Game:

Animal Crossing (2001)

Duration: 27:50

266 views

22

40 fish, 40 casts ;)

0:00 - Intro
3:51 - Chores
12:25 - Fishing Rod
12:52 - June
16:52 - August/September
20:44 - July
23:04 - March
24:52 - February
26:24 - Last Fish Caught

- Timer starts on the press of the start button on the title screen.
- Timer ends on the villager's fist pump (When the fist is fully raised in the air) after getting the Golden Rod.

I was interested in making a Golden Rod TAS many years ago but never went through with it. I made this TAS to learn more about the game at a deeper level. I wouldn't consider the run to be very optimized, but this is mostly due to lack of knowledge surrounding RNG manipulation. Things like text boxes, reeling fish in, etc are all frame perfect with a few exceptions, notably at the beginning of the run which I explain below.

Some improvements that could be made to the run:
- Routing. I loosely followed a guide on speedrun.com while making this and it left a little to be desired. There's a few interesting mechanics that exist, such as being able to catch fish outside of their regular times within a 5 day "transition" window. This could potentially allow for less save and quits to change the time, which is the most time consuming part of the run.
- RNG Manip. As stated previously, I relied on random movements to influence different things (fish spawns, fish movement, bites required to reel in, etc). With a better understanding of how it works, I have no doubts that it could be greatly improved.
- Town layout. This sort of goes hand-in-hand with RNG Manip. While the knowledge was there, no tool existed to view your town's layout (which is extremely important for this game/category) WITHOUT going through the several minute long intro, so I made it:
https://github.com/JustinDMS/AC-Map-Preview
Despite being quite happy with the town layout I managed to get, there are still some things that could have been better. For example: Nook being on the same side as the houses, a closer Wishing Well, and a single cliff instead of double.
- Villagers. This is mostly theoretical, but villagers could be optimized to to have favorable personalities. This influences their dialogue which could be longer/shorter, depending on which personality they have. Additionally, villagers have nicknames for the player. And since one character is displayed per frame (when sped up), you could shave off some time getting villagers with shorter nicknames (eg Midge's "tweedledee" vs Paolo's "pal")

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