shuppy — speedrunning

speedrunning gizmos & gadgets: puzzle glitching and best parts guaranteed

2026-09-11T14:33:53.366Z

in super solvers: gizmos & gadgets!, you need to solve puzzles to unlock doors to find the best parts to build the fastest vehicles to win races.

i speedrun the Windows versions (v1.2 and v1.12), and i currently use two novel techniques in my runs: puzzle glitching makes the puzzles easier to solve, while the best parts guaranteed strat finds safe, deterministic routes by predicting where the best parts will spawn.

if you want to speedrun this game, download v1.2 for Windows or v1.0 for MS-DOS and head to our forum on speedrun.com to learn more! note that some historical runs are currently hidden from the leaderboards due to a configuration issue.

there are eight puzzle types: Balance, Electricity, Energy, Force, Gear, Jigsaw, Magnet, and Simple Machine. you’ll want to turn off Magnet puzzles, because they suck.

puzzle glitching

[historical context: 2020 forum thread, research thread]

in my experience, Balance puzzles are the easiest to learn to solve quickly, but they can also be exploited to make them even easier to solve over the course of a run.

you can turn Off puzzle types in Options > Puzzle Customization, but the game tracks which puzzles you’ve solved, to create a progression from easier puzzles to harder puzzles and to avoid giving you the same puzzle twice. it can be difficult to finish a run without exhausting your favourite puzzle type, or even impossible in the case of full game runs.

to solve a Balance puzzle without marking it as solved, when you’re holding the final blue weight, press and hold the Enter key, then hang it on the scale.

when you enter a locked door, the game chooses a random puzzle type from the puzzle types that are On, then chooses a random puzzle from the first three unsolved puzzles of that puzzle type. once you’ve solved every puzzle of a certain type, the game locks that puzzle type to Off. but since the game has more doors than puzzles, you can end up completely running out of puzzles. once that happens, the game enters an “endgame” mode where you can get any puzzle. in the endgame, you can still turn Off puzzle types, but the game turns all of the puzzle types back On each time you solve a puzzle, which is annoying.

Balance puzzles have a bug that we can exploit to solve them without marking them as solved, which effectively allows us to play the easiest Balance puzzles as many times as we want. press and hold the Enter key before placing the final blue weight, and release Enter after you’re through the door. if you do that, you will almost never increase the Puzzles Done counter in Puzzle Customization.

best parts guaranteed

[historical context: 2017 forum thread, 2021 forum thread, two research threads]

if you race with a vehicle having all of the best parts, you’re guaranteed to win, but how can we know where the best parts will spawn?

you can tell when you enter the workshop for a vehicle for the first time, because the blueprint will open automatically.

empirical techniques for planning routes based on where parts will spawn have been used as far back as oddtom’s 1:03:56 in 2017, and the spiritual successor to his gizmos.js tool is ssgesus. both tools use the locations of parts on the initial screen of the warehouse, as input by the runner, to calculate where parts will spawn, and both tools are completely isolated from the game process, making them essentially glorified calculators.

when you start working on a new vehicle by clicking NEXT LEVEL or clicking a building, the game will spawn parts in the warehouse for you (and the chimps) to find. each part is spawned in a random location in the warehouse (ssgwin32.exe v1.2 414750h), and this only happens once per vehicle, when you enter the workshop for that vehicle for the first time. once the parts are spawned, their locations are stored in your save, and loaded from your save when you exit and re-enter the building (or QUIT and relaunch the game).

ssgesus route planner, showing a schematic of where the parts are in the warehouse of a playthrough of the class I gas-powered racer (automotive level 2), if the game was somehow started by a time traveller who took the game back to 1970-01-01 at midnight UTC.

random events in the game use a simple RNG (ssgwin32.exe v1.2 454254h), whose initial seed is the unix time (in seconds) of when you launched the game. exiting and relaunching the game resets the initial seed in the same way.

if we can avoid doing any other random events before spawning parts, we can predict where the best parts will be! there are no random events in the Technology Center, but there are many random events while you’re in a building. as long as you QUIT and relaunch the game before you start working on each new vehicle, spawning parts will be the first random events, making the outcome fully predictable as long as you can guess that initial seed.

future strats: worse is better?

if you’ve ever played the game normally, you probably know that you aren’t actually required to have the best parts to win the race. the game tolerates some amount of suboptimal parts, so we may be able to intentionally choose worse parts that would give us a shorter route than the best parts guaranteed strategy.

race oracle: ideally we would learn enough about the race algorithms to be able to reliably calculate whether a given set of parts would win without actually racing. in other words, we would have some oracle function winner(playerParts, mortyParts) that returns player or morty depending on who would win. this should give us the ability to find the absolute shortest possible route.
morty plus one: we may not even need a race oracle to do better than the best parts guaranteed strategy. R and i both discovered that the parts Morty uses for each of his vehicles are baked into the game’s PART resources, and they never change. in other words, the chimps don’t steal your parts for Morty’s vehicles, they do it just to be a dick! if the races are designed such that upgrading any single part always makes your vehicle faster and never makes your vehicle slower, then any vehicle that has the same parts as Morty plus one upgrade should win.

to make these ideas viable, further reverse engineering of the game will be required, then we can extend ssgesus to help runners make these more complex route plans. stay tuned for some more posts about that!

[WR] gizmos & gadgets! 1.2 ae% (without chimps) in 18:30

2026-08-08T10:18:57.000Z

https://www.speedrun.com/super_solvers_gizmos_and_gadgets/runs/znl0o79y

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2840480445

[WR] gizmos & gadgets! 1.2 plane% (without chimps) in 16:12

2026-08-08T10:18:53.000Z

https://www.speedrun.com/super_solvers_gizmos_and_gadgets/runs/y6496nqm

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2840480442

[WR] gizmos & gadgets! 1.2 plane% (with chimps) in 19:18

2026-08-07T11:47:57.000Z

https://www.speedrun.com/super_solvers_gizmos_and_gadgets/runs/yw7kp1nz

featuring four and a half minutes of bonus diffie. and bad audio, i checked my levels beforehand but they still ended up wrong.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2839574350

update for ssgesus, a route planner for super solvers: gizmos & gadgets!

2026-08-06T15:23:36.000Z

you can now click an area, to highlight it and all of the doors that lead to it. you can now click any of the doors that lead to an area, to do the same. polished the UI too :)

https://bucket.daz.cat/ssgesus/

untitled post by @shuppy@fedi.shuppy.org

2026-08-05T10:27:11.000Z

someone has beaten my super solvers: gizmos & gadgets! speedruns :D

so anyway, i might start running again?

just shy of ten minutes saved across two runs!

2023-09-04T04:16:19.685Z

[WR] Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
auto% (without chimps) in 14:29 (−4:13)

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1916652364

[WR] Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
any% (without chimps) in 53:42 (−5:46)

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1916004587

Gizmos & Gadgets! ae% (without chimps) in 21:35

2023-09-04T04:04:47.899Z

shuppy (@delan) — [archived] 2023-09-02T15:19:12.730Z

Gizmos & Gadgets! buildings (without chimps)

no one has set any times for the gizmos & gadgets buildings without chimps, so let’s fix that!

[WR] (technically)
Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
auto% (without chimps) in 18:42

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1915188201

[WR] (technically)
Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
plane% (without chimps) in 24:38

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1915188200

#speedrun #gizmos & gadgets! #ssgesus

and now for the last uncontested category!

[WR] (technically)
Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
ae% (without chimps) in 21:35

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1916645062

Gizmos & Gadgets! buildings (without chimps)

2023-09-02T15:19:12.730Z

no one has set any times for the gizmos & gadgets buildings without chimps, so let’s fix that!

[WR] (technically)
Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
auto% (without chimps) in 18:42

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1915188201

[WR] (technically)
Gizmos & Gadgets! 1.2
plane% (without chimps) in 24:38

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1915188200

untitled post by @love

2022-12-11T18:36:31.642Z

christine (@love) — [archived] 2022-12-11T17:29:38.327Z

So exactly one person is posting speedruns of GITCL on speedrun.com and normally I don't like looking at speedruns but... I mean... obviously I'm gonna look at one of my own game. Unsurprisingly it is insanely fucked up but also thankfully not nearly as fucked up as I feared? Like it's "oh lmao I guess that was exploitable" fucked up, not "how did I ever think this game worked properly" fucked up, at least!

That said it is bonkers to me that the no DLC speedrun is TWICE THE LENGTH as the one where you do the DLC, despite the fact that you... have to do the DLC. Which has a ton of mandatory random encounters and a boss that I'm continually nervous that I gave too much health to. (Whenever I revisit her for testing purposes, the Jill fight always takes long enough that I'm like "uh, maybe this was a bit much.") Anyway it turns out the reason why is because they figured out a combination of things that lets you do like 1000 damage in a single hit against normal bosses, and positively absurd numbers against bosses with elemental weaknesses. I had no idea the numbers could go this high. This is a game where 99 is considered a lot. The toughest bosses have like 8000 HP. If I had known, I would have implemented a Final Fantasy style max damage!

Seriously what the fuck is that. Good lord.

Anyway despite all that it's... actually, I'm kinda satisfied seeing it? The goal with the DLC items was to give players stuff that could POTENTIALLY be exploitable, but in a "you gotta understand the systems to know what to combine it with" sort of way, not a "this straightforwardly does more damage than everything else" sort of way. And I guess that turned out to be the case! I bet this was really fun to figure out.

I mean yeah okay it's Bank Breaker, but it's not JUST Bank Breaker. Also if you figure out exactly how to maximize on using a weapon that literally costs money with every use, imo that's sick as hell and you deserve it.

I'm actually really satisfied that this loadout took advantage of a Support ability... Sam has basically zero damage output, and having just three ability slots means that the game kinda has to deemphasize buffs/debuffs because you can't have a spread of them like you could in a more traditional RPG. So it really is a testament that the ones in the game really do count, and that support is the lynchpin of this strategy! In this case, they use Uncanny Light to keep adding stagger on every hit and just letting them ignore the combo system entirely to do damage in huge bursts.

And in the no DLC run, honestly, the big fights actually seem to pretty much line up with how I balanced them—even in hyper efficient play, they actually do stay roughly within the player damage spread that I intended, nothing is straightforwardly a pushover. That's pretty cool! Wow! GITCL was definitely a learning experience for me to develop and I had to figure out a lot of stuff about balance as I went along, but like... if the systems can withstand this much pressure and still be fun, I feel like that's a huge W! Watching this insane bullshit actually does make me feel like I got a lot of things right. Well, other than not having a damage cap lol.

#get in the car loser #love conquers all games