This is my first Super Paper Mario movie here. Far from being a final product, but I hope that you will enjoy it!
File info
- Game version: US (1.0)
- SHA1: 441c05ddd378ced5ef3b0f610a20f9a499f75ab0
- MD5: fe441d77d5cb9a7f01de954e84e6ca49
- Vi frame count: 59626
- Lag frames: 9
- RNG manipulation: around a hundred frames
Emulator settings
- Dolphin 5.0 with Lua Core v4.3 by MikeXander (syncs on 5.0 stable)
- Dual Core: off
- Idle Skipping: off
- JIT Recompiler
- DSP HLE emulation
- Wii aspect ratio: 16:9
- Disable Bounding Box: off
- No GameCube Controller, one Emulated Wiimote WITH a Nunchuck extension
General info
This is "maximum coins" (a.k.a. "999 coins"), a popular side category in the Super Paper Mario speedrunning community. Starting from a new file, the goal is to reach 999 coins as quickly as possible.
To my knowledge, this is the first full TAS attempt of this category. The primary goal was to investigate the potential of a new route idea. Additionally, this was an opportunity for me to get more familiar with the movement and the RNG in this game.
The route
- In 1-1 learn the flip ability, get an item selling around 15 coins (here a Shroom Shake) and get roughly 90 "raw" coins.
- Coin block trick by Igrmi.
- Use the Return Pipe and head to Flipside Outskirts using the Lineland Door Clip.
- Head to the lowest Flipside Outskirts floor (B2) and get the HP Plus (400 of selling value).
- There are up to 11 coin drop opportunities on the way.
- When leaving this room, you should have (at least) 98 coins.
- Head to the arcade via Flipside B1. Buy 30 Flipside tokens for 90 coins and redeem them for 6 Mystery Boxes.
- Head to Saffron's restaurant in Flipside 1st Floor, and cook your 6 Mystery Boxes for Roast Shroom Dishes (2% chance and 96 of selling value each, 576 of total selling value).
- The Mystery Box cooking outcome is available at address 0x807B760E in the US 1.0 version, and is decided right when the last text box before the cooking cutscene is closed (item IDs available here).
- Head to the Flipside shop in Flipside 2nd floor. Sell everything.
Known improvements
There are three easy improvements which could be made right away (and which justify the "LOTAD" label):
- First, it is faster by a few seconds to get a Shroom Shake from an item drop instead picking it up at Bestovius' house. I know that there are existing tools to , but I did not have one readily available when making this movie. This was the only instance of a potentially useful item drop in the route, so I preferred not to bother with it.
- Second, 3D movement is unpolished. I did not bother making diagonal movement as "straight" as possible, and I did not go for the 3D wall hugging speedup tech (which is similar to Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, for those who are familiar with it). While this would only save a handful of frames, such time save is easy to get (just more time consuming).
- Third, cooking manipulation can be improved by a lot. In this movie, it accounts for 85 of the roughly 100 total frames spent in RNG manipulation, versus about 10 frames for coin drops and 4 frames for the Happy Flower. Weirdly enough, in this game text boxes call RNG every frame. And conveniently, there is a skippable text box during the cooking cutscene, which can be made visble from half a second to four seconds. So, for all but the first Mystery Box, this opens up about two hundred scenarios with zero time loss for a 1 in 50 chance outcome. Thus there is good hope to bring the time investment for cooking manipulation close to zero frames, and save a second and a half as a result.
Potential improvements
With the current route, the main elephant in the room is Happy Flower manipulation (the yellow flower which triggers a rain of coins). From an initial investigation (shoutouts to Yme), exactly 30 coins are spawned with pseudo-random coordinates and falling speed. Additionally, each coin has a 5% chance of becoming a big coin, worth 3 coins instead of 1. This sets the maximum number of potential coins as 90, which is pretty what we need in this route. Ideally, this could save up to fiftten seconds. Other improvements include a more reliable way to get coin drops (e.g., with a script to visualize/anticipate when enemies will drop coins) and clipping out-of-bounds from the right side of the corridor in Flipside B2 Outskirts instead of the left side.
Now, it is worth noting that we are one wall clip away from a much faster route. This would involve the catch card shop located at the background layer of Flipside 1st Floor. There, you can buy boosters for 10 coins each and sell your cards. On top of several chests with rare cards in Flipside easily accessible with small detours, it is possible to manipulate what you get from booster packs. Although most cards can only appear in boosters when you advance the story enough, the Amayzee Dayzee and Mega Koopa cards are availalble from the get go, and you can sell them for 300 and 100 coins respectively. So the route would be to leave 1-1 as soon as you learn the flip ability, perform the Lineland Door Clip, get a few starting coins in 1-1 and Flipside from coin drops or rare card chests, head to the catch card shop, manipulate booster pack outcomes until you maximize your coin count.
With current techniques, we are 0.07 units away from clipping into the background wall (for the sake of comparison, the width of Mario's hitbox is 20 units). And this has been the case for a few years now. So we are both close and far from making this route a reality.