JapanWe need a moderator who can verify seeds on Mac.
It seems that seeds are OS dependent and I don't have access to a Mac computer so I am unable to verify seeds from runs on a mac.
Any volunteers?
No, API gem core actually does some pretty radical changes to the game and can cause numerous unintended glitches and bugs that could be favorable for runners using that mod.
For custom world presets any changes are ok.
It helps to list your changes in the submission notes though.
steam/steamapps/common/Don't Starve Together/data/databundles/scripts/scripts/worldgen_main
Copy that file out of the zipped folder then open with any text editor.
You'll see this line:
--SEED = 1568654163 -- Force roads test level 3
Delete the "--" of the line and change the numbers to the seed you want to use.
After changing the file save and copy and paste it back into the original folder.
If a run is short enough you can also use rollback to reset the world to start of day 1 on the same seed and show world settings after in the video (this is faster for quick resets).
'Recent patch' (show up as default) and 'Old patch'
But this leads to the exact problem I'm worried about, having two runs competing in the same category where the older run has a distinct advantage. Why would someone feel motivated to grind a PB/WR on current patch with currently available techniques when in a month or two they get put on the same board as someone using a free win glitch from 3 patches ago?
Do other boards on this site have people competing in the same category where older runs have a distinct advantage and there is no way to downpatch? Because the previous patch board still matters and with the game constantly updating, runs today should expect to be put on the PP board later, thus being forced to view them as their competition too.
it would take the same amount of clicks
I'm sure you could just move runs quickly, the issue would be checking if each run's individual seed still works. Even if you argue that old seeds don't need to work anymore for a seeded category to matter, what about the situation where someone records a run then intentionally or unintentionally submits that run after a patch that breaks the seed? Through meta gaming, this could be used to snipe the top spot in previous patch runs by finding a perfect seed and not sharing it until it's no longer working or leads to a run being rejected because the seed can't be verified anymore. I'd argue both of these situations demotivate runners. One "punishes" people for submitting a run early enough to have others use their seed and beat their time, and the other punishes people for unluckily submitting right around the time Klei releases a patch leading to their run being rejected.
Not every change would be obvious either, if Klei adds even 1 new boon to the game, the tables change which could lead to a seed changing but it may not be immediately apparent from looking at the patch notes. We'd have to manually check each run in game to verify that boons/worldgen/etc remained seeded.
preserving old runs is the best policy
Most runs have never been on SRC though. Many well known runners never used this board to begin with. We'd only be preserving the handful of runs that are even submitted, but those are still available on YouTube and Twitch.
While I would love for all runners to start using this site and to be able to use one board as a more accurate snapshot of all runs and how seeing a lot of runs here, we have to be careful that through doing so we don't discourage potential runners going forward.
Luckily, this won't be an issue until 2021 at the earliest and hopefully we get more feedback and suggestions from people and especially other runners. It's not something we need to fix today, and honestly given the rate at which runs are summited (a little more than 1 per month on average) it likely won't be an issue without some huge unforeseen blow up in popularity.
That would essentially require every patch to have it's own board though; creating a massively bloated and hard to navigate board. Plus, given the history of few runs being submitted, many boards would just be empty for each patch.
If we tried to avoid a new board for each patch, we'd have to verify that every seed continues to work each patch for all submitted runs (as Klei is currently making worldgen changes this could lead to old seeds not functioning anymore on any patch) as well as note all techniques/bugs/exploits used in each run and ensure all of those still work post patch. Even with as few runs as this game typically gets, that's a lot of work on the mods every single patch which currently is happening monthly.
Ultimately, the frequent patching puts us between a rock and a hard place. We make the board un-navigable to archive old runs, we dump old runs to encourage new runs on current patch, or we find a way to downpatch and have runners use specific patches to have a fair playing field. This is far from an ideal solution, but it's all I know to do to get it to be a runnable game again (hopefully).
That said, the current wipe that happened was due to shifting the board from unseeded to seeded. Since seeds are now required to be shown, old runs had to be removed as they didn't do this (since it wasn't a requirement back then). I don't think wipes will have to happen that often, but that's ultimately up to Klei until DST becomes a more stable game.
All categories have been updated and reset to reflect the new rule requirements.
Given the impossibility to verify if a run was seeded or unseeded, I've decided to just scrap the unseeded category in its entirety. Thus, going forward, all runs must show the seed used. At the end of the run, runners will be required to open the developer's console and type "c_announce(TheWorld.meta.seed)" no quotes to show the world seed that they ran on. If caves are used you will also need to announce the seed in the caves.
With seeds being shown, it is heavily encouraged for each of us to challenge other player's worlds to get an even better time! Also, if you don't want to run, feel encouraged to share interesting seeds that you find. Seed hunting will arguably be more important than simply running existing seeds as an ideal seed presents a significant amount of potential time saved.
Also, due to Klei's aggressive and frequent patching over the course of the last year, the patch number that you are running on must also be included. This can be achieved by showing the home screen of the game before clicking the "host game" button. Patches may remove bugs or exploits that are used thus rendering some old techniques impossible on the current patch. Until someone shares a way to safely downpatch your game, runs will be removed if a used bug is removed in a later patch.
Also also, due to time constraints (as 13 boss runs were already 10 hours long and now we have 2 additional bosses) and Klei continually adding new bosses, I've removed the all boss category for the time being. If there is significant interest in this category then we can reopen it later. Until then, each boss has their own individual level leaderboard.
I'm as sad as anyone to see the unseeded category go, some who frequent this board may know that I did unseeded speed runs on stream and YouTube. This feels like a lot of my content was just undone, but ultimately, it's for the best. It's been nearly 2 years since I posed the question on the single player board, asking people for a way to verify that a run is unseeded, to which even the developers of the game stated that there is no way outside of the honor system - which, sadly, does not cut it if we want this board to encourage healthy competition.
With all that out of the way, that means each category is now up for grabs. Let's get out there and find some crazy fast seeds and put our skills to the test to save some frames and go quicker!
Requesting super mod for the Don't Starve Series.
Current mod is unreachable and I have several runs for various games in the series in queue for between a year and a month.
The boards also need a lot of work with the last year of patches being completely ignored for Don't Starve Together (i.e. entire characters and bosses are not even mentioned).
Sorry for the repost (posted 2 weeks ago but haven't been mentioned in any of the updates given yet).
I was asked to follow up from this post (https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/k0mb8) and post here.
The mod has been sporadically active, but non-communicative despite several attempts and methods to get in contact over the past year. The main reason for posting is that it's been a full year since I submitted my 10 hour long WR all boss run for Don't Starve Together. I posted a shorter WR 20 minute run 5 months ago to see if maybe they were just too busy (for a whole year) to verify my long run, that has also been in the queue since then.
I'm not sure what is going on, they posted on the forums about 6 months ago then went silent again. They seemed to have verified a couple of runs over the past year but none of mine.
I've tried contacting the mod for the Don't Starve series several times over the previous year. I have had a run pending verification for over a full year now (a 10 hour long run, the games flagship run - all bosses - and WR pace). I have also submitted a different category (a shorter sub 20 minute one) run 5 months ago to see if maybe something happened to the first run. I am getting no feedback from the mod of the board though.
Because I am getting no feedback from the mod and have been unsuccessful in communicating him for over a year now, what can I do? It feels awful to have put months of my life into practicing for an endurance run only to have it completely ignored.
Steps I've attempted:
Tried to contact through twitch - didn't work. Tried to contact through the forums - didn't work. Tried to contact through SR.com messenger - didn't work.
What is my next step in this now over a year long battle? Here's the run in question for those curious: https://www.speedrun.com/do_not_starve_together/run/yv3okqez
"I feel like if you did one and submitted it, they would create a category for it, but historically, responses from mods over here are relatively slower than in other forums I'm a part of."
By slower, oddtom means a loooooot slower. I've had a run pending verification for 11 months now. Basically the mod here gave up, as he basically talks about in another thread on the series board rather than just the DS board.
Basically, I've given up submitting runs here and I just make my own categories and run them for fun. DS and DST weren't made for speed running; patches remove glitches thus making older runs impossible so this board would take a ton of work to keep up to date and one mod alone who isn't that interested in the game can definitely not manage it. It would be a huge amount of work for a game with a teeny tiny player base of speed runners. So my advice, do runs for fun and who cares about the "fame" of getting your name on an outdated and never updated site.
I don't log in here very often but stumbled on this.
You mentioned something about contacting the devs for a solution. I did so here about a year ago:
They said there is no way to do this for don't starve on PC. Bizziboi later added that hamlet was technically not seedable at the time, but it has since been updated and seeds are now consistent.
DST does seem to be less consistent in seeding i.e. suspicious marbles and boons may be different and in different places but the world shape is still the same (which may be why a certain poster has nearly all the single player DS first records and hasn't posted even 1 DST run). That said, the files of DST can still be messed with in many advantageous ways, such as editing drop rates (like 100% lazy explorer from ancient guardian, 2 yellow gems from dragonfly, and an additional eyeball from Klaus being of particular note in a speedrun.) So there is no way to verify that files haven't been tampered with. This is trivially easily done on PC and could potentially be done on cracked/jailbroken console versions too if someone were desperate enough to work that hard to cheat.
Not to mention Klei is still actively patching bugs that are useful in speedruns and adding bosses to DST. With no stable and consistent version for speedrunning one patch may have a distinct advantage over a later patch (for example, in my 10 hour DST run we used a bug allowing for a much faster shadow chess pieces fight which is now patched, that likely saved minutes.) Also that is a 10 hour speed run minimum since bearger spawns between day 74.75 and 76.25. Even if the 10 hour run were popular it all comes down to how lucky do you get on bearger spawning closer to 74.75.
Certain cheats could be detected, but would require a lot of effort on the mods part. Extra damage or reduced boss hp could be checked by watching every fight in detail and double checking the math against how many attacks it takes in game. For every. single. battle. Player speed could be checked with frame by frame analysis for the entire run (as a mod could be made to increase your speed after day 20 by a small amount so it wouldn't be easily noticeable. Could also be made to increase player speed when the map is open making it extremely hard to notice) And certain cheats could never be verified. There is no way to confirm that drop rates weren't changed. There's no way to detect if a world was seeded. There's no way to confirm that random values weren't changed (such as forcing bearger to spawn as early as possible). Even seeded runs could have these undetectable cheats enabled.
Because the files are so open and easily changeable there is nothing we could do. Make a mod for speedrunning to verify files are default? The mod is also open source and could be changed to fake that files are verified. Play on consoles of iOS/android? Cracked and jailbroken versions exist and could be used as a way to alter files exactly like on PC. Show files before and after the run? A mod that hides mods from the mod list already exists and could be used to hide mods that change files during the run and revert them after. The code is just too open and easy to modify.
It feels bad to say it... But I think Don't Starve runs are just dead. They are fun to do, to compete against yourself, but the potential for cheating is just too high and there is NO way (as confirmed by the developers of the game) way to prevent or detect cheats of this nature. I wish I could say anything optimistic for the future of runs since I love this game and had a lot of fun running it, but it's really just not possible to fix.
I strongly suspect that Vanakyria is cheating all his records in Don't Starve.
Checking his account, upon creating an account on speedrun.com he submitted 6 different world record runs on his first attempt. He has gone on to post 17 more World Records in Don't Starve, once in a bulk post 11 at one time, then another 6 at one time. I'd stake my reputation on a gamble to show that Vanakyria is not a legit runner of this game, and that he is merely acting as if runs are luck and padding them out so that they are just close enough to previous records to be believable but not quite enough wrong turns to not be first (for example, both best ending titles he beat by 50 seconds).
Doing research with members of my stream and the Don't Starve community we found a way to seed a run without it being visible at all by the current recording requirements. You can still show world preferences and generate a "random" world for the camera, while the game files are actually loading up a known seed that you have a map for. To the best of my ability we have been unable to find a way around this and actually verify that a run is legitimate.
So we as a community need to find a way to actually verify runs, because presently, anyone can take any record they so choose.
As proof of concept I have uploaded the first (at least first to be admitted) seeded run of Don't Starve. I ask that the mod and any members who check this forum do their best to find a way to delegitimize this run for reasons other than "well you just went in all the right directions as if you already knew." Because, that could still be luck and is nothing but circumstantial evidence. I posted this run on a dummy account to the mod and I'll post the video here.
In an effort to help people find a way to verify runs in the future I will also post how to seed this run in a (presently) undetectable way.
In the scripts folder of your Don't Starve game (or in the scripts folder for DLC1 [RoG] or DLC2 [SW]) open your worldgen_main LUA file with any file read (such as notepad) at the VERY top of the file is a commented out line of code allowing you to seed a world:
--SEED = 372000 -- Force roads test level 3
Simply remove the first "--" to make it not commented and insert the seed of your choosing. This is completely hidden from current video recording requirements.
As for how to find a seed, when opening a random world simply type
print(GetWorld().meta.seed)
and this will give you the seed of that world. By using a mod to reveal the map and show extra icons you can load a random world, quickly check the map to see if it would be good to run, and if it is, just print screen the map follow a believable route through the world, and get a new world record. Similar seeding can be done for adventure mode even.
So again, this post is a call to action. Because as it stands, no record, not even the "slow" runs on this board, can be believed. I've tried really hard to find a new way to verify runs, the things I've tried and why they have failed:
-Showing dev log at the start of the map; this doesn't show that it was seeded in anyway.
-Showing the world generated by going though the platform to world 2; you can change the seed while the game is "generating" the first world and that screen doesn't show a mouse so we couldn't even track it to see that the mouse left the screen to go and change the file back to random.
The only way I can currently think of that MAY work, is requiring DS to be windowed and that you do a screen capture (showing your task bar and mouse). This seems like it would be really invasive though and I may just not be creative enough to show how to cheat this method yet.
So please. If you care at all about the integrity of these runs, @Redlof and anyone else in this community, we need to figure out SOMETHING to actually verify runs.
Actually, after a lot more testing on stream after my record was beaten we found how easily hackable these records are. It's trivially easy to seed a run, including adventure mode. We tested even longer to try to find a way to show if a run was seeded or not but we failed. So really any run could be seeded.
For a lot of circumstantial evidence, go look at Vanakyria's YouTube page, where (s)he has posted world record after world record for all categories in one attempt all done on single weekends and is a new account and has never streamed or been part of the DS community. 6 world records his first weekend after making his account. 11 world records in one weekend later on. then 6 more over the next two weekends. A brand new account posting no PBs and SHATTERING 23 world records in a game that is trivially easy to hack? It's suspicious to say the least.
Honestly all runs should be called into question at this point, even mine (though it was done with a live audience sufering with me through bad run after bad run), it could STILL have been seeded and there's no way to prove it wasn't.
I totally forgot to mention how the clouds turn off both viewers and runners. We need a mod to disable them or to add a rule to prevent zooming out. There's no way a serious runner would give up the tremendous advantage that is seeing more of the world unless it is expressly banned.
Even the people asking me to do this run on stream change their minds within a couple of runs of just staring at the clouds. So it's currently a run that isn't fun to run because it's pure luck and it's not even fun to watch for the people who are interested in seeing Don't Starve played quickly.
It would change the run so much if they opened it to all characters (since character differences give no advantage in one world) and banned scrolling out beyond the point to which the camera defaults.
Alas, unless redlof joins us in this discussion there's nothing we can do?
First, Best Ending should be opened up to all characters. My new run doesn't eat, doesn't fight, doesn't craft, doesn't come close to insane, and only gets hit one time (and that was avoidable). No character has any sort of advantage in Vanilla DS for that kind of run. This shouldn't be different categories, just maybe a little note on which character was used in a run and perhaps a filter to show runs for a specific character. This make no difference to WR attempts while also making the game more appealing to people who have a favorite character outside of Wilson. I also think that this should not be our first tab run given it's sheer luck nature.
Second, Unless we brainstorm out a better category, at the very least adventure mode should become our first tab category. This is the most skill dependent category we have and maybe pushing it into the spotlight would incentivize people to actually submit even one run.
Finally, some suggestions on alternative categories:
Hat Trick: Same as best ending, but escape 3 times in a row on the same file.
Why?
By having 3 successive runs, we mitigate a lot of luck without removing it. Same principle used in card game tournaments. More games in a single match helps mitigate the chance of a highly skilled player losing due to a poor draw as a poor draw is statistically improbable 3, 5, 7, etc times in a row.
Furthermore, this run would be shorter and thus less of an endurance slog than the current adventure mode (3 easier worlds vs 5 more difficult worlds).
As for rules, character choice would be a factor again as a sheer luck do nothing but walk world 3 times a row is statistically improbable. If true balance was desired it would have to be limited again, but I propose that this level of balance isn't even needed. This isn't a hyper competitive game and would likely have very few runners. If it did become competitive and was getting more submissions than splitting categories would be needed but would be messy. (Also the most consistent run for this would very likely be Wickerbottom as she can most easily create a diving rod but this is saving a few minutes on a run that very likely would be over 2 hours. World gen would be a bigger factor than Wickerbottom's minor advantage.) So I say, open it up to all characters. Also, no mods of course.
Seeded Adventure Mode. This one has been mentioned before, but it would require an entire special made mod to make happen. So this suggestions is more of a dream as I personally don't have the modding skills required to make it a possibility.
Why?
If we hosted an official mod, that gave all runners the same 5 worlds, this run becomes less about luck and more about memorization, routing, and skillful execution. This would essentially be an entirely new mode modded into the game. This would be similar to runs in subnautica; a world you can learn the layout of while still having some luck to keep it interesting.
Those are the best two that I can think of. One to mitigate luck, and the other is kind of a pipe dream.
While these runs are pretty much dead now, it's actually a good time to start making this game more inviting to runners. With the Hamlet DLC announced for single player, we'll see more people playing and watching Don't Starve soon. I feel the best way to do this is move our focus from sheer luck runs to skill based runs. Adventure mode and/or hat trick should become our focus in my opinion.
Let me know what you guys think below. Would you rather let DS stay as a luck-only game or see us push a more skill based category before the release of Hamlet stirs up more interest in our game?
