Lamakan Desert

                                      ----------  Routing the Desert ----------

Introduction:

It wasn't until I started practicing the desert in an attempt to get some kind of percentage for chance of success (i.e. no one dying) that I realised that if I did the exact same movement patterns I would get approximately the same encounters. More specifically, I would get the first encounter reasonably consistently and the second encounter reasonably consistently and then things would fall off somewhat.

This told me that there was some element of predictability to the RNG in the desert -- I suspected it was the dust clouds that you kick up and some time later when I got my RNG script I confirmed that it was in fact them that was causing the RNs to tick over.

This means if you can keep the number of dust clouds that you kick up the same between each in encounter (and make them go in the right direction so that the RNs tick over properly) then the desert is predictable.

Why is this hard?

Turns out that these dust clouds are particularly fussy when it comes to behaving. The first major problem is entering the desert part (as opposed to the oragne stony part) having taken the exact right amount of steps (i.e. you keep it consistent for your desired RNG pattern). There's a small indent in the wall that makes holding up+right as you enter the desert impossible, so you get a little bit of variation. But with some practice you can get this without too much difficulty.

The next issue is leaving the desert and entering the orange area and then re-entering the desert. Keeping this bit consistent is rather hard. Re-entering the desert may or may not kick up a dust cloud depending on how precise your movement is (even the most minute of deviations will fuck it up) and that will lead to you getting an encounter that is one dust cloud/RN tick off. Other times you may spend too long in the orange stones meaning your encounter steps are off meaning you get random encounters early, which means the party will be different because you haven't proc'd enough clouds!

Every time you enter/leave the desert this same kind of problem repeats itself. So that really starts to ramp up the difficulty.

But it gets worse... certain cliffs will not proc the dust cloud when you go around their corners as tight as possible. I have no idea why this is, or why it even happens. Two movement patterns around these areas that are identical can have different results in proc'ing the cloud or not (the differing factor being what has happened before that movement pattern... again making this even more complex).

Some good news though, as far as I know the portraits (party members complaining) do not affect the RN! You'll get reasonably consistent portraits that come up and thats because the portrait is selected by the RN (afaik) but since the net number of portraits that come up between encounters doesn't change there's no net change to the RN... from memory anyway. Same goes for when the party overheats, I don't think that has a variable influence on the RN either.

How do you route this?

Save states... lot's of them. I can get to the third desert patch getting the same two encounters reasonably consistently. After that I think I expect 3-4 encounters to the manticore (where you get a reset! yay for RN control!) Mapping that out gets exponentially more complicated the number of encounters you check at each step -- mapping out 3 would give you somewhere between 27 and 81 different encounter chains. Do whatever you can manage and hope like hell you can get those patterns consistent.

TLDR?
fuck dust clouds