Speedrunning

This page describes how to use various features in Cassette Beasts that may be of interest to the speedrunning community.

In-Game Timer

On all platforms, Cassette Beasts features an in-game timer that can be enabled from the settings menu: Gameplay > Speedrun Timer.

The timer counts from the start of your playthrough to the end and persists between sessions. So if you save and quit, and later come back, it continues from where it left off. It will also helpfully display the message "(Cheated)" on your screen if it detects that you've enabled the cheat command console at any time during your playthrough.

The in-game timer will automatically pause on loading screens and during character customisation.

While the in-game timer is enabled, you can hold the middle mouse button (or Y on an Xbox controller / X on a Nintendo controller) to speed up dialogue, and automatically select the first dialogue option.

Seeding, Randomisation, and Permadeath

Once you've beaten the game, Cassette Beasts unlocks a number of options that can be used to customise subsequent playthroughs.

Of most interest to speedrunners will be the Random Seed option here, which will ensure chests and scripted battles reward you with the same items other players on the same seed get.

While we recommend that speedrunners familiarise themselves with the game with a normal playthrough first, these options can be unlocked with a cheat code--handy if you're playing the game on a different machine.

While on the title screen enter the code in one of these ways:

Keyboard: Hold Ctrl and type modes

Controller: Hold L + R and then press in sequence Up, Up, Up, Down, Down, Down, L3. (For L3, press the left stick in like a button, on a controller that supports this.)

LiveSplit Integration

LiveSplit is a popular timer program used by speedrunners, available for Windows. A major feature of LiveSplit is the ability to use 'splits', which separately records time for different sections of a game. For example, speedrunners can split each time they complete a level in a level-based game, and then see how they fared in each level, compared to their past playthroughs.

Various plugins for LiveSplit have been developed that can peek into the memory of a game and automatically split when things happen in the game. These plugins are useful because they allow the speedrunner to focus entirely on the game, because they no longer need to worry about remembering to use key combinations to split manually.

Cassette Beasts has LiveSplit integration built in. No plugins or mods are necessary, and splits can be triggered by the game completely automatically. It's flexible, and fully configurable through an INI file, almost anything you do in the game can be used to trigger a split if you want it to.

Prerequisites

1. LiveSplit (available only for Windows). 2. The LiveSplit Server component. 3. Own Cassette Beasts on either Steam or the Microsoft Store.