Does anyone have suggestions for categories for this game? I have not played it sofar, as it just came out yesterday.

Two Players as separate category? Individual Levels?

Hello,

this thread has two goals. First, I will give a short overview, how you can change your "unlocks"-File, to optimize it for speedrunning purposes. Secondly, I would like to start the discussion, how we want to deal with this as the Kingdom community.

Topic 1: How do unlockable work in the game?

Kingdom: New Lands contains 13 unlockables. Each island has specified list of unlockables. You unlock the next of the specified unlockables by going to a sign post on that island, paying it two gold and then either beating or losing the island. You don't get it, when you die. At the moment I believe, that you always get the same order of unlockables for a specific island, this could however also be random.

Believed unlock order:

Island Unlockable 1st Statue of Archery 2nd Dog => Statue of Building => Superior Horses 3rd Ballista Hermit => Great Stag => Statue of Scythe 4th Statue of Knights => Warhorse => Great Bear => Bakery Hermit 5th Knight Hermit => Unicorn

This means, that to get the Unicorn you first have to get the Knight Hermit. If you don't want to get the Statue of Scythe, you could only unlock Ballista Hermit and Great Stag.

Can anyone confirm this unlock order? There might also be a chance that you get a random unlockable out of all unlockables for the island, but I believe this is not the case.

Topic 2: The "unlocks"-File

This is based on the research of dezimator1337, which can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=750478344. Big thanks to him!

For PCs there exists a file named "unlocks" in the following folder:

Windows: C:/Users/[USERNAME]/AppData/LocalLow/noio/Kingdom Mac OX X: /Users/[USERNAME]/Libary/Application Support/noio/Kingdom Linux: /home/[USERNAME]/.config/unity3d/noio/Kingdom

This file can be openend with any kind of text editor, like Notepad and will show something like this:

{"unlocked":[0,9,10,3,12,1,7,4,2,5,8,6],"recentUnlock":6,"forceRecentUnlock":2,"land":5,"gameFinished":true,"challengeFinished":false}

What we are interested in is the following part: "unlocked":[0,9,10,3,12,1,7,4,2,5,8,6]

Those numbers tell us, which unlockables the player has achived. If we remove or add a number, the specified unlockable will appear in game or it will disappear.

These are the IDs for the unlocks, Pangolin and dezimator1337 found:

0 = Statue: Archer 1 = Statue: Builder 2 = Statue: Scythe (farmer) 3 = Statue: Knight 4 = Superior Horses 5 = Warhorse mount 6 = Bear mount 7 = Stag mount 8 = Unicorn mount 9 = Dog 10 = Hermit: Ballista 11 = Hermit: Bakery 12 = Hermit: Knights

For the string earlier "unlocked":[0,9,10,3,12,1,7,4,2,5,8,6] a possible change would be removing 3 & 9 to make sure I never get dog and knight statue and would look like this "unlocked":[0,10,12,1,7,4,2,5,8,6]

Topic 3: How to deal with this?

There are several ways as a Kingdom speedrunning community to deal with this. We could ban the use of doing anything to the unlockable file. How would we detect it? I don't know.

You could also argue, that basicly for speedrunning the game with unlockables on the long run, people will go for an optimal build by starting a blank game and only unlocking what is really optimal for speedrunnig. This is something we would probably be okay, but it also gives an advantage to those persons.

With the file manipulation you could reach the same game state as doing that long grind. We never would know the difference.

If my assumtion of the specified unlock order is correct, people can also reach a better gamefile by manipulating the game, then doing it by hard work of grinding the game to the best state for speedrunning.

Therefore I propose the following: Players are allowed to edit their "unlocks" file. However the following rules have to be followed:

• The unlocks file must be in an "achievable" state, which you could get by grinding the perfect order. This means that for Baker Hermit, your unlocks file also needs to include Statue of Knights => Warhorse => Great Bear in that order
• If you change the unlocks file, you have to be transparent about this in the submission and also include your complete string from the unlocks file in the submission. This gives everybody a chance to confirm the "achieveable" state

What do you guys think about this?

Hello,

I would like to explain how to time a run for a single island.

Time Start: We start the timer at the moment you can move the Monarch around. When checking a submission I will write down the timestamp of that run (e.g. 12:17)

Time Stop: We stop the timer at the moment when the victory screen shows the da of completion (e.g. 33:55). We do not stop time at the moment of paying the coins. Should you for some reason freeze the game between those moments, you will lose some seconds for the run.

Calculation:

We take the Time Start & Time Stop times and calculate the difference. I normally use a calculator like this one from grun1.com: http://www.grun1.com/utils/timeDiff.cfm This is the time we enter at the video. For the moment, we will recheck times for all top 5 run submissions for a category and edit the times in the submission.

I came up with the rules basicly on my own. I am very open to discuss this.

Do you feel something important is missing. Do we start or stop timers at the wrong moment?

At the moment on the leaderboard all runs are listed in the same leaderboard, despite them using different difficulty levels. I am not sure if a practice run should really be on the same ranking list as a normal run.

Other similar games that have multiple difficulty levels, use one of two approaches for this: a.) Category-Tabs (see the Aladdin Gameboy port: https://www.speedrun.com/aladdingb) for each difficulty level, also naming the categories then "any% practice" b.) Sub-Tabs (see Harvest Moon: https://www.speedrun.com/hmfomt#Marriage) for each level

I think both options would be more easy to understand compared to the current "table attribut" version.

What do you guys think? Or is the difficulty maybe so irrelevant, that it is not worth making it so prominent?

Hello,

coming from watching Harvest Moon speedruns I was a bit surprised about the marriage% category.

For most HM games, the marriage% is split up by potential love interest via the tabs. For example take a look at Friends of Mineral Town: https://www.speedrun.com/hmfomt For SV the category is split up in glitchless and glitch run with the love interest being only a row in the table.

For me this gives a worse overview compared to what I get from HM. I also don't think you should really compare a Shane run to a Maru run.

What do you think?