I'm working on a TAS for fun and recently finished World 1, so I wanted to share some notes.

You move faster on the ground than in the air, so you generally want to minimize airtime as much as possible.

Tapping B instantly kills your upward momentum. You can do this to shorten jumps and not get boosted by flowers or enemies.

You can skip the tutorial, autoscrollers, and timed levels by simply quitting out of them.

Tech for the diehard runner: landing on the corners of ledges shortly after you release B to stop flying changes the Y-position you land on and lets you slightly clip into the floor. You don't fall through and still collide with walls, so full out-of-bounds doesn't seem feasible, but you save frames by landing from jumps earlier. This may occasionally happen RTA if you're trying to make accurate short jumps up ledges since there's a few frames of leniency.

You can actually clip into the ledge you mushroom bounce onto in Tutorial 2 and walk out the other side, skipping waiting for the platform to break and saving around 1.3 seconds. However, the tutorials are skipped in the TAS.

Finished the TAS, clocking in at 37:25 by RTA timing. There is around 10 minutes of free timesave in the current WR because some levels can be skipped, but I'm surprised because there aren't really any big skips. The biggest skip is a shortcut in 5-4 that saves 40-60 seconds, all other notable tricks saving at most 10. I really wanted to find a big skip in 5-3 but couldn't find one. I hoped you could clip into a ledge near the ending flower and walk out the side with the platform for a big shortcut, but it wasn't working here. I also couldn't find any spots where you could get to the upper section from the ground.

Some useful tech I found is damage boosting. Since you generally want to be on the ground as much as possible, sometimes getting hit so you can walk through other hazards saves time. There are lots of places where this saves frames, but also some significant boosts that save seconds.

Random Notes

• Occasionally you may see the TAS land on a mushroom and walk on it without bouncing. This is not RTA viable, you do it by canceling the bounce on the first possible frame as you land on the mushroom.

• 3-5 and 5-3 have instances where clipping into the floor actually saves considerable time by getting you low enough to not be hit by falling spikes which is neat.

• Fun fact: the rocks in the ground of World 3 have collision. If you clip into the floor low enough and walk into one, you can get bumped up out of the floor or even stopped from moving forward.

Really nice!

It is so smooth, congrats on that work!

Thank you! At some point I want to basically redo the whole thing because I found ways to optimize movement toward the end of making the TAS, and it's hard to change things earlier without breaking everything. With the changes, it should definitely reach 37:1x, maybe lower.

Redid the TAS from the beginning and now have it at 37:19.683. Timesave mostly came from optimizing the earlier levels but there are also a few new damage boosts.

Redid the TAS again and lowered it by over 7 seconds to 37:12.35. This time I focused on vertical movement, mostly avoiding unnecessary bobbing and jumping on the tops of flower/mushroom/enemy hitboxes when going up. There's also a few new tricks like a different damage boost in 4-3 and a faster route at the end of 5-2.

Late into the making of this version, I unfortunately found another way to squeeze out frames, so at some point there will be yet another redo. 37:0x is close but I don't think it's likely without something major like a shortcut in 5-3.

I watched the entire 37:12 TAS and it's so satisfying to watch! A beautiful work of art, well done! ( ^-^)

Thank you! On-and-off working on the next (and hopefully final) version which I would like to be 37:0x.