WAD: Sunlust
Map: 24
Skill: 4
Category: NM-100s
Exe: Dsda-Doom 0.29.4
Time: 4:25.54

Author: 	Kinetic
Demo Date:	September 11th, 2026
Attempts:       269
Practice:	2 hr 45 min
Grind:		3 hr 36 min
Goal:           First Exit
Satisfaction:   :D :D

- complevel 9

Comments: 

The practice is very high, because it took a while to figure out how to beat the map in NM-100s. The map feels almost completely incidentally complex in terms of routing options for this category, although almost every single route idea leads to certain death. Between the sequence break at the AQUATILE maze, the pacifism for the red key, the different times and ways the invuln secret can be grabbed, the penultimate area being able to be tackled with invuln or potentially without or with BFG, the linedef that lowers the wall that allows you to lower the wall to the imps around the tech spire, etc.. There are a lot of things to consider, and every single choice has a trade-off.

The first viable route idea I had was this:

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I considered doing the map somewhat straight-up but pacifist, to lower the imp wall and be able to access the invuln later. The issue with that is that you can't lower the wall that lowers the imp wall without doing the lower area of the AQUATILE hub area first, since the baron blocks you from using the sequence-breaking stair-climb to trigger the wall to lower. So that is tricky, but not that bad. But then you basically need the cyber in the upper area to just crush the imps after you lower the wall, before he dies due to infighting respawning high tier monsters, or you just run out of HP and imps start respawning and you can't get to the RC wing teleporter. But you also cannot have the one perched turret manc die in the upper AQUATILE hub area either, since he is essential to you grabbing the secret in the RC wing while remaining pacifist and silent. That manc frequently infights the cyber and dies, and he pretty much never respawns quick enough for you to still have access to the RC wing teleporter (he needs to see you and be awake in that AQUATILE hub area). And then while the RC wing is pretty trivial with this route, returning to it, you have to plasma through a bunch of imps, lower the wall to the invuln shoot switch (there's a trigger surrounding the spire, so you need to approach the center of the imp horde), hit it, then make it to the invuln without dying. That is a completely bad scenario where you are likely going to get demolished, even having 200 HP and 100 green armor. There's just too many imps that take most of your health away when you teleport in, and then HKs and revs and barons and pinkies are also there to make hitting the switch hard. If you somehow got to the invuln successfully, the route ends similarly to the route in the demo, where you just go grab the YC while wearing invuln -> get BFG -> do penultimate.
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This was just a way too inconsistent route to commit to, even if I could pacifist up to lowering the imp wall somewhat often. Here were some other things I tried:

I tried a lot of different ideas with the sequence break and stair-skip, including jumping for invuln off of it, then using perched manc from the upper area to continue playing pacifist and have it kill enough imps for me to get to the RC wing teleporter. That was trash and never going to happen, so I decided to not play pacifist and just blast a way to the RC wing teleporter, use the invuln to do the first section of it unscathed, then look for a viable strate for the red card encounter. I could not find one. So I had to throw that idea away and accept the only way the run was going to be done was by doing the RC wing pacifist and thus anything prior to it also pacifist. I had some ideas involving going to the YC wing early after the sequence break, but it just never really proved to be a good idea for a route. I thought a lot about archviles and potentially useful AVJs, I thought about the perched manc and what he could see and hit, I thought about the cyber in the AQUATILE hub area and what his splash damage could reach and if him respawning could be viable for anything. I studied the triggers of the map in UDB several times, and looked at eh map's sound propagation several times to double check if I was missing any opportunities to shoot without ruining the pacifist strat.

However, it was only when I was tinkering with the pacifist route, and thinking of alternate ways to hit the invuln shoot switch, did I think of the route in this demo. I had come up with the idea that doing the RC wing pacifist was the only way to do the run, but the first viable route was so bad that I was looking for ways to find a more consistent route centered around the pacifist strat. So obviously the instinct was to use the sequence-break to immediately go to the RC wing, since the only other thing you can do with the sequence break is grab the invuln which forces you to blast your way out after grabbing it, killing the pacifist strat. So given I was using the sequence break to go to the RC wing ASAP, and not grabbing the invuln beforehand, it becomes a question of, if the imp wall is never lowered (which happens when doing map normally), how do you grab the invuln secret later? So I began thinking about different places to hit the shoot switch from around the map, bypassing the fact the imp wall never lowers in the route. I tried shooting from the YC arena, which I don't think is possible to hit the invuln shoot switch from there. I tried from the teleporter hub with the spire, where I found SSG vertical spread can hit the invuln shoot switch. The issue with this is you need to clear most of the imps around the spire for safety and a clear shot at the switch, and you may miss a few times before hitting it, and if you do then imps begin to respawn. So that is hardly viable. But then when I was exploring the idea of going to the penultimate room earlier in the route to recharge on HP using the megasphere there, I was just looking out over the edge of that section into the rest of the map, and had the idea to try hitting the invuln switch from there. And luckily you can, and the area is completely safe while giving you a free megasphere. At that point, the route clicked into my mind:

Start of map (pacifist) -> sequence break (pacifist) -> RC Wing (pacifist, use perched manc from AQUATILE hub area to grab secret in RC wing) -> return to hub, using plasma to cut through to penultimate area -> grab megasphere + shoot invuln switch -> teleport back to hub, go for invuln -> YC wing -> BFG -> ending

For the actual route and demo: this is a bit of an annoying run. The start is fine, you can just get blocked sometimes. I slow down when releasing the specter to get them infighting, helps prevent them from getting in the way of jail-breaking the beginning. Then probably the stupidest part of gameplay in the run, is the 5 revs in the tiny corridor when you first teleport to the AQUATILE hub. It's basically RNG to get past them, I doubt anyone gets it more than 33% of the time, maybe more like 25%. Then the sequence break seems like no big deal, but if the cyber begins infighting the manc, you basically have to reset because the cyber kills the manc 99% of the time before it dies from other enemies. I never saw it happen in attempts, but one time the cyber infought everything else, then was infighting the manc, and he killed the manc before dying in one hit to a respawned HK I got him to aggro. I try to get the cyber to infight the revs from the narrow corridor before doing the sequence break, since that's easy to do, but I failed it here and didn't want to slow down to get it since him infighting the revs doesn't guarantee he won't hit the manc as you're running up the stairs to the teleporter. But luckily his rockets missed the manc as I was doing that here. Then the first area of the RC wing is just pretty stupid, basically the PEs and lost souls give you a path to hit the switch or they don't. It feels 50/50, or 40/60 losing odds, the PEs can be real dicks. If you have low HP here, it's even less likely odds to survive. The main RC encounter is pretty neutered due to playing pacifist, but if you do not have a set movement pattern to avoid getting trapped by the specters, you will lose runs here. Late in attempts I died here a few times due to that, so I practiced a choreographed movement to stop dying from being an idiot. Then the last hard part of the run is basically teleporting back to the teleporter hub, where you really want as close to 200/100 as you can get, and you first hug the northern side of the teleporter when you teleport back so that way some imp projectiles get blocked by using the imp on the north side of the teleporter as a shield, all while carving a path west to the penultimate teleporter with plasma. You only want to hug the northern side of the TP for the first few imps you kill heading west, since then you basically begin to plasma inefficiently by hitting imps that aren't actually in the way of the path you're carving (autoaim and big plasma projectile + angle of shooting). So after the first few imps in the path die, that's when you jump into the path and begin faceplanting and plowing forward with plasma, only plasmaing the singular line of imps needed to escape as quickly as possible. After you teleport, the run is free.

I did have 2 attempts make it to the penultimate teleporter but still became failed runs. The first time, I made it all the way to the BFG and had an attempt at teleporting to the finale, but I got nuked by the viles before I could cross the teleporter lines. I realized I needed to have a more concrete and sure-fire strat for the viles in the penultimate area, so I tinkered wwith it a bit and came up with what I do in the demo. The other failed attempt that made it to the penultimate area, I had 4 HP after plowing through the imps, so I didn't want to immediately run across the damaging floor to the megasphere upon teleporting up there, so I hesitated, tried to run around a bit on the teleporter pad to gauge nukage timing, but random enemies from the rest of the map had sightlines on me and killed me quickly with fireballs.

I know I write really long, rambling text files sometimes, but I enjoy reading the minute details of strategies and routing from players. This run in particular was one of the most difficult ILs for me to figure out how to route to make possible, and I found it interesting tinkering with the tradeoffs of different route ideas. Sunlust Map30 is the last official remaining NM-100s run for Sunlust to do (Map28 has been done by David Asaad but it's not on DSDA), but it is difficult to see a world where Map30 is done. It would really take some super out-of-the-box routing to find something viable for non TAS.