Tildes Archipelago - FINISH!
Everyone, proud to announce that after a week and nine hours the tildes archipelago is complete as of 6:51 AM ET! We, astoundingly, had only one release due to excessive backtracking and only one technical DNF out of sixteen games. (As a first-time host I'll take that as a win!) Otherwise two Radiances and the Hollow Knight said good night, the Ender Dragon ended, the Spire was (mostly) Slayed, Red ...'d, Bowser blasted big, Ganon's gone, Ganon's gone again, Rogues Legacied, John Darksoul prevailed, Doomguy doomed all over the place, and... Poker. Also we found that last strawberry. Jesus.
Big thanks to everyone who participated and hope you had fun! I'm thinking I'll throw a sign-up thread in a month or two to gather YAMLs and we'll trek through it again. Definitely excited to try some new games!
Hey, thanks so much for making this happen, it was a lot of fun and even thought I hit my goal pretty early in the process (I'll probably choose something a little harder if I do Balatro again) I really enjoyed it, and it's been fun seeing the chatter on the discord as folks have been trying wrap up runs. I'd love to see us do it again, and thanks again for herding cats!
Totally agree here. I asked around the Dark Souls 3 chat on the Archipelago Discord and got some really good tips I'm keen to try next time to both cut down the number of checks that's dominated by DS3 and also ensure my game doesn't end in 3 hours lol.
Thanks Lapbunny! Looking forward to the next one!
I've done lots of DS1 rando runs (single player), but not yet for DS3. What did you think of it? It seems like a fairly linear game, as I can only think of a few keys that are absolutely required. Though I guess the lord souls would also need to be found.
In addition to randomizing gear, I think a fun idea would be to have your max level locked behind checks. Add something like 100 "max_level_progressive" checks to the pool, and cap your level as a way of slowing progress. You can still push on, but it might get difficult!
It might be hard for me to make a comparison because I've only played DS3 out of all the Dark Souls games and Pokemon is the only other game I've randomized!
There's a few places in DS3 that's interesting, but you're right it's not exactly a totally different game experience. You can go to early Lothric Castle by killing Emma right at the start if you like and that opens a different branch of the game (if you're good enough to fight Dancer and Lothric Castle earlish).
There's lots of interesting places and checks you can setup to find key items, like you can end up doing something like finding one of the shop NPCs, giving them one of their shop items, buying a key for an area, going to that area, finding the transmutation kilm, that needing a boss soul drop that gives you a key item.
You can randomize the enemies too but I'm too wimpy for that lol.
Great point about merchants and the transmutation kiln. That would definitely add some more difficult pathing. Especially if it requires a difficult boss to unlock something.
I'd definitely consider doing DS3 for a future run, so cheers for the info. Enemy randomization would definitely make for a more spicy run.
Even though I didn’t participate, I thought this was such a cool event idea! I’m thrilled that it went well. Kudos to you, Lapbunny, for organizing it.
For those of us not on the Discord, does anyone have any cool moments or stories from it to share?
I played Minecraft for my run, and one notable thing is that I had to work around unlocks in a couple of ways. Due to the way things get randomized, I arrived at the end of the game without being able to craft beds, a shield, diamond armor, or a bucket. So I had to use alternate means to get some items. It was fun to flex my obscure Minecraft knowledge to find ways around.
It was also pretty funny to me to see the names of Dark Souls and Hollow Knight items pop up in game as I unlocked things.
I got my Dark Souls 3 key items (the cinders to best the game) in the first 3 hours before I logged in for the first time. So my game was weird because I was basically playing "how low level can I beat the final boss?"
I got a bunch of boss souls too, which I used to get to around level 30 but my weapon I could only get to +3 (out of 10) and I couldn't really do the damage to win. So I had to go do some exploring to find more upgrade material, luckily it didn't take very long after running through some item dense areas. I beat some bosses on the way and got to level 45, my weapon to +10 and clubbed the final boss. I won the second day of the randomizer!
Couple goofy things in my Crystal run:
I chose Scyther as my starter. I wasn't aware the game lets you apply the trade items to evolve Pokémon, so I caught a Scizor, got sent a Metal Coat, and by endgame my party had two Scizors.
I got a Squirtbottle pretty late, so most of the first half of my run was running all the way between Goldenrod and Violet through Ilex Forest, Azalea, and Union Cave. Then I got the Pass for the train, so I could go to Kanto... But I still didn't have the Squirtbottle. So once I got that, I had to go from New Bark Town to Cherrygrove, Violet, Union, Azalea, Ilex, Goldenrod, then Saffron, Vermillion, take the S. S. Aqua, land in Olivine, go to Ecruteak, and end up in Mahogany. I got all the checks along the way. Then I had to go back to Goldenrod for Team Rocket...
Despite all that, I got my badge to use Fly so late that I flew exactly once - to Viridian to go to Red.
The GS Ball isn't necessary, but my team was underleveled and I got it from a check literally right next to the shrine, so I actually used Celebi!
I had to fight Sabrina for a check pretty early, and I had the randomizer stick to (one) matched type when randomizing... So, yeah, I got a level 50 Mewtwo when I was like 20 levels under. Funny enough my Togepi knew Fly, and Mewtwo didn't have any attacks aside from Future Sight. So I actually had it survive each Future Sight and then chip away with assorted Metronome crap, Fly, and Cut... And it almost actually killed it, but Sabrina used a Hyper Potion. Then Mewtwo started Struggling and that did PRIIII in.
I set 50% chance that an HM move would be compatible with a Pokémon and a 5% chance of TM compatibility so I couldn't just teach everyone Earthquake (but I might get it, as a little treat). Unfortunately I also forgot that Union Cave has a bunch of checks locked behind Rock Smash... So I had to go on a catching adventure. Many thanks to the random Croconaw I caught.
The hardest battle in the game was Bugsy's Shuckle with Toxic and Surf. That thing was awful.
I set my levels to scale with spheres. (These are sort of the outline for the Archipelago tiers. You get sphere 1 items to start, dependencies off those items you find will be tier 2, and so on.) Since there's a mildly limited amount of money, I went kinda miser on items to start, preparing myself for the Elite 4 gauntlet and Red fights. The Elite 4 was, uh, a bunch of Level 17 Pokémon. So that was a little disappointing. I think Sabrina's Mewtwo was actually the highest level trainer Pokémon outside Red? Basically no other fight leveled that high.
Then I fought Red! Which thankfully still wasn't difficult, because he used basically all unevolved Pokémon. Except Sunflora. Also a Zapdos that threatened wiping my party, but thankfully ELVIS had that.
SETTINGS LESSONS LEARNED: Force fully evolved trainer fights above like 40 for the challenge, sphere AND distance scaling, bump up exp to 4x to compensate, early Fly, minimum like 10% TM rate. Though I did submit an enhancement on the github asking to put TM08 with HM chances! I'm helping!
For some reason this delights me the most.
I didn't realize how randomized Crystal would really be. All the wandering sounds pretty fun to me, breaks up the usual routine to have to cross into Kanto and then back to Johto. If there's another Archipelago round, I might join and play that!
Thanks for running this! I regret choosing such a short goal, but maybe for the best as it was my first randomizer run.
If you turn this into a monthly event or something I can see myself joining them fairly regularly.
I hope you run one of these again! I hope to take part in the next one.