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.

hmm was thinking about speedrunning this game since I find it so fun, but I am unsure how to go about that also, what about different character runs? Just a thought.

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%.

Hey Wilarseny,

I agree that one character would become the default if we keep it the same and I know currently we are a very small community but I do think that this game has more potential than we currently give it credit for. I did think that splitting the game into character specific runs would be a fun way to have different ways to finish the game, obviously I don't want all the categories made right now when we have no runs for them but it was just something that I wanted the community to consider.

I agree that the "main" category should be any% deathless it allows for a lot more in the terms of development on movement and general routing in terms of starting location and the like.

I had one other idea for a new category and that was all constellations (where you get all the constellations), or even 100% (where you get all the constellations and then get all the recipes.) This would allow for a lot more routing than we currently have in the game. Some ideas to consider, welcome back from GDQ.

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

Hi, Sorry in advance for my bad english... I repost the new run, i hope it will work this time ^^ To answer your previous message, for my part I'm trying to convince people to try to speedrun Moon Hunter but it does not seem to interest many people. I do not really know how it would be possible to revive these boards, with more category or try to publish some new run to revive the boards a little.

Thanks

Just a quick question, what difficulty are runs done on? Its a speedrun so I assume easy?