One of my viewers compared the two runs I did today and noticed the minecart minigame path was identical (until a point where I made a different choice and ended up being 30 seconds faster). I looked at all of my runs so far, as well as petriform's WR and Winter_Doggo's most recent run and have what is ... mostly a map of the mine, and yes, some paths lead to less decisions than others. Hadn't seen anyone mention this anywhere so here it is: https://imgur.com/7QOq1BL

This is really cool!! I feel like this could be fleshed out to help out people like me with bad reaction times for this minigame, to include the paths that happen if you choose the bats. It shouldn't be that important now though, since it looks like we can just follow the optimal path (RLLLRLMLLM)!

Oh this is interesting! I've always wondered a bit about if the minecart could be mapped out (and doing that would certainly give a lot of practice for the boss fight in the process), but I never actually got around to doing it. If at some point we could figure out an optimal path that would be pretty neat.

I might maybe look into this sometime

I'm actually going to map out more today (including some bat paths) and I'll update later. I've already found a faster path than the optimal one from the first image.

Edit: Most recent map based on some more testing

Once you get deep enough, it seems like it almost doesn't matter what choice is made. Because of how short the current optimal path is, I tried to focus on the early decisions and I don't think it can get much better if at all.

I noticed some of the options have missing/the wrong names, you can find what each fruit is called here https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Dog_Island/Scent_List

;O Real Cool Development! Thanks for laying the info out all good :>

This is an awesome optimization! But it's got me thinking - can we go even deeper? Some of the branching path animations are significantly shorter than others - the longest I've seen is almost three times as long as the shortest. I wonder if it's possible (or worth it) to optimize considering fewest choices AND shortest animations?

I recorded a playthrough of Phantom5800's fewest-choices route and stacked up the animations I encountered side-by-side. It may not be an exhaustive list of animations that can happen in the mines, but it's a start?

That's actually really interesting, there is one route that has the same number of choices, and a couple that are pretty close, so it could be worth checking out.