The rules for what locations/checks can be reached in what situations and with what items are painstakingly encoded in a machine readable format: https://github.com/OoTRandomizer/OoT-Randomizer/tree/Dev/dat...

I don't know the specifics of the OoTR algorithm but in general they work by considering a set of items which are currently "available", and then progressively picking a random item to place only in locations which are reachable with that current set of available items (which is expanded with each placement).

Or balding!

Oh dear, do it! It is my favorite Zelda game by a wide margin. And GP is completely correct in how it holds up, especially with the HD version.

Nintendo released that teaser trailer of a realistic Zelda in an epic fight with Ganon and the world was anticipating that for years. But Nintendo realised competing with PlayStation was going to be a race to the bottom so they built the GameCube as budget hardware that could have never rendered that Ganon fight scene. And thus disappointing all the children who had become teenagers since the release of OoT.

Without that context however, the game is indisputably great. And the fact that they used vector graphics is a lucky win as it means the game renders crisply on modern TV's and monitors.

> Like Super Mario 2 hardly being anything like SM1.

I would not call that a design choice. It's a consequence of putting Mario branding on an unrelated game.

>Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all?

It can be configured with options as to how items are distributed. But yeah, in general anything can be anywhere. Without clues: sometimes there are clues, those silly gossip stones in OoT can output a message about the general location of a thing, but you check everything you can. You learn which items open up each logic path and then open every chest, do every quest, etc.

>How out of sequence can the game get?

Completely. There are randomizer settings that require glitches and sometimes if the logic is wrong (it is sometimes) there are unwinnable seeds.

> Someone should do this with Majora's Mask, but in a way that can somehow combine the two games.

Someone did:

https://ootmm.com/faq

There are a few multi-game randomizers out there.

Some of them even run on real SNES hardware

I don't know about OoT, but in the case of Super Metroid Map Rando (https://maprando.com/), the logic is also quite detailed – see e.g. https://github.com/vg-json-data/sm-json-data/blob/master/reg... for one room – and comes with information about the difficulty of the tricks necessary to get from one place to another with a given item loadout, health, runways from connecting rooms etc.; having that, it is possible for the user to specify a desired difficulty, and one of several game modes then effectively ensures that the "next" item is located in a particular location, access to which has only been made possible by the current loadout and doing tricks of the given difficulty, so that players sufficiently familiar with the logic (and the tricks) can quickly narrow down the set of possible locations. Other game modes will be less strict in how items are placed, which in practice can mean that the game becomes "easier" by giving you a more powerful item loadout but "harder" in that figuring out where to go becomes less straightforward; and as a result, you end up with games that feel completely different just by having a different focus on the exploration and execution aspects.

I've find that it becomes quite an interesting spectator sport too, since people will compete on completing a given random map as quickly as possible, effectively having to perform difficult platforming tricks while also having to solve a non-trivial constraint satisfaction problem to understand the map layout, and different speedrunners have evolved different probabilistic heuristics for how to do that.

Some good showcases:

- The AGDQ 2025 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it_xbTZHan8

- The grand finals of a recent tournament: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2485240928

> Does it ever put things in absurd places, eg. a necessary dungeon key in a random grotto halfway across the map (or in another time)? Without clues, how would you know where to check next? Does the game help at all?

I haven't played this OOT randomizer, but with the Wind Waker randomizer I've been playing, you can configure things like that - so dungeon keys could spawn in their own dungeon only, or literally anywhere in the world, or just other dungeons. It also has settings that allow you to talk to an NPC to get hints where game-progressing items are.

From what I've seen of YouTube runs, it can make zero sense (think going into a random cave out in the wild puts you into the queen's bedroom etc.). I guess it must be most fun for people who've played the game so much it's already just a DAG to them. Or maybe they enjoy the surrealism.