Hey, I have a run I wanted to post but I'm not sure what timing method is used. From what i can tell it looks like: name entry -> white fadeout starts

correct me if i'm wrong. also what controls the time difference between game time and real time?

I made a route for this category, it's not very accessible but I think it's fairly fast. https://pastebin.com/XE1bjJbx

I think red boot is worth getting if you get it early enough in the run, which is what this route aims to do. Feel free to post alternate route or other ideas here.

In order to find the optimal Dragon Coin route for this potential category, I made a really terrible graph of the overworld:

Yellow nodes means the level has dragon coins. Since this map is a little hard to read, I also made one specifically for the Iso Level Tour. Now, in this category, we need 44 sets of Dragon Coins in order to unlock Miscellaneous Monument, which is Iso's last level. But let's pretend that restriction didn't exist for a bit. Without collecting DCs, the route would look like this (click for zoomable):

If this is still too hard to read, just look at the blue paths. Those are the areas we visit.

Now, in this route alone we actually pass through 27 nodes with DCs anyway, which means we might as well collect them in all those levels. Unfortunately, one of those is Misc Momument itself, which doesn't count since we need 44 BEFORE unlocking that level. But still, even 26 means we only need to pass through 18 more yellow nodes. In fact, we don't even need to complete every level we get DCs in, unless it unlocks another level we need to visit. (BTW, yes the other 3 in special world are worth it because one extra trip to the storehouse is a lot faster than 3 whole other levels.)

So all we have to do is go from each of the black rings in the picture above and visit as many new yellow nodes as we can without passing through any gray nodes. After doing this, the new route would be:

Except this gets us to 48 DCs (not including Misc Monument), which means we overcounted! So now the question is, which of these new levels we just added can we remove? Well to simplify this question, I drew each of these new branches in a smaller image:

Every node in this image has DCs in it. So all we have to do is start removing nodes from the right to shrink the branches until we're down to 44. So we could just remove the last 4 from the bottom branch, but we probably want to minimize the number of red nodes.

One more thing to mention is that, although unlocking Peaks of Revolution would require going through a gray node which isn't in a DC path, it would actually be pretty fast. Doing this would only cost about 40 seconds, so it might be worth it to unlock a new DC level. With this consideration, the new summary would look like this:

From here it's hard to tell what the optimal route would be using only a graph like this. We'd really have to know how long each exit takes, with and without DCs. I would assume the bottom branch generally contains longer levels, but obviously Disarray and Bridge Engineering take awhile as well. But anyway, this should help simplify whatever DC routing is left.

Here is a list of every level containing Dragon Coins in somewhat chronological order or something:

Introduction to Ledges and Edges - w1 Mushroom Ledge - w1 Monty Pit - w1 Musical Grasslands - w1 Springity Sproing - w1 Chuckleton Plains - w1 The Untitled Sky Level Place - w1 Salty Roasted Peanuts - w1 Bastion in Blue - w1 Pipes in Literally Everyone's Business - w2 TIDES, OK? - w2 Land of the Jolly Tan - w2 Effortland - w2 Beezos in the Trap - w2 Aquiferic Pressure - w2 Roy's Terrible Sadistic Castle - w2 Siberian Precipice - w3 (ice) Efficient Heat System - w3 (ice) Peaks of Revolution - w3 (ice) Glacier Soup - w3 (ice) Cool Kickin' - w3 (ice) The Dumbest Cavern - w3 (cave) Spring Green Spelunking - w3 (cave) Tunnel of the Living Rock - w3 (cave) Cave of the Jocks - w3 (cave) Crusher Cavern - w3 (cave) Rapture of the Deep - w3 (cave) Perilous Pier - w4 Swim With the Stars - w4 Horse Eating Disorder - w4 -CHARGE!- or -FIRE!-? - w4 The Cave of Layer2 - w4 Bridge Engineering - w4 Under Construction - w4 Boiling With the Best of Them - w4 Spike Toss - w4 Chuck Magnet - w4 Angry Fish - w4 Rope is Nightmare - w5 Luminous Leaping - w5 Polished Pipeline - w5 Manky Bridge - w5 The Smog that Smiles Back - w5 Wigglertuff - w5 Keep a Positive Altitude - w5 Mushroom Tripper - w5 The Ruins of Challenging Sadness - w5 Coin Guides are Always Accurate! - w6 Into the Dark Forest - w6 House of the Holy - w6 BALLS - w6 THE TREES ARE DEAD - w6 Shouldering On - w6 Old Fogey Skie - w6 Shell Shrine - w6 Burnt Mountain Tango - w7 Industrial Interior - w7 Skulliloquy - w7 Ludwig's Grindhouse - w7 Think Fast! - w7 Rock Climbing Rush - w7 Root of Yggdrasil - w7 IMPETUOUS ATHLETIC - w7 Chains of Atrophy - star Disarray - star Tactical Ambush Operation - vortex Super Grand Ultra Marathon of Finalness - vortex The Black Hole - vortex Miscellaneous Monument - vortex

I noticed in Xelna's All Levels run, the level select started each difficulty at level 1 instead of the last level. I'm not sure if there is a way to do this without editing the prefs file, so I was just wondering. I just don't want to break any rules by changing the files, so hopefully it's ok :P

The benefit of this means you dont have to delete your times to start at level 1, which means there is no 'You beat your best time' message after every level, which of course saves time.