Hey, I'm new around here, but I love this game and want to get into speedrunning it, but it seems like all the categories with runs are almost optimized to perfection. So I have an idea for a new category called Lobbyless or something, where you cannot take anything into the dungeon besides your character's default weapon. No beginning chest, no forging Electric Ninja Stars or Trekking Poles or anything. Nothing. You would have to find weapons in chests or buy them from the shop. That way, it would be more like Minecraft RSG speedruns (which is the most popular form of Minecraft speedrunning) where there are tons of strategies and more of a reason to reset besides "I was behind schedule." There would be more risks to take (do I go into this ! room or not?), therefore more reward to be obtained. It just seems to me like there is one set rhythm that you have to optimize to be precise down to the seconds, and creating a new category would open up a lot of possibilities, as well as draw in new people like me. Let me know your thoughts! 😊

I actually did some runs of this category and it was way more fun than normal runs. Dying was an actual risk, I had to be smart about collecting weapons, and I found that berserker was the best option (for me). I think it could be a really fun category.

My rules were the same: you just pick out a character and walk in

Yeah, that's kinda what I envisioned. It opens up way different strategies when you find different guns in the dungeon, and, like you said, many runs are lost to dying instead of being behind schedule.