ACNL 100% Speedrun FAQ

Q: How is an ACNL 100% speedrun even possible???

A: Well, at first glance, it would seem absolutely insane to even consider doing something like this. But, there's something that makes this doable RTA, and that is the playtime badge. You need to have 500 hours of total playtime to achieve it, and it is required for 100%. Getting playtime is actually as easy as just standing still in your own town. Since I'm pretty sure it doesn't take 500 hours to get everything else, when I need to sleep and stuff I can just keep the game on to make progress towards that badge.

STREAM FAQ:

Q: What's your stream schedule gonna be for this?

A: Well I plan to start the run on April 9th, 2021 at around 11:00AM EST. How I planned to set it up is wake up, eat breakfast, start stream. Then stream for about 4-5 hours then stop streaming to eat lunch/take a break. Then come back for another 8 or so hours to finish off the day. So in total I'd be playing for 12 hours per day with an hour or so break in between.

Some days I might use that lunch break not only to eat but take a nap so it could be longer if needed.

Also every 2 hours I'll try and have a Nightbot command setup to where it tells me to take a 5 minute stretch break. Not only for my body but my hands as well since playing a 3DS game everyday for 12 hours could take its toll on me if I don't take stretch breaks.

Q: What is your estimated time to complete this?

A: After doing my practice playthrough, I'm going to estimate that this run will take around 700 hours to complete. Which is around a month long.

Q: How are you gonna keep your computer on the whole time?

A: I won't. Yes I know in the rules it says you cannot pause the timer but I have a plan for that. So there's a stopwatch on my phone I can also use and it's really good at keeping track of time even when the phone is in sleep mode so I have that to reference when my computer is shut off. Also I plan to record the starting and ending dates of the run in IRL time so I have a fully accurate time (or at least I'd hope so).

Q: So you're not gonna stream the whole thing?

A: No. I mean in theory I could maybe? But honestly I think it's a bit unnecessary and also Twitch isn't the biggest fan of idle streams. I know that you can remove the game from the category but I'd rather not take the risk and just stream when I'm actually playing.

Q: Well how would we know that you wouldn't cheat offline?

A: Don't worry, I will record the entire run from start to finish. I have a camera I can use that is very good at recording for long periods of time. If I lose power then it's ok since I have a battery inside so it will continue recording at least until the battery is depleted. It shouldn't be an issue though. I guess if my camera gives out for whatever reason I could order a new one mid run but I really don't see that happening.

Also I have a backup battery and backup MicroSD card in case something were to happen with that.

Also, let's be real, why would I cheat a 700 hour speedrun? lol

Q: Isn't streaming for 12 hours per day for a month long gonna be like impossible?

A: Eh we'll see. I'll give it my best effort. Plus at the end of the day, no one else has done a run of this so if I need to I can straight up take a day off or stream for way less. But of course I'll try to do it 12 hours per day as much as possible. Though I will keep my health in mind too.

Q: So does this confirm no 24 hour streams?

A: Yes. Unless for whatever reason I'm like hyper close to the end maybe??? I doubt it though. I will make sure I get a good amount of sleep each night so nothing to worry about.

GAME FAQ:

Q: What does the game count as playtime?

A: Ok, so there's two types of playtime. Player playtime and town playtime. The only difference that I'm aware of between the two is town playtime does not get tracked while you visit another town, while player playtime does. Town playtime is only for your town tree and player playtime is for the playtime badge.

Pretty much anything you do inside your town is playtime no matter what it is. From what I've tested, the game does not track playtime during the following things:

- Loading screens (anytime the loading screen icon is on screen)
- Whenever you're in another town (town playtime stops as soon as you accept to connect to the internet/local wireless to visit other towns and continues when the loading screen before the trian cutscene of coming back into your town ends)
- Whenever you're in a dream town (playtime stops I think as soon as you pay the 500 bells to go to a dream and continues as soon as you put back on your normal clothes)
- Whenever you visit club tortimer

Everything else is fair game. Including the island, minigames (like island minigames/desert island escape/puzzle league), the campground, heck even standing still and stopping on text boxes still increases playtime (including ALL menus).

Q: What even is an Animal Crossing speedrun?

A: Well, for one, a speedrun is where a player tries to complete a certain task within a game as fast as possible. Usually this is trying to complete a game as fast as possible, aka called any%. Of course, you can't BEAT Animal Crossing. So in AC speedrunning, the most well known way to "beat" the game is paying off all your debts. There's other categories however, such as golden net where you catch all the bugs, golden rod where you catch all the fish, or even collecting all the golden tools. Most infamous is 100%, and that is the goal of this speedrun.

Q: What do you need for a 100% speedrun in this game?

A: Well, there's no actual defined definition for this. So I had to make my own:

Full Encyclopedia (All Bugs, All Fish, All Diving Creatures)
All Golden Tools
Gold House Parts Unlocked, you don't need have the gold house present, just the house parts unlocked at Nook's Homes
All Nookling Upgrades
All Main Street Shops Unlocked: Kicks, Shampoodle, Dream Suite, Club LOL, Museum 2F, and Katrina's Shop
All Menu Unlocks: All Emotes and Best Friend List Tab
All Public Works Projects
All Gold Badges
All Town Unlockables: Island, Secret Storeroom, QR Code Machine, and Color Contacts
Max Town Tree
Full Catalog

Q: Full Catalog? Isn't that impossible since there's DLC items?

A: Well, yes sadly. However, there's no point in giving up just because of that. That's why I just excluded them in this. I also excluded all items you can only get from Club Tortimer islands.

Q: Why exclude Club Tortimer?

A: Well, the thing about Club Tortimer is the items restock only once per day. I mean a literal day in real time. So you could go the whole speedrun without seeing one of the items you would need and I honestly thought that would've been really unfair so I decided to not include it. Also sometimes you can encounter hackers and if you do something wrong they can actually mess with your town I've heard so it's better to not include this. It's only 6 items though so it's not a big deal.

(also let's be honest, most RTA speedruns don't do online play stuff anyways at least with other players, the only "online" play you do in this is the dream suite but since that is required for a gold badge and you don't REALLY do online play with anyone else I think it's fine for this)

Q: What are the exact items that you don't need to get?

A: Here's the list of them: https://pastebin.com/x526wb1T

Q: Why aren't you requiring hybrids? Didn't you get them in your previous 100%?

A: Well, for this, I'm thinking in terms of an actual speedrun.com ruleset. So the thought process behind the requirements is I wanted to include things that were permanent unlocks and were considered great importance to 100% completion. Things like catalog, badges, emotes, even gold house parts, are all saved forever and can always be viewed as "verification" at the end of the run. If you say, accidentally destroy one of your hybrids and forget about it, it's almost as if you never obtained the hybrid flower at all which doesn't really make any sense. It would different if you got like an achievement for getting the hybrids but there's no where in the game that saves this information as far as I know. So that's why I'm not requiring hybrids in this.

Q: Well, what about Golden tools? Aren't those not saved anywhere either?

A: Ok yeah, this is the one argument you COULD make, as there is no where in the game that says you got all the golden tools. But the thing about these are they feel more "important" to obtain as all of them have some special text when you get them. Plus, getting all the golden tools was a requirement in ACGC 100% speedruns so it feels like a staple. One more thing, when you try to sell your golden tools, Reese says "My, a (insert tool here) like this is extremely valuable! Do you really want to part with it?" and if you say no she says "Oh, of course! I agree. It's so much better to hold on to and treasure valuable items like this!" so the game does recognize it as "important".

Q: What about Silver tools?

A: Here's the thing about silver tools, you can obtain multiple of them and with the silver axe, it does break so it's kinda the same concept with hybrids if you think about it. The only one you can only get 1 of is the silver watering can but to keep things consistent I won't include it along with the rest of the silver tools. Though some silver tools like the silver rod and silver shovel are useful (especially the silver shovel since those can give you gem rocks) so I'll obtain those at least.

Q: So what about other small things like wetsuits and whatnot?

A: Yeah those aren't gonna count either. They just don't feel important enough to include since the game doesn't save them anywhere like in your catalog.

Q: What about extra characters?

A: I decided not to include that since honestly past the gamecube animal crossing, there's almost no reason to make extra characters for 100%. Like in gamecube you would get player statues displayed outside the train station which for sure feels important to obtain. After that the houses were just kinda there and feel like a waste of space. However I am allowed to make extra characters if I want to if they help out but they aren't gonna be needed for 100%.

Q: So what are the rules for this?

A: To simplify it, I created a ruleset that would still be fair in terms of playing legit, but also allow some things to make the speedrun doable. These include allowing some homebrew apps like clearing the MAC filter which lets you use streetpass as many times as you want and hacking 300 play coins. Also using 3rd party tools such as n2 elite which allows you to scan any amiibo (any ones you don't have if you know where to look for the files) since the amount of money you'd need to buy all the amiibo cards/amiibos for this would be in the thousands so yeah.

As far as gameplay rules, anything is allowed that isn't literally cheating like using hacks. Glitches/time travel/other normal gameplay exploits and whatnot are fully allowed for this.

Though one small rule is all copies of the game must be on v1.5 (welcome amiibo). You could argue if this is legit or not but it would just feel weird to play on an older version then update it mid run, regardless whatever game you're playing on.

And yes, you do have to play on welcome amiibo to get 100% in the first place. I explain it more in another question down below.

Q: Will you be using any glitches in this run?

A: No. And that's simply because the welcome amiibo update pretty much patched every glitch in the game. I honestly do not know of any glitches that are in welcome amiibo. So this run will be completely glitchless.

And before you ask, no, I won't do anything like use 1.0 JP to dupe a bunch of stuff then update to welcome amiibo. I feel like for an RTA speedrun that seems almost cheating. Especially since you'd have to connect to the internet or use a homebrew application to update it.

Even if it were allowed on the leaderboard, I'd rather not do that since I'd also like to use this speedrun as a "guide" per say of getting everything in the "easiest" way possible in welcome amiibo only.

Q: What glitches would have been useful had they not been patched?

A: Well for one, in 1.0 JP only there was a glitch that allowed you to dupe items with some crazy setup involving trees/tiles/items to overload memory. But if we're just talking pre welcome amiibo update (v1.1), the abyss glitch would allow you to catch a bug over and over without it actually going away so that would make the 5,000 bug badge a few hours faster probably. Also the wifi dupe glitch which you could honestly argue if that should be allowed since you have to connect to the internet to use it and as I said before the only "online" play I'm allowing is getting the BF list and Dream Suite. Though I have heard that it is possible on local play but I'm not 100% sure on that.

The only things that would be helpful to dupe though would be royal crowns (to speed up the bell badge by few hours most likely) and gold nuggets for the golden items which honestly both of those things aren't really that bad without the dupe glitch. (there's better ways to get golden items through gold nuggets than just hoping you get a new one since you can just give another game the gold nuggets and let it sit there for 30 mins while you do other stuff on your main game and reset doing that instead)

Q: Why play on welcome amiibo since there's more items? Wouldn't it be easier to play on the older version of New Leaf?

A: Well, you'd be almost right with that. Except the only thing preventing that is the Dream Suite (and getting the BF list?) since that requires you to connect to the internet. And to connect to the internet... you have to update the game. So yeah. I guess if you wanted to you could just exclude the Dream badge but honestly seeing that full gold badge collection and missing a whole badge would feel really weird/incomplete.

It's kind of a shame though since with this game it could almost be like BOTW 100% where its split between "Original" and "Extended". I mean again I guess you could exclude the dream badge but like ehhhhhh. lol

Q: What's RTA and IGT?

A: Just speedrun terms. RTA stands for Real Time Attack which means the timer you started yourself in real time. IGT stands for In Game Time which is what the game keeps track of. You can view your IGT in the ACNL Save Editor. Though you will need to homebrew your 3ds in order to create a backup of your save file to upload it to the save editor. You can find the save editor here: https://www.marcrobledo.com/acnl-editor/

Please note that save editors are still banned in speedruns. So if you wanted to do your own 100% speedrun (god bless you lmao) you cannot use the save editor for any reason, even if you don't make any edits. Though I have wanted to make a tool that only shows your IGT but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. lol

Q: Why even do this? This honestly seems kinda dumb/insane

A: Well, I wanted to have this be a surprise. Since everyone thought I was just gonna redo ACNL 100% again, I knew I had to up the stakes so I decided to make it into a speedrun. Plus, I kinda wanna see if I can break the record for the longest RTA speedrun. The longest recorded time that I'm aware of is 338 hours for Baten Kaitos 100%.

Q: Do you have a route for this?

A: Yes, here's the link to the route: https://pastebin.com/AC8PNJqt

Although it will likely be edited a lot since it's just a rough draft.

Q: How are you gonna keep track of items?

A: I created a google spreadsheet for this. Here's a link to a blank template for it that you can make a copy of yourself if you wanna have your own spreadsheet for NL 100%: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kX1_XPXSzQbqlUcqhUxZms4onNMUF3_nQgurz-XCH-8/edit?usp=sharing

Q: Do you ever plan on doing Wild World/City Folk 100% Speedruns?

A: No not right now. I know Wild World would be possible with LHG (Letter Header Glitch) since that pretty much gets you any item in the game. City Folk on the other hand I have no clue. You'd have to allow Wiimmfi to get the Katie items (it's possible with DS suitcase but honestly takes so damn long it wouldn't be RTA viable) and other region items. Plus to dupe many things to make the run more doable like magic lamps/royal crowns for bells.

Q: ur ACTUALLY e bruh

A: yeh