The A Link to the Past Randomizer

Note that since the Randomizer itself is by default in English, and the English-speaking community unsurprisingly uses the game's English-version terminology, I'll be using that on this page rather than my translations of the Japanese as elsewhere on this site.

Also refer to my sample Randomizer run, done in something similar to Let's Play forum style because the video wouldn't process.

Where can I find it?

Here's a link to the ALttP Randomizer main site. Aside from the Randomizer interface itself, the site also has more information on the various options and links to more in-depths guides and resources (such as utilities that keep track of checks made and items collected).

What is it?

In short, it's a tool that takes a copy of the game and randomizes it, shuffling things around to create a new and unique experience. Maybe you'll find the Bow in your house, or unearth Ether in the digging minigame, or spend 500 rupees to buy a red rupee from the Zora king. Maybe the old man on the mountain inexplicably has the Master Sword. Maybe after hours of trying to track down that Ice Rod you need to beat Trinexx, you'll discover it was in Turtle Rock all along.

Under its default settings, the Randomizer ensures that it's always possible to progress without using any glitches, though you'll often need to investigate locations that aren't worth the trouble in a regular playthrough, and may need to think outside the box to figure out what options are available to you.

Although the main draw of the Randomizer is, of course, the randomization, it also makes a number of more general minor changes, some of which are just there to speed things up especially in a race, others of which would have been nice quality-of-life things to have in the original game:

• The Randomizer uses the Japanese v1.0 ROM as a base, so a number of bugs and glitches (some of which are permitted in competitive play) are present that were patched out of later versions, such as Item Dashing, Fake Flippers, and Mirror Block Erasure.
• One glitch is partially patched: If you take damage during the Fake Flippers glitch, the game will kill you outright. That may sound harsh, but is actually a mercy, as the original game instead tends to place Link at an invalid location that easily leads to the game getting stuck in an endless screen transition attempt, forcing a reset and loss of progress.
• Most text and dialog is removed in the interest of speeding things along and sparing repeat players from having to reread the same cutscenes over and over again. Some NPCs do have things to say if you deliberately talk to them, mostly in-jokes, though Sahasrahla tells you where to find the Pendant of Courage (the green one) to show him for an item, and the Bomb Shop proprietor similarly tells you where to find the Crystals numbered 5 and 6 to make the jumbo bomb appear.
• Similarly, the Kakariko bottle merchant, King Zora, Kiki the monkey, the various minigame NPCs, and the blacksmiths all take your money (assuming you have enough) automatically when you interact with them, without any prompting, questioning, or other dialog.
• The waterfall and pyramid faeries each have two chests with random items sitting there, ripe for the taking, in front of their springs, instead of expecting you to guess what you need to throw in to get a useful reaction. Approaching the spring itself automatically tosses in an empty Bottle, if you have any, for a refill (though what they refill it with varies from seed to seed, is generally not the same for both faeries, and may even be nothing).
• The Lake Hylia faerie, who offers Bomb and Arrow capacity upgrades for a price, has been reworked to function like a normal shop, so you can just walk in and grab an upgrade for 100 rupees, instead of having to toss smaller amounts into the pond over and over until something happens.
• If you Save and Quit in the Dark World, loading your saved game will start you in the Light World unless you both have beaten Agahnim in the Hyrule Castle Tower and have collected the Mirror (the base game checks story progress only and doesn't care about the Mirror, so keeping that unchanged could leave you stranded in the Dark World). Note that because the blacksmith and locked chest come with you if either was following you when you saved (this is true even in the base game), this also lets you bring them to the Light World whether you have the Mirror or not, so either of them can potentially have the Mirror.
• The blacksmiths reward you without a delay, and don't take your sword. Just reunite them, walk out and back in, and for 10 rupees, there you go.
• The treasure chest minigame and digging minigame in the Dark World (both of which reward you with a heart piece in the original game) give up their prizes far more easily. Specifically, the chest game always gives its item in one of the two chests you open the first time you play, and the digging game always gives its item after a realistically achievable predetermined (though randomized from seed to seed) number of digs.
• Mothula takes damage from the gold sword (and tempered sword spin attacks).
• You can press Y in the menu when selecting certain item slots to toggle between items that share those slots, assuming you have both options available: Normal and Silver Arrows, the two Boomerangs, the Mushroom and Powder, and the Shovel and Flute.
• The frankly annoying popup Bottle submenu does not automatically open when you cursor over the Bottle slot in your inventory, instead opening only when you press X when on that slot. You can also cycle between Bottles by pressing Y on the slot when in the menu, similar to the items noted above.
• The game keeps track of, and displays after the credits, various information and statistics about your run, such as how long it took you to find a sword, how many times you slammed into something while dashing ("bonks"), and how many of the 216 item locations you collected.
• The Open World State setting allows you to skip the opening rescue of Princess Zelda, and instead start the game with her already at the church, so that you can begin from either Link's house or the church and just start exploring the world immediately. Or, if you're feeling more adventurous, choose Retro to make the game behave more like the first Zelda game (small keys work in any locked door, using the Bow requires a quiver purchase and costs rupees with every shot, and more), or Inverted to begin in the Dark World with many of the functional differences between the two worlds flipped with each other.
• After randomization, you have the option to enable using L and R to cycle through items (quickswap), giving these buttons a useful purpose. Pressing L+R when on an item that shares a slot with another one, such as the two Boomerangs, swaps between those two items if you have both.
• There are also several largely cosmetic changes that can be applied after randomization, most notably the ability to replace Link's graphics with one of over 360 alternate options (and growing), from other video game heroes (or villains) to cartoon characters to objects from the game, and more.

When not generating a Race ROM, you also have the option to view or save a "spoiler log" that records the settings used, the locations selected for everything, and something that's essentially a walkthrough of where the logic expects you to go to progress through the resulting game.

"Seed"? "Run"?

In computer science, a "random seed", often just called a "seed", is the starting value (or set of values) used to initialize a pseudorandom number generator. In the ALttP Randomizer, the seed is a combination of the selected settings and whatever form of randomization it uses under the hood. Since the output of a pseudorandom generator is entirely deterministic based on the seed, the output—in this case, the randomized copy of the game—may also colloquially be referred to as a "seed".

So, yeah, in Randomizer context, a seed is basically just a particular result of randomizing the game.

A "run" is just a playthrough of a given seed (or a game in general). Players doing runs are accordingly called "runners".

What do people do with this?

Some simply use it as a way to bring new life to a familiar game. Others use it as a form of competitve racing, with multiple players attempting to get the best time on the same seed, often streaming on platforms such as Twitch. Runners' streams may be restreamed together in a single video with other people providing commentary, like a sporting event. In addition to channels on Twitch itself, examples of this can be found on the ALTTPR League YouTube channel and elsewhere.

What actually gets randomized?

It depends on the options selected. Most or all of these are customizable, but...

Under the default settings:

• Most items, including all chest contents, items from NPCs (such as what you buy from the bottle merchant or are given for showing Sahasrahla the Pendant of Courage), items lying out in the open, the Master Sword pedestal, and boss drops (heart containers in the regular game) are shuffled with each other. Items are placed in a way that ensures progression is always possible without using any glitches, though the intended route may be convoluted. The following limitations and restrictions to item shuffling apply:
  
  • Things found under pots or skulls, including keys, are never modified, regardless of settings.*
  • Special items (keys) dropped by specific enemies are also never modified on any setting.*
  • Pickups found by dashing into trees or piles of rocks are similarly never modified.
  • By default, all dungeon items (maps, compasses, and big and small keys) will remain within their usual dungeon. In some cases, this prevents certain chests (like the first one in Swamp Palace) from containing anything other than a small key.

  * More recent builds of extended randomizers not currently incorporated into the main site, such as the Door Randomizer, can shuffle these items with the others. Some also have the option to shuffle pot contents around within a room.

  Under the default settings (100% Inventory Accessibility), all inventory items will always be reachable without using any glitches. Specific item locations, and even a few rooms, may not be accessible if they contain keys that aren't needed for anything else. For example, the big keys of Swamp Palace and Skull Woods, which are only used to open the big chests of their respective dungeons, may be locked inside these chests.

  Based on the commentary in a throwback race, the current placement logic for items that can affect progression works on a loop that goes something like this:

  1. Start with no items placed.
  2. Pick an item at random from those not yet placed.
  3. Assume the player's inventory is the list of items not yet placed, minus the selected item.
  4. Select a random unassigned location that the player can reach given that assumption, and place the item there.
  5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 until all items have been placed.

  In short, this has the effect of starting with all locations open for placing items, then working backwards from there. Earlier versions of the Randomizer basically did things the other way around for step 3, assuming that the player's inventory is all items that have been placed, so would effectively start by placing items in the early game and working forward. This often resulted in lopsided outcomes, as the algorithm would run out of interesting items to place before it was able to assign things to late game locations, and also had a higher chance of making one progression item lead directly to the next one (for instance, as soon as you got the Gloves, the next item you needed was disproportionately likely to be in one of the locations that finding the Gloves gave you immediate access to).

• Unless set otherwise in the advanced options, Swords, Shields, Mail, Gloves, and Bows use progressive items. This means that instead of having (for example) a single Golden Sword that you could potentially stumble across early and have for pretty much the whole run, the seed instead places four generic Sword pickups, each of which increases your current Sword level by 1.
• All four Swords are randomized with the rest of the general item pool (Randomized Swords).
• The three Pendants and seven Crystals are shuffled with each other. Any of them can appear in either world. Under the default settings, the world map shows dungeon prizes, Pendant dungeons use the Light World dungeon music, and Crystal dungeons use the Dark World dungeon music.
• Because the Master Sword pedestal can have any item, and most often ends up with something largely useless, the three Pendants are generally not required to finish the game. However, all seven Crystals are, as usual, required to open Ganon's Tower, you need to go through there to fight Ganon, and you need to beat Ganon to win the game (Defeat Ganon Goal with 7/7 Crystal settings).
• Hint tiles will give clues about where some items were placed (Hints On), though a few of them will have useless joke messages or references instead.
• Certain objects in the game (specific trees, statues, and more) spit out four of a pickup when tugged on. In the original game, these are green rupees if you've killed 1 to 3 enemies since the last pull, blue rupees if you've killed at least 4 but taken damage, and red rupees if you've killed at least 4 and not taken any damage (no kills since your last pull results in no items). The Randomizer randomizes each of the three prizes, selecting from possible enemy drops.
• Hoarders (which the community tends to call "bush crabs") hide under certain bushes and rocks. Lifting their covering causes them to start tossing supplies around before vanishing or after a set amount of time (or until killed). In the unmodified game, these are green rupees, eventually followed by a red rupee if Link grabs enough of the green rupees quickly enough. The Randomizer randomizes both prizes, selecting from possible enemy drops.
• Speaking of enemy drops, those are shuffled, too, but with certain restrictions. The game associates one of eight prize packs with each monster to determine what it can drop. The Randomizer shuffles the prize packs around, but does not change the series of pickups within any of the packs, and does not change which enemies share the same pack. The empty (no drops) prize pack is not shuffled, and the drop rates for each enemy also remain unchanged.
• Similarly, the pickups dropped when a stunned enemy is killed and when a frozen enemy is crushed are both randomized.
• How often Agahnim uses blue balls and how many times Ganon teleports repeatedly without stopping are randomized ahead of time so that they'll always be the same for a given seed (at least on your first attempt at each battle), instead of being randomly determined on the fly. This helps ensure that no runners get an unfair advantage in competitve play.
• Each seed gives Blind a randomly selected groanworthy pun to utter at the beginning of combat.
• Ganon similarly has a random selection of lines to start combat with, from game quotes to bacon facts to song lyrics.

What about settings that aren't the default ones?

Just about everything can be customized.

Additionally, the site provides a daily challenge using a random selection of settings each day. These will display some of the major settings up front, with the option to view a partial spoiler log that specifies which other settings are in use.

Randomizer Presets

These are the easiest to use. Just pick an option other than "Default" from the presets dropdown.

• Basic: This uses Basic Item Placement, designed to be friendlier to casual players; differences from the default Advanced Item Placement include avoiding certain valid but tricky results, ensuring that a Lamp is available before any dark rooms (regardless of lightable torches) are required, and always making equipment upgrades available prior to requiring more difficult dungeons. The player begins the game with a sword (Assured Sword), and must go through the Zelda rescue / castle escape sequence before exploring the world at large (Standard World State). All item locations are guaranteed accessible (100% Locations Accessibility), so keys can't lock themselves in, for instance. Hint tiles give relevant gameplay tips rather than item location hints (Hints Off).
• OWG (overworld glitches): This uses Basic Item Placement and 100% Locations Accessibility, with the caveat that it expects you to be willing and able to use a variety of glitches on the overworld along the way, possibly including some major glitches. This preset also uses the Fast Ganon goal, which means you can jump into the Ganon fight as soon as you reach the pyramid, without needing to clear Ganon's Tower. You still need all seven Crystals to damage him.
• Crosskeys: This preset combines Crossed Entrance Shuffle with Keysanity. All dungeon, cave, and building entrances and exits are shuffled among each other across both worlds (except that the front portion of Skull Woods remains restricted to the Skull Woods area, Link's house and the back of the Kakariko tavern are not shuffled at all, and areas you can enter by dropping into a hole remain paired with their usual non-hole exits), though they remain coupled such that walking out of a doorway that you just walked into will always take you back to where you entered from. All maps, compasses, small keys, and big keys are shuffled into the general item pool and may appear anywhere, not just in their usual dungeons, and will tell you which dungeon they belong to when you find them; additionally, the menu now indicates how many keys you have for each dungeon, your world map will only indicate which Pendants or Crystal is in a given dungeon once you have its map (and the music within each dungeon is also randomized to avoid giving anything away), and each dungeon's compass (when you have it and are in the dungeon) is made more useful by indicating how many item locations you've collected within the dungeon. Like OWG, the Crosskeys preset uses the Fast Ganon goal, so Ganon's Tower is not necessarily required.
• Super Quick: You start with a sword, the goal is Fast Ganon, and you don't need any Crystals for anything. As soon as you have pyramid access and the inventory you need to beat Ganon, you can go do it. Basic Item Placement is combined with Beatable Accessibility, meaning that you're only guaranteed to be able to access items you actually need to beat the game. Hint tiles give gameplay hints rather than item location hints.
• Nightmare: Combines Keysanity with Insanity Entrance Shuffle (similar to Crossed except that entrances are also decoupled, so you can walk into a building, walk back out the same door, and find yourself somewhere completely different from where you first entered), Beatable Accessibility, Inverted World State (you start in the Dark World and certain world functionality is flipped; more details below), Random Boss Shuffle (all bosses except Agahnim and Ganon are independently selected at random), Random Enemy Shuffle (all monsters are randomly selected, including those hiding under bushes, along with the odds of that happening, and tile rooms also use random patterns), Random Enemy Damage (enemy damage is randomized), Expert Enemy Health (enemies have randomized, and most likely large, amounts of health), Swordless mode (there are no Swords anywhere; some locations are slightly modified to make them possible with this setting, and the Hammer takes over some Sword functionality), Expert Item Pool (only three full heart containers and eight pieces of heart are available, for a maximum of 8 total hearts, and there are no armor upgrades and only a basic shield to be found; this would also remove Silver Arrows except that they remain available when paired with Swordless), and Expert Item Functionality (magic potions refill only 25%, health potions recover only 4 hearts, faeries can't be caught, Powder turns anti-faeries and Bunny Beams into single hearts instead of faeries, the Magic Cape consumes magic twice as fast, the Cane of Byrna doesn't provide invulnerability, the Boomerang and Hookshot can't stun enemies, and Silver Arrows are disabled except while fighting Ganon).
• Custom: Each of the available settings can be chosen independently.

More detailed descriptions of some of the settings follow.

World State

• Standard: The game starts basically as the original game does, with Link in bed and his uncle leaving into the rainy night, and the castle escape sequence following. In this mode, unless using the Assured Sword setting to begin the game armed, your uncle is guaranteed to give some sort of weapon capable of getting through the castle dungeon (though it may be as awkward as a pack of ten Bombs). Additionally, while going through the dark passages on the way out, the game provides you with a cone of light as though you had the Lamp, even if you haven't found it yet, a change put in place to ensure this part is manageable without forcing the Lamp to appear early.
• Open: The game starts basically as though you've already rescued Zelda (except that none of the chests or other items along the escape route have been collected and none of the locked doors are opened), with the option to start at your choice of Link's house or Sanctuary from the outset.
• Inverted: The Light and Dark Worlds are, in many senses, flipped. Link's house and the Bomb Shop have traded places, the caves connecting the mountains to the rest of the world have swapped into the Dark World in exchange for their counterparts, portals go from the Dark World to the Light World, the Mirror warps from the Light World to the Dark World, the Flute only works in the Dark World, the Moon Pearl protects you from changing form in the Light World, and the Hyrule Castle tower has traded places with Ganon's Tower. Numerous other geographical changes have also been made to ensure everything remains accessible, including stairs and bridges all over the Light World to reach normally Mirror-only spots, an opening in the wall around the Ice Palace, the ability to hop onto Turtle Rock from the tail, and a stairway up to Agahnim's Tower (where Ganon's Tower would normally be). Also important to note is that you can Mirror from the Light World to reach the secondary entrances of Turtle Rock. Other than all that, this functions much like Open state, with the option to start at Link's house or the church counterpart dubbed Dark Chapel from the onset, or on Death Mountain after rescuing the old man.
• Retro: A twist on Standard that reworks a significant amount of functionality to behave more like the first Legend of Zelda game. Bows require the purchase of a Quiver for 80 rupees (added to a random shop) before they can be used at all, and consume rupees to shoot instead of arrows, 10 per shot or 50 for Silver Arrows (similarly, obtainable arrows are replaced with rupees). Small keys are shuffled into the general item pool and work in any dungeon, but fewer than the usual total are placed, and some shops sell additional keys for 100 rupees. One randomly chosen single-entrance house or cave that is normally insignificant will have one of the four sword upgrades, and four other such locations will give a choice, one time each, of a free heart container or blue potion (the potion requires an empty bottle, and the heart containers are extras in addition to those normally available, but your total health remains capped at 20 hearts regardless). Furthermore, the sword upgrade hidden like this may be part of the logical progression—one race I watched required it fairly early in the seed in order to fight Agahnim, and a runner who didn't know about these special caves ended up forfeiting before making it to the Dark World.

Goal

• Defeat Ganon: The default setting, and the same as the original game. To win, you must defeat Ganon, after clearing Ganon's Tower to open the arena, which means you also need enough Crystals to open the tower and to harm Ganon. None of the Pendants are required unless you need whatever Sahasrahla is holding or whatever is on the Master Sword pedestal. As such, runners tend to prioritize dungeons with Crystals and put off those without.
• Fast Ganon: Like Defeat Ganon, except that Ganon's Tower is not required. The hole in the pyramid (or Hyrule Castle in Inverted world state) starts off already opened (except when entrances are shuffled). However, if Ganon's Tower requires fewer Crystals to open than beating Ganon does, runners may still need to venture into the tower for items to finish additional dungeons.
• All Dungeons: You must beat the boss of every dungeon, including Agahnim in Hyrule Castle tower, and then go beat Ganon.
• Master Sword Pedestal: The Triforce is sealed on the pedestal. You must collect all three Pendants and pull it out to win. In a complete reversal from the usual goal, the Crystals generally aren't required, since the only thing they do in this mode is open Ganon's Tower, and Ganon himself is invulnerable.
• Triforce Pieces: A number of Triforce fragments are shuffled into the item pool. To win, you must collect enough of them and bring them to Murahdahla, a sagely NPC added in the Hyrule Castle courtyard. The amounts can be set manually when using the advanced settings under the Create Cusom Game menu, and will default to 30 pieces available with 20 needed to win otherwise. No dungeons are necessarily required, and Ganon is again unbeatable.

In case you don't know the exact goal or need a reminder, a sign is added near the top of the pyramid (or on the upper part of Hyrule Castle in Inverted world state) that indicates what you need to do to win and (if applicable) how many Crystals you need to beat Ganon. As of v31.0.8, the sign additionally indicates whether clearing Ganon's Tower is required, but not how many Crystals are needed to open the tower (a separate sign by the tower gives this information regardless of goal). Ganon himself, if you encounter him prematurely, will also say something related to the goal setting and why there's no point in continuing the fight just then.

Swords

• Randomized: The default setting. You start without a sword, and four sword upgrades are shuffled into the general item pool.
• Assured: You start with a sword, and there's one fewer sword than usual in the item pool. (Note that in Standard and Retro world states, you can't actually use your sword until after reaching your uncle, since the game disables the sword button until then.)
• Vanilla: The sword upgrades are placed at your uncle, the Master Sword pedestal, the blacksmith, and the pyramid faerie.
• Swordless: There are no swords. The Hammer takes its place for activating tablets, breaking Agahnim's barrier, and damaging Ganon. Doorways blocked by curtains or vines, which normally need to be slashed open, start off already opened. Medallions only work at specially marked locations (the spots for opening Misery Mire and Turtle Rock, plus several Bombar tiles added inside the Ice Palace to melt things), and are unusable anywhere else. Finally, Silver Arrows are guaranteed to be available, even when using Hard or Expert Item Pool settings, because the Ganon fight would be nearly impossible otherwise.

Entrance Shuffle

These settings allow for shuffling the connections between the overworld (i.e., Light World and Dark World) maps and the indoor map (caves, houses, dungeons, etc.). When Hints are enabled in modes with shuffled entrances, they may give information about where some of the entrances lead.

Certain entrances have special logic across all options. The back entrance to the tavern in Kakariko Village is the only one that faces that direction, so it's never moved around. The Skull Woods dungeon is complicated enough that all of the entrances to the front section are only ever shuffled with each other, even on the most chaotic settings (this isn't always the case, though I haven't checked enough to be certain which level of shuffling starts mixing these entrances in with all the others; most likely it's only in Insanity due to holes and their exits being decoupled). The main entrance to Hyrule Castle, as well as the side area with your uncle, are not shuffled when using Standard or Retro world state, to ensure that the escape sequence remains possible (the upstairs exits from the castle are also blocked off at first for similar reasons). Finally, Link's House is not shuffled, except when paired with Inverted world state, in which case it connects to a random Dark World location.

Additionally, when the goal is Fast Ganon, the hole in the pyramid (or Hyrule Castle in Inverted world state) does not start off already open; however, unless Ganon or something else that's required happens to be there, you don't need to clear Ganon's Tower to win. In contrast, when using the Defeat Ganon goal, although you'll often be able to reach Ganon without clearing Ganon's Tower, you can't actually damage him until after clearing the tower.

• None: The default. Entrances and exits lead where they do in the original unmodified game.
• Simple: Entrances are grouped by type—single-entrance dungeons (including the final section of Skull Woods), all other Skull Woods entrances, multi-entrance dungeons (Hyrule Castle, Desert Palace, and Turtle Rock), Light World mountain caves, locations that can be entered by dropping into holes (which remain paired with their other entrances, so, for example, after dropping into the hole by the smithy, the exit always comes out at the cave by the smithy regardless of what's down there), all other single-entrance locations, and all other multi-entrance locations—and shuffled only within their type. Additionally, the cave leading up to the mountain is not shuffled, and all entrances of every multi-entrance location connect to the same world.
• Restricted: Like Simple, except that all non-dungeon entrances are shuffled with each other, including the cave that leads up the mountain. Dungeon entrances are still shuffled only amongst themselves, with multi-entrance dungeons keeping all their entrances grouped together.
• Full: Like Restricted, except that all dungeon entrances (other than the front areas of Skull Woods) are shuffled in with everything else. Dungeons can be anywhere, and each entrance of multi-entrance dungeons may now lead to a completely different area from the other entrances.
• Crossed: Like Full, except that locations with two or more entrances may connect to the Light World by one entrance and the Dark World by another. This often allows for bypassing the usual requirements for entering the Dark World, making logical progression more complicated than ever.
• Insanity: Other than single-entrance houses and caves, entrances are decoupled, meaning that going in through a doorway and back out the same doorway may take you somewhere else entirely—entrances and exits are effectively one-way. (Note that single-entrance dungeons are not exempt from this, only single-entrance non-dungeon locations.) Additionally, for locations that can be entered by dropping into holes, the other entrance can lead anywhere and not just to the exit otherwise associated with the hole. Note that more than one indoor location may exit to the same place.

Whether an indoor location is considered to be in the Light World or the Dark World (and therefore whether you need the Moon Pearl to function normally) depends on which world it was entered from. This also affects certain monsters. For example, the rats in the Light World and the cricket things in the Thieves' Town attic share the same internal ID, and will have considerably more health and inflict considerably more damage (and won't squeak) when in what the game regards as a Dark World location, even if they still look like Light World rats. On Crossed or Insanity, the same location may be treated differently based on which entrance you use.

Item Pool and Item Functionality

Selecting Hard or Expert for Item Pool increases overall difficulty by reducing the amount of health, armor, swords, shields, and bows available in the seed. Hard caps at 14 maximum hearts (7 full containers and 16 pieces plus the starting 3 hearts), green mail, tempered sword, red shield, and (unless using Swordless mode) normal arrows. Expert further reduces the health cap to 8 maximum hearts (3 full containers and 8 pieces plus the starting 3 hearts), the sword cap to Master Sword, and the shield cap to the basic shield (though you can still buy a red shield in the shop that sells one). These items will continue to be placed as usual, but once a player reaches the maximum allowed level for any of them, all remaining items of that type will be replaced with packs of 20 rupees, displayed as a green rupee with a 20 on it instead of as the usual red rupee to indicate the substitution.

Item Pool also has a Crowd Control option, which is used with the Twitch Crowd Control feature that allows viewers to interfere with the game as it's played.

Note that because the Hard and Expert settings for Item Pool remove Silver Arrows from the game, using either may force you to beat Ganon Silverless, even when the Glitches Required setting is None. The exceptions are when the Swordless option is also active (because finishing Ganon off without Silver Arrows or a sword is next to impossible even for skilled runners) and of course when the goal doesn't involve beating Ganon to begin with.

Selecting Hard or Expert for Item Functionality increases overall difficulty by reducing the effectiveness or limiting the usability of a number of items. On Hard mode, Potions don't work as well, the Bug Net can't catch faeries, Magic Powder turns anti-faeries and similar things into hearts instead of faeries, the Magic Cape burns through magic twice as fast, the Cane of Byrna doesn't make you invincible, the Boomerang can't stun enemies, and Silver Arrows are disabled outside of Ganon's room. Expert mode further reduces potion effects and additionally removes the ability of the Hookshot to stun enemies. These restrictions are apparently lifted when in Spike Cave, and possibly a few other locations with damaging floors.

Prior to v31, these two settings were both part of a single Difficulty option. Sometimes race commentators still have trouble remembering that they're no longer coupled and that Hard Item Pool doesn't necessarily mean Hard Item Functionality, or vice versa.

Other mode shorthands

The community has come up with several special modes that aren't directly available from the presets, including:

• Enemizer: A portmanteau of "enemy randomizer", this is the module of the Randomizer that deals with enemy data, potentially including changing which enemies appear where, how much health they have, and how much damage they inflict. When Enemizer is mentioned in commentary or descriptions, it typically means that some form of Enemy Shuffle or Boss Shuffle (or both) is active. In addition to making things more chaotic, Enemy Shuffle also reduces the requirements for some dungeons by ensuring that kill rooms never have any enemies with only a single vulnerability, which for instance means that a Bow will never be specifically required for anything other than the cyclops statue in the Palace of Darkness. Boss Shuffle may unpredictably either raise or lower requirements for clearing a dungeon, since (nearly) any boss can show up in (nearly) any dungeon.

• Ambrosia: Standard World State with Assured Sword, your uncle gives you a clue to where the Pegasus Boots are as he leaves the house, and bosses always drop non-dungeon items (meaning they never have maps, compasses, or big or small keys). Knowing that bosses have items from the general pool sometimes lets runners skip more chests sooner (for instance, if a dungeon has three items and they find two, then the last one must be on the boss), but also tends to make them more reluctant to enter a dungeon before they have everything needed to clear it (for instance, Skull Woods has only two items, so they can get at most one if they don't have the Fire Rod to enter the last section... unless that one item is the Fire Rod).
• Invrosia: A twist on Ambrosia. Inverted World State with Assured Sword, bosses always drop non-dungeon items, and big keys (other than the Ganon's Tower big key) are shuffled into the general item pool so that it's less likely the game will expect you to face a difficult Dark World boss with minimal equipment.
• Wild Maps and/or Compasses: Instead of being restricted to appearing in their usual dungeons, maps/compasses are shuffled into the general item pool and may appear anywhere in the game. Functionally, the main effect is that since these items are free to appear anywhere, dungeons are more likely to have more (potentially) useful items. By the same token, this prevents runners from being able to safely skip chests once they've found everything except the map and compass in a dungeon. Additionally, when maps are wild, the world map won't show whether a dungeon has a Pendant or a Crystal until you find the map for that dungeon (and the background music for each dungeon is randomized between the two dungeon themes to avoid giving it away), making it more difficult to decide whether any given dungeon is worth clearing.
• Spoiler Log Race: Runners are provided with the spoiler log shortly before the race starts so they can (attempt to) plan out their routes ahead of time. They may also continue to refer to the spoiler log during the race, and may even watch each other's streams and the race commentary if they want to. Since runners (in theory) already know where to find everything they need, this mode emphasizes quick planning, efficient routing, and proficient execution. I've also seen a team variant of this where one person plays the seed while in communication with a teammate who has the spoiler log.
• Mystery Seed: Runners aren't told what settings are in place, and have to figure things out as they play. Races done in this format typically have a predetermined range of possible options with weighted probabilities for each one, so that the runners have some idea of what to expect but don't know any specifics ahead of time. Naturally, this increases unpredictability.

Extended options

Select Create Custom Game from the Generate Game dropdown at the top of the page to specify all sorts of things that aren't available in the basic interface, including changing Link's starting inventory, customizing the item pool, placing items in specific locations, and much more.

The extended options even include items that aren't used otherwise, including non-progressive items, 1/4 magic consumption, clocks that affect remaining time when using the time limit function also found in the extended options, and the rupoor (which reduces money on hand when collected).

Want to test your survival skills? Try setting the Timer mode to Countdown OHKO and the Timer Start to 0...

What if I want more things to be randomized?

There are at least two Randomizer extensions, not included in the main build so far, that add even more options.

Door Randomizer

Expanding on the Entrance Randomizer concept, this takes things a step further and shuffles rooms and connections within dungeons. This, of course, substantially complicates the logic, and also makes the item counting function added to the compass far more useful than it would be otherwise.

Dungeon entrances may appear in different rooms from usual. The nature of other connections between rooms may also be changed, not just their destination. For instance, a locked door may be replaced with a cracked wall, or a normally open doorway may now require a key. Big key doors, to the best of my knowledge, are never moved, changed, added, or removed. Dropdowns and teleporters are also never altered, and there seem to be a few other special cases that always remain intact. Note that in a room with both a dropdown and a stairway leading downward, the stairway and dropdown may lead to completely different places, and similarly that a stairway up from a room dropped into may not lead back to the room dropped from.

Some larger rooms have as many as three exits on the same side, and all three of these may end up connecting to different places. For instance, the northwestern room of the front area of Thieves' Town has three exits leading east, two on the lower level and one on the upper level. Each may lead somewhere different.

Door Randomizer adds an indicator on the HUD that shows which dungeon you're currently considered to be in (L3, for Light World dungeon 3, is Tower of Hera, for example). Unless bosses are shuffled, each dungeon will have its usual boss. Keys, as usual, work only within their own dungeon.

As an artifact of how the game is structured, all rooms within the same "supertile" always remain connected to each other; only transitions between supertiles are affected. Supertiles are groupings roughly two screens tall by two screens wide that the game often divides into four smaller rooms, or one long or one wide room along with two smaller ones, or any of various other combinations. (As a simple example, each floor of the Tower of Hera is one supertile. The gridlines on the dungeon map in the unmodified game helpfully divide it by supertiles, and even in Door Randomizer, the blinking dot that shows your current location still (if visible at all) indicates your relative position within a supertile even though the map is largely useless otherwise with the rooms shuffled.)

More recent versions of this also add the ability to include as part of the shuffle the special items (i.e., keys) found under pots and as drops from specific monsters.

Since the map doesn't really work very well with the rooms jumbled around, getting a dungeon's map now also shows how many keys you've collected and how many there are for the dungeon. I'm not clear on whether keys found under pots or dropped from monsters are included in this count if they aren't shuffled, or it may just depend on the version.

Having the compass also displays a blinking indicator when the boss is in a supertile adjacent to the one you're currently in.

Door Randomizer may be approaching inclusion in the main Randomizer interface, given that the final dungeon of the 2020 spooky festive event featured shuffled rooms in its final dungeon, and the 2020 winter festive event used dungeons in this style that combined rooms from multiple standard dungeons.

Multiworld Randomizer

This creates a sort of cooperative mode, using two or more interconnected games with items for each player shuffled across all of them. An external server handles communication between the games so that items found in the "wrong" game are given to the appropriate player.

To make things even more interesting each player can, as I understand it, use completely different settings for everything else. If one player wants to play some basic Defeat Ganon in Open world state with Basic item placement and no special tricks, and another wants more of a challenge and would rather play All Dungeons Swordless Inverted Crosskeys, they can both have things their way and still play together. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, since I haven't tried this variant out.)

Multiworld may be combined with Door Randomizer.

I've also seen runs, I think using Multiworld, that had the pots within each room shuffled amongst each other. That is, a button that would normally be under one pot could appear under a different one in the same room, and the items were similarly moved around.

What if I want to mix in another genre entirely?

You're in luck! At least, possibly. Other games have their own randomizers, and after seeing a joking comment about combining the ALttP Randomizer with a Super Metroid Randomizer, someone decided to look into it and found that, by lucky coincidence, the two games use different memory regions and can be combined in a single cart without much trouble, with a shared region used to communicate between the two games. And so the SMZ3 Randomizer came to be.

Items and powerups from each game are shuffled across both games, and the two games are connected at set crossover points through entrances that normally aren't particularly useful (such as the fortune teller southeast of Link's house). In addition to collecting Crystals and defeating Ganon as Link, runners must also defeat Mother Brain and escape planet Zebes as Samus.

Other randomization options for SMZ3 are currently quite limited, though the site indicates plans to add more.

It's also my understanding that the Super Metroid side expects a higher degree of familiarity with quirks of the game mechanics and various less-than-obvious tricks, making it less accessible for casual players. Personally, I'd rather watch SMZ3 Randomizer runs than play one.

Miscellaneous terminology and abbreviations

Shorthand names for dungeons (in standard dungeon order)

• Hyrule Castle: HC, Escape (escape sequence)
• Eastern Palace: EP, Eastern
• Desert Palace: DP, Desert
• Tower of Hera: TH, Hera
• Hyrule Castle Tower: CT, Agatower (Agahnim's tower), AT
• Palace of Darkness: PD, PoD (typically pronounced "pod")
• Swamp Palace: SP, Swamp
• Skull Woods: SW
• Thieves' Town: TT, Thieves'
• Ice Palace: IP, Ice
• Misery Mire: MM, Mire
• Turtle Rock: TR
• Ganon's Tower: GT

Various other location and NPC names (alphabetically)

• Back of Escape - the section of the passage from Hyrule Castle to the church reached by dropping down from the graveyard, in particular the three chests behind the weak wall
• Bob - one of the antifaeries in the room above the Armos refight in Ganon's Tower; in Randomizer runs, Bob has a glitched appearance if the item on the torch was not collected (this glitch could be, and at one point was, patched, but has gone back to being unpatched due to popular demand)
• Bob's Torch - the torch with an item on top, down the lefthand stairway from the entrance of Ganon's Tower; collecting the item returns Bob's appearance to normal, which is why this torch is Bob's, and taking the item is sometimes called killing Bob
• Bonk Rocks - any pile of rocks that crumbles when dashed into, most often the one west of the church with a cave under it that has a chest
• Bow-Locked Side - in the Palace of Darkness, the section with two chests reached by going down the righthand staircase near the entrance, into a teleporter, and through a Mimic kill room (which logically requires a Bow unless enemies are shuffled, though glitches can get around that)
• Brewery - the bombable small building in southwestern Village of Outcasts with a chest on a lower level next to some barrels
• Bumper Cave (or Ledge) - the Dark World cave (or the ledge with an item reached by passing through that cave) with a bumper blocking the way inside, located at the place corresponding to the mountain access cave in the Light World
• C House - the house in northeastern Village of Outcasts with a chest in the back of its roughly C-shaped interior
• Cave 45 - the cave southwest of Link's House reached via Mirror, named for its numbering on one map of entrances
• Checkerboard Cave - the cave under a rock reached by Mirror in the northeastern desert, containing an item past a checkerboard pattern of pushable blocks
• Coffee Break Room - the tile room in the Tower of Hera basement and/or the chest beyond it, so named because it's fairly simple to stand in the activated crystal switch blocks for invulnerability from the tiles and go AFK for a little while
• Dark Cross - the cross-shaped dark room between Hyrule Castle and the church, in particular the chest inside it
• Dark World Shopping Mall - the three caves on the eastern shore of the icy lake, generally irrelevant unless entrances are shuffled
• Desert Ledge - the raised area of the desert reached through the Desert Palace, particularly the item on it
• Desert Torch - the torch with an item on it inside Desert Palace, which requires the Boots and may prevent progression without them
• Floating Island - the detached island with an item east of the Tower of Hera
• Hammer Pegs - the cave opened by pounding down all the pegs near the Dark World equivalent of the smithy
• Harmless Hellway - the room in Palace of Darkness with a chest to the side of a narrow corridor with moving spikes; it looks intimidating but pushing the statue near the chest into the middle defuses the danger entirely (except in Door Randomizer when entering from the south)
• Hellway - the corridor in the back of Thieves' Town featuring a long vertical conveyor belt riddled with spiked blocks and an assortment of annoying enemies
• Hobo - the guy camped out under the bridge east of Link's House who hands over a bottle in the unmodified game
• Hookshot Cave - the cave under a big rock atop Dark World Death Mountain that contains multiple chests reached by Hookshot
• Hope Room - the room with two chests down the righthand staircase in Ganon's Tower, where runners hope to find the big key immediately
• Hype Cave - the bombable cave, south and a bit east of the bomb shop, with an NPC that gives an item in the front and four chests behind another bombable wall in the back, so named because it was practically guaranteed to have progression items under earlier versions of the randomization algorithm
• Ice Rod Cave - the cave on the eastern shore of Lake Hylia that contains the Ice Rod in a standard playthrough
• Ice T - a room in Ice Palace shaped like a sideways T (⊢) that has a treasure chest
• Jeremiah - the frog smith, presumably because of Three Dog Night's Joy to the World ("Jeremiah was a bullfrog...")
• Kakariko Well - the cave jumped down into in northwest Kakariko containing three chests in the open and a fourth behind a cracked wall
• King's Tomb - the chamber with a chest under the tombstone in the northeast graveyard, requiring Titan's Mitts or the Mirror to reach
• Laser Bridge - the narrow bridge deep in Turtle Rock with four chests on side branches guarded by laser eyes
• Lava Chest - the vanilla big key chest in Turtle Rock, in the room with pipes over a background lava pit
• Left Side Swamp - the two relatively isolated chests in the western side of the main level of Swamp Palace, which runners generally hope to be able to skip
• Light World Hype Cave - a nickname for Mini-Moldorm Cave, which, like Hype Cave, has four treasure chests plus an NPC with a fifth item
• Luck Faerie - the great faerie that upgrades bomb/arrow capacity, usually ignored unless a runner is short on weaponry
• Lumberjack Ledge - the ledge in the cave behind the lumberjacks' hut, reached by dashing into the tree they were cutting after beating Agahnim in Hyrule Castle Tower; since it's not readily accessible, runners prefer to see something unimportant here
• Magic Bat - the strange creature that appears and gives an item when Powder is sprinkled on the mysterious altar in the cave under the smithy
• Mimic Cave - the cave with a Mimic kill room reached by Mirror from the ledge outside the Turtle Rock big chest room
• Mini-Moldorm Cave - the cave southwest of Lake Hylia with four mini-moldorms in the entrance, then four chests and a thief that gives out an item beyond them
• Mire Shed - either of the two side entrances next to the Misery Mire dungeon entrance, especially the one on the left that has two chests inside
• Old Man - typically refers to the lost old man on the mountain who gives an item and provides a new continue location once escorted to his cave
• Paradox Cave - so named because falling from the apparently lower entrance leads to the same cave as the apparently higher entrance, this is the cave in the southeastern Light World mountains with two chests behind a bombable wall and five more in a room with a crystal switch and mini-moldorms
• Ped - the pedestal where the Master Sword rests in the standard game
• Purple Chest - the escortable locked chest that appears in the Dark World equivalent of the smithy after reuniting the smiths
• Pyramid Faerie - the upgrade faerie inside the pyramid (two chests and a bottle refill in Randomizer)
• Rando Room - a room with four chests in the basement of Ganon's Tower beyond a destructible wall beyond a cracked wall in a teleporter maze, so named because it's only worth visiting in a Randomizer run
• Right Side Desert - the two chests beyond the locked door on the eastern side of the front section of Desert Palace, which can be something of a pain to reach if the key is somewhere inconvenient, especially in Keysanity
• Safety Door - the bombable exit from Laser Bridge, which provides a convenient restart point deep in Turtle Rock in case of an unfortunate death
• Sahasrahla's Closet - the room with three chests behind a cracked wall in the back of Sahasrahla's hut
• Scamfish - the king of the Zora, who more often than not gives you junk in exchange for 500 rupees
• Shooter Room - the room with a chest and two fireball shooters down the lefthand staircase shortly into Palace of Darkness
• Sick Kid - the bedridden boy in Kakariko who gives you something if you show him a Bottle
• Smith Chain - the items gained by reuniting the smiths and opening the locked chest (sometimes also hammer pegs or magic bat, since they're in the area)
• South Shore - the items along the south shore of Lake Hylia, typically meaning the floodgate and underwater item outside of it, Mini-Moldorm Cave, and Ice Rod Cave
• Spike Cave - the cave below Ganon's Tower with a chest at the end of a winding passageway covered in spikes
• Spiral Cave - the cave in the eastern Light World mountains with a spiraling path that ends in a dropdown to a chest
• Stumpy - the flute boy, turning into a tree in the Dark World grove, who gives you an item
• Superbunny Cave - the cave next to Hookshot Cave that has two chests and a full magic refill, so named because it's possible to fall into the room with the chests, thus activating the superbunny glitch if visiting without the Moon Pearl and allowing the chests to be opened regardless
• Validation Chest - the final chest in Ganon's Tower, which appears after beating the Moldorm refight
• Waterfall Cave / Waterfall Faerie - the upgrade faerie behind the waterfall (two chests and a bottle refill in Randomizer)
• Waterfall Chest - the chest that appears after pushing a block in the room fairly deep in Swamp Palace with waterfalls all along the north wall

Some item shorthands and nicknames (alphabetically)

• Arrow of Destiny - the single arrow item, originally found in Palace of Darkness perhaps as a clue to shooting the statue
• Bacon Sword - Tempered Sword, for its color
• Big 20 - a red rupee, worth 20
• Butter Sword - Gold Sword, for its color
• D - Bow, for its shape
• Dorito - a Triforce piece, for its yellow color and triangular shape
• Fire Source - Lamp or Fire Rod (for lighting torches), or Bombos or Fire Rod (for melting ice)
• Glitch Stick - Cane of Somaria, due to the many glitches it's involved in
• Goo (Red, Green, or Blue) - a potion
• Green 20 - A pack of 20 rupees displayed as a green rupee with a 20 on it instead of as a red rupee; these replace items that have been removed from the item pool, which also makes them a clue to the settings when they appear in a mystery seed
• Life Lesson - small amounts of rupees awarded for paying large amounts, usually to King Zora
• Little Bit of Love - heart container piece
• Literacy - Book of Mudora
• Metal Hotdog - Hookshot, presumably from the handle's appearance
• Riot Shield - Mirror Shield
• Sanc Heart - the Heart Container originally found in the chest at Sanctuary, distinct from other full containers in that it heals the player when collected
• Sticks - Arrows
• Swagnet - Bug-Catching Net
• Swingy - any sword
• Vampire Skewers - Arrows
• Zora Money - 500 or more rupees, enough to pay the Zora king

7/7 (and similar combinations of two numbers)

How many Crystals are required to open Ganon's Tower and how many are required to beat Ganon, respectively. Both default to 7, and can be set independently. A 4/6 seed, for example, requires four Crystals to open Ganon's Tower and six to beat Ganon.

As mentioned in passing above, seeds that require fewer Crystals to open Ganon's Tower than to defeat Ganon have a chance for progression items to appear inside Ganon's Tower. In other words, you might need to collect enough Crystals to access the tower and retrieve something from inside before you're able to get the rest of the Crystals you need to fight Ganon, even if the goal is Fast Ganon and actually clearing the tower isn't required. Similarly, even a Pedestal goal may force you to clear Crystal dungeons to enter the tower for items you need to clear the Pendant dungeons.

Aga (Agahnim) Seed

Any seed that logically requires the player to beat Agahnim in Hyrule Castle Tower, whether to open up the tree the lumberjacks were cutting down, to access the Dark World, or for some other less probable reason. Typically, the first Agahnim fight is completely optional unless the goal is All Dungeons.

In some cases, runners may be able to go out of logic to avoid fighting Agahnim without breaking any racing rules even in a logical Aga seed. As a simple example, if one set of Gloves and the Moon Pearl are readily available, but the Hammer is in Waterfall Cave and the Flippers and second set of Gloves are in the Dark World, beating Agahnim is logically required for Dark World access. However, runners can use the Fake Flippers glitch to collect the Hammer, then use that and the Gloves to reach a warp tile without fighting him.

BK Mode

Sometimes in a multiworld game, a player will get to the point where they've checked everything they possibly can with the items they have, and need to wait for an item from someone else to make any further progress. Apparently, a streamer who got stuck like this for a while once ducked out to get something from Burger King, and the name stuck.

Blind Pull

When a runner pulls the item from the Master Sword pedestal without having confirmed what's there ahead of time. Since the pedestal itself is somewhat out of the way, on top of the prerequisite of clearing dungeons for the Pendants even though they aren't required to clear most seeds, this doesn't happen very often.

Check

The act of confirming what was placed in a location, either by actually collecting the item or by other means where applicable (looking at items that are out in the open, reading Hylian text, etc.). "Check" is also used as a noun to mean these locations themselves, so every treasure chest is a check, viewing any location that has a visible heart piece in the unmodified game is a check, things that can be collected without going into dungeons are overworld checks, and so on.

Connector

When entrances are randomized, any indoor location with at least two exits, such as the elder's house in Kakariko or many of the mountain caves. Connectors tend to be especially important, as they often act as convenient shortcuts and may even be the only way to reach certain areas.

Double Dipping (or Triple Dipping, or...)

Visiting a dungeon twice (or three times, or...). Because of the time involved in traveling to and progressing through a dungeon, runners prefer to avoid double dipping whenever possible, and will often put off dungeons they aren't yet able to clear. However, although advantageous routing can avoid double dipping in some cases, other situations leave it as the only choice, especially in a Keysanity seed, where keys are scrambled all over the worlds.

EG

Short for "exploration glitch", which refers to any of several ways getting Link onto the wrong layer of an indoor area (the upper and lower levels of the main Hyrule Castle area, for example, are different layers). This makes the walls meaningless (in many areas) and allows for transitioning screens in directions that were never intended. The most infamous use of it involves navigating to Ganon's room and walking off the north edge to reach the ending mere minutes after starting the game. Any use of EG is unsurprisingly banned in Randomizer races, though runners sometimes do it when playing just for fun, particularly if stuck in a multiworld seed.

Frustration Slashes

Runners often tend to slash their sword a few times in frustration after finding an essential item they could have had ages ago if they'd only bothered to check there sooner, or after putting a lot of time and effort into a check that turns out to be largely pointless.

Similarly, some runners might plant Bombs on chests and NPCs to express their feelings when annoyed.

Go Mode

The state when a runner has (or knows exactly how to get) everything they need to clear the seed. Upon reaching Go Mode, a runner will typically rush through any required dungeons and make a bee line for the goal. The phrase may also be used as a verb, with "Go Moding" a dungeon meaning to head straight for the boss, skipping as much along the way as possible and ignoring anything that isn't either absolutely necessary or at the very least along the way.

Ice Rod Hunt

What happens when a seed comes down to finding one last item that could be just about anywhere in the game. The Ice Rod is often the item in question when this happens (hence the name), because it's required to beat Trinexx and for literally nothing else, so has almost no restrictions on its placement. Other fairly common "Ice Rods" include the Mirror when Swamp Palace is required or certain keys when using Keysanity.

There's also a custom mode by this name, in which you start with every last inventory item except the Ice Rod, and need to hunt it down and beat Trinexx to win.

In Logic

Unless using the No Logic setting for Glitches Required, the Randomizer will place items in a logical sequence of progression, such that one thing will lead to another thing and so on until the game is cleared. Anything that the item placement logic expects you to be able to reach at a given point in a playthrough is "in logic". When a Lamp is available (even if not yet found), for instance, all reachable dark rooms are in logic.

Staying in logic helps runners avoid missing things, but can also slow them down as compared to using permitted minor glitches or dark room navigation to check potentially important things that aren't in logic yet.

Item Go Mode

In any seed with keys shuffled outside their dungeons, this is when a player has all items needed for Go Mode, but still needs keys they haven't yet found. Similarly, this could also happen when using Entrance Shuffle if the player doesn't yet know the location of a dungeon they need to clear.

Key Logic

The Randomizer places keys in a way designed to make no assumptions about how a runner will use them, sometimes alternately described as assuming the runner will misuse every key as wastefully as possible. Key logic is the fairly complicated set of rules that determines the specifics of that, and is especially relevant when keys are shuffled outside of their usual dungeons. Familiarity with key logic isn't necessarily essential, but it can make a difference in reading the seed and determining what the logic thinks you're supposed to have access to at any given point in the run, or can give clues as to what the logic thinks you're supposed to have already found before going to a certain location.

For example, the Palace of Darkness has a total of six small keys. If you're Go Moding the dungeon and already have the Bow, the Hammer, and the big key, you can head straight to the boss through the Bow-locked side and only need to use a single small key along the way. However, all six small keys are logically required to reach the boss, because you could already have used five keys to open the other five locked doors. If the boss drops the Hookshot, for instance, you can be certain that the Hookshot is not required to reach any of the PoD small keys.

Similarly, four small keys are logically required to reach the compass chest, even though you can reach it with just one key, because you could already have spent additional keys on the central entryway, the stairs to the big key chest, and the locked door on the way to the boss. It's four rather than six because the final two locked doors are in the same section of the dungeon as this chest, so you can't use keys on those until you have access to the compass chest anyway.

Swamp Palace, by way of contrast, is far more straightfoward. It has just one randomized key, and that key is required to reach anything past the first room.

For another comparitively simple example, Desert Palace has a single randomized key that's meant for unlocking the right side of the front section, in addition to several non-randomized keys and corresponding locked doors in the back section. If you haven't found the randomized key, you can either use the keys in the back to reach the boss as intended, or steal one to open the right side of the front, but not both. Since the game can't make any assumptions about which one you're going to do, neither the right side in the front nor the boss is in logic until the randomzed key is available. Similarly, if the small key is on the torch (and this applies even when keys are restricted to their own dungeons), then both the right side and the boss are out of logic without the Pegasus Boots.

Know Mode

Named because the audience knows where to find all the items required for Go Mode, this occurs during a race when everything needed to clear the seed has been found by at least one runner, but no single runner has everything they need.

NMG

Short for "No Major Glitches", a standard speedrun ruleset. Some glitches that are allowed in a Randomizer race are banned in NMG, and the very nature of randomization means situations can come up that aren't even possible in an NMG run (not to mention many others that, though they could happen, never would in a serious speedrun because there are faster ways of getting through the game).

When NMG is mentioned in a Randomizer context, it tends to be essentially a shorthand for saying that something is going much as it would in a non-randomized speedrun, such as fighting Vitreous without the Golden Sword or Silver Arrows (which, in the unmodified game, aren't available until after beating it). Shooting Vitreous with Silver Arrows is therefore very much not an NMG strategy; it's also extremely effective and the preferred method in Randomizer when available.

Out of Logic

Unless using the No Logic setting for Glitches Required, the Randomizer will place items in a logical sequence of progression, such that one thing will lead to another thing and so on until the game is cleared. Anything that the item placement logic does not expect you to be able to reach at a given point in a playthrough is "out of logic". For example, runners fairly often use the Fake Flippers glitch to go for a swim before finding the Flippers. Anything they get to by doing that, and anything that items found that way may lead to, is out of logic until the Flippers become available (unless they were already available and merely hadn't been found yet, in which case all that was technically in logic all along and the runner just didn't know any better).

Going out of logic may give runners an advantage by letting them skip ahead, or finish off a dungeon that would otherwise require double dipping, but may also lead them away from important items that the logic expected them to find relatively early on.

Ped (Pedestal) Seed

Any seed that logically requires the player to obtain the item on the pedestal, and therefore all three pendants. As with Aga seeds, there may be ped seeds that runners can work around with authorized glitches, though it takes a more unlikely scenario for that to happen. I think a 6/6 seed with Flippers on pedestal and Crystals in Swamp and Ice and would count, since a runner could avoid Swamp entirely and fake flipper to reach Ice for their sixth Crystal.

Every seed with the Master Sword Pedestal goal is, of course, unavoidably a ped seed.

Progression

Anything that gives a runner access to more of what they need to clear the seed. A Tempered Sword kills things quicker, which always helps, but won't be progression because the Master Sword can already do everything it can, if more slowly. Gloves, on the other hand, are virutally guaranteed to be progression. Boots may or may not be, depending on whether there's anything important in the limited number of locations that require them.

Schrödinger's Go Mode

When a runner might or might not be in Go Mode, and can't yet tell which. For example, a 7/7 Defeat Ganon seed with a Crystal in Turtle Rock is this when a runner has every item that could possibly be required except for one of the medallions, and doesn't know which medallion opens the dungeon. Having everything but the Pegasus Boots is another case, since it's always possible the Ganon's Tower Big Key will be on Bob's Torch.

Sphere 0

Everything that's logically available immediately, with no items obtained (other than Bombs, which can be bought or found as random drops). In a typical Open seed, without anything tricky like Inverted mode or shuffled entrances, these include the chests in Link's House and Sanctuary, Uncle and the front of Escape (which you can do with just Bombs if need be) the mushroom spot and thief hideout in the Lost Woods, most of Kakariko, South Shore checks, Aginah's cave, Sahasrahla's closet, and part of Eastern Palace.

Whatever you gain access to by clearing Sphere 0 is then Sphere 1, anything Sphere 1 gives you access to is Sphere 2, and so on. However, typically only Sphere 0 is discussed, partly because it's always the same for the same settings (not counting Entrance Shuffle), partly because higher-level spheres are far more confusing to keep track of, and partly because few things are as frustrating as searching high and low for a critical item only to realize it was in Sphere 0 all along.

Stealing a Key

Especially in a mode where small keys are shuffled beyond their original dungeons, this refers to taking a non-randomized key (such as one from under a pot in the back of Desert Palace) to unlock a door elsewhere in a dungeon (such as the right side of the front of Desert Palace). Key placement logic is designed to make no assumptions about how a runner uses keys, so this won't permanantly lock a runner out of the usual place for using the key, but anything found using the "stolen" key is out of logic, and since there's no telling where the shuffled key will be, doing this will temporarily prevent further progress in that direction.

Stun Prize

The item that drops when a stunned enemy is killed. More often than not, it's better than the standard single rupee. The prize for crushing a frozen enemy is similarly randomized from seed to seed, but it's rather more trouble to check that, so most runners won't bother with it.

Vanilla (also Chocolate, French Vanillla, and Strawberry)

In the context of game modification, something that's "vanilla" is unchanged from the original game (modified parts are sometimes called "chocolate" by analogue). For example, the chest beyond the tile room and torch lighting in the basement of Hera Tower is the vanilla big key chest, because that's where the big key appears in the original game. If the big key appears there in a seed, the key itself is analogously described a vanilla big key.

Commentary may also refer to things as "French vanilla" when they're similar to vanilla but not quite the same. For instance, the Moon Pearl appearing in the chest mentioned above would be French vanilla, because the item appears in that dungeon in the original game, just not in that exact location.

I've also occasionally heard item locations called "strawberry" when they're different from but conceptually related to vanilla ones. For example, one race I watched had a strawberry Fire Rod placement in the Ice Rod cave. Finding Ether there would similarly be strawberry.