Fun and potentially useful stuff lightningkatana / me / itscolby found while running this game for a day:
Start-Button Cat: If you click on the start button around this spot, your cursor will instantly land upon a cat and you can click it right away. There is a delay before you can actually click, so a way to consistently get this cat is just to double-click on it after clicking the play button. If you miss, just hit ESC and start over until you can line it up. Free cat.
Counter-Cats: There are two cats hidden behind this counter that you can actually click while the counter is covering them. No need to move the counter until you can see them. The exact location will depend on how you panned your camera, but if you pan all the way down from the start, they'll be approximately at these locations.
Cat-Panning: Panning the camera will often lose you time due to spending time panning, and it also makes it hard to be precise after the pan. For these reasons, you'll typically want to limit your pans to as little as possible. However, when you are forced to pan, instead of panning by clicking somewhere on the screen and then dragging, instead use a cat to click on and then drag. This will combine both actions (panning + clicking a cat) into one and save you time. You can further optimize this by doing line-ups with your pan-cat, ie dragging the cat 40% of the way up the screen in order to get the resulting pan screen to be at the exact location you want it to be at. It's theorized you could maybe do multiple cat-pans in order to group the cats more favourably and optimize your route.
Buffer Clicking: At the start of the game, there is a slight delay before you can click on a cat. If you right-click and then left-click, you can click on the cat slightly faster. Useful if used in conjuction with Start-Button Cat.
Zoomed Cursor Teleport: This only works if you have zoom set to 3x. The zoom-in animation is slightly slower than 2x zoom, but the zoom out animation is instant, and when you zoom out, your cursor will "teleport" to the same point on the screen as where it was while it was zoomed in. You can click on cats while the zoom-in animation is happening, and ideally you find a line-up where when you zoom-out, you can instantly click a cat wherever your cursor lands. When you zoom-out, your map will also pan up to the very top, meaning you can click cats + teleport cursor + pan up all in one action.
A video from lightningkatana of an example of how it works / could be used
Horizontal Aimlock: If you hold down left-click, your cursor locks onto the x-axis, allowing you to "draw" straight lines left and right with ease. This makes it very easy to quickly hit two or more cats that are horizontally adjacent to each other. It also makes it much easier to hit pairs of cats that might not look like you could draw a straight line to. Example shown. Normally 57>39 requires you to aim slightly up and to the left, but you can aimlock 57's head and easily touch 39's feet.
The route I used:
Wow, these tips are actually incredible. I might do a few more runs now.
Also, I noticed if you have the DLC level, the instant first cat doesn't work.
Question: I found sometimes the camera immediately zooms into a location (without the zooming transition) if i scroll at the right time before hitting play. This doesn't help with your route, I'm just curious because it's happened to me a lot.
Yup, start-button-cat doesn't work with DLC button, but it does allow you to start on another cat still if you want to try routing it that way or just take the free cat and start somewhere else.
The immediate zoom I've never had happen to me since I never zoom to start my runs, but a big part of the reason I start in the middle is because of start-cat and because it would take time to move to the edges or zoom in elsewhere. Might open up some routing (especially with zoomed cursor teleport) if you could somehow choose somewhere to instantly start zoomed in.
Something interesting I found is occasionally when I was mashing esc and restarting (especially after completing a run), the leaderboard would pop up but the cat image would also show up behind it and you could start clicking cats through the leaderboard even though there was no timer and the leaderboard was still on the screen. Don't know if you can glitch it somehow to pre-select a bunch of cats or maybe even all of them while no timer is running and have the game recognize them.
Updated path I used for my 43.405 time:
I mostly just used start-button-cat, cat-pans, and counter-cats for this run. If you're looking to get a time around 50-60 seconds, you can get there by just cleanly and accurately clicking on cats one-by-one and stopping on each one as long as you don't miss many.
I think this route is decent but it's just what it naturally evolved into after taking into account my own strengths / weaknesses / preferences and I definitely think you can beat my time with other routes. One tip I can give with routing is to just continue to identify problem areas and sections you're slow in and see if you can change the order of the cats to make it more consistent and easier for yourself.
One example of this in my own routing is at the bottom left I used to do [8>25>56>35], but I would often miss since I had to do a kind of precise triangle pattern and then flick right and slightly up to the cat on the bike wheel. Once I changed it to [8>56>25>35] instead, it immediately felt way more natural and I could get through that section quickly more consistently. The reason for this is because [8>56] and [25>35] are straight vertical/horizontal lines so they aren't nearly as hard to quickly line up and click.
General tip for lowering time:
If you're looking to get closer to sub-47 or so, you need to start clicking on cats and then immediately moving onto the next cat without waiting for the confirm (the meow / blue fill-in). If you end up missing, instead of staying in one place and trying to mash left-click until you finally get it (loses you a lot of time), just continue as if you never missed and click the next cat right away before immediately flicking backwards to the one you missed.
Trying to keep that fast pace does a few things for you:
- you get better at going fast
- you get good at quickly correcting misclicks
- it conditions you to just go quickly and not take your time (especially for sections that are hard for you and make you want to slow down)
- i find i'm actually weirdly sometimes more accurate if i just full-send it rather than take my time even if i think i'll miss
Get used to going fast and you'll eventually adapt and get faster runs more consistently.
