So, I've been spending the past couple days researching any% second ending and I've unfortunately come to the conclusion that it doesn't make much sense to have one. Let me explain why.

Second ending occurs after you complete either Mission 45 or Mission 46. To get missions 45/46 to spawn, you must do the following:

• Complete all story missions up to Mission 43 (so this is Prologue, M1-32, M35, M38, M41, M43)
• Complete the following Side Ops: Extract the AI Unit, Eli's Challenge, Extract the Man on Fire's Body, Extract the 5 missing children
• Listen to all yellow cassette tapes
• Build your command platform up to level 3
• Reach bond level 100 with Quiet (if you want to unlock mission 45)

It's funny, any% first ending is very straightforward, but after the first ending, the game gets very complex. It's not clear when certain missions open up, you have to go back and complete some missions you skipped in the first ending run (5, 9 and 11 if you want Quiet) and beginning with Mission 35, you HAVE to have the Cargo fulton extraction device, which requires an R&D level of 19 and a Support level of 16. So you have to slow down and farm staff for a while to build your staff up.

All of this is fine though. It's all runnable. The Cargo Fulton can be gotten in time for Mission 35's spawn, you just have to extract some extra soldiers and be really clever with your staff management.

The problem is the base platforms. The problem is two-fold:

• When speedrunning, you don't have enough resources to start building platforms until after Mission 35 once you get the cargo fulton and can farm containers.
• Upgrading the command platform to 3/4 takes MORE THAN FOUR HOURS GAMETIME to complete. And that's assuming you have all of the resources and click to expand it immediately upon it completing.

To put this into context. For me to get from the end of Mission 31 to end of Mission 43 took about 3 hours each time. I was going very slow both times. I was stopping to extract soldiers and in one run I was spending time getting Quiet's bond level up (actually not hard, just boring). Even when I upgraded the command platform to 2/4 as SOON as it was available, I finished Mission 43 with more than 40 minutes left for it to hit 2/4. It takes over 2 hours for it to go from 2/4 to 3/4.

Even if you farm resources early and start building the platform early on, say around Mission 20, you're still looking at a minimum 6.5 hour run.

What I'm saying is: Second ending any% requires you to do one of two things:

• Slow way down and farm resources/soldiers throughout the entire game or
• Sit around and wait about 2.5 hours after finishing Mission 43 for the base platforms to finish.

This is why I think we should just get rid of the category and just have the All Missions S Rank category instead. Because in that extra 2.5 hours you need to finish the platform to spawn Missions 45/46, you can easily go through and complete the rest of the missions. So if the run is going to have to be 6-7 hours, might as well complete all the missions while you're there. As it stands, doing a second ending run is likely barely any faster than an all missions run.

So I propose the following full game categories:

Any% first ending First ending, Foxhound All Missions, S Rank NG+ All Missions NG+ Foxhound

As it stands, if you're going to run Second Ending, there's absolutely no reason not to run All Missions because they both require the exact same amount of time more or less. And in many ways, you NEED to run all of the missions to get 45/46 to unlock anyway.

gotta agree with this. i thought that Second Ending any% is pretty pointless.

I made it a misc category just to clean up the leaderboard, considering it probably won't be run. It was also mostly a placeholder before it was figured out which one people wanted to consider any%.

I also made all missions S-rank misc for now. It seems somewhat arbitrary. Does anyone have a reason why all missions s-rank should be a primary category, and not, say, just ng all missions, or ng 100%.

Like, is anyone actually doing the run, and is there a meaningful distinction between all missions and all missions s-rank? because there frequently isn't a difference for s-rank ils, and a new game run wouldn't have most s rank restricting items anyways.

Honestly, S Rank in general feels pretty meaningless to me. That goes for both full game runs and individual level runs. With the exception of a handful of levels, if you get the any% record, you'll have the S Rank record and vice-versa.

I'm fine with just:

• First ending any% NG
• First ending PSNK NG
• All missions NG
• All missions NG+
• All missions PSNK NG+

Misc Cats = All missions S Rank, 100%, Subsistence(?), etc. That seems pretty logical and accessible to me.

I'd like to run an all missions NG category one day. Whether it's S Rank or not doesn't matter to me. At that point you're talking about the difference of maybe 15-20 minutes in a 7 hour run.

I think having 100% as a primary category, at least for now, doesn't make sense. Who knows, maybe we completely break the game in the next year and make it doable. But at this rate, that's probably an 15-20 hour run.

No way 100% is that long. Probably under 10, but since the biggest factor is going to be all objectives, we'd need more 100% ils optimized for real time before we could reasonably estimate the time.

all side ops would take up the next largest amount of time, but probably not more than 2 hours.

All missions NG is as dumb as Ng Second ending, but way harder OneHand It should be harder when you think about it.

I think that all category that doesnt have a current run should be Misc right now. For better "reading". I do think that all category that use cheat items should be Misc.

However i don't think that S-Rank all mission should be rule out. I mean even if the Perfect Stealth only has 3 missions in wich you don't get S-Rank that an huge deal / Route difference to have the ability to get alert / Kills. On top of that, i know that someone is working on S'Rank (Probably All missions) and it's going to be really different than Peacenik All missions and NG+ Any% ALL Mission. And that should be taken as Misc.

I don't think all missions NG is dumb at all. It's just dumb to have both All missions and second ending categories since they're basically the exact same run.

But yeah, a lot of this is just waiting and seeing what people want to run and what appeals to most people. Both "All Missions" and "100%" appeal to me, as I love 100% runs. I just don't see anyone completing a 100% run any time soon. That would take a TON of optimization, especially doing all of the side ops.

All missions =/= Second ending.

Yeah i do think that 100% is super long, and that would need a couple of people to route the game correctly.

What we need the most for 100% right now is a list of side op unlock conditions and precedence.

What I imagine the run right now to be is: do main op, gathering any shipping invoices on the way, do any nearby sideops and sideops that you can presently fast travel to. Later in the run, when you have all the capture cages and invoices, do some deployments to clean up animals and side ops.

While we're doing all that, we also need to get our 1000 fultons, any in world animals, and enough materials to get the additonal (if any) strut upgrades, research and deployment costs.

For side ops, if it's possible to get quiet's anti materiel rifle, she can do a lot of sideops on her own while you're doing other sideops. Even with just her base rifle, she's a big help. The issue there, of course, is that you don't get d-horse or d-walker movement speed while you're doing this.

Of course, we still need to route all objectives on every mission, which is alone a huge undertaking.