Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reverse engineering this game to try and build something like oddtom’s probability tool, mostly in these threads:

• https://twitter.com/dazabani/status/1454514421603057669 • https://twitter.com/dazabani/status/1457082691262693377

But not only did I figure out how parts are placed, I also noticed that if you open the game and then start a level (and hence do parts placement) as the very first thing, the RNG seed is the current unix time in seconds. This is much easier to guess than the full 64-bit seed space, so I wrote a tool that shows you where your parts will spawn with 100% certainty:

https://bucket.daz.cat/ssgesus/

Set the seed to as close a time to when you open the game as possible, then plug in the locations of parts you can see at the start of the level. As far as I’m currently aware, the game will need to be restarted after each level.

I’m happy to explain or document it in more detail soon, but yeah, feel free to use it how you wish. I’ve used this tool in my Without Chimps world record. Any questions or objections?

This is so much better than what I was doing. Good stuff.

I'm not sure how much was changed between the DOS and the Windows versions, but placement based on unix timestamp could explain some of the oddities I stumbled across when I was doing initial test runs. Could also explain why I had a much smaller data distribution since I was going through same motions every single time I opened the game and probably ended up within the same (ish) time window each time.