The only objective of the category is to reach the end of the game, the code is allowed but not mandatory. Sleeping for 40 minutes would still be a valid "Any%" run, as long as you make it to the final day. Again this has never come up before across 150 runs in the 8+ years this board has been around, which is why we unfortunately didn't notice it on his first two submissions. The rules are the parameters of the run, not a guide on how to do it. If anyone is unsure on when the final day of the game is, or what the L+R+Select code does they can check one of the guides, Google it, watch one of the runs, or ask in the forums or community Discord server.

I think the rules were clear, like Demo said, they've never been misinterpreted before until now. They clearly state timing ends on sleeping the last day, and that the code is allowed. The code isn't required, it's just used to get to the last day faster than sleeping for 40 minutes.

I also want to mention in regard to "I believe my run should be accepted because it is legit as per how the rules were written when I submitted it", the rules haven't been changed since March 6th, which was before your first submission on the 16th.

https://imgur.com/a/FUYONQD

Hi, yes, emulators are allowed. We haven't established any official rules yet, but BGB and Gambatte are both perfectly accurate to console. VisualBoyAdvance and other emulators can run faster (or slower) and don't emulate lag properly.

We used to use this in 98%, but it was slower until recently since we either had to grow all Spring crops in Year 1 and get the first rucksack upgrade, or do a third dupe. Now we can harvest crops without breaking the dupe, so this is faster, the route just hasn't been finished yet. The current Karen record uses this, but the other bachelorettes haven't been ran since the dupe was found

We're going through all the leaderboards and cleaning them up. A lot of VODs were missing here, and the live timings weren't accurate at all. Almost all of the top-20 placings were inaccurate, so we're frame counting everything under 2:00 now, which is why we went through the obsoleted runs too and purged everything with missing VODs.

Ending ILs when the cutscenes begin and leaving main categories as-is sounds good to me

Board's been updated with those categories

All Animals has been added with sub-categories with and without Z-Cheat.

Sorry for the late response, each bell has been added as an IL category

Text can be sped up if you hold a d-pad direction, it works on console and emu. Some emulators do have faster loading, but BGB and Gambatte are 1:1 with console

Getting into Carmite before clearing Mist's tutorial makes all deaths take you to the title screen, and I couldn't manage to buffer into the town, seems like the whole loading zone was changed to a textbox trigger.

I've been working on some notes, selling at the Clinic instead of the 12:00 PM shop should save 2-3 minutes. I think sub-15 is the limit, we'd have to find some new stuff to get a sub-10 https://pastebin.com/bx2crMFX

Edit: I assumed his sub-20 was still using the 12:00 PM shop to buy food for the higher damage buff, but it's virtually the same as those notes. Sub-20 was probably the last big milestone, just a matter of fully optimizing the EXP route now

Hey, glad to hear you're planning on running. I've added a marriage category and updated the rules, had to make the spouses a variable rather than subcategory because of how many there are, but they don't obsolete each other so the WR of each spouse will always be shown.

I plan on running All Sunstones later this or next month once I finish routing it, but I might do some marriage runs as well

Thanks for testing this. I was doing some timings, and the axe upgrade should be ~3-4 minutes faster than sleeping to Summer 26, if you have good mining luck. The Greater Daemon split is around 7-8 minutes faster, getting the wolf breaks even at worst, and Greed Cave / finishing the game is 2-3 minutes faster if you can get invincibility with a warp spell.

Sub-40 should be possible now, but I think we need to skip clearing Carmite and/or getting the wolf to break 30 minutes. You can use pausing and the L+Select menu to get a few pixels closer to the Greed Cave loading zone, but I wasn't able to trigger it (on the JP version, at least). I doubt it would be different on US/PAL, but we wouldn't have to money glitch for HP restoring and better weapons

This is a rough route I was working on: https://pastebin.com/c5fnqypJ

I think it's an All Bosses run, but there's a run on Nicolive that uses a cooking glitch to make 100k G. If you put a weed in a certain spot in your inventory, use the touch screen to hover it over an ingredient slot in the Kitchen, then press A, you get a glitched dish that sells for ~100k G.

(Happens around ~7:15): www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm33232798

Can also press L+Select on the final frame of a "Return to Dungeon Entrance" warp, then go through a door for the same invincibility glitch as being pushed up stairs during the animation. It is hard to do consistently, but it would really only be needed for a quicker / easier first half of Greed Cave

Individual Event Paths are now listed in the IL section

Here's G_Heinz' Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/u/g_heinz
Has in-depth Cutscene requirements, affection notes and a few of his routes. I don't know if he has one for Azure, but I made an up-to-date route a few days ago. It's really unorganized and missing stuff, but I'll fix it up and put it in the guides section tonight. We also have a Discord for Harvest Moon Runs if you have any questions about routing and stuff: https://discord.gg/UqpKP4g

Found this in FES earlier. Not sure if it's already known about or if it'd be useful in runs, but it works in P3P too.
Mashing doesn't seem to work too well, so I try to time the Square-press when the map loads in.

Not sure if this is already known about, or how useful it'd be in a run, but it's done by moving forward and opening the Square-menu every frame.
Haven't tested it with Fuuka yet.
Edit: Works with Fuuka.

Yeah, the length would be an issue too. And looking into it more, there'd be a lot of random things like hitting a home run in the batting cages / Futaba's voice lines / Doing x thing an x number of times / dealing 999 damage, than actual completion stuff like the Compendium / Twins / Confidants

My main reason for using the bad end for an NG+ file was so you could end timing on the True End without having to fight the final boss twice, but I didn't realize you needed the True End to fuse Satanael.
Ending on the final achievement would be good since you wouldn't have to worry about splitting files or anything. But either way it would still be really arbitrary, and I see what you mean about having arbitrary one-run categories