Just ran an updated 100% route. Recorded it, will upload it with some commentary and actual splits in the next day or two, when I'm feeling better. This run was sub-3hrs despite some major rust on my part. I'm very go-with-the-flow in my running, but by planning this out better (exact number and point of level-ups, exact number of Dust of Disappearnce needed for end) and simply executing many points better I could probably get this down to near 2 hours or even sub-2.

I'm using a full group, which I'm simply used to--4 F/M, 1 C/F/M, 1 F/M/T largely for the mansion although he still doesn't manage much--but I could probably drop one of the F/M and blaze through with 5 pretty easily. Four? Not sure, but you get so much exp from doing 100% that you don't need to reduce party for bonus exp too much. All my characters are 4-5 by the time we finish, so I think going less than 5 won't help too much, but a bit of extra xp by going to five will make multiplying items a little easier and give enough bonus exp that I could skip some of the treasure grabs I do in places like the mansion.

I use a thief because there are traps in a couple of the places, like Koval Mansion, that a thief can disarm, but he generally failed on 90% of the disarms anyway so maybe I should just drop the F/M/T. For the speedrun in the gold box games, the thief has only (sometimes) been helpful in Secret of the Silver Blades

Cool. I look forward to watching that. Hope you’re feeling better soon.

I’ve got a route mapped out in my head, but we’ll see how that plays out in real life. I’m not overly concerned with level up points, given that I’m planning on duping the necklace and dust and I effectively managed to account for Tyranthraxus with two 4th level fighters and a wand. One advantage of a smaller party, I might add, is that it makes most of the random encounters smaller too, and that’s no small consideration when you have plough through 15 of them. A quick experiment with my any% party took about 13 minutes from game start to clearing the slums. My inclination is to do 3 fighters and a mage and take the hits in the mansion and the kobold caves from the lack of a thief. I don’t think a cleric adds much in a speedrun.

I’m not sure I’ll have the patience or the time to refine this one (like Ozzy - small child in the house that cares not for 30 year old games), but I’m genuinely curious to give it a go and see how I manage it.

Actually, one question about conditions for this category - is taking out Norris the Grey mandatory? It doesn't come up in the roster, but it is one that gets a "clerk speaks" reward. Also, I think the game doesn't mark the library as complete until you've cleared it too, even though they're two separate rewards.

Not that either of them are particularly lengthy interludes, but my initial experimentation with this category has suggested that sub-1 hour might (just) be possible and every time save counts! :)

If we say 100% includes clearing all sections of Phlan that noris would be required. Clearing the library would then be required which is just the basilisk fight since the other required fight to clear it is forced when you leave.

But then if we do that, we should also count clearing textile house, plaza and wealthy areas. But these aren't quests given to you, just extra ones, so, meh. I can see it both ways, but I lean more towards just the quests given to us explicitly.

I count Norris the Grey because it's the only quest available in Kuto's Well; essentially, every area has a quest cleared. For Textile House, Library, Plaza and Graveyard, you don't 'full clear' them but you do complete major quests. Of course, it makes it a bit difficult to come with a catchy 100% accompaniment phrase, because it isn't actually '100% (All Areas Cleared)' but Kuto's Well is arguably not a major quest so '100% (All Major Quests)' isn't exactly correct, either, although it's probably closest. Unless we want to use Super Mario RPG's 'Most of the Stuff(TM)' definition. I still lean towards '100% (All Major Quests)' as the best descriptor.

I agree that Clerics are generally useless in PoR, and I've often thought of dropping them, but my neurotic 'safety-first' mentality has prevented me from doing it. In 100% there are moments where just having a few healing spells is particularly useful, especially if you're soaking trap damage during some longer segments.

Sub 1-Hour is definitely plausible, perhaps with 4 characters. My next run will likely have 5 and then if that goes extremely well I might go down to 4; the fewer characters you have, the less optional treasure points you have to visit and the more time you save.

With all of this work you two have been doing on this game, it's really making me wonder how my '2- and 3-game' runs will be reworked when I'm ready to tackle those again.

I've just watched your run (hooray for lengthy commutes to work by train!) Nice job. I think execution alone can shave a big chunk off that one, and I'd say the route optimizations you've picked are on the ball. My game plan when I had a casual go was to do the any% run, clearing the slums on the way, doing Sokal, the wealthy area and the temple, then doing the necessarily duplications and clumping together the missions by area. I don't know if sub-1 hour is possible. I'd say I was on track for about 1:10 before it went south when I realised I'd forgotten to free the lizardmen in the pyramid, so there could well be 10 minutes worth of optimizations that I can find just through execution. Of course, doing it in bits and pieces is a lot easier than doing it in one sitting.

I've got a few ideas for tightening up some areas off the bat, some major, some just minor tweaks:

Slums: One of the biggest time saves would be to use an exploit that I discovered a little while ago that’s a bit cheap, and certainly would fly in the face of your preference for doing things properly. You can actually skip most of the planned encounters. This being an eighties game, where any way to tighten coding is vital, it keeps track of the number of fights you’ve had in the area, and marks it as complete when you’ve done 24 and resolved the Ohlo mission. Since random encounters (counted separately) stop when you've done 15, that would normally force you to do the 9 set encounters, but if you try to rest in an unsafe area and you’re interrupted, you’ll have a fight which will also add to the total fight counter. Since most of the random encounters are much shorter than the set encounters and you don't have to walk to each of them, it can easily chop 4-5 minutes off, even if you return with the necklace. You can also reset the random encounter count by attacking the gypsy, but I don't recommend this because it makes the combats harder.

On a less cheap path, a four person party, suitably tweaked, will result in 6 monster random encounters, which will be nicely arranged to knock out 5 with a sleep spell and you can zip through them pretty quickly.

Sokal Keep: Target your fireball at the bottom left orc leader. That should take out enough. There are 50 monsters in this fight. Once you’ve killed 25, morale will break and they’ll surrender the next round.

Kovel Mansion: You have to kill a set number of thieves to clear the mansion (which is complicated by the fact that the number the game adds to the counter does not always correspond to the number in each encounter). When there are still thieves around, someone will try to attack you at most of the doors. Taking out one of these thieves plus the two ambushes is enough to clear the mansion. The fight with the thieves beating up the old man doesn’t count – they were sent by Tyranthraxus and aren’t connected to the guild. You can check to see if the mansion is cleared by trying to rest – you’ll be interrupted by thieves with slings if it’s not.

Nomad Camp: The quickest (and least heroic) way of completing this quest is to attend the feast, go “meh” when they ask you for help and abandon them to their fate. And the council is cool with that, rewarding you for completing the quest. Not sure how well that would sit with you, but it’s legit as far as the game’s concerned.

Kobold Caves: Just a little optimisation here: there’s a secret door at the end of the cavern where you fight the wave fight which lets you enter the king’s room through the north end. You start the battle much better positioned.

Buccaneer Camp: Fighting the entire camp is enormous fun, but if you’re doing this quickly, best way is to buy a pass from the merchant, go and see the captain and then buy the boy.

By the way, it’s pretty difficult to actually fail this mission. About the only way to do it is to surrender to the captain after fighting off most of the guards. That said, it is the only mission you can actually fail – you’ll get told off by the clerk when you return to town – unless you count Cadorna threatening you for stealing his treasure.

You also really don't need to go out of your way to get any treasures at all. The any% run, which has virtually no diversions to get non-essential treasures, gives you enough experience to take out Tyranthraxus, so especially with infinite dust and fireballs, you'll do fine in any area in the game without doing anything you don't actually have to do. Most areas can be accounted for with a minimum of combat. You can also avoid combat with virtually any encounter with intelligent creatures in the wilderness by speaking and choosing Abusive.

You also mentioned early on that you weren't sure what exactly I was doing in some places because of the speed of the inputs (and probably poor buffering in places to be fair), so when I get some time, I might do a post explaining the strats and the rationale behind certain decisions, which could also help people who have potential improvements and optimizations from what I've done.

Thanks for the tidbits and advice. I just finished a 5-man party in under 2 hrs and if I get a chance today might stream another. I think I'll save off on the Slums for now, just do it as normal, and then later on try a 4-man party that exploits the encounters. My wishing to do things the 'right way' is not entirely consistent--far as I'm concerned, the Slums is a big bunch of battles so finding an alternate way to do them is plausible. I'll have to try playing with the buccaneer and nomad sections to speed through them (on the 2 hr run I just did I tried helping the nomads, and you have to wait around for quite a while before the kobolds start attacking, which is very annoying). 1:30 is definitely in play, we'll see how much more I can drop it

One of the biggest time saves would be to use an exploit that I discovered a little while ago that’s a bit cheap, and certainly would fly in the face of your preference for doing things properly. You can actually skip most of the planned encounters. This being an eighties game, where any way to tighten coding is vital, it keeps track of the number of fights you’ve had in the area, and marks it as complete when you’ve done 24 and resolved the Ohlo mission.

That's the way I did it since a kid. I generally go to the area near the fortune teller, there's an area with walls on three sides. Go in there and just rest. Because of the limited space, you won't face many foes. Then just reset since it forces a fight quickly.

I only found it a few years ago, but great minds! :)

Using that and Quick combat (which I never really experimented with before - thanks MSKain!), and doing them en route to the hobgoblins and the treasure room in the NW corner, I've managed to go from starting to being rewarded by the clerk in under 10 minutes. It's definitely a massive time save.

But the slums is basically the game's training grounds, so I can see why it would require a lot of combats, but in terms of speedrunning, the slums actually has as many unavoidable fights as the rest of the game combined - although in practice, 8-10 random encounters are unavoidable too, and there are always a few battles to get to key treasures.

Some more observations from trying a few dry runs on this:

1. Buying the boy from the buccaneer base isn’t such a good idea after all. I thought they just take money, but they take a lot of magic items as well, which can throw a spanner in the works. The time you save you’ll probably lose again recuperating the losses, even if it’s just grabbing the swords from the fighters before fighting T.
2. This run is surprisingly forgiving. Unless you have a character killed outright, you can have people level drained or knocked out in key battles and miss out on experience and there’s enough so that you can get by comfortably.
3. On the same note, doing the graveyard as early as possible will minimise the amount of impact if you do get drained, the size of the encounters, and the anguish of losing a run late in the game. One third of the random encounters in the eight areas have mummies, which can quickly result in a run becoming unstuck.
4. The AI is better than I thought. You can safely use Quick combat with the necklaces of missiles because characters won’t use fireballs if there’s a risk of taking out their own side. Wands of lightning are dangerous though because the game utterly fails to take account of rebounding.

I’ll have to wait till I can sit down and try this all in one go now, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that under 50 minutes might even be possible.

Hey, congrats on going under an hour! Very nicely done. 😀