Thanks to everyone for playing the new level categories!

A quick update regarding the new 1-Lap categories for Taj Challenges and Wizpig 1; all 1-Lap submissions must be performed on Lap 2 of these races going forward. This allows us to use the more accurate in-game timer's printed lap time instead of doing some inaccurate math to assess what time Lap 3 would have been.

Any times submitted so far that have been performed on Lap 3 will be either rejected or resubmitted in favor for the Lap 2 time gotten in their 3-Lap personal best.

Reach out with any questions in the Discord!

Thanks!

Diddy Kong Racing's Individual Level leaderboards have been around for quite a while now, but not all of DKR's content has been available on it. This game presents a wide variety of unique challenges that are all required to be completed for full-game RTA runs, but we've never before hosted a place to track and compare the best times for every challenge in the game.

Today, that changes. Welcome to the new Levels leaderboards! Here's all the new stuff in detail.

Change notes:

• All Time Trial runs have been archived. Go to dkr64.com to see time trials!
• Vehicle specific levels have been archived in favor of IL subcategories. Click into a level to see separate categories for each vehicle.
• Silver Coin Challenges now have their own subcategory on every track in the game! (Adventure 2 coins is not yet implemented.)
• Magic Key races now have their own subcategories on Ancient Lake, Crescent Island, Snowball Valley, and Boulder Canyon.
• In Bounds for Glitchless Any% now have their own subcategories on Hot Top Volcano, Windmill Plains, and Spaceport Alpha.
• Wizpig 1 and Taj Challenges in Car, Hover, and Plane now have 3-lap and 1-lap categories. These races are essentially time trials, making 1-lap runs a valuable category to keep track of.
• Tricky the Triceratops now has a Glitchless category with Tricky Skip banned.
• Bubbler the Octopus 1 and 2 and Bluey the Walrus 1 and 2 now have their own subcategories.
• Wizpig 2 and Smokey the Dragon now have an In Bounds subcategory.
• Fire Mountain, Darkwater Beach, Icicle Pyramid, and Smokey Castle have been added as new levels! These categories will each be frame counted to ensure competitive leaderboards, as the minigames do not offer a timer.
• Many runs current and obsoleted have been moved over into the correct new level categories. Congrats to those reclaiming old WRs!

In total, these changes added up to around 37 new categories on our leaderboards. That's a lot of content! And it was a lot of work to get all of our current and obsoleted runs moved over into the new level categories. So please, if you find that one of your old runs was moved into the incorrect category, reach out to the mod team! We want our boards to be as accurate and as organized as possible.

Sometimes however, organization is not completely in our control. Speedrun.com's Level board does not discriminate against subcategories within the levels themselves. This causes a frustrating little issue on the Levels page, where subcategories that are faster than the default category will show up as being in first place...

Take Frosty Village for example.

Leah here has the fastest default vehicle time in Car with a 59.40. However, her Plane time is faster at 55.63. Even though these are completely different categories, the site does not consider them to be different and displays them both at the top. MorKs run in "3rd Place" here is also a Plane run.

While this is unfortunate, and completely out of our control, the true leaderboards still work great, and this format for our levels is the one that makes the most sense for our boards.

That's all we have to update you on for now. The new level boards are OPEN for submissions, so please feel free to submit any and all of your Silver Coin, Key, and In Bounds times!

Thanks!

Greetings, all! Lots to discuss today...

2025 Mass Leaderboard Retiming

Over the past few months, MrPonytale has been assessing the entirety of our leaderboard, frame counting every single submission, hunting for VOD reuploads and dead links, and keeping track of incorrect dates, versions, EverDrive runs and everything in between. This is an incredible amount of work, but thanks to Pony, we should now have an excessively accurate board spanning all the way back to the very beginning of DKR's time here on Speedrun.com.

The vast majority of retiming runs resulted in a one second time save. So congratulations to everyone who PB'd by one second this weekend! This time save is typically due to inaccuracies in starting/stopping the timer. When frame counted, these little discrepancies often knock you up or down a few milliseconds. Since most of our boards do not measure in milliseconds, we get to award you a tiny bit of time save. Or, time loss, in some cases! You can see every retime for every category here.

Along with these updates, all Emulator runs submitted long ago have been removed from the boards. These runs were not wholesale deleted, but instead just retroactively rejected. This allows moderators to hold onto board history while also making sure placement is kept accurate. DKR remains a console only SRC board.

Going forward, the mod team will be retiming all submitted runs using a retiming tool such as somewes's Frame Count tool, or the YouTube Frame Timer. If you'd like to perform this retiming yourself, you can do so very easily by following Pony's DKR Retiming Tutorial.

Twitch VOD Deletion

Many runners submit their RTA PBs by way of Twitch Highlights, and unfortunately, Twitch has decided to implement a 100 hour storage limit across Highlights and Uploads. So for those of us who have been streaming and speedrunning for a long time, some of our oldest times could be at risk of getting deleted starting April 19, 2025.

As we went through and retimed everything, we did find some individuals with PB VODs at risk of being deleted. These individuals have been messaged through Speedrun.com's messaging app. Should they be unable to to export their PB VODs to YouTube and resubmit/supply the mod team with new VOD links, it's very likely they will lose all record of their PB.

Please note, this does not mean we will be deleting your time from the leaderboard if you are unable to save the VOD before deletion. However, it's not unlikely that the next time our mod team does an audit of the leaderboard like this mass retiming project, these runs will be hidden or rejected for failing to provide video proof of the run.

In general, our entire mod team highly recommends all runners to export their PB VODs to YouTube. This will ensure your runs stay on the boards for as long as possible. If you need help in saving your old speedrunning VODs, our community would be happy to help. Please reach out to the mod team on Discord or via Speedrun.com, and we'll see what we can do to keep your run up to date.

Thanks for reading!

Hello hello,

It's very exciting to have completed the fourth tutorial video of 2024, our first ever Plane tutorial. While many different demonstration and tutorial videos have been made for a wide variety of DKR techniques and strategies, I think this is the first video made that is fully dedicated to the Plane in detail. Not to mention, alongside the Car and Hover tutorial videos, we now have a full suite of "how to play" vehicle content for new players!

I especially want to give a special thanks to the whole community of DKR gamers that helped with this process, from reading my wordy scripts to reviewing the video drafts, you all played a pivotal role in helping create this, and my hope is that these videos will have an exceptional lifespan as a result of your hard work.

Another extremely exciting project that is in the works alongside new monthly tutorials is the translation of our videos into a variety of different languages! I can't stress enough how awesome this is. With the generous efforts of players from around our community, each DKR tutorial will eventually offer subtitled translations in Spanish, German, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Japanese. Our hope is that this project will extend the lifespan of these videos even further, helping Diddy Kong Racing players around the world learn to play the game in its speediest fashion for many years to come.

If you or anyone else you know is bilingual and could help us in this project, please reach out to one of our Discord mods! These are long scripts, and will take a lot of time and effort to translate, so the more help we have, the better!

Check out the full DKR Basics playlist here: DKR Basics - YouTube

Thanks all!

Just a few months ago, the All Bosses category was added to our miscellaneous leaderboards, and it's already seeing a few new discoveries that warrant a quick revisit to the rules in order to clarify some things.

On all boss races in a completed Adventure Mode file, you can do a cutscene skip on the final frame of the race to avoid the long fade out sequence that plays after you win. This saves a substantial amount of time on races like Wizpig 1, where the console needs to be reset in order to skip the credits sequence. In short, the ability to cutscene skip opens up a lot of new opportunities for time save for All Bosses. This makes the category both more flexible in its routing, and more difficult in its execution, making for a more competitive leaderboard in the long run.

It's important to address some of the concerns brought up as well. In normal full game runs, these skips are not possible, since Adventure Mode boss progression isn't saved until the frame after the race is won. So, is the boss really "beaten" if progression in Adventure Mode is not saved? In the case of All Bosses, it's required you run the category on a file that has already been completed. In this case, there is no progression being saved. For this reason, we've decided to allow cutscene skips in All Bosses. As long as you see that big gold "1st" show up, you've beaten the boss!

Remember as well, cutscene skips are not required to play the category and enjoy it. You can route All Bosses any way that works best for you. It's one of the best things about this category! That, and the Wizpig 1 practice...

DKR has been in need of beginner tutorials for a very long time, and this year, we're hoping to address that need in it's entirety. Let's start off the year by demystifying one of Adventure Mode's most frustrating skips - Tricky Skip.

Have questions or are confused about something in the tutorial? Reach out to the community in the Discord, or leave a comment on the video!

It's been a very long time since the Diddy Kong Racing Speedrun.com boards have seen new RTA categories. Over the past month however, the DKR mod team took some time to review all the ideas for categories that have been put forward over the years and find out which of them the community really wanted to see made into a moderated leaderboard.

As it turned out, the community wanted nearly all of them! We're very excited to introduce six new misc. category leaderboards;

• Individual Trophy Races
• Any% Glitchless
• True 100%
• T.T. Amulet
• All Bosses
• All Characters 100%

Only one of the ideas did not make it to the boards, which was Individual World Segments. While the idea has a lot going for it, it's unclear at this time how exactly an idea like this should manifest itself into a real category. For now however, we're very happy with this expansion of categories, and can't wait to see more players trying out the new runs.