Hi! So in THE DOG Island I managed to decode most of the fishing system - enough to determine what fish can appear where, their sizes, etc. Turns out Petz follows a near identical fishing system.

How it works is like this: when you enter an area, the pier will randomly choose a fish setup to use. This determines the chances of each fish appearing, if at all. I haven't looked into it much in this game yet, but in the dog island there were almost always 3 setups per pier, and south pawville has 4 setups. This means it actually IS true that sometimes, you'll be able to enter the area with certain fish completely unavailable unless you leave and come back again. (Alternatively, some fish will just be more common or rarer than usual)

I'm hoping to find out which fish are exclusive to setups. So far, I've confirmed that Goatfish is indeed not available in some of south pawville's setups, so there's a free 1.5h timesave on my 100% run right there :P Although it seems like a bit of an issue, perhaps some fish are mutually exclusive so at least you have an indicator when you're on the wrong table. This was the case in THE DOG Island for a lot of fish so hopefully it's the same here.

When doing a run today on my JP copy, I discovered two differences between it and the international versions that would afffect speedruns. Although I've just reported this to the Discord, I figured it would be important to get it down in our forum too.

• When naming your dog at the start of the game, pressing + does not bring you to the confirm prompt, instead just changing your keyboard to Kana. You have to manually scroll there with a left and an up press.
• The Petasi's Goodbye cutscene at the very end of the game, previously thought to be unskippable, can be skipped in the Japanese version, saving time.

With this, the Japanese version appears to save an entire cutscene over the American version. As I only have the Wii version of the game, I can't test this on PS2, but Auaora has said she might be able to help so hopefully we'll have an answer on that front as well.

Edit: Auaora has confirmed that it works the same way on PS2. Edit (27/9/21): another edit just to get in this thread that JP also has faster load times than US, enough to save several minutes. We've known this for a while but. yknow

I remember there being a bot reporting thread somewhere around here for every time we found a bot. I can't seem to see it now, so I guess it just filled up?

I also heard talk of there also being a discord server instead. Or maybe they've added reporting a bot to the site itself since. Could someone fill me in on how this works now?

If I'm understanding right, the next wave comes up when the current wave is damaged around 35-50%. How come a lot of runners sacrifice lawnmowers early in a level then? Wouldn't you want to damage the first few zombies faster in order to get to the next waves? Is it so you can build up sunflowers/defend other lanes more comfortably?

I just want to try and understand better before I try running this c:

I get a lot of notifications for google minesweeper because I have a run of it that gets beaten a fair amount. though this could be partially solved by improving at the game, I'd really prefer to not get notifications about my run being beaten at all in this game. I lose places so much anyway so I'd rather find out next time I look at the leaderboard, and I'll gain some again when I get a new PB.

From what I can tell there are two ways of solving this - one of them is following it and turning off everything, but if I do that it'll dominate the top of my homepage which I'm not too big a fan of. The other is to turn off notifications for this in all games I don't follow.

I guess the latter works fine right now because I already follow all the games I've run that I care about seeing, so that'll probably end up being the solution I use if it really is the only other option, but I'd love to see the ability to turn this of for an individual game basis, or the ability to also toggle it being at the top of the homepage.

Forgive me if I'm wrong because I'm not at all familiar with this game, but couldn't you theoretically save something like a minute from any% x2 by reloading the page? You already have one cake, so if you reload you can get straight to the next.

Thoughts on ILs for minigames (or at least racing)? Given the replayable ones are timed in-game, I think it would be neat to be able to try getting the best times in these too.

Trying to optimise and get the best time in the hardest racing course was probably my earliest introduction to speedrunning- I was 9 and competing against nobody but myself, but I was having a wonderful time regardless. I spent a fair amount of time on Soccer, too. Maybe if I practice I'll be able to get back some of my former glory, haha.

It's no big deal if not (I'm trying to work on getting an any% run without any stupid recording issues anyhow) but I just think it would be cool :)

I just finished a speedrun for a game that lasted about 3 hours - quite messy, but not so bad in the end - and was watching through the footage to make sure all was well. All was not well because about half an hour in, the footage skipped a little bit- I checked again to make sure, and yes, about 0.2 seconds of video was missing. Can I assume that this makes my video likely to be rejected? It's a small game in terms of speedrunning but nonetheless they'd probably not want to take any risks.

Anyway, since this was recorded with a capture card, I suppose I'm better off using both that and a camera at the screen as backup. I was already planning on doing that, but I forgot beforehand. I'm just glad I checked my video before uploading it.

It's not a massive loss and it'll motivate me to get a better PB next time, but I'm just wondering if anyone else does that? Use both a capture card and a camera?

Thanks in advance :)

Hello!

I've done an any% run today, and am planning on improving my time at some point in the coming days before uploading it. However, I am also preparing for a potential 100% run. Of course, since nobody's done the category before, there's no rules set for it.

Comparing to The Dog Island, that game wants you to get all scents for 100% and that's it- no speciifcation about quests (though many unique scents are exclusive to quests anyway). In this game, there are quests such as Charles' Golden Angler Fish quest- can I safely assume this is required? Also, what about the Zoo, treasure chests and clothing?

I just want to be sure on this. Thanks in advance :)

Hi, everyone!

I'd like to run this game, and I will try to run it regardless of how this is handled, but I only have the PAL version which apparently runs at 5/6 speed. I would've been okay with buying an NTSC game for this, but discarding the fact that it'd probably be tough for me to find one, the Wii is region locked anyway.

I hear some communities like Mario Kart take this into account when timing their runs, increasing NTSC times or decreasing PAL times to match each other. Would it be possible for something like this for Catz/Dogz? Like I said, I'll still happily try to run it and I understand if it's not okay, but I don't like the idea of myself or others being idsadvantaged over something like this ^^;

Hi I recently submitted a speedrun (minecraft classic, if that matters) and - though it took longer than usual - I got the pop-up that said "your run will be verified by a moderator before it appears on the leaderboards". I then went to my pending actions, and the run hasn't appeared there. Does this mean the run didn't go through and needs to be resubmitted, or does that just mean that the pending actions page is broken?

Hello! I'm planning on doing a run for this game, but I would like to know exactly when the run should start and when the run should end, since it's not made entirely clear in the rules.

HoMM2 and Homm3 are consistent in that the run ends when the last dialogue box of the campaign closes, so I can assume the same would apply here- and we don't have to count, for example, the ending cutscene/reaching the high scores table. However, HoMM2 starts from when "Campaign" is clicked, and HoMM3 starts from when "Begin" is clicked (this game's equivalent would be closing the description of Gateway after choosing your lord). I believe the knight run by Septimus1993 chooses similarly to HoMM2 but I thought it would be best to check.

Where should I start the timer?