RNG Info from Dr. Slash (the developer of the game)

As the dev of Retold, I'd like to share some info/recommendations that may be helpful to you and anyone else looking to speedrun the game:

1. There are three screens where the minstrel is allowed to appear, and he has a 1/3 chance to appear whenever you enter one of those screens. BUT if the minstrel has already spawned on another screen, the chance of him respawning somewhere else is just 1/30. This means that if you encounter the minstrel somewhere you don't want him to be early in the run (e.g. on the cliffs by the seashore), it's best to just restart the run to avoid having to reenter the screen ~30 times.

2. Similarly, there are three screens where the unicorn may appear, however in the case of the unicorn the starting screen is decided when you start the game, meaning that you can keep restarting the game and scouting the starting location of the unicorn until you get it to spawn where you need it.

3. As you've already figured out, the whale can spawn on any empty screen with the ocean, so there's no need to go back to the northeastern screen after you get the feather. The only screen adjacent to the island where the whale cannot appear is to the south.

4. The position of the feather is decided when you first enter Genesta's island. This means that in theory you can keep quickloading a save made just before entering the island until you get the feather to appear on the northeastern screen.

5. I highly recommend looking into the hotkeys supported by the game (information on the hotkeys can be found in the readme file). Lots of useful stuff there that can potentially save you some time (e.g. quicksave/quickload).

6. A very minor routing suggestion: you can turn on the lantern as you wait for the fisherman to leave the pier. It's not a big time save, but every frame counts in speedruns, I guess.

(originally posted to King's Quest Speedrunning Discord)

OneShortEye