SA2 Hunting Tips

These are tips that apply when speedrunning any treasure-hunting stage in Sonic Adventure 2.

You won't have record potential all the time. Because the piece locations change every time, it's inevitable that some layouts take longer than others to clear. You can try playing a bad layout, but all it'll get you is a bad time. Each piece has a best location, and when it comes time to go for the records, looking for the pieces in anything other than their best locations will result in a blown chance. Hunting runs can get boring fast, as at the record-setting level they consist of running to one spot to see if a piece is there, and usually finding that it isn't, then repeating several times until it is there, then repeating for the other pieces. Don't bother wasting time using hints--you'll just know where the best pieces are, and only go for them in those spots.

Bring lots of lives. In each stage, there are 108 potential piece/key/emerald locations, of which piece 1 gets 45 locations, piece 2 gets 36, and piece 3 gets 27. This means that even if you don't botch any of the pieces when they do show up in their best locations, it can take about that many tries to clear the level. If you get your lives up to 99 beforehand, good for you. Occasionally 99 has proven to be not even enough (more precisely, if you bring 99 lives and never miss a piece when it's in the right location, you have a 53.21% chance of getting a completion before running out of lives), but it's a good thing Knuckles and Rouge have the power to dig. If you run out of lives in any hunting stage except Security Hall, just dig up a bunch of rings until you have more lives, then try again. That's all there is to it! You might even dig up standalone life icons along the way--think of them as an added bonus.

Collection order: why 3-2-1? You'd think it wouldn't matter what order you collected the three pieces in, but it does. There's a small trick to the piece placement algorithm. If you already collected piece 1 on a previous life, the game looks for any locations for piece 2 that are close by to that piece 1 location, and makes sure never to put piece 2 in one of those locations. Likewise for piece 3 never being close to a previous 2 location. Feel free to come up with your own reasons for why they did that. Anyway, since the good locations are usually those closest to start, and those are naturally likely to come within the radius of "closeness" that triggers a lockout by the game, that can interfere with ever getting correct piece placement on a run. Fortunately, there's a way around that. Get piece 3 first, when it doesn't answer to anything. Then get piece 2, and save 1 for last and you neatly erase the problem of lockouts. It may not always be necessary, but 3-2-1 order is guaranteed not to interfere with anything. Unless you can get two pieces in the same life, 3-(1+2) or (2+3)-1, which increases the expected number of tries from 108 to 1017 or 1647, or the dream (1+2+3) layout which takes about 43740 tries and doesn't even save any time in most levels, just stick with getting them one at a time and in 3-2-1 order.

Kill vs. Restart: You probably already know this, but it's worth mentioning. If you die (by getting hit or falling out of the bottom), you retain any pieces you may have collected. If you pause and choose Restart, you still lose a life, but lose all your pieces and start back at the beginning. Because these levels can be so tedious, with you repeating the same motions over and over, choosing Restart where possible can make your tries go by faster. This means that if you don't have any pieces yet, use Restart after you find that your piece isn't in the right spot; once you already have one or two, you'll have to find a place to die normally.

Radar. Because you'll be getting the pieces in 3-2-1 order, and (unlike the first Sonic Adventure) the radar is only active on one piece at a time, you'll be getting pieces 3 and 2 "blind." But once you get those, you can use the radar on 1 to know if you should even bother trying for that piece or if you should just die right away and move on to the next life.

Now you have some tips that can help you. But the biggest tip of all--know where the desired piece locations are. Of course they vary from stage to stage, and the locations are listed on the levels' pages (Wild Canyon, Pumpkin Hill, Aquatic Mine, Death Chamber, Meteor Herd, Dry Lagoon, Egg Quarters, Security Hall, and Mad Space)