Passing Time III: Time After Time
2025-01-17 // Contest Overview
Welcome to Passing Time III: Time After Time, the winter contest for Loathers.net! This contest is a lovingly rendered recreation of community stalwart Beldur's original Passing Time contests -- both the 1st in 2021 and the 2nd in 2022. Credit for the original idea and the general coziness of the concept go to Beldur. Thanks, Beldur!
THE PREMISE
Unlike our extremely complex yearly contests in Autumn (with NSFW-AI & The Robot's Bodyguards), the concept of Passing Time is quite simple. The point of the contest is to pass the time between the start of the year and the first challenge path of the year by seeing who can play the fastest runs with the new standard meta, with the hope that our collected entrants find fun tricks and tactics that we never unlocked in our previous years. There will be rewards for all participants, but the best prizes will go to the fastest ascenders!
ELIGIBILITY
In order for your run to be a valid entrant to the contest, you must do the following things:
- Play Kingdom of Loathing. You know, the online game. If you don't, it would be very weird that you're still reading this!
- Ascend into Standard -- either normal or hardcore, whichever you prefer.
- Play your run in KOLMafia, via the relay browser so you have a session log. If you need to download it first, you should do that. It's hard to use KOLMafia if you haven't downloaded it!
- Finish your run. Play as fast as you can! (In turns, not IRL time. Everyone knows that playing fast in IRL time is for suckers.)
- Send your logs to the organizers through the Google Form linked later in this post. To produce a log, use ScotchLog! (You will also need to send a Greenbox or an AV-Snapshot; those are detailed in the form as well.)
- Consent to having your log's run be immortalized in a spreadsheet celebrating all path runners at the end of the season, like last year's contest!
That's it!
THE PRIZES
Each player who submits a run will get 3 million meat. That's right -- 3 mil just for playing! What a steal! There will be four prize-winning categories. First, we will be splitting by Hardcore and Normal. Second, we will be splitting by "Full Shiny" and "Half Shiny". That means we will be splitting participants up by the percentage of the full shiny IOTM set they own at time of their run. In order to determine which group you're in, here are the shinies we're counting from:
- IOTMs -- At the conclusion of the contest, there will be 26 "normal" IOTMs; those released from Jan 2023 to Feb 2025
- IOTYs -- There are 3 IOTYs eligible (the hobo sheep, the Black & White Apron Meal Kit, and CyberRealm)
- Special -- There are 2 TTT items (the wardrobe-o-matic & the unevolved organism) along with 1 special item (Oliver's) in standard
That totals to 32 counted shinies -- we are excluding Clan VIP & Manuel of Numberology from that count. That means that anyone with fewer than 17 shinies will be in their own "½✨" category; hopefully, this will allow people with incomplete standard sets to play for some of the bigger prizes!
Unlike our autumn contests, we will be distributing prizes in a slightly less complicated way. This is mostly because I, Captain Scotch, have a baby on the way whose due date is in the middle of this contest. There is absolutely no way I will have the energy for a prize stream like the ones we did for NSFW-AI or Robot's Bodyguard. Sorry, folks!
Still, in addition to the meat, the prizes are pretty neat; there are 20 Mr. Accessories up for grabs for the top 12, along with other goodies!
| ½✨ (Normal) | Full ✨ (Normal) | ½✨ (Hardcore) | Full ✨ (Hardcore) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Place | 3x Mr. A + 2 standard IOTMs you don't own | 3x Mr. A + 1x Cargo Cultist Shorts | 3x Mr. A + 2 standard IOTMs you don't own | 3x Mr. A + 1x Lil' Doctor Bag |
| Second Place | 1x Mr. A + 1 standard IOTM you don't own | 1x Mr. A + 1x Cold Medicine Cabinet | 1x Mr. A + 1 standard IOTM you don't own | 1x Mr. A + 1x Cold Medicine Cabinet |
| Third Place | 1x Mr. A | 1x Mr. A | 1x Mr. A | 1x Mr. A |
In addition, the contest managers reserve the right to add a handful of extra "cute" prizes at the end, like a prize for (say) "most improved", a prize for the funniest self-restrictioned run, or a prize for someone sharing their strategy publicly to help their fellow speedsters. (As a rule, I am very devoted to helping more and more people find speedrunning fun.) One official side-prize that warrants mentioning here:
- If you provide feedback (either via GitHub Issues or within the ASS Discord) for the Ascension advice script YORICK after your run (bugs, ways to improve it, possible changes, etc.), you will gain an additional 1 million via Beldur.
HOW LONG WILL THIS LAST?
This contest is meant to pass the time between the start of the year and the spring challenge path. However, due to Scotch's impending paternity leave, this will extend (a tiny bit) into the challenge path. Any run completed between January 15th, 2025 and February 25th, 2025 will be eligible for entry.
ANY RESTRICTIONS ON OUR RUNS?
- No multis are allowed. Only one account per person. Anyone found using multis to extract multiple prizes will be disqualified on both accounts.
- While we have tracks for both HC and Normal, only one run will count. We will pick the run that gets you the highest placement, if you enter multiple runs!
- As runs will require runlogs, once again, your runs must be fully completed in KoLMafia. (Sorry, mobile friends!)
- Your run cannot be using a fully-automated ascension script like Autoscend. If you are using pre/post-adventure scripts, that's fine. But if you are clicking a button to generate a full ascension and demanding prizes, that's less fine. Please reach out to the contest organizers if you have a more complex personally coded private ascension script you would like to use; we are fine with folks using bespoke scripts, but it has to be something you yourself built rather than a community script.
HOW DO I ENTER?
Simple -- fill out this Google form every time you do a run! That's all!
ANY ASCENSION TIPS TO HELP ME OUT WITH MODERN STANDARD ASCENSION?
Certainly! Here are a few helpful links for you.
- Last year, our very own BurningBman provided a general guide on planning a Standard ascension. There are a few minor updates since; there is a new 2025 resource template that is fully updated to modern Standard. Just make a copy of the sheet and start planning stuff out!
- If you would like to figure out some good standard-relevant pulls, check out the ASS Standard Pull List, which goes over a ton of useful pulls from turnbloat to turnsave, as well as (in many cases) a discussion of why the pull is strategically valuable.
- If you would like to figure out what your suite of IOTMs do, and what you may be missing, I've put together a Standard IOTM Tier List, with commentary.
- If you would like to figure out what things you should consider summoning with your Chest Mimic, you should check out our primer on the best summons to target; it's great for figuring out the best mobs to summon!
- This website has full page analysis covering every IOTM released since the Patriotic Eagle. Go to our analysis page, linked at the top of the page, for more!
WHO PROVIDED THE PRIZES?
Big thanks go out to the following chums and buckets (in no particular order) who all donated prizes, meat, or labor for this contest:
- Beldur (#1046951)
- Captain Scotch (#437479)
- gauSie (#1197090)
- sweaty bill (#1515124)
Thanks y'all! Enjoy the contest!
Love, Captain Scotch & the ASS Team
This contest is sponsored and officially run by the Ascension Speed Society. Join us on discord for the kinds of speed ascension tips and tricks you may need to win this contest!