WAD: Plutonia
Map: 01
Skill: 4
Category: UV-Max
Exe: Dsda-Doom 0.29.4
Time: 1:39.40

Author: 	Kinetic
Demo Date:	July 8th, 2026
Attempts:       2422
Practice:	0 min
Grind:		11 hr 31 min
Goal:           1:39
Satisfaction:	:D :D :D

- complevel 4

Comments: 

This was by far the most difficult max for me to get on this map. I think it shows that my 1:40 was a little bit lucky, although there were certainly stretches of grinding it this time that I was not playing very well and could have converted some promising runs but messed up. The crate room looks like it went kind of bad since I had to spend an extra SSG on a chaingunner that never died in a shotgun blast, but the time loss is offset a bit by the time it takes to kill the archvile and then set yourself up for a more consistent double kill on the pair of chaingunners outside of the room.

My split at the rev room switch is about a full second slower than my fastest paces there: 31.06 in this demo, which is alright. High 30s are solid, low 30s are pretty good, and 29s are super super good although a bit rare. 32 is basically a reset, but I played every single 31 I got. The rev room went good I would say, I got to kill all 4 revs in 7 shots, but I have had better movement and positioning before that allowed be to do that section quicker.

The rest of the demo was just business as usual, although the caco/PE could have gone a little cleaner and faster, and the BSK room had shitty rockets: 3/6 imps dead after using the two rockets is basically the worst common outcome, so some extra time chaingunning them I suppose. I watched my 1:40 and the same thing actually happened lol. I can't tell if I chaingunned two chaingunners by the door fast or not, I kind of missed bullets and didn't leverage using one of them as a shield perfectly, but I also positioned myself outside the room as I was killing the last guy. And then the ending was basically pretty good as well with the rockets. Prayers for the southernmost manc that died in 3 rockets.

I do not know if I will improve this time again, it is becoming very difficult to optimize. The entire run requires pretty solid movement, and the geometry is a bit weird in some places, like the rev room. Skipping the backpack and blue armor at the start to save ~1.5 seconds on average makes it so you can die pretty easily in this run, and that you need better rocket damage rng since you get one less rocket. This run could have already been a full second faster based on my rev switch splits, and then there is a couple movement errors and faster scenarios I experienced in failed attempts, that if everything lined up, maybe a 1:37 or 1:36 is in play. Maybe a 1:35 if using the archvile self-damage to kill it in 3 SSG. I watched the 1:23 TAS from 2008 by abyrvalg, and i'm not sure how much of the ideas in there are practical for a non TAS run.

But the run already requires some annoying rng with the vile tower and the RSK manc and the ending room's rocketing. Some enemies can path in annoying ways too. And the beginning is just kind of sickly with pistoling shotgunners and running through 64 unit corridors and running down stairs that curve 180 degrees at the end. Shotgun damage rng in the crate room, etc.. So yeah, IDK if I will return to this again.