I'm fairly new to speedrunning, and I've decided the first game I should seriously start with is this one. Looking at the leaderboards for levels, I see people effortlessly no clip through the floor and instantly reach the end of the level, but when I try, it can never seem to work. What type of technique do professional runners use to perform these, and how are they found? Is there a place where well known glitches are documented? I feel like I'm missing a crucial piece to being able to speedrun well, so any help would be appreciated.
Hello TeaConnoissuer! Here's a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiF75JoAs0OVk9NoulUiv62JVTJN4nNi5
If you want to speedrun sonic games, I recommend starting with sonic 2 honestly. There are fewer zips and tricks to learn, and the run is typically more forgiving. That being said, S3&K is a lot of fun, you just want to be careful about getting burnt out on the length of the run.
If you check the guides section, there is Both Chrezm's youtube playlist and the community document (for Sonic & Tails) which has most of the stuff currently used in runs.
As for finding the glitches, some are found by accident, others are from understanding how the game reacts to certain scenarios and use that to try to create a new glitch.
Feel free to join the #sonic-3 channel on the discord. We have plenty of people willing to help out with learning the game.
As of today, any new submissions of S3K from the Steam version will no longer be allowed. This is due to a couple of factors but mostly being inhibited availability as SEGA delisted it when releasing Origins. Any existing runs will remain unaffected.
