Hey! I'm working on routing v1.0.2. Is there any chance you could add IL's for each chapter? Would really motivate me to build up to fullgame runs. My thought would be time starts when the chapter title screen fades and time ends when the next game fades into the next chapter title screen. I have a recording of chapter one I could submit for you to see.

Looking forward to getting into this game!

Hmm, I'm interested in adding any options that would allow people to enjoy running this game. While I would love to just say "Sure!" and add it to the leaderboards, there might be a few problems the community would need to work out first, but it might still work.

Chapter 1 wouldn't have these problems, but for the rest of the chapters, there's 2 main issues. The first one being that you can just grind to obscene levels before starting a chapter, then blaze through it since there's no level caps per chapter, and enemies never start giving reduced experience. If you're willing to, you can even grind up to the actual level cap of 30 and then start from there. The other issue is that there's no quick way to start an individual chapter, other than preparing a save somehow, so making attempts is pretty inconvenient.

There might be some solutions to this. We might need to impose level restrictions for each chapter starting point. The most convenient way for runners is if the modding community was willing to release a version of the game where you could have a chapter-select mode with a pre-made setup for each chapter. Maybe someone would be willing to work on a project like that.

If everyone is fine with just accepting that these problems will be part of the category, or if we could find some sort of solution then that would work.

For something similar, we could easily do something like a Segmented Run category. There you could stitch together attempts of each chapter or each save point as long as you keep the same levels and items between each load. Then you could route out each segment and redo each portion until you were satisfied.

I'm glad you're interested in running the game! Let's try and find something that would work best!

Ah those are great points, I hadn't considered people just power-leveling prior to a chapter! Probably because I've mainly been working on chapter 1 lol.

As far as level caps, I noticed that in my first (causal) playthrough, I fought each mob exactly once (i.e. each overworld enemy sprite exactly once), and I found the difficulty to be fairly balanced. That could be a potential reference for what levels the characters might be at when each chapter begins, and so could serve as the level caps for starting each chapter.

The added difficulty of modding pre-made setups for each chapter (besides the actual programming involved!) is that there would need to be a discussion about which items and equipment and how much money you'd have at the start of each chapter. Still doable, but requires a lot more discussion.

Segmented runs are also an interesting idea. It could potentially fall into the same issues (power-leveling, item stocking, etc) unless it's specified that the segments must come from the same overall run. In other words, you run chapter one over and over until you're satisfied, then save and run chapter two over and over /from that save/ until you're satisfied, and so on. This would be easy to verify too because the exp, items, money, etc at the start of a chapter would be the same as the end of the previous chapter. And as you say, it could even be segmented from save to save rather than chapter to chapter.

And of course like you say ultimately it's a community decision, just throwing out some potential ideas on how that could work. On a different note, do you play on steam? I'd love to play on v1.0.1 as well so I can make runs in the same category as you, but I'm not sure how to change versions on steam!

I did downpatch my game on Steam. A while ago they made it harder to do for some reason, but I used these guides and eventually got it to work:

XeroGoFast's guide for downpatching Hollow Knight https://www.speedrun.com/hollowknight/guide/jlten

a more general guide for downpatching on Steam https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1086279994

The easiest way right now is to buy the game on GOG because they let you select whichever patch you want to play instantly. EDIT: actually GOG might only let you switch patch versions if you've already had access to that version at some point? So if you buy it now it might not let you switch to 1.0.1 sorry!

For now, I've added in Segmented run categories for each type. The idea is that it pretty much must all come from the same run, and load-> next save seems like the most convenient type of segment to work with. Each next segment would need to have the same items, exp, money, equipment, etc. that the previous segment ended with, which is pretty hard to do in a game like this in any other way than just going with the same starting file all the way through.

The only thing is that a full run couldn't be submitted until it's actually fully completed. You could still break the run into a ton of individual videos and submit the parts all at once though. I've seen segmented runs where a runner would work segment by segment, and release individual videos on Youtube whenever they finished a segment or a group of them. That might be a good way to keep making videos while working on a long segmented run.