Ideas for New (more interesting) Categories
9 years ago
Ohio, USA

I've created a reddit thread on /r/StardewValley that about sums it up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4d5koi/stardew_speedruns/ For those who don't want to click on the link, I was thinking something along the lines of: Legend% (10M Gold) Millionaire% No Upgrades (1M Gold, being able to upgrade only your sword. [boots and rings allowed]) MotFW% (Master of the Five Ways Achievement, level 10 in every skill) PotV% (Protector of the Valley Achievement, Completing every Adventurer's Guild mini-quest) Popular% (5 Hearts with 20 people) as well as a few others. Of course not all of these categories would have to be added, just suggestions. I may start speedrunning Stardew soon, as soon as I get a computer that can handle streaming. :P

United States

As I said in the beginning when I first started running this game, my initial categories were just kinda off the top of my head and I'm sure there's better ideas, they were never meant to be the default runs for this game just kinda happened. But iIf you think a run would be worth doing I say give it a couple test runs, and link us the video on here or discord, and we will be glad to add runs that are more fun and other would rather do.

The main problem with adding more runs is it kinda over saturates the market so to speak and can be a bit overwhelming at first. I think we need to change them up a bit but Im not exactly sure how yet.

Wisconsin, USA

I think marriage% really needs to be changed in some way. Having 10 categories (with only 2 runs total listed) just looks bad. I personally would like something similar to the classes for http://www.speedrun.com/d2lod#Any_RTA_p11 Then you could see the overall rankings or click the drop-down menu to only show 1 husband/wife. I know I suggested this before and there was difficulty setting it up that way. Not sure if it's possible to do that without it showing those sub options for every category. Having all those tabs and no runs kinda gets to me.

As for the OP suggestions, I like the ideas, but I feel like most of these categories wouldn't see many runs since they are longer categories. But just because they are long doesn't mean they shouldn't be on the list either, so I will expand upon the original post with my view on the categories.

Bundles is great the way it is, don't change a thing.

50k Earnings is a fine category, but a RNG praying for rain game. If it took more money you could hope the RNG will balance out a little bit more. You could rename the 50k earnings tab to just "Earnings" and have sub tabs (like marriage% has right now) for each achievement... I dont know what they all are, but I assume its something like 15k, 50k, 100k, 500k, 1M, 10M. 15k would be very silly, but so short that lots of people would run it since its like a 5-10 min run. I'm not saying i'd want to grind out a 10M run, but it doesn't seem like it'd add too much clutter adding them this way and it allows people that want to do longer runs more options that don't involve keeping track of 200 items to turn in (all bundles). I would also like to add I still would really like to see a Farmless/Hoeless earnings run in some form. Probably just 15k? Not sure what amount would make for a decent run, but just throwing the idea out here while we're on the topic.

Similar to changing 50k earnings to just plain Earnings, the same could be done with mines level 50. I personally think lvl 50 is just wierd and never understood how that became the floor goal for the category. I personally would have done 40/80/120 since those are all the changing points of the mines. Then PotV would fit in under the Mines tab just fine. Although with this idea, lvl 80 mines is very similar to boiler room run, not that it really matters, but just a thing to think about. Could do 50/120/PotV instead since 50 is already a thing and 80 is basically boiler room%?

Marriage% could be renamed "Social" having Marriage% as a sub tab and Popular% as another. Could of course do the other social achievements as other categories. Again this comes back to if there's a good way to clean up marriage%. I think I remember someone mentioning All Rarecrows a while back, I don't really like the idea, but it could fit here too since some of them are from winning the festival days or befriending the dwarf i think is 1. Seems like a bad category though since you'd need to get all 4 dwarf scrolls from RNG fairly deep in the mine if I am right about the dwarf selling 1. That however leads into the idea of "All Festivals" won/participated in. Gotta get a girl to dance with you at the spring one, win the egg hunt, get amazing comment for the beach luau, win the winter fishing contest, etc.

As for lvl 10 in all skills... I think that might take longer than All bundles. Getting level 10 in some of the skills on my main play through didn't happen til the end of year 2. Not sure how long it actually takes, but I don't think it'd see any runs realistically. This also leads to the idea of lvl 10 in single skills, but seems kinda stale and boring to me. 1M Earning would be basically the same as lvl 10 farming. lvl 10 foraging would be farming trees for a few hours. Fishing would be like Fish tank but you fish in the same spot for a few hours. Just seems way too boring imo.

Just want to reiterate that I am not pushing for these changes. I am just expanding on the OP and putting the ideas out there for consideration.

North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

The idea Raarz, isn't bad. I try to figure out how to do them, but in case your run disappears, just reenter it then.

Anyways, will you ever consider using Discord? It could help a lot, to discuss things.

Edit: have a Look!

Earnings runs seem like the least interesting - I may be wrong, but there seems to be little routing or execution involved past determining the ideal setup. For 50k I assume this has been/will be found fairly quickly (and that will probably be the case for the other categories as well) and from there every run is entirely dependent on rain luck.

This may not be entirely the case for larger categories - it may well be worth your time to obtain quality sprinklers if you're going for 10 mil - but in that case those categories will have a little more setup then devolve into a couple hours of extremely tedious harvest grinding. Maybe there's a happy middle.

If mining had multiple achievements like fishing did, it could be interesting - ship 50 gemstones, 50 of every bar, etc. Could also go for all crafting, cooking etc, harvested, etc categories.

Wisconsin, USA

"The main problem with adding more runs is it kinda over saturates the market so to speak and can be a bit overwhelming at first. I think we need to change them up a bit but Im not exactly sure how yet."

Just had a really good idea... I was looking around at other games and realized you can set categories to "misc" and have a button at the top right to hide/show misc categories. http://www.speedrun.com/pmario#Any%25 being the best example I stumbled across.

I feel like level 50 mines is basically just a shorter version of Boiler Room that very few people have actually done runs for, so it could probably go in misc. Under this logic though you can also argue 50k earnings is just a shorter Vault, (which really it kind of is)... Vault is actually only 42500, but you need to actually earn that money rather than resell seeds repeatedly once reaching ~30k. I know 50k earnings has a ton of runs in it already and Vault has almost none, so I feel like this will be an opposed/rejected idea. (The 50k part, not the mines part)

Having a "Show misc categories" button would also allow us to add in some of the other categories mentioned here under the misc tab. I know someone posted a "0%" as they called it on the forums here, which is basically the same as the "All Days" category for the original SNES Harvest Moon. http://www.speedrun.com/hm1#Any1 I also noticed that almost all of the Harvest Moon games listed on Speedrun.com have like 3 or less runs for every category except Any% for SNES Harvest Moon, which from watching it made me think of the "Introductions" quest.

I think shorter categories will always have great appeal to the masses and that is why 50k has so many more runs than Vault so far. I am also very confused as to why Marriage% is so unpopular... everyone loves waifus!

What I would personally like to see is the following.

Definitely

  • Move Mines 50 to misc.
  • Add "0%" to misc (should be named Any% imo - but whatever we want to call it) its a silly category, but if you have to name a condition for "beating the game" you would most likely consider that Grandpa's visit. Although completing the community center could also be argued for "beating the game"
  • Add "Introductions" to misc. Seeing this is basically the equivalent to the most run category for Harvest Moon, it seems like it should be a category here too.

Questionable

  • Change 50k Earnings into "Earnings" and make the sub tabs 15k and 50k. As mentioned above... I believe that the masses really like the shorter categories. As much as I like the idea of 1M and all of the other ideas from the OP, they just seems too long and repetitive for people to actually run them.
  • At the very least 15k Earnings should be added to the misc tab, since 50k earnings already has a ton of runs under it and might be best left untouched.

Sorry for the giant wall of text as usual, just wanted to make sure i fit in everything I was thinking.

Would love to hear other people's opinions on these proposed ideas.

DigiD likes this
United States

I like the misc/hidden categories idea, this allows for more run unique options without really over crowding the boards. I might play with some different layouts today, so if you see things changing around bare with me, I will mostly be testing things to see how things work.

Wisconsin, USA

I think maybe Earnings and Marriage should be swapped... Feels weird with a category with only 2 runs being a main tab while a category with 10 is a misc. Although with the talk of seeded runs there may be a new tab soon to think about too.

North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Okay after a Discussion on Discord, I changed the following:

  • Added "Known/Unknown Seed" to Bundle% "Known Seed" runs start from Load File-screen of a clean file. ¤Clean File = Year 1, Spring, Day1¤

  • Added "GameID" to Bundle% "Known Seed" runs need the GameID. If incorrect or not added, the run gets rejected. "Unknown Seed", don't need to post their GameID.

  • Moved Earnings from Misc. to the Main Leaderboard. "The Category with the most runs has to be on front.

Game stats
Followers
2,467
Runs
2,744
Players
978
Latest news
1.6 Leaderboard Updates

Alright folks, it's been a week since 1.6 dropped and it's already been a wild start! So many new mechanics, QoL fixes, and general nonsense. We're going to start lifting the embargo here on 1.6 runs, sometime tonight the options should populate on SRC and you'll be able to select the new version. W

1 year ago
Latest threads