no exploits should remain separate. But I think using minor bugs and exploits should also be separate from outright hacking. Character hacking will entail very different mechanisms to save time; plus this breakdown would give a nice 30min/20min/???min summary for the best times.
I don’t think that a “False (Hacks)” category is interesting. As noted before, if you’re hacking, then you can just give yourself a purified Crolna and skip the whole game. I think that if you allow hacking, you need restrictions if you want it to be an interesting category. If you want to do a “Chicken Rogue” run, though, then go for it.
I do think that there’s room for interesting categories that are neither True (“the game as intended”) nor False (“the game as released”). I’m not opposed to calling True/False something else; I just liked the sound of “True Storyteller”, “False Wizard”, etc.
There are also the standard speedrunning terms any% and 100%.
@Wizard said in Cythera Speedruns:
The Ariadne kidnapping (state 1) progresses through:
- Learned from Guard (at this point, you can get Ask Halos about Comana from Propontis)
- Killed Eudoxus
- Ariadne joined
- Returned to Odemia (dead or alive). If you return with a corpse, though, that sets state flag 3, though, which I believe prevents you from getting the pipes.
I'm surprised to see killing Eudoxus as a requirement, so I went back to see if Ariadne says something different while he's alive. She doesn't, and he doesn't seem to mind that we freed her
It’s not a prerequisite for stage 3—but the stage exists in the progression. I don’t think that learning from the Guard is a prerequisite either, though there are at least conditionals that distinguish 0/1, whereas I looked and didn’t find any that distinguish 1/2.
Also, state[1]==7 seems to correspond to the interrogation.
I was wondering if I could Fetch away the secret door in Kosha, thereby allowing the Odemia arc to be skipped. The Sapphire Book bug can be used so that only one book need be found. Unfortunately, the game bugged out on me in the sixth hall, so I didn’t answer the question of whether that door could be fetched, but I did realize that “Ask Halos about Comana” can’t be acquired without at least talking to the Odemia guard.
I did somehow manage to kill all the polyps under Catamarca with a single bomb, so I wonder if avoiding party members might be an improvement.
I went looking in the code to see if I could find any shortcuts. For example, the Opheltius murder (state 3) progresses as follows:
Unfortunately, while it’s clear where the progression from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 are, I can’t find the code that starts the murder thread itself. Maybe it’s in some common subroutine that I haven’t disassembled. Does anyone know what exactly triggers it?
(Also, there’s something about Eudoxus’s note in his code—can you progress with just that?)
The Ariadne kidnapping (state 1) progresses through:
@Wizard said in Cythera Speedruns:
I'm not entirely sure how to classify this run. On the one hand, Remote Manipulation is designed to work this way; one is even required to make use of it in game (e.g. Tyrant's Tomb). On the other hand, it does bypass an intended quest, although we've been bypassing huge portions of quests (like repeat visits to Charax) from the beginning of this endeavor.
I would say that Remote Manipulation is definitely not intended to work that way. Using it to pull a lever makes sense, but using it to activate a map transition is akin to teleporting. I’ve classified this as a “False” run above.
23:27 Sure would be nice if there were a spell that could pick up an object at a distance…
Oh, yeah, and using Direct Nexus within LKH. My understanding is that he was sleeping to move Alaric to a point in his schedule when he’s in the throne room instead of a locked room. Just using the bed doesn’t trigger Alaric’s location to change, but Direct Nexus will reset him to an appropriate place.
Is that correct? If so, it seems like a bug, but a workaround for a bug rather than an exploit.
Speedrunning Cythera seems to be interesting enough to break out of the Anniversary topic, especially now that Buzzzzy has uploaded the first speedrun video. I’d like to try too, so hopefully we’ll have a few examples soon.
I found some of Buzzzzy’s techniques interesting. For example, he learned Cooking from Emesa, then walked away. For a moment, I thought that was strange, but then I saw that he was timing his actions to Hector’s patrols.
Or, in Cademia, he heads directly to Neoptolemus to learn Persuasion so that he doesn’t need to wait for the right time to visit Halos. Are there other benefits to Persuasion, or could this be skipped by timing the visit to Cademia more tightly?
On the other hand, there were a couple of times when he left LKH by the road to Odemia then came around to the cave entrance to the Underground. Is that really faster than taking the direct LKH-Underground route?
Note: Several portions of this topic were split out of the livestream discussion
Cythera speedruns:
Above, I’ve applied some tags, such as “True Rogue”. I’m imagining these descriptors, and possibly more: