In order to clear up some things that might be confusing, we decided to make this post with some important details about this leaderboard and this game. We also recommend joining the Club Penguin Speedrunning Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/RVYRfNb
Club Penguin and Flash are officially down, but it does not mean you cannot play or use them.
Way before the game closed, “private servers” were already a somewhat popular thing. They use emulators created with the intent of matching the game, and run on the original flash files directly extracted from the original game’s media server. This is how you can play the game today, either running the flash files directly (which is very limited), or creating an emulator of the servers so that you can simulate the gameplay from the original game. With that being said, it is true that the original Club Penguin is not playable anymore, and that all recreations are prone to not quite being the exact same as the original game. We will comment more details on this later in “Information on valid runs”.
Flash reached its EOL in January 12 2021, but you can still use it by downloading old versions and browsers that support it.
If you are looking for the banned% runs, you are looking for the original club penguin leaderboards, which also contained 500 Coins and All Missions runs. That leaderboard was the original one and runners used it for submitting runs before Club Penguin closed. We created this leaderboard for submitting runs after the shutdown, initially having “Club Penguin Rewritten” in mind, since the moderators did not want to submit unofficial runs to the dead leaderboard. Then, after a while, we also renamed the old leaderboards to “Club Penguin (Original)”, and renamed this leaderboard to “Club Penguin”.
The plugin has a time lock for browsers. There is a guide that teaches how to disable it, you can access it by clicking here.
There are different ways of playing Club Penguin currently. What we recommend the most are localhost emulators and standalone applications. The most popular way is through “private servers”, that is, websites that run non-official servers of Club Penguin, but because of the end of Flash in browse players, private servers have been limited.
Localhost Emulators What we recommend the most for speedrunning is to use localhost emulators. They allow for better customization, which gives you practice tools, and let you run valid versions better (see later on “Information on valid runs”), as well as unlimited access to the database, which helps you create new accounts, which are required for some categories, besides the ability to edit them as you please. They also tend to have better loading times. The only downside for them is that they generally take some effort to set up, and you may need help from other users to get it working. We recommend two localhost applications: CPSC, and Houdini.
CPSC Developed by stick for the speedrunning community. Stands for Club Penguin Speedrunning/Singleplayer Client. The Github page is available on the resources page of the website. There, you can find the download, an installation guide and a discord link for the CPSC server where you can ask for help. This is an “AS2” emulator, that is, it emulates a server from around the 2009 through 2011 era of Club Penguin.
Houdini Developed by the Solero community. Also informally known as CPS3 in the speedrunning community. A server emulator that works well for “AS3”, or modern Club Penguin, that is around the 2011 through 2017 era of Club Penguin. We made a written guide to aid new runners into setting it up if they wish to use it for runs, which you can find on the resources page of the website.
Standalone programs are a simple way of getting into speedrunning minigames. They only let you play a portion of Club Penguin, so they are limited, but they are much easier to set up than a full emulator. We have a comprehensive list of the programs in resources, you can check it by clicking [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cGHEVOs8v09c833JfZajPvhFt-oyeD2rCZjb0mOp6_0/edit?usp=sharing Google Docs)
They are the most popular option for their accesibility. However, they do have some disadvantages, and ever since flash was disabled, HTML5 private servers have emerged, which are not allowed for speedruns. Disavantages include, since you are playing through the internet, you are subject to losing time to loadings, although this is not a big problem most times, it can become annoying. Another disadvantage is that some categories allow 30 FPS, while most private servers are completely only 24 FPS (more details below), which might lose you time. Furthermore, you cannot create as many accounts as you wish since most private servers have protection against spamming accounts, and some categories require new penguins. Finally, private servers are known for not being particularly safe, and there have been database leaks containing personal data and IP addresses in the past. If you are willing to use a private server, we advise not to use any personal data. If you are looking for private servers, you can access this external link for a comprehensive list of the sites you can use. Remember that HTML5 private servers are not allowed for speedruns since they are a completely different applications.
When it comes to flash games, changing the framerate of the game changes its speed. Historically, Club Penguin always ran the flash files at 24 FPS. However, after the game shut down, a private server that became popular called Club Penguin Rewritten (CPR) used an emulator that ran all the files at 30 FPS. Not only this, but also some other emulators like the basis for creating CPSC also used 30 FPS. Once the runners came back to the game and started using CPR to run the game, they did not notice that the game was at 30 FPS, which means that it runs at a faster speed (1.25 times faster). After CPSC was developed, this kept on going unnoticed since that emulator also happened to have been programmed for 30 FPS. It was only after a long time speedrunners were running the game that they noticed that they were playing a faster version of the game. In addition, eventually, CPR updated many of its minigames to start running at 24 FPS which made 30 FPS way less accessible than it was before. Because of this, we created the distinction between 24 and 30 FPS runs. Since there was a big amount of history done in 30 FPS runs, the community decided to keep the categories that were already 30 FPS, but in the categories that were effectively mostly 24 FPS, we banned the faster version, and this ban also applies to any future categories we create.
If you are using a CPPS, you are most likely running in 24 FPS, with the exception of CPR, which we know to have 30 FPS in the following minigames: Catchin’ Waves, Ice Fishing. Then, if you are using CPSC, it is defaulted to 30 FPS, if you are using Houdini, it is defaulted to 24 FPS. To change the framerate you must be using an offline client, since you cannot change the files for private servers, unless you are an administrator of it. For changing the framerate in localhost emulators, ask for help in the respective discord servers (links on the resources page).
Despite this being a leaderboard for runs done in non-official versions of the game, this is merely because it is impossible to play the game in an official version currently, since Disney closed all the official servers. This does not mean that we allow one to use any version to run the game. The goal of this leaderboard is to resemble the original one as much as possible, which means one can only submit runs performed in valid versions. The definition of “valid” is rather vague, but the idea behind is that you must play in an emulation of the game that is equivalent to the original Club Penguin in gameplay to at least one version that was available in its history.
The community preserved the original flash files (SWFs), which means that you can play the minigames exactly as they were minus visual details such as fonts. However, for Club Penguin emulators (applications that emulate the server), it is a bit more complicated. Since emulators must be done from zero, they do not resemble the original code exactly. This can be a problem on some occasions, but generally, since you cannot play the original code anymore, we allow playing in versions that resemble the code well enough, that is, to the extent that it would not affect the speedrun in any way whatsoever.
For minigame categories, we need not to be too strict, since the original SWFs have been preserved and the gameplay is about the exact same as it was in the original Club Penguin (minus the frame rate detail). For categories that go outside the minigames, one needs to make sure that everything they do is valid, that is, that the version they are playing the game is equal to at least one version that was available in the original Club Penguin. Another way of saying this is that every feature used in the run must have existed at the same time as all other features at some point in the history of Club Penguin. An example is, in stamp categories, one cannot do both Pizzatron stamps and use the old Pet Shop (pre 2011), since they never existed at the same time.
The idea of “validity” is not to enforce playing in an exact replica of Club Penguin, since it is mostly impossible to recreate everything, considering the original “server files” were lost for the Club Penguin community (likely forever). Because of this, the concept of “valid” only extends to what influences the run and its gameplay. Therefore, flexible rules may allow such version inconsistencies that do not influence the run in any way. If in doubt about what we allow or not, contact the leaderboard moderators. We also recommend running on CPSC for this reason, since the moderators have direct access to that application’s code and make changes to make it as authentic as possible for the speedrun.
