Bloodborne Archipelago

Yharnam, shuffled. Every treasure, boss reward and script award in the game becomes an Archipelago check, and the things that open the city up arrive from other players' worlds. Runs under shadPS4 on Windows, against your own copy of the game.

Build a yaml Downloads Host a room Browse the checks

What a run is

You start in Central Yharnam with whatever the seed decided your starting weapon and firearm are, and the city opens the way the base game opens it — except that the keys are somewhere else.

The Hunter Chief Emblem is the chokepoint

Cathedral Ward is behind it, and behind Cathedral Ward is most of the game. In a randomized seed the Emblem is an Archipelago item like any other, so an early seed can feel small until it turns up — in your world or in somebody else's. That is the run's one real bottleneck and it is worth knowing before you start rather than after twenty minutes of wondering whether something is broken.

Lamps are the only fast travel

No Torrent, no warping from anywhere. Route accordingly: a check on the far side of a region is a walk back.

The DLC is a gate, not a side area

With include_dlc off, The Old Hunters' checks do not exist in the seed at all — they are not "optional content you can skip", they are absent. There is a separate switch, include_dlc_gear, for DLC weapons and attire in the pool: that one is independent, so you can play a base-game route and still find Old Hunters gear.

Three endings, and you pick one

Submit to Gehrman ends after Mergo's Wet Nurse; refusing him means beating Gehrman; Moon Presence, the default, additionally wants any three of the four shuffled Third Umbilical Cords.

How big is the seed?

That depends on your options, and rather than print a number here that will be wrong by the next release, the yaml builder counts it live from the world's own location table as you toggle things — per region, base game and DLC separately. The check browser lists every one of them by name, with the vanilla item each replaced and the AP id it was published under.

One thing the count does not move with: Randomize Enemy Consumable Drops. It shuffles local loot tables and adds no Archipelago checks at all.

The two channels

Stable

A tagged release. The launcher zip and the apworld both come from it, and the pages on this site that describe an option surface or a check list are built from the same tag — so the wizard you used and the apworld your host generated with are the same thing.

Development

Whatever is on main. Newer, and occasionally broken in ways nobody has noticed yet. If you are playtesting, this is the one to be on; if you want to finish a seed, it is not.

Which tag each channel points at lives in release/CHANNELS.tsv, append-only, so "when did stable last move, and to what" stays answerable.

What is on this site

PageWhat it is for
Builder Pick your options and copy out a yaml. Renders from the apworld's own option surface, and stamps the apworld version into the yaml so a host can see which wizard wrote it.
Downloads The launcher zip and the apworld, from the same release. Take both from the same one.
Hosting Hand in yamls, get a room. No Archipelago install needed to run a seed for friends.
Checks Every published check: region, kind, classification, the vanilla item, the event flag and the AP id. Filterable, permalinkable, exportable, and diffable against another build.
Report a bug The form that asks for the files a diagnosis is actually made from.

Setup in five minutes

You need your own game files. A PS4 dump of CUSA03173 (Game of the Year Edition) at update 01.09. Nothing here distributes game files, and no other release works — not CUSA00900, not CUSA00207, and not a pre-modded repack.

  1. Get BloodborneAPLauncher-win-x64.zip and bloodborne.apworld from the same release. Unzip the launcher anywhere.
  2. Install shadPS4 0.18.0. You do not have to configure it — the launcher hands it the game folder. (That means the folder containing CUSA03173.)
  3. Run BloodborneAPLauncher.exe and fill in the four things it cannot guess: shadPS4.exe, the AP seed file your host sent, the server address, and your player name spelled exactly as your host spelled it. Save Setup.
  4. Generate Launch Plan, once.
  5. Doctor. Every line should say PASS; a FAIL prints its own remedy underneath.
  6. Randomize & Launch.

Cheat Engine is not needed. Item delivery is native and the launcher does not open it at all.

The long version, and everything this page condensed: PLAYTESTING.md · LAUNCHER.md · KNOWN-LIMITATIONS.md · SECURITY.md

Contact

Something went wrong in a seed: use the bug report form. It asks for the session folder, which is what a diagnosis is made from.

Anything else — questions, patches, a seed you want another pair of eyes on — open an issue. Security problems have their own private channel in SECURITY.md; please use it rather than a public issue.