#Time Penalties All future runs which use NTR to record will follow these time penalties:

• Any% - 24 seconds
• NG+ - 12 seconds
• 100% - 27 seconds
• Low% - 24 seconds
• NGNG+ - 10 seconds

The following categories don't have any penalties:

• the 5 individual mansions
• the 34 missions and their subcategories
• the 36 Scarescraper types and their subcategories
• All Gems
• All Boos
• All E. Gadd Medals

#Background NTR is a custom firmware modification that can launch and run certain plugins. It can be installed on all of the systems in the 3DS family. This thread specifically refers to the New 3DS and New 2DS systems however, since their extra processing power is required to run any of the several video streaming plugins available. These plugins allow you to capture the video stream without a capture card. Unfortunately for speedrunning, they will often cause load times to be shorter than normal because they utilize the extra processing power available to the New 3DS systems. Because of this, time penalties are needed to alleviate this discrepancy. This is why NTR is a necessary consideration for any 3DS speedrunning community.

#Other NTR Issues In Any% and 100%, some NTR users may experience difficulty performing home menu resets. NTR may crash or softlock during the process. If you are experiencing this issue, please confirm that you are using the latest version of NTR and the video streaming plugin of your choice. You may also consider seeking assistance from other 3DS homebrew communities. If the issue persists, you will unfortunately not be able to perform any home menu resets during the run, however you may perform just the intro cutscene skip on a new file before beginning the Any% or 100% run. You may start the run on this "primed" file with a timer offset of +23 seconds (this is different than a penalty). If you have any questions about this, please reply to this thread or ask in our Discord server. In the future, if NTR users are still experiencing issues with home menu resets, we may discuss the possiblity of developing and implementing a "time-loss compensation" system to account for the time lost to watching the unskippable E. Gadd bunker sequences upon unlocking different things throughout the game. Again this is only relevant within Any% and 100%. All other categories do not utilize home menu resets.

#Original post (edited): This is very long overdue, but I have finally finished enough of my analysis to begin this discussion. On average, NTR saves 0.9s when exiting a mission in Any% and 0.45s in NG+. Upon entering a mission, there is negligible difference. So NTR seems to affect save times, but not load times (in the case of Dark Moon). Over the course of an entire run this means that NTR saves ~24s in Any% and ~12s in NG+. Starting today these penalties will be applied to those categories, affecting all future NTR runs, but no current NTR runs. As for 100% and other categories, I will do a few more tests to confirm what their penalties should be. I am also wondering if we should even bother adding an NTR penalty to the mansion categories. At most, the penalty would only be about 2.5s. I don't think it is necessary, but I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Finally, I'd like to address a certain topic for discussion. Some NTR users have reported crashing upon exiting the game. This places the upgrade cutscenes in Any% into an awkward situation. Normally we perform a home menu reset to skip them, but of course this requires closing the game, so some NTR runners would be unable to perform these cutscene skips as a result.

We need to decide if those unavoidable time losses should be alleviated. As in, applying some sort of time compensation to cover for any upgrade cutscenes that the NTR runner gets. It's likely that this retribution would have to be determined on a mission basis however, as the time-loss does differ depending on the cutscene (e.g., the polterpup missions are like twice as long). The downside of implementing this system would be its complexity, likely causing confusion (...if you aren't confused already). There is also the argument that NTR runners shouldn't get a "free pass" on performing home menu resets because it is unfair to non-NTR runners. While home menu resets are not difficult to perform, it is still the runner's responsibility to remember to do them.

So I want to pass this to the community to hear your thoughts on if a "time-loss compensation" system should be implemented for the upgrade cutscenes. Additionally, if anyone has any insight regarding easy solutions to the crash issue itself, that input would be appreciated. Again not all NTR users experience these crashes. It may not be a large issue.

I have finished my analysis on the 100% category. I concluded, to my surprise, that the A-1, A-2, and A-3 revisits will incur similar time discrepancies to uncleared missions. It seems that gem collection impacts the way the game saves. The penalty for 100% will be 27 seconds. I also looked at Low% and found that even though no money is collected, the game still takes a similar amount of time to save. The penalty for Low% will be 24 seconds. Finally for NGNG+, I have not performed an analysis, but I infer it will be no different than a truncated NG+ run. Taking the data from B-1 through King Boo of a NG+ run, I got a penalty of ~9.5 seconds, which I rounded up to 10 seconds.

Following the questions I posed in my previous post, I have decided to not implement penalties for the mansion categories. If anyone wants to discuss this decision, I am open to overturn it if enough people disagree. I have also decided to leave the home menu reset discussion to stand. No changes will be made, however in the future I am ready to discuss it if anyone wants to revisit the idea.

Also, upon revisiting parts of my analysis, I found that NTR users who can perform home menu resets may need additional penalties. I have very, very little data on this, so I won't be implementing a penalty until more NTR home menu resets are available for me to look at. The penalty could be as large as 3 seconds per home menu reset. If a penalty like this is applied in the future, all current runs at the time will not be affected.