Hello! I'm so excited to see that other people are into running this game. In an effort to compare notes and improve our collective times, I wanted to start this thread (at least as a starting point). I'm just going to toss out some thoughts to get things going - feel free to respond, ask questions, add new ideas, whatever!

• The only real two "skips" we know about so far are 1) the dialogue break right after going underground, and 2) jumping onto the platform in the hall of seekers (to drop the crystal smasher) and avoid having to grab the gate key.

1. I've tried skipping other dialogue throughout the game in a similar manner (but haven't tested all of it - this is on my to-do list), but so far the only other spot that I've found that works is the Right Tunnel dialogue, just before you take the leap of faith. Unfortunately, the path across the gap doesn't become available until after she finishes talking so it doesn't provide any benefit (that I've found).

2. I'm not sure if the lack of invisible walls here is an isolated location, but I'm curious if there are other spots that one could simply jump around to skip. Nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I'd be curious to know if there are any candidates that could be tested.

• I'd love to hear strategies for the Mastermind key puzzle, and maybe see if there's a way to practice it. I got lucky on my timed run and got it first try, but in practice I was routinely having to do 2, 3, or even 4 rounds to get it (essentially just having to wait until I got an easy one). This is only one of two RNG puzzles (the other being the Simon game in the Mechanics room, which good ol' paper and pencil take care of, no problem), so might be worth optimizing.

• The potion you make from the "purple grape" (as I call it) in the garden gives a wicked speed boost. I opted to make and use it for my run, as it can be done with little added time while other plants are being juiced and/or when the test tube is being fillled, but it's really only this once that it makes sense to make it. I used it between firing the battery core mold and getting back to the mine to the empty it, but there might be a better place to use it (I tried making one and carrying it underground with me, as I wanted to see if it would speed up the super slow leap of faith walk across the chasm, but it seems like the game clears your inventory and gives you back just the items you need when you go down. This is why you end up with the blue torch, even if you never picked it up above ground).

Would love to hear other thoughts!

I'd love to hear strategies for the Mastermind key puzzle, and maybe see if there's a way to practice it. I got lucky on my timed run and got it first try, but in practice I was routinely having to do 2, 3, or even 4 rounds to get it (essentially just having to wait until I got an easy one). This is only one of two RNG puzzles (the other being the Simon game in the Mechanics room, which good ol' paper and pencil take care of, no problem), so might be worth optimizing.

I'm a beginner at programming and one of my first few projects they made me do was figure out an AI to solve a variant of Mastermind in as few attempts as possible. I could realistically come up with a reliable method to get that one done but I'm busy with other stuff for a few days.

I'll investigate purple grapes and look over the routing for things myself as soon as I can catch a break... which is probably not soon. I have plenty of interest in this run, I just don't quite have the time.

im in the process of uploading a run at the moment that i think will be bringing some very helpful finds. I found a number of places around the upper portion of the island where you can climb the terrain and jump around above various places. So far I have found ways to get to half of the locations in the aboveground portion of the game without having to do their respective puzzles, but since most of these locations are locked from the outside, most of the routes ive found are not helpful. I did however find 3 climbing routes that together I would estimate save around 6 minutes. In the order they appear in the run, one gets to the battery that you normally need to gear key to get to, before even going to the alchemy lab. The next one gets me out of bounds so I can run to the alchemy lab without having to do the skull puzzle or ride that slow ass boat (I thank zzymyn for originally finding the way back in bounds and into the alchemy lab). the last climbing skip is probably the most useful, and the most simple. By jumping onto the fence on the summit, you can get behind the box that contains the lense, and grab it straight through the back of the box. This skips not only the need to open the mirror on the summit and shine the right light at it, but it entirely cuts out the need for alchemy lab 2. If anyone is interested i could make a video showing some of the places I've figured out how to skip to with climbing, and maybe someone else can find use for them that I couldn't, cause there really are a lot of places that you can get to immediately after opening the first door at the start of the game, but they're mostly locked from the outside. Great to see some other people interested in the run!

TheIdiotNinja: All sounds great. I'd be interested in even just a small tool to allow practicing the Mastermind game, as per the rules in Quern (my understanding is that traditional Mastermind allows for duplicate values in the answer, which the Quern version does not. This changes the rules enough that the online guides/versions of the game I've found are different enough that using them for practice doesn't really help).

gigafreak2: Does skipping the gear box to get that battery early save time? You still need to climb the ladder early for the lever that opens the battery room, and having the stairs behind the gear key box open makes grabbing the last quarter-circle-key piece from the water a lot quicker.

The other two sound very promising though. Not having to ride the boat would mean skipping the skull puzzle and skipping the lever in the chest/the two keys to open it. Also, depending on where the OOB starts, there might be some routing implications as well (e.g. could delay the orange torch/tower console puzzle if you don't need to keypad for the door down to the beach/forge area). As for grabbing the lens from behind the box, are you able to do this without triggering the dialogue with Gamana? It seems like these two have the potential to save well over 6 minutes potentially. Awesome finds!

I think a video - of all of the tricks you've found - would be awesome.

I believe skipping the gear box saves about 30 seconds just because it allows me to use the key somewhere where it's less out of the way, but i do still use the key later for the convenience with the quarter key. And yes the lens skip avoids gamanas diologue, it's very convenient and not very hard to pull off. I'll be sure to get to showing off some stuff I've found sometime soon

Just saw the video - well done!

Hi all, great to see more people running this game. I found a bunch of out-of bounds and other bugs when working on Any% before I found the save & quit stuff.

Best I found was this one. If you're OK with full-on out-of-bounds, use version 1.0.1 because you can get access to all the part 1 items by jumping out into the water, video:

For part 2, in the Spirit Corridor there's a section of wall with no collision, you can use this to skip a ton of Part 2:

However, not sure if this is really in the spirit of what you're looking for for this category, but I'll leave the rules for this category up to you runners. Let me know if you want them changed.

Thanks zzymyn - and thanks for moderating!

I think grabbing all of the part 1 items in the water, in my mind, would not be in the spirit of this category. If there's general agreement around that, I think it might be worth just categorically stating in the rules that you can't use any of the items from that location in a run under this category (but I'm happy to discuss if anyone feels differently).

I have less of a problem with the spirit corridor skip, but there does seem to be a difference between utilizing the terrain, as constructed, to get over barriers and access new locations (as in gigafreak's latest run), and finding a spot where the devs just forgot to add collision. I can check later to see if this collision is still missing in the latest version (1.1.4, I think?), but if it has been patched we may need to have a larger conversation about allowable versions. Just in case folks are curious, this would skip ~7.5 minutes of the run.

In short, I think grabbing all of the part 1 items is out for me, but the spirit corridor wall skip (again, depending on versions) is similar enough to other OOBs we're doing now that I'd be fine with it included.

I whipped up a website to practice the mastermind key puzzle: http://zzymyn.com/quern/

If we're deciding to stick with the most recent version of the game it isn't actually possible to grab the items from the debug area. Despite being out of bounds, it is heavily sealed off and I don't see any possible way of getting through it (except the save and load glitch that lets your camera pass through the wall). Little follow up on when I said I'd record some of the intense parkour opportunities I've found. I'm curious if there's specific interest in certain areas, cause I don't think it would be terribly productive if I just made an hour and a half long video of me wandering around the map to all the spots I've found. I'll list some of the places I found ways to get to early and maybe people can isolate some things that I can dedicate their own showcase to. Places I can get through terrain abuse: -The room where you pick up the red crystal (useless both in the excess time required and inability to leave the room) -Swamp Isles (might be useful but I haven't fathomed any way that it would be faster than just going in with the white crystal in a logical manner) -The Mines (gets you in behind the drawbridge, so it could potentially be used to skip that short puzzle, except you're trapped in there so probably useless) -The Cave (once again, trapped because the batteries aren't in so the area is closed off) -The Summit (I can climb all the from the main square up to the summit without using the green crystal, but as with the swamp isles I can't imagine a way it could be used to actually save time against the original route) -Upper Alchemy lab (with this discovery I made like 10 minutes ago, the green crystal could be entirely cut out of the run. It shouldn't be, because by no means would it save time to go out of the way for all these places that the green crystal can take you in a matter of seconds, but it definitely could be) Other than that the only things that might be worth showing off are a number of places that might lead to routes I haven't figured out yet. Idk, lemme know if any of this seems worth sharing.

Something I found today, just thought I'd add in case anyone is curious. managed to climb on top of the mechanics building. dropping inside just gets you trapped, but from the roof of the mechanics I can get on to the upper area without using the ladder. Could be theoretically useful, but only if it could be managed to get the jumps to get up there consistent enough for it to actually be faster than just taking the ladder, which honestly I'm doubting is very reasonable. Skipping the ladder could almost allow for skipping the alchemy lab entirely, except that the key trapped in the crystal will force you to go there, and also you need the spoon to fill the bucket. If those could be worked around, we could entirely cut out the need to go to the alchemy lab. That's all I've got today. I'll keep updating if I keep finding things.

First off, thank you zzymyn for the Mastermind practice!!! That's a huge help. Quick question: would it be possible to show a record of guesses (or at least just the most recent guess), as well as a counter for how many tries you've had?

gigafreak2: Yeah, none of those locations (that you mentioned in your post from yesterday) strike me as having much potential for time savings. The one place I keep coming back to as being ripe for some skips is the swamp. If there was a way to get up to the pipe puzzle without having to the green light puzzle below, that would be huge. I've managed to get in the water around it (using the same rock climbing that you found for the battery and to skip the boat), but haven't found a way to get back out.

Found a few things too:

1. The wall with no collision in the spirit corridor is still there in the most recent version of the game. The run I just posted includes this skip, which as I mentioned saves a bunch of time.

2. The long, slow, "air walking" that you have to do underground can be skipped by switching to the pot, opening and closing your inventory, and then opening and closing the "tab" menu. You can then sprint across the gap.

3. I'm pretty sure that almost any cut scene can be broken by closing the window and then hitting "no" and "continue." The problem is, it only seems to work once per instance of the game. For example, I can do it when you first meet gamana in the cave, but if I then try it when crossing the swamp bridge I don't get the prompt - the game just closes. Finding a way to "reset" this, if you will, could be a huge time saver.

4. Very inconsistent (and minor), but it seems like jumping into the tower and hitting the elevator button before the tower reaches the bottom can sometimes result in one or both of the levers at the top already being in the down position. Again, can't seem to do it consistently, but seemed interesting.

[quote]Quick question: would it be possible to show a record of guesses (or at least just the most recent guess), as well as a counter for how many tries you've had?[/quote]

Sure, I can try to add something like that.

btw there's a discord for Quern speedrunning I made a while ago: https://discord.gg/pJdTQAT if you're a discord user

Found some useful skips towards the end of the game yesterday. 1) you can run along the invisible walls of the sound puzzle to skip it and go into the library. 2) there's a spot you to jump up to clip through the wall and get on the bridge in that last area, it skips the professors first dialogue and the key, as well as gamana's first dialogue that holds you up on the bridge. I'll upload a run with them soon and you can see what I'm describing.

Couple of small things, both in the second underground room (where you get the first round puzzle/key piece):

1. You can grab the disk in the cupboard through the back of it (similar to grabbing the second lens up on the mountain), which saves a second or two since you don't have to open it from the front.

2. For the spinning/circuit puzzle, the quickest pattern for solving it I've found is two turns to the right for the top two disks, and one turn to the right for the third (from the top) disk.

You can see both of these in the run I posted, around the 30:53 mark.

So Lucky, since it seems you aren't a part of the Quern discord with the rest of us, I have something to present to you here that we haven't made a solid decision on. In a video I'll link at the end of this post I show a method I discovered for skipping all of the end dialogue and cutscenes and such after finishing the library. The issue is that in this method I am accessing something that isn't one of the two canon endings of the game, but rather triggers a for some reason still existing endcard from the beta stages of the game. The discussion that we have yet to conclude is whether or not this is to be considered a valid condition for having beaten the game. zzymyn says he dislikes it since, from a story standpoint, one never really reaches the ending of the character leaving Quern. But as he does not run this category he is also leaving the decision up to the two of us and will accept whatever we decide. I am mostly indifferent as to whether or not we use this skip, as I think that it is entirely fair to discount this as a valid ending and therefore claim that one wouldn't really be finishing the game by using this end condition. But I also would like to hear from you on this, as I'm reluctant to drop a relatively easy skip of probably 3 or 4 minutes purely based on story reasons.

As I said I'm willing to go either way. Let me know what you think.

welp, RIP part 2