PREFACE I will preface this guide with the fact that while this technique is currently legal as it is abusing the developer intended drop table manipulation, I think that repeated use and optimization of this will result in insanely low times that will result in "get makeshift floor 1 or reset" and that honestly doesn't sound the most fun to me, but who am I.
SADDEST OF STORIES Also I put "Theory" in quotation marks because I, at one point, had this save file completed; it had ideal items, characters unlocked, and the bullet completed, it worked, and it worked beautifully. However, due to my incompetence I did not upload a copy of this save file to the cloud and when my computer BSOD its last BSOD I lost the file forever, therefore if someone would else wants to follow through on this they are more then welcome but I do not want to sink another month of my life into this project that ended up disappointing me.
NEW ITEM RNG So to understand this theory you must understand how the RNG table works in this game, or at least as much as is pertinent to this theory. The developers, in all their glorious knowledge, decided that with hundreds of items capable of dropping they want you to enjoy the newly unlocked items as soon as possible and as a result of this any newly acquired items are sort of "marked" resulting in them having an insane drop rate compared to that of any other item of their tier, however, once you actually pickup that item in the gungeon it returns to a standard drop chance. You can prove this by simply buying an item from the store, playing the game and marking how many runs it takes you to actually get the item you just purchased, then continue playing and see how long it takes for this item to drop a second time; i guarantee there will be about a 10x difference between the number of runs needed after you grab the item the first time.
HOW TO CREATE THE FILE Now lets get into the theory, the theory is to start a brand new save file, ideally B or C, and go through the game, try to unlock as little as possible, yet saving all the NPC's, trying to complete the bullet, finishing all the shortcuts, unlock all the characters as well as completing as many hunts as possible to try and get to the last one but stopping before collecting the Makeshift Cannon reward. Now you need to come up with a list of all the items you want to unlock, in my experience the only items that are worth the trouble of manipulating for are a few shop items and the makeshift, this is due to the fact that it is very difficult to try and time an item to unlock before the "Big Run" if you have to unlock it by doing something in the gungeon. OK so once you have a list of all your items you want you need to stack vendor inventories to just the items you want to purchase, as vendors don't change their inventory until you purchase an item from them to free up a slot, just make sure you don't purchase any of the good items before the "Big Run". Then you need to do a few full completion runs to gather up alllll the undesirable items you have unlocked as any that are left over will constantly show up during the "Big Run" and we don't want to fight the drop table by it being stuffed with garbage from a vendor. Okay now that you have all the items waiting to be unlocked you need to backup your save, this would be the save I recommend you keep for your own use, as it would be a super backup, you would never use this save unless catastrophe happened. Now that we have that backup you will need to go around to all the vendors and purchase the Manipulated Items you have been stacking and go over to Frifle the hunter and unlock the Makeshift Cannon. Now that everything is unlocked save and quit one more time and backup your save, this is going to be the save file you will constantly be reloading so back this one up in a few different places. Then you can go and do a run 9/10 you will get at least 3 of the items you manipulated for if not more. After the run is over simply close the game and copy one of the backed up save files over your slot B/C and reload the game and try again, rinse and repeat till you get a sub 6 run.
APPROACHES There are two approaches to this file theory you can either stack the file with as many good items as you want to ensure that every run will be at least playable, or you can do a minimalist file and simply do Makeshift+Duct Tape, as this combo will destroy any boss in about 3 seconds saving you 5-8 minutes in any given run, however if both of these items don't drop on the first floor, or at least after the first boss, then you have to reset and reload.
CONCLUSION So there you have it, I will leave this up to the current Moderators and other runners to determine if this technique should be allowed or not. If this were allowed I could see the leader board breaking sub 5/6 minutes at its peak. If it is banned it would be easy to tell who is still doing it as they will be constantly submitting runs with the same item combinations. Or maybe a third route with new category called Manip Any%. Anyway thanks for reading this and good luck to anyone who tries to recreate this file.
Personally, as from a view of a runner and not moderator, I think this would be cool but at the same time would take away a lot of the satisfaction from getting a good run doing it like this, it would also make competing in this kind of an enviroment rather annoying because from what I understand, you would have to reload the save file each time after you do the "big run" in which you do get the combo, that in of itself isn't that much of an annoyance since you wouldn't need to be reloading it that much because you won't get the combo in every run anyway, however, what I do personally find bad about this kind of a competitive idea is how annoying competing it would be in it, the way as the leaderboards are right now depends on how good the player is combined with a lot of luck factor, a leaderboard like that would be less so much about skill but even more about RNG, you'd think that getting a significantly higher chance of makeshiftape in a run would make it less rng reliable (or for that matter push for lower times, which if you consider that, yes it's true) but all it would do is make for a very annoying thing to compete in, it would now not just depend on a person getting the right guns/items and generations, but it would fully move over to just grinding out the generations, say someone gets an 8 minute run but didn't get the right generations, they now need to not try to get better but just grind until they find the right generation to get an unbeatable run, or get very close to such a run. I personally find the competition of full RNG combined with a very hefty amount of skill involved much more interesting and more "skill" dependant for that matter, I would rather run a completely rng scenario with guns and generations, than to have to grind one exact thing to beat the record. What I love about the current way it is is that you can take the record by just having very well mapped runs with good generations or you could just get very good guns and items that would save a lot of time, it adds a variety kind of competition, while competition with the manipulated file would be compeltely dependant on one person getting a good generation or not, there is obviously still mapping skill and not fucking it up but it's not to such degree as the leaderboards right now.
From a viewpoint of a moderator of this leaderboard itself: I think this could make for an interesting extra category similar to "boss rush" but it would have just the normal categories inside of it as subcategories (1char any%, 1 char hell% etc and have their turbo counterparts), I'm interested in seeing people go for ultra low times. However I do think it would yet again clutter the leaderboard way too much (similar to what happened with turbo mode coming out) considering that we would either have to do what I suggested, which in of itself isn't that clean, or have to add it alongside normal or turbo which would make it absolutely atrocious looking. Something like a google docs leaderboard could probably be done for this but then it would remove the interest in competing in it and it wouldn't have as much of an exposure for others to try it.
As a moderator I will say that I'm indiffirent on this but if I had to choose a yes or no, I would say no to this.
Allowing this would force the game into a much more grind heavy mode, as I said in the post you are just resetting until you get Makeshift+Duct Tape pre-boss 1 maybe boss drop but that would be the latest to get it. Once you do you just grind out the perfect maps, just as you mentioned. As I said my goal of posting this was to show everyone that this was a thing, how to catch people who do it, assuming its banned, but more or less I would love to see this as its own category, as it is honestly the best way to teach you the map generations, who cares about enemies if they all die in one hit from makeshift.
The number of categories is a different issue in its entirety and if it were me I would take a big axe to all the categories that noone runs, trim the fat if you will; for example coop is such a niche category, just make it one Coop Any% category forget the other ones, that drops about 10 categories that have been empty since it was opened right there.
