TNDA Any% Speedrunning Primer

Hello Dear Reader,

Welcome to the home of Star Wars: The New Droid Army speedrunning. I'm BlackLimba, leaderboard moderator and at the time of writing, WR holder.

The goal of this guide is to cover the basic speed techniques utilized and the core concepts of the current route. Wihout further ado.

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SPEED TECH:

Keep your lightsaber sheathed. This is the single most important rule to follow if you want to go fast. Your health and stamina regenerate MUCH faster when your weapon is not drawn AND Anakin walks faster.

Comlink Buffer: This is the mechanic that enables all the sequence breaking in this game. If you time opening your comlink (start+start) with an ability that displaces Anakins character model (up+attack/jump force power) you gain the ability to clip through just about anything if you time your inputs correctly. Additionally, if you find yourself in a bind; comlink buffering despawns projectiles in flight. The timing of these abilities is difficult to explain, I strongly recommend you watch the TAS and just practice. I promise it's possible, but it is not easy at first.

Jumpless: this is just the name of up+attack buffered with the comlink. It's used once in the game in order to sequence break in Mos Eisley and avoid having to complete Xelric Draw.

Force Teleport: this is force jump buffered with the comlink. It is the bread and butter of the any% run and enables us to quickly and cleanly void out or skip locked doors at will.
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THE ROUTE:

-TATOOINE
Starting from when you gain control of Anakin, route straight through to Mos Eisley, once here, if you head far enough south you can skip the cutscene trigger at the entryway to the city. From here proceed to the gate heading north towards the Dune Sea, again giving (!)'s a wide berth to avoid text boxes. There is a womp rat in front of the gate, this is one of 4 enemies in the game that is a "required" kill. This one can be skipped if you are a TAS, but as a human I recommend killing it. You need to draw your lightsaber here anyway so time loss is nil. At this point we have encountered the first sequence break of the route. Using the "jumpless" tech you can clip through this gate and head on to the Dune Sea, completely routing out Xelric Draw. 

From this point on through Jabbas Palace the route proceeds very similar to a casual playthrough. There is one required interaction amd that is Bellek, if you don't talk to him the path to the Jundland Wastes is blocked. You can probably skip this with Jumpless (I haven't confirmed this), but if you fail it once then taking the text box is definitely faster. 

In Jabbas palace we gain access to the jump force power and thus access to force teleporting. We will use this twice to skip having to unlock both doors in the area. NOTE: when you skip the exit door it's possible to clip "too far" and not hit the cutscene trigger. If this happens simply walk back to the door to activate the Saato boss fight.

Saato is trivial. Spam down+attack and she goes down.

-CORUSCANT
The opening few checkpoints on Coruscant are incredibly linear and surrounded by death planes. So play out these levels "normally."

One note, once you reach the Core Bay if you run to the far south edge of the map it reduces the level to an afk autoscroller. There is only one enemy that can damage you in the whole map.

After you reach the Jedi temple things get interesting. The very first thing we do is run directly south and use a force teleport to get out of bounds. From here we can run straight to the exit door at the end of the level. We do this again in the Jedi Archives, but this time we have to jump back in so we can beat Trenox. The next cutscene trigger is locked behind defeating him. 

If you force teleport in behind him, you can approach and begin attacking without getting any of his pre-fight textboxes. It also makes the down+b 100-0 much more consistent. Doing the fight normally, Trenox can sometimes just choose to "super armor" through your ability hitstun.

-METALORN
This level has the most unique routing in the entire game. Almost the entire world is spent out of bounds. Right off the bat. Run south and force teleport outside the map. From here, run east; being careful to avoid the out of bounds lava. Path towards the door about halfway down the south edge of map 1, this will teleport you to a location about 3/4 of the way down the east edge. Immediately force teleport out of bounds again and run directly to the load trigger for the mext map. If you hug the wall the trigger extends outside and you do not need to clip back in.

On map 2 we again immediately clip outside of the map and begin proceeding along the eastern wall towards the exit. IMPORTANT you MUST be far enough east to barely see the wall as you traverse the map, if you are too close there is a cutscene trigger where you normally get a popup conversation with Yoda, if you trigger this while outside the map it is a softlock. Other than that, proceed directly to the exit load zone.

Seeing a pattern here? On map 3 we immediately force teleport out of bounds and head directly to the load trigger for map 4. Easy enough, no softlocks here.

On map 4 things are more interesting, we still start off by immediately getting out of bounds, but now since we do not have Wat Tambor with us we have to find a way to trigger the cutscene without him. There is a text box intended ro turn the player around if Tambor isn't present. Fortunately, the load trigger is still present. It's just further east "behind" the blocking text box. If we swing wide enough south it's possible to approach from behind and trigger the cutscene.

Map 5 plays similar to map 4, void out, run to the end, path around the Wat Tambor "stop" trigger and hit the load for the final fight.

From here all that remains is to beat Dooku. He's pretty handily the hardest fight in the speedrun since he is more than capable of armoring through your attacks. I've found the most consistent strat is to spam left+attack and get him backed into a corner and just spam until his green bar is depleted. Rinse and repeat post text box and time is when his health is reduced to zero.
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To anybody who made it this far:

Thanks for putting up with that wall of text 😅. Feel free to reach out to me with questions, and happy speedrunning. I look forward to the day when it's more than just my runs on the wall!

-BlackLimba

BlackLimba

Star Wars: The New Droid Army

Game Boy Advance

Zmoneytrain

There's been some interest, so I put something together. Small discord server with some useful info. Place to talk about strategy and share runs. 

https://discord.gg/4enX78GrSV