Smash 3DS How does Smash Run actually work?

[abx]

Ever since I started unlocking everything in SSB4 3DS, I digged Smash Run Mode a lot. Recently I'm interested in working on my high scores. The randomness might be bothering at times, but the most frustrating thing is that it is very hard to figure out what exactly determines the actual score. I am aware of some general guiding lines like "Collect as many stat boosters as possible but do not go out of your way too much for little ones" or "Avoid running through the same area twice".
Still, it seems that I hit a ceiling for now between 250k and 300k, with only few scores below 250k and a single 300k with Bowser. That was lucky and that's already something to boast of, if I may say so. However, taking this list (alternatively this list) into account, there seems to be way more possible. It's worth noting that I struggle with reproducing my better scores even on a half-regular basis. And sometimes I end up with new high scores even when I considered the run to be a failure. Point is: I have no idea how to Smash Run.


So I tried some tests to get an idea where to look to. Unfortunately, the results are not satisfying and on most occassions inconsistencies question their validity. I'll share them anyway and I hope other people could fill in to complete the puzzle.

1) It appears that a large (but how large?) portion of the score is determined through stat boosts. It doesn't matter if the boosts are obtained via collecting or via acting. That is: Collecting 5 running points is as much worth as obtaining 5 running points by actual running.

2) There's a multiplicator at the end of Smash Run which depends on your position in the finals.
I obtained 20 stat points in four runs and aimed for different rankings in the finals. These were the results:
4th - 200 pt. (x10)
3rd - 300 pt. (x15)
2nd - 400 pt. (x20)
1st - 600 pt. (x30)

These numbers are thoroughly confirmed as I can reproduce them consistently as long as I don't do anything else than gaining stat boosts.

I can also confirm that a tied 2nd rank does also lead to a multiplicator of 20 and a tied 3rd rank to a multiplicator of 15. There are other observations concerning the multiplicator:
- Judging by these very neat scores above I consider it confirmed that only your ranking in the finals matters. it doesn't matter how well you do.
- I haven't tried to confirm this, but based on my overall experience I believe that at least collected stat boosters still count towards the total prae-final score even after that particular stat hit the maximum of 1.000. Otherwise, I'd be short of an explanation how a 4x1.000 run could best a 6x1.000 run.
- Finishing the run with 0 prae-final points whatsover leads to 0pt. regardless of the ranking.
- Getting KO'd during Smash Run apparently yields only the reduction of stats and the corresponding score reduction as punishment. That is: With a 37 stat points total I got myself SD'd and ended up with 24 stat points. I ranked 1st and got 720 pt., indicating a neat multiplicator of 30 without any substraction.
- I strongly believe that part of your prae-final score is not affected by the multiplicator. It even might be that your stat boosts are the only portion which gets multiplied. The following results led me to this believe:

Run: 20 stat points, opening one chest, rank as 1st - 607 pt.
Run: 100 stat points, defeat one blue Kritter, rank 3rd - 1501 pt.
Run: 100 stat points, defeat one blue Kritter, rank 1st - 3.004 pt.

Take note that the multiplicator for ranking 1st is 30. Apparently, opening the chest or defeating a blue Kritter nets me less than 10 post-final points in any case. Maybe there's a separate, reduced multiplicator for defeating enemies, as suggested by the fact that defeating a blue Kritter and ranking 3rd yields less points than ranking 1st afterwards. It's definitly a difference. But it doesn't look like it's worth investigating. It's also possible that the deviation is just pure randomness, as I found it hard to reproduce scoring upon defeating an enemy consistently.


However, I believe that there must be a different source to this. In the following I try to cover other possible sources. But beforehand I want to do some arithmetics.

Let us consider a run with a perfect run with 6x1.000 on stats. For the sake of argument, let's assume a total of 8.000 stat points has been obtained. That's extremely huge. Is it even possible? What result can be expected? 240.000 pt. when ranking first. Plus all what is obtained by defeating enemies, opening chests, mastering challenges, going through events (like bounties). As I try to explain below, these sources add only little to the score. How can one dream about reaching scores beyond 300.000 or even 400.000? 8.000 stat points is extremely ambitious and I don't think that the world records are only explained by getting more than 10.000 stat points. On my 300k run with Bowser, I maxed out 5 stats, 2 of them during the last 30 seconds. I can't remember when I maxed out the other 3, but I doubt that I've got a total of 8.000, meaning that more than 60.000 pt. must have come from elsewhere. I'd like to think that there are other significant score sources which one must draw from alongside. But where are they?

3) Apparently, defeating enemies yields but only few points (besides the amount of stat boosters they offer). This is also true for strong enemies, including Clubberskulls. I did some runs where I aimed for a specific stat point score and defeated only one enemy. The most starting phase enemies yielded less than 10 points after ranking 1st. At one point, defeating one of these winged pink balls from the kirby games (Bronto Burt) yielded 0 points.
And then there this one run, where I defeated the following enemies: 1x Clubberskull, 1x Hammer Bro, 1x Flage, 1x Magikoopa, and one other flying enemy which got caught up in the middle.
You can check the enemy names here.
I didn't open any chests and didn't participate in any events. I ended up with a total of 349 stat points. I ranked 2nd in the final round and got a total score of 7.246. Out of this, 6.980 pt. derive from the stat points (see above), meaning that defeating the Clubberskull and the rest yielded less than 300 post-final points.

4) However, there might be more to this. I did another run with defeating the following enemies:
8x Bullet Bill
4x Monoeye
3x Geemer
3x Blue Shy Guy
I settled with 400 stat points and ranked 1st. I ended up with a total score of 13.096. Whoops! 12.000 pt. derive from the stat points, so I've got ca. 1.000 post-final points from small fry enemies.
To add more evidence, I did another run where I defeated 5 Bronto Burts and one red Shy Guy. All enemies which give less than 5 points when defeated isolated. I got 200 stat points, ranked 1st and ended up with 6.049 pt. Suddenly, Bronto Burts gave way more points!

I believe that it is possible to get more points by defeating several enemies. But how exactly? That I don't know. Maybe there are higher rewards for defeating several enemies of one kind. Maybe those need to be chain-killed. Maybe it's just a matter of getting comboes, that is defeating a lot of enemies without greater interruptions or without getting hit in the meantime. Maybe there is a bonus system at work similar to the one in Brawl and Melee. This bonus system might contain chain kills or comboes, but also other things like taunting or using a group of items throughout the run. Maybe it's a combination of those or something else entirely. It is also unclear how much potential such a system could have.
One additional observation is that defeating several Clubberskulls during one run doesn't automatically result in extremely high scores, even if the stat points are nice and all. That I experienced not in a test run but during my overall Smash Run experiences. So I believe that if the enemies can add significantly to the score, they do it only through complex means (like a combo system) and not just by defeating a lot of them.


5) Chests. I can't tell what they're about. Here are some results:
Run: 100 stat points, 1 chest, 2nd rank - 2.333 pt.
Run: 25 stat points, 1 chest, 2nd rank - 597 pt.
Run: 93 stat points, 1 chest, 1st rank - 4166 pt.
Run: 20 stat points, 1 chest, 1st rank - 607 pt.

Going with these, the points rewared upon opening the chest seemingly varies between 7pt. and 333pt. The range is probably even greater. The ranking doesn't have a substantial effect on this. It's still unclear if the rewards from chests could be boosted by opening a lot of chests either during the entire run or within a short time window (chest combo). I can't figure out one chest so I don't know how to figure out a series of chests.
I thought I settled with the assumption that chests give roughly 1.000 points but I don't know when I came up with this and I haven't any notes on this.

6) Dimension gates. One might think they would make a difference. I'm not sure on this. I only made one single test and lost faith in it.

Run: 34 stat points, mastering a target challenge (Normal), ranked 2nd - 877 pt.
By stats I've got 680 pt., leaving 197 pt. left for the challenge. That alone is underwhelming, but it's possible that doing several dimension gate challenges results in way higher results, similar to the enemies.

7) Last: Events. I think they don't help much either. I tested two bounties and got the following results:
Run: 1x Bonkers as bounty; defeated alongside: 1x Ghastly, maybe some small fry enemies; 98 stat points, ranked 1st - 3.059 pt., which means the enemies and the bounty brought 119 pt. in total.

Run: 1x Clubberskull as bounty; defeated alongside: 1x Stalfos, 1x Ghastly, some small fry enemies; 332 stat points ranked 4th - 3.934 pt., which means the enemies and the bounty brought 614 pt. in total.

That's more than the other things added, but it's still very little. Again it's possible that there's some way to get more out of it, but I doubt that there's much potential to combo those. I haven't tested platform events so far, but at this point I doubt that they offer more.



It still needs to be emphasised that events and dimension gates still offer plenty of stat boosters, and so do top tier enemies. However, as far as I can tell by now, one should not go out of their way too much for them. But: As I demonstrated above, it's hard to imagine that the key to achieving high scores lies in collecting more stat boosters alone. For example, assuming that stat points were the key, getting a high score of 400.000 would by guess require a total of 12.000 stat points, leading to 360.000 post-final points, assuming that the missing 40k can be obtained by other means. That's doing a 6x1.000 twice during one single run!
I am still convinced that stat boosters have a great impact. Apparently record holder Ryuoto "BLC" knows how to exploit games (check BLC's YT channel). I am sure that there's room left for improvement. My current guess is that perfect usage of 2x-icons can make a huge difference. And luck is needed as well. Maybe there's room for improvement of equipment. I mostly go with spinning blades and a few invincibility items, for light-weighted characters I combine spinning blades with horizontal blasters. But I am also convinced that there's some additional source for points which I haven't identified yet and from which one doesn't draw from by accident. The fact that my intuitive judging of newly finished runs often is erroneous should support my conclusion. My need for overall improvement aside, I have the feeling that I'm missing something important. I can't imagine otherwise. Whether my imagination is to blame for this, you must decide.

My next step is to keep track of my upcoming regular runs, check how many points my stats should yield (especially when I didn't max any stats) and check how much bigger my total score is. If you have any observations you consider helpful, please go ahead and share.

 

[Jigglymaster]

I've been running smash run for a long time and I too have scores near the same height as BLC.
My highest score being 468k with Ganondorf

You can find all my other stats here, I've gotton over 310k with the entire roster.
https://www.video-games-records.com/smash-run-groupe-g17265.html

I can whole heartedly say that the bulk of your points comes from pure damage output alone. You are correct that the winning the final game is a x30 to your point system, as well as the max score for getting 1000s in all categories being 180k. However, your strategy of luck requiring 2x multipliers is not a key factor in obtaining such high scores.

This is gonna sound insane, but the way you need to obtain these scores is a mixture between the Devils Pact (Lvl 4) and Spinning Blades (Highest Level you can use). You see, every second of the 5 minutes you have can be used to deal damage, and sometimes you always can't due to the fact that you've got to move around the map, and since you have no speed invested... you're probably slow. However, with the Devils Pact, it increases like 4/6 of your stats to 1000 points. This allows you to move around the map at lighting speed dealing massive amounts of damage (assuming that it chose to raise your Speed, Jump, and Attack stats). You start at a good point of the map where there are a bunch of enemies clumped together so that your single strong attacks will hit multiple times due to hitlag, you get the powerups you need to move faster and attack harder, and then by the time the Devils Pact wears off, you should be fast enough to move around the map quickly on your own. This in turn, makes you hit things far more often than you would when not using the Devil's pact. The downside to this is obviously... you have to play the entire 5 minutes at 300% with super terrible defense. Anything can and will kill you. It's hard.

Use spinning blades like you'd normally would, run around the map doing your single strongest aerial attacks (like any of Ganon's aerials) or Smash attacks if they're going to hit a big enemy or multiple enemies at the same time. Near the last minute of the game, just ignore the stat points entirely. The time you spend collecting them could be time spent hitting more enemies. Plan your route so that you don't have to go through the same part of the map twice. And generally get lucky, 2x multipliers DO help, but I can get highscores without the need of them.

Also, this should be self explanatory, but Challenge Doors are awful. You lose a ton of time just entering and exiting them to the point where they are not worth it, regardless of what room you get.

Follow this strategy and you should at least be seeing 350k+ results, depending on your skill and character. I think I've gotten over 400k 9 times now, with Ganon, Cloud, Falcon, Doc, Lucario, Roy, DK, Brawler, Bowser, and Marth. And with Ganon, I can reach 400k rather consistently.

One last thing, the absolute best enemy you can possible get is the Mite, the little yellow guys that come in a small pack. They may not be worth much, but they're all clumped together and you could say, land Ganon's F smash and hit 5 of them. Well Congratulations, you just performed Ganon's F smash 5 times at the same time and those points racked up.

Anyways, hopefully I'm not too late to the party to the point where nobody even reads this anymore. But might as well give my 2 cents.

 

[Espyo]

Some days ago, I tried searching on Nicovideo for Smash Run runs, and sure enough, there are some absolutely gargantuan scores there. This is the highest I could find, at 1147431: http://en.niconico.sarashi.com/?sm28742824
You can see the player uses a lot of Ganon's up-smashes, and even has powers that increase foot-attack damage output. I've struggled to understand the custom equipment they had, back when I first saw this, but I think I reached the conclusion that they had the bonuses that makes you faster at 0%, stronger at 0%, and also capable of critical hits, all of them in the attack category. Sure enough, you can see the player using a lot of healing powers to keep their damage at 0% as often as possible.

 

[Jigglymaster]

Some days ago, I tried searching on Nicovideo for Smash Run runs, and sure enough, there are some absolutely gargantuan scores there. This is the highest I could find, at 1147431: http://en.niconico.sarashi.com/?sm28742824
You can see the player uses a lot of Ganon's up-smashes, and even has powers that increase foot-attack damage output. I've struggled to understand the custom equipment they had, back when I first saw this, but I think I reached the conclusion that they had the bonuses that makes you faster at 0%, stronger at 0%, and also capable of critical hits, all of them in the attack category. Sure enough, you can see the player using a lot of healing powers to keep their damage at 0% as often as possible.

YOOOO THATS INSANE. Granted I watched their run and they're insanely lucky throughout the entire thing. What with coming across tons of mite packs, getting a x2 multiplier and an attack stat boost fest at the same time along with endless hoards. That must've taken a lot of times to do but still. I never would have thought using those powerups would have been the answer. The routing seems to be exactly what I do... but ****... gotta try this out for myself.

Edit: ...yup. The foot power up is flat out better than spinning blades. Not even after a couple attempts, I got this score.
https://sta.sh/0bq8u1bp150
And now this: https://sta.sh/0r1iddd4pqi

All I can say is that I don't think there is any equipment that increases your power at 0. I know that there is speed that gets increased, but not power. That being said, despite his massive score over mine, I still think that the devil's pact would still be better than using the 0% speed buff and using all healing items. It's just that the foot power up is WAY better than spinning blades ever was. I'm going to test things out for a bit and see if I can push my score closer to his.

 

[abx]

You guys are fantastic! I applied some of your tips and went for raw damage et voila! I instantly improved on my average and got a few more 300k high scores, which is huge for my track record. I still need to work out a comfortable routine. Now I finally have an idea what to go for! Worth the waiting.

"All I can say is that I don't think there is any equipment that increases your power at 0."

How sure are you? I have some power ups which straight-forward say "increase speed at 0%" and some which say "increase strength at 0%". Well, I'm playing with German translation, so the wording might be different in actuality, but there are two different 0% boosters and I do notice an increase in power. I also have one booster which supposedly raises speed and strength at 0%. Unfortunately, it's only a glove.

 

[Espyo]

You almost made me doubt myself, but I checked the wiki, and sure enough, the "Unharmed Attacker" items give you a 1.5x attack boost at 0%. Which is pretty insane when you think about it. Congrats on getting those scores! I'm trying to get high scores as well, but only every once in a while. I definitely need to hunt down for an Unharmed Attacker power equipment, one day.

Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention: Notice how the player in the video I linked fights against Robins. At first I thought it was just because that player really liked beating up Female Robin. But then I realized the true reason: If you let the game pick randomly, you do an excellent job, but then the final challenge is a race, and one of your opponents is Sonic... well, there goes your run. Robin has the worst run speed in the game, making a race even against Ganon safe, and Robin's jump for the climbing challenge isn't anything special either.