Hey all,

I've just competed another WR for the Baja 1000 run, so I figured I'd upload a few thoughts here to give an update to anybody poking their head in from time to time. Most gonna talk about optimal strategies and room for improvement (there are very few runners for this game so LOTS of room for improvement to say the least). If you haven't joined the discord yet, please consider it. I'm mostly in there rambling but theres some fun to be had, I think.

Class 1 - I have a new theory that the Class 1 vehicles might be a better option than the Trophy Truck vehicles for a lot of the tracks. While the Trucks do have the engine power advantage, they are also one of the most unstable, hard to control classes in the game, making any sort of consistency hard to pull off. You'll be cruising just fine on straightaways, easily outpacing anything else, but the minute you come to a bumpy turn the fun times are over and lots of momentum is lost. This is where Class 1 excels. Class 1 vehicles are a bit slower than the trucks but they easily make up for it with the ability to stay on all four wheels during those moments the Trophy truck feels useless. I call all of this the Class 1 theory, because I'm still not entirely sure that the best Class 1 player could beat the best Trophy player, but do notice that the WR I just set was with Class 1 and beat out every record prior that was set by a Trophy Truck. The Desert Doc is the Class 1 car I specifically put the most praise towards. The wheels are far apart and the suspension seems to do a good job at keeping the bottom of the car from sending the player off of random bumps.

Cutting - I think the biggest optimization that could be made right now is learning what turns you can cut and which turns you cant. There are so many time saving instances where you can basically skip full sections of the track by jumping in and out of bounds. The problem is that the game has some pretty random, inconsistent decision making behind the logic for determining cuts, so the playerbase would be best off by going through each turn one by one and determining if it can be skipped or will have to be fully passed through. If you watch my Baja 1000 run, you'll see tons of instances of me skipping a bunch of the track and tons of instances where the game teleports me backwards for skipping the tiniest little section imaginable.

Campaign Upgrades - Another thing that literally anybody trying to get the WR for the Baja 1000 could do is play through the campaign in order to get upgrades for you car. If you do so, you can transfer the car over to the time trials mode and have a significant advantage over the vanilla cast. I'm too lazy and unmotivated to play through that slog of a campaign right now, but if somebody wants to get a free speed boost, this is an option. Apparently there is a cheatcode that does this for you but I haven't been able to make it work for my setup soooooo IDK.

Manual Gearbox and Clutch Boosting - The most essential tech for this game that determines if you'll be going fast or not is whether or not you understand how to clutch boost while using the manual gearbox. It would take many paragraphs to properly describe how it all works, but to keep it simple, you can trick the game into thinking your car is at full power in third gear while going around turns you'd normally have to approach and exit in second gear. Essentially what you want to be doing is coming at a turn in fourth, dropping into third gear just as your starting to turn, tapping the clutch button once every second until you've exited the turn, then going back to fourth. The setup changes if you are going up hill or going into another turn, where you will want to stay in third instead of going to fourth. By tapping the clutch button you trick the game into forcing your RPMs upwards instead of rapidly dropping like they normally would if you were to go into a turn in third gear. What happens in game is that you'll be in a turn at 30 mph then come out of it at 80 mph without having to do much besides hold the gas down.

Thats all I have for now. I'll add more comments if anything comes to mind.

I've just become the moderator of this community, and as far as I can tell there is a very small amount of people interested in running this game. That said, I am more than open to ideas if anybody wants to suggest things or get custom categories added. The previous moderator added the main score runs but if you want to do a specific track and get the best lap time or the best overall time just let me know and I will add it. I am going to start running the other tracks besides the Score 1000 and compete with TFisher.

Just some general thoughts from me from the start:

The arcade physics are much easier to handle in comparison to the realistic setting and I believe it would be really fun to divide the runs into two separate categories between arcade/realistic for those who want to try both. If the game grows in popularity this will definitely happen but for now, when we only have two runners, it doesn't seem necessary.

While the repair system is a fun idea and makes racing more interesting, it is hard for me to want to add it as a category due to the rather finicky helicopter that often fails to consistently arrive when it is requested to. Anybody who has done the Score 1000 with repair enabled can understand the frustration that comes from pulling up to the helicopter only to have it fly away before doing anything OR when you request it to land and the AI just bugs out and keeps flying away from you. If somebody we're to run this, there would be too much RNG in the helicopter AI to make it worthwhile.

If you can remember to do it, try to include the menu settings in your recording before the run starts, to make sure I can verify your physics settings if that becomes something worth considering down the line.

Your final time should be from the in game timer which displays after you've completed the track/track setlist to the right of your vehicle and name display.

My final thought is about the manual gearbox, which may or may not be faster than the automatic. This is something I've been experimenting with for a while and can't seem to get some positivity behind my results. That said, I am starting to believe that the manual gearbox has much faster acceleration than the automatic if you understand the RPM amounts that are needed between each shift. Somebody else should look into it and give their thoughts some day.

I've just started speedrunning this game after years of thinking about doing it and have immediately come across some bits of confusion that I can hopefully clear up for anybody new coming to the scene.

In the menus of MX Unleashed, the career section includes both racing and freestyle/freeride events. Despite this, the current rules for the career any% run do not require any completion of freestyle events and only ask the runner to finish all of the races on offer in the campaign menu, which bounce between nationals and supercross type tracks.

For gold% the same exact rules apply, with the addition of asking the player to get gold in every single race. I still have some confusion here and hope that the mods can come in to provide some clarity. The issue is that there isn't any clear declaration of what getting gold is in this game, and that to earn first place in tournaments does not require the player to earn first place in every race. In my current any% run (which is currently pending approval) I manage to get first place in every single tournament in the career mode, which is further indicated with a golden trophy at the end of every completion, but do not do so by getting first place in every race. Because of the point distribution, with a majority of my races being finished in first (but not all), I manage to get the golden trophy every time. This only instance that I can think of that includes gold on screen is where my confusion presents itself the most. In my attempt at any%, am I also able to submit my run for gold% despite not getting first in every race? The rules are not clear enough for me to know.

Furthermore, to get a %100 run finished, the player must complete all events in game, including the freeride events. Nobody has completed this run yet but I plan to do so soon. An important strategy I have been planning for is the ability to purchase your way out of having to do certain events in the freeride mode. By doing tricks in game, the player earns points that can be used in the main menu to purchase events that will show up as completed in the career mode. I am going to assume that my %100 run can be shortened by this strategy that is not addressed in the rules, and hope that it remains this way. The planning behind doing tricks and the correct purchases to mitigate time loss will add another layer to the run and make things more complex overall. Seeing that nobody else has said a word about the run, I hope that this statement is in common agreement with everyone else and I will continue to argue for its inclusion into the run if there is disagreement here. My best defense would be to point out that the in game percentage menu that indicates how far the player is to getting %100 is affected by these purchases, so while the player doesn't have to actually play through them, they still act in some way to count them as completed.

Thanks for the read.

-matt