So I'm not active at all in the speedrunning community, but I just discovered a glitch that could create a whole new category, but I didn't know who to contact or where to put the information, so I made this account to post here.

TL;DR, going through door 4 in 6-8 and into the autoscroller and exiting to map, backing out to a file on 5-4 and doing the 1-1 warp goes to the autoscroller in 6-8, allowing completion of the game without playing 5-5 through 6-7.

So this was done on SwitchVC and I don't have an actual cartridge to test on, I don't know if this will affect things. I was playing the game from a save state from a while ago that was on 5-2 and I played up to 5-4, decided to try the 1-1 warp and ended up in the 4-4 boss room unexpectedly. I beat the boss and it cleared 5-4 like a normal warp, and then I went back in to see if it was repeatable, and it happened again. I reset to see if that changed things and the warp went to 1-1. I played through 4-4 and then tried the warp again and it went to 4-4. So then I got to testing. I didn't test every level but I got 2-4 to work, but taking the warp brings you to the end of the 3D room and not the boss. Then I had an idea. I knew of another glitch that carried through files. Picking a non-green yoshi level, exiting, and backing out to a new save file causes the tutorial yoshi to be the color you picked, so I figured, what if this worked through files? I tested it and sure enough it did. So then I went through 6-8 to try and see if there could be a huge skip for a potential run that allowed this glitch. I tried door 1 up to the final fight and exit, did the warp, went to 1-1. So I tried door 2, and the warp actually went to the room with the key slime behind door 2, and the rest of the level functioned, albeit the autoscroller gets faster and faster and doesn't stop at the door, and the boss music starts playing again during the fadeout to the big bowser fight. Beating him started the cutscene up to the score complete screen, after which it boots to the map and unlocks 5-5, but after when time ends in the other categories. After further testing, door 4 would be fastest as I got it to work by exiting as soon as I got to the autoscroller through door 4.

In theory, a run would consist of having a complete file, starting a new one, playing up to 5-4, backing out into the complete file, going through door 4 in 6-8, exiting to map and backing out to the original file, doing the warp in 5-4, and then beating bowser. I wrote down my process of testing as I went through if anyone would want to see it.

I'd be excited to see what comes of this, but it's alright if nothing does.

Thank you for your time,

-Skylar

So I finally got around to a run (not valid because I rewinded deaths and couldn't record anyways) completely unoptimized and got a 1:34:15 which is insane. I'd love to see top level runners try this at some point.