New manip strats and draw predictor.
Scotland

New strats first. It turns out I made a small mistake when I was initially looking for decks, and so there are in fact early decks that can get MBD without winning an additional card first. This includes the 14810 deck, but also some very early decks.

There are two main strategies available: go for decks 706/711, or go for deck 14810. TAS speed is about deck 211 or so, to give you an idea of how quick the early decks are.

The advantages over the previous strats are that you do not need to wait for a > 900 card before getting your MBDs, and both strats only involve one "spawn 3d duel" per MBD. A "spawn 3d duel" is when you quit the 3d duel as your monster is spawning in. A very safe time to quit is once the three coloured circles have merged into one white circle. You can save maybe half a second to a second from this, and if you want to then I suggest looking at the seed in Bizhawk and seeing when it stops changing. I also speak of a "quick 3d duel" in the doc, this is just starting a 3d duel and then immediately hammering circle to quit it asap.

So, what are the differences between the two strats? Well, you can look at the three decks here: http://pastebin.com/mUfS08jd/. As you can see, the later deck has Raigeki, Beast Fangs, Sogen, and 2 D/5 T. Meanwhile the earlier decks have Dark Hole, Power of Kaishin, Umi, and 2 D/3 T. Other than that and waiting time for the deck, they're more or less the same: the MBD duels are more or less identical. Edited: it turns out all three decks have three MBD frames to go for, but the 468 duel for the 706/711 decks is slower. There may be faster ways to win on seed 468 with the 706/711 decks, if instead of setting Umi you play a card in defense.

Next, timers. Here is a set of spreadsheets with everything you'll need: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zF3ZuGZrdMOKSG0EDXkvsVWoJQFHW72kllmdZZLPV2g/. If you opt for the 14810 deck and you ran the old strats then obviously no change is needed. If you opt for the 706/711 decks, and you want to aim for 708.5 let's say, then you will want to subtract 235.03 seconds, or 3m55.03s. If you've never done manip runs before, then the sheets given will help you calibrate your timer.

As for the MBD timers, you'll want to aim for 470, so subtract 2.85s.

Now, MBD strats. You'll find them here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13xqZYvL-twV6BrHp21HF1zEohDgoXMDSH5rCBkcSD5o/. As you can see, they're all very similar. I provide optimal plays for each duel, for the ease of newer players who may not know all the fusions to avoid.

So, what next? The next big thing would probably be final 7 manip, then chaining the MBDs together to save on resets. Needless to say, this is a lot of work and it's not good that the community doesn't have the tools to easily work on this. As a result, I am currently spending my time creating a tool to aid runners in coming up with RNG manip strats. No, I don't know when it will be ready, that depends on how much free time I find and how many technical challenges I meet on the way.

Edited by the author 7 years ago
cistine, Spec3x and 2 others like this
Scotland

Which brings us on to the draw predictor. The tool I'm working on now will contain all of the functionality of the draw predictor, so there's no reason for me to keep working on it. As a result, I am releasing it. You can download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q2CTLME7-Q6yy3nO3aqdZkdBxLU_HL8z/view?usp=sharing. It's Windows only right now, but if you're on another OS and want it then let me know. I'm not looking for feedback on this; I already know plenty of ways it could be improved but there's no need to work on this when I'm building the successor. Yes, it's annoying to use, yes, the error messages never vanish, yada yada I know, spare me. I'm mainly releasing it because it's about damn time the community had the means to do verification. I am however willing to help with issues that could come up when using this for verification; see below.

With that said, a quick tutorial. What you're interested in is the .exe inside the folder, I suggest making a shortcut. To recreate a duel, you need three things: the deck, the pre-duel sort, and the seed. By punching in the deck and the opening hand (and more of the first 20 cards if needed), the program will spit out the range of seed numbers that could give that shuffle. Once you have a seed number, you can use the predictor to figure out what the actual seed is (so for example, seed 0 is 0x55555555). To recreate this duel, you then recreate the deck, go into the duel with the correct pre-duel sort, then as the screen goes to black you pause the emulator and change the seed to the desired value (using say Cheat Engine, or the RAM Watch if you're using Bizhawk). There's a bit more info at the start of my Mergy 3:07 doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y_zXISrseL8at2kVssQJBROfYjS1V3WV8swSu30UMuI/.

There are some caveats to this however: the draw predictor doesn't work past the first 10 million seeds, it doesn't deal with random sort, and this doesn't in any way help you check the starter deck. If you're verifying a run and run into these issues, then get in touch and I'd be happy to help. None of these issues are that difficult to deal with per se, just the draw predictor doesn't handle them.

I appreciate that this tutorial was very short and probably not that helpful. If people find this sufficiently unclear then I'll write a better one, but for now this'll have to do.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
São Paulo, Brazil

Amazing work, GMS. Great job redhot and gcah also for trying to complete runs every time a better strat gets discovered as well. Shoutouts to the RNG manip crew, in general, for contributing to make this game faster in more viable ways! I hope campaign MBD gets found so that I can run manip + card cloning US ver. just so you guys can cringe really hard :D

TheRedhotbr likes this
Vermont, USA

Thanks for posting all of this!

I have a question, though: how do I get the 14810 deck?

Vermont, USA

But that's the thing--frame 14810 would seem to demand a precise input window, right? So...how much longer than 5 minutes should it be?

My thought was that, assuming my PS2 processes the game at 60fps, then: 14810/ 60 = 246.83 seconds /60 = 4.1 minutes

^which would mean waiting roughly ¤4¤ minutes and about 6 seconds.

Am I wrong? How does 14810 become 5 minutes?

Vermont, USA

Okay--I will try this. Thanks for the help!

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