Lets talk about the Fewest Deaths run
3 years ago
Texas, USA

Im thinking the minimum is 9 at best. 1 in tunnel one, 2 in tunnel two, 2 in tunnel three and 4 in frozen tunnel. The fungi one in the first tunnel will kill you for sure. The lost world one will kill you, and the cave trolls will kill you. The mammoth one in the ice caves might actually be possible to live through. The nether in tunnel 3 will kill you, and so will the underworld. I think you can get an angle on the hell crystal and live after getting it. Sadly, i think the first 4 in the frozen tunnel will get you killed, unless maybe the very first one doesnt but you wont get any other crystals if you live after getting it. Im pretty sure you can survive the final dark noxesium in the lava area, it would just be tough. Everything else would just have to be a perfect run.

United States

I'm actually very interested in seeing someone try to run this myself. In internal testing, we proved you can survive Mammoth and Cave Trolls (although Cave Trolls is apparently incredibly difficult to repeat). In the Frozen Tunnel, I've personally managed to get 1 and 2 in the same run, and I believe if you did them correctly you could survive both of them (although you'd probably have to do them separately). The reason I added this is a category is for thoughts like this, and to see what methods people could come up with to avoid dying.

Texas, USA

Whoa, did you happen to record getting frozen tunnel 1 and 2? The slime pipe one is so high up and I always lose so much speed getting the first one. And I really want to see how close the cave trolls one is, because the dead end in that room makes it seem impossible. You probably have to start from higher up than the waterfall in the base camp so you would have to get it coming the long way. The hitboxes on the crystals are pretty big so I can see how you could be high enough to dodge the plate but the speed loss from turning around would be so bad.

Texas, USA

Also I just re-read the rules for this category. This means the absolute minimum time for a fewest deaths run would be more than 6 hours technically? Plus the 10 or so minutes of cutscenes. Edit: I feel like the runs should be retroactively given the penalty based on future runs with less deaths. Or possibly a less harsh penalty of 10 minutes or so. That should still be enough to ensure the ranks are based off death count but without making the runs appear to take a quarter of the entire day.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
United States

Haven't recorded it, no. I swooped down for F1, then bottomed out under the pipe to fly up to F2. I almost made it to F3 as well, but couldn't hold the speed.

We chose a 1 hour penalty based on advice from the original mod who has seen other games do it this way. The nice thing about this is that it makes it very obvious when you're looking at the time of the run to see how many deaths the person had, as it's likely their actual run time won't be over an hour. We can look into doing some changes once someone has submitted a run to make sure it's obvious to people browsing the category.

Texas, USA

I was thinking of taking inspiration from the Mario Odyssey minimum captures runs. Where any runs that don't actually have the minimum deaths possible are just removed. Because they just kept finding ways to skip captures, the times didn't have any penalty due to the required captures. Instead they would just no longer be the minimum/fewest possible so the run became invalid.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
United States

That's an interesting thought. I guess I would be scared that, in a category with few runners, we'd be deleting quite a few runs. I suppose it'll be more obvious what decision we should make when people start running it.