Zelda ALTTP Randomizer Crossworld Keysanity 2026 Tournament

Tournament Introduction

The ALTTPR Crosskeys Tournament is back again! We’re here to re-announce one of the most popular ALTTPR events of the year! This year continues the direction we set last year, with expanded capacity from Hyrule Town Hall helping to support a more diverse experience for those who choose to while preserving the same classic crosskeys experience for those who desire it.

Hyrule Town Hall

As part of this tournament, we will be continuing our association with Hyrule Town Hall, to handle automation for a majority of the tasks of the tournament. HTH will be responsible for interfacing with the tournament page: from creating scheduling threads and handling scheduling to opening racetime rooms, rolling seeds, and reporting match results. HTH has been improved and expanded since last year’s tournament. For more information on HTH, check out its website at https://hth.zeldaspeedruns.com/. In discord, HTH will be represented by The Mayor, the (friendly?) local discord bot.

Registration

Registration in this tournament will be handled through HTH. Please go through the registration form on HTH.

Upon registration you will be asked a series of questions for which modification to the standard crosskeys mode you are willing to play in this tournament. If you only want to play the standard crosskeys preset, simply answer no to every single relevant question. Feel free to still answer yes to questions opting in to waiving delay or allowing hovering/bouncing. For exact specifics around how this works, see the Race Settings & Rules section of this document.

Registration is open to sign up before the deadline with no player cap.

Structure

The tournament will take place in two phases. The first will be a Swiss stage that will last for 7 weeks (the exact length will be confirmed once tournament signups have finished based on the size of the player pool). In the case of the Swiss round having an odd number of players, the chosen runner for a bye is considered to be given a victory. Afterwards, 24 people will advance to a single-elimination bracket where each match is a best of three. This number may change depending on the exact signup number, but it should be roughly the proportion as in the 2025 Crosskeys Tournament.

If runners have tied records at the end of the Swiss stage to determine who will advance to the bracket stage, all tied runners will be invited to compete in a tiebreaker race. This race will be scheduled on the weekend following the end of Swiss, but the exact day and time will be determined by polling runners who will be participating. Runners who cannot participate at the designated time will be allowed to attempt to qualify by playing the seed asynchronously before the race. The finishes of async runners will be announced in the race room at their appropriate time. 

For advancing runners who are tied at the same record but are not in the tiebreak, their ranking will be determined pseudo-randomly with a simulated Level 9 CPU Super Smash Brothers match with each runner choosing their character. Characters who have won previously are banned from being chosen.

The currently banned characters are

• Jigglypuff (Skele, 2024)

• Isabelle (Zelgadissan, 2025)

After the Swiss stage, the runners who advance to the bracket will play a single elimination bracket in a “Best of Three” format. The same rules for modes will apply, although if they would like, runners who qualify for brackets may change their mode preferences between the Swiss stage and the bracket stage. This needs to be declared before the bracket phase officially begins.

Format and Schedule

Starting July 8, 2026, each runner will be required to play one match per week against their specified opponent, which will be determined as soon as the final match for each round is played. Because any delay in the round delays the entire tournament, our round deadlines will be quite rigid, with matches needing to be completed by 11:59 PM Eastern time on the Wednesday of each week. In the event of scheduling complications or unresponsive opponents, please reach out to tournament admins (preferably with message proof). In the case where the runners cannot find a time, async accommodations can be arranged by contacting the tournament admins.

Unlike in previous years, we will not be seeding the first round of the tournament. Instead, we will be completely randomly seeding the pairings. We were uncertain about the efficacy of the seeding, but we’re not committed to not using seeding in future years, and with a decreased amount of data to draw from, we are opting to fully randomize the seeds.

After all of the Swiss rounds have completed, the runners will move to a best of three single-elimination bracket, with the expectation being that a round of three can be completed in 2 weeks.

The grand champion will be awarded as the 2026 Crossworld Keysanity Tournament winner and given the honorary Furaime role. In the event of a previous winner reclaiming a title they will earn a Super Furaime role.

Consolation Bracket

The majority of runners will not advance, but we have heard requests from people who have wanted to keep playing. In order to accommodate this, we’ll create another tournament on HTH once the Swiss stage is over. Runners who have played through the entire swiss stage without dropping but did not advance to the main bracket may opt to join this tournament. This will be a single elimination bracket with Best of One matches until the semifinals which will be played as a Best of Three. The exact time when the change from BO1 to BO3 happens will be determined when we see the number of entrants in the secondary bracket.

If you can convince Alaszun, the winner of the consolation bracket will get a “Baby Furaime” title.

Race Settings & Rules

Race Settings

The base settings for the tournament are as follows

       Crossworld, Keysanity, 7/7 Fast Ganon. No Hints.

       Accessibility: 100% Locations

       Quickswap, regular menu speed

This is equivalent to the “crosskeys” preset on sahabot. Changing the menu speed via the ROM adjuster is banned.

Additionally, for each match, certain settings will be tweaked based on what choices runners made when registering. For each setting, when registering runners will choose either Always, Random, or Never.

If both runners have chosen Always, any match between those two runners will always have that setting enabled.

If both runners have chosen at least Random but have not both chosen Always, when creating the scheduling thread for the match, The Mayor will randomly decide to enable or disable the setting. This should allow players who left options off because they were afraid of playing every match with them to have some variety in their choices.

If at least one runner has chosen Never, the setting will not be enabled.

Any tiebreaker match that requires 3 or more people will simply use the base crosskeys preset except in the extremely unlikely case that all runners in the race have opted into a particular setting. If a particular setting or rule is almost unanimous, administrators may reach out privately to disagreeing runners to see if they would want to change their setting just for this race.

Any match that is played before its appropriate week (i.e. the very rare pre-asyncs) will be played on base settings only.

The settings that may be opted into are as follows

• All Dungeons

  • If enabled, the goal of the seed will be set to “dungeons” instead of “crystals” and winning the seed will require doing all ten dungeons in addition to defeating both Agahnims. This will also disable blue balls from both Agahnims.

• Starting Flute 

  • If enabled, runners will start with an activated flute in their inventory

• Inverted

  • If enabled, the world state will be set to “inverted” instead of “open”.

• Keydrop

  • If enabled, enemy key drops and key pots will be shuffled into the item pool. This is equivalent to enabling the “keys” values for the “dropshuffle” and “pottery” settings.

• Mirror Scroll

  • If enabled, runners will begin with a map in their mirror slot. This functions as a mirror but only in dungeons, allowing you to return to the start of a dungeon without death warping.

• Pseudo Boots

  • If enabled, runners will begin with pseudoboots, which allow dashing but do not allow item checks or water walking or hovering.

• ZW

  • If enabled, skull woods will be mixed into the dropdown pools. This is equivalent to setting the “skullwoods” option to “followlinked”. Enabling this will also remove the vanilla small key in the Skull Woods pinball room chest.

  • For more information on what ZW entails, see the Appendix.

• Completionist
  • If enabled, requires doing every check in the game and defeating all bosses before ganon will be vulnerable.

To hopefully clarify exactly how this works, we’ll provide an example.

• Upon registering, the runner “AAndy” indicated that he was willing to opt-in to mirror scroll, pseudoboots, and keydrop.

• Upon registering, the runner “BAndy” indicated that he was wiling to opt-in to pseudoboots, keydrop, and inverted.

• Upon registering, the runner “CAndy” indicated that she was willing to opt-in to random keydrop.

• Upon registering, the runner “DAndy” indicated that she was only willing to play with the default options.

• When AAndy and BAndy match up, they will play with pseudoboots and keydrop.

• When CAndy matches up with AAndy or BAndy, they will play half of their matches with keydrop on.

• When DAndy matches up with either of the other three players, they will play with the base settings

Finally, and most importantly:

Do not harass or give grief to any runners for their choices. Do not even give the appearance of doing so. Failure to follow this rule will lead to consequences up to and including removal from the tournament and the discord server.

This modification to the tournament is meant to allow players to customize their experiences more to their liking. We hope this can be done in a way that can increase fun for everyone without noticeably increasing toxicity. As such, we will treat anyone who pushes on this boundary very, very seriously.

Rules 

All minor glitches are allowed and all major glitches are banned according to the competitive racing ruleset: https://link.alttpr.com/racerules with the sole exception that hovering and Moldorm bouncing is banned in this tournament unless mutually agreed upon.

Minor Glitches definitions: http://alttp.mymm1.com/wiki/Minor_Glitch

Major Glitches definitions: http://alttp.mymm1.com/wiki/Major_Glitch

The current live version of the randomizer will always be used for all matches. If an update is released midway through a stage then the new version will be used. https://alttpr.com/en/randomizer

In the event that both players have opted in to allow hovering and bouncing, hovering and moldorm bouncing will be allowed in their race. The Mayor will inform runners of this in their scheduling thread and race room as a reminder.

Restreaming and Volunteering

Restreams, commentating, and tracking can be handled through HTH as well. While ZSR is our official partner for this tournament, we welcome independent and other restreamers to pick up matches as they might like. 

For more information on how this process works, see Coverage.

Please behave reasonably and maturely (i.e. do not simply grab tons of matches for your restream). 

Delay Policy

A 10 minute delay is required for you to play in this tournament. However, when registering for the tournament, you will have the option to opt-in to no delay in races. Just like with settings changes, if both runners have chosen to opt-in, the race will be run without delay. The Mayor will inform runners of this in their scheduling thread and race room as a reminder.

VOD Availability

Please local record your races, as if you have a missing or very choppy VOD, it may need to be uploaded. Please publish your VODs of your races ASAP and keep them available for the duration of the tournament. You may need to highlight them to ensure they remain available. With new restrictions that Twitch has enabled, uploading on YouTube is likely the easiest way to store VODs.

Retime Rules

When a retime is done, the winner will be the runner who finishes the seed within the shortest time from when they started the seed. If your video is recorded at below 60 FPS, the administrators will draw the maximally unfavorable inference about the time. This is unlikely to affect any races, but in the interest of fairness we felt it necessary to document the exact procedure.

In the incredibly rare instance in which the administrators cannot determine if a runner finished first, the race will result in a tie.

The administrators will do their best to keep things fair within the spirit of the rules, but in the off chance something comes up with the retime that is not covered in this document, they will have the final decision on what is in the best interest of the tournament.

Keeping Things Fair

This tournament is purely for fun. Please be fair and honorable. Do not accuse other players of cheating in public, please DM a tournament admin if you have something you need to escalate.

Use your common sense, do not do anything that could give yourself or another racer an unfair advantage.

The admins reserve the right to use their best judgment when dealing with anything that comes up. This could include overturning match results, expulsion from the tournament, or other rulings. The tournament admins reserve the right to make any minor changes to these rules that are deemed in the best interest of the tournament.

Appendix: ZW

One of the common criticisms from higher level players of crosskeys as a mode is the way Skull Woods is implemented. In situations where players need to choose a Skull Woods dropdown, dropping into pinball room vs. dropping into a more preferred Skull Woods dropdown can at times create huge differences in a way that can feel very unfair. ZW is an attempt that has gained popularity in attempting to address this issue. ZW solves this problems by dividing Skull Woods into three different groups.

The green circles are dropdowns that remain vanilla. The left one drops west of the Compass Chest. The right one drops into the pinball room.

The blue circles are two entrances that are added to the entrance pool. One of these two must be a reachable connector (similar to TR bridge).

The red circles are two new pairs of dropdowns that are added to the dropdown pool. Note that the drop side of the center dropdown is accessed only by the only-connect blue circle. Like other entries in the dropdown pool, the dropdown always exits at the paired spot.

Major Changes 

• Ganon can be behind a must-connect if it is at the middle Skull Woods dropdown.

• If the pyramid drop has one of the Skull Woods dropdowns, this can create a connector to the pyramid ledge.

• Pinball room is no longer required to always be a small key.

• Because of the previous point and because Skull Woods can be accessed from the Light World, Mothula is no longer always locked by the Moon Pearl.

Coverage

All races will be assigned to restream channels by restream coordinators. By default, this is the Admin team, ZSR, and everyone who received the role last season. If you are planning to restream matches on your channel, please reach out to the organizers to receive the coordinator role. Coverage in different languages is possible, so if you are planning to restream in any language other than English, please let us know.
For all volunteers, the Mayor bot will announce all upcoming races in the #volunteer-information channel.

From there, you can sign up either through the buttons in Discord or through the races page on HTH.

After a volunteer signed up, organizers or restream coordinators need to confirm the signup first.
You will be informed via DM in Discord once your signup is confirmed and once a restream channel has been set.
Please note that not all races will be restreamed, but we will try to showcase as many races as we can. Restreams will be added to the Discord events list at the top.