I have looked into the RAM for the game and begun to understand the events that cause the pseudo RNG for Clock Tower bolts. It is not random. Address $0063 is affected by movement of: The boss in forest Active moves of the mini-clowns, and movement of the boss in toy factory Choco devil hitting the wall/breaking up Breaking a walking A or the jumps of a bouncing A, or appearances/moves of the book in library Activation of bolts in the clock tower.

Activation means that a bolt is allowed to move off the stack: if you are quick and kill a bolt in place it will not advance the rng counter.

The easiest way to think of this is to imagine a series of branching paths which lead to a fixed point in a sequence in clock tower. Once you enter that level you can no longer edit what path you are on, but you can burn as many bolts as you need to get an H not an L on the right one.

Just as interestingly, it seems that inverting level order will put you on a different path even if your actions in the levels are the same both times. If you have done many runs before you will have noticed sometimes you had the same pattern in clock bolts because of this. So for example if you are very consistent at Levels 1-3 but struggle with Book boss, going clock first may help your RNG.

It may take some time but I plan to research into specific ways this can be manipulated so that there is a firm strategy available for fixing this rng. Meanwhile feel free to try your own methods in practice - you can try to reliably perform each rng action the same each run, and work out where you are in a pattern.

One more thing that may be of semi-importance here: I noticed a now obsolete TAS by Tee-N-Tee uses Castle of Illusion v1.1 rom stating: "In this version, you'll get the deciding movement of the second topmost screw nut "naturally" (meaning you don't have to spawn and respawn this enemy in a whacky way), which more than makes up for the 30 lost frames in the previous level."

Unsure whether the official releases rule covers this discrepancy but perhaps it should be looked at going forward just for consistency's sake since we can now begin to manip the rng ourselves.

Here is the first primitive version of Usain Bolts clock manip. Go to Toyland first, before forest/choc factory, I haven't yet checked whether inversion of this messes you up. Kill both clowns after the bubble skip, so that they only raise their arms once each. (It's possible to get past them that way without killing them but even with the slope speed you can flub.) You are aiming to get one of those two patterns on the Jack in the Box to get a seed of 5, which gives you a natural High bolt for the wall skip, and a backup High in case you lose one from a hit.

Edited: Was going to look at using book fight letter positions as an aid but they are useless because you can manip the H/L positions in-fight but this doesn't change seed. I am now looking at attempts to manip H/Ls for faster fights. Your best bet is to practice your Jack in the Box fight so that you consistently land on only one of a couple of seed values and then go to clock tower ahead of Library to keep a set seed pattern. I'm looking at a possibly more reliable Jack in the Box fight but it may just be that you have to learn to recognise what pattern of rng you're on in the clock tower and knowing that it isn't random, know whether you need to burn or delay by any number of bolts by your own methods.

This is great work. The book is still a wild card, but I think I've come up with a solid route for Clocktower first.

Go to the Forest first and kill the boss. $0063 changes for each movement he makes, but it doesn't matter if be bounces or not. You will have a value of 241 at the end of the stage.

Now go to Toy Land. The two clowns should increase the value once each giving you 243 for the boss. Now here's where things go off the rails. The value will change each time the boss jumps, lands, and summons balls. I can't get a consistent value, but after a lot of save state practice I almost always end up with value of 11, 23, 46, or 92. I think the variance is due to sometimes not hitting the boss before his "has landed" code triggers.

Starting with one of those 4 values, let's go to the Dessert Factory. Only the boss changes the value in this stage and as long as you don't let him punch the walls then you'll get a consistent value each time based on your starting value. The game is also pretty generous here. Even if he just barely punches the wall, if you're fast enough with the next hit the value won't change.

11 -> 148 23 -> 41 46 -> 83 92 -> 167

Now we skip the Library eating a 0.7 second time loss and go to the Clocktower starting with one of those four values giving us one of the four possible bolt patterns.

41 Up, Down, Up, Down, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Down, Up Delay 1 at gem ladder

83 Down, Up, Down, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Down, Up

148 Up, Up, Down, Up, Down, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Down, Up Delay 2 at gem ladder

167 Up, Down, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, Down, Up, Up

You can identify the pattern you're on within the first one to four bolts. 83 and 148 are your best values. The others require you to delay one or two bolts.

Re: Jack In the Box, that is precisely correct. I have a couple of theoretical manipulations that are likely to make for a consistent window, thus far I think it would be better to leave players to explore and work out their own preferred manip though because that boss is so chaotic that trying to do something outside your comfort zone won't help.

Ultimately I decided to abandon the RNG manip for the bolts. It's mentally demanding and you do lose a second doing the Library before the Clock Tower. What I ended up doing instead is simply playing consistently and making a note of each bolt pattern that I encountered. Instead of manipulating the bolts, I learned to read the pattern and react accordingly. I ended up with these notes. D means the bolt jumps down and U means the bolt jumps up. Based on the first 2 (and sometimes 4) bolts I was able to figure out the pattern I was on.

• DD-DU-UD-UU-DU

• DD-UU-DU-UU-DU

• UU-DU-UD-UD-DU

• UU-DD-DU-UD-UU

• UD-UU-DU-DD-UU

• UD-DD-UUD-UU-DU

The tenth bolt is the one you need to bounce on to reach the wall, so for the last pattern in my list I simply waited for an extra bolt before falling down the ladder to pick up the gem. All the other patterns worked well. Not sure if this helps anyone else since we're all going to play a little differently, but maybe it will.

That said, this RNG discovery was still really helpful. If I hadn't known there was a pattern in the bolts, I never would have considering writing the various patterns down.