Hello, welcome to Exoddus!

So, you're interested in speedrunning? Welcome to the right post!

Be warned this game is hard but you can do it. A few things need to be set up though before you can get started with your runs.

First You will need some program that allows you to run the game in windowed mode. DxWnd is the one that is used mainly within our community. A guide for that can be found here

IMPORTANT: Make sure the game you are trying to use with DxWnd is on your C:/ drive. Otherwise, IT WILL NOT WORK.

Second You're probably going to need a controller with a program to emulate it. You can use JoyToKey OR Xpadder (This one costs some money)

A lot of members in our community use Xpadder, a guide for it can be found here

@HimmDawg made a guide for JoyToKey which can be found here

Once you have your controller set up make sure that you go into the game and edit the keys. Always select the Keyboard option instead of the gamepad. Also, make sure you rebind alt, shift, and crtl to different keys. They can lock up your controller while you're doing a run. Certain keys (such as G) are unable to be bound in game since it classifies them as 'illegal'. If you bind a key and it resets once you restart your game then try binding a different button

Third You will also need a splitting tool of some sort. We recommend live split. It’s the most popular one that most runners use today.

Once you have live split installed you can get your splits from the resources section on the game page for the category that you're interested in running. A basic category explanation can be found here. We HIGHLY recommend doing Any% NMG first. It is the most friendly category for new runners. Make sure you read up on the rules for the category that you want to run. These can be found on the Full-game Leaderboard OR the Level Leaderboard. All you have to do is click “View rules” in the upper right corner.

If you don't have any form of recording/streaming software then OBS and Stream Labs OBS are recommended. They are both free open source software that anyone can use.

If you have any concerns or are confused about anything you can go to the forums https://www.speedrun.com/abe2/thread/whza9 and ask any questions OR the discord link below.

Good luck to everyone. If you want to join our community, please click the discord link found here -> https://discord.gg/uyqMtsD