City Hall Skip

From SMO.wiki

City Hall Skip is a strategy that can be used to reach the top of the New Donk City Hall in nighttime Metro Kingdom without entering its interior. The trick involves using Stingby storage to obtain enough height to trickjump onto the large wedding billboard facing the Heliport and then continuing to trickjump to the top. The trick is faster than traversing the interior of the building, making it optimal for categories such as Festival%, but since the trick bypasses the City Hall Lost & Found moon, it is not yet known whether it is optimal for categories such as Any% that require collecting enough moons to leave the kingdom as it would necessitate collecting a replacement moon.

Execution

Although as of yet the trick has only been executed using TAS, the method to execute the trick is listed below:

  • After collecting the Girder Sandwich moon, climb onto the nearby building and then trickjump directly across to the large metal platform with the swarm of Urban Stingbies. (Note that this is the same route used by 12/13 Captures.) Roll past the Stingbies and use the metal wall at the north end to jump to the top, while panning the camera away from the three Stingbies next to the wall at the correct moment in order to store their attacks.
  • Pan the camera down to load the Stingbies back in, then jump high (such as using a triple jump and dive) as the Stingbies fly up toward Mario.
  • Bounce on the Stingbies for extra height, then use any remaining movement options to land on top of the large wedding billboard.
  • From there, jump to the top of the billboard on the south face of the skyscraper, then trickjump back to the right and around the side of the building to reach the top without being blocked by the fence.

Speedrun usage

Any%

Although City Hall Skip vastly reduces the amount of time taken to reach the Mechawiggler fight, it results in skipping the City Hall Lost & Found moon, requiring that it be replaced by collecting another moon during daytime. The optimal moon to replace it with is City Gardening: Building Planter (although in two-player speedruns, the resulting optimal reroute also replaces the Captain Toad moon with City Gardening: Plaza Planter). Overall, in one-player speedruns, this results in the skip saving around seven seconds.

Festival%

In Festival%, there is no need to collect a replacement moon for City Hall Lost & Found, so City Hall Skip saves significantly more time.

Minimum Captures Any%

In the one-player variants of Minimum Captures Any%, the fastest known route passes the Urban Stingbies regardless, as the spark pylon to the right cannot be used. This means that less of a detour would be taken to perform City Hall Skip than in standard Any%. However, a replacement moon would likely be slower in this speedrun, as there are fewer fast moons to be obtained when captures are disallowed. Due to these factors, it is unknown whether City Hall Skip saves time in Minimum Captures Any%, and how much if so.