So, in 1.3, the powerup state is different for each character. This is reflected when you select a character to start the game, as well as when you change characters from the pause menu.

In SMBX2, this remains true for when you start the game. So if mario has the fire flower and toad has the ice flower, starting as mario will give you fire mario, and starting as toad will give you the ice flower.

But then, if you change characters at the pause menu, the powerup state of the character you're playing as will carry over to the other character you choose. This means that if you chose toad at start and have the ice flower, then switch to mario, you'll still have the ice flower. It gets even better, though. If you now beat a level as mario and still have the ice flower, not mario's powerup state has been changed to ice flower at start. You can essentially duplicate powerups for characters this way when you start the game.

after disovering that you can change the startup powerup state, I'm using this to play as Raccoon Toad and Mario in The Invasion 2. However, Mario also has the hammer suit in reserve for when I need to take down bosses. I'll be using that for the first two (perhaps 3? haven't gotten that far yet) invasion levels, as well as rawest forest and the eventual bowser fight.

If needed, I can post a video of what I described.

Things have been slower recently, as I've had to pay attention more to college classes. Here's a recent strat I made for world 5:

1. That's what someone told me. I haven't actually compared holding down when swimming to regular swimming, but I assume holding down is a slight bit faster.

2. For the clip? I figured out that it's triggered by letting go of down and jumping at the exact same time. It's not as big of a timesave as hitting the very specific invisible blocks, though.

3. Very, VERY specific timing. I'm actually surprised it works.

4. Yep! And you're right, I found it a little too precise, so I figured out a way to beat the level by flying. A lot of useful skips/optimizations come from flying toad, huh?

5. If you look at 11:35, you'll see that I land on the grey pipe. That gives me a significant amount of flying distance which allows me to reach the green flying turtle I landed on. It is possible to get to the red flying turtle if you don't land on the grey pipe, but you have fewer options that way.

6. Alright, thanks! And I hope your computer starts feeling better. If it's still running SMBX too slow though, you can try using SMBX Beta 3 since it uses a modern version of OpenGL rather than an outdated version of DirectX.

7. I plan on switching to Mario at the beginning of world 6. There are some useful strats I'll miss out on, but I believe it's necessary. At least I can hold on to the hammer that way.

8. Unfortunately not, I haven't played Lowser's Conquest yet. I'm focusing all my time and energy on TI2 right now.

9. Thanks! I hope I can get this run finished, too. From the looks of it, I might be able to get around 36 minutes with all the current timesaves, though I have even more for later on.

I've managed to get up to world 4 now:

I optimized both the suck and the invasion, I'm so happy!

Oh, I've done it before with toad. It takes some amount of precision (not nearly as much as required for Super Easy Road, though), but once I have time I can record a playthrough of that.

I changed my strat about the W4 dungeon, I'm now considering the leaf (which you can get at the bottom of Mole Hole) since it has far more advantages than the ice flower. Also, it turns out that the ice flower freezes toad when he powers down like most items, I thought it would change instantly like the leaf or the suits.

You can see the exact strat I'll be using in the single level strats thread.

That's not what he means. He's not surprised to see you here because it's speedrun.com, he's surprised to see you here since you hadn't posted here yet.

If you can do it, then that's fine by me. Tangeruse seems to have found a route which doesn't require that, though, so I might be using that in the meantime.

Copyleft, I've tried hopping from the second to fourth pipe before and it's just not feasible enough for an average run of the game. The timing is nearly frame perfect, so I just find it better to hop on a goomba. With that said, my run can definitely be optimized and someone else has already beaten it:

UbuntuJackson, I don't have the full strat planned out but I hope to get the hammer in world 6. I still haven't quite planned out that far, I've been optimizing the earlier parts in the meantime.

I've been making some strats for single levels, and I thought it'd be neat to share them.

I also found another user named 하늘바람 (can be romanized as "Ha Nil Pa Lam") who does speedruns, though for the sake of simplicity for english speakers I've been calling him honeymelon in other circles. Here's his runs:

I might have something by sunday or monday, but I can't say for sure.

I only intend to get hurt in Pipehammer maze. The other times I got hurt I could easily recover from, but overall they're detrimental to the run.

I was referring to the optimization specifically in the first post--rather than hitting every other block, only hit the blocks which are enough for you to run and jump at full speed. Figuring out which blocks to hit took some initial calculating, but in the end it's very beneficial and can save plenty of seconds of the run.

I do plan on bringing the ice flower into the W4 dungeon, but only because it's absolutely necessary for The Mole Hole, and I need to have a third heart to get intentionally hurt past bowser with minimal time lost (Toad has a very brief powerdown animation when going from three hearts to two, much quicker than getting hurt normally). And I don't know of any fire flowers in The Mole Hole which are easy to get to, sadly.

I made a small optimization to getting the exit in Frigid Awesome land, as seen in this video:

Using this strategy in Dungeon of Inappropriate Phrases is also important, I believe.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here? I thought this topic is requesting people not to use character switching.

If it is indeed allowed and I'm not misunderstanding the purpose of this topic, then it might need to be closed before it confuses anyone else.

SMBX 2 is made up of two parts: the new characters, enemies, blocks, and other content, and LunaLua.

LunaLua is a hack of the SMBX engine which does numberous things, among them that could affect a speedrun are facts such as using OpenGL instead of DirectX, fixing crashes like when a mushroom falls into lava, and various other Quality of Life improvements. It also adds scripting capabilities to SMBX, which is what all the SMBX2 content is made from.

If speedruns are allowed to be made with SMBX2 (and I feel they should, given the benefits it offers, and due to the fact that SMBX2 will not officially release for several years at this point) then the version number for LunaLua should be noted as well as the beta number. Someone could be using Beta 3 but they updated their LunaLua, and the run might work slightly different as a result.

Is this rule still enforced? UbuntuJackson's current run uses character switching between Luigi and Toad, in this segment:

I'm not trying to point fingers or anything (I also want to use character switching for a portion of my run, too), but I just wanted to clear things up.