The any% run takes advantage of a duplication glitch. There are some tutorials on Youtube on how to do the glitch. Take a practice run or two to get used to duping quickly.

This run can be split into two halves, before 15 mins and after 15 mins. The blueprints for the antennas and receiver can only spawn in after 15 mins have passed.

The strategy of this run has changed. And the first half of the run can be optimized further to save time.

Before, you had to prepare as much as possible without having the blueprints for the antennas and receiver. And then the run would really start at 15 minutes in with the first objective being swim around picking up barrels and hoping to get the blueprints quickly. This wasn't very fun as it was completely luck based and could end runs right then and there.

The new strat relies on the fact that barrels do not have predetermined loot, meaning that what is inside the barrel is determined when you pick it up out of the water. Because of this you can hook a barrel at the 14 minute mark, wait until the 15 min mark, pull it out of the water, and have a chance to get one of the blueprints instantly. But that's not the best we can do, you can have multiple items on your hook at once and this applies to barrels as well.

With a normal small-ish raft that we use in most categories of runs, it is a lot harder to pick up multiple items and impossible if the items are on opposite (left/right) sides of the raft. However, If we build our raft such that it extends out on each (left/right) side we can now pull the hook left and right as much as we want, and can collect many barrels on the hook without reeling it in.

In the first half of the old strategy, it was relatively easy to complete all the tasks necessary within the 15 minutes and once these tasks were completed we'd just wait until the 15 minute mark. There was no use in trying to optimize anything in the first part of the run. But now, the faster we get these tasks done the more barrels we can have on our hook and the more likely you will get one or both of the blueprints right at the 15 minute mark. So optimize away on the first half, and be rewarded with instant blueprints.

The second part of the run now remains similar to the old run but once we get good at getting blueprints early, it will be more important to optimize the second half of the run, especially the climb, which was never all that important before.

That's the high level strategy for the Any% Utopia that I came up with and plan to start using in runs. Hopefully the higher skill ceiling will draw more people to the category and maybe bring back players who left it.

Sub 25 is gonna be a fun one.