you can't just ban all "unintended game behavior"

On rulesets for the type of speedrun category frequently named something like "glitchless"

We’re just short of halfway through the month and I finally glowficced a little earlier today! Thank you Celene for the tagging. Unfortunately, the result is that it is now 10:40pm and I have written only a few sentences of a blog post. I don’t expect to end up having any issue publishing this evening, but it is the first time that’s happened and now I’m wondering if it’ll happen more often as the month progresses.

Let’s pull something off the list of post ideas that looks relatively easy to get through in an hour. A couple days ago, I said:

The term glitch has no consistent technical definition, and probably shouldn’t be given one. Elaboration on this topic is going on the list of blog post ideas

Yeah, sure.

Fundamentally, the concept of a “glitch” in speedrunning is sort of adjacent to “game behavior unintended by the developers” or “strange unexpected game behavior” or something somewhere along those lines. The issue is that interpreting any of those ideas strictly literally is going to make a “glitchless” category really annoying and terrible.

What if we just banned 1.7 from use in RSG

If one inspects the Minecraft leaderboards on speedrun.com, they might eventually notice a curious fact: while almost every version of the game has either a corresponding All Achievements¹¹ AA for short. category or a corresponding All Advancements²² Also AA for short. The abbreviation being ambiguous is specifically desirable. category, there isn’t one for 1.7 in particular. Which is kind of weird. Why not? Did 1.7 not have achievements for some reason?

You see, it isn’t possible to get all of the achievements in 1.7. The Adventuring Time achievement, which requires you to visit all the biomes in the Overworld, was first added in 1.7. The issue is that, in 1.7 in particular, Adventuring Time requires that you visit all and only the biomes in the Overworld, since they implemented it by asking that the set of biomes you’ve visited exactly match the set of Overworld biomes. This initially seems like a fine implementation—there’s only one possible set of every biome—but the Nether and the End, even if they didn’t “have biomes” in the sense that the 1.16 Nether has biomes, did each have a single dedicated biome that filled the whole dimension.

At a first glance you might think this glitch could be avoided, because you could just get all the Overworld biomes before ever visiting the Nether or the End. The issue is that achievements have prerequisites. You can’t, for example, receive the achievement for obtaining a diamond if you've never gotten the achievement for making a pickaxe—you just won’t get the achievement, even if you somehow pick up a diamond. And Adventuring Time happens to have The End. as a prerequisite achievement. This places you in an insurmountable catch-22, preventing it from being possible³³ I think I ever heard of someone, maybe Crafterdark(?), looking into some galaxy brain work around technique; it might merely be very difficult, I’m not certain. to complete the category “AA 1.7”.

One incredibly silly argument you could make is that entering the Nether or the End and thus locking oneself out of Adventuring Time constitutes the performance of a glitch, and therefore ought to be banned in glitchless categories. This would result in the usage of 1.7 for RSG speedruns being made illegal, which is dumb.

I thus propose the policy:

Bucket glitch

Consider first the infamous bucket glitch. Or at least it’s infamous to me. I don’t fully remember the details of bucket glitch, but I remember it being very annoying for speedrunning the 1.5 Minecraft adventure map Herobrine’s Return. Basically, the issue is that (in some versions) if you try to pick up a water block into an empty bucket while just on the edge of being close enough to reach the water⁴⁴ Don’t quote me on this being how it works, I could be entirely confabulating the idea that this is the situation it happens in., it can visually appear that you successfully filled your bucket with water when actually you didn’t. Perhaps it has something to do with exiting the range of the water very shortly after grabbing it—I’m not sure if that’s it, but I’d guess the cause to be something vaguely similar to that. Maybe it has more to do with looking away from the water too quickly, and you’re just more likely to do that if you grab the water while looking at the very edge of a water pool. That sounds a little more plausible and would explain why I have some sort of “don’t stand too far from the water” superstition / heuristic.

The result is that sometimes you then leave the water (or lava) pool behind, try to place the water from your ostensibly-full bucket, and then the game realizes it was actually an empty bucket the whole time, updates your inventory to display an empty bucket, and doesn’t place any water. This typically loses you the run.

Now, whether that’s a “glitch” isn’t super relevant to Herobrine’s Return, but my understanding is that it can sometimes come up while building a Nether portal in RSG runs (at least of older Minecraft versions, I tentatively suspect it might’ve eventually been patched). This is mostly a mild annoyance that loses a couple seconds, especially if the runner knows to look out for it—and usually it can be avoided with practice.

I claim that banning bucket glitch in RSG would obviously be a really quite stupid idea. It would mean that, instead of people sometimes randomly losing a second or two for no good reason while trying to build a Nether portal, they would instead lose the entire speedrun. It might be called “bucket glitch”, but it shouldn't go on the list of things which you are prohibited from doing in a “glitchless” speedrun.

To me, a clear principle is:

I don’t know that I would literally endorse this as an inviolable rule. I can imagine that there might be cases where some incredibly strange and difficult-to-cause-accidentally bug is in some sense “strictly disadvantageous” but would, if a player used it anyways, cause the speedrun to somehow radically diverge from what one would expect a glitchless speedrun to look like. Maybe something like that makes sense to ban.

But as a basic rule of thumb, I think something might not need to be banned if runners would almost always prefer to avoid it.

Double eating

Consider the double eating bug in Minecraft. I found a seven-year old Reddit post where someone complains about it:

If you eat a food item, it’ll often instantly consume a second food item unless you quickly switch to a different item in your hotbar. This bug has been around since the introduction of food in Minecraft and has never been fixed.

Does there exist a mod that patches it? That would be fantastic.

Most Minecraft players are not fond of this bug. In certain PvP formats where players have a limited supply of golden apples for regeneration, people sometimes accidentally eat a second golden apple they had intended to save for later. This can be a pretty substantial setback in some cases.

But in speedruns, double eating is actually preferable in most cases. The second food item still restores hunger, and is eaten instantly—thus avoiding the time loss induced by the slower player movement and inability to sprint that occurs during food consumption.

Should this be banned? It is an advantageous mechanic that would typically be regarded as a bug. But the advantage it gives isn’t very large, and it can very much be done on accident—hence the complaints.

I believe double eating was permitted, and in fact was frequently intentionally abused. This seems like the best solution to me, losing runs over double eating would be dumb. I suppose you could give a time penalty or something, if you really wanted to?

I definitely don’t think “things that can be done on accident shouldn’t be banned” would be a good takeaway, though. It is a strong point in favor of allowing something—I even would feel awkward about how to handle a run where chunks being slow to load in caused an x-ray effect that revealed the stronghold’s location to a runner who had absolutely no intent of abusing the lag-induced x-ray, and I can easily imagine that in plenty of cases I might end up arguing against rejecting such a run. But nonetheless, a general policy that chunk load x-rays are always legal sounds like it could be very bad for the RSG category.

Exploits

Some people in speedrunning use the word exploit as a technical term, defining it as something like “an unintended consequence of intended mechanics”. I don’t know if that definition is a very good one—what, exactly, makes something a “consequence of intended mechanics”?

But the idea is that if you, say, cross a pit of spikes by taking damage and then jumping off the spikes during invincibility frames, this isn’t a glitch per se. You’re supposed to be able to not take damage from spikes during i-frames. The developers just didn’t imagine you jumping over that particular gap that way.

I can enjoy some good rules lawyering if it makes the route of a category in some game more interesting, but permitting everything that could be called an “exploit” rather than a “glitch” isn’t always a good idea. In some Minecraft versions, you get i-frames upon saving and reloading the game, and can use this to (for example) avoid all fall damage. That would be a little silly to allow for, say, getting down from a tower in 1.7 RSG.

Nether Roof

We let people get the On a Rail achievement by climbing onto the flat bedrock roof above the Nether and then setting up minecarts to infinitely boost along the Nether roof without a rail by colliding into each other repeatedly.

This is obviously blatantly unintended behavior. There is no excuse except that no one wants to make a one kilometer minecart rail track.

I’m not totally sure how to feel about this one, but “nothing like that ever” seems too far. If a glitch makes the category substantially more enjoyable to play, it might sometimes be reasonable to just carve out a totally arbitrary exception.