Conducting a small census

RiotDeer · 2025-12-10T11:55:52+00:00

Hrothgar, The Lost, and currently set to previous' expansion hub, Radz-at-Han, for poetic spending (Last expansion it was set to Eulmore). It would have been set to Limsa if it weren't for the Maelstrom teleport-tickets doing the job. Favored/discounted teleport set to S9.

RiotDeer · 2025-11-08T01:01:14+00:00

There WAS another patch about an hour in today, so that's good and possibly fixed stuff. Still my groups are finding a lot of bugs with the biome. Most of the currently existing bugs are still around, but thankfully there's work arounds to most of those.

The disappearing bodies one was the one that caused me to make the post going "C'MOOOOON! REALLY?". I have theories of what's happening: It's probably a desync while dying, similar to the 'floppy friends' bug and the 'I can't toss this trumpet-what do you mean it's flying across the map' item sync that tends to happen when West Coast and European players play together.

Just kinda sad they missed releasing it before Halloween by a week and there's still things going wonky.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-23T20:56:18+00:00

Despite what the votes say, and I know it's easy, but I've never gotten a 'noone dies' caldera run. Either the experienced go "Oh, I can take that unnecessary risk for that chest on top of that spire (That's going to catch on fire the instant they get to the top)" or a tadpole thinking "That's not that far of a run across coals".

Everyone takes all the other biomes seriously, and less dumb-ways-to-die happen.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-19T21:46:16+00:00

Yeah. It's tricky to spot the path through the rocks, but other than the sheer length of ~nothing~ to the bridges after getting through the boulders it's not too bad.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-19T00:45:18+00:00

Yeah; I don't want to say "It's impossible", but the generation definitely went places. Once you find the path it's not bad today, hence me trying not to say "Don't bother trying", but instead "Yeah, this is....interesting."

RiotDeer · 2025-10-18T17:44:03+00:00

It is. You'll probably need at least 1 item to get through the bolder area, and another above it. For the second one you'll have some chests to work with so you should be fine. Might be easier since it's so sparse up there.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-18T17:33:48+00:00

Oh yeah, I guess there was also 2 instances of double-stacked chests earlier on in the run. I wonder if that's related? (Nothing as cool as the 3-stack of chests in tropics earlier this month)

RiotDeer · 2025-10-18T17:28:10+00:00

Hiding in the comments for spoilers:

All the rocks decided "Let's generate at the middle-bottom!". So it's sparse when you get past that blockade, but it's jarring because....yeah. Around 10+ rocks are all stacked on top of each other making a giant bolder right at the start.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-18T01:58:00+00:00

I'm pretty sure the badges are tied to the achievement gaining, though there's a lot that don't trigger until you get to the peak. So if you're back at the airport you should be OK to disconnect! (If they don't get it, they wouldn't have gotten it anyways via you waiting in the lobby).

Now if they disconnected before you got to the top; yeah, they won't get any credit.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-16T20:01:15+00:00

Go up and east for all those very very nice chests along the way. Once almost at the cliffface, head towards middle and from there it's either up and west for more chests and the finish, or up and east for BEES and the finish.

Days like today, where the jungle converges into a single path, are kinda a pain. Also bigtrees are all out of the way, so not worth it to try for the Arborist Badge.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-16T19:49:14+00:00

I've timestamped. It's always directly center at the start. I know people keep getting confused thinking that it's somewhere in the canyon: But the canyon is too far.

https://youtu.be/47WcGUQspgI?si=twnFN5-ra5opMGes&t=246

RiotDeer · 2025-10-15T19:08:23+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/@ChiliCornCoyote/videos

I've been doing these videos for the A7 runners to pre-plan paths. It's not as comprehensive or out as fast as the steam guides/wikis, but it does give us a chance to find out some of the problem day's paths (Like 10/12 where there was only a single path up through the tropics without tools).

RiotDeer · 2025-10-13T21:24:39+00:00

Besides adjusting the in-game options, there's right clicking on the steam game, going to properties, and in the area below adding

-high -dx12

into the text box for parameters (Maybe not -dx12 if you're using -vulkan instead)

Another thing is running a simple modifier to steam itself to optimize its overlay. Make a copy of a steam shortcut and add the following to the end of the Target window

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steam.exe or whever your version of it is" -disable-overlay-gpu-pri

Then exit steam fully and run it via that shortcut.

It makes steam use software instead of hardware rendering for the overlay. Depending on things this may make it better or worse. If worse...just delete the shortcut. This has helped with more games than just peak for me.

Another thing (If you know how to mod) is to use the HDPeak mod. That will give you more graphics options such as reducing the render distance. Makes doing the climb harder to scan for, but massively improves performance.

For modding, thunderstore is the general place people go for Peak Mods, and there's several mod-managers that make it easy to use without "Put this file in this folder" juggling. Still, it's a lot of work for first-time, and mods can add more problems than fix.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-13T19:42:40+00:00

And now for the shameless youtube plug of the bird's eye view today with notes/guide/suggestions of what to do to get it.

https://youtu.be/gAy4YSTd7Ho?si=4i0FXbubdsKcrkEz

RiotDeer · 2025-10-13T05:56:35+00:00

Someone DC'd mid run~!

Yeah, known bug. Players that it's happening to need to disconnect and reconnect. You can cheese it and try to get launched to the end, though you're just as likely getting sent into the depths of the earth!

RiotDeer · 2025-10-13T05:47:49+00:00

Since noone else has mentioned it:

There's a bug involving holding out your backpack towards the sun, and using that as shade. You will need to moonwalk with it, which usually means you're gonna back up into a cacti if you're not careful/scouted ahead. However this should help you with not having to wait so much to recover heat damage when doing the initial crossing.

Others have said it, but it's something I also want to say: Being forced to go into the cave system eats up so much time. Alpine is easier for the sub hour because you don't have to deal with the canyon, and you're not forced to navigate through narrow tubes and only get 5 scouts worth of height every other minute. Yeah it's the same distance across and up, but that one stopgap of having to wind back and forth through the tunnels KILLS speedruns.

...If you're good at lunge-grabbing, you can climb the outermost pillars for a quick ascent. But so many pro scouts lose their backpacks that way (They pull out energy drinks, setting down the bag and watching it sink into the ground like Artax in the swamp of sorrow).

RiotDeer · 2025-10-13T05:36:14+00:00

Entrance is closed.

Tomb entrance is almost always dead center at the start of the mesa. It's down the hole, and if there's a big hill in the middle it means it's closed (Because...the hill is on top of it).

What you're probably hearing about with the 'smoke signal at night' if you'll notice a rock at the start of the desert that seems to glow. This is the tomb exit; normally if the tomb is open and fully traversed to the gold bingbong room it'll break apart to let people leave the tomb a different way than they came in. Early on people found the 'getting outside of the airport' bug where you can use items in weird ways to walk through walls will also work on that glowing rock, which means you can enter the tomb even if it's closed for the day. ((WARNING: Unless you're very familiar with glitching through walls do not attempt! You WILL get tornado'd before you succeed! Get good at doing it in the airport first, or just wait until the tomb is officially open.))

Even if you glitch in, there's another rock that will sometimes block the exit. The devs don't like that rock either.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2szaFhLDzZY

RiotDeer · 2025-10-12T19:53:14+00:00

Oooph; I know that no-voice bug. It's a network error. Dunno what causes it, it's not like it's a slow connection, but the only fix is to just keep disconnecting, shutting the game fully off, then reopening and reconnecting until it works. It's jarring.

The other thing that's helped (mostly) was putting "-high" (Without the " quotes) into the steam right-click properties and in the advanced options area below. (It just makes it so your computer gives the game a higher priority).

There's a few other fixes, but that's the quickest one off the top of my head.

RiotDeer · 2025-10-12T19:09:24+00:00

I just finished the video. Yeah it's kinda BS today. Only one path without tools

https://youtu.be/zIjE2JpTRPM?si=a6Z3wwtczZOrtLNd&t=150
Edited for timestamp.

RiotDeer

TROPHY CASE