For alternative encodes, please see the description of that video.

For a subtitles file which can be used for the publication encode: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RBu05AV_bibPt3TNCuPXT0cTL2vRf6ru/view?usp=sharing

If you would like to watch the live premiere and commentary: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/676065389

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is an RPG developed by Intelligent Systems and is the second game in the Paper Mario series following Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64. It incorporates a world made of paper and turn-based battles, much like its predecessor. In it, Peach asks Mario to help find a treasure hidden in Rogueport. When he arrives, she is missing as usual, and he must collect 7 Crystal Stars to save her and open the Thousand-Year Door to collect the treasure.

Because using a floating trampoline for Palace Skip and ignoring gravity for Blimp Ticket Skip weren't enough, Mario has decided to further violate the laws of physics by jumping through a wall for Teleporter Room Early. Please, I beg of you (partially so I don't need to make a 9th TAS for this game), do not let Mario violate any more laws of physics. Additionally, Mario has decided to re-learn English as opposed to continuing to traverse the Paper Mario universe while speaking Japanese.

This is an improvement of 13:49.2, or 49752 frames.

I have done a considerable amount of testing to try to synchronize this run with multiple different settings.

I'd first like to discuss the regional changes that occurred upon the discovery of Teleporter Room Early (described below). The new TRE method works equally as fast on either version, as we no longer need to depend on the Japanese-exclusive Flurrie Superslide method. This was the main cause of timeloss between the different regions of the game. Now that we have dodged this barrier, we could start to time the region differences. Firstly, there is more English text than there is Japanese text. As such, we lose a few frames every few text boxes, which can progressively add up over a (less than!) 2 hour game playthrough. We estimate we lose about a minute due to more text. However, this timeloss is immediately cut in half when we factor in the US and PAL-exclusive Goomba Trio Skip (described below). The other noticable difference is the faster method of setting up the Chapter 6 Super Jump. Instead of creating a save file at Flurrie's house, there is an e-mail in the Excess Express that we can use to obtain Jump Storage. Considering we don't have to return to the title screen 3 times, this saves a considerable amount of time, leading to US pulling ahead of Japanese! Also, I'd like to add that it has been incredibly weird to actually be able to read what everyone is saying in-game.

After exporting collision .obj files and viewing them in Blender, SolidifiedGaming discovered that there was a small gap between the wall collision and the door collision. Really_Tall succeeded in squeezing Mario inside this gap. Start in Paper Mode to give Mario a small hitbox. Approach the gap in the wall by angling slightly left of up. When at this gap, let go of R (to unspin from Paper Mode) and press A to jump. This will cause Mario to jump while unspinning. In doing so, Mario immediately returns to his full walking speed of 2.25, whereas he would normally unspin at a speed of 1. This speed, in conjunction with Mario's smaller Paper Mode hitbox, allows Mario to squeeze through the gap.

The implications of this glitch are that we no longer need to obtain Flurrie, therefore we no longer need to enter Chapter 2. Though we could perform TRE as early as mid-Chapter 1, we will need to access the Great Tree in order to obtain the Super Boots. If we do not trigger the cutscene with Punio right before Chapter 2 (in which Punio opens the back path to the Boggly Woods pipe), the passageway to the pipe will be blocked. Funnily enough, there IS a gap in the side of the passageway that would allow us to clip through and reach the Boggly Woods pipe if the passageway is not revealed. However, this same clip does not work when returning from Boggly Woods. Therefore, in the event we do not talk to Punio and reveal the Boggly Woods pipe passageway, we would remain softlocked. Therefore, we sadly need to complete Chapter 1 in its entirety before performing Teleporter Room Early.

(Try saying THAT 3 times fast!) We can use the same clip method from Teleporter Room Early to get out-of-bounds immediately onto the train tracks. This prevents me from having to move as far left to set up Koops for Jump Storage. This doesn't save that much time in the grand scheme of things, but it looks pretty cool!

In the US/PAL version of the game, the moving platform by the Goomba Trio in the Prologue moves farther to the left and right than in the Japanese version of the game. This is seemingly to reduce the difficulty of jumping from the platform to the pipe. However, this moving platform moves sufficiently far enough left to push Mario inside the left wall. This completely cuts out the Goomba Trio fight to save half a minute.

Yeah, you read that right. This game has a floating point precision-perfect trick. Two rooms before we reach the spiral of the castle, there is an airplane panel that we usually have to take in order to reach the door higher up. The need for the plane panel was obsoleted through the use of a Double Jump, however this still took a considerable amount of time as the transition in and out of battle is slow. When you ride the block up to the top path, there is double-sided collision for the bars. In other words, there is a piece of collision for the front-facing portion of the bars and a piece of collision for the back-facing portion of the bars. The alignment of these pieces of collision is such that there is a small gap between the two collision pieces. If we obtain a Z-axis position of exactly 100, we can walk straight through these bars along the top path and drop down by the door. This was performed in the TAS by first using a Lua script to test different analog stick inputs and output their corresponding Z-axis speed values. I then discovered that particular angles were associated in a way in which one angle produced a Z-axis speed twice that of the other angle. or so I thought. As it turns out, as the result of (seemingly) inaccurate floating point rounding, the faster Z-axis speed value is not precisely twice that of the other Z-axis speed. As a result, I could use this knowledge to offset my Z-axis speed by 1 millionth of a unit everytime I performed the corresponding analog stick inputs for these speeds. This sufficiently allowed me to navigate to a Z-axis position of 100.000000, which satisfies the condition to walk through the double-sided collision. All of this madness saves merely a few seconds. But it was soooo worth it!

Right before fighting Hooktail is a very long spiral staircase. In order to save as much time as possible, I confided in PistonMiner to modify textures such that the outer portion of the spiral is invisible and the inside of the spiral alternates colors when the angle of the wall changes. Being able to visually observe the change in wall angles allowed me to better optimize the spiral around getting the much better wall pushes compared to the previous TAS. This was a very tedious process, as I essentially had to use a different input for every frame, but I managed to save nearly 25 frames if I recall correctly.

The Grodus Card Key was re-routed such that we grab it on the first Chapter 7 visit. During the first visit, we need to read the red note in order to correctly set our state to Chapter 7 in order to unlock the Great Tree. In doing so, this allows the Card Key in Grodus's office to spawn. On the second visit, because we perform Elevator Skip, we are not explicitly required to read the red note. To avoid reading the note on our second visit, we just grab the office Card Key on the first visit. Additionally, we grabbed the left Card Key on our first visit as well. In retrospect, I believe this movement wastes a few frames. However, for once RNG has saved my butt because if I were to skip this Card Key on the first visit, my RNG value would be farther away from the necessary value for the Mega Rush P drops. This would result in a net loss of a few frames. Thanks RNG!

Let's say, hypothetically, that you're making a TTYD TAS, and after completing Chapter 1, SolidifiedGaming discovers a new trick. Upon investigating this glitch and its constraints, you conclude with a modified Chapter 1 route in order to conform to this new trick. Let's then say that further review resulted in you having to redo Chapter 1 again with another modified route. Then let's say that you AGAIN modified the route to chop off a few more seconds, meaning you again have to redo Chapter 1. All the while, you were manipulating a 1/1,000,000 random scenario (if done humanly) for the Hooktail battle, and you had to redo it for each modified route before the next modification was realized. Huh, that would be quite the wild ride, right? I'm really glad that's not what happened to me. Definitely didn't happen to me...

Anyway... We first set Koops up in such a position that Mario falls down below while Koops grabs the Card Key. We pause and unpause upon landing in order to gain control of Mario earlier. This allows us to control Mario before Koops grabs the items, whereas we would normally be stuck in place until after Koops grabs the item. Then we go into Paper Mode briefly and pause to use an item. The item will allow Koops to bring the item over to the edge of the upper platform. Going into Paper Mode allows the overworld to freeze after a small delay. This results in the Card Key falling off the platform after Mario is done using the item. Thus, we can swap to Yoshi and use him a few frames before the item lands on us. In doing so, we obtain Jump Storage, which is a prerequisite for Super Jump, the trick that allows us to gain infinite height. After obtaining this jump storage, we navigate to the scooter, step up onto it to gain Y-velocity, which is the second prerequisite for Super Jump, and then Super Jump all the way to the door to Magnus von Grapple 2.0. This skips the need to go into the background after obtaining the Card Key in order to make our way back to the higher platforms and activate the staircase. Overall, this saves around 20 seconds.

This is a newly discovered variation of Palace Skip which saves a few seconds over skipping an additional battle and avoiding the need to obtain a full inventory. We repeat the same initial setup as previous Palace Skips in which we obtain Text Storage and get out-of-bounds with a Yoshi Teleport. Then, we set Koops up on the edge of the front seam. Then we traverse behind the left door and jump towards the back-left corner of the room. While manipulating the Ember to navigate far down-left, we can release Koops to hit the Ember while we are midair at the top-left corner. Doing so allows us to perform a Double Jump mid-air to make our way around the top-left corner and land back onto the back seam of the room. From here, we can easily navigate to the loading zone beneath the floor.

Here I will briefly mention some new scripts that I have implemented to save additional time (both in the TAS and in real life!). The X-Naut ambush cutscene is not a consistent length, due to a change in the time it takes the X-Nauts to walk out and to stop jumping. I used a script to repeat the same sequence of inputs, while testing wasting frames throughout different textboxes in order to shorten this cutscene. The Gold Fuzzy fight can vary in length when the Fuzzy Horde comes out. Their movement towards the stage is random, and thus they take a variable amount of time to reach the stage. I constructed a script to handle this case. A similar issue is presented when the Dull Bones fall before the Red Bones fight, and a script helped mediate the process of brute forcing RNG for this sequence.

Okay, here's the tough one! For the Hooktail fight, we want to try ending the first phase of the fight (deal 20 damage) in a single turn. We can use Mario's Power Bounce to repeatedly jump on Hooktail. After the 8th jump, Mario has a 2/3 chance of getting capped, meaning the game will not let you continue jumping even if you hit the action command. This means that the "softcap" is the 9th jump, which means this is the first jump where we can get capped and forced to stop. The "hardcap" is the absolute maximum number of Power Bounce jumps you can deal to a particular enemy. The hardcap for any particular enemy is always twice the softcap. Therefore, we can do a total of 18 bounces to Hooktail to deal 17 damage (Hooktail does not take damage on the first hit). Since each jump after the 8th has a chance at capping, we need to NOT cap for jumps 9 through 17 (as long as we're not capped on jump 17, we can continue to the 18th jump). Thus, we need to not cap for 9 consecutive jumps, which is a (1/3)^9 chance, or 1 in 19,683 chance. We still have 3 damage to go, so we can use Koops to deal 2 damage. But we still have 1 left, so how can we deal with this? We can manipulate a bucket drop after the Power Bounces, however this random event is determined as soon as we stop Power Bouncing and occurs at a rate of 2%. Thus, the combined probabilities for an 18-cap AND a bucket drop is a 1 in 984,155 chance. This may sound ridiculous (don't get me wrong, it absolutely is), but I have a trick up my sleeve. After performing a jump and before landing for the next jump, you can perform a "Stylish" in which Mario does a pose mid-air. These poses are randomly determined and thus call RNG at a consistent rate, such that doing a different number of stylishes leading up to a particular cap will produce different calculations for the determination of the cap. It's important to note that performing 1 stylish on jump 1 is no different than performing 1 stylish on jump 2, as they both will advance RNG by the same amount by the time you reach the first cap. Thus, I wrote a brute force script to try stylishing a different number of times leading up to a particular cap to produce different results. After running for a few hours, it can usually produce a few 18-cap scenarios, from which I can test stylishing/not stylishing on the last jump and see if a bucket drop occurs. After around a day of running, I was usually able to find a sufficient outcome that produces an 18-cap and bucket drop. And like I mentioned earlier, I definitely didn't have to redo this 5 times due to route changes or anything. Yeah, definitely not!

Things die down for a bit in terms of scripting after Hooktail for a bit until I need to manipulate Mega Rush Ps from enemies in the sewers. Through the help of jdaster, we determined the RNG calls that occur when loading the room and which calls in particular set up parameteres for the two fights in the room, including whether or not the enemies are holding a badge, and, by extension, are holding Mega Rush P. He created a Python script to replicate these RNG calls, allow us to input our current RNG value, and output satisfiable RNG values that occur in the future, as well as at what index these RNG values exist. We can use this reference to line up our RNG value such that when we enter the room, two Mega Rush Ps spawn. This process is repeated in the West Sewers after Chapter 3.

Okay, let's be honest here: Chapter 3 was one of the weakest points of my last TAS. The item throws from the audience were incredibly slow, and we didn't have the framework established to look further into the mechanics of item throws. Given that, at the start of this TAS, we still didn't have any idea how to reverse this process, what do you think we did for the item route? That's right! We added even more item throws! I was terrified, honestly. However, jdaster once again saved my butt and had disassembled various different parts of the audience mechanics. Through this knowledge, we were able to determine an address which stores the number of items that can be thrown in a single turn. We further learned about the calculations that occur in regards to when an item will spawn, and also which audience member it will spawn from. I initially obtained all the required item throws by manually brute forcing them myself. However, by using a similar script to the Mega Rush P drops, we were able to reverse this process and determine satisfiable RNG values, and I managed to chop off 11.5 seconds from my earlier brute force attempt. I am incredibly satisfied with the result.

In Chapter 7 for the Elite X-Naut fight, I again use a brute force script to waste as few frames as possible while getting all enemies to run from a Fright Mask and drop a Stopwatch. Again in Chapter 8 I use a similar script for the Dark Bones fight to manipulate a Showstopper to kill all 5 enemies, which is a 1.7% chance. it probably wasn't fully necessary to use a brute force script here, but it made testing a lot faster. I used a similar script to the X-Naut fight in order to get a Fright Mask and item drop from the Ember for Palace Skip.

Let me preface this by saying that I never thought this Bowser fight would happen. It saves a few second to use a Showstopper instead of taking two turns to Ground Pound with Yoshi. For Bowser and Kammy, it is a 1 in 2,500 scenario that they wil both die from a Showstopper. A brute force script easily produced a suitable outcome for this fight!

Learn how to count to 8 with TTYD! 1, 7, 2, 6, 3, 7, 8!

Nothing too different occurs in the Prologue compared to my previous TAS. One noticable change though is the introduction of Goomba Trio Skip, which saves around 30 seconds. As you'll see later, this introduces some problems to our XP route. However, I did manage to manipulate Goomther the Goomba to perform a moonwalk during the Goombella cutscene. This occurs when Goomther turns around in the overworld, and thus this turn is reflected in the cutscene, even though he keeps walking right. It doesn't save or lose time. Just for fun!

Again, nothing is substantially different in this Chapter, though the item route varied slightly. Because we no longer need to reserve the Mystery item for the Chapter 2 Shadow Sirens fight, we could instead use it on the Red Bones fight to save a few seconds over using 2 items like before. Because we do not level on this fight, as a result of skipping the Goomba Trio fight, we will run out of FP during the Hooktail fight. As such, we need to grab a Honey Syrup in the Ms. Mowz room. We perform the floating point precision-perfect plane panel skip before reaching Hooktail. For the Hooktail fight, we successfully implemented the 18-cap + bucket drop as described above.

The new Teleporter Room Early is shown off in its full glory! I love how it turned out. I implemented the Card Key re-route, and as mentioned far above, I mistakenly grabbed the left Card Key during this first visit, though this probably saved me a few frames due to Mega Rush P RNG. This RNG was aligned such that I only had to waste a few frames during text boxes to reach the necessary RNG value.

There's not much to say for this brief Chapter. It is important to mention a slight improvement for the Jabbi Hive Skip. Vynneve found that you could get out-of-bounds in the 10 Jabbi fight room without the need to Goombella Buffer. This saves a bit of time from having to swap to/from Goombella and activate her.

The new Jump Storage setup first requires us to read the note by the Sanctum. Failure to do so will result in us starting at the beginning of Chapter 6 when we enter the train. Reading this note prevents us from entering an early Chapter 6 state. After grabbing the Crystal Star, SolidifiedGaming managed to find a way to clip out-of-bounds which sends us to the center of the room. This saves a few seconds over walking from the pedestal to the center of the room.

This new version of Blimp Ticket Skip was difficult to work on because I couldn't see Mario too easily. Additionally, the US and PAL versions of the game restrict how far away partners can be from Mario compared to the Japanese version of the game. This makes setting Koops far away enough to get Jump Storage a bit more difficult. The item throws across this chapter turned out really well in my opinion. Before the Dull Bones fight, we equip Multibounce for the fight. It would theoretically be faster to equip these while we're already paused for Jabbi Hive Skip, however this advances my RNG such that I reach Chapter 3 with an RNG value that does not align that well with the RNG values that would produce the item throws I need. Thus, it is seemingly better to pause here.

Elevator Skip turned out better than the previous TAS. The Card Key Super Jump in the factory room was really fun to work on and it turned out amazing to me.

The Dark Bones fight was a nice improvement, and so was the new variant of Palace Skip. The Bowser and Kammy fight Showstopper was another nice timesave and is something I've always wanted to include in the TAS ever since I found out it was a possible strategy. I managed to save a bit of time on the Gloomtail Warp after. When beginning plane mode, you can actually spam left every third frame to gain a lot of height before leaving the panel. This allows me to reach the doorway without having to maintain as much height which restricts X-axis speed. Additionnally, on the doorway, I managed to get setup for the Super Jump a handful of frames faster than the previous TAS. As for Shadow Queen, I first had to get Yoshi into peril. I could do so quickly by manipulating the audience to throw garbage at Yoshi twice and having the Shadow Queen attack Yoshi once. Afterwards, I successfully manipulated a Boo to attack the Shadow Queen which counts as one of three necessary hits to end the phase; this strategy is identical to what I used in the previous TAS. For the last phase, I used Double Dip and a Point Swap. Double Dip reduces our FP from 5 to 1. Then Point Swap switches Yoshi's HP with our FP. This effectively causes Yoshi to get into peril instantly. With a few ground pounds, we can defeat the Shadow Queen and save the world from plunging into eternal darkness!

Remember when I said that I had to redo Chapter 1 several times due to route changes? Yeah? Well I thought that was the end of it. And then uh.... https://twitter.com/EZGames69/status/1275490512707993602 I accidentally made this TAS on a modified ISO, and when it was repackaged after modifying a text file, I guess that data became dislocated in a way that caused loading times to change. (You would think that garbage data being read from addresses within Cheat Engine would have been a good indicator, but I decided to ignore it!) As such, my TAS did not synchronize starting when I begin control of Mario at the very beginning of the game. After contemplating for a day, I decided to redo the TAS from the very start by copy-pasting inputs where I could and redoing RNG-dependent scenarios. This process worked out fairly well, but I worry that I might have lost a handful of frames due to trying to manipulate RNG such that some of my inputs for rooms with minimal RNG-dependency would still sync up. I don't believe this is a significant amount of time though. Also, PLEASE check your MD5 or SHA1 before starting a TAS. Do as I say, not as I do.

When calculating timings regarding a small skip in the room after grabbing the Super Boots, I failed to account for a faster way of swapping partners, wherein you swap partners while in the background of a room, such as entering the Great Tree in Boggly Woods. This eliminates the animation time of the partners swapping out. This means that it would actually be faster to use a Goombella Buffer in this room, as opposed to ground-pounding the floor panel. My commentary incorrectly cites these inaccurate timings and is incorrect. Therefore, less than a second was lost because of this mistake.

The Chapter 3 audience throws are really awesome to see now, but obviously with better RNG manipulation a handful of frames could most definitely be shaved off.

Elevator Skip in Chapter 7 is dependent on the left Z-Yux's position. He needs to be far enough to the right to hit me in front of the elevator after I obtain Text Storage. To my knowledge, there is no way to manipulate his position before I enter the Elite X-Naut fight, as it seems that his movement cooldown timer does not reach 0 before I enter the battle. As such, he remains in his spawn position. If I were to get better RNG such that he takes a more direct path towards the elevator, then I could maybe chop off a second or so.

For the new Palace Skip method, Koops isn't set up exactly on the border of the Ember's zone, meaning I could probably save a handful of frames by not walking as far to the right to set him up. I did attempt this though, and could not produce a satisfiable condition in which the Ember would approach Koops at the necessary time.

The setup for Blimp Ticket Skip (creating the save file, dying at Flurrie’s house, completing Chapter 6, and the intermissions that follow) is much more lengthy than we’d like. If a better method for Blimp Ticket Skip was found, we could definitely shave off a few more minutes. We don’t currently have any significant leads as to how this may be possible, though if we found a way to obtain Jump Storage in Poshley Heights rather than use a file at Flurrie’s house, that in itself may save a minute.

My last submission had this written, and it's nice to know this was made possible!

If we were able to perform TRE without Flurrie, then we would not need to finish Chapter 1. After obtaining Paper Mode, I could advance immediately to Chapter 7 via TRE, get the Super Boots from the Great Tree, go to Poshley Heights and finish Chapter 6, Blimp Ticket Skip, Glitzville, Chapter 7, and end with Chapter 8.

This was written in my previous submission too! Funnily enough, at the time, we didn't understand that we would still need to reveal the pipe to Chapter 2 before doing TRE.

The switches inside the Sun and Moon Stone pillars have solid hitboxes, but the hitbox of the pillars prevents us from interacting with the switches in any way. In the event we are able to find a way to activate the switches without the Sun and Moon Stones, then we would be able to cut out the entirety of Petalburg and Shhwonk Fortress/Sewers. This would save approximately 9 minutes.

Our next holy grail is performing Palace Skip without Yoshi. This would cut off the entirety of Glitzville, resulting in a near 25 minute timesave. This would result in TTYD becoming faster than than the Paper Mario 64 TAS AND possibly faster than the Super Mario 64 120 Stars TAS. Our main lead for this theory is a memory overflow involving writing EFF (think of particle effects on more modern game engines) entries to an entry table past the limit of the table and into Mario's data structure. Once the table is full, performing certain actions can result in certain bytes being written to Mario's data structure such that he can walk through walls. I have a more detailed description of this phenomena in this video:

It has been incredible to watch as the community has succeeded in discovering so many theorized glitches over the years. I have been TASing this game for 6 years now. Since helping with the first TAS with CoolKirby2000 and Masterjun, I have now reached a time almost 3 hours shorter. This is mind blowing to me. You could play this TAS 3 times and it would beat Chapter 7 on the third playback before the first TAS finishes. Everytime, I say that this is the end and that no tricks will likely be found, and then I regret saying that. I will not be surprised if a future milestone is reached in glitch discoveries for this game. At this point, I expect it because SolidifiedGaming and Really_Tall are amazing at what they do.

VI: 192485 https://i.imgur.com/tHUXMyG.png

VI: 251048 https://i.imgur.com/DkBD2A2.png

VI: 307788 https://i.imgur.com/6CRQeMf.png

VI: 308475 https://i.imgur.com/Q3L1ioZ.png

SolidifiedGaming - Card Key Jump Storage

Jdaster - Reverse-engineered the battle system to calculate Mega Rush drops, audience item throws + events, and bucket drop probabilities

trivial171 - Developed a lua script for monitoring the index values and rate of advancement for RNG

PistonMiner - Created texture modifications to allow me to better optimize the Hooktail Castle spiral

Vynneve - Routing

MuzYoshi - Intro image in my Youtube encode

Until next time, enjoy!

Memory: Claiming for judgment

Memory: Thanks to Stovent for confirming sync.

Optimization seems really good, a lot of effort has been put into this game over the past years.

As usual, TTYD is filled with lots of crazy tricks and glitches. The presence of Frankly is of course quite amusing as well. The audience also universally enjoyed this TAS.

Accepting to Moons to obsolete [4077] GC Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door by Malleoz in 2:00:58.23.

Stovent: Processing...