I've taken the liberty of creating a discord server, I thought it might be useful to start more consistent discussion about running the game. Here's an invite link for those interested: https://discord.gg/vHRDAkX

Some notes about the behavior of this glitch:

• Double jump shoots you up - fast. You can cancel out of it with corrupted air dash (I'm assuming regular air dash works too)
• The gravity wells still affect you while the bug is active
• It only affects upwards momentum - and breaks other movement tricks like cannon jumping
• While floating upwards, you can attack in mid air to keep moving up - I used this in this clip: to navigate all the elevators in A3, get all the skills/A3 boss keys (except mid), then canceled it on my farm chest in A3 - it's definitely faster than other methods I've used to explore A3, but could probably use more optimization
• It's for sure hard to navigate with, and I'm not sure it would be viable for use in an entire run. The fog in A3 insta kills you if you double jump into it because of the glitch https://www.twitch.tv/dyindude/clip/EasyHeadstrongGnatMcaT , so I don't think it would be useful to cheese things like the new passive ability rooms, but definitely a tool worth exploiting for speedruns in current patch.

I started running the game again today after trying out Eldritch edition, and I've been routing a run on Easy for Any% - but I realize this would probably be a different category.

The moon jump discovered in the other thread is definitely useful for scouting out Area 3, getting the keys for the A3 boss + abilities - but using a route similar to the one I was using in my old runs I'm finding I'm still having to do some farming. I've been meaning to check out the other runs to see if there's better optimizations I could make than just farming the same A3 chest N times, lol

I'm glad to see some more activity on these forums than a year ago when I was doing my old runs.

While I'm at it, I have some questions on how we define our timers.

On my Neutral% runs, I start RTA when IGT starts (clicking "yes" after selecting the difficulty), and end it on the final hit of the final boss. I noticed that @Warthermair mentioned he waits until he loses control of his character in the 100% run. In the spirit of fairness, I figured it would be worth starting a conversation around what rules we should follow for tracking times (again since the IGT is so wonky)

It's good to finally see other people running this game. My first run was almost 5 hours, and I got it down to sub 2h30 before getting discouraged by seeing no one else on the boards. Seeing a new time ahead of me makes me want to pick it up again :)

@Warthermair , I've tested the IGT a few times and even submitted a post on Reddit asking TL about it - https://www.reddit.com/r/sundered/comments/6wafb3/speedrun_questions_for_sundered_devs/ - the IGT still passes during load screens - but not consistently, obviously, because RTA still lags about 10-15 minutes behind IGT.

Because of the inconsistencies with IGT I think it makes sense to track times by RTA, unless others have gotten a more consistent test with the IGT in recent patches.

I've been trying to reproduce this in early game (Luther/Arlie/Hidden A1 shard) but haven't been able to yet. I keep either just picking it back up or burning the crystal. Do you remember what kind of attack, movement, anything like that (even which direction you were facing, etc)

Yeah, since making this clip I've discovered some more efficient routes in Area 3 for pathing to the skills - in my speedrun I used corrupted dash to go up near the 1st elevator to start continuing the path up towards the wall run, which shaved a bunch of time off the strat. In the video in this thread I wasn't as familiar with Area 3, I kept getting lost and dying because of it lol.

I'm not 100% sure, but I thought the path to the cannon was necessary in order to unlock the Area 1 Boss room. In either case, the cannon is extremely versatile as a utility tool, especially for momentum.

• The earliest place it's useful is right after you get it - you can use it to bypass the entirety of the puzzle before the Area 1 Boss room by going up to the top, firing a shot backwards and doing a doublejump halfway through your trajectory to jump yourself in the area with the hidden shard.
• In my runs, I find that I Return to Sanctuary a lot in Area 2, because there are a lot of divergent paths, especially if you're trying to pick up skills and route to bosses, etc. You can use the cannon to launch yourself into Area 2 or Area 3 the same way, face backwards, fire the cannon, double jump, then attack (or glide if you've unlocked it).
• In Area 3 I use these backcannon jumps + glide to fly over wide open areas, such as the area before Wall Run and the path to the T3 chest arena from the upper right (sorta disconnected) elevator. I think there are similar spots you can use it near the grappling hook skill.

I can definitely agree that the up attack has its uses, it's a mechanic I'm still trying to work into my runs. I haven't practiced the up-attack climbing strats much yet, but I find myself only really needing that stuff in Area 3 and corrupted air dash seems to fit my use for this for right now.

In my experience learning this game, it seems that some level of farming is necessary - you need skill upgrades to compete with the mobs in the new areas (especially area 3), and perk upgrades give a huge bonus when you can farm T2/T3 chests.

In my completed run today, I discovered a cheesy strat for farming T2/T3 perk chests earlier than you can normally using Rebirth:

Rebirth will kill mobs in the area when it activates. If you can survive until the Lith mob for a perk chest spawns, it dies along with most of the rest of the mobs, and you'll just have some minor cleanup to take care of afterwards.

I just ran a route attempting to get all of the player skills as early as possible:

I know it can still use some improvements. The section in the cathedral in particular is pretty sloppy, because I started getting lost.

In either case, routing the skills this way with no hiccups will easily take about 45min to an hour, but since the shard cost of nodes on the skill tree is based on how many shards you've already invested, I'm curious to see if this would enable you to grab some optimal skill upgrades with minimal shard investment, farming some perks during/after finishing retrieving all skills.

My initial thoughts on continuing a full run from this would be to farm T1 perks, kill the Area 1 boss and see if that's enough to set you up for farming T2 perks (and thus getting you closer to being ready to take on the Area 2 boss)

In this route I grab the corrupted Leaping Device because cannon strats + glide help navigate a few of the Cathedral areas.

I had that 2nd bug occur on my casual playthrough. The only thing it really does is trivialize the fog on your way back up, because it essentially despawns the entire encounter (fog goes away, music stops playing). You stay zoomed out like that until you climb back up to where the fog encounter normally ends and then the camera re-adjusts.

Bosses = shards = upgrades, so an optimal route will likely include a few of them - that being said, as far as I've seen the only requirement for unlocking the final boss arena is killing the main bosses in each area.