Hello! So I'm not the only person interested in this game, heh.

Hey, I just saw your message on Twitch, so I'll respond to both of them here if that's okay. TL;DR I used statistics. I submitted the one where I happened to be right three times in a row, but what you don't see is all the ones where I didn't get it right.

In more detail: I live about an hour light rail ride south of Seattle, and every time I rode in to work, I'd make a single run and record what the clues were. I was curious to see if there was a repeating list of clues or if certain clues were used more often than others. In cryptography, there are different types of "random", and some are easier to predict than others. For instance, a truly random number selected from the set [1,2,3,4,5] should result in more or less the same number of occurrences of each, but a truly random number selected from the set [1,1,1,1,1,2,3,4,5] will result in "1" more often than the others, even if the selector is truly random. This seems to be the case (in at least my version) for certain variables (for instance, the number "2" in clues for the first stage seems to be more frequent than other numbers, and certain clues seem to be tied together, for instance, if you see four flounders, you can pass right by it, because I've only ever seen the clue "three brown flounders". I'm sure there's more I'm not catching, but it's basically just using probability based on known data sets.

On a slightly different note, I've never actually seen your version before; I was wondering why you were using an updated program when the original is much easier to find. I've been using the emulator on this site:

https://classicreload.com/treasure-cove.html

I like it because once the game loads, it doesn't require an active internet connection.

For anyone still paying attention to this thread, the video for the run in question is here:

As an added note, I find it interesting that I'm not the only person on the planet that knows about / cares about this game. It makes me giggle a lil' bit, heh.

If I ever get this thing stabilized, I'll make it open source and link it to github or something so you guys can get a piece of this action too.

Hey, yeah, no problem. The program works strictly off of user input, and is no more than a glorified calculator. Whether or not it is "tool-assisted" is the question, I think.

I've actually been throwing numbers into a database for weeks before I started getting results that kinda sorta work, and the one I submitted still had flaws. Honestly, I just wanted to see whether or not it could be done.

See the thread post I made here: http://www.speedrun.com/Speedrunning/thread/0l7sz/1#uw84t

That's about what I figured, but I'm kinda new to this (and kinda love it), so I'm not sure where these lines are drawn. I figured it's a question that a lot more people than I have, but I suppose I'll be the scapegoat who actually asks, lol. Thanks all!

There's a game I'm working on that has random item drops, but if I use a probability density function based on the information given on the first stage (requires a calculator), I can calculate the most likely route in later stages. Is punching numbers into a calculator considered tool-assisted?