Hi guys, I'm new in the community, I hope this is the right place.

I want to share with you a spreadsheet that's been very helpful to me, in order to find the best route for my Spyro runs:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sY34cm3VnxT28GRt8KADHILPoma_1qE-1Mq6TJ9gV1s/edit?usp=sharing

I briefly explain how to use it:

LEVELS the first sheet contains a count for the number of "quality gems" you can find in each level. I call quality gems blue, yellow and purple ones. The overall quality value for each level is the percentage of that level's treasure covered by quality gems. I also tracked the gem count for every strong or sealed chest in the game, as well as for some secondary route for some levels.

RUN in this sheet, which I copy for every run I do, I track the treasure, dragons, eggs and time for each level of my run.

In this way, I obtain the "gem x second" count, which represent my speed of getting gems in that level. This can show you interesting things about where to improve or which part of a route ignore because it's too slow.

In the cell J48 you have the "gem x second" of your whole run, and that's your average speed.

In the K column we have what I call the "time loss" column.

In the levels with a "gem x second" lower than my average (J48), I multiply that difference for the seconds of the level, and I obtain a quantity that tells me how much that levels sucks for my run. The highest value of time loss could come from a very low "gem x second" and a very long time in that level. A negative value can be interpreted as "time gifted" by that level.

Lastly, the small red list on the right is a count that tells you if you are achieving the balloonists in every world. I also use this sheet for plan a run and decide if I'll save the far dragon in stone hills, or if I'll catch the second thief in Wizard Peak.

Hope someone will find it useful as I do!

And if anybody could answer me: Why nobody does sunny flight in Any% NBS? Even if done with a bad time (for instance 90 seconds) the level holds a "gem x second" of 3,33 which is absolutely not bad!

hey! im glad the spreadsheet helps you, the % of quality gems is really interesting for a few levels. To answer the question about sunny flight, dark passage is simply faster for slightly less gems with how we do it, but if youre not confident with hitting the cycles in dark passage then yeah, sunny flight is the next best option especially if you can get good sunny flight times. hope this helps :))

The actual reason of why Dark Passage is faster than Sunny Flight is due to this skip existing:

This means we can get about 280 gems in this level which is significantly faster than an optimal sunny if you have fast cycles in the level despite having a slightly lower net gains over the flight. We compensated the lost gems by getting extra gems in Cliff Town and Stone Hill, which overall makes it about 2-3 seconds faster over Sunny route.

As Narwhal mentioned, if you can't hit cycles consistently, then Sunny might be faster for you. Some runners still do Sunny for that reason, in fact.

Otherwise the spreadsheet is actually nice to have, it does give some insight on the quality of the gems in each level in more detail.

https://ibb.co/8KRjXG9 Here is the math that was done on why dark passage beats out sunny flight

thank you very much for your feedback. I understand.

My best run so far is 38min, and I just can't do a 85 seconds dark passage with 292 gems, so I will do Sunny Flight until I get better with my movement, even if my Sunny Flight is currently 80 seconds and not 70.

Thank you again for the info!