Hi Dimarx, and anyone else browsing these boards,

I am not sure of the current community interest in running this game, but a new any% submission (rejected today due to non-working video) prompted me to post in the hopes that someone is interested in cleaning up these leaderboards and creating some new category definitions. There have been some major game updates since all of the current leaderboard runs were verified, to the point where I think the older runs maybe should be archived or removed. Of course - it sucks to have an empty leaderboard, so it would be best if we submit some new runs!

I don't have a ton of time to undertake this project, and have mostly moved over to running SMO, but if someone has a great idea for a category maybe I'll do a run or two to fill out the boards. If anyone is reading and is interested in reviving these boards (Jma777?), please let us know and we can figure out the best way forward.

Thanks, w

Hey Dimarx:

I'm open to different characters becoming categories of runs for sure. It definitely feels like, as character balance gets tweaked, one or another will be the best, and it is maybe a bummer to restrict runs by default to that character. Similar games have broken characters out into categories as well.

I do think we should perhaps pick a "main" category for the game before doing this. My preference would be for any% deathless, as the any% routing where you just die immediately in every level makes for a fairly boring run. I feel like this should be decided on - even if just tentatively - before adding character categories because splitting the current 3 categories out into the 6 characters would mean making 18 categories for a game where like 5 total runs have been completed so far.

On that note, I'd be happy to hear some ideas for other categories to be added if any seem more compelling than any%/any% deathless/weapon%.

Hi folks,

I've approved both runs pending verification. Sorry for the delay, have been quite busy IRL post-SGDQ. I will likely not be very responsive over the next week but I plan on picking this game back up once those things are wrapped up.

Now that a couple more people have done runs of this game, I wanted to run a couple things by people:

• Should I remove my own runs since they were done on a previous version? The mardokh fight had less health and the character balance was quite different. Should we have a requirement that "all runs must be on current version" until the game has a final release patch?

• Should we require or ban things like running on fully/partially unlocked save files? For endings requiring killing mardokh, some cooking recipes might end up being optimal routing. In general, other games of this type -- e.g. Isaac, Necrodancer -- generally play on fully unlocked save files, but I could also see a requirement of playing on a fresh save depending on what folks prefer.

• Given my IRL stuff lately, I've added Dimarx as a mod as per his request. It feels moderately silly to have 2 mods for a game 3 people have run, but hopefully things will grow :)

That's all I've got for now. The version difference thing is my main concern. My inclination is that my runs should be removed, but curious to hear thoughts. Thanks!

i all - been a roguelike speedrunner/racer for a couple years, and wanted to see if Moon Hunters worked as a speedgame. Have been playing it casually for ~30 hours or so now, so I felt like my game knowledge was decent enough to put in a few attempts.

Here were the final run times:

Any%: 4:00.82 Deathless%: 6:06.24 Mardokh%: 8:27.48 Weapon%: 8:20.72

To clarify what the categories mean:

Any% is about what you'd expect: finish the game in any way. Basically this meant checking the sculptor for the early mardokh encounter, dying immediately in every zone, then getting the moon ending. It may turn out to be faster to skip the moon tiles and just die to the weapon. Ultimately, optimizing this category would mean finding a seed where the early mardokh encounter was directly accessible from spawn, which is a pretty boring thing to reset for.

Deathless% attempted to solve the problem where dying is faster than actually finishing zones, so I had to get to the end of each and camp before progressing. The same sculptor-> early mardokh strategy was used.

Mardokh% meant killing Mardokh without doing the secret weapon encounter (so no moon ending, which I felt was anticlimactic and reduced the overall interest of the run). This is the only category where finding the sculptor in the first zone and reading the clue correctly wasn't needed. It was ok, but it's kind of boring not to have that pressure. (I didn't include this one in the leaderboards here, but if others disagree we can add it. It just didn't seem mega-compelling compared to the others.)

Weapon% meant finding the early mardokh encounter and killing the secret sun cult weapon. I thought this was the best category. It also included the deathless restriction, to avoid the whole dying-immediately thing. This category forced some upgrading of stats to make the weapon fight go faster.

Curious if anyone else has attempted a run yet, and any thoughts on the various potential categories!

Overall, this experiment wasn't really compelling enough for me to want to do too many more runs. It's unfortunate that the speedruns basically consist of skipping every enemy, ignoring events/merchants/opals/etc which are the things I really enjoy about the game. But I can't really come up with a good category that would avoid this problem without being just crazy RNG-reliant. The one thing I can think of that would rely on events is the seduction ending, but it would be insanely sped up by finding the random mermaid event, and grinding resets for that encounter seems super boring. I'll probably revisit speedrunning this game as more patches and content come out, but it may just not be the type of game that lends itself well to speedruns.