Randomizer Thoughts: To Wander or to Seek

Hello and welcome to another installment of Randomizer Thoughts! Where we unravel the mysteries and complexities of Zelda randomizers and discuss what’s new in the world of randomizers. This week, we’ll be talking about the two different approaches to Randomizers, Blind and Routed approach. We also have some updates on the randomizer leagues including the results of the first length of the A Link to the Past Randomizer League 2020 Invitational and news on qualifiers for the Ocarina of Time Season 4 Randomizer League! We also have an Ocarina of Time Race seed to challenge your routing abilities!

If you’re new to Randomizer Thoughts, check out our FAQ for a little bit of a lesson on what exactly Randomizers are as well as our previous installment covering figuring out the right settings to use for your playstyle. Without further ado though, let’s get into this week’s topic.

 

Blind vs. Routed

So, when we talk about randomizers, there’s two major approaches to play. The more common one is what’s called Blind. This is the process of literally just booting up the game and just opening chests to see what you find, slowly trying to chip away at the locations you have access to at any given time. This playstyle can be casual or competitive, and is often done over multiple sessions when one isn’t racing. It plays more on knowing exactly where all the different item locations are in the game and casual runs tend to feature much larger item pools in order to keep the game interesting and varied throughout the entire playthrough. The Spoiler Log, the document containing the master list of where every item has been moved is usually only used if the player gets stuck.

This style can evolve in a lot of different ways depending on the exact game being played. For example, in Majora’s Mask, the three day cycle creates a bit of a situation in terms of item collection as there are a number of items that disappear when the cycle resets. This has more than once led to some pretty precarious scenarios like completing Snowhead Temple in the last hours because a small key I needed was swapped with the Postman’s Hat. Wind Waker offers a bit of a peculiar element in this with the presence of The Great Sea and having a wild number of potential places to go as soon as you have a sail. Quite likely, it will take a couple tries before you actually manage to finish your first blind run.

The counterpart to Blind is the Routed style. This playstyle more resembles speedrunning in nature, and is typically played competitively almost exclusively. Players are allowed to view the Spoiler Log for a set amount of time (15 minutes typically in most competitive matches) before they begin their run proper. During this period, they have the opportunity to create a route in order to complete the game as fast as possible. The victors of these races tend to be the people who can create the most efficient route and do everything possible to clear through any opposition as fast as possible. As noted above, Race seeds tend to use much smaller item pools so that the race can be completed in a reasonable amount of time and provide entertainment for anyone watching them, but when using the Routed style, there’s an opportunity to throw a bit more strange locations in since the players will be able to see them coming.

Part of the biggest difficulty of Routed is learning exactly how to read the Spoiler Log in a quick and efficient manner and learning the process of routing. Personally, I find it is absolutely best to view it in a program that allows for searching for certain terms, as it’s going to make all the more quick to locate those crucial items. Before playing any run, it is also crucial to know the absolute minimum item requirements to completing a game. The thing is though, is this can possibly completely change depending on different elements of your run. For example, Ocarina of Time only requires the Spirit Medallion, Shadow Medallion, and the Light Arrows to actually get access to Ganon’s Castle. Typically, this would mean you need everything to get through Gerudo Desert in addition to what you need to complete the Spirit Temple not to mention all the tools necessary to complete the 7 trials in Ganon’s Castle.

However, if you have shuffled entrances, it’s entirely possible that the Spirit Temple entrance could be tied to the Deku Tree, allowing you to skip all of Gerudo Desert entirely, but the Shadow Temple could be moved to where the Water Temple is, requiring an entirely different set of tools. To this end, it’s best to be completely prepared to know everything you need to get to essentially anywhere in the game, because the last thing you want is to find yourself stuck because you forgot to get the longshot and need to completely backtrack to where it is, adding tons of time onto your run. It was mentioned in the Randomizer FAQ, but I absolutely recommend downloading and making use of EmoTracker if you have any interest in going into Race seeds as it will just make one less you thing to worry about while time is ticking. However, do note that Autotracking, the process where tracking applications automatically update as you play, is banned in near all forms of public racing.

Randomizer Spotlight

Introducing a new section to Randomizer Thoughts, Randomizer Spotlight. Each installment, we’ll be covering various randomizers in the community and highlighting their developers! As often as I can, I’ll be trying to reach out to them to get their direct input on the process and development of the randomizer, but regardless, we hope we can bring attention to a lot of unique randomizers and enlighten people on the complicated and devoted process that many of these developers go through to make these work.

We open up with the fantastic MetalMachine, developer of both a Map Generator Randomizer for Legend of Zelda for the NES, similar to that of the Map Randomizer by Garret Bright covered earlier this week, as well as the randomizer that’s the topic of our spotlight this week, Z1M1: a randomizer that mixes the gameplay of both Zelda and Metroid for the NES and a personal favorite randomizer of mine. Metal reached out to me through out Zelda Dungeon Discord and I had a chance to ask him a couple questions.

Go ahead and introduce yourself!

“Hi, most people know me as MetalMachine or just “Metal” — either is fine. I am the creator and primary developer of Z1M1, which is the NES Zelda + Metroid combo randomizer, and I have some other randomizer projects in the works as well. Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, 8- and 16-bit gaming was a huge part of my childhood. The first console I remember my family having was the Atari 2600, which my brother and I played constantly. Later came the NES, SNES, Master System, Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 systems, all of which were in constant play at our house. In addition, I was also into computer gaming. I remember playing games on my dad’s “portable” computer that he would occasionally bring home to finish work on. Later on I got into Commodore and Amiga computers as well. I started to gain an interest in coding, and the idea of building my own games started to appeal to me. That really never came to be though. After high school, I was in the US Navy for a few years, then I became a software engineer after that, which I’ve been doing for about 17 years now. In my 30’s I got the creative coding bug again, and worked on various projects here and there. Nothing really “stuck” though, for whatever reason. In early 2018, I became aware of Twitch and noticed there were whole communities of people playing 8- and 16-bit games, which really interested me, and I then became aware of randomizers, which intrigued me even further. I eventually started getting to know some people via their streams, and made several friends along the way.”

In your own words, what exactly does your randomizer aim to do?

“From a high level, the Z1M1 randomizer combines the worlds of Legend of Zelda and Metroid, by establishing “portals” between the two games, which are doors or other ways to travel from one game to the other. It also takes all the items from both games, and re-distributes them across both game worlds. The goal of the randomizer is to play through both game worlds, collecting items so you can progress, traveling between the game worlds as needed, with the eventual goal of being able to finish both games, by defeating Ganon and saving Zelda, and by defeating Mother Brain and escaping Tourian. There are many options available on top of this basic idea. For example, you can shuffle all the dungeon locations, shuffle dungeon rooms, randomize enemies and enemy difficulty, modify boss behavior, randomize the internal rooms in Zebes, etc. This just scratches the surface. I like offering a lot of options for players to adjust gameplay and difficulty to their liking. A particular configuration and seed can be easily shared to facilitate races and the like.”

What inspired you to make this randomizer?

“One of the earliest randomizers I became very interested in was the Super Metroid + Link to the Past combo randomizer. I’d seen single game randomizers before that, and as fun as those are, the idea of a combination randomizer strongly appealed to me. At the time, I thought surely someone must have created a similar combo rando for the NES Zelda and Metroid games, but I found that wasn’t the case. That planted a seed in my mind. I thought, “Well, I know how to write software, and these are two of my favorite games, so maybe I can tackle it”. I quickly threw a prototype together. That was in May 2018. The prototype wasn’t much to speak of. It was a single LUA script running on FCEUX, but it showed me that I could switch between games in a controlled manner, and both alter and maintain the state of each game. The first versions were emulator only (specifically FCEUX) simply because that’s the approach I found that worked, and I had zero experience with ROM hacking before this project. The last major version released (3.0) was redesigned from the ground up specifically to play on real hardware, and I was lucky to get a lot of expert help in this major architectural shift, from two very prominent and skilled Zelda and Metroid hackers, namely Fiskbit and snarfblam.”

Can this randomizer be raced at all? Is there a community for it?

“Yes and yes. We have a very friendly and growing Discord server, which is the main hub for the z1m1 community. We currently run a weekly race every Thursday evening, although there is the occasional race or event outside of that weekly race. The randomizer is designed for both solo play and to facilitate racing. It has a feature to share the configuration (aka flagset) either as long bit of text, or it can be shared to a cloud service in exchange for a “code”. The flagset string or code, along with a seed string, is distributed to the participants, so each person can generate the seed for themselves.”

Anything else you’d like to add?

“This project has my name on it, but it is far from a solo effort. As the project evolved and started getting a bit more complex, I realized that I needed some help, so I have reached out from time to time. Various people have helped this project become what it is today, such as Aze, Cina in the earlier versions, to Fiskbit and snarfblam in the most recent versions, who were instrumental in making it work on real hardware (as mentioned above), which was no easy feat. There are also TONS of custom graphics and sprites available in the randomizer, and 99% of those were created or adapted by ZeroMeaning, who has been an amazing sprite-making machine. In addition, there have been a lot of people who have helped in many ways, from playtesting to showcasing, so special thanks go to shatty, eatmysteel, RainingElementalist (aka DarkRupy), syscrusher, Antlerz44, xIceBlue, Anova80, 4iSteven, ZeroMeaning, FssZilla, nintendesi, and many others that I’m sure I’m forgetting. The community behind and around this project is amazing, and I’m honored to know them all.”

I can personally attest that Z1M1 is a blast of a randomizer to play since it really plays at your understanding of how different worlds interconnect with one another and keeping track of multiple different contingencies in your mind. A tracker for this one is almost a requirement in many regards.

You can download Z1M1 for yourself right here, join the Z1M1 Discord right here, as well as support Metal on his Twitter right here!

League Update

Next up, we have some news from the world of Randomizer Leagues, a community of folks who specialize in streamed one on one matches through the routed/race format of randomizers.

Our first order of business is the announcement that Qualifiers have begun for Season 4 of the Ocarina of Time Randomizer League! The first qualifier was held on December 5th and qualifiers will continue to run through January 10th on specific dates throughout the week as well as every Saturday and Sunday. Qualifiers are open to join to anyone in the Ocarina of Time Randomizer Discord by simply participating in their standard scheduled races. I’ll be participating, so perhaps I’ll see you there! For a full schedule of Qualifier dates and more info on participating, join the Ocarina of Time Randomizer Discord!

Next up are the results of Weeks 6 and 7 of the A Link to the Past Randomizer League Invitational! As mentioned in our last installment, Week 6 was an All Dungeons-Keysanity run and things only got more tight in the rankings as a result. The Kakariko Division wound up in a 4-way tie, The Last Locationers were challenged by team Triple Dino Disaster in the Lost Woods Division, while Shaktool’s Digging Game and the Phendrana Drifters held their leads in the Dark World Conference.

This last week saw a Defeat Ganon run with shuffled enemies and co-op play with teammates sharing info as they work to complete the seed together. By the end of the week, a number of victors emerged, ending this heat of the invitationals. Kakariko Division saw teams Pugtrio and Error 216 tie for highest score, Last Locationers took Lost Woods Division, Shaktool’s Digging Game was tied in the very end by WJPDTB in Misery Mire Division, and Phendrana Drifters took Skull Woods by a landslide.

In the end, the top three teams from each division will face off in the division semi-finals and finals before challenging the division winner within the same conference. Those two conference winners will then face each other in the Finals and determine the winner of the Season 3 Invitational. If you want to see the races live, keep an eye on Speedgaming and A Link to the Past Randomizer League‘s Twitch pages and we’ll have the results on the next Randomizer Thoughts.

Zelda Dungeon Seed #002 (Routing 101)

Finally, we have our bi-weekly official Zelda Dungeon Randomizer seed! Essentially, using the seed provided here, you can receive the same exact randomization as anyone else who uses the seed. This allows for both potential discussion of the contents of the seed among others and an opportunity for the particular run to be quality checked beforehand to ensure it’s fun and engaging and meets certain themes. I alternate between Blind and Race seeds, so there will be one of each, each month! Race seeds will also come with a Zelda Dungeon time (set by yours truly) to try and beat.

This week comes our first race seed! Much like last installment’s Blind seed, this is a seed designed to be on the easier side of things, just with a bit more of an emphasis on trying to complete the game as fast as possible. You are welcome to view the Spoiler Log for as long you need to while routing, but if you want to do it like the pros, give yourself only 15 minutes to do so. Like before, this is also an Ocarina of Time seed and is obtained exactly the same way as before though I’ll repeat the instructions just the same.

In order to play the seed, you’ll need to go to this link right here and submit your Rom into the randomizer. Note, that it will need to be clean copy of Ocarina of Time in order to work. From there, it should just take a couple minutes to patch the rom and then download. From there, stick it into your preferred method of play and have fun! The Zelda Dungeon Time to complete this seed is 3:57:54. If you manage to beat it, send a screenshot of your time and we’ll feature in next month’s Randomizer Thoughts!

A couple hints for your run here!

• The Ocarina of Time Randomizer site’s spoiler log produces something called The Way of the Hero which details all the locations of all the items required to complete the game.
• It does not include the items needed to obtain these items necessarily however, so make sure to take those into account.
• As with the previous seed, make sure you’re checking the shops.
• Several items for this run are behind 100+ Rupee walls, so make sure you have a plan to quickly collect money
• As well, like before, all 5 medallions are required to access Ganondorf, but they are shuffled with the Spiritual Stones.
• Don’t forget that Mido blocks the way to the Forest Temple!
• The Boss Key to Ganon is shuffled into the mix! Make sure to include it in your route!
• The Lens of Truth is not required to complete the Shadow Temple and will add quite a bit of time to your run if you retrieve it.

That’s all for now, but check in next time where we’ll be talking about programming flags and using them to skip sections of the game!