So far we've found 3 major 'techniques' - one to skip the congratulations message, one to place objects where they cannot be placed, and another to essentially change the position of objects after you've started the physics simulation (if you can call it that).

Firstly a few keyboard shortcuts

• F3 and F4 will open save/load menus
• F5 to start/stop the physics simulation
• P to 'pause' the game

1. Congratulations skip 100% thanks to @DillsburyDoughmin - by turning music and sound effect volumes down to 0 (not sure if just one of them or both) the congratulations messages are skipped at the end of each level.

2. Placement glitch For this you need to play the level by pressing F5 while you're holding an object - the object will then effectively be placed wherever you're holding it. However, when you next go into the object placement 'phase', either by stopping on the same level or starting the next level, you won't be able to interact with anything. The only way we've found to fix this is by opening up a menu like with F3 or F4, and then clicking on an object from the inventory while still in the menu. After closing the menu you should be able to interact like normal. As a result using this glitch has the potential to be slower rather than faster due to the time it takes, especially if the physics doesn't agree with you or placement was off. As such it was definitely overused in my recent Expert% run. But it looks kinda snazzy and is more fun than just placing things!

3. Pause glitch The 'pause glitch' essentially allows us to change the position of objects during the level after you've started the simulation. To do this:

• Pause the game with P while it is still playing. It can also be paused during the start of a level before you can press play, as I did in the Any% run.
• Stop the game with F5 when the ball is where you'd like it to be.
• Unpause by pressing P again. You should then be able to place or move objects. Doing this will also reset the balls momentum, which could perhaps be useful on levels where there's a tendency to overshoot the end level trigger. If you stop the level again without performing the glitch the ball will reset to the default start position. This glitch has similar repercussions to the placement glitch in that it can easily waste more time than you gain from performing it. I think this is best used as a back up on levels that are notoriously finicky so that you can attempt to 'save' a simulation if placements were slightly off or the physics buggers up.

While not at all a glitch there are a few levels where there is no ceiling, so you can somewhat bypass the level such as in levels 13 and 18. Pretty sure they're the only levels where that's the case, perhaps there's another I'm forgetting.

There are also some lines of inquiry regarding potential tricks - let me know if you find anything!

• Some cat death animations appear to be skippable, identified by Ivenofriendsyeet to happen in the following run on levels 3, 32 and 37 (https://www.speedrun.com/bad_rats/run/z11l2xwz). I think these are all of the microwave death levels. It is perhaps linked to the congratulations skip; I haven't really investigated it though. Finding a way to skip other animations, or at least an explanation as to why the microwave animations is being skipped, would be handy.

• A means by which to skip the score screen at the end of each level would also be big, but I imagine the only way to do that would involve saving/loading which is prohibited in the category (though I imagine this is only to prevent just loading levels that you are not up to yet/loading solutions [namely the last level], which seems like a fairly redundant rule that could be rephrased to something like 'do not load levels that you are not yet up to, or solutions' especially considering saving/loading is a frequently used tool in speedruns.

• Seems a bit far-fetched, but the holy grail would be to find a way to glitch the ball through walls. Don't ask how because I've got no idea, but I would not be surprised if it could be done. The ball can, in theory, be hit off the 'front' of the level along the z-axis, and with enough spin, bounce back into the level straight onto the end-zone which could serve as a more practical proxy, but it would be a matter of luck finding something like that.