Universal Paperclips is the first thing to come to mind (the fastest Speedruns are ~1.5 hours but finish the first 2 stages in ~1 hour, and the time to complete each stage is a decent milestone for measuring people), with the problem being that you can’t lose; you have as much time as you need to to explore the mechanics. Any mistake will only slow you down, the worst thing that can happen is a single occasion where you lose one single point of trust, you never get shut down by the humans even if you mismanage the wire extremely terribly at the very beginning and completely run out of resources.
Also, there is some pretty annoying RNG with the stock trading and yomi generation which are key time bottlenecks. If you reach out to the designer Frank Lantz, he might be glad to see that his game is being used for something valuable and give you what you need to turn off the RNG (or even reconfigure the game into something better for the purpose, as it is a very simple system).
I went back and tried playing it again, and I’m no longer confident in Universal Paperclips. It’s way too heavy on the explore aspect of the explore-exploit tradeoff; you’re constantly bombarded with new things to try and have no way of knowing how much they’re helping you (maximizing things other than paperclips is usually the winning strategy). It probably doesn’t outperform speedrunning most things e.g. various parts of TOTK.
Universal Paperclips is the first thing to come to mind (the fastest Speedruns are ~1.5 hours but finish the first 2 stages in ~1 hour, and the time to complete each stage is a decent milestone for measuring people), with the problem being that you can’t lose; you have as much time as you need to to explore the mechanics. Any mistake will only slow you down, the worst thing that can happen is a single occasion where you lose one single point of trust, you never get shut down by the humans even if you mismanage the wire extremely terribly at the very beginning and completely run out of resources.
Also, there is some pretty annoying RNG with the stock trading and yomi generation which are key time bottlenecks. If you reach out to the designer Frank Lantz, he might be glad to see that his game is being used for something valuable and give you what you need to turn off the RNG (or even reconfigure the game into something better for the purpose, as it is a very simple system).
I went back and tried playing it again, and I’m no longer confident in Universal Paperclips. It’s way too heavy on the explore aspect of the explore-exploit tradeoff; you’re constantly bombarded with new things to try and have no way of knowing how much they’re helping you (maximizing things other than paperclips is usually the winning strategy). It probably doesn’t outperform speedrunning most things e.g. various parts of TOTK.