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Doing everything in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will take you hundreds of hours. Most casual players won’t even be able to get through the starting island in less than 3 hours, but speedrunners are already doing the whole thing in under an hour. Here’s how.
More Tears of the Kingdom Guides:
Best Healing Item Location | Rupee Farming Methods | Arrow & Bomb Farming Methods | Zonaite Farming Methods | How To Get Cold Protection | How To Respec | How To Unlock Autobuild & Camera | How To Upgrade Horses | Horse God Location | How To Unlock The Dream Home Plot | How To Easily Find Bubbul Gems | How To Unlock Gerudo Secret Club | Gleeok Boss Tips | Giant Horse Location | Hylian Shield Location | Glide Suit Locations | All Purah Pad Upgrades | All Misko’s Treasure Locations | All Divine Beast Mask Locations | Gloom-borne Illness Quest Guide
How are Speedrunners beating Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom?
The best Breath of the Wild runners have already begun to use new and old tactics to get to the end of Tears of the Kingdom. The current world record for an any% run is a 53:55 by Gymnast86. To get this time, Gymnast was playing on the unpatched 1.0 version of the game, which puts this run in a different category than the latest patch.
Gymnast and other speedrunners use exploits that have since been patch out of Tears of the Kingdom to get this insanely fast time. In a funny twist of fate, half of the run is spent on the Great Sky Island tutorial zone.
In Gymnast’s world record run, he uses unexpected routes to get the Ascend ability first, Fuse second, and Ultrahand third – opposite of the intended order. This makes up 35 minutes of the run. After this, Gymnast makes a b-line for Hyrule castle.
From here, there is a major glitch that will drop you into the Demon King’s Army encounter. After completing this, since they skipped all four temples, runners will be faced with a boss rush, which another major glitch can skip entirely. After that, there’s just two boss fights until rolling credits, which Gymnast did in under an hour.
That’s the general overview, but there are some important glitches used to explain how runners get through this route.
Item Duplication
Easy item duplication is the reason that playing on the 1.0 version of Tears of the Kingdom is faster than any other patch. This early glitch lets runners like Gymnast86 duplicate important items as many times as they want. There are a few ways that this makes the run much faster.
For starters, Gymnast uses this to create numerous wings that help him zip around the starting island quickly. He also duplicates fairies, which help him survive otherwise deadly falls and hits throughout the run. The dupe glitch is used on rubies as well, which are used for quickly defeating the Demon King’s Army and final Demon Dragon bosses.
Major Skips and Glitches
There are two major skips in the any% run of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Once you are in Hyrule castle, there is a wall at coordinates[-0237, 0793, 0072] that you need to use to perform the first major clip through the geometry the community calls “descent.”
Making sure this fall happens involves dropping and equipping weapons while pressed up against the wall in a specific sequence. You must do this six times in a row, for some reason, for the skip to properly work and skip to the final battle room in the Depths. On the way down, Gymnast stops at a platform to kill a Lynel for its bow (which he needs for the next encounter) before continuing to the bottom.
The other big skip happens right after the Demon King’s Army fight. Once the fight with Colgera starts, Gymnast runs towards the Gloom covered wall at coordinates [-0230, 0828, -2452]. He then drops a steering stick from his inventory, which allows him to clip through the wall into the next area and onto the Demon King Ganondorf fight.
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