Since I already moderate and run a discord for Save the Light, I decided to incorporate the two games together.
https://discord.com/invite/NkeyvqJ
The discord will house all the Steven Universe games and their discussion.
So rubbertoe64 discovered a file duplication glitch (video can be seen in the discord's general channel) which allows you to start a new file while retaining stats from the original file. Steven will be leveled as per the original file and be holding any badges, while every other character will have all their points but they won't be assigned. It appears that items and weapon upgrades do not carry over, nor do other characters' badges.
It's easy to perform - press A and pause at the same time on the file you want to take stats from. Press start to unpause, and wait for the characters to get to the pad. Press B to exit and move off the pad. Press pause, press A on resume and you'll see the main menu. You can then go select an empty file and when you enter it, the glitch will carry over the stats onto the new file.
So basically - you can start a new file and have everyone at their max level, plus Steven can hold any two badges of your choosing. Rubber confirms it works on Switch, I know it works on PC, and polarbear will be able to confirm if it works on PS4 or not.
Now the question becomes, how do we implement this glitch into the leaderboards? I think it should go without saying that Glitchless runs shouldn't allow this. As for the other categories?
In my opinion I'd be in favor of making another main category called Any% NG+ that allows for this glitch, while the current Any% category would add in a rule that it's banned. I don't know how I feel about the other categories though. For our character% categories the point of them was to make a sort of All Bosses challenge category in order to prioritize other characters and eliminate Connie's Study exploit so I'd kind of want it banned in those. Hessonite Rush and Jedi/Kill The Light we already are maxed out so it's irrelevant. CBF% I suppose I'm not against it. Same with Map Completion.
So that leaves 101% and All Bosses. I don't believe Steven having the badges affects it, though, I'd be curious to see if giving him the badge Bolton gives you and removing it will make the game think you already obtained it, thus eliminating Boltron RNG from the run. If this affects percentages it'd be kinda interesting to see if giving him any other badge from the start could make the route faster but that remains to be seen.
As for All Bosses, I dunno. I'm not 100% opposed to it, but I also feel like simply allowing the glitch would remove some of the RNG and fun from the run (e.g. no need for Stevonnie on Dave, Connie could probably kill him with like 1 study and Garnet's defense debuff and sword storm). Like it would just kinda, streamline it I guess? But I also feel like All Bosses NG+ might kinda clutter the boards up a bit. I mean we could also add another sub-category to each category and separate runs as NG+ and Regular, so there'd be leaderboards for categories with this glitch and categories without. I just feel like having both console/PC and NG+/Regular to make a bunch of sub-categories seems kinda cluttery, especially since we don't have a ton of people running the game.
But anyway - this is a community discussion, and all input would be appreciated (esp other mods).
So I think if I had to say what I'd most want, I think I'd like to see an Any% NG+ category added. And maybe just ban the glitch from everything else. If we want to allow it outside of Any% I'd want to then discuss separating runs as some sort of NG+/New File separation.
We have a new official Discord for the community. Here's the link to it.
Hi! So since at present, FLUB has been MIA for about 8 months, Frog has sporadic activity, and Sora does approve runs but I don't believe keeps up with the game much, I requested srcom mods to make me a mod of the game and got approved.
There are a few changes to the leaderboards that Polar and I wanted. The only other runner who's sort of active is tralalapis, who agreed to these changes as well. I don't believe they're anything too major, and since leaderboards are a community thing they can always be changed if we don't all agree/have a majority agreement.
That said, Any%, All Bosses, and 101% will remain the same. As will the parameters of CBF%. The changes that we're making are as follows:
Glitchless will specify the tricks that are allowed and not allowed. We've agreed that as of now, five things that we are aware of should be banned.
-Dave Skip -Forge Skip -Dew Skip in Familiar Grounds, which allows you to get the Green Key early. -Frigid Bridge clip, which allows you to get the Indigo Key early. -Depths Skip, which allows you to avoid doing the metal blocks puzzle with Peridot.
This means some "glitches" like the menu glitch to move during cutscenes, the Peridot/Connie trick in The Split to avoid doing the puzzle, and Pearl Skip are allowed. We agree that with all we have in the game at the moment, a fair definition of a glitch in Save the Light for the purposes of speedrunning is something that skips a major portion of a particular area (e.g. Familiar Grounds, Waterfall Way, South Trail, etc.) or makes it so you do not collect a key item that you otherwise need in a regular playthrough.
This is why, for example, Pearl Skip is allowed but Depths Skip isn't. The fight skipped due to Pearl Skip is possible due to placing characters in certain positions, using Pearl's ability, and switching characters in a certain frame of time, allowing you to open the gate without engaging the enemy there due to being first-striked in the cutscene. The enemy does not drop any important item; this trick simply plays around with the enemy's aggro. Thus, we don't consider it a glitch under these parameters. Depths Skip is banned because you skip the majority of that area and do not progress through it to the next portion of the game as it would obviously have been intended for you to do. This is also why Glitchless now bans Dew Skip - because the way it works allows you to skip two fights that drop Dews and not have to collect the fourth dew in the breakable block, all of which would otherwise be mandatory to get to Waterfall Way.
Console and PC will be separated. This is because the PC version has faster loading times, which further seems dependent on how good your computer is. It was also discovered by me that if PC users put their graphics onto "fast" this saves even more time. The longer the run, the more time saved due to faster loading times and cutscenes being faster (e.g. easier to mash, Sapphire and Ruby's re-fusion is faster, etc.) And on the PC it's faster for 101% in addition, since you can change system time in between loading zones instead of while still sitting in a zone as the console requires.
We're also moving CBF% to a Misc category. As is, we believe Any%, All Bosses, Glitchless, and 101% would be satisfactory for main categories. A "beat the game as fast as possible, anything goes", a "Defeat every boss in the game, and everything goes" "beat the game as fast as possible, without glitches" and "get your file to 101%". If anything else gets discovered in the future, we can amend the rules as necessary, though unless anything huge is discovered (e.g. a way to get the weapon upgrades through a faster, non-source means) I imagine we'll be keeping these four as our main categories.
With CBF% being moved, we're also making a few more Misc categories. As of now we will have the following:
-Pearl% -Amethyst% -Map Completion -Hessonite Rush -From My Point Of View The Jedi Are Evil
I believe we plan to have a Greg%, Steven%, and Peridot% at some point. For these categories, the idea is essentially to ban Connie's damage exploit and only allow team attacks using the character of the category (e.g. Pearl% would not be able to have Garnet and Amethyst fuse into Sugilite). These are basically challenge categories that run under the All Bosses rules with additional restrictions. Map Completion simply requires you to have every area of the game unlocked via the warp pad. Hessonite Rush is a boss rush of sort, where you start on a previous file and try to kill SC and Hessonite as fast as possible. The Jedi's goal is to kill the Prism during the Hessonite fight and get a game over.
And one final thing - I'm moving All Bosses over one spot so the order is Any% - All Bosses - Glitchless - 101% -- Misc.
Hi, from what I can gather the way games are listed in your profile go in order from your latest approved run to the earliest one. So if you've run, say, 10 games, the game at the very bottom would be the one with your oldest run on it, whereas the first game to appear would be the last one to get approved (e.g. if the latest was submitted to any leaderboard was two weeks ago, that game appears first)
I have a small customization proposal, which is letting users be able to arrange them in any order they'd like. I know that personally I'd want to rearrange them based on my place on the leaderboard rather than a chronological order. I might imagine other people may want to do the same, or want to categorize them another way, like perhaps alphabetically, or by series, depending on what it is they've run.
I've been pondering what might be a good category to add to the game and I thought of one. I'd also propose if we end up having two, we should put CBF under a "misc" category along with this one and future ones we come up with that we don't feel fit the main category criteria (which as of now I feel I'd define as defeating Hessonite in the speedrun)
Could be called something like Complete Map, Warp Map, Fog of War, Map Completion, etc. But the goal of the run is to unlock every location so that it's available to warp to via the warp pad.
Areas simply need to be unlocked, so you don't need to fight Light Warrior or Dave. You'd also need to unlock and enter all of the secret areas in the game too so they'd have to get routed in. Time would end once you have completed the map (which, routing wise, I imagine the fastest way would be to save Hessonite's Warship for the end)
All glitches and skips would be fair game.
A continuation of stuff I talked about on my stream and also the discord. But basically, on the PC if you lower your graphic settings, you end up saving a decent bit of time through faster loading and other things (for example, seems like tutorial text boxes go by quicker, as do cutscenes).
Unfortunately, at least in Any%, this causes you to softlock a lot in South Trial when you roll through the log. Like 9/10 times probably. Realizing this I figured it wouldn't be viable to do this for runs, at least not until the WR became more optimal.
That said, I was fiddling around and discovered that a simple bit of pause buffering, and rolling a good distance from the log eliminates this issue. So that's no longer an issue. I don't know what other low graphic problems arise in other categories (yet) but I can at least say this eliminates the issue with Any%
Related, given that this can give PC users an even larger advantage over console users than previously, I'm personally a bit of a stronger advocate for us separating console and PC on the leaderboards. The loading differences are just pretty big at this point so I'd be for it if everyone else feels the same.
Specifically with how NMG/All Bosses is currently it's own category. Right now, merging the two of these seems to be done with the purpose of eliminating the use of Forge Skip in the run. But by having one of the criteria be no major glitches, the forge still needs to be done for the sake of completing it. But the forge doesn't have any bosses (if we were to say, use the criteria of an enemy using the boss theme).
I would propose that an All Bosses category exist with the parameter that every boss need to be defeated. Everything else goes. Currently, that would mean All Bosses would allow the forge skip.
Should anything else be discovered in the future that could be considered a major glitch, this would also cover how to address it in the future. Say, theoretically, if something were discovered to clip through walls and make the sunken pyramid extremely fast. A NMG category could arguably ban that from being used.
In addition, I'd propose a category called "Glitchless" which would take inspiration from other games like Paper Mario and Ocarina of Time. Essentially, something that would allow limited use of glitches/techniques but nothing too major (e.g. using the menu glitch to get into the Dave room a little quicker is fine, Forge Skip would not be). I feel like this would better define what NMG/All Bosses currently looks like.
I know as of now there may not be a lot of glitches that we're aware of, but I figured I'd toss it out there since I'd like to start running other categories and maybe try to look for glitches myself.
Hi everyone. So, I'm looking to learn this game pretty soon and would be doing so via an emulator. I was wondering if there was a reason why the rules state that only the PS emulator can be used?
The N64 version has the option to turn off the adrenaline bar, so you'd never have to worry about having to engage enemies in order to keep your health from depleting. I'm not sure the exact differences but the platforming elements were apparently made easier on the N64 port, and then there's the removal of movies and the different load screens. I'm not sure if the latter is faster or not, but I would think that unless there currently are (or would be) glitches or exploits that are PS exclusive, the N64 port should be the one that would be the fastest.
But that's besides the point, is the N64 emulator just not allowed for an arbitrary reason? If so, could the rules be changed so that runs can be submitted on one?
