It has been highly debated what the fastest Any% route for this game is. Any% is broken into 3 Categories (Dino,Bird,Mammal)

With very few runners (especially active) it is still not fully understood which is the fastest route. I can however Verify that Mammal is definitely the SLOWEST any% route at this point and time.

Mammal is however the most POPULAR route, given it has the most runners, and quite frankly one of the only categories that has multiple runners atm. (this could change in the future, but not much interest has been shown aside from my own)

Q: so why do so many people run Mammal?

A: The first RTA (Real-Time-Attempt(s)) of the game were documented to be done by DarkwingDuck_SDA. DarkwingDUCK_SDA mostly ran Mammal, and during that time it was believed that Mammal was the fastest route for an RTA speedrun (Non-TAS)

A fun Fact is that DWD also did runs of Bird a long while back, and the Bird route is Definitely the Fastest Any% route for a TAS (Tool-Assisted-Speedrun) of the game.

HOWEVER, DWD did not ever expirement with not upgrading DIno to either Bird or Mammal, which I have most recently discovered and argue that at this point and time DINO IS THE FASTEST RTA any% route a human can do.

So while I am pretty Well set on my claim that Dino is the fastest route for a human to run, it is still possible that Bird route might at some point be pushed to a level close to the Dino Route.

I definitely believe a Bird route RTA can surpass the time of a Mammal RTA, with a combination of RNG in your favor, along with good execution. I do not however believe a Human will be able to capitilize on all of the Time saves in Bird route that can be obtained in a TAS speedrun.

Take my Bird PB atm 49:38 (tied with DWD's Mammal run) it got the Rainbow meat during the oyster grind, which saved a significant amount of time, however New strats are coming about and riskier strats that I am definitely aware of are out there that can save time in lots of places.

I will List the Categories in order in which RTA runs are faster, so if Bird surpsasses Mammal in the future I will Swap them.

My belief is that the leaderboards will at some point be :

DINO > BIRD > MAMMAL

as of now based on the best times listed on the leaderboards it is currently

DINO > MAMMAL > BIRD

So in conclusion, ik i dropped alot of knowledge in this forum, but as the Supermod of this page I WILL ALWAYS LIST FASTEST RTA ANY% Categories FIRST!!

New Game + and 100% record evolutions I feel are big enough categories to where they should be listed as major categories as opposed to MISC categories.

All Misc categories were exclusively made to showcase parts of the games that WERE NOT SEEN in all of the main categories.

Hope this helps with understanding why so many categories, why no straight up ANY% category, and primarily why they are listed in the order that they are.

A sensible explanation.

Strictly speaking, any% is just whichever of the three routes happens to be the fastest on the leaderboard at any given time - but I think it makes the most sense to keep the leaderboards separated so one can see the performance of each individual runner relative to the evolution build.

I would think you would want the most popularly ran category to be the main category, as it is typically with leader boards. Also you could just make one Any% category and then list the evolution route in the PB time (like how the show console, version ext...)

I think I understand the reasoning, but this is my input on the subject.

yea i mean mammal was listed first for the longest time because that's all people did runs of, im just trying to break them out of that Mammal spell because it's the easier/slower category,

I always meant to come back around and do a dino run after I had a time with mammal that I was happy with - but I'm bad.

Better put Mammal back at the front of the pack :O

It seems very complicated to figure out the fastest real-time evolution through my time playing and researching the game. If you crafted very solid theory TAS runs and don't account for absurd flashing meat luck, I believe the Dino and Mammal routes are very similar, with Mammal probably being faster. The current Bird route seems the slowest by a huge margin, but with all of the route possibilities it gives me a headache thinking about testing everything. With at least one flashing oyster meat, I think Bird can get much closer, but still be the slowest. So without making any sort of theory TASes (yet), I'd put it in this order (with final TAS time guesses in brackets):

No Flashing Meat - Mammal [42:00] -> Dino [42:10] -> Bird [43:10] Flashing Meat(s) - Dino [41:50] -> Mammal [42:00] -> Bird [42:30]

Speedrun.com is shit and won't let me edit or remove my above comment, but I thought about it some more and updated it. Please ignore the above comment and read this one:

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I've always liked the idea of just having an Any% category with the animal route listed as a variable (like Colin mentioned) for both the JP and ENG versions. That way we wouldn't need to worry about changing the main category and also everyone's runs throughout history can be on the same leaderboards for JP/ENG.

I know some folks might not like the idea of getting rid of the specific categories for each animal route, so what could be done as an alternative is add an Any% category as the main category in addition to the existing categories. Yeah, you'd have a small amount of overlap between Any% and Dino/Mammal but I don't think that's that big of a deal really. But tbh I don't think having the animal specific ones would be super necessary if we had an Any% category.

It's always bothered me that there has never really just been a "main" category for this game.