Routing is mapping and following a predetermined path through a run. If executed properly, the player will know every single thing that is going to happen in a run, down to the rarity of each boon offered. This can allow for incredibly optimized builds, chamber types, and enemy patterns. Here is an example of a route being executed borderline perfectly, by Vorime.

When you walk through a door in Hades, a few things happen:

• A new seed is generated based on a combination of your current seed and how many times RNG has been used, and that new seed replaces your current one.
• The room you entered, including enemies and specific rewards, are generated
• The reward type, tile, Chaos/Erebus gates, and wells, are decided for the next room. For example, you might see Poseidon, but the rewards he'll give you haven’t been determined yet.

At its core, RNG is not really random. It follows a set sequence of numbers, determined by your starting point, or the “seed”. For the duration of an encounter, every single thing that uses RNG increments your position in this sequence. However, when the doors unlock your position is reset to the beginning. From there, you can use specific manipulations to change what is going to happen in the next rooms.

In order to properly manipulate RNG, it is incredibly helpful to see your seed and increments. Luckily, there is a mod that allows you to do this, included in the Hades Routing Mod Pack later in this guide. Once you install this mod, you can clear a few rooms, and keep an eye on your increments after clearing the room. You’ll notice that in most cases (excluding Chamber 1, Sisyphus, and Tartarus Midshop) your RNG Uses will settle down and not change unless you do something specifically to increment them.

There are a few manipulations that we know have a fixed number of increments:

• A cast landing on the ground increments RNG by 1
• Breaking a pot increments RNG by 1
• Summoning increments RNG by 2 the first time you do it, and 1 each time after that
• Charon groaning at you increments RNG by 1
• Opening a well resets your RNG to a value of 12

There are others, but those are the most commonly used, because they are very fast, or easy to work into your pathing through the room.

Yes! As of 1.0 we have Unseeded and Seeded leaderboards for Any Heat, 32 Heat, 40 Heat, and 50 Heat. A routed run will fall under the Seeded category. The main difference between the two is that an Unseeded run requires a death to be shown before the run to prove there is no previous knowledge of the starting seed.

There is a collection of mods and tools available to help do routed runs:

• Save Manager for creating/loading save states
• Hades Routing Mod Pack which includes the RngDisplay and ShowChamber mods, with more on the way.
• Paras Door Predictions to display all of the information for the next room, including rewards, enemy types, and exits
• Ellos Boon Selector Mod for setting your seed
• Spreadsheet of the Route made by Paradigmsort. Would recommend making a copy for your own notes in case of weirdness.
• Save State Pack made by SatanIsAChillGuy for use with the above notes.

1. Install the above tools.
2. Read through the route to get an idea of what to look for as you go and start to get familiar with the manips.
3. Use the Boon Selector mod to select your starting seed, and make sure your mirror, keepsake, and pact match the route.
4. Start trying the route with mods. The mods above will help give you the information you'll need to help you stay on route. Use save states to your advantage if you mess up a room, just be aware that save states have been known to change rewards and some manips throughout the route. Don't worry though, rewards will ALWAYS be the same on a full start to finish run.
5. When you start to feel confident in running with the mod, start trying to run without! Remember, consistency comes first THEN speed.
6. After you've completed a few full, start to finish runs, try optimizing! The rooms will always be the same, play around with how you clear enemies!

There are a few spots in the run that are especially difficult to get through.

There are a lot of shades running around in the very first chamber, all of the incrementing RNG on a fixed interval. Because of this, your timing has to be as consistent as possible in order to get the correct Chamber 2.

There are also a lot of shades running around in Tartarus Midshop. Luckily, there is a very consistent pattern to how shades behave in this room, and there are various tricks to mitigate their increments.

• There is a brief moment where no RNG increments happen. The background music will have a long pause (7 beats), followed by a loud chime. When that chime happens, there will be a window of a couple seconds to select your boon and run to the door, do your manips, and leave.
• You can increase the duration of the no-increment window by killing shades in the room, at the expense of time. The most efficient way to do this, on Nemesis, is to dash three times, then use the Special+Dash combo to land in front of the shop items. Your Nova will clear a large group of shades, and you can immediately select the Hermes boon, then wait for the audio cue.

This room has a lot of voiceline weirdness that happens, especially since it often leads into a Chaos gate, which has even more voiceline weirdness associated with it. There are two main approaches to dealing with this.

• Wait out all voicelines before picking up the room reward, then do manips from a stable starting point
• Pick up the room reward immediately and do manips as quickly as possible, once the doors unlock, so you can avoid some of the voiceline weirdness. You will generally have to add 1 increment to the normal manips, if you use this approach

Drinking from a fountain appears to eat the Summoning voiceline, if it happens within a couple seconds. Listen for whether Zag says something when you try to summon, and adjust your manips based on that.

If you're off in your increments one of the following things probably happened:

• Voice lines incrementing RNG or in the case of Chaos voice lines, stopping RNG increments from updating.
• Shades increment RNG by walking around and also whenever Zagreus walks through them.
• Save states CAN cause some weirdness, especially when voice lines are involved
• You picked up the reward too quickly, and there were some increments in progress when you did so. For example, rubble/pillars falling in can increment RNG if it falls after doors unlock.

The most important thing is consistency. Some manips, especially in Tartarus, are time sensitive. Others just require you to wait a moment before doing the manips.