Great run, makes me want to come back to the grind after seeing some of your strats. GGs

The item spawns on stage 5 is heavilly dependant on the layouts (specially stage 4), although, spawning the mystery item on 4-4 doesn't affect the spawns. But the item spawn on the mecha bomber (rollers or fire on any%) is due to the positioning of the bombs that lock the boss.

If you place another bomb on the top row to lock the mecha bomber's kick, the slow RNG for placing item kicks in, although seems kinda delayed for that to happen. Maybe manipulating the boss positioning there is a factor as well. The fact is if the roller spawns, the 6-1 layout is slightly slower (+0.5s roughly) than if the fire spawns. So we try to do the phantom bomber strat, where we position ourselves in the direction that the bombermen on stage 5 are facing after finishing the cage.

Good to see you liked the run, and thanks for the prime! Will try to run more often, just having a bad week due to university workload, so not that much time to grind. Hopefully by the weekend we can run more.

Yes, the 4-4 is the only one that spawns the item, but sometimes the item spawns as soon as we enter the stage, giving light that something we do prior to entering 4-4 is triggering the >=3 check to work.

I gave light to this case specially because on any% we don't want the mystery item spawn to occur, since it produces a worse layout for 4-5, 4-6 and 4-7. I was just assuming that the condition of 3 combo could be overflowing from 4-3 to the start of 4-4, but I never actually said that the item spawns in 4-3, although it was poor communication on my part and kinda left that ambiguous.

Anyways, I got a run going, the time is a bit bad since I did some weird shiz on 4-1 and it deviated from the layouts I was routing, but for now it's good enough proof that the route is viable, just need some more optimization and I trully believe that a sub 16 is possible as well.

Feel free to study what i did on the run, although in portuguese. I will be opening a new category soon for this run.

The idea of the empty tile formula advancing the rng on the slow generator to change the layout makes hell of a lot of sense, and the fast generator changing enemy patterns explains why 2-3 has a different enemy pattern. Great to see someone already made the research for the game's RNG, I was just unaware of the science behind the game.

One thing I'm thinking is the category should be to only spawn all secret items, cause collecting some of them seems a nuisance, specially in early stages, and do not value the time of the runner LUL.

I'm still not gambling on the mystery item collection on 1-5 and 2-4, cause, as you said, it can change the layout of subsequent stages if collected, and my current routing makes sense in my head so I do not want to indulge in branching options just yet, and do not want to lose my kick for a bomb pass, no thank you.

Also the 6-7 heart spawn manipulation is still very useful, since it changes the 6-8 boss arachnid robot movement patterns, allowing for a quicker kill.

I have also not been able to completely figure out the 3-combo theory yet, since there seems to be two ways to do such. One is killing 3 or more enemies with a single bomb (doesn't include bomb chains or bomb spams). But I also saw that if you kick a bomb (any bomb) into three different enemies (case and point on 1-3), that also does count to the three combo. It baffles me cause these conditions should not trigger the 4-4 mystery item spawn, since on 4-3 for any% we're always bomb spamming, making it feel like a bit of RNG still for the 4-4 spawn. Something feels off still, and I would gladly accept some help figuring this out

Will start my daily grind now, more news soon.

So I started routing this category, and I must say that the routing is much tougher than any% or 100%, but I found some peculiarities.

First: I took your idea to heart to have the second player on screen some of the times, to ensure the 4 corners on 1-5 and 4-1, and also to drop the lives on the second player when needed on 3-4 and 4-5. also 1-7 works just by black bomber staying still on the start of the stage till the end.

Second: I've been able to map the whole layouts and surprisingly a lot of the layouts overlap with the any% route. 1-1 and 1-2 stays the same, but there's a magical thing with the 1-5 mystery item that you can manip so that you can go back to the any% layouts from 1-6 onwards. but if you make it spawn on certain spot you have a quicker 1-6 than the any% route, and a faster 2-1 and less random 2-2. 2-3 is weird since the layout is the same from any%, but one enemy behaves differently and so the normal any% strats for that stage also do not work. I've made myself a new route to fit the extra bomb as well, more details later. 2-4 plays exactly the same, but you need to spawn the mystery item. but the cool thing is you can manip the mystery item sapwn placement from the top right to bottom right, ensuring better layouts for 2-5 and 2-6, while coming back to the any% layout on 2-7. The heart spawn on 2-7 changes the 3-1 layout a bit, but it can be a faster layout than the normal any% route. From 3-2 to 3-6 you can keep the any% layouts, but on world 4 things start to get really warped. The good thing is that once you spawn the mystery item on 4-4, 6-1 and 6-2 keep the same route from any%, but when you throw the bomb on black player's head, you'll have different 6-3 - 6-7 layouts from any.

Third: Bombs routing: Since you need to have a score ending in 20 on 3-3 and 6-4, you need to find 2 + 10*k bomb upgrades, where k is a constant. The good thing is is that there are 13 bomb upgrades up until 3-3, so you can even skip one. There are two paths that could be followed here. The first is to get only the two bombs from 1-1 and not anymore until 3-3, or grab all - 1 bomb upgrades until 3-3 and be good for 3-6 (placing 6 bombs on screen). If you go for the first strat you can get the 2 bomb upgrade in 3-3 getting you to 5 and using black bomber on 3-6 to place the sixth, but you'll need to get a lot going forward. In stage 5 you can get 4 for free, getting to 80 points, and I believe 4-3 and 4-7 can be routed to get easy bombs. also 6-1 has one, so maybe it's not so bad to find another one, but I think getting all in the start and avoiding the rest sounds better.

As soon as I get a run going I'll be posting the video link here. The game is mostly routed, just need to finesse some of the stages, not get owned by 2-4, and avoid the bombs after 3-3 and all should be great.

Super Bomberman 3 allows starting with black bomber and is faster for most stages, if ypu want to reroute the game to see if it's faster, be my guest. I'm having trouble enough trying to route the all mystery items run.

I don't see reason enough for this idea to be banned, only thing is that you can't guarantee the correct layouts for the lenght of the game, so I think in the long run you would be losing time for having different layouts every run, and specially on the game start having to insert the password everytime you want to start a run.

I would be down for that, also that explains why the mystery item sometimes appear on the 4-4, that we on the brazillian community had no clue for a while, I'm also hyped to start grinding any% again with this "discovery" LUL

I don't know if I have enough powers to create a new category here, but would be down to run, seems like fun

I would recommend you check the emulator speed, seems like your dropping frames and also your load times seem to be longer than usual. Also recommend to display the fps during your run for you to check yourself if you are indeed dropping thos frames.

Recommend you keep grinding the category, you can easily grab the wr for the no power-up%, that item respawn was bullshit, I must agree. Also recommend you switch to japanese version since you can manipulate the layout you get for an easier time remembering the route thorugh the stages.

I may recommend you change your emulator or hardware that you may be using, it seems that the game is running quite laggy, and the load times are longer than usual, keep that in mind if you want to have better results in the future, and gg's for your run

P.S. Sorry for taking so long to verify, but it's thoroughly verified now

I would have to agree with both Luna, for glitchless being a self-explanatory category, due to the impossibility of executing glitches and skips in the run, but also have to agree with Harutomo for a name change, 'cause all skips in the game can be interpreted as glitches, but not all glitches can be considered as skips, so I believe there's a confusion.

No major skips in my humble opinion would be a more fitting name for the category, just because of little 3D skips like in 2-1, 3-1 and 4-1 are not considered as major skips and are often used in runs, and disallowing the other major glitches like door animation skips, wall clips, moo fence skip, green orb skip and the big 4-1 and 6-2 3D Jump skips, which at the moment are considered more like major skips and less like major glitches.