Scott Rogoff | SSBM Event 25 - 3.43 [TAS WR] @Mario64Master | Uploaded January 2024 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
This tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) was completed by Mario 64 Master (Scott Rogoff) on January 7, 2024. Thanks to Samplay for helping develop the strategy!

This is the current TAS world record for this level at time of posting. The previous best record was real time (no faster TAS existed). However, that real-time record was disputed:

- Samplay obtained a score of 3.78 in 2020 with video proof (youtu.be/w-Y4_94HbOU).
- kavaz claimed a score of 3.67 around 2009 / 2010 with screenshot proof, but the proof was lost when wii-records.com went down, very few people remembered seeing it, and nobody remembered hearing any strategy details.

To set out to try to prove or disprove the feasibility of 3.67 (or lower), I used scripting capabilities of Dolphin Lua Core to test many RNG seeds: I wrote a script that would start the level with a random seed and check if DK's vertical position was low enough by a certain frame (i.e. he quickly fell between the right buildings). I ran this script on 16 copies of Dolphin, running at 200% speed, for about 16 hours. Across a total of 227,000 resets, I found 22 seeds where DK died at 0.23, and 306 seeds where he died at 0.25 (and a single ultra-rare seed where he died at 0.26). The seeds are listed at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KcoWzsbeKZ0ce3XNVVe6RuubEjmx37Q06erTvDhgU8g

I then shared these seeds with Samplay, who did some manual tests on the second stock to find movement that would cause DK to walk left, fast fall, and nair. This video shows one such sequence of inputs.

Inputs: Starting at 2.00, down for 4 frames, then right for 6 frames. Then down + L to spot dodge the nair.

Seed at the CSS: 0x25a46b54

Setup:
Dolphin 5.0 (via Dolphin Lua Core v3.5.1)
Melee NTSC 1.02
Fullscreen Resolution: 3840x1600 (cropped to 1944x1600 with OBS)
Internal Resolution: 8x Native (5120x4224) for 5K
Anti-Aliasing: 8x MSAA
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x