An idea came up in the racing discord server to integrate some sort of seed preview into the gauntlet mod, letting you scope out the seed before playing.

With the Gauntlet category requiring playing on a completed savefile, and the meta being defined by pillar skip equipments, it makes grinding runs for the low chance of finding a skip rather frustrating. A seed preview would also make runs a little more like races, where the loadouts and stage order is known before playing.

Modding the game to preview the seed would be considered pretty iffy by most roguelike speedrunning communities, but I believe there could be some merit in allowing it here.

Keep in mind, no tool for this exists yet. Still, I'd like to hear what the community thinks. Should we allow something like this? Should it be allowed here on the main boards, or maybe make a new board on the category extensions page for it? What are, in your mind, the pros and cons of allowing a mod like this for speedruns?

This would of course apply only to the Gauntlet category.

It would

1. lead to even more resetting and therefore to a lot more frustration aswell. You could also reset a run where you got Vase early but no damage to optimize, because you can just reset for the next vase lol
2. depending on how much we'd be able to preview (is this only about vase or also about stage order, do we know what stage the vase is on) we would never see a bad run turned good or something "hype" happening as the need to run a slightly suboptimal run just gets diminished
3. not even make running the category significantly easier, the opposite actually i think. Searching for "the" vase might lose a lot of good runs, as the player will try to look for one on purpose and therefore lose a lot of time, when there mightve been an "easier" vase later on in the run. In essence this point is: the player lost a potential run to knowledge he shouldnt have had in the first place.
4. i imagine it as unfun to play as a run is no longer focused on finding everything but on finding the vase i know exists
5. adding quality of life into an established category not only feels like people have been butthurt about not getting the luck they want/feel like they deserve, it also invalidates any run done under the previous circumstances
6. the "optimal" seed will have a vase on the way to TP/near the TP regardless so this doesnt even increase the potential for a faster time (which would also be bad) it just adds quality of life into speedrunning, something i dont think should be done
7. since i forgot to add it: playing differently because of knowledge artificially gained not only is boring to watch in a potential world record, it also conflicts with how the game was meant to be played in my opinion. Take this situation: You have charged the TP and have gold to hit a chance shrine one more time. walking to that chance shrine and hitting it will lose you 30 seconds. It could be your vase. If you know there was a vase in your seed, you would be more inclined to go and hit that shrine. If it then actually gave you the vase, this entire thing would feel unorganic
8. idc about "category spam", changing a category where runs exists just sucks go make a new category for a new ruleset instead, this also eliminates this entire discussion since people can run what they want

Can we instead discuss removing the pointless requirement of using the gauntlet mod for this category? It is essentially just Eclipse 8 Lunarless (where it is modded it so you cant die??)

None of the reasons that the mod exists translate over to speedrunning, and only 3 people have done runs for the multi-run category, it would be much cleaner and more accessible to have E8 Lunarless and then have the multi-run gauntlet in category extensions.

i feel like that's another forum topic that can and should be discussed

For sure, but let's settle on something here first.

another thing to point out about seed previewing is that it would lead to people finding the supposed "perfect" seed and play through it normally to find out where all the items are and theoretically how optimal it is before recording a run and faking a live reaction