A Few Time Saving Tips

I want to preface this by saying that these are not all the possible things that can help with speed, mostly just beginner info, and they may change in later patches.

1.  Alternating attacking and blocking in quick succession allows for more possible hits since you do not have to go through with the entire swing. This is mostly useful against large, immobile bosses. Your character will always start swinging from their left.

2. Portal as much as you can. It not only saves huge amounts of travel time, especially considering not having to use energy to dash when you portal places.

3. Make a portal to Santa Fae before entering the Winter fight. This lets you quickly go back to Santa Fae after the fight, but you cannot open a portal after the fight.

4. Know when to shop. Gold can be a bit light in the run until Tai Ming, but slight damage increases can help a lot.

5. Picking up any item that gets held above the character's head, that animation can be cancelled by blocking while getting the item (keys, baking soda).

6. (Multiplayer only) Video link (not mine) provided here for explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0YCU0Mq16A
Instead of entering the map on the left side, enter on the right. This skips the Hydra boss and a lot of the temple. Winter mode must be enabled to move the vine so the out of bounds player can re-enter the map and open the way for the in bounds player.

Arcade% Tips And Tricks

Secrets Of Grindea Arcade% Guide

Intro
Arcade mode is the shortest category currently available for Secrets Of Grindea and is also extremely RNG dependant. You will find yourself randomly Minutes ahead only to get the mimic boss in Tai Ming Again and want to jump off a cliff as another potential world record gets flushed away (Even though current WR actually gets Mimic but we don’t talk about that)

But even with the insane amount of RNG there are still many ways to tip the scales in your favour which is what this guide will help you do.

Part 1: Routing On The Fly
So this is probably the most important thing to note off the bat, finding the boss room is the primary objective of every floor. For this you mainly want to travel up when you can and only go down when there is no other option, left and right don’t seem to be different for boss room probability but I tend to always go right out of habit. The reason you should only go down when there is no other option is that the boss room has to exit upwards, this means that heading down has a 0% chance to have a boss room adjacent to it as the boss rooms have to be entered from below and exit from above with no rooms to the left and right. This is also why you should go up if you can as if there is a room to the north then the east and west rooms can also not link to boss rooms.

Next thing to note is to never enter challenge rooms under any circumstance, they waste your time and are not worth the rewards they give. Always go into Chest rooms and shops to see if they can increase whichever attack power your build is using be that physical or magical, until Tai Ming in which case you should have full build by then. The reason you check chests and shops even early on is so that you have items to sell later and so you can scale better into later floors and not lose time by being weak in the earlier boss fights.

Part 2: Tricks And Treats
In Arcade mode you have the option to activate tricks and treats to modify the conditions of your run, the score counter must stay at 100% during your run so every treat used must be balanced out by a downside with an equal % modifier.

For the treat I would highly recommend sing the one that stops any elites from spawning, this will be incredibly useful throughout as you won’t have to deal with things like elite beehives which spawn like 50 bee’s in 2 seconds or Ghosts that have stupid amounts of health. The downside here is that you lose 20% score modifier so you have to put on a trick to counter this, for these you have several potential options, the best of which are the one which adds mushrooms to every normal room (not that big a deal in arcade mode) and the one which adds later floors enemies to the floor below (Can be a pain but at least you can see, it only adds one per room and they don’t always even spawn.).

Part 3: Build Paths
This section will be quite short, anything can work in arcade mode at the moment because of how op pins are, 2 Handed has proven too be the most consistent and is what is used in the current world record, 1 Handed is just as good as it was in any% and can become even more powerful with the right pins, and magic only works with a very specific set of pins but has the potential to be  the fastest, especially if a form of RNG manipulation can be found, but we are still very far away from that at the moment.

The only thing I would say is essential for every build is the strength boost potion and the bubble shield. Health is a limited resource in arcade mode so the bubble shield will make any run far more consistent.

If you are looking for guides on what is best for 1 Handed, 2 Handed and Magic I intend to make those in the coming weeks but TLDR: 1 Handed = Naruto (Shadow Clones + Flurry), 2 Handed = Thor (Throw and Slam), Magic = Roy Mustang (Fire ball or flamethrower both have their uses).

Part 4: The Best And Worst Bosses For Each Floor
Floor 1: They all die about the same speed, Halloweed probably the fastest and horde room probably the slowest due to the added movement but no real noticeable difference.

Floor 2: The Zoo is the fastest and Giga Slime and Vilya are both rather slow but Vilya is worse as you won’t be OP at this point in the run

Floor 3: Terror weed is best for 1 handed rest best is Jump king

Floor 4: Phase man is by far the quickest just Perfect Guard the first shot and kill him either before he recovers or after 1st teleport depending on your power level, Gun-dam is the worst as it’s desperation attack is longer than the entire Phase man fight.

Floor 5: The Toy machine is the slowest as you have to use the trains to do any truly significant damage, The fastest is by far Marino as he dies very quickly and the bubble shield makes him a complete joke.

Floor 6: Difficult to say if the Hydra’s or Winter is a bigger pain in the ass, probably the Hydra’s but only by a narrow margin, The Summer + Autumn fight is by far the quickest and easiest.

Floor 7: All can take a while but Power Flower is the worst due to it’s defence form, Vilya and Queen Bee are equal so depends on which one you are better at fighting.

Floor 8: These all take ages so again probably a personal preference thing, I argue that the Mimic is the longest and Worm is the worst but that’s because my Hard Mode co-op play through made me uncomfortably good at beating the Priestess.

And then you are done, my perfect run would probably be: Halloweed, The Zoo, Jump King, Phase Man, Marino, Summer + Autumn, Vilya 3, priestess. Those last 2 could definitely be argued but as it says above the later bosses are personal preference, they all suck in their own special way.

Part 5: Potential Changes For The Future
This last part isn’t actually guiding anything so if you were here for tips and tricks the bosses are the end ATM. As the category evolves and new patches come out there will be a lot of arcade mode changes as there are 2 more floors worth of content in the game already with desert and lost ship hopefully being added soon along with whatever the story will end with after that, the current times for arcade mode will probably not be seen for the completed version of this category but it remains to be seen what that will look like. As for changes during the current climate I would have to say that the bosses have a lot of potential optimising in the later floors and new strategies are being discovered all the time, the most recent being an actually viable two hand build which requires no pins so saves tons of time by skipping all of them, but loses time with slower boss kills than other builds.

Beginner speedrun guide (1 handed, solo)

I've made a pretty comprehensive guide for those who want to try the speedrun for the first time. The routing is not optimal, but the strats are pretty safe. If you have any idea for improvement, please don't hesitate to tell me.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODbE02pz3bg9DB93PMZj_HA09JFEBIMm/view?usp=sharing

UPDATE: The guide has been updated to the newer and faster Flurry/Insult to injury routing (thanks to Mordaak for showing me how much of an improvement it was).

UPDATE (March 2021): Morkaak did a total overhaul of the guide to update it with the new strats.

How to run NG+

Since there is no current way to reset the campaign normally, there is one other way to do it while keeping your character.

First, enter your Roaming folder (type %appdata% in the 'run' console), then the Secrets of Grindea files.
Next, the "worlds" folder will have all the world data for each character. World 0 correlates to the first character slot, up to world 8 and the last character slot. To reset the campaign, first go to the starting house in the campaign and quit the game. Then either move, rename, or delete the corresponding world file.

After that, the next time starting the character, the quests will be reset.

Underflow and Overflow

Underflow(UF) and Overflow(OF) are both ways to increase skills and talents above their normal limits. There's an important distinction in that OF is allowed on all runs, while UF is most definitely not.

OF: This is done by putting skill/talent points that you already have into a skill/talent that is already capped. Video example can be seen in most of my runs, sorry for not have one on hand. It is done by quickly moving to the capped skill from a non-capped skill and pressing the select at just about the same time. This gives the option to upgrade the capped skill further, and can be repeated.

UF: Roughly similar to OF, this will instantly raise a skill/talent to rank 255 without consuming any of the player's current skill/talent points. This is done is a very similar way. You start on a skill/talent that has at least on point in it and move to one that has no points in it. Doing the same procedure as in the OF, you then select refund all instead of upgrade. Do it again but select refund one this time. This will set the skill/talent to 255. Again, UF is incredibly broken and will not be allowed in Any% runs.

Name	Author
A Few Time Saving Tips	Pukeattack 6 years ago
Arcade% Tips And Tricks	PBLuny 4 years ago
Beginner speedrun guide (1 handed, solo)	3ps1l0n 4 years ago
How to run NG+	Pukeattack 6 years ago
Underflow and Overflow	Pukeattack 6 years ago