With DF hinting that it'll come to Steam, I'm wondering if we'll see a spike in popularity! With that in mind, I wanted to discuss making runs more standardized and/or accessible.

Sorry this isn't more organized, but I have a bunch of thoughts on these things:

A. Do runs have to act like you've opened the game for the first time? In other words, can you use saved parameter sets for world gen? Can you increase frame rate before your run even begins? Both of these represent big time saves; I have an old run of 23.83s with these tricks... but I never submitted because I'm not sure it's in the spirit of the rules.

B. Should loading times be counted? Counting loading times makes speedruns a little less accessible because slow computers take longer... but the game isn't terribly demanding to begin with. Maybe the best option is to time the game from "striking the earth" to crumbling? You could even start counting frames instead of timing (if the times become short enough).

C. How should different versions of the game be accounted for? (matters more or less depending on A and B are addressed)