Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

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What does randomization do to this game?

The one-time items sitting on the ground throughout Dracula's castle have had their contents shuffled. That covers 115 pickups on a normal file, plus 5 more that only exist in Hard Mode. Money pickups are shuffled along with everything else, so a candle that held 500 gold in the vanilla game may now hold a soul, a weapon, or another player's item.

Souls dropped by enemies are not shuffled. You still farm those from the enemies that drop them, exactly as in the vanilla game. Only the ground pickups become Archipelago locations.

Nothing else about the castle changes: room connections, enemy placement, and boss fights are all vanilla.

What is the goal?

Set by the "Goal" option.

• Chaos (default): reach and defeat Chaos's second form — the true ending. As in the vanilla game, this requires all three Ancient Books plus the Flame Demon, Succubus, and Giant Bat souls, and you must have beaten Graham.
• Graham: defeat Graham with whatever equipment you have — the bad ending. A much shorter seed.

What items can appear in other players' worlds?

Anything that can be found on the ground: souls, weapons, armor, accessories, consumables, the Ancient Books, the Castle Maps, and gold.

What does another world's item look like?

It looks like a Skull Key. Aria of Sorrow has to hand Soma something physical when a pickup is collected, and there is no "empty item" in the game data, so a Skull Key stands in. The Skull Key is not otherwise obtainable, which makes it an unambiguous marker.

Collecting it still sends the check. The client trims your Skull Key count every tick so the 9-consumable cap can never block you from collecting more pickups.

Which souls does the logic care about?

Logic tracks the movement souls, since they are what gate the castle: Flying Armor, Skeleton Blaze, Malphas, Hippogryph, Undine, Skula, Black Panther, Giant Bat, Grave Keeper, Kicker Skeleton, and Galamoth.

Flame Demon and Succubus are enemy drops rather than ground pickups, so logic instead checks whether you can reach an enemy that drops them. Transformation souls (Devil and Manticore) work the same way. Curly is deliberately not modelled, which keeps logic conservative.

Logic difficulty

Some routes in the castle need execution skill on top of the right soul. The "Logic Difficulty Preset" option decides how much of that logic may expect, and each tier includes the ones below it:

• Canonical (default): developer-intended routes only.
• Standard: may expect launching off a kickable enemy.
• Advanced: may also expect platform clips.
• Expert: may also expect pixel-perfect platforming.

Quick-save resets are never expected by any preset. Each technique also has its own override, so you can force one in or out of logic independently of the preset you chose.

Item smoothing

By default the world biases placement so that weaker items turn up early and stronger ones turn up late, using aggregated community tier-list data. This only moves items that are not needed for progression, so it can never make a seed unwinnable. Set "Item Smoothing" to off if you want placement to be genuinely uniform.

Two axes control how "early" is measured:

• map_distance (default): structural distance from the start in the unrandomized castle. A room is always as early as its position on the map makes it, regardless of where progression landed. This means you can still find something useful if a seed pushes you into a hard area early.
• spheres: logical reachability order within this seed.

The three Ancient Books are spread across early, middle, and late rather than being treated as junk. With Ancient Book Soul Drops (on by default), holding a book makes the enemy that drops the soul it describes (Flame Demon, Giant Bat, or Succubus) always drop it. The vertical mobility souls have their own option ("Early Mobility Souls"), because they gate movement rather than power; by default one of them is usually pulled early so you do not start completely mobility-starved. Black Panther has a similar toggle of its own.

Gameplay options

• Skull Key Warp (on by default): using a Skull Key from the Consumables menu teleports Soma to the starting room.
• Hard Mode: shuffles the five Hard Mode-only pickups into the pool, and the client forces the difficulty so they spawn. Enemies take less damage.
• Study Sealswitch: normally the Forbidden Area gate at the bottom of the Study can only be opened by a button on the far side. By default that button is replaced with a shuffled "Study Sealswitch" item, so the gate opens once you receive it.
• New Soul Pause (on by default): a soul from another world that you do not already own shows the game's first-soul box and stops the action until you press A, the same as absorbing one yourself. Turn it off and every received soul gets the short banner a duplicate gets, so play is never interrupted by something another world sent.
• Single-Jump Divekick (on by default), Classicvania Movement, and Oops! All Whips are optional gameplay tweaks ported from Xanthus's public Aria of Sorrow patch collection.

Does DeathLink work?

Yes. Enable the "Death Link" option. Soma's death is broadcast the moment the game enters its death state, and an incoming death runs the game's real death routine rather than simply zeroing your HP.