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Since the route is no longer very new, we can call it music box route so the name is evergreen.

In short, this route collects an extra music box from 5-1 using the P-Wing in order to facilitate skipping as many HB battles as possible. When every unnecessary HB battle loses over 10 seconds each, obviously these timesaves are significant.

This new route does make several levels harder than they used to be. Here is why:

5-1: The duck fly is tricky to do optimally, and it is easy to clip into the ceiling and lose all momentum. Level in general is less consistent than it used to be.

5-2: It is slightly harder to do the movement optimally to avoid the pit of shame. It is only slightly more difficult IMHO.

5-5: Significantly harder. Without fire flower, you need to do a very light duck jump under some enemies to gain p-speed early. Late P-Speed loses about 1.5 seconds.

5-7: If you are not careful, you may not keep p-speed after grabbing the fire flower. Also IMHO some of the cues for where to jump are more difficult because the star removes all of the brick enemies and thus you cannot bounce off of them.

6-9: 1 or 2 frame window to do a walljump here in lieu of using a P-Wing. Noticeably harder and less consistent.

7-2: Due to the routing, you may not have a star for this level. If so, noticeably harder and more scary.

7-6: You would have to do a clip in this level. Conveniently, a standing clip is possible if you have subpixel in the range of 3-10 inclusive. This means 50% chance. However, this is noticeably harder than using P-Wing still.

7-8: Due to the routing, you may not have a star for this level. If so, significantly harder and more scary.

Obviously a lot of levels are more complicated now, so how do we simplify this while still getting the benefits of this route?

1) Doing 6-10 instead of 6-9: You can grab the fire flower in 6-10 instead of walljumping 6-9. This loses 10 to 10.5 seconds in 6-10, but you can make up 3.5 seconds in 6-F3* and can save up to 3.5 seconds in 6-Airship. This without question puts you in a better position with more options for 7-2 as well. You can save another 0.8 seconds not taking damage in 6-8 to go from big->small Mario for 6-9 walljump.

Overall time lost compared to optimal route before 7-2: just under 3 seconds.

In 7-2, having fire can be a 1 second advantage to not having fire assuming you do the fastest ideal strategies. That narrows the gap to 2 seconds.

2) Attempting to grab an extra P-Wing from one of the HBs and skipping the HB in the later half of W5 with music box: This is great if people don’t want to clip 7-6. Also, this simplifies 7-8 and gives people more options to work with. For most runners, this will give them an extra star to work with because they don’t need it for optimal 7-8.

3) Using the card game to grab two fire flowers in World 3: As of now, I (Feloliyaya) am the only person to use this strategy, but more people may use this in the future.

In World 3 after beating 3-1, you can go to the card game. Imagine the card game as a 3x6 2D array, where [0][0] is top left card and [2][5] is bottom right card. While the pattern you get is frame dependent, you can flip two cards and know where the fire flowers on the board will be. You want to flip [1][1] and [2][1]. What you get from flipping these will tell you where the flowers are. After you get the two flowers, flip two cards to cause a mismatch to exit the game.

Card game takes approximately 13 seconds. Notably you can buffer inputs and do up/down+left/right to move diagonally.

After getting music box from 5-1, you can equip fire flower for 5-2. You save back about 3 seconds in World 5 doing this because you have fire flower for 5-F1 and don’t need to regrab in 5-7.

You can also save back up to 6 seconds in World 6 by equipping fire flower for 6-F3 after walljumping 6-9.

This strategy simplifies many of the levels in W5, especially 5-2, 5-5, and 5-7, while still giving more options for 7-2 and 7-8. The downside is that you must go for the 6-9 walljump for the best results.

Overall time lost compared to optimal route before 7-2: about 4 seconds

In 7-2, having fire can be a 1 second advantage to not having fire assuming you do the fastest ideal strategies. That narrows the gap to 3 seconds.

Hopefully this helps give people ideas if they are struggling with fastest warpless strategies and are looking for alternatives at little time cost!

Feloliyaya