If you're wanting to do a mission based speedrun, either a particular mission or a full main mission run, you'll need to be very careful to not lose your hard earned game progress.

Step 1: Turn off Steam cloud saves if you haven't already. If you're playing on steam, right click the game and go to properties. The next pop-up should have checkbox to turn off cloud saves.

Step 2: Locate your local game files. By default these files are saved in your user's documents folder. The file you'll want to save is Documents > Avalanche Studios.

Step 3: Back up and back up the back up. Make sure to COPY this file (Avalanche Studios) and save it elsewhere on your computer. I have a file labeled COTW Backup Saves. Where I have two folders, a current, and a previous save folder. I do this incase I mess up copying I have a backup I can revert to. From there, I also copied that file to a USB drive for extra safe keeping.

Step 4: Start a new game. It is now safe to start a new game. If you ever want to get all your progress back, simply copy the previous file from wherever you saved it and paste it back into your documents and replace the Avalanche Studios folder.

Step 5: If you want to do a run with your current characters stats. It's easy! Simply go to your back up saved Avalanche Studios file. From there go to Avalanche Studios > COTW > Saves > (bunch of numbers) , and copy the file labeled thp_player_profile_adf. Then copy this file into your fresh game file in your documents in the same spot (Saves > (bunch of numbers)). This keeps all your money, perks, skills, inventory, and storage for your run!

Step 6: Enjoy running the game!

Outcasts RNG time save can be accomplished by restarting the checkpoint after destroying the last satellite. What I believe happens here, is this gives the game an opportunity to catch up the RESTORATION to next to the star destroyer, as when you don't restart the checkpoint, it is still aways off. So, when it is close, it fires at the shield arrays and hits more times than when it is far off. Also I believe resetting it actually allows you to do damage to the shield arrays (though not much). (Found this out thanks to kpshizzle)

The Observatory RNG is eliminated by restarting the checkpoint after destroying the amber after finding Del. This allows the bugs inside the cave to despawn, which is important, as only some of them follow Del out otherwise. When protecting Del, make sure none of the bugs fly back into the cave (for some reason some of them like doing this?). If they fly back in there, they don't get killed in a reasonable time, thus why Del stops. Same reason he stops for the midpoint. But just ensure no bugs fly back into the cave, and you're golden on his behavior. (Thanks to TannedBatman for using the restart of the checkpoint).

Finally found a way to eliminate the dumb RNG haha.

Hello! While comparing runs, I was baffled that my new best time of 5:10 on The Cleaner was 15 seconds behind the best time. I compared the runs and was about 2-3 seconds behind since I made a few errors, but come to find out, it takes up to 10-15 seconds longer to activate a certain door with the ID10 unit. For comparison, the best time currently at 4:30 you see it takes about 5 seconds to activate that door. In my run of 5:24 at 4:44, it takes about 15 seconds to activate that door. I want to know how I can eliminate this LARGE gap in time for optimization?