Been running game for a day or so, tas:ed around and stuff as a n00b. And here's what I found out:

One of the rng is set by when you procced past the title screen of the game, what you do after that does not affect RNG as far as I've seen.

You can then advance rng to new spots by exiting and entering the "town". Rng keeps going if you press reset, so if you wanna set rng, you need to hardreset.

Reason I share this is cause the WR of this game becomes extremly suspicous when you understand how the game works. I cannot say if they did cheat or did not, but would claim the video not including the starting screen is enough to ban the video. Very easy to create a save state, load it, and start the recording.

And the second thing that makes it more suspecious is month 2, they enter the town, exit right away, cause that is faster, but then accidently enter the town a second time, and does not, even tho it is faster. One could sum this up to "f it, I'm just gonna eat the small time loss", but that also sets up the rng for the rest of the run this one decision.

Like I said, don't know if the person did cheat, but unless they have a session video I would say the chances are there.

Also this goes without saying: Always have a reset/power on included with the run you are doing. So many cheaters that get exposed that don't do that. a simple reset prevents so many possible ways you could be cheating, so please include it :)

First of all, thanks for putting some TAS work into this game and figuring out some mechanics of the RNG. I look forward to seeing what good manipulations you can come up with.

Secondly, thanks for bringing up some valid concerns.

I'll start by saying that I 100% agree that resets should always be shown before attempts. One of the main reasons being exactly because of the potential for save state abuse. I feel like this should be a general site rule for most consoles, at least older cartridge-based systems such as NES, but that is not the situation. When I became the moderator for this board back in July, I immediately added that to the rules (including some other standard requirements).

This leads me to the first issue: There were no requirements for visible resets in the rules before I added them. I noticed GoddessAthena's 17:25, as well as slimehunter's 24:45, submissions both start from the screen after the title. However, since they were not breaking any rules at the time of submission, it was only fair to make an exception where the rule only applies to future submissions. Back then, I was not aware of how the RNG worked in the game, but I don't think it is appropriate to reject old runs based on new rules, even if the new rules are there to make cheating more difficult.

This leads me to the other issue: Since no rules were broken at the time of submission, is there enough evidence (or serious suspicions) that we claim that cheating was probable? I don't believe you are suggesting this though, rather just stating the possibility. It could be argued that they left the title screen out of the recording because it didn't seem important to them to include it. GoddessAthena has only run this game, and slimehunter has only run this and Xenophobe, so they might not be as familiar with the importance of including resets as we are. It could also be argued that is was done to hide save states, but there is no way to be sure just by looking at the submissions. I will admit that in GoddessAthena's 17:25 submission, it is odd that the town gets entered on the left side, exited, then re-entered at the top which isn't faster, but it really does just look like a mistake to me. Otherwise it would have been quicker to just re-enter again from the left and still advance the RNG the same.

Oddly enough, it looks like slimehunter has a faster time highlighted on Twitch, and with a visible reset, but I haven't watched the entire video yet. As for GoddessAthena, I can only find one YouTube video (the submitted 17:25) and no videos on Twitch. I will reach out and see if she still has a longer unedited recording available. It would be nice to verify a reset before the run so that your suspicions may be addressed, but the run is over a year old at this point so it might be a bit much to expect that a recording still exists.

Also sorry that I rambled on for a bit. I wanted to make sure I articulated all of my thoughts. :D