Hello everyone, Spore speed running is really taking off and I want to take this opportunity to do some house keeping and some refreshing to the leader board to keep the board clean and more inclusive. There also seems there is some confusion about timing and category rules. Going forward I will try to make all rules more clear to new and existing runners by providing more video examples in the rules and giving more detail and in depth explanations here in the forums if necessary. As followers of this page may know, I am a big fan of "less is more" when it comes to categories on SRC. I also favor using the Full Game leader board to hold all the times instead of the individual level board available on the site. However, category confusion and a want from new runners for more fun run categories is present and I do not want to ignore requests! I am opening up a miscellaneous category tab where fun and meme runs can be easily added without needing to clutter up the standard tabs. For example NG++ will be moved to miscellaneous and where Grox% runs can be added! Suggestions for new categories are encouraged! Either here on the forums or the discord is great. I will state that I would prefer at least two runners have time submissions ready in order to open a category. More updates coming! Feel free to ask questions about categories, timing, or anything to this forum!

You may use the same world each time. So you can know the terrain and layout each time, that is not a problem. If you are going for a full game, starting from cell to allying the Grox, then I would recommend making sure no other space saves are helping your run if you want to stay in the NG style. Yeah timing starts when clicking the blue arrow to start. There hasn't been an official run of when to stop, but either when the asking to ally and they accept or when the Dance with Devil badge is earned would make sense.

Some arms are unfortunately impossible to reach the center with only interstellar drive 2. 2 of 5 arms are impossible with really only 1 arm in particular being really fast! With the arm numbering system in this picture: https://imgur.com/a/nxckgPk Arms #1,2,5 are possible while arms #3,4 are not. Arm 5 really sucks with a lot of dead ends lol, but I recommend using arm #2 like in the videos for Space NG. The general paths to follow that allow interstellar drive 2 to make it look like this: https://imgur.com/a/AkpdY1K I hope that helps! Good luck on your runs :)

NG has beaten the NG+ time of 41:14!!!! First by Savage_Brick and myself as well. Now that NG is faster, NG will show up as the Default category when joining the site! And I believe NG is the better speed run category over NG+ anyway. Doing this to try and promote NG more and relieve some of the obstacles NG+ may have imposed on new runners. NG is really easy to start running. Only major rules are there can be only maxis creations present when starting a run, no help from space saves (to be safe I suggest never saving in Space Stage at all in your galaxy), and no use of wormholes. I will be providing an updated galaxy for download in the resources tab that follows NG rules.

There is a Galactic Adventures page on speedrun.com now! Check out https://www.speedrun.com/Spore_Galactic_Adventures for all the best Galactic Adventures speed runs!

Please stop asking me to become a mod. One should never ask to be mod. I would like to see a more active speed runner of the game to make sure I know one knows all the rules and subtleties between NG and NG+ in order to be qualified to be a moderator. Please refrain from using manipulative language in your posts.

I am requesting to be upgraded to a Super Mod on the Spore speed running page. I contacted the only other Super about a year ago and this individual said he was done with Spore, I can provide proof. I have been a standard mod since August 2016 after joining the small community in March of 2016. I was given mod by a Super who is no longer with the site. Since becoming a mod a have helped reshape a terribly disorganized leader board, solidified the timing rules, brought in many community members, and achieved the full game WR. https://www.speedrun.com/Spore

There are only 15 by my count. That is not an official amount from Maxis or anything. That is what I could find after a couple hours or so of trying different planets. I may have said 16 a while ago but must have found a doublicate. Originally I was trying to spawn in different locations on the same planet to get a couple different views of the same planet layout. Doing that got me really confused and I tried to remove all extras to get only one picture for each but left a duplicate on accident before.

Made this a couple months ago. I found there are 15 home world planets. https://imgur.com/a/dciw4

There actually used to be a level leader board about a year ago. But there used to be about 60 categories with hardly any entries so I redid the leader board to the current format, clearing out over 30 miscellaneous and pointless categories. The few of us there at the time agreed that this way looked better. I attempted to make it match Halo's co-op board https://www.speedrun.com/halo_coop#Halo_CE which I think looks really clean for how many levels there are.

Join by entering through this link: https://discord.gg/vrubb8J

Yes, you can enable "Global Hotkeys" in LiveSplit's settings so the hot keys will work even if LiveSplit is not selected.

Great! Here are my splits for Easy Full game, I split at the beginning of the loading screen between stages and end at the start of the final cutscene. 4:26.7 18:02.9, 13:36.2 segment 29:58.8, 11:50.9 35:42.3, 5:48.5 41:14.4, 5:32.1 Most of the time save is in Tribal and a bit in Space.

That is all the right stuff to start speed running! Good thing to know is to record or stream Spore using "window capture" in obs and play Spore in windowed mode. For some reason obs and Spore do not get along in full screen.

I personally do not like having timers on screen but I do have splits for my Easy/Hard Full Games and a few ILs if you would like something to compare against, I happy to share!

Good luck! :)

That is really cool! I tried it a bit, myself. Looking forward to some normal% competition potentially with the three of us. Optimistically I think the category could go under an hour!

Yes, perfectly legal! Speed running is all about using glitches and manipulating the game to go as fast as possible.

I did a quick search around and I could not find any spice duplication videos, can you make a quick showcase video? I would love to see it, and to make sure you get credit for discovering it!

Thank you for sharing the link, that is incredible!

The wormhole strategy is fairly new and has not been implemented into the normal% runs yet (which are over a year old). However, using wormholes should be useful on every difficulty but are definitely not a requirement. Unfortunately every runner has to do their own wormhole mapping for their personal galaxy.

Good luck with your runs :)

More interesting info. I played Spore on another computer and in Space, everything in the galaxy is in the exact same place, however, every system and wormhole are named differently and every wormhole is connected to differently. All the wormholes are in the same locations but they send you to a different one. I only have a sample size of two so if other people could check out the wormhole at these in game coordinates "1.31°, 1,228.31(pc)" and tell me where you wind up, that would great. The coordinate system did not change between computers. Find your coordinates by hovering over the tiny ship icon on the bottom of the screen just above the progress bar.

In creature stage, there is only one migration pattern per planet. Every creature stage for a particular planet starts and migrates to the exact same locations. I thought it would be closer to starting from Civ stage from the main menu, where you could start in one of actually 6 starting locations.

Also there are only 15 different planets, and 7 of the have 6 spice geysers on the starting continent.

I found some interesting tech! There are 16 different home planets for the player. This only matters in Creature/Tribal/Civ. But it is very important for Civ stage. if you play Civ enough you see the game always puts you on a continent with your city and 3 other rival cities, out of 5 possible locations, and this continent has 4-6 spice geysers on it. I found the planets range from 12-18 spice geysers total, with 2-5 in the water. Most importantly, on the starting continent there are 8 planets with 6 geysers, 4 planets with 5 geysers, and 4 planets with 4 geysers. I have pictures of every planet's mini maps if anyone would like to see.

Now that we know there only 16 different planets, we should start finding and running each of these different planets in Creature/Tribal/Civ stages to find which is the best planet for each stage to make the speed run the fastest. I have done a lot of research into Civ stage, since it is my favorite, and I am starting to figure out the best planet for running. Notice which planet I used in my 4:49 Easy time, I think is the fastest. But Creature and Tribal still need a lot of work. We need to find all the migration patterns, if the 70DNA extinction reward locations are consistent, all the starting locations, possible spawn location for rival tribes, which planet has the most and closest plants nearby the starting home tribe.... And now with my newest Space Stage run, the idea of using wormholes to reach the center, has blown this game wide open! I have starting wormhole mapping but I bet there are better wormholes that could bring us closer to the center and that are closer to the starting home planet.

I really hope people are still active and want to help me optimize this game to the max! I think a sub 45 minute Easy Full Game is possible.

Thank you for your very well articulated suggestions and enthusiasm! I am not too familiar with ROM hacks but I will definitely look into it. These are very good ideas, but there are not very many people playing Spore at this time. From my expirience gathering runs for the Stages, people are not very interested in resubmitting their videos here. It has been slow going and a struggle to get the submissions in the existing categories. I am worried that the adventures will not be very competitive. However, I would love to be proven wrong. Also, I have been trying to keep the leader board very clean, I personally do not like miscellaneous categories or categories with very few runs (I have removed over 30 miscellaneous and empty categories since becoming mod a few months ago). But if there were more active members I would be happy to add them back. Perhaps if either of us find record videos either on youtube/twitch we could keep a running list in the forums.