Hey Gamers!

There is a Venture Kid discord now available! I did some looking around and couldn't find anything regarding a community for this game. I'm in the process of building out channels and roles, so bear with me on that.

Otherwise, all are welcome! https://discord.gg/xNsGfXD

Good Day Runners -

We the mods have been discussing going through and cleaning up the leaderboard for Kirby's Dream Land (KDL). When the KDL board was initially created there wasn't much known about emulator inaccuracies and the rules were very relaxed in that a time could be approved without sufficient evidence.

As time has gone on we've learned more about emulators and how they impact a run whether it be sped-up game play, reduced lag, or just overall inaccuracies to how the game is suppose to ran and now needing sufficient evidence of a run, we will be going through a bit of a leaderboard clean up.

We want to make sure there is integrity with our leaderboard and make sure it is as accurate as it can be. We want to give past, current, and future runners confidence, integrity, and pride for being a part of our community & leaderboard.

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What should be expected with KDL Leaderboard Clean Up: Phase 1: Console Selection. You've probably noticed for a long while now that some runs are missing what console it was ran on. This is because the original creator of this leaderboard listed inaccurate consoles that this is for. with removing those consoles it left a small void in the leaderboard that we've been very slowly filling (300+ runs... it's a lot)

Phase 2: We will be removing ALL runs that do not have a video associated with the run. If you were a past runner and you wonder why your run is gone we encourage you to PLEASE resubmit your run with the video. We don't want to exclude your accomplishment.

Phase 3: Current VBA runs. If there is sufficient evidence that KDL was being ran on VBA, the run will be removed from the leaderboard.

Hello Runners!

Some of you may know that emulators and game boy often have a love/hate relationship and only a select few emulators are allowed for Game Boy games.

Speedman, has recently found an issue with one of the cores provided with BizHawk emulator. BizHawk can use 1 of 2 cores for Game Boy emulation: GBHawk & Gambatte. The GamBatte core is still perfectly usable, however it was found that GBHawk core runs faster than it should.

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With this new finding (thank you Speedman) we are implementing some new rules for those running on emulator. These rules will be shown in the Pop-Up as well.

We're taking a few rules/pointers from the Pokemon Leaderboards on this.

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If you are running Emulator: You must use BGB, Gambatte, or Bizhawk (must use GamBatte Core). VBA, BizHawk with GBHawk Core Active and any derivatives are not allowed.

If using emulator, using save states and speedup for any reason (including reaching the New Game screen faster) is not allowed.

If using emulator, you must do one of the following to prove your run is using the correct emulator:

1. Hard reset the emulator using Ctrl-R or the menu option before the start of every individual attempt, and include the footage of that reset in your run submission video
2. Capture the entire emulator including the window border for the submitted video. An example can be seen here: https://imgur.com/OmW2I75

Bumping off Legs please be sure to read the rules for the game and most Game Boy games. SGB1 times will be converted.

As for capturing, there are a few ways to do this and honestly we explain it best here: http://gbrunners.com/game-boy-speedrunning-explained

Typically a person will buy a GV-USB2 (20 dollars on Amazon) and plug their consoles into that and capture though Amerac & OBS.

a '100%' category could just be All Squids and Finish the game. That could be interesting, you'd see all parts of the game instead of select sections pending on category ran.

To add onto this, from what i found with jumping into a corner for 30 minutes to see if I could OoB. You need to be at a certain height for squidy to shoot ink. If squidy is too low to shoot ink, it'll trigger a jump. I was able to jump again before hitting the ground on multiple occasions, this is seen heavily in the library stage when inking all the books in 3-1 when you have to climb all the 'steps'.

So on fast fall sections, if you are able to time your ink/jump input before landing you could save the horizontal movement (could be very useful in stage 2-1 and stage 3-2.

This is just from a few hours of playing around with the game and glitch hunting. I've found a few ways to clip into tiles, but nothing game breaking.

A few questions: Do you folks have a discord server?

• https://discord.gg/x3E8jf

How much time does curry kill save? Is it only faster if you get both kills? Best I've been able to do is 1 kill. At that point is it even worth it?

• Don't do it. It's not needed unless you're going for a top 5 time I would say. Does it help, sure. But you will lose time and reset more times in stage than anything else. My 11:33 and Mugg's old 11:29 didn't utilize Curry Kill at all. Most of the sub 12 times do not utilize Curry Kill at all.

Curry Kill will save time IF your movement is perfect and you get the perfect lolo/lala pattern to 1 cycle them. Followed by a 3 cycle lolo/lala. 3 cycle lolo/lala is more doable than a 1 cycle curry kill. If you miss a 1 cycle with Curry you are bleeding time and was pointless. I tell new runner to not learn it until they are comfortable with the game and want to contend with speedman or tanuki.

I don't understand the swallow trick. So you're supposed to spit an enemy, and then immediately press down to also store the swallow? How quickly do you have to do this? I've sometimes gotten the spit and then been fast enough to get the swallow animation/sfx, but it doesn't seem to do anything? I'm really confused.

• This is a 8 frame window trick. Once you have spit an enemy out you have 8 frames to press down to create a swallow animation/sound. To use this trick to your advantage you need to be within a pixel or 2 of the next sprite and press spit immediately (typically a masshing action after sucking in) to spit immediately. If you are too far away (when you inhale there is an animation), get hit, or fly you lose this storage and TAS Spit will no longer work until you set it up again. TAS Spitting is useful only in a few select places (Green Greens, Whispy, Dedede). It's easy to do, but is situational and need to know when to use it for optimal movement.

Is there a known way to manipulate rng in your favor? Seems like you can lose a great run just because Kracko or Dedede decide not to cooperate. So it just comes down to running over and over and over until you happen to get the rng to work for you?

• There is no known rng manipulations in the game when it comes to Kracko and Dedede. Kirby's Dream Land is a grind-fest game where you will run the game until it decides to award you a good time. This is why movement and lag reduction is so important in the run because of the amount of randomness this game has with its bosses. EVERY action Kirby does changes the randomness factor. move 1 tile left, changed, if you jump, changed. If you high jump and land and create little stars, that changes everything (and causes lag). Literally everything you do in the game changes the RNG factor of the game and so far there has been no successful findings on how to manipulate it.

Adding to what speedman said. It would take more time to splice a run of KDL together because no 2 runs of KDL are the same. Boss movement, on the fly thinking in certain areas make each run slightly unique.

We haven't had much issue with cheating and those we've had an issue with are no longer a runner of KDL or within the Kirby Community (at least not actively).

That's my favorite side game in KSS :3

However it is VERY different from Kirby's Dream Land and no extension of this game. So doesn't belong here at all. I do see you're point since the idea is the same, but 2 very different games.

I do miss the KSS Extensions because, personally I only like 2 side games in KSS (Spring Breeze and that Samurai game). The KSS Board should just create a MISC section of the board and include separate categories for each of those side-games. I'd submit to the KSS board then ;)

I would just capture the TAS video and livestream the TAS as I was "playing".

^ This scenario literally just happened with Super Mario Bros.

I'd say a large chunk of runs on the leaderboard are highlights from twitch or where ever and uploaded to YouTube because Twitch's archiving is bad and youtube's is MUCH better. At least that's what I do some of the times (when I remember).

Just watching the first 30 seconds of the run.. movement can be greatly improved. You should be out of that opening scene in 19-20 seconds. A lot of the hits you're taking are pushing you backwards.

The biggest thing right now I would say for you.. play the game and memorize the levels, beating the game deathless will vastly cut your time down. Once you can get through the game deathless, work on your movement.

Those 2 things will bring your time down the fastest.

Way to show encouragement Demo, really helps the stream....

8bitHorror- we do have a Kirby Discord, I think it's in the main Kirby Series forum. Normal Mode top 10 is gonna be a tough goal to achieve, but if you put your head down and push yourself you can definitely make a run at top 10. If you're goal is top 10 Extra Mode, honestly a few runs to get acquainted with the difficulty curve and you'll be top 10 in no time for that category.

...or just submit a run for extra mode all items and you're guaranteed top 10 haha.

Hey snoozingslowpoke -

Welcome to the KDL Forums! Fun to have new runners come for this game :)

Starting out I would set goals for yourself. Small goals, to start. You have to learn to walk before you can run. This is what I do and the same advice I give new runners in all games.

1. Just play the game. Play it a few times without knowing any speedrunning things and see how fast you can do it a few times.

2. Beating the game deathless. Strive to completing the game without taking deaths (this is obviously gonna be faster)

3. Start taking some damage boosts. Understand your current limitations and comfort and take only the damage boosts you feel comfortable with.

4. Do all damage boosts. After you start to get comfortable with damage boosting and the momentum of the game incorporate the rest of the boosts into your run.

5. Skipping Powerups. Maybe during your runs you pick up an extra curry in Float Islands or go out of your way for some health. Start to ween yourself off of doing that and fighting through the stages.

6. Understanding lag management. Tanuki has shown us this with flying colors in his videos on the discord, but understanding that the game is poorly optimized when it comes to coding is huge and understanding what actions you can take with Kirby to reduce lag and better optimize the performance is huge.

7. Last... ABSOLUTELY LAST.. Curry kill in stage 2 is not a needed skill to have a very good run. A lot of the sub12 runners do not use Curry Kill to achieve their time. Curry Kill is really if you're wanting to push for that top 5 spot. Speedman has made a video showing a manipulation to get perfect patterns for curry kill, but the movement still requires a lot of precision and practice and this should be the last thing a new runner should focus on.

When it comes to RNG and changing the boss battles. EVERYTHING Kirby does in KDL changes something in memory which will change the outcome of a boss battle. Walking, jumping.. everything.. I'm sure if someone were to dig through memory and spend hours upon hours investigating they might be able to find something.

Hugging the screen as far as we can tell doesn't make the animation any faster for unlocking, however you will be greeted with an enemy most of the time on the other side of the lockout.

When I use to use keyboard for emulators I would bind the following:

UP - W DOWN - S LEFT - A RIGHT - D

A - Right Arrow Key B - Left Arrow Key

Start - Enter Select - Right Shift

A lot of this is going to be user preference, the above is what I was comfortable with, but I'm sure others have different bindings. You might need to play around with it to see whats comfortable for you.

If you have a PS4 or Xbox 1 controller you can plug those in with a microUSB and those will work with an EMU. There are also USB to SNES/NES/N64/{list goes on} adapters you can use as well. I have the USB to SNES and USB to NES adapters for Emulator practice now.

Sorry I been quiet in this thread. This was a fault on me, I'm use to rejecting runs without video proof from other games that I mod. Sorry about that mix up, Wasserkrieger.

As a few of you mentioned above the rules should be reflected for that change. We agree and have made changes to the rule set for Kirby's Dream Land. This really shouldn't impact any one wanting to run the game. It just adds more clarity to what will be accepted, etc, etc.

https://www.speedrun.com/kdl/thread/dc8ni/1#kehee

Hey Fellow KDL Runners, Old, Current, and New!

I've updated the rules for Kirby's Dream Land: Beat the Game & All Items categories. This shouldn't really impact you or how you run the game, but there are a few new changes to be aware of.

1. Super Game Boy 1 (SGB1) This piece of hardware runs game boy games ~2.4% faster than the original hardware (https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Super_Game_Boy_timing). So to try and keep things on a level playing field, those running on SGB1 will need to convert their time (http://nudua.com/convert).

2. New accepted emulator added to the rules. The rule set before only allowed BGB and GamBatte for acceptable Emulators. I've added BizHawk as another accepted emulator. BizHawk uses the GamBatte Core for it's Game Boy emulation.

3. Video Proof Yesterday I made a mistake in rejecting a run that wasn't sub12 because it's mainly a force of habit for me at this point to reject runs with no videos in other games that I moderate. See: 'Rejected' thread (https://www.speedrun.com/kdl/thread/7de50) for more info. So I want to apologize to Wasserkrieger first off. As of now, ALL submissions will need to have a video submitted to be accepted n the leaderboard. There are a few reasons for this: a.) The past year or 2 there has been a lot of 'trust' in other communities with top runners and later we find those runs didn't exist or were dishonest. We've had this happen once in Kirby's Dream Land and I would really like to not have this happen again. So to remove any ambiguity all submissions will need a video submission.

b.) With the advancement of technology, it should be fairly easy to record game footage one way or another. Whether it be through a video capturing software (Amerac, OBS, etc.), through an emulator, or simply pointing a webcam/phone to a tv or game boy. Video submissions don't have to be the highest quality ever, just as long as we can see whats happening, you're good!

Now you might say to yourself.. 'Hey eBC, there are runs without videos from like 1921 on the leaderboard.' Yeah we understand that and as of right now we're grandfathering those runs in and they'll remain on the board until we (the mods/active community) determine best course of action.

The leaderboard is a slight mess still as I'm still going through and updating consoles (this takes a long time for 300+ runs) so please bear with me while I chug through that.

If you have questions, concerns, or w/e please speak up :)

<3 Love ya TruShade. I'm excited to see you in roughly 43 days for SGDQ! You've done a lot for the KDL Community and you were always the person to push me in the game to do better. You were one of the first people I encountered on this strange hobby we call speedrunning and I consider you a very good friend even outside the hobby :)

You'll always be remember in this community for the great races and that sick sub12 run at SGDQ 2016.

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For those that don't know, TruShade is the sole reason I even started running Extra Mode.

Super Mario Bros 1 use to have ILs or a variant of it, they may have moved it to the SMB Extension.

noooooooooooooooooo...

There is ZERO reason to have ILs for Kirby's Dream Land. Absolutely ZERO. If you want ILs, go run SMB 1, one of the Smash games (similar concept), or something else.

Another issue is, yes the game has a lot of RNG elements associated with it. But we still don't fully understand it. If we allow ILs to be a thing, a person will have a save state before each stage.... if KDL does have a seeding mechanism this could provide an unfair advantage over a console user, there are many more cons to this outside of this obviously, but I think this gets the point across the fastest.