I’ve got some thoughts on categories and wanted to make a post if people have any comments (sorry about the length).

I’m not sure if there should be two categories. Basically I’ve found the getting the RNG to get the seed you want is much easier that I initially thought. With a bit of setup I’ve gone from needed a few hundred resets to getting it with the first 10/20 tries.

With this you can pre-plan the entire run. This obviously speeds things up a but I’m not sure it’s really fair to compare against random runs where the runner actually has to think.

I should probably write a guide for getting the seed you want too. But I need to actually do my run first!

I saw the suggestion for first to certain number of gems burst. I think gems burst relates to level so there could be something like a fastest to level 100 run. However after a while gems fall at a constant speed and you have to burst them not to loose. That means the slower, early levels are probably the only place you could gain time.

I wonder if something like fastest to rank ‘master’ would be a better run? As rank is determined by all the factors on that are shown on the report card, like making long chains and double using black magic gems. If you play well you can get master rank before 2000 gem bursts but if you play badly it can take over 3000.

This is kind of how the in-game leader board works as well. The highest listed score is the one where master was achieved with the least gem bursts.

I think there are two possible categories you could do for this. A 24 gem 'Complete The Crown' run that ends when you get the crown completion cut scene (the main ending). And an 'All Gems' run when you unlock the 'secret' 25th gem.

The only problem I see with these runs is that I think you need 2 game packs to get all the gems with one character. So this would be required for both runs.

I think the main post game run suggested was beating the cpu as fast as possible using any gems you want. The only complication I can think of is that I think the cpu use different gems depending how many gems you’ve collected. Unless I’m wrong about that?? So maybe the rules would have to specify all gems being collected? Or maybe having exactly the right gems would be part of the strategy.

Another, less serious, idea would be an all gem powers cpu run. You start on a save with all 25 gems and have to beat the cpu as quickly as possible using every gem power at least once. idk I think it would be a pretty fun one as there'd be load of different way to play it.

So I did a flash run at the weekend and after some playing around I'm not sure how viable it would be to have separate categories / what they would be. I my run I used survival mode to do and arbitrary seed setup and avoided skipping stage intros. My thoughts were that any pre-planned flash run would be easily identifiable because of the setup and fact the stage intros were not skipped.

However there is a seed (215:0, not a great one) you can get for flash quite easily where the only prep is some tight menu navigation after power on. And while you can get consistent colours by not skipping intros you can also get consistent colours with perfect intro skips (alternate spamming 'start' and 'a').

I guess what I'm saying is there isn't any RNG in the game at all, it's all down to how well you navigate the menus. And if a runner is resetting from power off each time and retrying as fast as they can they're going encounter the same seeds multiple times just by accident. This is true for all game modes.

I would be interested to know if anyone else has thoughts on this?