This guide contains the base routes for Any% Rental and Any% No Rental. Now, how you actually make your way through the levels is all up to you, but this guide will give you the general path you should follow for both categories, along with some important things to note.

Applies to the whole game: Sonic Forces does not have any form of M-Speed or D-Speed, which you may know if you're familiar with Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Generations.

No Rental: The most important part of No Rental is unlocking the Drill Wispon as early as possible. The normal unlock time for Drill without upgrades is by beating Infinite 2 (Stage 17), however using the Dog species for your Avatar gives you access to a different Drill with 1 perk. This Drill is awarded for leveling up your Dog Avatar to one Gold Medal, which happens before entering Capital City assuming you don’t take too many hits, or die too many times – both of which will make you lose rings, therefore missing out on the ring point bonus at the end of the level. When combined with the x1.2 EXP bonus from a daily mission, you can unlock it as early as Casino Forest, however this is completely luck based since the game generates a new set of daily missions when you start a new game.

==Base Route== Before the run:

• Uninstall all DLC to prevent the extra notifications from popping up.
• Launch Steam in offline mode to prevent SOS missions from appearing.

During the run:

• Choose Dog as your Avatar species (Mash A through the entire Avatar creation menu)
• Continue as normal; You'll hopefully unlock the Drill before reaching Capital City and then you'll use it for the rest of the run
• Go fast

==Early Drill== Variant 1:

• As soon as you unlock daily missions after Ghost Town, go into the Avatar menu and change every cosmetic part of your Avatar. If you got lucky, you'll get a cosmetic daily mission and a popup will appear when you close out of the menu saying “Daily mission complete!”. If this does not happen, you need to decide if you want to keep going, or reset the run and try again.

Variant 2:

• As soon as you unlock daily missions after Ghost Town, go into the Avatar menu and change only your upper headgear after the game forces you into that menu for the tutorial. If you got lucky, the daily mission was "Change your upper headgear". This variant is far more reliant on RNG, so don’t bother with this variation if you’re just starting out.

After both variations:

• Back out to the world map so the daily mission completes and your x1.2 EXP bonus activates
• Continue as normal; you’ll hopefully unlock Drill after beating Casino Forest and will be able to use it from Aqua Road onwards
• Go faster

Rental: The game’s Rental Avatar mechanic allows you to get access to the Drill Wispon (or whatever other Wispon) on every Avatar and Tag Team stage.

Steam cannot be in offline mode for Rental runs, because the mechanic relies on the Internet. Therefore, you’ll just have to deal with the time loss from any SOS Missions that appear.

==Base Rental Route==

1. Pick the Dog Avatar, so you can still unlock Drill early
2. Rent Drill with Stomp Dash on Spaceport and Prison Hall
3. Rent either Drill or Lightning on Arsenal Pyramid depending on which strats you use (Drill inbounds saves up to 10s over Lightning and Drill out of bounds saves up to an additional 15s). Alternatively, don’t rent anything and go through the level with Burst. All 3 are viable options, though Drill is the fastest.
4. Rent Drill on Park Avenue, Aqua Road and Capital City
5. When you unlock your own Drill, equip it on your Avatar so you don't have to sit through any more Rental menus
6. If you use Burst strats on Null Space, rent a Burst so you don't get an additional 2 equip menus
7. Go fast!

==Advanced Route==

If you’re feeling very confident in your gameplay skills, and you want to try lowering your time a little more, you can follow a more advanced version of the route. This modified route saves about 15 seconds, so be sure you really want to go through with it before switching to this. The route is the same as the above base rental route, with one difference: You cannot slide, stomp, or strafe as Modern Sonic, starting with Sunset Heights.

Beginning with Sunset Heights, the game unlocks for you three challenge missions. Slide, stomp, and strafe in a Modern Sonic stage (does not apply to Tag Team stages). When you complete one of these missions, a prompt for this shows up at the end of the stage, and you unlock more Avatar customization parts. Each of these extra prompts wastes 5 seconds, and with three missions, this totals to 15 seconds of time lost.

Again, due to the relatively low amount of time this saves, you might not notice the time save right away, but if you practice Modern Sonic’s levels with No Stomp/Slide/Strafe (NSSS) strats, the results can be worth it, as seen with thebluemania’s many PBs attained using NSSS.

==Additional Important Rental Notes==

• You do NOT want to get any Daily Missions in the Rental category. This is because unlocking the Drill earlier is not as much of a priority thanks to the Rental system, so the only thing the Daily Mission’s EXP bonus does in Rental is give us more S Ranks, which is bad because getting an S Rank is an automatic 5 second time loss due to the extra prompts. If you get a Daily Mission during a Rental run, just reset.

• Rental is the more reset-heavy category of the two, because without the help from any mods as mentioned below, if you go into the Rental menu and no Drills appear, most runners usually reset, especially at Spaceport and Prison Hall.

• On PC, the way the Rental system works is that it chooses the 9 selectable Avatars randomly from the top 32 people on the in-game level leaderboards. Unfortunately, because of hacked times, most of the Avatars in each Avatar/Tag Team level do not have a Drill. You can get around this by installing this mod by CodenameGamma https://bit.ly/2R0TmL2 using HedgeModManager, which forces the first Avatar in the Rental menu to be equipped with the best Drill.

• For whatever reason, the Rental system works differently on the console versions of the game – currently, exactly how it works on them is unknown, and with no mods to fix this like we can on PC, running the Rental category on console might be considerably more difficult.

• On PC only, it's possible for the game to get stuck when trying to connect to the Rental Avatar Menu. Sometimes when you press X to use the Rental feature on the world map, the game will just hang as it says “Connecting”. There is no timeout on this (it will keep “connecting” forever), and there is no cancel button either, so the only way to get out of it is restarting your game. We refer to this as the Rental Avatar Softlock, or the Rental Softlock, and it is by far one of the most annoying run-killers of this category. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing when it will happen, as it seems to be random. Proceed with caution.

That covers both of the categories. If you have any questions that weren't answered here, please feel free to ask in the #sonic-forces channel of the Sonic Speedrun Community Discord server linked on the left panel!