You're welcome to try running it yourself with your rules to see how you enjoy it and share your findings, but considering the other categories for this game rely on having the mounts unlocked you might be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to delete their unlocks file to compete with you. What you're describing sounds about as close as we can get to a hard mode island one run so it definitely sounds interesting though.

You are able to go back to previous islands whenever, theoretically you could continue playing for as long as you want. However the seasons are cyclical and become progressively longer. I don't see how it would be possible to make a "New Game+" scenario work in this case because there's no way to track how far along the runner is in the seasons. The Greed become stronger as well, unless you destroy the caves on every island.

The any% category, if it's about real completion of that island, I think would have to include the beginning playthrough up to the point where you get the onscreen notif saying you've secured that land. There's so many variables to account for if you're strictly looking at when they go back to the island to bomb the greed. You would have the seasonal advantage, you could have gone all the way to island 5 and gotten the unicorn, you could build up the base camp on the island all the way and then just come back and start the run when you arrive even though the island has already progressed so far.

To get the full completion you have to get to island 4 and then go back to the island you want to finish, but I feel like there's lots of space for developing strats and efficiency. The boat% is available if you want to do fast and easy runs, but I honestly feel more inclined to do the completion runs just because it's actually challenging.

Yea to get the bomb you have to reach the 4th island and get the gem mine upgrade. It took me an hour and a half to blow the cave on the first island. If we did it just based on getting on the boat then it would be about the same length as the previous game. The first islands would be a lot faster now since the boat requirements are less at the start. Boat would be a good any%? The only issue would be that you'd have to do the previous islands every time in order to run any of the later islands. Unlike New Lands you can't just hop around between the islands to retry indefinitely. There's also the new part where the upgrades are static, the only RNG would be the location of gold chests/peasants/trees.

I've been addicted to the game since it came out lol, it's really easy to play for hours.

I'm pretty satisfied with the greed cave completion, though it's unfortunate that it's so long compared to the previous game.

I tried out doing an Island 1 run on the default biome and it still took longer than I thought it would lmao. At least I figured out how to get out of the cave alive! I think I can take out the Knights split and just stick to the bomb, maybe add the Archer statue in there but it's not necessary unless I'm bad at remembering to unlock it...

I'm also on the fence about whether clearing the dock portal is necessary for a completed run. It wasn't necessary to get the Kingdom Secure screen but I don't know how picky folks want to be. Also! Should the timer stop when the text "The Monarch has secured the kingdom" displays on screen? Or when the crown displaying the game is being saved after?

two players should definitely be its own category. the advantages/disadvantages of having multiple builders makes it very difficult to compare a coop playthrough to a solo. map awareness alone at the later levels is huge.

they've completely changed the way the islands work in this iteration; you can go back to previous islands and (though they suffer some damage and need to be rebuilt) everything that you've earned/built remains. i haven't found a way to do individual islands like in New Lands, but a full playthrough will take longer than 4 hours unless it gets really optimized. i spent over 4 hours playing just figuring out the new mechanics yesterday and i haven't sailed to the 5th island yet.

you may be able to do individual islands by recording how long it takes to destroy the Greed on that island? i don't know how spoilers work here but in this version you can go inside the greed cave and use a bomb to blow up the portal for good on each island. you can sail to the next island without destroying the portal so maybe you could time how long it takes to destroy that islands portal.

i think a fun but exhausting category would be 100% unlocks, since you have to unlock all of the hermits/mounts/statues with gems now. it would be shorter than a full run because it doesn't require killing the greed but you'd still have to get to island 5 to complete it.

now that i think about it you'd probably have to differentiate between biomes as well, as the japanese dlc has different units and the biome adds at least twice the amount of trees. i've only played the dlc a small amount but the difference is quite noticeable.

I've got the bakery hermit unlocked but not the bear/knight statue. I think it may be RNG. Where are you getting the information that there is a specific unlock pattern?