Speedrunning the game?

Can you speedrun this game?

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Not in the sameway as most games

Of course. Set a goal, try to reach it in the least amount of time, done.

The main hurdle is establishing your categories – an “any% without using console commands (cheats)” speedrun could probably be achieved in >1 hour by taking advantage of re-embark mechanics; or if the goal was simply to defeat the Titan then you could probably just re-embark with 10 ballistae, 3 max-rank max-gear Clerics, take the “food” starting load-out and set up a single tiny fortress to hide in while your ballistae pound on the Titan and you can GG that in around 10 minutes.

And then you have the whole question of mods – even the base game is built from mods (the Rayya’s Children and Northern Alliance are just “official” mods that come included and pre-activated with the game; ACE is similar, there are a bunch of mods like Debug Tools and Micro World Test which come packaged with the game but aren’t activated by default…) Even if you stick to just Asc, NA and RC as your only allowed mods, there’s still potentially significant timing differences between playing different factions (for example, NA have a natural leg-up on the blacksmith which in turn means a leg-up on good weapons to power through combat-based storylines); and the different paths you can take through the game also have huge potential to swing the speed one way or another… great luck with merchants could see you save minutes off of the core progression; or using the military hearth to train your soldiers quickly could let you guarantee the town worth required for new citizens every day…

Not to mention the variable game speed (and the experimental speed 4 setting); the difference created by the number of hearthlings available; or what happens when you wall your town in and can avoid enemies vs having to fight invasions every day…

There are just so, so many variables; and the nature of a sandbox game is that there’s always a creative work-around for any limitations. So, while I agree it’s absolutely possible to speedrun the game – I’ve kinda done it when I’m trying to set up “re-embark farming towns” to use in future runs – I think the main thing you’d have to do for any speedrunning attempts would be to find an agreed-upon set of conditions, mods, rules and game settings to create a semblance of similarity between runs.

Even with all those caveats, I’m personally interested to see how quickly someone could do a “no exploits” run from embark (no re-embark allowed) to defeating Gary, using vanilla + ACE (since ACE is intended as the default anyway.) Something tells me it could be done within an hour with the right map and a good set of blueprints to make building an all-in-one fortress quick and easy.

But how about the random person with random stats is it if you use a mod for stats?

Sorry I mean, is it oké if you use for example stats mod

I’m not “in charge” of any rules, I just came up with one example of a category – but any category is possible.

I think that if mods are allowed, then one that reduces the random-ness of starting hearthlings is a natural choice. Players can just re-roll the hearthlings an infinite number of times until they “randomly” roll a 6/6/6 with the perfect traits for the intended job they’ll fill… a mod like BEAM which lets you pick them directly just saves on the hassle hahaha.

As far as using stats modded outside the normal value (e.g. 10/10/10 or 999/999/999), in theory it’s possible to do that in vanilla with half of your hearthlings using re-embark if you have enough patience; but more importantly having super-hearthlings doesn’t have a large impact on how quickly you can progress anyway (there are certain “milestones” which depend on time/number of days, or number of immigrants, or defeating a particular enemy)… it’s up to the player to progress through the milestones, having super-hearthlings just eliminates unlucky situations e.g. an important crafter being in the wrong place during an invasion. I guess it speeds up a couple of progression milestones, but they’re not likely to be “bottlenecks” that the rest of the run gets stuck behind, since you can always work on multiple goals in parallel while you’re doing things like levelling up crafters or fighting enemies (which are the few times that super-hearthlings make any difference.) When it comes to the Titan fight, even having super-hearthlings doesn’t help much since you still need to wait for enemies to spawn in their waves.

Okay, are you in to do it together YetiChow?

Not in the near future, I’m afraid – I’m pretty busy with a lot of IRL stuff and don’t have time to set up recording software etc. to be able to do it.

I like the idea of speed-playing Stonehearth, and it’s cool to theorise about. Doing a formal and “fair” speed-run is a lot of work to set up, though. If I was already set up to stream/record the game I probably would have tried it already hahaha; but sadly I just don’t have the time or energy to set up recording software.

If you have a go at it, though, I’d be keen to help you theorise ways to save time and come up with new strats :merry:

That’s what I would consider a “fair” Stonehearth “speedrun” too.
Perhaps even without ACE.

But I think it would take much longer… I mean, even if you try your hardest, getting to Gary depends on either completing the Orc campaign or befriending the bunnies. Both of which are quests that have multiple time-gates/locks between each part that no matter how perfect your run is, you’ll still be playing for way longer than one hour when these finally reach the point of interest. (The Titan fight)

Depending on bad luck, some of the “waits” can literally take many in-game days. I’d probably go for the Orc quest because the bunny one is even longer/has more waits because you have to farm reputation with the bunnies… But trying to rush the orc quest is in itself a very challenging affair. All in all, I’d say it can’t be done in an hour. But anyone is free to try the challenge, of course :smiley:

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I’m imagining an extremely minimal set-up approach, outright ignoring several classes, and semi-cheesing fights by using a lot of archers (with the cleric + knight combo as a “speedbump”, and several player-made chokepoints around the town for easy defence.) The crux of it is using NA for hunted food, and taking the banner of cunning to boost trading and roads. With quick access around the map via roads (which also boost town worth AND block enemies from spawning too close to town), it becomes pretty easy to control the flow of combat. So the premise is that the time gates are really what control the run, the skill portion is being ready for them so that as soon as they fire off you can clear them and get ready for the next one.

I’d probably go with the Hearth of Glory still, simply because it’s an easier/more guaranteed way of gaining wealth as well as chances to level up the guards. For fountain, I’d probably take the Font of Summer for that +1 to stats.

The key to getting ready for Gary quickly would be stockpiling food and healing supplies from the get-go, rushing to tier 2, and trying to buy in resources like iron, steel, etc. rather than having to spend a lot of time mining and cleaning up after mining. I’d probably have stockpiles right next to mining zones so I can clean + sell the extra stone straight away. I suspect that living in a rock somewhere would allow several birds to be taken down with one stone – that’s secured housing w/ limited access, plenty of materials, and chances to find ores for when the blacksmith comes online (which, playing as NA, is probably quite quickly.) All the spare stone would be used for making stone fences to line the roads with, which breaks up incoming enemies into “streams” kind of like a tower defence game… no gates or doors anywhere, just easily-defended chokepoints.

ACE would make a huge difference because it allows you to automate berry bushes etc. with basically no error (i.e. you never lose time because you forgot to go click a button; as soon as harvests are ready there’s an order created and as long as you have idle hearthlings they’ll go do it), gives a bunch of recipes that can be made with no farming required (Hunter’s Feast is the main one that comes to mind), and the patrol points allow for effectively automated hunting (plus the improved trapper fields give access to greatly increased resources.)

I think the rabbit campaign is an interesting side-mission – I’d be going to Gary via the Orcs because of that increased stability; but if you get lucky with Rabbit timings it’s possible to build up trust fairly easily while your town is building up to attract Ogo’s attention. The key thing is that the Orc campaign works off of population numbers (which is gated by daily updates), but the rabbit campaign once started fires off in semi-regular intervals regardless of what your population is doing. If you rush to tier 2 (which needs 11 citizens IIRC), you can have the Rabbit quests start firing before you’ve even faced down the goblin chief. So, I think it’s possible to get to the point of having a geomancer before the Orc campaign has reached the Gong; although I highly doubt that getting the Arbalest before then is possible. I wouldn’t delay starting the fight just to try and get the Arbalest (the time saving isn’t significant enough to be worth it), but getting a Geomancer and the couple of extra Rabbit citizens would be significant boosts. And if ACE is present, then all those Hearthbloom recipes…

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Jobs you need:
Carpenter;
Herbalist (Lvl 4 to craft the heavy bandage, can be later level up to number 3 cleric);
2 Clerics + 1 old herbalist;
6 Archers using 4 flamy and 2 spiky
Mason;
Blacksmith;
Cook;
Farmer;
Trapper;
Weaver;
Workers
Truth or false? What do you guys think?

And a 4/4/4 stats mod is also good but it is not in the Steam Workshop

I would say an engineer makes sense too, since you’ll have time to get one up and running before you get to the gong (if you promote 2 blacksmiths, you can stock up on ingots; buy steel for the wrench ASAP and then your engineer can level up by crafting a bunch of gears to later use on turrets; which cuts down on the amount of defence you need. If you’re using a tight chokepoint as the single access to your town, and you have a couple of traps down within range of the turrets, you might not even need soldiers manning defences – leaving them free for hunting, whether it’s wild game or enemy camps or Gary’s minions.)

I would personally skip the weaver – it’s a very useful class (doubly so if ACE is used), but has a lot of “busy work” to keep ingredients in stock. Armours and clothing aren’t especially rare or expensive via traders (and they can drop in loot chests or for mid-game enemy camps too); use that hearthling as another soldier.

I reckon you’ll want a knight to tank and protect the herbalists, and more importantly draw aggro away from the archers. In fact, I would have all the archers in one group, and the knight + clerics in a second – send them in first, then have the archers come in after the enemies are engaged and focus-fire on particular enemies. Because of the focus-fire strategy, I’d say 1 spiky quiver and the rest on fire.

But how do you make a 4 stats mod, because the mods where you can choose what stats you want, for example the 1-x mod doesn’t work for me. :merry: :content: ?