This was first posted here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraria/comments/830nsc/terraria_moonlord_normal_seeded_10019/

This is the result of a ton of work; nearly one hundred attempts on this seed alone. I’ve been speedrunning Terraria for two years and there is no run I’m more proud of than this one. The story of why this one is so special is owed to two other runners: BandsWithLegends and MaxOverPower. BandsWithLegends found the seed used for this run after hours and hours of searching (I will talk about why it is so special later) and set a strong record WR at 1:11:04 beating the previous 1:37:36. It took three months for me to submit a run that broke this record at 1:05:03 and less than a month later MaxOverPower takes the record for himself with 1:03:32. That wasn’t enough for Max though, because three days later he submits an insane run at 1:02:03.

You can watch Max here:

Max’s run is amazing because he does a few things that no other runners are doing at the time; earning seconds by focusing on DPS. Most of the time during runs you are simply trying to get all the ingredients together that you need for a successful run. Max added all the things possible on top of that to increase his damage. Even telling to me that food was not something you could skip as it provides a 5% damage increase. The level of absolute grind and focus required to get everything to fall in place for this run has become staggering. I firmly believe that without Max there is no way that the ML record would be what it is today. I’m also quite sure that if he wanted to badly enough he would be able to reclaim his WR.

The Seed: The seed for this run is 908319048, Small, Crimson, Normal as I mentioned before credit to BandsWithLegends for finding this seed. Right off the bat this seed has a few incredible things going on for it:

An old school enchanted sword spawn

Enough iron bars for the dupe glitch in a chest

A sandstorm in a bottle for mobility

Two easy hearts

Diamonds for a lovely hook

Teleportation potions

Rubies for King Slime later

An easily accessible hive for a 7 minute queen bee & free arena

A tree that will provide a bit of extra housing on the cheap

We get our enchanted sword at 20 seconds, providing us with a great weapon for self defence and taking down queen bee.

The bars and the 2 chest themselves only a few blocks away from the sword allow us to get our dupe glitch going as quickly as we can. Which eliminates much of the farming, wood chopping, and grind that is required for a successful run.

The sandstorm in a bottle in concert with our diamond hook will allow us great mobility throughout the game so much so that wings are optional all the way up to Moonlord. With two hearts, we have max hp as soon as we get back to our dupe machine!

I’m always impressed by how powerful the diamond hook is, its reach and speed save us a lot of time on movement.

Teleportation potions are the new bread and butter of runs since you can have as many as you want. They let us get to all the points on the map that we so desperately need to visit without an insane amount of digging. It also allows you to make a few mistakes and possibly recover because of some lucky teleports.

The rubies we grab will allow us to get the slimy saddle, used for another glitch, as well as souls of night and souls of light very quickly.

Queen Bee on Expert is a really tough boss, but not so much so on normal. If we get her into the tree just right it is easy to bring her down. Especially since the hearts we grabbed earlier will put us at max hp.

The same lovely tree that has provided for us all game can be turned into two houses, or more, very quickly saving us a bit of time early on.

Glitches: Since i’ve talked about the dupe glitch a bit already let's discuss all the glitches that we use during the run. First off, if you have any questions about what is and what is not allowed consult the official rules of https://www.speedrun.com/terraria1.3.x I do not make the rules, I’m not a moderator there, I simply follow them.

The number one glitch you are probably interested in is what I call the “soft dupe” glitch: This video is kind of a poor tutorial of an early version of the glitch, but it works. I’m not sure exactly how this glitch functions but I know it depends on multiplayer, and item frames. The biggest crux of this glitch is that you need a few materials to start it off and that it cannot duplicate singular items. This is where the “hard dupe” comes in.

Just as important is the “hard dupe”. This dupe takes far longer to do, even requiring a reset of the game, but allows us to turn one item into two. This is critically important for some circumstances since the soft dupe requires two of an item to duplicate. Used smartly this glitch will propel you to a much faster “soft dupe”.

Last, but not least, is the slime mount invincibility glitch which I found from Mappy Gaming: This is a simple one that allows us to take no damage from any boss (expect moonlord). Again i’m not sure how this works exactly, I just know that it has something to do with how invincibility frames are given to the player. It is very cheap to pull off, only requiring the use of a slimy saddle, some hay and some wood. This glitch effectively trivializes all the bosses in the game with the exception of Moonlord who has his own damage frames.

The Run: First off I want to talk about the natural choke point that exists at 37 minutes. The mechanical bosses can only be summoned at night and since you cannot kill them on night one the earliest it is possible is night two which is around 37:15 depending on how you used your hard dupe or save exit recalls. Because of this effectively all the things that occur before are only preparation for that moment and the real speedrun begins the second they can be spawned. This is where high dps is of the utmost concern. Killing mechs fast will lead to a fast Plantera into a fast golem and so fourth.

So the question stands: Where did I save a minute and forty four seconds over Max’s time? At Plantera we had saved 17 seconds, setting the fastest ever Plantera and giving us the chance for the WR. This lead increased on golem kill to 24 seconds, still not huge, but on pace! A lucky TP pot here gets us to cultist before he is even available to be killed. On top of that, I had pre-built the arena for him in pre-hardmode.Sometimes the boys can take some time to spawn, but I get lucky with only a few seconds lost waiting for them. A quick flight to the right of the dungeon and back has them waiting for the pain. Suddenly I’m a minute and fifty seconds ahead of WR time. At this point unless I mess it up the record is mine. Fortune smiles on me and puts the vortex pillar, the most important, just to the right of my base. From there, and with some lucky tp pots, everything is in the bag. I still think a time improvement is possible, go out there and get sub-1 hour!

Terraria Speedrunning: If you are interested in the rules or categories in Terraria speedrunning check out https://www.speedrun.com/terraria1.3.x

The #1 place to direct your questions about speedrunning or talk to other runners is the Terraria Speedrun discord: https://discord.gg/0maR10mlOHFLnZGJ