Assuming every shard only takes 45-50 seconds, in 100% this will save: 20-25 seconds on Dark Forest-2 30-35 seconds on Underground Temple 70-75 seconds on Frozen Mine

Overall shaving about 2:00-2:15 off. Bit of a shame though, watching the same fight 4 times (3 of them being back-to-back) is less interesting than the previous route.

Any% on the other hand barely has anything to worry about other than the 4 main stages. You will play through the first few stages as normal, going to Dark Forest-1 to grab the underwater breathing upgrade before going back to the map and finishing the 4 main stages. Then you will hit the debug room in Underground Temple, go back to map, and farm the Dark Forest-1 fight 4 times in a row before heading to Gael's Castle.

The possible times for the glitched categories are starting to get very low.

Haha was just coming to post just that, though mine uses the shrine by the secret entrance.

So this is fast enough that it should get rid of the Underground Temple, Dark Forest-2, and Frozen Mine boss fights (and frozen mine puzzle) in 100%. The Aqueducts-2 fight is still faster to do, as long as you get the 1 cycle kill.

In Any% this is going to completely remove all sub-stages except for Dark Forest-2 for the underwater breathing upgrade, and Underground Temple for the dev room.

Edit: Alright so we both found the same path from the secret entrance- seems like there couldn't be any faster way.

Very big find. There are only 4 bosses you could skip with this, as the main-stage bosses are all required to get to Gael's Castle. The time we could save in 100% for skipping each boss after collecting all the collectibles are: Underground Temple: after you collect the heart piece is about 1 minute 20 seconds. Dark Forest-2: after you collect the armor is about 1 minute 10 seconds. Aqueducts-2: after you collect the heart piece is about 25 seconds. Frozen Mines: after the final backpack upgrade is about 2 minutes.

The biggest time-save would be Frozen Mines, as it would skip the entire block puzzle before the boss. This means that in order for this trick to save any time, we would need a setup and a boss fight that in total takes less than 2 minutes to collect the extra shard on.

However, this is huge for any% as it means you only need to progress through the strength, underwater breathing, and dash upgrades. Demon Armor and Level 3 sword will be unlocked via debug room, while double jump and cape (though we'll unlock it in debug anyways) won't be needed anymore. Won't need to visit Aqueducts-2 or Frozen Mines at all in the run. Normal any% glitched time could be sub-30 minutes real-time with this.

Here's a similar skip, but this one is to skip the autoscroller in 100%.

This will change the route for the stage. Instead of going to the debug room first, quitting to map, and coming back to do the rest of the stage inbounds, we'll get the backpack first then go to the debug room and do the skip from there. All together, the stage will look like this:

Takes time spent in Underground Temple from 5.5 minutes down to 4 minutes or less depending on movement (there's about 9 seconds wasted failing to get fully out of bounds in the video).

Okay, forget that last post. Here's a better strat that goes through the debug room. The camera can get locked in place at the start of the stage, but when that happens its simple enough to use the audio from the glider to tell that you did the clip right.

Underground Temple - Diagonal zip and out of bounds clip from the first tablet straight to the final room. Entire stage completed in about 2 minutes. Skips a heart piece so it'll only be useful to any% glitched

I think it might make for more interesting runs if it's separated simply by using OoB or not, like how LttP is split into "No Major Glitches" and "Major Glitches". We're not actually keeping much extra content by not doing glitches.

The bosses we'd be fighting rather than skipping are: -Green Dog: Super uninteresting fight, you just crouch and whack the head and it dies before it actually does any of its moves. You still end up fighting the second phase normally, so its not as if the boss fight is skipped

-Albey 2: I think using flame armor to kill the first phase the normal way is better than the spear skip, but even if you do skip her, you still fight the second phase and all you're skipping is whacking at a boss too fast for it to actually do its moves

-Amargein 2: This is the only boss that you can skip that I think has a somewhat interesting normal fight, but again it's mainly just flame shield abuse. ()

-Final phase of the last boss: Again, the alternative is using the flame shield and standing inside the boss spamming hits killing him before he does any real moves. The more interesting part is the first 2 phases.

Then you have the matter of the pause bugs, used to kill 2 enemies in the game saving less than a second on each of them. The big casualty here would be having to hit one of the pulleys in Aqueducts-2 8 times without the glitch which is just a pain without using the bug, and its not as if it takes a different skill set or is impressive to do.

So we'd have -Out of Bounds: Beats the game as fast as possible, using out of bounds glitches and zips to skip sections of the game and the debug room to circumvent the demon armor fight and the worm boss.

-Inbounds: Beats the game as fast as possible while remaining inbounds. Uses quick kills on bosses, but still has to do the worm boss fight, demon armor trial, and all the extra screens that zipping skips.

I'd also suggest changing the order of the leaderboards to look cleaner. A low% run would be so tedious beating the final bosses on 3 hearts with a level 1 sword that even if somebody does end up running it, it's going to be a very long time and more of a gimmick run than anything. It shouldn't be the default tab. People should either land on glitched or glitchless 100%, since those are the categories that really make sense (and already have runs) with the nature of this game.

I think the best format would be: [Glitched] [Glitchless] [Normal] [Veteran] [100%] [Any%] [Low%]

If we should even have Low% at all (until somebody actually wants to try it) is questionable to me, I think it just makes the leaderboards look more empty to have extra categories that won't be run.

Since there seems to be some slight activity here now, I thought I'd share my simple auto splitter script I made when I first started running the game: https://pastebin.com/bMnytwX5

Save this as an .asl file, go to "edit layout" in LiveSplit, Add > Control > Scriptable Auto Splitter, and add the file you just made.

Time automatically starts right after you select which mode you're playing on, it splits on every "saving" screen, and time ends on the save screen after you kill the final boss. Makes things a bit easier, and makes your splits way more accurate.