I found a new skip which might save substantial amounts of time. It works the same way dialogue skip does, but instead of pressing down for dialogue, you press space or whatever your select key is to select the mode when you enter a level. I think it works for the same reason: the mode options load in before the level or you're able to see them. When you enter the door for the level, just spam the select key (space) the same way you do for the two dialogue skips. It will select Contact mode before you can see the level. I don't think it works for selecting other modes, though. You're also able to move around a bit before the level loads. For example, you can jump, and when the level loads, you will be in the air and not activate the platform you would normally spawn on. You can see this in action for most levels in my PB here: The skip is not hard at all and I think probably saves around half a second per level, which adds up quickly over the run.

I'm going to name it Mode Selection Skip.

@Rifltz I'm looking forward to when you can do runs again 🙂

Fair enough. Also the 7 seconds starts after the second of those three dialogues so there's an extra 2 or so seconds at the start as well. I think maybe a 12 second time would be around the limit.

That's pretty good :) Have a look at @Merl_'s 6.97 Beta Contact time and see if you can improve your time with strats from it:

Cool, thanks for the tip. I think with a better Ultima Radius run a sub-10 second run can be possible.

@Merl_ Question in the post above

Also, we should come up with a name for this, to be referenced in the new category rules. If we knew more about how it worked we could call it something like window storage for example. I think it would make sense to call it starting from a glitched file, since that's what seems to be happening.

Here's a video guide of some interesting things you can do on Ultima: Read the description for explanations and timestamps.

None of this is really helpful for speedrunning, I just thought it was interesting.

Oh great. I thought it might be. I'd love to see a video. The part of it I was able to do was really hard lol.

Three any% PBs today Less than 2 seconds away from the sub-8 now, mainly from dying on Ultima and not pausing while the boss falls:

Also did some Ultima Radius, will probably go for a low 7 in the future:

@Merl_ Congratulations on the sub-8 :) I might get one soon. I don't think sub-7 is gonna happen for a while though.

Yeah exactly. Maybe we could have one that finishes at the credits after you first beat Ultima and another that finishes when you beat the last level on the last mode.

I'm also not sure if Arduum (one of the debug levels) is beatable on growth. I tried for a while but the furthest I could get was the spring before the end. If it turns out to be impossible it could just be excluded from the route.

I meant just splitting All Levels into the four difficulty modes like as in Any% and Any% NMG.

Do you select the save file after it finishes resetting, or as you begin to reset it?

Today, three new PBs. Any%, getting closer to the sub-8:

Beta Contact, getting closer to the sub-7 but I just can't nail that strat at the end:

Beta Radius, a pretty good level to speedrun, sub-6 is possible:

The rules for the 100% category currently read: "Complete all levels including the boss on all 4 different level modes. Use in game timer shown in the credits."

It seems doable by simply running the All Levels route but redoing each level 4 times for each mode. However, the rules have two conflicting statements: that you have to also do this for Ultima, and that you use the in-game timer in the credits. As far as I know, you cannot reset Ultima like the other levels to play another difficulty without exiting it. In a regular full-game run, you automatically exit the level, talk to the CEO, and the credits play. I haven't found any way to have the credits play again after the first time. To complete Ultima on the other 3 modes you would have to go back to the Star Fix HQ and navigate all the way back there (debug room being disallowed), then play the level on one difficulty, enter it again, play on another difficulty, and so on. After you finish it on the fourth difficulty you do not enter the credits so there is no reliable and standard way of figuring out in-game time at the point when you finish the run.

I think the best way to resolve this is by saying that you only have to play Ultima on 1 mode but still use the in-game timer in the credits. Still requiring beating Ultima 4 times would make the route weird and require a new timing method to be devised.

@Merl_ Your 8:17 and 8:16 actually beat the radius mode WR now lol (8:17.930 - https://www.speedrun.com/mobility/run/zp42l78z )

I have now also enabled email authentication. If @Merl_ gets added as a mod I would like to too but it's fine if I don't, as long as there's someone to verify our runs. There's becoming quite a backlog.

That's really interesting. Can you explain exactly how it happens?

I feel like the best thing to do now is ban this from the main category. If one of us becomes a mod we should have Any% as one category and have the modes as sub-categories. Any% can become Any% No Major Glitches which bans this, and we can have a new Any% category with the same sub-categories which allows everything. The same sub-category split should happen for All Levels as well.

I realise now that windows+alt+r is part of the game bar anyway lol

Yeah I use windows 10. I guess there are other ways to do it but I prefer OBS because of all the other functionality like being able to stream. I think another option is windows+g for the game bar.

Yeah I realise that. The only other places I can think of right now are when you enter Star Fix HQ and the final dialogue when you exit Ultima.