This guide is highly important for competitive runs. Please follow its instructions thoroughly before doing runs!

For those who are unfamiliar, an autosplitter controls certain behaviors of the most commonplace timing program, Livesplit. The behaviors important for this game's leaderboards are load removal and automatically stopping, starting, and splitting.

Step One: Installing and Setting Up Livesplit

You can install Livesplit from this page. This program is fully customizable, but for this guide we will assume that you are running it from a fresh install. If interested, there are plenty of video guides on customizing Livesplit to your liking out there.

Upon launching Livesplit, you'll want to head to the Viewfinder Resources page. There are three files here:

1. Full Level Any% Splits These splits will divide an Any% run by individual teleporters in the hub world, what we call Levels. This is the recommended starting point for beginners.
2. Sub Level Any% Splits These splits divide these levels into individual puzzles, what we call sublevels. This is for runners who may want to track more precise data, but is not necessarily recommended for new runners.
3. There may be future splits added to this page. In the case this happens, this guide will be updated.

After downloading one of these files, extract it into a folder - I recommend extracting it into the same folder that Livesplit is in. Then, open the file with Livesplit. You should see something like this:

You may be wondering: What are all the dashes and brackets for? Those are for something called Subsplits. You can either remove the symbols (Right Click -> Edit Splits -> Manually edit every "Split name" row), or head to the bottom of this page after setting up the autosplitter.

Step Two: Autosplitter

The autosplitter is imperative to getting accurate timings during runs, since it removes load times. Setting it up is simple, but first... Why remove the loads?

Loading times are removed to eliminate hardware differences impacting final times. There are many examples of situations where a PC on the lower end or without certain hardware would lose significant amounts of time over the run to a PC on the higher end. Therefore, to make as level a playing field as possible, we remove load times.

On to setting up the autosplitter. First, head into the Edit splits menu (Right click -> Edit Splits). Here, you'll want to enter in the Game Name as Viewfinder. If you've used one of the split files from step one you will already have this entered. Then, click Activate where it says "Auto start/split and load removal available. (By CaptainRektbeard)".

Then, head into the Settings (right beside Activate). Here, you will see a few checkboxes. The ones you check will depend on what split files you are using, however you should always have the Start and Split options enabled.

1. Split on sub-level end - Use with the Sublevel splits described above. If using this, do not check any other boxes.
2. Split on level end - Use with the Level splits described above. If using this, do not check any other boxes.
3. Split on level start - Use this if you've made customized splits tracking movement between levels.
4. Split on moving to next hub - Use this if you've made customized splits tracking movement between hub worlds.
5. Individual Level Mode - Use this if doing Individual Level runs.

I'd highly recommend as a beginner just using either option 1 or 2 depending on the split file you're using. Over time, you can experiment with tracking more or less.

After deciding your splits, click OK on both the autosplitter settings and edit splits menu.

Step Three: Game Time comparison and Troubleshooting

Once your splits are set up, you need to start comparing your time to game time (Right click -> Compare Against -> Game Time). Only then will Livesplit display the appropriate time.

Then, start a run! If you're running into issues, we have a channel in our Discord Server to assist anyone running into issues.

An important note: your timer should be stopping between levels and during a short period in between hub worlds. This is intentional behavior, and should not be a concern!

(Optional) Setting up Subsplits

Subsplits are used to create "Chapters" for tracking times. One split will act as a "Header split", and this split will drop into many subsections (hence the name subsplits). The text notation on the splits files from our resources page assumes usage of this. This is completely preference, but is easy to set up.

Here's an example of what these splits will look like. Note that the character names (Aharon, Hiraya, etc.) are the header splits and that the levels are the subsections:

You'll want to start by going to Edit Layout and adding a Subsplits component (Right click -> Edit layout -> Plus sign -> List -> Subsplits). After adding this, you'll also want to remove the Splits component by clicking "Splits" and then the minus sign. Reorder the list in the menu as desired.

You can change the way subsplits are displayed as any other component from this list, but this is optional as well. You should have something very close to above by just adding the Subsplits component to the list. Click OK.

And there we are. Thanks for reading. Again, if any assistance is needed, feel free to reach out to me or the Discord Server. Now go take some good pictures!