Wario Land: Shake It!/Routing

Spreadsheet

The coin route spreadsheet is available to download here. The key sheets are sheet 3 (which lists the coins in game order) and "4 last" (which lists the coins in order of time per 1000).

Methodology

The aim of this exercise was to determine the most efficient coins to collect to hit the target of 501000 for the game. These coins had to meet two conditions:

• Not only is it required to have 501000 coins after having completed four worlds, but all of the intermediate coin requirements also need to be hit.
• The coins selected had to be the most efficient, in terms of time spent deviating from pure speedruns of each stage. To determine efficiency I used not time but "time per 1000 coins", which allowed direct comparison of coin values of varying rates.

Luckily, arkarian had already done pure speedruns at a very high standard of every stage, and kirbymastah had done 100% routing which picked up almost every large source of coins. Between those and Flip's existing segmented run, three different videos could be used to compare times.

To calculate the time deviation for any given set of coins, use the entire screen that the coins are in. Take arkarian's time through that screen, then, unless that same screen with exactly the coins you want to time is run in Flip's or kirbymastah's runs, run through the screen yourself and collect only the coins you wish to time. Subtracting the former from the latter gives you the marginal time required to collect those coins.

Once you have a marginal time for all major sources of coins, it comes time to see what the fastest route is. In preparing the spreadsheet above, three routes were chosen: entertaining the possibility of ending at world 3, 4 or 5. From here, sort all coin sources by "time per 1000" four times: once after buying each new map. For the 1-2-3-5-4 route, for example, the first sort should be after world 1, and the first 51000 coins should be locked in, even if faster coins appear in later worlds. Then sort worlds 1+2 and add coins until you get to 151000, sort again for worlds 1+2+3 and add coins until you get to 351000, and finally 1+2+3+5 and 501000.

From there, adding up the total time deviations for all three possible routes shows that the route ending with world 4 is the fastest by approximately 40 seconds.