EcuadorYou might've misread the text in the category rules because I believe the rules for seeded runs make it quite clear to consult the list of approved mods as the definitive resource, there doesn't seem to be any mixed signals here:
"Runner must use a set seed for the world. Worlds may be seeded by editing worldgen_main.lua or via approved mods (check game rules for more information). Different seeds may be used for the surface and the caves if you wish."
Don't Starve Alone and Disable Autosave are currently the only two server mods allowed in every single category, and API Gem Core is allowed in all seeded categories.
@knewster If you have any runs that you never submitted to this board feel free to submit then now
As I mentioned, I wasn't responsible for the categories that we currently have, the purpose of the leaderboards is to act as an archive of runs so if you have any ideas for categories you should do a few runs first
Hey there @Gonnar, welcome to the boards, always love to see more people taking interest in it after what happened, if you'd like to talk to the community I heavily recommend you join the discord server since that's where everybody talks: https://discord.com/invite/HhGVQ3puyF
In regards to the categories I do think there's potentially more fun categories than just the ones here but I won't add new categories if runs don't exist for them, so if you're interested in creating new categories it's best you just run them first even if they don't exist and if other runners are interested then we can add them to the leaderboards for real
As for speedrun resources, sadly there basically aren't any because of how small this game is and the troubled history it's had, so the discord server I mentioned should be your best bet since most of the seasoned runners are there, hope to see you around
@Kartini @IvanderLatidjan If either of you would be interested in running this game, now's a good chance since runs are getting accepted again
@oddtom If you believe Vanakyria cheated any of their runs and have anything concrete to justify that position, you are more than welcome to provide that to the moderation team and we'll look into it, but we've been aware of the attitude of previous individuals towards Vanakyria for years and have never seen anything that was particularly suspicious in their videos; the current landscape of DS/T speedrunning is very different from how it was back then and nowadays we are aware of vastly more ways in which a player might attempt to cheat but Vanakyria's records seem perfectly realistic considering the context in which they were achieved and we don't have any reasons to think otherwise.
The previous moderator of the DST leaderboard (which I will not name) took it upon himself to spread lies about Vanakyria for years, claiming that they supposedly achieved world records in 23 different categories in spite of the fact that Vanakyria didn't even have 23 Don't Starve videos (and a third of thse were repeat categories that just improved upon personal bests), not to mention lying by omission by making it seem like Vanakyria achieved an inhuman task when in reality the vast majority of those categories were either nearly empty or had records that were extremely easily beatable with new strategies (for example, the "All Bosses" category in Vanilla had a single 3 hour run that was easily beaten by Vanakyria by 2 hours by simply using a different character).
The previous moderator accused many different runners over the years of cheating with laughable evidence, choosing to be extremely abrasive and intimidating towards any newcomers who just happened to get a good run, and overall acting like an insecure person who couldn't tolerate the idea of someone potentially challenging their old records, and this was a major contributing factor towards the huge lack of activity in DS/T speedrunning for a time period of years that it's only barely managed to recover from.
I could go on for hours but you get the point, the words of the previous moderator could never be taken seriously and that includes their nonsensical claims about Vanakyria's achievements which basically never held any weight; they never had a logical foundation, they were simply the product of personal grievances which he bullied everyone else into believing by typing long essays in which he used absolute statements that implied FAR more agreement about Vanakyria's status than there actually was (e.g. the phrase "a confirmed cheater" to refer to them). The previous moderator's actions caused nearly irreversible damage to the community and moving away from that period is something that I take very seriously, which is why I should be clear that we do not in any capacity believe Vanakyria was guilty of foul play and our stance on that won't change unless you can provide better evidence than "there are red flags of spliced runs".
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UXHGsqkBIgTZn0IS6tfu-vvxnTSXIy1WE7j0Yk0nI0M/edit?usp=sharing
This is the current list of client and server mods that runners are allowed to use in verified runs (this applies to all categories). This document will be updated as time goes on. If you disagree with some of the inclusions here or want another mod to be added, feel free to discuss so in this thread or in the discord server.
that just makes me wonder why you didn't just try to take the "records" yourself, none of vanakyria's runs were spectacularly fast and quite a few of them were in categories that had either no runs or had records that were extremely easy to beat even with terrible RNG by just using the correct strategies
no offense but it just seems to me like you're being unfairly harsh on someone who just used the leaderboards for their intended purpose, vanakyria didn't "kill" DS/T speedrunning, the incompetence of previous moderators did
edit: I just went back to double check and indeed only 3 categories that vanakyria submitted runs to were categories that I could, in good faith, consider to have been somewhat contested at the time (quacken, sw best ending and ds best ending). Every other category either had 0-1 previous runners or hadn't been seriously attempted until that point
also I find your sentiment about vanakyria not sharing their progress to be illogical because you can clearly see in their page that they had a fair amount of runs that became obsolete after they tried a different strategy (e.g. their tiger shark speedrun), complaining that they didn't want to be part of your community seems odd to me because you yourselves decided to discourage them from submitting any more runs in the first place despite there being no evidence of foul play, you could've just as easily been welcoming to vanakyria instead of shooting yourselves in the foot by rejecting one of the very few people who were interested in running DS at the time
Unix clock standards are only expected from very important runs, it's ok to just submit raw footage for categories like these
Vanakyria wasn't a cheater, the previous moderator vastly exaggerated how suspicious they actually were
Hey there, the problems aren't really there anymore since the moderation has changed and we've worked hard to fix most of the issues that were present beforehand. That said, we're still kind of in a transition period (The DST, SW and HAM leaderboards have all been reworked, but this board hasn't been tidied up yet and we don't have ownership of ROG yet).
As you can see we have a lot on our plate still, but thanks to the new moderation the boards are in the best state they've ever been and now is arguably the best time to start speedrunning DS/T (that said, the singleplayer leaderboards are kinda dead due to a general lack of interest in DS in general, but DST has had more activity in the past 3 months than every other year combined).
If you'd like to stay in contact with the mods directly, we have a discord server: https://discord.com/invite/HhGVQ3puyF
FYI even if your world settings were allowed I still can't accept your run because you're using a server mod that isn't permitted
^PSA to the people who came across this thread: The community had already agreed upon a fairly comfortable and hassle-free way to verify unseeded runs via a unix clock (based on the same principle described above) for quite some time now, this thread isn't introducing anything new
Discussion about these two categories is still going on at this moment in the discord server. Even though I'm mostly in charge of the boards, I don't make these kinds of decisions by myself; the community has to reach a consensus and there is no easy solution that benefits everybody.
I'd like to point out that specific categories do have specific rules; you can view this by clicking the "category rules" tab in each individual category. These are the ones that the community has already agreed upon and are much easier to define. We have antlion (summer start), eye of terror and twins of terror (night only) (which allow you to either use the lights out chest or set starting resources to "always"), we have a "custom seasons" deerclops category (where the hostile flare is used and allows you to change season lengths and start at your own discretion, due to pretty much unanimous request from the community), and we have a klaus category that allows you to enable winter's feast and change the season start to winter.
Celestial champion is inevitably going to go the same route, it's just a much bigger issue with no easy solution. The elephant in the room is that pretty much everybody who has chosen to run this category on youtube has used their own world settings and therefore I can't simply pit these runs against each other because none of them are default settings and none of them run the same settings, so they're all different categories, and if I take it upon myself to decide that one of them is the "valid" one then I'm being biased and essentially picking a favorite out of my own volition which isn't how I want things to be done (i.e. I can't simply decide that your world settings are the valid ones and exclude the other runners).
The most elegant solution that the community seems to be gravitating towards is an official mod that guarantees the celestial orb on a particular day, but of course the problem this brings is that none of the (few) CC speedruns would be valid under this ruleset and we'd need new runners to do runs with this mod. As you can see, there isn't one single solution that benefits everybody here and runs are going to be excluded no matter what, so for the time being the category is a placeholder that only accepts default world runs. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion about this category, do so in the discord server with the other members of the community.
As for all bosses, I just have to apologize because that was never meant to be a category; we lost access to the boards for a while and weren't able to edit the categories and the "all bosses" category that you submitted to was simply a placeholder until we finalized the look and format of the boards. "All bosses" is not going to be a category because the community has overall agreed that seasonal bosses go against the competitive nature of speedrunning, and due to the fact that every "all bosses" speedrun in both youtube and bilibili utilizes its own arbitrary ruleset of which bosses have to be killed and what world settings are allowed, we cannot, in good faith, condense all of these runs into one single category. An "all main bosses" category (kill all the bosses in the "main boss kills" section) might be added in the future, but because CC is part of that list, we first have to discuss that category before adding that one.
tl;dr discuss this in the discord
