If you haven’t been paying attention to Elden Ring Any% Unrestricted speedruns, it’s time to get on it. The current world record is from Distortion2, and comes in at 12 minutes and 13 seconds. Just two weeks ago, the speedrunner had a time of just over 22 minutes, which means Distortion2 shaved off a whole 10 minutes in quite a short period of time. The run is also an incredibly wild one to watch, as it involves a technique known as the zip glitch. The zip glitch is a weird one, and it’s not currently known why it happens, but essentially it works like this: it’s a frame perfect glitch where if you move in a precise way while blocking, the idle animation is broken, shooting you across the map. If you watch the run you might notice that the character falls from high up, but no fall damage is received, likely because the game thinks the model has not moved upwards. This allows runners to zip across the map, skipping large sections of the game. In fact, the run currently only has one compulsory fight, a late game boss fight, though there are theories brewing on how it might be skipped. The zip is also utilised to make the final boss spawn beneath the world map, meaning it dies, so if you’re looking for a run that involves high level boss-fight play, this isn’t the one. Because the glitch is a frame perfect trick, a metronome sound has also been used to help time it, though it’s being used less as it’s been found to not be too effective. Though it was fun for a little while at least. There’s still clearly improvements to be made in places too, but they’ll likely come as the tricks are perfected.
