Hi! I saw the comment you made on my run, and I think your decision is justified. I can agree that there's value in preserving speedrun gameplay that reflects the casual experience. I just have some minor thoughts to clear up a few things.

I'm putting this in a forum post because it's more publicly visible, just in case the very occasional visitors don't see the run comment, or I get a new record at some point.

1. It seems that you have a misconception about what I refer to as Chronos killing. Chronos killing (or Chronos glitch, the naming doesn't really matter) refers to pressing the save button during a battle to allow cooldowns to end. Pressing the save button right when a battle ends is what I refer to as instakill, or setting up instakill. They're similar in execution, but inherently different in their purpose (Chronos killing is mostly obsolete, with only a very niche usage after the discovery of instakill). Both are corny terms that I coined, though, so if you want to disallow both in the glitchless category, it might be clearer to just prohibit "abusing the save/share button during a battle" or something in the rules.

2. The new rules prohibit having more than one tab open of the game, which is probably fine, because there probably are some funky exploits that involve multiple game instances. But just so you know, the second tab I have open in my runs serves no purpose other than being a place to go when doing ship skip. I didn't really want to show my bookmarks on a new tab or anything, y'know.

3. I saw that you noticed that my 4th place run in the glitchless category does do the space skip, and I assume you're choosing to leave the run there. That was probably a good idea, because I decided to watch some runs after completing my run to look at strategies and apparently, Thursday's 5-year-old run and Storm's former 43:29 world record also use the technique of reloading on death to prevent the cooldown, and Thursday even reloads to preserve their items at one point, which is pretty cool to see. Pre-update runs also take advantage of the extended bolas duration, I guess. Anyways, I wanted to mention that for some reason just to confirm that my run isn't a complete outlier in the category.

4. It might be nice to include in the glitched hyper% category rules that importing saves external to the run is not allowed. I was sometimes confused by the fact that it wasn't in the rules, although it is pretty intuitive.

5. Can I still reload before a run in a glitchless run? I assume I can, because it's not part of the run, but I want to make sure. Reloading before a run aligns the events with the timer (although I might start doing something different because the first event is missing for some reason).

Thanks for verifying my run. Hopefully I can train hard enough to beat your glitchless record sometime.

Hi thanks for updating the rules, they look pretty good

However, I must question about using FTC on the learning game tasks. Personally, I don't really think that's a good idea. Those two tasks don't take very long, and completing the games take like 10 seconds each. Even if you're considering the fact that it could remove the need to retime those sections, gems still need to be earned during the first shield at some point. I think allowing FTC when it's not necessary kind of ruins the integrity of the run.

Idk let me know what you think I guess

also maybe you should include in the rules that you can use the console to complete learning games lol

Hi So uh even if we're the only two people to ever speedrun this game, I think I might find it fun to continue running it, so I have some proposals/clarifications to make.

Also you can take your time to respond to this lol I'm not planning to do runs soon

1. Past the training shield, is it necessary to show the learning games being completed in the video? They can all be completed before or after.

2. On a related note, especially if your answer to the previous question is no, what are you thoughts on using the console to skip learning games and perhaps recesses? ("tt cheats 1" and "set recess [seconds left]" being the commands) This might ruin the integrity of the runs a bit, but I'm impatient and would argue it makes sense.

3. I (finally) found out that the user data is in the program data folder (crazy), which means that by copying an old file and pasting it after a run, I can effectively complete runs of different shields without redoing everything before it. I don't know if you knew about that already. Is that allowed? It shouldn't affect how the runs start or anything, and it makes running the game much more reasonable.

4. The rules say timing starts "on the first frame your character moves." Can my initial location be anywhere, including right next to the first task as long as no progress is made?

5. Can I do stuff before the run starts for shields after the training shield? This matters because I can pick up/grow flowers that might be needed later or something. Maybe you can take pictures or something too. I'm fine if this isn't allowed, but I want to set it straight.

Thanks this game is cool