Speedrunning

Hopefully Swarm speedruns will become a thing! Here are some ideas and guidelines for how it might work.

Uploading/hosting

Speedruns can easily be recorded and uploaded via asciinema .

How should Swarm speedruns be timed? There are a few options:

A speedrun could be judged on the number of game ticks taken. However, this creates a strange incentive to make the game run slowly so that you can type a lot per game tick. That sounds boring!
A speedrun could just be judged on the elapsed wall clock time. In that case managing the game tick speed would be part of the challenge. However, the problem is that this could privilege people with faster computers which can keep up with a faster tick speed.
Perhaps a happy medium is to simply specify a standard ticks/second rate (32, perhaps?), insist that all speedruns must stick to that rate, and then measure the elapsed wall clock time.

For now there are not too many options for interesting goals; there should be more in the future.

Resource: race to obtain a certain number of a specific resource (e.g. get 1000 iron ore; make some curry; etc.).
100%: obtain at least 1 of every possible entity.

Specific goals can be encapsulated in scenario files.

Random seed: start from a new, random seed every time. Using a predefined library of general-purpose definitions is fine (it seems too tedious/boring to require retyping definitions every time). This type of speedrun is about developing a good library of general-purpose tools and then reacting to the given world quickly and effectively.
Set seed: start from a specific, chosen seed, perhaps one that has many resources close to the base etc. Presumably, this category is about crafting a specific program which carries out all the steps automatically, and making that program as efficient as possible.