yo, just yesterday Ivy Rose discovered something new called "Z-Tech", which basically lets you massively extend the duration of a golden mushroom by constantly switching characters.

there's already a lot of discussion going on about it in the discord server (which you should all join), but for those who are still doing runs who aren't in it i thought i'd mention it here

here it is in action:

new runs using this aren't being accepted for now, until we decide what to do

try it out! let us know what you think :)

Amazing! I see no reason not to accept this. Edit; maybe i can finally get top 100 whahah

I'll crosspost my thoughts here on the forum, but the gross of this discussion with majority and core of the community is done in the MKDD Discord.

First of all, to clarify some details:

• The inputs and driving are extremely simple, optimizing is a bit of a frame game.
• It seems like you can have around 51 (!) seconds of constant shroom usage.
• You can stall the shroom use by constantly switching. The timer is 300, each perfectly timed switch is -1
• SwareJonge estimates that on a perfect spree you can get 60 shrooms out of 1 golden shroom

You can use this technique on almost every track, and I'm currently estimating it's optimally faster on 9/16 tracks, maybe more or less depending on execution and bag speed.

Now what does this do?

• It allows for the majority of track, especially with a bunch of offroad to be "driven" faster to EXTREMELY fast (DDD 1:16)

Now you might say that's comparable to an ultra shortcut, but what are the differences? USCs are a lot more difficult to do and require a good grasp of the mechanics. Luck is also generally not involved.

With this trick, it's the flipside. Skill is way less important, and luck becomes way more of a factor, especially seeing what else you can bag while you're behind.

This creates an extremely low threshold to get top driven times, if not faster, which kinda flips at the very least mushroom cup on top of its head with something that might have a bigger impact than BC ultra did compared to top rankings. It also seems like Flower Cup is quite affected, Star Cup, and thus, All Cup Tour as well. Special Cup is still too unexplored to be able to answer it well.

Then there's the issue of what is the speedrun really about? A few factors:

• Skill
• %Mechanics of the game
• RNG
• Flashiness Currently RNG is already an incredible high factor, but this would amplify it to unparalleled heights. ThatCowGuy already did the math that with 4 tracks, the chance of getting the golden mushroom RNG is 27%. This is not even accounting for no blue shells, no lightning, and other items you'd potentially want to bag such as triple mushrooms or a star. You'd also sacrifice skill, showing off the mechanics of the game, and even though it's a novelty right now, it'll eventually wear off

Now obviously it's not like the only driving left is shroom driving but it affects a considerable amount of tracks, even MuC could profit from it (not counting chomp strats).

It really alters how you approach GP as it affects pretty much every category, and thus I find it more sensible to consider a separate category at the moment.

I think that category split or not, it would be silly to have no "proper Any%" category with this trick allowed, since people have likely used it in the past by accident without even noticing

But splitting does make total sense with a potentially super dominant and "boring" trick like this as well

ill say for now that so far in my testing DDD is the only track that isn't only a couple seconds faster than it would be otherwise, and that the large majority of the tracks don't benefit from z-tech (BP, MB, DC, WS, SL?, MuC, DKM, WC, BC, RR)

SL i haven't tested much, i imagine it could be faster but i definitely wouldn't go for it

LC and PB each are definitely worth going for and seem to save up to 3 or 4 seconds on a good run

MaC i've gotten pretty unlucky on so far in my runs but have still beaten my non-ztech time by a second, i can easily imagine this track being at least 5 seconds faster on a good run

DDJ is a weird one, im sure it saves time but i haven't been able to get the shroom to last long enough to cover 2 ramps, likely because during the fall animation when you go off the ramp makes you unable to switch characters while the golden shroom timer keeps ticking down. and since there's only 2 shroomspots anyways im guessing you'd get similar results without ztech, if you just bag normally for triple shroom and star or something like that

YC is like DDJ but more in ztech's favour, there's more offroad that you can cut with the golden than in DDJ and the falling animation timer is a lot less impactful, i haven't gotten to test this one a lot either but i bet it would be at least as good as LC and PB

there's still more testing to do, but i at least want to urge people not to judge ztech by mushroom cup alone, or DDD alone. i want all of you to try it for yourselves and see if you think it changes the game enough to warrant a new category