Going over the rules, I see that mods understandably are not allowed. However, I do not enjoy the idea of randomizing pawns until we have decent ones.

Perhaps a standard could be set using the Plan Carefully mod. This way run starts could be more standardized, and based on pawn point values instead of pure luck or just good map seeds.

I have considered this possibility more than a few times, but no. Prepare carefully not only allows for the creation of unfair “perfect” cyborgs that might be never generatable by the game, but allowing any mod also puts god-mode type control of the game into the hands of the mod author (who may release new versions at any time), and that’s just a disaster for a speedrun site. We can choose to trust the game creator. But we do not have the resources to monitor mod authors and check the source code (if released) for secret exploits and the such. There is also the possibility of counterfeit mods, which is impossible to verify from a video.

The rules currently allow you to stand there for hours just hitting “randomize” without punishing your clock (as long as you don’t cut the recording), and apparently, the new release (beta19) also has relative stable and reproducible pawn generation from a world-seed. The current scheme may be inconvenient, but it is fair.

To speed up practice, you can use devmode/mods to set your pawns to whatever configuration you like, but you cannot submit such videos.