Thanks to @TheDementedSalad we now have an autosplitter for the game! You can find a setup guide for it under "Guides" and some pre-made splits for it under "Resources".

Now that we have a working autosplitter, we should talk about the timing rules for Duckstation. For New Game runs, it starts and ends when it is supposed to (starts upon difficulty selection and ends when Hypnos 3 dies). However, for New Game+, we could not get the timer to start right when we select "yes" to load the game, but it starts 2.1 seconds later. Here are two options for us:

1. Make the start and end times of the autosplitter the official timing points and REQUIRE the use of the autosplitter displaying REAL TIME. Existing New Game+ times will be reduced by 2.1 seconds in this case. This will also eliminate the need to manually retime your runs!!

2. Keep things as they are now.

If you have a run in the Duckstation category, please give your choice between Option 1 and Option 2 below!

Since Duckstation runs are timed in real time, we want to be more precise about the timing so that we can remove any human error from starting/stopping splits. Timing will start and stop on specific frames:

Start

New Game - Time starts on the first frame of the screen turning white after selecting difficulty.

New Game + - Time starts on the first frame of the textbox after selecting Yes/はい to load your save. (https://imgur.com/a/SJaoGz4 is the Japanese text).

End

Time ends on the first frame after the Weapon/Bullet/Condition HUD disappears upon defeating Hypnos 3.

We will be retiming existing runs over the next few days, which will take some time, so please be patient!

It is strongly suggested and requested that you upload Duckstation runs to YouTube to aid in verification. You can easily get precise timings of YouTube videos using the tool below: https://slashinfty.github.io/yt-frame-timer/