I never noticed that. It's possible it was added later but more likely I just did not pay attention. Good catch.

All done.

If it makes it easier, I am willing to have my run retimed to .999 instead.

Feel free to do a 100% run and show off a video of it. That'll lend more weight to the request. As far as I can tell, sebi joined yesterday and neither of the requesters here have actually ran Paratopic. It'd be a good gesture to show you actually have an interest in the game and aren't just suggesting a category because you have a fun idea but nobody who wants to run it.

It is a fun idea, but there are a couple of hurdles to think about.

• Timing rules: What counts as starting from Van Horn? When does the timer start?
• Necessity/uniqueness: We do have horseman challenges already, as mentioned.
• Popularity: Every speedgame has a lot of category ideas, to the point where making boards for all of them is simply a waste.

If you want to champion this as an idea, a good starting point is to establish an idea for timing rules, show how it differs from being part of the horseman challenges, and also submit, and get others to submit, a run or two. Thought and interest are what create categories, and without those nobody will really be open to it.

I've been doing that, at least. There's no reason it would be banned that I can think of.

Haven't the challenges all had runs already, so they should be safe?

The website allows buying guns way before they are actually unlocked. On a save just after A Strange Kindness, I am able to buy Mausers, the Carcano and the Repeating Shotgun.

There's a WR route posted under guides, that has what I do and in which order

We realized that ILs have no distinct timing rules visible. Since there's no recollection of what they outright were, we've clarified the timing rules and will retime ILs.

Hi. The run is gone, unfortunately, as I was at risk of DMCA strikes for pretty much every hilight I had, so once Twitch started enforcing them more vigorously I nuked what I had. I'll work on getting a PB done and uploading that, but if you have any questions about the run, feel free to hit me up.

I'll be updating the rules and retiming the runs now.

I've added in #1 to the full game and IL rules for now. In this case, it affects only one run so far, so it is an easy decision to revert if good reason is found not to make that change.

I'll give #2 a couple of days; I'm not expecting a lot of people to post arguments for or against it but once there's a sense of community consensus for it (or community silence), I'll change the rule and retime the available runs.

Two things will be implemented for now but are up for discussion:

1. The time for the end of an episode will be refined from "when the to be continued screen appears" to "when the screen is visible or the crack of thunder signalling it is audible". Due to the known problem with animation duping, it is possible (and I just managed it) to dupe the final cutscene and overwrite the to-be-continued screen. IMO, it is preferable to allow checking for the sound effect as well, as the animation dupe is still poorly understoof and not under the runner's control. Once we understand it better, this can be re-addressed.

2. I brought up with thewoofs, but am looking for further opinions, that we should start timing from the first meaningful input of the run. There are no real cycles to take into account, and right now the amount of delay before the gameplay starts is somewhat random. A clean restart of the game straight into a new game is usually reliably instant, but also, there is no reason to start fiddling with constantly resetting runs for optimal start menu RNG when nothing meaningful is changed by starting timing on the first input.

I gave it like 10 minutes of trying at some point and I don't know if anyone else has. It'd be useful for sure, but potentially tricky to do, so for now we've stuck to manual splitting.

That sounds like a fun idea. There's nothing wrong with a new category, and we can add one. But, unless it meaningfully alters the route or the run, we'd prefer if you (and preferably someone else as well) made example runs with the category first to show there is an actual interest in running it. If it will just get run once or twice and then forgotten, it's not necessary to add.

It's been mostly on the backburner for me, because right now the top time is really hard to beat. If you want to give it a shot, I definitely recommend it. Paratopic right now is very optimized, so what it would need most is finding better strats or skips but I've definitely come up short on trying to find any. The run is still fun, though, so give it a casual try (one of the best casual horror playthroughs out there) and then a couple of run attempts if you're feeling it.

Do not advertise for personal Discord servers, even if TOMI-adjacent.

I have no new info, so go right ahead

Welcome! It's nice to see other people interested in running these games.

It's good to think of categories, and a lot of those are very distinct from each other because of how routing Orwell games works. I'm down to add categories, but I think the core idea should be that the categories have at least one run done to show that there is interest in doing them. So, if you want to see a particular category happen, do a run of it, post about it in, say, this thread, and we'll set it up.