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.
 * Pressing the Yellow Cap Switch is believed to shuffle around many of these values and tracked stats.

Tracked Stats
For the purposes of affecting PVs, numerous different stats are tracked by the game:


 * The amount of Red Stars collected.
 * The total amount of Stars collected.
 * The kind of Star collected:
 * What type of specific Star is collected (Red Coins/Slides, Bosses, etc)
 * The theme of the course that the Star was collected in
 * If a specific cap switch was required to collected the Star
 * How often you take damage/die.
 * The specific way in which you die.
 * Certain "skill issues" like dying from fall damage, drowning, or quicksand are counted for a singular separate value from other deaths.
 * How the player plays the game. More specifically, it tracks if the player:
 * Explores different areas
 * Collect Stars
 * Kills a bunch of enemies
 * "Parkour" (presumably performing a lot of platforming tricks)
 * Swims in water
 * Talks to NPCS or reads signs

It is not yet known exactly how many of these tracked stats are actually used by the game in any meaningful way.

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.

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.

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
Once 3 Red Stars have been collected, some specific levels may change in size very subtly, making traversing through certain areas more difficult.Notice how Mario is now shorter than the doorknob.

Dynamic Difficulty
One particular nebulous stat tracked by the game is the Difficulty Modifier, which seems to raise and lower depending on certain actions taken by the player once 2 Red Stars have been collected. This has an affect on numerous aspects of the game as described below.

New Enemy Variants
Goombas, Bob-ombs, and Amps may start appearing as harder variants that are more dangerous to deal with. For more information, see the List of enemies page. The specific variants that spawn are dependent on the player's Dynamic Difficulty values.

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.

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.

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.