It finally happened!! A solid All Debts speedrun world record time that I'm happy with using my Turnip route. I plan on making a separate video explaining this route I developed as well as the turnip price predicting tool that Cuyler made specifically for this category.
Briefly, this route aims to acquire over 135,000 Bells as quickly as possible to both pay off the first debt and also have enough left over to buy Turnips from Joan to hopefully sell at an 8x profit the next day. After finding a good town layout which includes an A-2/A-4 Nook's/Post Office location as well as close villager placement to Nook's for a hopefully fast chores time, some information is collected throughout the chores segments to help predict turnip prices for the week. First, these inputs are needed:
1) Train station type
2) The mailing order of villagers when you write a letter
With this information, RNG seeds can be determined that may correlate with the one used to generate your town layout. There are ~4.3 billion RNG seeds and trying to determine a specific one is both programmatically difficult and computationally taxing. Cuyler was able to implement GPU computing to significantly speed up the process. However, because the turnip prices are determined after the train ride intro, more information is needed:
1) The furniture and umbrella in Nook's shop
2) An estimate of RNG calls that occurred during the train ride. (Usually between 14,000 and 16,000)
With this information, turnip prices can likely be determined for the entire week including Joan's Sunday turnip price and which day, if any, a turnip spike will occur. Multiple results may be found with this limited information, but you can likely verify which result is valid when talking to Joan later and matching the turnip price with one of the possible results.
Finally, by inputting the acre of the museum, police station, wishing well, and lake, a spread of possible locations can be determined for the Money Rock and Golden Spot (if you haven't found it already). Currently, this is mostly valuable to show you which acres have rocks in them and which ones you can avoid.
By inputting all this information in real time while speedrunning, I determined Joan would have a turnip price of either 74 or 128 and a guaranteed spike on Thursday if the price was 128. The higher the price, the better, usually. In order to get enough money though, I typed in some Nook codes. You can type in 3 codes per save and quit which is an annoying limitation, but still works out for my route.
The codes do more than just provide items though, they can also execute various dialog commands using a 7F Byte. This byte is found in all dialogs in the game which, when read by the game, will execute a dialog command based on the proceeding characters. Dialog commands are responsible to determining how fast a dialog is, if the dialog can be skipped, prompting a selection menu, adding pauses in the speech, ending the dialog after a certain amount of time, among other things. They can also invoke a Katrina fortune which, when activated, maxes out the Golden Spot and Money Rock Bells, providing a lot of quick money needed for my route. Also, I found you can cancel the music with 7F which saves time when loading a new map, which happens a lot. Additionally, I determined the shortest amount of time you can spend to cancel the password dialog without softlocking the game. This is all accomplished with a single Nook code as you can set the Town Name and Player Name to whatever you want for a password and when you receive your present from Nook, he will read off the Town and Player the present is from. Since the town and player name contains 7F commands, those dialog commands are activated.
The codes used to activate these dialog commands will provide two 30,000 Bell Bags and 100 Turnips. Then, using an Excel spreadsheet I created that calculates how many Turnips you will need to buy depending on the selling price Joan has, you will buy those Turnips with the money you acquire, and hope to get a spike on the following day(s) either by predicting the turnip price or gambling for one with 10% odds.
Incidentally, by predicting turnip prices, I am forced to change the game time by changing the hardware clock instead of via the in-game menu. This is because when you press start after the demo, if it's currently Sunday in game, the turnip trend and prices for the rest of the week will be rerolled and they can't be predicted. The only way to work around this is to change time using the hardware clock which is actually costs the run 30-45 seconds. For one, it's slower to change time like this, and two, the music returns which means if you want to turn the music off again, you'll have to type in another unique Nook Code which is slow.
So with ideal RNG, it's actually faster to gamble and hope for a random spike instead of predicting it. But this route is fast enough it can afford that extra time.
Thanks for watching!