Tunic Rant

First, tunic requirements history lesson. In the beginning, the tunic logic was as follows: You needed tunics for travelling from lower to upper crater, for the "scarecrow route" in crater, for entering Fire Temple, for entering Water Temple, and for completing the Fire Trial. That's it. It was changed in 3.0 because for a bit there it was just TestRunner's personal fork and he thought the tunic logic was dumb, so he removed all of the tunic requirements except climbing Fire, Volvagia, Central Pillar, and completing the Fire Trial. The tunic requirement for the Scarecrow route is actually required, but nevermind that, it's gone too. There was pushback to some of his logic changes, so he added the first few tricks to the randomizer, one of them being "Fewer Tunic Requirements", which readds some of the tunic requirements when it's disabled. It wasn't really noticed that the tunic checks were removed in crater, so no tunic check was readded on lower to upper (even today it still hasn't been readded, which is something I'm hoping to fix eventually), and for a version or two there the Scarecrow route remained impossible but in default logic with no tunic at all. TR also added two new things under the FTR trick, namely the fountain bottom PoH and the toilet. (The Goron Tunic is also checked now in some cases as an alternative to OHKO, but I mostly want to talk about timer logic.)

When dungeon ER was added, something needed to be done about the fact that you would just spawn inside these two dungeons that normally needed a tunic to even enter. It didn't make a lot of sense if you couldn't even take a look around in the early non-timed areas, so FTR tunic logic was needed inside the dungeons themselves. If the tunic logic were as lax as it is in other areas of the world, you might find some basic treks that are currently covered by FTR ending up in logic with no tunic at all. I think for example, Fire big lava room open chest and the nearby skull are very likely completely safe without any tunic. I'd have to go in and see what else might fit well with current standards in other timed areas. But I think allowing such long tunicless treks in these dungeons would be against the original intentions of the FTR trick. So I made the weird decision where, if you go into a heated room or underwater for any length of time in the Fire or Water Temples, a tunic would be required without FTR. I thought that this was the only way to keep the original 'promise' of having a tunic for those dungeons when FTR is disabled. But this has lead to some wonkiness in particular in Water Temple (partly caused by the fact that the Zora Tunic sucks actually), where some hilariously short underwater treks might require the tunic. So I'm asking whether this should be kept as-is, and if not, what kind of scheme would make the most sense as far as where tunics should or shouldn't be required, when FTR is off?

Eventually, the Zora Tunic check was removed from the Water Temple entrance as well, but the Fire Temple entrance is currently in a very weird spot. So that the opening of that entrance for child in dungeon ER isn't invalidated just by not having the FTR trick on, it's in logic for child to enter the dungeon without any tunic, but for some reason, adult needs the tunic to be able to enter. That's just dumb. But at the same time I feel like removing the tunic check entirely goes against the original intentions of FTR as well.

Another thing that's difficult to decide what to do with is when there might be multiple trips required to collect everything. For example, every single crate at the bottom of MQ central pillar hard requires the tunic. But you can pretty easily get like 1 crate with plenty of time to spare. The problem is that you can maybe check three crates max before you die, and there are a lot of crates down there, so you might have to make several trips. You could probably argue that this type of thing, where you might have to make multiple trips, is exactly what FTR was designed for, but on the other hand, actually checking most of central pillar like this would be pretty painful. (Maybe a bit of pain is what you sign up for when you enable tricks, but I guess we have to be kinder with this trick since it sees wider usage than most.) When FTR was first implemented, the toilet was added as needing a tunic by default because, without it, you might need to make multiple trips to get all of the rupees (though if you know what you're doing it's actually pretty easy to get all of them in one dip). The entirety of the fountain bottom is covered by FTR, but with so many checks down there on freestanding shuffle, there's a decent chance you might have to make multiple trips. The actual reason the fountain bottom was added to need a tunic by default because without it, you would probably die before you could resurface. That also makes me wonder about cases where there's enough time to get the check but not enough time to survive without either dying or voiding out or something. You can get a lot of the silver rupees in MQ Fire Trial without a tunic, but you will probably have to focus on getting one at a time, and then either dying or voiding out after each. (But if voiding out is a problem, there are actually plenty of checks that are impossible to get without voiding out or warping away or savewarping out, or something? Like child crater but your only warp song is Bolero. That's a heated area! And you're not gonna be able to walk out of there before you die lol. I suppose you could pretty easily avoid that death at the bottom of fountain as well, just by savewarping out.) I forget where all we landed as far as tunic requirements for individual silver rupees in the fire trials or in the toilet, and whatever else like that. The point of me rambling like this is to try and give you an idea of how hard it is to reach any sort of consistency with FTR and tunic logic as applied across the logic as a whole.

The trickiest place to write for tunic logic might be the crater. The way the logic is currently written it's not really possible to capture all the nuances of how much time is really required to get from every point a to every point b. I mentioned that going from lower to upper crater currently requires no tunic but should probably be covered by FTR instead, and that's a change I plan to make at some point. I wonder about covering every trek that should probably be covered by FTR but currently requires nothing, and actually covering it under FTR. But there may also be some cases that require the tunic that can actually be done with nothing with plenty of time to spare, and I'd like to fix those cases as well. But to precisely handle everything, you'd have to consider every entrance and connect each individually to every place that you might want to go. That gets huge and very difficult to maintain pretty quickly. On the other hand, the way crater logic is currently written it not exactly the easiest to understand either. So I'm not really sure what to do about it. I might have to find some way to hack in fixes for the problematic treks, or maybe some new idea for how to structure the area is needed idk.

The 'scarecrow route' in Crater requires you to survive some fall damage, and using a fairy to survive OHKO for it isn't safe in some settings (we removed it from logic entirely because it was getting tricky to keep track of which settings it might be safe in) b/c it's a passthrough, and you might need a fairy in the next area but not have any way of bottling a new one. The problem with the current implementation is that there are plenty of checks inside crater itself, no passthroughs required, that could theoretically be obtained without breaking the fairy logic. So I'm not really sure if I should fix that or how that would be done. (It's been suggested in the past to rework the randomizer algorithm to include how many fairies you have access to in a similar way that you keep track of what times of day you have access to, but that's always felt like overkill lol.)

I want to talk about the logic for using a fairy in a heated area in OHKO. Somebody decided that it wasn't safe to use a fairy in a heated area without a Goron Tunic because you would just die again immediately from the flames. The truth is, all you have to do it walk around and the flames go out. I think a lot of people PANIC and try rolling, but you gotta think back to your elementary grade school fire safety! None of that stop drop and roll, that's nonsense. Run like crazy instead. So I wonder how necessary that tunic requirement really is. But if you think the tunic check should be kept, I know it's quite different from the other uses of FTR which normally concerns itself with timers, but it feels like not needing the tunic to not die again in a heated area might actually fit in well enough as a fewer tunic requirement anyway.

It was also brought to my attention that technically any requirement to take damage on a passthrough is not safe. Imagine you have to go through Goron City grotto, and you take some damage to where you now have slightly fewer than 3 hearts. Then you wind up in crater with no way to restore your hearts and you don't have enough time to get from A to B since your health has been reduced. Normally that's no problem, because you can just die and revive and you're back to three hearts. But what if that costs you a fairy? And then the next place you go after crater has a required fairy use with nowhere in between to refill your fairy? I really don't like that this insanely improbable issue exists, but I'm not sure if there's much of anything that I can do about it.