In this Part of my second Pay off Dept TAS, I tackle Early Blues (EB) and Snagret Hole (SH). Read more ---
Early Blues:
I exited WFG with a good RNG seed that lets Olimar bump two purples without whistling, and it has good pellet posy positions. For the scale glitch, I use the spicy cutscene, since I didn't have a good use for spicies yet. This avoids ever triggering the poison cutscene.
I had the good luck that the blues started attacking the first two pellets by themselves, letting me harvest all pellets before the gate. Two blue sprouts get left behind though. If I had collected the pellet from the dwarf bulborb on Day 4, it would have worked out perfectly.
SH-1:
I need to reach 5000 pokos after BK to skip the 40% cutscene. Therefore I go pretty hard for bugs in SH. Collecting the bulborb takes about 52 frames for 7 pokos, or 4.2 pokos/sec. I didn't get the fast death animation.
SH-2:
This is one of the best layouts, and the first time that I actually got the specific RNG seed I wanted. Thanks to APerson13 for finding it.
This level involves manipulating the enemies to politely miss my Pikmin, and to make the Pikmin not lose their flowers. It looks fun, with the bits of random movement here and there to manipulate RNG.
SH-3:
Here I get the best layout, with the hole next to the snagret and snitchbug. The snagret on the rocky side is about 15f faster. I snipe that snitchbug for style points (and free pokos). The slowest part is collecting the head in time, because it takes so much longer than the treasure to get tangible.
It's actually possible to kill snagret before the first peck and before it shakes, but I hadn't known about it back then.
SH-4:
This layout is not the best. Also I didn't throw enough Pikmin on the marble at the beginning, but I didn't want to redo the level. The canon beatle kill shows off what you can only do in TAS, as I throw my Pikmin before the beatle is even there. Getting the rigth amount of whites on the body took many tries. Also notice the poor red Pikmin that loses its flower D:
SH-5:
Good layout. Sadly, I couldn't snipe the bulborb in mid-air, because then the marble would have slided further away. This is one of the few times where I don't collect the body, so I bitter the antenna beatle and manipulate a bitter drop.
SH-6:
For this sublevel I made a Lua script to search through layouts faster, by automatically executing CaveGen with a seed. It's still manual, but this is about 5 times faster than checking seeds without the script. Feel free to use and adapt it:
github.com/Julian-Wollersberger/Pikmin2_Scripts/blob/master/Pikmin2_CaveLayoutManip.lua
I grow extra whites here, which only loses 2.7 sec. I can conveniently pluck them while snagret is dying. With that, I have 5 more whites than RTA.
The bulborb gets sniped this time, and lens is collected with convenient C-sticking. Here I learn that you can kill snagret faster if it does the slow come-up. With lens and TST I have 180 extra pokos, of which 80 were already skipped in WFG3.
SH-7:
This was a very hard level to optimize. First, I ruled out that I didn't want to use a spicy, because it messes up the quick kill, and also no bitter, because I can collect mitites during the death animation. That's 25 pokos for about 6sec of timeloss.
The next hard part was getting a stun. There is a 1% chance of stunning snagret when a purple hits on its downwards arc. I don't think you can stun on the upwards part of the throw. This took many tries with many throwing angles.
Pikmin manipulation needed to happen at the same time. I needed to throw the purples quite fast, with mostly 3 frame throws ('A' nothing nothing). 4 or 5 frame switch throws ('A' 'A' left nothing nothing) were to slow. I needed 2 purples left for mitites. When throwing the rest, I carefully needed to C-stick to avoid throwing any of my 11 leaves or the remaining 2 purples.
Then it's mitites time. The furthest 4 mitites needed whites to get collected fast enouth, but I only had 3 white flowers. So only 9 mitites for me. Then I stall for a bit, because it takes ages for the nectars to become tangible.
Snagret needs to stay on screen the whole time to get a good treasure slide. The head is the slowest thing again, so I dismiss all the whites on it. With a bit more Pikmin finagling, they get on the treasure decently fast and don't overshoot the pod. With that, Snagret Hole is complete.
Sprays:
At this point, I'm convinced that unlocking sprays was a mistake. Spicies mess up the boss quick kills and bitters erase the bug bodies that are almost always needed. Only the few gates become faster. I don't think that will save the 40sec it took to unlock sprays.
Timing:
Enter SH takes 1:45.3 and SH takes 6:43.8. I leave SH at 32:59 RTA timing, with 31576 rerecords. For comparison, the community gold splits are 2:28 by Jack and 8:10 by iid. (Data from 2021, see docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/105B12_mhvdNJXnw3wd-8lc8kGlmwDY3yYE4K3PLDMDU)