With DF hinting that it'll come to Steam, I'm wondering if we'll see a spike in popularity! With that in mind, I wanted to discuss making runs more standardized and/or accessible.

Sorry this isn't more organized, but I have a bunch of thoughts on these things:

A. Do runs have to act like you've opened the game for the first time? In other words, can you use saved parameter sets for world gen? Can you increase frame rate before your run even begins? Both of these represent big time saves; I have an old run of 23.83s with these tricks... but I never submitted because I'm not sure it's in the spirit of the rules.

B. Should loading times be counted? Counting loading times makes speedruns a little less accessible because slow computers take longer... but the game isn't terribly demanding to begin with. Maybe the best option is to time the game from "striking the earth" to crumbling? You could even start counting frames instead of timing (if the times become short enough).

C. How should different versions of the game be accounted for? (matters more or less depending on A and B are addressed)

i have been thinking about this actually.

A. i intended to implement rules that required you to show you unpacking the game from the newest version release or showing that the game is unmodified before use. It was clear to me that there were modified worldgen params which removes any of the actual talent out of the run (adapting to your world)

b. loading times would be counted because making a pocket world and embarking on a 1x1 is going to work on a potato and is the smarter strategy anyway. unless you're running this on a chromebook from 2010 it will be fine. if the game gets popular enough that actual strats are found for worldgen manip it will be included in the run then as well, instead of someone just genning 300 worlds until they find one thats perfect and then making a flawless run.

c. Speedruns would always be run to the latest version