Yes, technically joycons are the optimal controller, as downthrows do save a little bit of time. But the difference is negligible. There are only a handful of places where down-throws are useful, and even in an AM--an 8+ hour category--the down-throws probably only save a couple of seconds total. Whenever a downthrow is useful, there's always procon-friendly alternate strat that only loses half a second.

So use whichever is more comfortable to you. I'm on team procon. I used to use joycons, but my hands would cramp, and I would lose more time from accidentally pressing buttons with my giant hands than the down-throws could ever hope to save.

My understanding is that he will never give you painting moons before you get to the credits (beat Bowser at Moon), but after that he can give you the painting moons.

Having done a Talkatoo AMNPG (All Moons No Post Game) race, I can confirm that he will not give you painting Moons before the post-game. However, I can't confirm that he will give them to you during the post-game, as I have never tested it.

Tippi (formerly known as Timpani) may be the guy to ask about that, as he has done Talkatoo AM before. Or you could painstakingly comb through his 12-hour VOD to see if it ever happens.

Yeah I think it's a bit too easy and arbitrary for it to have a leaderboard. Most decent speedruns of the main board categories are deathless. Dying is usually slow, so people already tend to avoid it.

The only exceptions are the handful of death warp strats. In Any%, you can death warp back to the Odyssey after collecting the last moon in Lost, but it's actually a bit slower than the deathless strat. In Talkatoo%, runners death warp all the time in Lost to get back to the checkpoint near Talkatoo, but even then, you could just do a normal warp back instead, which is only a tiny bit slower.

I can only really speak on the categories I'm experienced in, but I'm willing to bet that there isn't a single category that would be very different to do deathless.

Yes, I think 1:30 is a great time for a first run. I also followed Smallant's guide and I believe my first run was a 1:48?

Also, yeah, definitely use Tomshi's guide. It's much more up to date. Lot's of free time save.

Some other tips...

When making a practice file, grab all the moons you need to leave, minus one. Dump them. Grab one more moon, save, make copies. This way you only have to watch Mario dump 1 moon at the start of each IL, which saves time.

You can also have profiles with saves right before forks (Wooded/Lake, Snow/Seaside) to save space.

You can also buy a nice outfit in a previous Kingdom so Mario has some swag in your practice/IL file.

To my knowledge, the SMO practice rom doesn't have savestates, which to me, makes it not worth the hassle of modding my Switch. It pales in comparison to SM64 and SMS's practice roms.

I think the best way to practice SMO is to use the other Switch profiles. You have 8 user profiles, which can each have 5 save files. In my experience that's been plenty. Have a profile for each Kingdom you want to practice, save a file right before leaving the previous Kingdom, make 4 copies of that file, and there you go. You have 4 attempts at an IL before you have to make copies again. It takes like 15-30 seconds to make copies maybe.

Yes, Switch Lite is allowed. You would just be forced to play in handheld/tabletop mode, of course.

The rule on handheld vs docked is that as long as the video signal doesn't cut out at any point, you're good. So you can't switch between docked/undocked mid-run. You have to pick one or the other and stick to it.

Yeah I capture sound by connecting the Switch's headphone jack to the "line-in" on my computer.

So I run SMO, SMS, and SM64, and here are my thoughts: SMO is the best speed game. All three games have great movement and very high skill ceilings, but SMO is the most accessible game in many ways.

1.) It's the easiest game to get a hold of. You don't have to hunt down tons of old hardware. 2.) It has the best resources. As Collin said, there are so many great tutorials. SM64 literally has like... a wiki with some uncommentated videos of each star you can try to copy. SMO has Smallant and Tomshi's beginners guides. 3.) The movement has a very high skill ceiling but it's also very forgiving. In SM64 there is no "course correction". You make a jump, you're locked into that jump. If you messed up the jump, you're probably dead and the run is over. In SMO, if you mess up your jump, you have like 15 ways to correct it and recover from it and only lose a few seconds at most. 4.) None of the advanced tricks/skips in SMO Any% are necessary. Seriously. You could get sub-hour without Nut Clip, Lake Clip, DSS, Snow Dram, Scooter Clip... All these tricks save like 5 - 20 seconds tops. (This is more of a slight on SMS, where every other level has some stupid clip/OoB trick that you HAVE to go for because it saves MINUTES. SM64 isn't quite as bad with stupid tricks.) 5.) The gameplay flow is better, IMO. Not getting booted out of the level after each Power Moon makes it a totally different experience. SM64/SMS feel very "stop-and-go", whereas SMO feels like it flows much better. It's hard to find the words to explain this, but if you've speedrun both games you'll know what I mean. 6.) The 60fps looks incredible. Seriously, switching from SM64/SMS to SMO is always a treat for my eyes. The game is just gorgeous, and I can literally feel my eyes relaxing with the smooth 60fps. (And that's a good thing if you're gonna spend hours looking at it.)

So yeah, I definitely lean towards SMO, as you can tell. But SM64 is a great speed game too. As others have said, try both, and see which one feels better to you.

Congrats on the PB!

Side note: I could see someone arguing that Scooter Clip is actually not a glitch, because technically you don't clip through the wall--you just kinda reach through it by leaning Mario's hitbox over.

It's kinda like how you can collect Moon Shards from inside cars just by throwing Cappy at the center of the car. His trigger zone is so generous that it just reaches through the car. Is that a glitch? Or a feature? I honestly don't know. Probably a glitch? But like you could make a case that it's not.

Ok but keep in mind, RoseNoArson was asking about Any% Glitchless. Yes, there are lots of glitches/clips used in other categories, but in Any% there's maybe a minute of total time save from glitches--probably less. (Chest Clip 2s, Lake Clip 5s, Nut Clip 20s, Scooter Clip 7s, Snow Moon Clip 3s, Fish Clip 5s?) You could get sub-hour without ever using a glitch.

I don't think defining what a glitch is is the problem. The problem is the glitches in the Any% route don't make enough of a difference to warrant a separate category. Now, if we get some huge glitch that allows us to skip multiple Kingdoms, then Any% Glitchless would make more sense. And even then, it would probably be "Any% - No Major Glitches", or "Any% - All Kingdoms", or "Any% no (insert game-breaking glitch here)".

As a game developer myself, I've always considered a "glitch" to be the game behaving in a way the designers didn't intend--but only when it comes to coding-related stuff. Even that isn't a super great definition.

So like, Moon Cave Skip or Dino Skip Skip aren't glitches. Sure, the designers probably didn't intend for us to get up there, but nothing about the game's code is behaving in a way that was unintended.

Whereas Nut Clip and Lake Clip are glitches, because you're bypassing the game's collision detection and getting past a wall that is hard-coded to be impassible.

In any case, Any% glitchless would be kind of a dumb category because there are only a very small amount of glitches that save any time. Namely, Nut Clip, which saves 20-30 seconds. Lake Clip saves 5 seconds at best. Scooter Clip saves like 5-7 seconds at best. And...that's pretty much it. (At least, that's all I can think of.)

Bowser (Wedding Outfit): Unlocks Bowser wedding outfit and reveals location of regional coins. Mario (Wedding Outfit): Unlocks Mario wedding outfit and grants temporary invincibility. Peach (Wedding Outfit): Unlocks Peach wedding outfit and gives a Life-Up Heart.

Source: https://www.nintendo.com/amiibo/games/detail/super-mario-odyssey-switch/

So, yeah, I don't think Amiibo would do anything for Any%. I wonder how the "temporary invincibility" works, though. Is it like grabbing a Power Star in the 2D games? Where you insta-kill / damage enemies on contact? If so, maybe that could be used to speed up the Bowser fights?

Unlocking outfits instantly could technically save some coin grinding for 100% too I think? Unless those outfits are considered "Special" outfits that don't count towards completion.

@linny356 Actually, it would be best Metro exit, since you can just go right to Seaside from there.

@Harv123089 That said, generally categories that are just Any%-until-some-point-and-then-do-something don't get accepted, as nobody is interested in running them. The closest thing we have to that is Festival%, which is just Any% until Metro, and then rush the Festival.

Seaside% would be almost the exact same thing--Any% until the end of Metro, then select Seaside instead of Snow. Not only is it an Any%-until-some-point-and-then-do-something category, but it's also too similar to Festival% too.

Maybe there are some 2P CRC shenanigans you can do with Warp Paintings? I don't think so, but even if there was, that's what we have Star% and Min Caps for.

You're certainly welcome to time yourself up until Seaside for practice. I often do Any% runs starting from Metro just to practice the second half of the game. Similar to how SM64 runners might do "Upstairs RTA" for practice, which is just 120 Stars starting from Upstairs (to practice the latter half of the run).

Well for starters, we would need a lot more information--like the specs of your PC. (Motherboard, graphics card, capture card, CPU, RAM, hard drive). Your SLOBS/OBS settings matter too, of course. So we would need to know how you have things configured. The program should also be producing log files that will give more information on the crashes.

But, even with all that information, I probably wouldn't know how to help you. I can certainly try, but you're probably better off making a post on the OBS/SLOBS forums.

In my own experience, though, whenever I have had issues with recording in SLOBS, it has usually been related to my hard drive. Some hard drives just aren't built for constantly writing huge amounts of information (like 1080p60 video and audio) to them over long periods of time. It's generally good practice to make sure the hard drive you're writing to isn't also being read from, or you don't have two programs writing to the hard drive at the same time. But I would expect these things to lead to issues with the recordings, not crashes. I'm just shooting in the dark because I have basically no information on your setup.

Yeah it can take a few weeks, even for Category Extensions, even for WR's. (My Hardcore Talkatoo WR took...3 weeks I think?)

You aren't alone. We all have to wait, unfortunately.

They're super backed up, and verifying a single run is a pretty long and tedious process. This is a very large community with hundreds of active runners submitting runs. So, that said, it's generally a good practice to hold off on submitting PB's if you believe you can easily get another one within a few weeks.

Yeah if you already know you're serious about running this game, I'd recommend getting a good Elgato capture card (Elgato HD60 Pro or HD60s).

If you just want to dip your toes in the water and do a run or two to see if you like it, just point your phone camera at your TV. That's what a lot of people do. The quality doesn't need to be amazing for it to be accepted on the leaderboards.

Hell, even if you do one run of SMO and decide it's not for you, it's still nice to have a good capture card. You can use it on any game/console/device that has HDMI-out.

Yeah there was an "All Rematches" category (don't remember exactly what it was called), where you started from a postgame file and fought all the boss rematches in Mushroom Kingdom. It was part of a thing with Guinness Book of World Records, and I believe it was entirely their idea, and it was moderated by them. (I remember there being some really bizarre rules.)

I think there were 4 runs on the leaderboard by the end? After it was open for several months? Literally nobody could be arced to run this category. It didn't sound incredibly fun and the weird rules created an extra barrier to entry.

I mean, it's a good idea for a CE, but as an "official Guiness World Record", it really missed the point of why people run this game. Most people don't run SMO because they just love the auto-scroller bosses.

I've thought about this before. There are a number of problems with it though.

1.) He charges 50 coins per hint, so you'd have to coin grind. You'd have to have all the Hint Arts memorized and then you'd still probably have to grind. You'd be screwed if he gave you Shopping or Treasure Made From Coins.

You could use Amiibo instead, but 2.) you can only use 3 at a time, and they have a recharge time. Not sure exactly how it works, but I could forsee you moving fast enough that you end up just sitting around waiting for your Amiibos to recharge.

3.) The Hint Toad is only available post-Peace. So... you'd have to get World Peace in every Kingdom before you start getting your Toad Moons, which I think is kinda dumb. Maybe we could make this one of those start-from-a-completed-save-file categories, but I think those are kinda lame, personally.

4.) The hints that Toad gives are a lot more...vague than Talkatoo. It's kinda paradoxical, because they SEEM more specific, but if you actually think about it, they're kinda stupid in practice. He marks a Moon on the map. Some Moons are close together though, and can easily be confused. (Literally all the Deep Woods Moons would be really stupid.) So you'd have to check the Moon list thing, where you can see the NUMBER of the Moon, but not it's name. So you'd have to memorize all the Moons by number. It's much easier to memorize the names that Talkatoo gives, since many of them are pretty self-explanatory.

It's an interesting idea for a category, since I'm sure that's how many of us played the game casually. I would get my 3 Talkatoo hints, scan my 3 Amiibo for Toad Hints, and by the time I collected those Moons, I could come back and do it again. But in practice I don't think it would make a good speedrun.