I've been reverse-engineering this game and I decided to look into exactly how the secret knock works to see what makes it so tricky. I thought folks here might find that interesting as well. I made a video with details and examples which I'll link at the bottom, but to summarize:

• All timing is based on the first knock, NOT the time between knocks.
• Each knock has a 7-frame window, up to 3 frames before or 3 frames after the ideal frame.
• Knock #2 should come 18 frames after knock #1, #3 should come 29 frames after #1, #4 should come 39 frames after, and #5 should come 55 frames after.
• Timing is based on when you press the button, not the animation or sound.

Here's the video with visuals and examples of different knock patterns:

If people don't like the idea of 100% spawn, what about a mod that would tell you if it's there earlier? If I recall correctly, the game rolls to see if it should spawn the moon as soon as you enter the forest, so you could have a mod that would pop up a "no moon" message right away. Then you could reset immediately without having to run all the way to the other side of the map to see if it's there. Might be a nice middle ground option.

I haven't played the game in a while, but you guys' recent glitch-hunting threads have reminded me of some research I did into the game code last year that I never shared.

• @H1atus, your guess about how the flying/gliding glitch works is exactly right. One interesting thing is that once you're flying, if you hold back instead of forward, you'll get the speed of going down the hill + the speed of gravity, so you'll go down super fast. One place I thought this might be useful is underwater, because it takes a minute to slowly fall down the pit into Suburbia. If it was possible to get up one of the inclines on the side, you could turn around and run backwards off of it to fall very quickly. I tried this a couple times and couldn't get it but I didn't put too much effort into it.

• The thing that makes the river skip so tricky is that the far bank of the river is technically too steep for you to stand on, so you should just slide off of it into the river, which is what happens most of the time. As far as I can tell, when the trick works, what's happening is that you're actually clipping into the river bank just enough to trick the game into thinking you're standing on it. It pushes you back out after a couple frames and you start to "fall", but because of the flying glitch you can fly up to the top. One thing I wondered, but never tested, is whether the trick would be more likely to work at different framerates. For example, since theoretically you would move more from one frame to the next at a lower framerate, maybe you would be more likely to end up inside the river bank. Or it could be the opposite; maybe it's easier for the game to tell you're trying to cross a solid object when you're moving in large chunks and small movements at a very high framerate would be more likely to slightly clip you into it for a frame or two before the game notices. Or physics could be on a timer and the framerate could have nothing to do with it. It would be interesting to test, though. For reference, my success rate on the river jump was ~15% playing at 144 FPS.

• The moon has a flat 10% chance of spawning each time you enter Autumn (so if you had some way to know if it was there to start with, you could just back out and come back in over and over until it spawned). This is actually why I stopped playing the game lol. I really wanted to get sub-40 in All Endings No SLA, but my last run was so lucky only falling into the river once. When you combine the 15% chance of making the river jump, plus the 10% chance of the moon actually being there once you make it, and then ANOTHER 15% chance of making it over the second time for the wine ending, like 99% of your runs will die somewhere in that sequence, and I didn't have the patience to keep trying. I actually considered the possibility of making an SRT that would tell you if the moon was there as soon as you entered Autumn so you could reset immediately instead of having to throw yourself into the river several times before you found out, but I didn't know if people would feel like that was cheating.

• I never tested this either, but it looked like fish have a 1/500 (0.2%) chance of being attracted to the fishing rod per frame, so I think you'll actually catch fish faster on average at higher framerates.

I didn't realize it had already been decided that nothing past GL tool would be allowed; that pretty clearly excludes this. Either way, it seems unanimous that this is not something people want in speedruns. Since only the Japanese and Taiwanese PC versions are on the leaderboards, maybe what I'll do is release something that only supports the English versions of the game. That way people could still use it for fun but it wouldn't be available for speedruns. It would save me some work anyway.

I appreciate everyone's feedback.

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the GL tool. After watching runners reset or lose runs over and over on other RNG parts of the game, I began to wonder if it would be possible to make something like GL tool for those segments. So, that's exactly what I did. I made a demo video showing what the tool can do: . You can see I'm playing the English version of the game in the video, but it has preliminary support for other versions of the game, including the Taiwan version.

I recorded that video around 6 months ago. I've been sitting on this project since then not sure what to do with it. I understand that GL tool was controversial when it was released, and this takes that concept to the extreme. I asked in a Twitch chat if the speedrun community for this game would be open to a tool like this and the results were mixed. Some people thought it would be nice to see fewer resets, but others (including the runner) said they would not want such a tool in runs.

As you might expect from the author, I'm not opposed to seeing this used in runs. The tool doesn't allow you to make anything happen in the game that couldn't already happen naturally. I see it as just eliminating a bunch of runs that never would have been submitted anyway because you reset on Aqua Cure or a 6-change music box or something else you had no control over. I understand a lot of people won't agree with that, however. Personally, I would like to release this regardless of whether it gets used in speedruns. I think it could be a fun thing to mess around with in a casual playthrough, or maybe it could be used in practice even if it's banned in submitted runs.

The potential issue if the community does decide that this isn't allowed in runs is that I don't think it would actually be possible to tell if someone was using it or not. I don't know how you would tell the difference between someone getting legitimately good RNG and someone locking the RNG outcomes ahead of time with this tool. What I want to avoid is a scenario where I release this tool, the community bans it in runs, but since no one can tell the difference it gets used in runs anyway, and now no one is sure which runs are legit and which aren't.

With all that in mind, I thought I'd post the video here and ask for people's feedback. Would you allow this in runs? If not, do you think it would be directly harmful to RE3 speedrunning if this was available? I'm not a speedrunner myself and I don't really participate in the community, so I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.