Stealing Bob's Tools - Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland speedrun (Cake Contest, any% glitched)

harvest moon speedrun discord:   / discord   notes: https://pastebin.com/xPdS6NvA (rough) sharing as a proof of concept to showcase a new glitch just discovered in save the homeland: "part-time work escape"! this was long theorized but never possible. after you start part-time work at the brownie farm, bob takes your tools, and replaces them with just a brush and a milker. if you try and leave the pasture area, you're met with bob asking if you're finished. if you say no, you return to the pasture; if you say yes, he pays you and gives you your tools back. if you remain in the pasture without leaving, the game warps you to the bob encounter at 5PM and the PTW state ends. it was long known that if you could somehow skip the 5PM trigger, you could escape PTW by waiting until 5AM, when the game warps you inside the house (after staying up all night). but there was no known way to interrupt or skip over the 5PM PTW warp. i went over some of the history of this in a video about the "chicken off the farm" glitch:    • How speedrunners use the chicken to Save t...   while messing around with chicken off the farm, i discovered that pocketing an item while in the CoTF position (basically right next to the farm-to-town loading zone) could create some weird effects. most interesting was that if you overlap the pocketing animation with the 5AM house warp, you can effectively "store" the farm-to-town loading zone and trigger it remotely whenever you want--from wherever you want. when you trigger the "stored" load, the game just fades you out and warps you into town, as if you had just walked there from your farm (33:05). a lot of different actions will instantly trigger the stored load: picking up an item or animal, pocketing an item, eating an item, using (most) tools, or even hopping a fence. the easiest way is just whistling (L1/L2). this lets you warp out of the brownie farm pasture while still in the part-time work state. so you will still have bob's tools (brush/milker), and if the clock hits 5PM, the game will still warp you to the bob encounter to end PTW. if you try and enter the area where bob's shop is (up the hill from the flower shop), the game crashes. but you can sleep as many days as you want, and the PTW state persists as long as the clock never strikes 5PM. unfortunately, payment only takes into account time of day, not date, so there's currently no way to use this to get paid a massive amount. there are some other quirks to it, but that's the gist. unfortunately, although the glitch seems promising and it's fun to mess around with, i don't have a good application for it in speedruns. this route was the best i could come up with. the cake contest ending normally requires you to buy a cow, a chicken, and a milker, and the milker itself is 1800G. so by stealing bob's milker, you save a lot of money. i thought i could make it a lot faster by cutting out crops entirely and making the cow money purely through foraging and incubating+selling chickens, but i ran into a lot of problems. first, the glitch is slow to set up. you have to wait something like 4-5 min to get to the 5AM warp just to get load storage. i tried to fill that with mining, to make use of the downtime, but mining at night raises your fatigue, so if you swing the hoe more than 34 times, you'll catch a cold and lose the next day, even though you're not out of stamina. another funny thing is that while you're in the PTW state, any cow that you milk will produce ONLY small milk, no matter its affection, and even if it's your own cow. so you have to save+quit+reload to keep the stolen milker, but get rid of the PTW state, just so you can get the golden milk. do note that if you do this on your own file, you will forever lose access to your own tools; the PTW tools basically permanently become your tools. there's other issues with the route, and i ran into a routing mistake near the end where i had to improvise, but it's still funny that this is only like 2 min slower than my PB. it's probably still slower, strictly speaking, than the standard route, but i might try and use it to beat my time just for fun. it's by far the most interesting route the game has seen so far. cake contest is always my favorite for this stuff.