I think it's problematic to allow them for 171 Star because the idea of 100% should have priority over a fix star count, and getting those stars in a 171 Star run means that you knowingly fail on getting all stars that are in the game, in a run which intends to show how to collect every star as quickly as possible. At this point, 171 would be an arbitrary number and you just pick whichever stars you like best, in a way, even though I can sympathize with the desire to dismiss coin grinds.

This does make it hard to come up with something that's really different from the current 100% categories though. It seems most reasonable to simply turn 100% NSR into a 173 Star category that allows you to break the game however you want (if we account for this glitch at all) whereas 100% Normal remains the way it is, because that's the traditional way of how the game is meant to work.

That said, the idea to design a category that tries to be particularly enjoyable for runners at the cost of introducing arbitrary rules is fine by me although it's quite unpredecented among the whole community. This is also the concerning part of it, because the general lack of interest and collective effort make any telling on the future of such "designer categories" nearly impossible, i.e. how active they would actually be/how long their hype would last, how non-runners would view them and how they would be moderated at large, including the questions that that leads to, such as what standards the designing processes are subjected to or how conflicting ideas are dealt with etc.

I would like to suggest an update to the current functionality of game series pages. In its current form, series pages have barely any moderative functions, that means it basically just shows all games that belong to the respective series and they simply represent a community via Discord servers, Twitch directories or series forums. It does allow you to add games to the respective series though, which is kinda powerful.

In this fashion, my first suggestion is to give each series a switch that mods of it can use to transition between a "representative series" (which every series currently is) and a "functional series". Obviously, this option could be locked and only available to site staff concerning more important series like 2D Mario or 3D Mario. Generally speaking, the option to actually toggle the series mode could be something that a distinction between normal and super moderators would be useful for.

Here are my ideas for options that a functional series could contain:

1. Feature a button that allows a series mod to automatically add or remove a person as a mod to every single game that belongs to the respective series. This way, a newly added series mod could add themself to every game part of it. (For all intents and purposes, this option alone would already be a tremendous help for my needs.)

2. More extensive than the first option, but at least as important and efficient would be a dedicated page which shows a table of all games part of a series. The left column would display each game while the top row would show the name of everyone who moderates at least one game within this series. The most right column of the top row would allow to enter a username who then becomes part of this table. The rest would basically be a set of boxes which can be ticked to add or remove people as mods from each specific game at lightning speed. By clicking on a name in the top row, you could also have each box be checked/unchecked immediately. And then of course you can save these changes before they actually take effect. Only downside is that it might take a rework of the notification system to prevent spam.

The specific background behind these suggestions is that the series for Super Mario 64 ROM hacks has well over 100 games that belong to it at this point. Nearly every one of these games has fundamentally equal rulesets and, generally speaking, these are hacks, so they basically play all the same. If you know what to do for one game, you know what to do for every other one. Therefore, it would only make sense that a mod of any of these hacks could generally also take care of every other hack, and that's actually how we handle it at the moment. However, there's currently no good option for us to add moderators efficiently. We'd have to manually add someone for more than 100 games at once if we wanted to make sure whoever we add can actually help us out in full scope. Likewise, removing someone would take the same effort, and given that people might quickly lose motivation to verify this many submissions, it would be very painful for us having to replace people at fast rates and not just a single time. It's even worse that the only motivation to add people comes from a lack of motivation of everyone else to verify any runs in the first place, so if that's the case there's no way anyone would feel motivated to add someone as mod to 150 games instead, which can be quite a problematic downward spiral.

I assume you only used the normal leaderboard to make this, which are very unreliable for this, unfortunately.

These are the true progressions as far as I can tell: https://pastebin.com/RVX5ATx4

I sadly can't add sources because that would probably take some hours to do for everything. It's nice to see people have interest in creating such historic documents though!

I'm not sure why you posted this 3 times but anyways, I've added timing rules now. The game name did include a "Super". It wasn't included everywhere, but if you saw the release trailer before it got taken down ( the title probably still shows), you can see that it said "Super Mario Odyssey 64 - Release & Download". And even if you were to say that "Mario Odyssey 64" is still the more accurate title, you can't deny that including the "Super" will make this leaderboard easier to find because then you'll see this result by searching for either of the two titles.

I haven't been involved with this game a lot and therefore can't accurately answer all of this, but knowing that these questions are probably gonna stay unanswered for a while, I'll just give my perspective on this. I did a bit of "research" to get some information that probably gives decent answers to these questions.

I looked at the audit log and the process of creating categories went like this: LinCrash added 8 star and 50 star -> I removed 8 star and added 9 star and 10 star -> LinCrash removed 50 star -> sizzlingmario4 added 46 star and 49 star.

As for the Any% category, I think I added both of those because there was a 9 star run and a 10 star run. I didn't put a lot of thought into that and just one Any% indeed sounds like it's what it should always have been. I assume it's just different routing that resulted in two different categories. I never quite knew the content of those Any% runs and especially not after all these years now, but 9 star is probably the only thing there should be.

I hardly understood anything about these 100% categories either but after a bit of research, I found this message by GmdDoesDMG, which probably led sizzling to add the 100% categories with respective changes: "to those that got pinged, to recap, luigi and the forest ruins 64 needs changed. 50 star is not possible, because of the yellow switch mechanic. it needs to either be 49 star (getting the yellow switch and not the second mips) or 46 star (getting the second mips and having the yellow switch already be pressed) (or have both) unless you can show me how it actually works". To add to this: Apparently the star ID of the MIPS star is equal to one of the stars you get from the yellow switch, so if you get those stars, the game thinks you got the MIPS star and won't spawn him anymore.

The 47 stars <-> 50 stars thing on the fandom page is something different though. Looking at the hack's release trailer, it seems that the very first released version had 47 stars and was followed by a "Revision 1" that had 50 stars. I can very well imagine that the update came very soon after the actual release though.

Where the 40 stars come from is something I really don't understand though. It could be Crash misremembering the star count. I know at some point he put 40 stars for this hack as star count in his list of completed hacks which he also noticed to be wrong after I pointed it out to him. Depends on where you got the information that there would have been 40 stars from I guess. My best bet on this one is that, if it wasn't the mistake I just explained, Crash did some pre-release help for Gael to reduce the amount of coins needed for the stars from 100 to 50.

Anyways, you'll be able to find both released versions here: https://sites.google.com/view/supermario64romhacks

Revision 1 is the 50 star version which I suppose you generally wanna use for this game.

Just reset the game and enter the stage again after you added the cheats. The cheats usually don't work instantly when you add them while the game is loaded.

The run is not on the leaderboard because it is TA (= time attack) and not RTA (= real time attack). This means that the run was done with breaks in it and with the video and final time being cut and adjusted afterwards, although it doesn't mean that the run is "spliced" in the usual sense but something like this is obviously banned for submissions (although that pretty much only counts for the last decade). The practice of including breaks in long runs actually hasn't been uncommon during SDA times, so what Spiderman did was allowed, supported by SDA and has always been known about, although recently, there were people who noticed the video cuts and raised suspicion about the run as they probably weren't quite aware of this. Either way, the suspicions weren't the direct reject reason. To keep it short, TA runs aren't allowed because pieces of the run/video are removed, even if those are just breaks with no action, and it becomes impossible to retrace what really happened within these break times while nobody could exclude the more or less likely case that an actual splice was hidden through that. Spiderman's run falls under that.

Personally, I really disagree that TA runs which are now older than ~5 years, and especially Spiderman's run in particular, should be rejected for a wide variety of reasons, as well as I disagree with even attempting to distinguish between TA and RTA, mostly because TA was very common in the Japanese community too, which, for us, raises a lot more problems than TA in the SDA community, and I essentially see a high risk in unfair treatments through that. However, it was a decision that was made by the mod team and whose reasoning I can still fully comprehend. This is just to illustrate that the removal of TA runs is not as single-sidedly supported as mod decisions always make it seem. Nevertheless, I guess it still is a rather valid anti-cheat measure after all.

Yeah that's basically what you need to do. Here's a lazily made video that shows the skip:

I'm not really sure about adding them. Although I understand why they could be added, they feel a lot more like segment RTAs which generally don't have any official leaderboards. The boss stars basically act like keys do in Vanilla, so adding worlds would feel like having RTAs for lobby, basement and upstairs in SM64 because those are also areas and need a key for further progress to be made. Just that in SM64 you have three of these areas whereas this hack has eight. And besides being on the same overworld, these levels have a rather loose connection and except for the toad house stars, there's basically nothing that truly bonds them together. Additionally, like you briefly indicated by suggesting 4 categories for each world, I do think it would become a very wide block of categories, because those 4 categories per world are more of a minimum that we would end up with.

Either way, I understand the suggestion but it seems rather unfitting given how hack leaderboards are generally structured and given that the levels are largely seperate from each other, while mostly forming not much more than key areas of the game but nothing that could truly fit the category of a "stage RTA" in the broadest sense.

For a start it would be banned (which should obviously not stop you from running if you wanted to anyway), but given that speedrunning on that version finds noticable interest it would be considered to add seperate categories, this happened with SM74 and Mario's Nightmare 64 already. Formerly banned runs would of course become valid at that point.

The hack already has a speedrun.com page, go here https://www.speedrun.com/sm64oot

Stage RTAs of this kind are not meant to be done, there's just no way to remove them for some single star categories individually.

I find it very, very questionable to speak of a "WR" for this, it is literally the bowser fight of the original SM64 with more than negligible changes to it. I mean imagine if there was a WR for every bowser fight in hacks when they are all pretty much equal to each other, it would be ridicolous, not to say silly.

But to actually name a time, I honestly need to admit that I don't know the best time for this bowser fight, the best I know is a 39.96 from ikori for the bowser fight in the original SM64, there might be a better time than that but 39.96 is pretty good already.

https://discord.gg/TsTB9B9

As there have been a couple of category suggestions as well as others outside of this forum, I want to give a small statement about the current suggestions already made in this forum and present the new ones here, too.

We are still quite unsure which categories to add but we do think there should be some more than only the current 3 categories. Discussing the categories ideas is welcome!

Any% NSB: NSB stands for "No Sequence Breaks". The idea would be to do an Any% run but without clipping through walls/objects and without doing death warps etc. Smaller glitches would be allowed as long as you would not go somewhere you are not supposed to be (for instance the quick kill glitch for king bob-omb could be allowed ()). The problem would be to define what a sequence break would really be, for example a simple shortcut which can be the fast route to be bomb defuser powerup or the double lavabounce up to it, it's not a glitch but an unintended shortcut.

All Temple Powerups: In this category you would get all powerups which are not depending on the star count, those would be vc, bomb defuser, super gp, hat throw, fire suit, mc, hover boots, anti-gravity boots, freezeflame, and spin gloves, life trade and lens of truth. The problem would be to conclude if only powerups would be included or also items like the cannon license or the peach letter. Furthermore, it would also need to be clarified if the category would end on collecting the last item, beating the first bowser or beating the second bowser.

171 Stars from finished save file: This category would be quite arbitary but likely still funny. You would start on a safefile that has all powerups unlocked and collect all 171 stars from there again. It would be very hard to define rules and verify these runs though, however it's probably worth to consider this idea.

Low%: This category would basically be Any% except you collect as few stars and powerups as actually required. For this it wouldn't be easy to define rules and it would be needed to clarify if sequence breaks would be allowed or not. If not however, there needs to be an option for what to do when it is figured out how to leave out specific stars/powerups that were required before. You probably only need 10 stars and the bomb defuser or 15 stars and no powerups for low% with sequence breaks though (I'm not quite sure).

30/31 Star: It was requested to have a category which is "escape% but you have to starslide onto the thing, and not the regular escape% route". This requires to at least have 30 stars after all. Personally, this category seems very arbitrary to me, even if it might be fun it is a bit questionable to have a category be focussed on one specfic powerup without deeper reason.

Present Run: This category was requested, it's actually consisting of 2 different categories. One category would get as many stars as possible before going through the Temple of Time into the future, the other category "where you beat all the dungeons and temples you can in the present". Personally, I can see why this category would exist but again I can't really tell if it was a good category (categories) to have.but as I said, it's hard for me to evaluate.

Now that I have presented all current category ideas, I can personally say that I would include Any% NSB and All Temple Powerups but rather not any other category for now.

However, I would be glad to know your opinions before we add any new categories. We will probably not add any new category before tomorrow. Your opinons could make the whole process be fairly easier for us generally.

After all this time we finally got to work on the adding requests. First of all I want to apologize that it took so long, it's just the fact that the "feedback" related to decisions about hacks being on this site has been very negative no matter what was done which has just demotivated everyone and basically made nobody really care about this anymore. When some hacks were added it ended up like "why are you adding hacks with only 1 runner and no competition? That's so retarded" and when hacks were rejected you got to hear stuff like "Every hack should be added so stop keeping them away and do your job correctly!". Those were no direct quotes but pretty much the reactions you got. Anyways I guess it's obvious that if you can decide between two options and both of those are wrong and result in being blamed you can imagine nobody wants to care any longer. However as I said the decisions were made and here they are:

• Bowser's Intense Challenge - Rejected because of missing competition.

• King Boo's Revenge - Added.

• Blue Star Adventure - Rejected because of missing competition.

• Yoshi's Adventure 64 - Rejected because of missing competition.

• Super Mario 32 - Rejected because of missing competition.

• Fidget Spinner 64 / Super Mario Odyssey 64 / Portal Mario 64 - For these hacks I won't be speaking "representive of all series mods", for this I'm going to speak about my perspective on these (type of) hacks generally. Personally I will not add these hacks and even if they got added I would not moderate them (even if I might be modded for them for reasons). However, if other series mods want to add and moderate these hacks then they have all rights to just do that as they want. I will keep myself out of the moderation for these and now I'm going to tell why. Nobody of them needs to add any of those hacks though.

At first one reason is that I do not even see these hacks as real "rom hacks" but instead as "modification". The difference is that rom hacks come up with mostly just new levels, modifications usually only use the original game without changing it majorly and just changing or re-arranging the original. For these 3 hacks specifically (and basically all hacks by Kaze that are like these) you only have the unchanged original with mostly a handful of minor changes, often changes considering the games physics but only one single change. Such hacks do not make up something "new and complete" in my eyes, it's the original + 1 change, not much. And especially as they don't have much to them that differenciates them from the original I personally can't see any sense why they are speedran at all, some of those hacks were even meant to just be horribly bad in all aspects, sure the one or other change is pretty interesting to say the least but after all you just get to play the "same old levels" all over again, if I wanted to play or speedrun it I would just take the original again. And of course you can apply some of these modifications on any other hack it would still end up somewhat dumb, for example if there are 4 categories then there are gonna be 4 more for the fidget spinner mod, 4 more for the odyssey 64 mod, 4 more for the portal mod, 4 more for the releasio mod, 4 more for non-stop, 4 more for multiplayer and 4 more for the chaos mod, then even more for combinations and another infinity of categories for sm64 online as rom hack mod. It would be a complete madness.

Another point is that - even if you can find this everywhere for unoptimized categories - for these hacks there seem to be way more people than usually who just run these people for attention and clickbait etc., of course there are also people who are running these hacks for passion and enjoyment but I hardly see anyone wanting to run them for actually getting a run that satisfies them considering the gameplay, the most only get WR for the sake of having WR and that's it, if even. I see a lot people on YouTube and Twitch with idiotic and attention-seeking titles like for example "WORLD RECORD ATTEMPTS - SUPER RELEASIO 64 0 STAR". It's obvious that for such cases there is no real fun and enjoyment involved, or only as minor parts, pure attention-seeking and the urge to intransigently have a "world record", even if those are not contentested (or just barely contested). And this becomes the main intention for some runners, "main thing is fame".

In my honest opinion, this pisses me off, where everything rom hacks ever meant to be is just thrown away for people running wannabe rom hacks that are literally the original game on an absolute low-effort level to get fame and attention the easiest way. I want to repeat that not everyone who runs or likes these hacks belongs to them but that the amount of people who do is so high is the deal while I can really not see any point in those hacks for the most part.

So as I said, I won't care about those hacks and I'll just let them others take care about such hacks. And at last I also want to point out that you should not blame them if they are not adding these hacks or other hacks, they have no force to moderate and if they don't want to, especially if the responses are as negative as the one I mentioned at the beginning. We have not gotten blamed for being inactive about adding hacks just yet but I believe that if we waited much longer it would have happened.

Thanks for your understanding.

Normally you can go to Options -> Settings -> Rom Settings in Project64 1.6 and set the counter factor to 1 which should minimize the count of slow resets but either way the runs will be retimed so it won't matter if you had a fast or slow reset.

There is now an actual discord server for SM64 rom hack speedrunning, if you would like to join you can do it here: https://discord.gg/TsTB9B9

If you can show how it is possible to beat the hack with 16 stars as a senseful category while beating bowser then I'll be very glad to add 16 star but this is not gonna happen. If you would know this hack which I assume you do not even do you would know that the warp to bowser 3 replaces the cannon on the castle grounds and is not in the normal location from the original, so you either need to get 120 stars and get there or you get inside the cannon with 0 stars doing a very hard trick. 16 Star would make absolutely no sense here.

For the future I really recommend you to get to know how a hack's speedrun category options can even technically work before you request anything. 0 Star and 120 Star are the only categories in this to make sense and there is currently no way this can change.

That one only has a wr history and only includes 70 + 120 star and misses a few times.