Hello,

Recently, the 39 Days to Mars page over at speedrun.com got a visual overhaul and two new speedrun records. To celebrate, and to help anyone who might be tempted to give it a shot, I thought I'd outline some handy tips and strategies for speedrunning the game.



For the uninitiated, speedrunning is the act of getting from the start of the game to the end of the game as quickly as possible. In 39 Days to Mars there are two ways to do this: Fail and No Fail. No Fail is simply playing the game normally, but if you want to go even faster, things start to get silly.

For the best time, there's four interesting behaviours in the game that you need to exploit:
[olist]

The game tries to make sure you never get stuck. For the first couple of times you have trouble, it gives you auto-hints, but if you fail a puzzle on the ship three times, it will let you skip it and move on to the next puzzle.

Cancelling out of a puzzle by pressing back and selecting 'Give up' counts as a failure.

If you fail a puzzle, Albert doesn't drink the tea or eat the scone.

You can place an uneaten/drunk tea or scone back on the table beside the respective fireplaces, and pick them up later.

[/olist]



So, a speed-run strategy comes out of this!

The timer starts when the start icon is completely filled in with black. First off, play the introduction as quickly as possible. There's no shortcuts here.

The first time the tea or scones puzzle comes up, you need to make it. The combinations change each time, so if you end up with a complicated scone, you can cancel out and restart the puzzle to try for a better one.

Once you've got the tea or the scone, you can start the puzzle - and promptly "Give Up" three times in a row, as quickly as you can. After three failures, wait in the ship for 4-5 seconds until the days continue to count down and the next part of the ship explodes! (The only exception is the coal puzzle that I find is fastest to just complete.)

If you were holding tea, and the next part requires a scone, replace the tea ready to pick up again later. If you're holding a scone, vice versa.



Failing sections like this is usually quicker than solving the puzzles, so do this as often as you can. The only exception is fighting the Kraken - make sure you win, because ending up in the stomach is slower.

Once you're off the ship and on your way down to mars in the descent capsule, crash headfirst into all the asteroids to explode and end up on the surface as quickly as possible.



If you manage this in under 30 minutes, you'll get the Cutty Sark achievement (less than 1% of people have this one!). As I write this, the fastest co-op speedrun is 24 minutes and 6 seconds. If you beat that, you'll have a world record!

I hope this was a fun and interesting read, and if you're tempted to try yourself, head over to speedrun.com for more details.

Happy Sailing (and running),
Philip