So I love this game and have been trying to get into speedrunning it for the last couple of days but I've quickly run into a problem. I play on pad pretty much exclusively, and only now am I realising that the default pad settings for this game are kind of...weird. I'm getting awkward effects like my dives out of jump being inconsistent and other stuff that generally doesn't feel right. I assumed it was just my motor reflexes being lame, but I was getting the same inputs 100% of the time after 30 seconds on keyboard.

Any pad players out there who've figured out some decent deadzone settings? All I could find online was one post about it and it wasn't really aimed at the speedrun crowd. If I can get stuff like mach cancels more reliably it'll be a real gamechanger for my ability to run this game.

As of January 3rd, 2021, IGT displays in-game are mandatory.

Most runs used this anyway, but after realising this was never laid out in the ruleset I've decided to make it official. I received a run recently that used an auto-splitter instead, and it took me a bit of work to verify it was accurate. This makes things a bit easier for judging purposes and also means people don't have to go to the effort of setting up an auto-splitter!

Also, by popular demand - style-locked categories are now available! For now I've set up categories for every style other than Boulder, since Boulder is already the dominant option for Any%. Have fun handstanding your way to victory!

So the Air Palace update dropped today and there's a big change that reworks the speedrun entirely. Mostly for the better because they take out a lot of the RNG that goes into getting good cursed item rolls, but things also get much trickier.

The change in question comes from the cursed item stand which is now available at the plaza. You can spend gems to get a cursed item at the start of your next run. This does NOT override the relic you equipped, so you can still enter with the pathfinder's map.

On that note, there are two new cursed relics which outclass everything in 1.0. There's the Laws of Contingency, which makes all attacks do 99 damage and somehow makes the machine gun mage build even better than it already was. And if you're completely insane there's Chaotic Comedy, which causes everything to die in one hit. Up to and including council members. [Sura needs one hit for each form, but his shield is ignored entirely.]

Chaotic is maybe the more interesting of the two in that it gives room to experiment with arcana builds. You no longer need the damage from the machine gun build because everything dies in one hit anyway. So does the priority become wiping rooms fast with stuff that'd otherwise do little to no damage?

There are probably pros out there with way more thought in this than I have but I figured I'd at least start up the conversation.

EDIT: As a note it doesn't seem like the autosplitter works on this version. It starts on 1-1 as it should but it doesn't make splits properly.

This happened during one of my runs yesterday and it was strange enough that I figured it was worth posting here. My guess is there's a very short window (1 frame?) before the boss starts attacking and Thunderstone happened to hit at that exact moment.

Probably not viable enough to use consistently, but if the stars align...

So as some people may be aware, twitch had a bug that caused several weeks of highlights to be deleted. That bug happened to get rid of both my WR runs, and I don't have local copies for either. This is entirely my bad.

I don't know what the ruling is on this, but if necessary I'm willing to have the scores roll back to the fastest times with footage. Here are the twitch vids for those:

Normal:

Hard:

I made a brief attempt to run the game again but it's been two months since I last touched it and I am rusty as hell and not really motivated to put in the time again. Apologies again for not being better prepared for this. >_<

Before I start, I want to say that I’m well aware of how this looks. As another runner with a run in validation, I’m going to look like I have a vested interest in this. But even before I submitted that run I’ve had questions about CVivian’s time, and how it could be so obscenely far ahead of everyone else. After some deliberation and discussion with friends who are also running the game, I feel like I have enough of a case to at least mark the WR run as suspicious.

More than anything, what makes CViv’s run so strange is the sheer jump between her time and the rest of the field. Watching it she seems to make absurd reactions that seem impossible to replicate – for example, look at about 5:22 on her Hard Mode run where she dodges dozens of enemies in seconds without ever slowing down. This could be driven by luck, but there’s a deliberate nature to her movements that implies she isn’t just swinging around and hoping for the best.

Of course, the first question that should be asked here is ‘how exactly could CViv have been cheating’? For this, I have my own experience to go on. See, the current release of Downwell isn’t exactly stable – for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, it runs at a much slower framerate than intended. I’ve had to use the beta in order to get the proper 60fps experience.

What’s important about this slowdown is that the in-game timer is directly linked to the framerate. That is, if the game is running at 30fps instead of the intended 60, the timer will take twice as long to increment. This isn’t random slowdown either – it’s constant, consistent, and therefore predictable.

With this in mind, there’s a very simple way to cheat for Downwell runs. You play the game on a lower framerate than intended, making dodges and skips that wouldn’t be feasible in a real life run. Then you speed up the footage so it’s in time with the intended 60fps, and the video looks entirely legitimate. I tried this out as a test, and I got a 6:53 on my first run, only nine seconds away from CVivian’s record.

There is, of course, an obvious flaw with this plan – the audio. Playing back a sped up video in this manner would have all the music and sound effects clearly out of key. Conveniently, both of CVivian’s world record runs are muted, a fact which only makes me more suspicious.

There are a few things that would potentially allay my fears on the matter – more footage of CVivian’s play, for example. Unfortunately, the two WR runs are the only footage from her I’ve been able to find, and even those seem a little sketchy. They’re both allegedly from tests of her stream overlay recorded offline, which also means there are no witnesses who could vouch for their legitimacy. I think one ‘accidentally silent’ WR in this manner would be understandable, but for her to do it twice (and the hard run is upgraded to 1080p, no less) seems extremely off.

So, to summarise – the WR run for this game is vastly far ahead of the competitors, is lacking in precedent from the runner, seems to show reactions that exceed human capability, and doesn’t include the audio that would rule out an obvious method of cheating.

This isn’t enough to mark the run as illegitimate, I admit. But I feel there’s enough precedent that I’d at least want CVivian to back it up with some extra evidence. I want to see a run from her that is at least in the ball park of what she accomplished in that WR; her IGT was 6:44, so I’d acknowledge anything around 7:15 or lower. If she can perform that sort of run live, with the game audio running to show the frame rate hasn’t been messed with, I’m willing to withdraw this complaint.

Apologies for taking up so much of your time. Hopefully this case has some sort of base in reason and isn’t me rambling off of my head.

Hey all, newish runner here. Picked up the game for a friend's speedrun tournament and ended up going as far as I could with it.

I have a run I feel is worth submitting, but my main concern with it is that I'm using the beta version of the game. From what I'm aware the two games are almost identical with one exception - the beta has no slowdown when the player takes a hit, while the main branch forces slowdown for about 20 frames at a time.

The reason I've had to use the beta in spite of this is that the main branch of the game is very unstable. It only runs at 40fps on my computer for reasons I've never been able to determine, and the dev has given access to the beta for people who can't run the main branch.

So yeah, could I get a ruling on this from any mods who are still around? Personally I would add a small time penalty (around 5 seconds?) to beta runs to make up for the lack of slowdown.