any% guide

The following is my notes for any% route. any places you see number separated by dashes they are your menu options and the numbers are what order to press for the desired outcome. For example, 3-2-1-E, would mean you need to press 3, 2, 1, and enter/escape. You do not need to wait for text to show. 

#Tutorial zones:
    1: Grab firebolt to access door, then top left cabinet. run to door and try to move quicker than the ghost to avoid dialog. Roamer has an annoying enter only popup but you can avoid it by running over the Trigger while in combat.
     right before or after level up and put leadership 4, mechanics 1, and stealth 1
    2. Go right, when hitting the fiora dialog press 2. Go into the building avoiding the thahd and talk to the mind
        Press 2-3-1 the mind to open the door.
        Leave zone try to avoid dialog with servile but you can just press escape/enter to leave. dont end combat here as the servile and pigs will get a turn.

#Vakkiri:
        First town, we no longer do quests here. Just run straight to the exit.
     


#WatchHill
        take the second left, create an auto save, run across clearing and go down.
        run right and then down and right to the exit. If you get in a fight its likely a reset but you might be able to break line of site and only lose a second or 2.


#Marshes:
        Very annoying area. The roamers appear to move in a random pattern when they start aggro, noticable by the "Grrr?" affect they do. 
        You can preform a speed tech at the start of this area but then need to walk. I head towards the south exit and if I am being followed trigger that zone and come back in for a hard reset on monsters location.
        If monster behavior was good I dip, quick save, then move to the right. We want this roamer to move to the left or up. If it does not it will likely trigger a fight.
        Cluster of trees to the right can help break line of sight, ideally we move quickly and dont trigger a fight. if we do, try to rush the exit and minimize the attacks. If you dont die you likely saved time over constant restarting. 

#Pentil woods:
        Where runs come to die. This is a very tight forest with high level enemies that are entirely controlled by RNG. Some tight vision control and speed tech is needed here but even if you master those you can
        still lose to the monster not moving for 5 seconds. quick saving and loading will cause RNG to reset so you can still pull off decent times if the monsters start to walk into you.
	I prefer going up at the first turn and dancing around to the top, then going right and then up. Taking turn and corners depening on monster location.
        If Spawns favor you can instead go right and then left and up. its not really better since there are just as many other monsters than can screw you later, but if one way looks good
        at start I will often go that way rather than hope the first monster behaves.
    
#Pentil:
        cant use speed tech due to the guards going first. a few ideal spots might allow it but mess up and you lose seconds while they take there turns.
        I grab health pots from the vendor and on his display for safty and to handle mines.


#Pentil East:
        As you start going the forest section, align yourself with the fence. This prevents the first creature for coming out to soon. You can be a little lower, but not much.
        Before the second opening get as close as you can to the opening, then trigger move tech and run and hope combat does not trigger. If it does try to break line of sight and get out as quick as possible.
        It is possible to have no monster combat here, but hard.
        
#NorthBridge:
        go south and then east. I tank the first few mines and heal through the damage but you can also do mine tech and skip the healing pots in Pentil.
        On bridge try to do a Sprint plus mines to be a little faster. I try to get myself into the bottom left of the bridge and then tank the first three mines to get enough vision for the whole thing in one go.
        Try not to talk to the guards by sprinting over there trigger.

#Buried cells:
        We dont have mechs so we need to do mine skip into the dark and then walk past monsters. Easy area.


#Quiet Marshes:
        This place sucks or is one of the easiest places.
        Go right, dodge pack.
        go up or right depening on spawn behavior, goal is to go right though.
	Continue right, dodge pack often by going behind tree, to the right over the top of the water, then back down. Sometimes spawn behavior causes you to go down and right though.
        Leave.
        Monster movement appears random. Save often here. Monsters can and will waste your time by standing in front of exit sometimes.
        This zone can end good runs but everything after this is purely player skill.

 #Kazg Plains:
        Easy, run right, once serviles appear on screen stop doing movement tech. You can try to tease out a few more but its hard and inconsistent.

    
#Tribal Woods:
        take upper path. Talk to guard. 5-1-1
        Walk right till tree with two bushes. Enter combat, and get ready to try and do a near perfect sprint. If you get this right no combat, if you mess up a little combat but livable, otherwise your dead. so quick save first.
        Guards will chase even on good run, dont stop moving.
        Move tech can be a little weird here due to monsters on the south road.

    
#Icy Tunnels:
        This is were I practice and time move tech.
        Run far to the right then when you hit the wall go down.
        women guard will talk to you, 3-1
        from where the guard who talks to you stands, go down the end of the little stretch of dirt road.
        go to combat and spend all movement getting in front of the door.
        A guard will hit you and knock you into the next zone trigger. You need enough life to survive this. Perfect run this wont be a problem, otherwise hope you packed a backup item.

    
#Docks:    
        go south and east using mine skip everywhere you need.
        The last one is a large area. There is a safe area by the cauldron to the top right but if you can do it you can redraw the area while moving and skip that part. Of course fail and you are dead.
        at the building quick save. You can try a sprint tech to get to the boat but sometimes the guard spawns are weird they will kill you before you reach it.
	hit boat, hit 1. TIME!.

Basic settings, speed Tech, and mind skip

GeneForge 1 - Mutagen makes heavy use of a basic movement trick that allows us to "sprint" through much of the game and even over some triggers. Additionally we make use of mine timer reset using the main menu and frequent quick saves. The following is my understanding of how these work and how to setup your game to abuse them.

#Settings:

1. Graphics Extra Details should be set to "Don't Draw". I noticed a massive (2 second per map) improvement when Turing this on and it also made the trick much more consistent for me. I have a rather beefy machine so I don't believe this is a hardware limitation but rather how the game handles drawing the screen.
2. Scrolling speed and animation should be set to fast because we trying to be fast.
3. I prefer draw full combat grid as it can be helpful for lining up some tricks, but its not required.
4.  I recommend you rebind quick save, quick load, action bars, manually enter combat, and inventory to make hitting these buttons easier and more comfortable.

#Speed Tech:

Very likely the most important trick in the speed run. The basics are you go into manual combat and click a location past or close to maximum distance as possible. As your action points (AP) gets close to zero, exit combat. You should continue "sprinting" as if you were still in combat for a short time. The closer to zero the faster I have noticed, 2 is the sweep spot I found for myself but sometimes the extra time is needed.  Nearly all movement should be done this way, though there are a few gotchas.

1. When you enter combat initiative is rolled, in towns (not the first one) and later areas you will not have a high enough initiative to go first and will lose time as you wait for everyone else to take there turn.
2. When you are in a real fight or when doing this trick would make enemies visible on the screen and thus not allow you to exit combat. 
3. When you lack enough visible area  to click where you need to go, in this case you will want manually walk until you have a larger field of view. 

#Mind Skip:

Another important glitch is the mind skip. My understanding is that mines have a counter when you get to close to them and explode when that counter hits zero. Opening a text box pauses and resets that timer. Thus if we spam open a text box, such as our inventory,  they will not go off. The timing is somewhat difficult when trying to get as far as you can but when first learning you can spam the inventory button and then slowly add more time between presses until you get the rhythm.  Some areas are a little tighter than others, such that they have unclickable black space beyond them. It is possible to have the game draw new areas as you are doing this trick but the time between drawing new areas and the mine exploding is quite tight. Less than a full second. Still this can be useful to move quick in the final area before the boat and the interior zones with many mines.
Lastly you can combine this trick with the speed tech above to "sprint" over the mines while opening your inventory every aprox second.

Good%

goals:
1. go to peaceful vale and talk to the wise man here and tell him we wish to side with the takers.
2. Get 10 leadership to talk our way out of having to kill someone to join the takers
3. Hit level seven so we have 10 leadership and 10 mechs
    7600 exp See chart below
3. steal the gloves.
4. get all conversation learning finished.
    4-1. Bottom left of kazzag, tell the guard that you are on a mission.
    4-2. Winding road bottom left, requires 500 coin.
    4-3. center of research quarters. There is also war blessing here if you did not get it earlier
5. go north and let him use the gloves.
6. go to the boat.


Stat progression:
    Idea 1:
        level 2: leadership 4
        level 3: mechs 5
        level 4: leadership  
        level 5: leadership 
        level 6: leadership to 10
        level 7: mechs to 10

Macro:
    Goal 1: 1-2-3-4-3-6-7-10-14-16-38-53
    Goal 2: 16-17-20-22-23-28-31-32-29
    Goal 3: 17-55-74-75-77-78
    goal 4: 75-55-17-23-45-46-47-51-60-63-64
    goal 5: 66
    goal 6: 32-81


Using the map at https://i.ibb.co/s6TNpp7/asdas.jpg

exp per level:
    2 free in zone 1
    3: 2000exp
    4: 3400exp
    5 4800exp
    6: 6200exp
    7: 7600

EXP per zone:
    Must hit 7600
    zone 1 instant level at end no other exp to be gained
        lv2 hit.
    
    zone 2: 
        75 in room, left canister or first canister does not give exp.
        70 exp for calming fyrora
        25 exp for book top left of brain room
        50 exp for finishing area
        total: 220
    
    zone 3:
        25: book
        195: wealthy man top middle
        140: spy
        100: dagger
        220: brigade
            Level3
        20: locked box at pod shop
        100: for unlocking box
        20: switch in weapons shop, take 2 living tools inside
        total: 690

    zone 4:
        200 exp after doing both options for the serviles
        total: 200
    zone 6:
        skip all mobs if possible

    zone 8:
        50: return chris
        30: get rod top left
        total: 80
    
    Zone 7:
        14: per thad
        20: per acid shooter
        220: for clearing area with explosion
        100: chain mail
        total: 354
        
    zone 10:
        14: switch x2
        22: switch x3
        25: book
        240: mind for disable traps
        220: mind for name 
        25: thad
        total: 604 with thad

    zone 14:
        140: convince guards to attack.
        200: clear
        22: per monster, if you are close enough you dont have to fight or have it on screen
        total: 362

    zone 16:
        30: switch
        14: chest x2
        26: middle chest
        11: exp per book turned in x11 turned in praticings
        total: 218 without books

    zone 17:
        14: per monster but try not to fight
        120: if you convince the guards to kill the spanwers. leadership 5
            Sadly this is slow as you need to kill all three spawners and get no zone clear exp.
            maybe 3 monsters give exp if you are in range.    

    zone 20:
        60: servile talk
        100: repair baton
        10: per plant south x4
        26: switch
        240: cross bridge
        total: 466

    zone 22:
        230: talk and feed mind
        130: talk and feed mind
        22: switch into mind
        total: 388

    zone 23:


    zone 28:
        260: talk guards into letting you into the city
        total: 260

    zone 29:
        300: servile in cell
        25: book x2
        20: bookcase
        130: talk guard into room
        260: language lesson
        280: ask to join
        700: join
        25: canister in back room
        total: 1765 

    zone 31:
        150: talk to servile
        150: let into city
        total: 300

    zone 55:
        140: if you give advice in the back
        total: 140

    zone 74:
        150: for completting (or was it 300?)
        total: 150

    zone 78:
        30: exp for the switch
        300: for gloves
        total: 330

    All Totals = 7577
    
    Zones leading to the leader should likely be done once only if possible and so were not added.
    They did not appear to have much oppertunity for exp though

Living Tools:
    9 by end of jar of hills Zone 10
    Need 7 for mech upgrade in city with mechs 6.
    zone 78 or the shaper stronghold you need 4 living tools for the switch



Biggest time saves wants:
    skipping pentil east instead of running it three times would be huge but you have to destroy three
    generators and its slow asf even with the people.

    red spore baton since were not trusted with docks people

Extra notes:
    freehold you can speak with the guard in the back for 150exp if you say  3-3-2
    in kazg you can go up the library stairs, walk down avoiding the monster, and get 150 exp.
        could not reproduce, required quest step?

Junk bag glitch

Ok, this one is a doozy. The short of the glitch is that we can click the down arrow in the junk bag more times than we are supposed to be able to. This results in using memory the junk bag is not supposed to use. Namely it uses the same memory address as the cameras coordinates. Due to this we can, by setting the camera in a pixel perfect spot, remove items from our junk bag that we could not otherwise have. This works in all version, including the most recent patch. Though setups will change for each patch due to the memory addresses changing. Otherwise this is very consistent, if much harder than other glitches.

A setup for living tools is shown below. In order to get the camera in the right spot I suggest changing the setting scroll speed to slow, leaving the menu, holding down left click, get into pixel perfect spot, preform junk bag glitch, reset scroll speed. Resolution changes what the setups look like. I sadly did not record what resolution I made this setup on.



120 living tools in first town setup:
In this setup the furnace on the left is much more forgiving then the sword. The furnace  left corner needs to be roughly at the very edge of the screen. The sword has to be pixel perfect.


https://i.imgur.com/33aFBWU.png

https://i.imgur.com/dP5XYBB.png


Video showcase using third party tool to speed up the process:
https://youtu.be/0JEbaWUYDcU


The following is a setup to get three items on screen resolution 1920x1080. Different resolutions have different camera placements.

https://i.imgur.com/UhZxaWb.png This spot gets you Jeweled wand.

https://i.imgur.com/88VTakr.png This tricky spot gets you living tools but sets you up for an easy gold bars.

https://i.imgur.com/X3OtEn7.png after getting living tools, don't move the camera and hit the down arrow 5 times or until it lines up with this image. Grab 120 gold bars.

Old patch install/CombatBug

A couple of large bugs were fixed in early versions of geneforge. Fortuantly we can still use these versions of the game thanks to steam. Some resources are linked below but the key command you need is:

open the steam console: WinButton + R -> Input steam://open/console

then in the steam console:
download_depot 1424710 1424711 9064308386077379001

Move old files to steam folder or launch from the new folder. Make a back up of the current patch so you don't have to redownload.


MapBug:
The big draw to this old client is that we have access to opening the map during combat. This has the effect of restarting combat which means if we go first, we can take our turn endlessly. This greatly simplifies difficult and rng heavy areas like south Pentil.

In order to do this, press the map button (M) while in combat. Sometimes you may need to hit enter combat in order to refresh the turn. 

Video showcase:
https://youtu.be/22TqV7rCjiU






https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/
https://steamdb.info/depot/1424711/manifests/

https://steamdb.info/depot/1424711/history/?changeid=M:9064308386077379001

Nome	Autore
any% guide	dragonguard 2 years ago
Basic settings, speed Tech, and mind skip	dragonguard 2 years ago
Good%	dragonguard 2 years ago
Junk bag glitch	dragonguard 2 years ago
Old patch install/CombatBug	dragonguard 2 years ago