Edit 23rd December 2025:

After much deliberation within the mod team and the general community about the Outlast 2 lurch speedtech, we have decided to postpone its validity in runs. The reason we are doing this is because their is some proof that there is an additional layer of hardware dependency which we were unaware of at the time of its allowance. We are only human and we make mistakes.

Thankfully, this was caught extremely early and there are very few runs which perform the lurch speedtech. Instead of removing them a time penalty of 25 seconds will be added to account for the time saved from lurches. To clarify, lurches aren't dead in the water completely but the mod team believes they need more significant testing before deciding again if they should be allowed or not. Any questions please let me know and happy holidays!

Original Announcement:

For the past several weeks, the Outlast 2 "Lurch" speedtech has been the center of controversy. Due to lurches initially being wildly inconsistent, we were hesitant to allow them, believing they may have various elements of hardware dependency. After a significant amount of testing, discussion amongst the mod team/community, and dissecting the source code which we believe to be related to Lurch - we have decided that as of now Lurches are officially allowed in categories that allow FPS switching alongside the following supporting clause that will be added to the ruleset where applicable:

"Lurch" refers to tech where the player quickly switches the game’s FPS from a low value to a higher value to create a strong burst of forward speed.

Lurch is allowed with the following restrictions:

• Lurch must be performed into a sloped or ramped surface in order to gain height and/or distance in the air. Using Lurch solely to gain additional grounded movement speed is not allowed.

• Lurch requires switching between two FPS values. The lower FPS value has no restrictions, but the higher FPS value must not exceed 144 FPS.

This clause may be tweaked or expanded in the future as we learn more, but we’re starting with this more restrictive version to keep things as fair and manageable as possible.

There's now a variable for you too select when submitting to the 100% category. You have to put what version of the game you're playing. It's faster to do 100% on the May 10th 2017 patch instead of the current version of Outlast 2.

The autosplitter works on all patches, and if you don't know how to legally get an older version there's a guide teaching you how to downpatch.

Due to even more discoveries relating to how save and quits work in Outlast 2, the moderation team have decided that the only fair solution for everyone is to exclude the main menu from timing going forward.

Why?

The community has discovered that depending on your hardware, framerate, lag, monitor refresh rate and other potential unknown factors that some runners could release spacebar earlier when entering into the main menu than others. The problem gets worse if you lowered your in game resolution down to 480p, where you could release it even earlier depending on the factors above, saving a lot of time over the course of the run.

The autosplitter has been updated accordingly, it will pause for 2 seconds on the main menu. This is not a change we are particularly happy to make, but it is the only decision we believed we could to make things fair for everyone.

We will be monitoring this very closely, changes will be made if required. Anyone who abuses this will be faced with run rejection going forward.

FAQ

How much of a difference will this make in the final run time We estimate about a 20 second timesave depending on your hardware

Will you be modifying any verified runs? No, we will not be modifying any verified runs as the timesave varies between hardware ect as mentioned above

Does this affect Outlast 1 or Whistleblower As of right now, we don't think so, however we are monitoring the situation very closely. We are ready to make changes if required.

The PC load removed time has been updated.

The timer will now pause for an additional 0.35 seconds upon returning to the main menu as it was discovered if you lowered your in game resolution down to 480p, and had higher fps / less lag than other runners when returning to the menu you could release spacebar earlier to load back into the game faster, providing an advantage to runners who had higher end computers. Also no one actually wants to play in 480p.

Runs currently verified on the leaderboard will not have their time adjusted. The moderation team is closely watching how it affects the run, and is ready to make adjustments if required.

For any inquiries, please ask in our community Discord server

Outlast 2 now has Category Extensions! You can find them here: https://www.speedrun.com/outlast2ce

I am still working on setting up the boards however feel free to submit runs. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know!

The moderation team has decided that we are going to merge the Playstation and Xbox leaderboards for Outlast 2. This means Xbox and Playstation runs will be tracked on the same category together.

There are a few reasons we are doing this, some of those reasons including that It is almost, if not completely identical to Xbox in terms of speedrunning, Xbox has also historically not been a popular platform for Outlast 2 speedruns. The last competitive time was submitted 4 years ago.

Switch runs will still have there own section, even though Switch has only ever had 1 Outlast 2 speedrun done on it as of this post, it is significantly different than Xbox and Playstation. Having it run on 30 frames is already enough of a reason to do this.

As always if anyone has any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out.

In the past few days the moderation team was trying to find a solution for the "lag timesave" If you are unaware of this issue I will explain briefly. Basically, if your FPS fluctuates due to lag while crawling through vents, logs, etc, you can get a speed boost and crawl faster, saving quite a bit of time. Depending on your pc, you can save more or less time.

The “lag timesave” was already a known problem for ILs, which made some ILs completely unbeatable unless you intentionally went out of the way to make your PC run worse than it already is, which frankly is not healthy for the game. However it has recently become a problem for full-game runs as well.

So, in order to make it fair for everyone, regardless of hardware, we are allowing to spam a keybind to set your max FPS to 1000 FPS. No one will ever reach this FPS, but that isn't the point. This makes your FPS fluctuate a lot, and you will get those speed boosts. it's also consistent for everyone, even on bad PCs.

However, spamming this keybind is only allowed on forced-crawling sections, such as the vent in Jessica’s Death. The only exceptions for this rule are:

• The crawling after crucifixion cutscene
• Crawling on the rocks in King of The Hill (Like crawling through the vents, it just uses a different animation)
• Crawling at the end of Val's Rebirth during the ceremony.

You are not allowed to use this to save stamina or to move faster after running out of stamina and you are not allowed to do this in Glitchless.

Put this command in your “DefaulInput.ini” file: .Bindings=(Name="F8",Command="Set OLEngine MaxSmoothedFrameRate 1000") You may change “F8” to whatever key you want.

As always, if anyone has any questions or concerns, please reach out.

Thank you - Symystery

The Outlast 2 moderation team now sees a reason to add a glitchless category to the game, because it is now significantly different than the Any% run. So, due to popular demand an Outlast 2 glitchless category has been added. It is under misc. for now, but if it gets quite a few runs we can move it out of misc. The rules are quite different compared to the Outlast 1 glitchless, this is because we want to be as lenient as possible due to the games length to put less stress on the runner and the moderator reviewing the run. :) <3

You are now allowed to change the FPS to will throughout the entire run to make clips more fair between runners.

The only rules for this being

• Skips that are only possible at a framerate higher than 144 fps are banned

• FPS should never be capped below 60 FPS

• No spam switching the FPS to intentionally lag the game

• Top 3 runs and all ILs are required to use the in-game FPS counter on the screen

There is a guide in the rules for how to set this up if you want to do this

Hey all. The individual level leaderboard has been updated to include all subchapters you are able to select from the load game menu as discussed and voted upon in our community Discord.

No CPK and No Stamina No CPK have been added as sub categories to the full chapter runs to make the ILs look less cluttered.