SMB3 100% general notes

Super Mario Bros. 3

* What does 100% entail? *

What we call 100% for Super Mario Bros. 3 is basically an "all stages" category. We have to beat every stage and every Hammer Bros. wandering in the various worlds. It should be noted that it does include the three "hand traps" in world 8 (that you wish to skip in other categories like warpless), so getting grabbed by them or not has a minimal impact on the run as you can enter them manually.

A simple way to define the category that the community often uses is "play everything that can kill you" (although if you want to be a smart-ass, it's possible to die in mushroom houses but forget about that because it's complex and will never happen on accident).

* Why not mushroom houses and mini-games? *

Two reasons mostly: first, it's actually impossible to get all of them in a single playthrough, so that already seals the deal. Reason being you need to break rocks in the overworld (using hammers) to reach some of them, and you simply don't get enough hammers for that.

Even if it was possible, the other reason is it would just hugely inflate the length of the category without adding anything to the gameplay/skill required. You'd have to lose on purpose in mini-games tons and tons of times, and grab the first chest in mushroom houses repeatedly (and as a matter of fact, not only would it make the run incredibly boring, but grabbing all those items would make the run easier).

* Coinships? *

Coinships are not extra stages, they are morphed Hammer Bros. (because of specific score/coins conditions). If we accidentally morph a HB into a coinship, we have to either beat the coinship or unmorph the coinship by dying in it (the latter would be the fastest solution). Side-note: because only normal HBs can be morphed into coinships, they can only appear in worlds 1, 3, 5 and 6.

* If you play everything, does it mean there's no RNG in the category? *

In a marathon context, the RNG of hundo isn't something runners will worry about. It's big regardless when doing attempts. Reason being that Hammer Bros. move around in the map everytime you beat a stage (or another HB), and there's a huge variance to the total number of movements they can give you in certain worlds. Additionally, their pattern during the fight can also be fast or slow. World 5 notably has a huge variance: I estimate that the difference between TAS RNG and worst case scenario is around 21s for that particular world. That's why in general, we hope to be able to kill all the HBs on the map as early as possible in each world.

* What's wrong with raccoon Mario, why do you get hit on purpose? *

When you have raccoon Mario, your speed decreases every frame when you're in the air (running on the ground is the same). Additionally, when you have pspeed, jumping makes you fly. Flying has two problems: first it's slow because of the reason mentioned above (as soon as you're in the air your speed decreases until it reaches a minimum speed, which is interestingly even slower than swimming). Also, as soon as you start flying, an internal timer starts and you lose all your pmeter/pspeed at once at the end of it (meaning you then have to regain pspeed). Only way to never lose pspeed with raccoon would be to never leave the ground, which is obviously not an option.

Also, Fire Mario has many advantages, in particular the fact that you can kill Boom-Booms & Koopalings faster with fireballs compared to jumping on them (you save roughly 4s by killing a Boom-Boom with fireballs). It can also clear your path when needed.

Nevertheless, raccoon is still usefull in some stages where flying is mandatory or simply way faster. You see it used a lot in world 6 and 7 in particular.

* YOU COULD SAVE TIME BY JUMPING TO GRAB THE WAND YOU IDIOT *

Jumping to grab wands is slower. In the cutscene that follows (with Mario falling to the bottom of the screen), the length of the fall is linked to the height at which you grabbed the wand, and the wand happens to fall faster than Mario. If you grab the wand at the top of a max jump from below it, you'll lose 20 frames (one third of a second).