Hey sorry about the delay, yeah we don't really have an active community unfortunately, but I'll always come out of the woodwork if it gets competitive!

In order:

• Yes there's a map of the game, I think you can actually find it in the game's files (C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\OVERWHELM\data\graphics\map) mapdata.png should be what you're looking for
• I used to do left side first, but the climb from squid to lizards is slow, and besides that, from a convenience standpoint, spider is a nice easy fight to end on (the bosses all take more hits, may be slightly faster/transition more often the later you do them.)
• The only optimization on ammo is picking it up so that you don't max out, usually that means after boss fights, but not a huge deal, pretty rare that ammo's a concern once you get going.
• Core-run death is forced but it's jank. Hard to practice too because you have to get through a whole run so yeah if you ever figure that one out lmk
• I've found that punch sideways and a little up is very slightly faster (not underwater, but it is more faster when doing it through the wind on the ascent to skullbird.) Besides that there's not much other movement tech, if you're holding down you don't land on platforms you can drop through which helps on the path to lizards, but yeah. Also for minimizing deaths, using the gun to spot crawlers in the dark area is good, but really its just nice to learn the spawns.
• Big timesaves are in optimizing the bossfights, but again this is tough because the fights are slightly different depending on how many bosses you've killed before them. If you experiment with it you'll find that you can get VERY fast fights on basically all the bosses by punching a lot with shooting in between (I've had spider fights with zero teleporting for example) but they all have their own little quirks. Tunnel worm in particular is a nightmare to optimize, very inconsistent where sometimes punching him just kills you for what feels like no reason. I haven't done testing on overheating your rifle, but there are certainly times where you'll want to do more rhythmic tapping, then finish off with a burst (if you know a boss is going to TP away or something, for instance)
• As for known glitches/tricks, there's some fun ones I've found, but nothing super useful. Sometimes boosting in to a charging rhino can send you pretty high up, (not enough to skip bird ascent, maybe enough to skip squid -> Lizard backtracking.) I'm sure you've had it happen where a crawler survives a shot, idk if its intended but its the main reason you'll see me punch more often than I shoot, because it's guaranteed to die. There's some crazy distance you can cover with death warping, but its pretty hard to do anywhere but squid area (it needs more testing, but you basically respawn when you touch certain 'safe' areas, which are definitely not underwater, so for instance if you don't touch any of the islands/sunken cavern and die to squid boss, you'll respawn allllll the way back before the islands.) The last fun thing I know that might be exploitable is this trick I've done on skullbird () but if skullbird is your last boss, you can enter his arena, spawn him, then leave (because the doors open on the last boss) and as long as you're not too fast, he'll travel with you while you kill him. It's pretty dangerous, hard, and you lose the time save from travelling from bird to spider though, so its not really worth it right now, maybe with some crazy route changes or something though.

We'll go ahead and use this as the hub for any new questions though, if you or anyone else have any more, feel free to ask!

Hmm, personally I like the idea of splitting categories, the only weird thing to me is assist mode because that feels like it's own separate thing, but it doesn't really matter because I doubt there's any real time to be saved with assist mode on. Only thing assist mode would help with is ammo (because the save + quit exploit on squid does skip an ammo box.) I really wanna get feedback though so I don't feel like I'm changing the goalposts or whatever

Considering getting rid of the new pause rule and sorting by igt, considering the save + quit exploit that allows players to skip some travel after grabbing a boss gem.

Any thoughts?

There is no 100% AFAIK, I just figured any% was the standard for describing beating the game with no extra conditions.

Yeah, I'm open to discussion. I figured real time was the easiest standard to follow, but in game time offers a few advantages as well, offering in game splits and such, but worried about pausing and such.