Sonic 3 & Knuckles Speedrun Strats - Hydrocity Zone: Ozone Strat (Drown during Act 1 to save RTA-TB)

This is a follow up to    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles Speedrun Strats - ...   It turns out that you can drown in Hydrocity Act 1 and still save RTA-TB time under some circumstances.

Back then, I suggested that this could only improve IGT, and thus not prove useful for RTA-TB. While that statement is still technically true, after retiming, it turns out it is faster for some slightly slower or backup routes for Sonic. This video shows the time differences between four different playthroughs

1. Ozone Strat (aka Drown during Act 1).
2. Current Strat A (reproduction of the currently fastest human viable RTA route). Ozone is about 4.5 seconds slower.
3. Current Strat B (reproduction of the "average" human route). Ozone is about 6.5 seconds faster
4. Current Strat C (reproduction of the slowest no unforced errors but no deaths route). Ozone is about 8 seconds faster

The video starts time from the moment I enter Hydrocity 1, and ends on an arbitrary common frame of Marble Garden. Note that the timers use RTA-TB timing, so timers will appear to offsync with one another; that is because we do not consider time spent ticking down time bonuses for final time.

While Ozone is not ultimately the fastest way of doing it, it is significantly easier than the best human achievable strat, and will yield faster times than your average attempts at the best human achievable strat.

We have affectionately dubbed this strat "Ozone strat" due to the broken title card that appears at the end of Hydrocity Act 2 (as the "O" of "Hydrocity" is the only readable character). Do note that a successful Ozone strat may not show the Ozone title card but instead show the water of the geyser that transitions to Marble Garden very garbly. Both are still known as Ozone, difference being in some currently inconsequential memory manipulation you can do.

This upload is sort of an emergency video upload given that there's been some massive developments with this strategy beyond the scope of this video. Those developments, once more rock solid, would be subject to their own video. The strat had been known for a few weeks by now, just never bothered compiling them all into one video until, well, the weekend happened and all hell broke loose.