I wanted to ask since well there are no runs here and wanted to ask about the Forest trick/secret. If you name your character "Forest" you start with the 3 star green deck. So you have one of the best decks available right away and can easily solo the whole game with that deck. So i wanted to ask if using that is allowed in Any% or if it would fall under another category? But as there is no known runners/runs of this game, I have no idea if it's okay or not.
Plus I've been thinking about trying to do a speed run of this game and with that being my first thought of beating the game reasonably fast wanted to know if I should do that or look into possible random decks you can start with.
Thank you for your time and thoughts on the subject on a game that's really kinda forgettable even though i spent a ton of time in just trying to get all 400 cards in causal play.
I think i lack the mental capacity to sit through animations.... anyway Forest only gets you a structure deck, it does not unlock the actual cards. A fire/nature spam would ideally be faster but you need to constant reset for a head start in that deck
Well while you don't get the cards to count towards that getting all the cards that's not the point, plus you can turn most of the animations off, plus the deck is a green/black deck which has cards like death smoke and Terror Pit which can clear nasty monsters before they become a problem. Plus the deck is built around Bronze Arm Tribe which gives more mana, and other small monsters letting you bum rush the enemy and beat them before they can do much, plus with Barkwhip they are stronger too meaning they're less likely to get targeted. Plus this deck gives one thing, consistency. So while I won't say the deck is the best, it's a solid deck to run though the game with. I've done it before, casually to build up cards to make my own deck.
I still don't claim to know this definitively at this point, but I think a fire/water deck can prove to be a better overall strategy for speedrunning than the forest cheat code. The sheer volume of turn 4 and turn 5 victories you can get with FW might offset the time saved from not having to edit your deck/ trade for cards by using Forest.
It never made sense to me back in the day that FOREST was the only one, so I went digging, and it turns out you can get the rest of the 3* preset decks by using other names:
- FURY = Fire
- WALTER = Water
- TOMB = Darkness
- BRIGHT = Light
There are a couple of other names that have interesting effects too:
- HONEY = Shop items are free
- RICHY = Start with 600 credits instead of 300
- XRAY = See the opponent's cards
- GAMER = Unlock the minigames
- DUALIST = Unlock the Duel Room
- DEV TEAM = Replaces the Puzzle Power image with that of a group of people (presumably the development team at Mistic Software). I haven't figured out how to trigger this one during normal gameplay, but forcing 0x03000F04 to 1 and 0x03000F05 to 2, and setting the player name to "DEV TEAM", caused the image to be displayed when starting the minigame.
I haven't been able to find any documentation of these, and no real idea for where to actually put the information. I assume nobody cared enough to actually check.
Dude this is MASSIVE and thank you so much for doing the work. How did you figure this out?? I always thought it was weird that FOREST was the only one. I'm particularly intrigued by HONEY, I think that one's gonna be seriously game breaking in terms of speedrunning. This is easily the biggest discovery in DMKS history, I cannot thank you enough for the amount of excitement you've provided me here
I searched "FOREST" in the game's bytes to see if there were any other names nearby. I had to open the game up in Ghidra, a reverse engineering tool, to figure out what most of the non-deck names did.
I never played that one as a kid, but SotC's equivalent for "HONEY" is "OKANE".
