What would be the best way to handle categories starting with a new account? Other gacha games (like Zenless Zone Zero) have categories like this, which may be a good place to look for guidance on rules. Here are some general rules that adapted from ZZZ that seem applicable to Nikki:

1. Runs must be in a full-sized single segmented video showing the whole game screen. Editing is prohibited.
2. Runs must be in a video format that is available permanently to be view by anyone (e.g. Twitch, Youtube, Bilibili).
3. Major glitches are prohibited.
4. Mods of any kind are prohibited.
5. Paid contents are prohibited.
6. Limited time events and contents are prohibited.
7. Mail rewards are prohibited.
8. Resonance gacha is prohibited (except where required by the tutorial).

I think these rules seem good, but maybe we can also have a category that allows gacha on the permanent resonance (blue crystals), but only with currency earned in-game (no cash purchases of stellarite). There is a "Gacha" category for ZZZ that works this way, and would replace the last rule with these:

• Gacha in the "Distant Sea" resonance using Resonite Crystals and/or Diamond's earned in-game are allowed.
• Gacha in time-limited resonance using Revelation Crystals is prohibited.

It seems like the no gacha rules are more popular, but both of these could exist if players were interested.

As for timing, I have a few ideas on what runs could be fun. All of these would start timing when you first gain control of Nikki in the Prologue.

Aurosa%

Timing ends when you craft the final piece of the Wishful Aurosa outfit.

This may be a really really long run, but with good routing it may be a very interesting category. You need to beat the main story with all of its platforming/puzzle segments, but you also need to route in enough whimstars and crafting materials to beat all of the Sovereigns to craft the outfit.

Chigda%

Timing ends when landing the final hit on the boss Chigda in the Wishing Woods.

This is similar to the Aurosa% run, but cuts out any material farming and the long chain of stylist battles needed to beat the Sovereigns. It's a more platforming-focused run, similar to a game like Mario Odyssey.

Cool%

Timing ends when reaching the "Success" screen in the stylist battle against the Sovereign of Cool.

This is like a mini-version of Aurosa% that doesn't require the player to move past Florawish. I suspect this would be a popular category.

Bouldy%

Timing ends when landing the final hit on the boss Bouldy.

A mini-version of Chigda% that also doesn't require a lot of stylist battles.

Just adding on with a bit of the discussion from Discord about this.

Question: How you could make new accounts? Don't you need a lot of emails?

My best solution for this would be to use "Salted" gmail addresses. You can add a "+" symbol to your gmail address and anything after that symbol will be ignored. For example, if you had Example@gmail.com you could sign up with Example+nikki1@gmail.com and just add more numbers to create as many accounts as you want.

Question: Would you get banned if they see a bunch of accounts logging in from the same IP?

Looking at the terms of service online, it doesn't appear that this breaks any rules. There is no rule prohibiting multiple accounts. However, there are rules against account trading/selling, so don't do that with the extra accounts you make. Hopefully Infold won't ban anyone unfairly.

Question: How can this be routed? Won't you run out of resources (blings, vital energy, etc) before reaching the goal?

I don't know for sure, yet. I plan to experiment with routing a few of these categories. I expect that Cool% and Bouldy% will be possible, but I am less sure about Chigda% and Aurosa%. It may be really difficult to route Aurosa% considering how many resources are needed to clear the styling competitions. You don't need to clear the battles with a "Perfect" rating, though, so it may be possible to just barely succeed with careful budgeting of resources.

im def super dubious of the legitimacy of the account thing, but the cool% and bouldy% are most def categories that i would like to run myself. I vote yes to the catagorise but put a disclaimer that were not sure if its against tos so play at your own risk type thing @GrsVeo what do you think?

Like I said, making multiple accounts is not against the terms of service: https://infinitynikki.infoldgames.com/en/notice/useragreement

My only concern is that they may misinterpret what you are doing making these accounts. Aside from the account selling rules I mentioned before, the TOS does prohibit "Bulk registration or logging in of accounts" as part of a Denial-of-service attack, but manually creating new accounts for speedrunning purposes should not appear like that.

Either way, speedrunning a new account category doesn't violate the letter or spirit of Infinity Nikki's rules, but carries at least some risk of falsely triggering enforcement from Infold.

My personal plan is to use a separate email from my primary account and salt that for any runs.

of course I support it.

The official will not stop multi account behavior, at least not those aimed at playing.And I think they would like someone to showcase these gameplay.

Looking forward to you completing your first SR demonstration video

Awesome! It may be a little while before I come up with a good run category. I'm still trying to feel out what the limits are on a single-segment run, because of the various gating mechanics in the game.

Sadly, as of right now it looks like Cool% isn't possible in a single segment without some sort of sequence break. The third faction in Florawish is locked behind the stylist Pepsa, who can't be challenged until chapter 2 (which is time gated by stylist rank). Unless some sort of sequence break is found, I don't think my original categories will work.

NOVAdtl and Unknown were brainstorming with me on some alternative categories that could work for single-segment with a new account. One promising option here is to have a "All Whimstars" category where you need to get every Whimstar available on day 1 of a new account. That could be a lot of stars, especially if the glitchy whimcycle physics is used to break some boundaries.

Another option is to pick some arbitrary star count, like "100 Whimstar". There is a category extension for Mario Odyssey with a ruleset like that, and it's pretty interesting from a routing perspective since you need to figure out which stars are the fastest to pick up. This would also let us fine tune the run length by picking an appropriate number of stars.

I'm going to continue working on this.

我这里有个新想法，就是收集必须要谜题空间，或者需要追逐的奇想星，而不寻找那些仅仅只需要钓鱼和触碰才能收集的奇想星，尽可能减少速通的时间并且增加选手的区分度

I have a new idea here, which is to collect the Whimstars that you have to puzzle space, or chase, rather than the fantasy stars that you just need to fish and touch, minimize speedrun time and increase player differentiation