Hey, Speedrunners!
I am a total beginner at submitting runs and actually competing, but I wanted to give it a go in this game but found the rules for the only category here a bit counter-intuitive.
Reaching Day 10 essentially only requires the players to defend their bases and kill the approaching Jötunn in the slowest way possible. If you span out the kill times with the bosses, you can reach Day 10 with only 2 or 3 kills, having an easy boss to defeat or ignore and leave at the end. For the most part, you would be AFK in your base.
As the game stands right now, you can already have an Epic weapon and Rare gear done by the end of Day 2 (sometimes even Day 1), after which you are strong enough to clear everything in the game, yet you are not required to do so.
I want to suggest changing the current category to a new one:
100%: The timer starts at the first frame after the game loaded and ends upon completing the following objectives:
- 5x Quests (per player) cleared
- 4x Jötunn (Angrboða, Hálogi, Geirröðr, Járnsaxa) killed
- 1x Fenrir killed (needs Jötunn, Event, Quest, and Hideout clear)
- 1x Warewolf Elite (found in the Underpass or the Hideout) killed
- 3x Toll Elites in the Hideout killed
- 1x Roosters of Ragnarök was catched
- 1x World Tree Stag was honoured
- 1x Prisoner of the Dökkálfars has been freed
- 1x Leaving through the Bifrost
Note: Járnsaxa can be killed while it's in a human form by Odin; that should count as "killing" even though you do not need to deplete its HP down to 0.
The idea behind this is to change the current category where you almost AFK for 8 days to a busy list with enough challenge that even groups would need Day 7-9 to clear it.
If the objectives are not enough, there is still a decent AFK time; there are additional objectives I can think of:
- clear one of each big and small type of camp in each biome
- kill the Ash Elite, Forest Witch, and the Loot Goblin
Additionally, I want to suggest new categories:
Any%: The timer starts at the first frame after the game loaded and ends when the exit through the Bifrost popup appears. The idea is that you would need to kill the first Jötunn and "leave". Potentially, this can be also done by killing the Fenrir before even the Jötunn enters Midgard, however, I have yet to run into the seed where the Bridge-skip was possible and had enough souls to buy the Jötunn fragments early.
Low%: The timer starts at the first frame after the game loaded and ends on the frame where the game announces that the Fenrir was slain.
100% Exploration: The timer starts at the first frame after the game loaded and ends when the player(s) unlocked all 20 Shrines.
For all of them, there should be a Glitchless variant were skipping the Bridge into the Glacier Peaks is not allowed; however, any other things like building a ramp into the Smoky Highlands or abusing the game AI to launch the Warewolf Elite into the depths is totally fair game.
Naturally, all of them played in the Saga mode, where Norsfell controls the game rules, and any starter kit, rune, or gear recipe behind the store or the season pass progression is allowed.
What do you think of these?
I hope my explanation is enough, and I plan to record a few runs in the categories I've suggested anyway. Let us fine-tune them to have some really cool moments of finding great strategies that are also enjoyable to play and watch!
While I like your 100% Galaad, especially the hideout point, the Jötunn and the events are on a timer and always in order. Jötunn spawns at the 15m mark and seems to be on a 15m cooldown after you killed it. The events are similar, just starts later around 25m mark. So there the speedrun would be how fast can you clear them in order to get the cooldown faster done.
Maybe clearing all possible events and Jötunn is a bit much, but at least one of them would be nice because you are guaranteed to get all of them within 30m and you need it for Fenrir anyway.
As for recipe unlocks we should wait and confirm from the devs that they are exclusive to something or not. Right now you just need to wait to a daily rotation and then buy it for horns, or do the challenges and unlock them. I don't see a reason to ban them without knowing for sure that they are indeed an unfair advantage, and thinking that everyone should be able to start speedrunning in like an hour of playtime would be a bit unrealistic.
While I like the small list of objectives personally, I don't understand why is it a concern to prune the list of objectives to be few. Or at least, are we still talking about 100% category?
"100% - Completing the entire game. This can often include completing certain objective lists, collecting all key items, completing all side quests, etc. What counts as 100% is determined by the community and game moderators."
- speedrun.com
"100%, or full completion, requires the player to complete the game to its fullest. This often includes collecting all key items or upgrades, finding all secret features, or anything else that may be deemed important."
- wikipedia.com
To me, those definitions mean that a key objective would require at least one Jötunn, one Event, one Hideout clear, clearing one Quest, building all Farms, levelling up all NPCs, build and level up walls and towers, finding all Shrines, discover every Ruin, building the Bridge, and killing Fenrir. While you can skip some of those by buying Fragments, I don't feel like that should be in a 100% run.
As for full completion, I would feel like that would require killing every elite and boss, clear every type of event, and clear all quests. Am I totally wrong to see that way?
While there is a major concern with RNG, and the spawn timers forcing runners to set timeframes, but if there are a lot of objectives I don't see where would be any sort of downtime. I'm on the side here that we should have a lot of items first, and when people submit runs where they are clearly held back by the objectives and have AFK time then remove those objectives from the list.
In all honesty, I only suggested 100% category replace the 10-day category, as it felt that one was only there for super long runtimes anyway. If we purely concern about fast times, then we could put the 100% discussion away for a while and focus on %Fenrir perhaps %Shrine first and fill up that board and once the participants are bored or have nothing else to do then bringing up the topic again.
Perhaps 100% would be more fitting for a set Seed actually, so that way the race is more of finding a good seed and then do a 100% on that. Something that would be repeatable by others, however, that feature as far as I can see is not in the game yet.
I dont see why a No Kit part needs to exist really, kits aren't hard to get and you cannot buy them. There are no gameplay advantages that can be bought in the game currently, so I dont really see why we would need to remove them based on that.
Theres definitely a lot of people on the official discord who want to submit at the moment but cant because the rules constantly shift and deny things, so it would be good to try get a basic category of day 1 - fenrir sorted
Hm, i kinda agree on the No-kit category, today it might seem irelevant , but IF in the future (let's say season5) you are not able to get a season 1 kit... well.. very unlikely to cause any disavantage .. but it might be unfair (just a tiny bit) , plus it's just more challenging to have no starter kit.. so it could just be a nice addition in my opinion.
Also maybe, regarding golden horns... i think they shouldn't matter for any category/ rules ...? I didnt see anything about that in this topic.
"- 1x Warewolf Elite (found in the Underpass or the Hideout) killed
- 3x Toll Elites in the Hideout killed"
These two, in your suggested 100% parameters, cant exist. Underpass and Hideout both have 3 permutations, so to get the Werewolf elite in either (or both) is all RNG. The boss room of Hideout is also RNG, so 3x Troll Elites may not be the boss you get.
Never had a situation so far where there was no two Hideouts on the map, one for the Werewolf and one for the Tröll one. But I do agree that it might happen and those should be replaced with the one previously suggested by Galaad objective: "- Open the chest in the Hideout"
Shall I edit my first post to the latest state? At that point, I might just split this topic into individual categories so that we can easily talk about each of them.
AFAIK There aren't always two Hideout spawns per map, but I've been speedrunning since the day after release (ergo I don't explore the whole map after I find 1). I would suspect that you would still run into two Hideouts that are both troll as 2 of the 3 boss rooms for Hideout are trolls.
Either way, Galaad's suggestion is better fit. Maybe changing the original post is the way to go as suggestions come in, and are agreed upon - that's up to you tho!
what do you mean by "Clear all fields"?
Banning kits would be boring, and the verification for the ruins is not necessarily good because they do reset in about 3-4 days. Not sure how long the 100% would take, but it very well can be the case that they reset by the time the runner finishes.
Probably we should just stick a number to the Ruins objective, but that needs some data to see if they are fixed numbers or not.
Seems reasonable to me as a starting rule-set, however, I would personally not limit the pre-kit or horns at first so that the times would be the best possible using all the game's features. We can always add the limitations later once we see the trends and are not satisfied with them.
Like, with the current Any%, nobody seems to focus on Horns anyway, likely it will come in later once everybody gets down to sub 30m consistently. Right now, the major blocker is the 22m Stag spawn, and the skip, the latter with @shobbs0010 made even more approachable with their big-brain strats.
The pre-kits actually make the attempts quite enjoyable on my end, even though I have yet to get a satisfying time. Purely for that reason, I would love to have them. Gathering materials in the first 1-2m just so I can go out to actually start a run feels really boring and rely on RNG placement of resources to get it fast.
The current ruleset has two glaring flaws.
"Unlock all Shrines" I believe there is a randomised number of shrines. So would we wish to say 20, or are we saying ALL shrines unlocked?
Do you want to open just one hideout chest, or in the case of two hideouts should they have to open both of them?
Currently finbulwinter ends at the start of day 34 and it is very easy to achieve, so I'm not too sure about that category.
Just to confirm @Ayaria 's point, Fimbulwinter does immediately force end at day 34.
Currently the fimbulwinter% will be filled with runs that get to there due to that issue. Good idea for a category but will get doomed by the bug that exists currently. Have spoken to the devs, it's an issue they are looking into, however at this time remains unfixed.
