After sitting back on this for 3 months, I do think I disagree with the embark profiles. I'm definitely biased, as I'd take first back though. It just bothers me that the run starts before world gen, while allowing settings that can only be edited after world gen. I think we need to change the rule on world gen or the currently unofficial rule on embark profiles
I do think timing should start the moment your dwarves are in the map. This is the way other games generally do it. Configuring settings pre-game is not normally included in speedruns. And including the time taken to generate the map is really strange to me; and also the reason I never felt motivated to speedrun, this because my PC takes a while to generate maps.
As for what in-game things to allow or disallow - I don't see any reason to disallow anything. Really it should be anything goes, as long as it is a fresh map, and you only stick to in-game options. I've never tried macros for instance, but if that was a legitimate feature the devs included for regular play, then by all means I think it should be permitted in speedruns too (as long as the macro was created during the run, and not beforehand, of course). Same goes for embark profiles, or anything else.
Currently there is only one full-game run on the board. (There were two others, but they don't seem to have VODs) I reckon there would be more interest in speedrunning the game if the rules weren't overly complicated, and allowed a wider range of strategies that could lead to shorter times than 8-9 hours.
"World creation parameters should be any of the included defaults in the game (i.e editing your files to provide you a perfect seed every time is not allowed)." Embark profiles are world creation parameters, change my mind.
I'll admit I'm biased when it comes to embark profiles, but for me "Stock" means it's right out of the box, so that it would be the same result as if you were to download it, extract it from the zip, turn FPS on, then speedrun it. On a related note, I'd like some clarification with the use of exploits and glitches (EX: Water reactors or atom smashers) in the vanilla game.
No rush, I just remembered this when I was messing around with speedrunning portal and thought I'd check in on it.
relating to jade_orb's post, that is how the rattlesalad mountainhome run is, but he mentioned its because of some restriction he has. Fully stock settings would also invalidate my fast times, so it would knock the last 2 1st place times out. That a would be more fun to get my record back, but I'd prefer whatever people think is the best irrelevant of records.
Only problem with downloading each time is its a super short run, and at least my runs are on the steam version. We'd have to turn off cloud save or smthn
You make some good points, undefined24. I suppose it would invalidate most other peoples runs. Looking at the settings I see some things that would change a lot, like moods and default embark size, and many that don't, such as window size and music. I myself changed the window size to shrink my mouse movements. I certainly agree on the concept of downloading each time, that just sounds like a lot of work, especially for the shorter runs.
Hello everyone.
I've left the leaderboards as they are for now, and have updated the rules to match with bolded changes. If i remember the admin panel correctly it should correctly show the global rules for every category with all the changes, and each category should have a brief blurb about that runs unique rule.
Since all of the old runs were run on the version of Dwarf Fortress before the Steam release, and the Free version of DF is now drastically different, I will be moving all of the oldschool runs off the board soon.
I think I know what you mean, but I have to make sure. Is the "Okay" you are referring to the one before choosing world parameters, the one before choosing embark location, or the one after embark?
Good point - it is intended to be the Okay right before gameplay starts, so gameplay and time would start as soon as you are actually capable of controlling the fortress/dwarves. This will obviously make all new runs faster and bubble out the old runs so I dont know if I even need to touch the boards really.
