while discussing this topic the past couple days, we made a concept like draw of how it could work but some things needs to be discussed with the rest of the community

but first things first: the concept is about allowing the runner after a specific time (duration will be a topic to discuss) to create a checkpoint of the current state of the run by backing up the savefile (if you fk up your run or you get rng trolled you can load from the checkpoint - time continues during this)

discussion topics:

1. should checkpoints be added for default (consens: YES)
2. whats the minimum session length between checkpoints

Ill answer each of these questions with my reasoning as to why.

1.) Should checkpoints be added for default? I do believe that checkpoints should be added for default as some maps are unforgiving. Any boss fight is also unforgiving. Being about 20 hours into a run then dying in a cave (has happened to me) is not a very enjoyable experience, and having to restart at that point makes players not want to do the defaults.

2.) Whats the minumum length for a checkpoint? In my opinion the minimum length doesnt matter. Id say if you play less than an hour and a half then you probably didnt get a lot of progress done so at that point its not worth saving.

We have discussed this in private but to put my opinion publicly, 1. yes it should 2. I think game session length should be no shorter than 30 minutes (apart from one or two exceptions during the run if someone suddenly had to leave), I also think they should be able to back up at any time, but just let the mods know if they ever use that checkpoint. however they should only be able to use the checkpoint for the following reasons (if they die, and not for reseting for spawn rng)

"if they die, and not for reseting for spawn rng" - could be easily outsmarted by dying when seeing bad rng - so i would suggest if it obviously looks like abuse it should be a reject reason

I absolutely agree with maverick here. If its an intentional death due to something thats easily seen as bad RNG then it should be rejected.

well if they intentionally die and then reset to get better rng, AND it is shown, aka they are looking for a tame and tame it after they intentionally die.

I also think there a "gray areas" the rule of whether it was intentional or not so I think it should be discussed among mods when someone does reset

look to be honest from dong the run i dont think "resetting for rng" will ever save time just due to the nature of things taking ages so I think we are all overthinking this

just to make this clear while multisplitting default runs isnt a big problem for a speedrun, backing up the actual savefile as a checkpoint actually is, cause as far as i know no other game uses this method, so we need to be transparent with the backup process (backing up the savefile needs to be shown same goes for loading in a checkpoint).

so i think everyone had enough time to response and the current state is very clear for point 1 (should checkpoints be added)

now we need to make clear whats the min length (point 2)

i want to separate session length (your recording time) and checkpoint length (time between checkpoints)

making a checkpoint will take approx. ~3-5min (logging out - closing the game - open save directory - backing up savefile - starting the game - showing settings - logging in)

so i think 1-2h would be fair

alternatively we could predefine the checkpoints by reaching different steps in a run (artifacts / bosses) and additionally giving X amount of free checkpoints (runner can freely decide where to make these checkpoints)

I feel like for default full runs we should maybe allow 1 checkpoint per artifact and 1 checkpoint before you grab it, as well as possibly adding checkpoints after each boss. However since the rest of the runs are not really going towards beating a boss the only way to do it like that is to either say you have to tame X creatures for QOB, etc for other runs. For consistency just allowing checkpoints to be made anywhere may be better, but maybe the community has a different answer. We would love to hear what yall have to say!

i think predefined checkpoints are probably the best. for the island it could look like this:

2 free checkpoints

before entering each artifact cave before a bossfight (only at obelisk) after a bossfight (only at obelisk) before tekcave (only at entrance)