Seanie's Skeleton Caverns Challenge Run [TAS]

I unfortunately ran out of time for this challenge so tried to optimize where I could/ended up having to leave 3.5 minutes on the clock but I'm happy with the result. This was a good excuse to flesh out my TAS tools for SC/mineshafts (still needs a lot of work...), mail, some additional overlays, and more "process of making a TAS" things. It's also my first real test of the SDV v1.5.6 HF#3 TAS build (not a single desync while testing!)

Basic Challenge:
- Given the starter file from Seanie, you get 1 day to prepare to go as deep as possible in the Skull Caverns
- Skull Caverns day can not exceed 21 minutes in length.

Route Description/thought process:
- Drop shafts are fixed by game seed/day/floor so I can precompute the # of floors dropped for each level of the mines
- A floor has a 20% chance of having a drop shaft (can predict upon reaching a floor but can't forward look)
- When a floor is generated, a random number generator is seeded by the current real time in seconds (which for this run is calculated as frame offset from the file seed). This means you can wait to the next second to try and roll a new floor (why I end up pausing a lot).
- Frame perfect laddering can be done at 80 frames with transitions
- Factoring in a tool use (10 frames) and ~2.5 tiles of movement (~30 frames), an average floor is close to 120 frames
- Taking a drop shaft is 120 frames with transitions (dropping 3-15 floors), which means for N floors I can drop, I should be willing to wait 2*(N-1) seconds on a prior floor to ensure that the drop shaft is generated
- I computed the minimum transition path to reach floor 1000 (sometimes this will want to avoid 1 drop shaft to pick up a later larger one, but primarily it's chaining drop shafts)
- This isn't an optimal strategy (it's greedy), and it's not super practical in an RTA run because the clock is running and sometimes you just won't get a shaft in the wait window. In a pure depth run, you could just wait on rolling the next floor which would minimize spent time vs depth.
- Instead I mostly use this path as a loose guide that I try to shadow, in particular getting into sync when there are large blocks of good drop shafts.
- I was able to make floor 1000 in 17:35, which I find pretty freakin cool because pure laddering would only get to floor ~945 in the 21 minute window due to how long transitions take!

Chapters:
0:00 Day 1
4:40 Day 2

Challenge Doc Link:

Shoutout to Seanie Dew, this was a fantastic challenge idea for the community!

[brandiganBTW]

i could watch your stardew TAS runs all day

[imwhomim]

Ah yes the casual floor 1000 before 6pm

[louloudaki_]

i know he knows what he’s doing but the anxiety i felt at that health bar was📈📈

still satisfying as hell to watch

[sourcream]

Massive effort! You can tell it takes a lot of hard work to make it look this easy! The result is nothing short of mesmerizing ✨ Keep it up!

[doraperez]

I love that even in a TAS, pacing outside buildings before they open is canon.

[amy]

wow this is impressive, I love everything about it :)) great job, I hope you get more recognition for this stuff

[cragasm]

He can go 1000x floors down more than me

[cryptogreen]

Would it be possible to manip all the chest floors to be rain totems using pause buffering in a TAS?

[goose_operator]

Hi, just a quick meme suggestion! Could you do Parsnip%? It's just where you obtain a Parsnip as fast as possible.

[theendofthestart]

id love to see something thats tasd for in game time, just how early in the game can u do x?

[jamessatler]

How are you avoiding mineshaft damage?

[karenluo]

Why are you picking up the treasure chests?