A typical stage progresses from the beginning to the end normally and the goal would be to kill the last enemy as fast as possible. Now, a lot of stages also have something we call killgates which are enemies which causes a “break” in the stage and you need to either kill everything when they spawn or, if there is a boss, you can trigger boss phases to act as if you killed that enemy and cause the stage to progress. How it exactly works and how the boss interacts with the killgate depends on the stage. If you wanna check if there is a killgate you can use https://map.ark-nights.com/.

After that there are 2 approaches depending on if you are trying to do an PTRS(auto) run or a manual run.

Manual speedruns like full events, SSS, IS and individual levels are faster by trying to avoid placing a lot of operators and pressing a lot of skills as the time spent can start to add up when you do that. You have to judge if trying to place stuff for dps or if avoiding steps is better in each case and optimize placement for that. New account speedruns would fall into that category but as you run with what operators you can get, you are usually more concerned with having enough to get to your goal and optimizing your resources. New accounts, IS and SSS also include going through menus quickly.

PRTS speedruns are for individual stages but annihilation is played the same way as it is using the "in-game time" provided instead of real time. For that type of speedrun, the time slow during placement and when you click on operators don't matter. Because of that, the optimization doesn't come from playing fast at all but instead, from triggering the stage to continue by acting on the killgate and finishing the last enemies both at the frame they spawn if possible. Here are some useful operators and skills to achieve that: Ash S3, Blaze S3, Fiametta S2, Firewatch S2, Horn S2 or and to a lesser extend Mlynar S3, Ebenholz S3, Ch’en the Holungday S3, Executor Alter S3. You can obviously buff your operators and debuff enemies as you see fit.

To time your run, which is optional to submit a time but can help you see how fast you are, follow the general and category rules on speedrun.com and use either :

• https://somewes.com/frame-count/

enter your files or your YouTube link, enter the correct FPS and find the starting and ending point of your run.

• https://slashinfty.github.io/yt-frame-timer/

upload your run on YouTube and follow the steps on the site to find the the starting and ending point of your run.

Don't hesitate to look at some already submitted runs if you wanna see how it works and to ask question here or on the discord at https://discord.gg/Z7wnTNeTKz if you need help for anything !