Personalization Values

Personalization Values (or PVs for short) are a mechanic introduced in B3313 v0.9 that dynamically changes the game in numerous ways based on the player's progress and actions. These can range from subtly increasing or decreasing the difficulty of the enemy encounters or changing the textures in various ways.

Triggering
How exactly PVs are triggered is still not fully understood, and research is still ongoing. The following is somewhat understood about the mechanic:


 * It is on a per-save file basis. Meaning any PV changes on one save file will not carry over to another one.
 * For the most part, any PV changes that trigger on a save file are irreversible, unless they are interchangeable with other types of PVs.
 * PV changes are often introduced without fanfare and are not immediately apparent until the player happens to encounter them in the wild.
 * PV changes do not happen all at once and may be gradually introduced to a save file.
 * The following are believed to influence how/when PV changes trigger (based on research):
 * The amount of Red Stars collected.
 * The total amount of Stars collected.
 * How often you take damage/die.
 * How long you spend in certain areas.
 * Areas explored.
 * Pressing the Yellow Cap Switch will shuffle around many of these values.

List of Personalization Values
The following are some of the various effects and changes that can occur on a given save file when PVs are changed.

Health Restoration Removal
When the player starts a fresh save file, Mario/Luigi will slowly restore health, one slice at a time. This effect will eventually be removed after making enough progress.

B-Roll HUD
While there are multiple different HUDs that the game will switch between depending upon the area the player is in, the B-Roll HUD has two mutually exclusive versions that the game will use based on your PVs.

New Enemy Variants
Goombas and Bob-ombs may start appearing as harder variants that are more dangerous to deal with. For more information, see the List of enemies page.

For Goombas in particular, some save files seem to favor one particular variant over all others, which may not necessarily line up with other players. For example. One player might end up with most Goombas becoming the Purple variant, while others will end up only encountering Red ones.

Coin Discoloration
Coins may be randomly replaced by different colored variants, some of which can be beneficial but most of which are harmful or even game crashing.

The Purple Coins and Orange Coins in particular will typically replace the normal coins that usually spawn from things like enemies and boxes, as the file gains more PVs.

Texture Randomization
Textures in certain areas may become distorted in different ways when visiting them. Textures may be misaligned, resized, or even have incorrect palettes.

Level Scaling
Some specific levels may change in size very subtly, making traversing through certain areas more difficult.

This doesn't affect Hub Worlds.Notice how Mario is now shorter than the doorknob.

Enemy Spawns
Goombas and Bob-ombs may randomly start appearing within any of the Castle Grounds.

Boss Difficulty
The difficulty of most bosses scales with the player's skill (as long as they have enough Red Stars), similarly to enemy variants and their increased spawn rate. This can result in bizarre phenomena such as King Bob-omb being able to survive over 10 hits.