This TAS completes Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin in some ridiculous time of 48.965 seconds. Considering my best speedrun of Hard took 17.5 minutes, this proves just how important the luck factor is in any playthrough of this game.
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- 2 players
- Heavy luck manipulation
- Genre: Action/RPG
457-Frame (7.63-Second) Improvement
The substantial improvement comes from a new route, completely reworked from scratch. By aligning myself for a direct shot to floor 12 immediately on floor 1, I was able to save about 150 frames by turning two less times and not opening a door, minus the extra wait on the title screen for RNG manip. This run also completely forgoes collecting the Midas book, which is a pain in the ass to find as a container drop. Instead, I find three defensive items and two attack items that give me adequate stats against the Minotaur. Also, the Teleport book was found on floor 9 instead of floor 11.
Difficulty
This TAS completes the game on Hard difficulty, which means the player must descend 12 mazes before they can face the Minotaur and grab the Tarmin Treasure.
Two Controllers
Using two controllers in this run makes item inventorying twice as fast.
Other Basic Information
- In the lower-right corner, there are three rows of six numbers separated by slashes. The top row is your stamina, middle is defense, and bottom is attack level. The left side of the slashes are your war stats, and the right side are your spritual stats.
- Overworld map layout, maze layout, item and enemy layout, container drops, and enemy attack/defense/stamina are all random variables to some degree.
- Pressing the "0" key allows you to retrace your last step. It is used in a couple places and can be a little disorienting.
- For more info, you can view the manual here: [dead link removed]
Floor 1
In all overworld maze layouts on Hard, you are forced to cross to the other side of at least one maze before floor 12, which was done immediately (see map below, path taken is in red). This is the reason I wait so long on the title screen, as I needed to find a scenario where no door separated me and the ladder, and the ladder wasn't positioned too far into the floor. The scenario found in the run is the best possible.
Floors 2-8
Nothing important to do here; I just manipulate the exit ladder to be as close as possible, and without having to go through any doors.
Floor 9
Teleport Book (blue): Using this book allows you to phase through walls and is a TAS essential, as no navigation around walls or through doors is necessary anymore. Teleport speed is also faster than walking speed, so this will be the main means of travel for the rest for the run. Having a large orange bag in our path of travel, and dropping a Teleport book after negligible luck manipulation was a huge help, as the Teleport book is a pretty difficult item to find this fast.
Small pink ring: This item is collected for the extra 10 war defense it yields. Under normal circumstances, the 20 spiritual defense boost would be the most coveted part of the item, but it will not be used in this run, as explained later.
Floor 10
Large gold shield: This item gives a whopping 26-point boost in war defense.
Floor 11
Gold gauntlet: Gives only 7 extra war defense but is necessary as we now have a total of 43 war defense. In order to survive the Minotuar at 12 HP, we should have at least ~40 war defense.
Floor 12
Weapons: It is not possible to defeat the Minotaur in one turn on Hard. We need at least ~150 of combined attack points to defeat him in two. A platinum spear and platinum dart were found right next to the Minotaur which is pretty godly placement, and we got 174 attack points almost instantly.
Minotaur: On Medium and Hard difficulty, the Minotaur will use either a war or spiritual weapon, crippling the player's war or spiritual staminas, whichever is lower. If they're equal, as in this case (spiritual stats need to be multiplied by two), the Minotaur will only use war weapons. Since we previously focused all our efforts on war defense, we can absorb the absolute minimum amount of damage. The Minotaur's stamina, defense, and attack level vary wildly from frame-to-frame; by carefully selecting the frames we attack on, we manipulate the Minotaur to be very weak, being easily defeated and leaving us with only 1 HP to spare.
Route taken on floor 12: Notice how lots of good items were loaded on this floor. However, inconvenient enemy placement made taking any other route non-viable.
Routing Considerations
Not only is it important to collect all those useful items we found along the way to fighting the Minotaur, but it also must be considered the time wasted going on a tangent to collect it. In each case, the time wasted was not that substantial:
- Doors take ~90 frames to open
- Turning takes ~60 frames to complete
- Walking takes ~30 frames to complete
- Teleporting takes ~20 frames to complete
We successfully avoided opening any doors thanks to proper routing. The big thing to limit here is turning—there were nine in the whole run, which I'd say is pretty good considering the one on Floor 1 is unavoidable, and we had six items to collect. Four were used for collecting the three defensive items, which is a great ratio. The remaining were for collecting the spear, dart, and facing the Minotaur. Now, I have to say I'm a little disappointed because if the weapons were just one space closer to the Minotaur, I could've saved two turns! It's alright though I can't ask the crazy RNG in this game for too much now :P
As far as the number of spaces crossed walking or teleporting, I have absolutely no complaints. The distances crossed are about the best you could hope for; I mean, seven spaces for the first four items?? That's just too good.
Useful RAM Addresses
You can download the RAM Watch file I used for this TAS here
Suggested Publication Notes
Treasure of Tarmin was the second licensed AD&D videogame on the Intellivision. The gameplay involves exploring a series of randomly generated mazes searching for weapons, armor, treasures, and magical items to battle a wide variety of monsters RPG-style. The game was released in 1982, meaning the 3D dungeon crawler perspective was very innovative for its time.
Winslinator uses an absurd amount of luck manipulation to breeze through the 12 chambers, defeat the Minotaur, and collect the Tarmin Treasure in under a minute. It is an improvement over the previous movie ([3861] INTV Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin by Winslinator in 00:56.59) by 457 frames (7.63 seconds), thanks to a completely reworked route that features better movement optimization, collects the Teleport book earlier, and forgoes collecting the Midas book!
Suggested Screenshot Frame 2656
Memory: Judging
Memory: From what I can see, the execution here looks good.
Personally I wasn't that entertained by this movie, but plenty of the audience was it seems. The currently published movie doesn't have good ratings (2.6 entertainment avg) but there's also not many ratings on it. For now it seems the best move is to accept to Moons and check back later to see how ratings are doing.
Accepting to Moons as an improvement to [3861] INTV Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin by Winslinator in 00:56.59.
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