At GDQ a couple years ago, tapioca said that a tas for this game was diffucult bc the rng was variable. Can anyone elaborate on this? Or better- provide a copy of an incomplete/problematic TAS and explain the issue?

I've been working on one for Harvest Moon 64 and I've come across issues with N64 emulation in bizhawk, notably the VI refresh rate can cause some lagging issues, but RNG is consistent every playthrough for a given set of instructions. There's some RNG that I have no idea why works, but it will be the same every playthrough.

I'm awful at actually playing this game, but if one doesn't exist already, I think I understand the basics enough to build a TAS for it or at least address the issues that one in progress currently has. Is anyone currently working on this or want to collab on it?

I didn't explain myself very well at the time. The problem I ran into is that the framerate and game speed is all over the place, and it effects the controls and on what frames the game actually reads inputs. So you have to work on the TAS in a linear order, if you do the whole game then realize the first level could've been slightly faster, there's really no way to fix that without desyncing the entire rest of the demo. The desync even persists through loading screens and menus, somehow. Just inserting/removing empty frames between levels doesn't save it, the whole physics of the game will be off it seems.

I did TAS this up through Schoolz Out, then realized I didn't do the menu at the start quite right, and that meant scrapping everything. TASing a 3D game like RFS is already annoying enough, this extra annoyance of having to do everything perfect on the first pass made me give up lol. That being said, I am a really inexperienced TASer so there may be a trick to this sort of thing that I just don't know.

I mean, you only had about 9 minutes to explain the game's history while also playing the game, so I think you did a pretty good job of it.

The variable game speed is probably the vi refresh rate (are you using Bizhawk?) that you might only notice when working frame by frame. It's pretty normal for N64, so mapping them out and deciding whether to avoid or plow through them is just part of routing.

But yes, TAS is a different paradigm. I recently had to re-do three entire in-game days for HM64 bc I didn't catch enough fish. Route had "catch X fish" but I didn't account for how few frames had good fish on them, so I had to go back and remove a single NPC gift, which meant reworking everything since everything RNG- weather/berries/NPC location/direction/speech all depended on certain frames. That's kind of just how it is- extremely unforgiving. There's no trickety trick besides, like, multiple save files/branches- there's a reason there are so many unfinished TAS runs out there.