The pre-built warrior character can get past the start of the game really quickly, but its damage output is reliant on finding better equipment, which a wizard build would not really need. You can get the Fish Club to slaughter everything past the Cyclops, but getting past the Cyclops with starting equipment is hard and slow.

You could get some intermediate equipment like the Ronin Axe, Bastard Sword, or Spiked Club to get past the Cyclops, but you would still need to get the Fish Club to handle everything after. Getting the fish adds like two minutes, so it would be nice if we had one piece of equipment that could handle both the Cyclops and everything after.

The Elemental Mace is a one-handed mace with 230 power. Certainly strong enough to take on the rest of the game. You can buy it in Nobbler's (and Weaselnose's) shops in the dwarven area for 790 gold. It has a prerequisite of 15 sta and 5 int.

It appears in the shops about half the time. If it didn't appear first try, you can reload the autosave at the start of the room (assuming you weren't poisoned when you crossed the door) and talk to Nobbler again to reset their inventory. That process takes about 8-9 seconds, and on average you will have to do it once. You could also possibly substitute the Ogre's Club, Angel's Axe, or Turncoat's Blade, but you'd have to wait a couple extra levels before you could use them

As for the prerequisite, that's 20 total points. You start with 1 sta and int, so that's 18 attribute points. You start with 3 extra attribute points at level 1, so it takes until level 15 to get that many attribute points. However, we are guaranteed to have Zhug drop their crown, which gives +1 sta, so we can actually do it at level 14. The Elemental Mace itself also gives +1 int, which can be used to pay its own prerequisite, so level 13.

You would reach this level after getting the winch, assuming you gave Thelonious his pickaxe while in the caves. That would work, but we can do better. You really only want to get the winch once Peon tells you about the drunk orc, so you can talk to them at the same time. However, for that to happen, you must have already defeated Peon's bullies. Defeating them with the starting equipment is pretty easy, but it's slow, so we would like to have the Elemental Mace by then so we can just one-shot them.

We can equip the Mace at level 12 if we had 1 more point of either sta or int. We could get lucky and find a stamina ring in one of the chests on the way, or buy a Phoenix Feather or Bag of Fairy Dust from Nobbler as well for 120 gold.

Assuming we need to buy one of those from Nobbler, that means we now need 910 gold. You start with 50 gold. If you use the unlocking glitch to get the Rotten Wine in the chest to the right of the Village Temple's monk, you can use that to beat Zhug and sell all three of your healing potions for 480 gold. That's 530; We still need 380 more.

I looked for which set of chests along the route could semi-consistently get that much. I went with: The chest behind Waxenwicks, the chest near the entrance of the Tavern where you get Mizar's hammer, the chest in the spider cave, and the chest where you get Orlinn's Dice. Those are usually enough, but if they aren't, you can also sell the shield you got from Bart for 83 gold. If that's still not enough for some reason, you can also open the chest behind Thelonious in the rat cave, the chest next to the one you got Orlinn's dice from or the chest next to Nobbler himself.

With all that in mind, here's the route:

1, 2, 1, 1, 1 on quiz for pre-built warrior

Wilkins, Strawman, Wilkins Right Temple Chest, Monk, Waxenwicks Chest Wilkins, Manuel, Wilkins

Gate Key, Prison Hallway Ore, Mizar Temple Hallway Ore, Tavern Dwarf, Tavern Chest, Mizar Bart (level up: sta and regen), Hobbler, Klugg

Zhug, Crown, Peon, Thelonious, Spider Cave Chest, Mushrooms Orlinn, Dice, Orlinn Peon, Nobbler, Livingstone (level up: 11-14 sta, 3-4 int, luck, 1 light, regen) Three Orcs, Peon, Drunk Winch, Wine, Horn Drunk, Peon, Rubblerat

Giles (level up: luck, regen), Zombie, Giles Picture, Crypt, Giles Livingstone, Wax, Giles Boathouse, Candle, Sceptre (level up: luck, berserk)

Cyclops, Oliphant, Room of Three Oliphant, Maze Toy (level up: luck, berserk) Minotaur, Dragon (level up: luck, berserk), Warlock

I have so far managed a 42 minute run with this route.

I've spent a bit trying to determine which abilities are of any use for a speedrun. Here is the full list of abilities:

Dodge, Regeneration, Veteran, Perception, Disarming, Winning Streak Elemental, Light, Darkness, Shadow, Witchcraft Berserk, Poison Weapon, Curse Weapon, Weapon Master, Iron Skin, Shadow Acrobat Battleaxe, Great Sword, Archery, Staves Mace, Long Sword, Club, Dagger, Short Sword

Perception doesn't matter as we can just memorize the location of any traps we want to avoid or hidden treasure we want to find.

Disarming doesn't matter because we can just use the unlocking glitch for locked chests, and stepping around traps (or just taking the hit) is faster than disabling them.

Winning Streak doesn't matter as we don't have time to gamble.

All the weapon-group-damage-up abilities aren't that helpful. As far as I can tell, they add 2 points to attack for each ability point. For a lot of the smaller foes, this isn't enough to change the number of hits to kill. For the endgame bosses, 2 is just tiny compared to the weapons at that point in the game. Maybe if you have nothing else to spend your points on.

Weapon Master would be great, but the prerequisite cannot be bypassed with known glitches, so that means we actually have to have three of the non-particularly-useful weapon abilities. Even if we wanted to do that we need ability slots. A pre-built character would take until level 31 (around getting the Maze Toy) to have four empty slots, which is too late to be useful. A custom character could do it at level 21 (blowing the horn) if they spent every ability slot, but I've tried this, and it is very slow.

Dodge sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would be useful for running past enemies, but it doesn't seem to... do anything. I had a save where I let myself get beat up by various enemies with 0 dodge, then tried again with 24 dodge and I cannot tell the difference. Either its not working, or so minor so as to be useless.

Poison Weapon adds damage over time, but we don't really want to wait around for anything in a speedrun.

Curse Weapon is pretty much only useful against the Cyclops, and only if you had really weak weapons. However, weak weapons would take forever still to kill the Cyclops and strong weapons can just kill the Cyclops before its beam attack matters.

Witchcraft is just the magical version of Poison Weapon and Curse Weapon.

Darkness' prerequisite can be glitched past if you wanted to, but it just contains really expansive damaging spells. Elemental does this better.

Iron Skin doesn't help against the endgame enemies because we don't really have time to add in much armor of our own. Against early enemies its probably better to just get more Regeneration.

All those abilities can probably just be ignored. Here's all that's left:

Regeneration, Veteran Elemental, Light, Shadow Berserk, Shadow Acrobat

Usually we take damage when we rush past enemies, and Regeneration means that we have enough hp by the time we reach the next enemies to do it again. Also lets us use mana abilities more.

Veteran lets you level up more (+7-11 extra levels by the end, depending on how early you apply it), which lets you get more hp, mana, and attribute points, which are useful.

Elemental is the main reason a wizard build could make sense. Your damage is not dependent on what equipment you can find, which is good because we don't have a ton of time to find any.

Most of the Light spells are not very useful, but Light 1 allows you to convert redundant mana regeneration into faster health regeneration,

Shadow 1 can stop the green beholders from poisoning you, which is important in a luck build. It can also stop the Cyclops' beam attack. Shadow 13 can freeze enemies that are in your way so you can just shove them aside.

Berserk's give extra damage and extra speed, which is good for quickly killing things we have to kill.

Shadow Acrobat is good, but you have to save up 25 points so you can skip past the prerequisite, and I'm not sure it's worth it.

You cannot spend points in Darkness until you have Light 24, and the same with Shadow Acrobat and Perception.

If you save up a bunch of ability points, you can spend them to get 24 Light and 1 Darkness, or 24 Perception and 1 Shadow Acrobat. Then you can reload your save to get the points back, and you will still have Darkness or Shadow Acrobat unlocked without having to continue meeting their prerequisites. I'm not sure how useful either of those are, but that's a thing.

It does not seem to work for Weapon Master's different kind of prerequisite. I have not tried yet, but I suspect it would work with Elemental, Berserk, Poison Weapon, Great Sword, Battleaxe, Archery, Long Sword, and Mace's attribute prerequisites as well.

Is there something that you're supposed to do to convince the dragon to land? I just did a run where the dragon just kept flying back and forth for over four minutes.

Hey y'all. I've been practicing for a run myself and I'm having difficulty with Mountain Top North. I can make it out to the water reliably enough and make it across the mountains, but the swimming through air portion is tricky. I got it to work by copying what xDeKuScrub did in his video, but it would be nice to know what's going on there.

It seems a bit capricious. When exactly can I swim and when do I fall? When can I press a to swim and when do I just wait and float? Someone please help out here.

I was considering doing some runs for the Gamecube levels, but the rules for them are the same as the GBA rules. The Gamecube version does not have passwords, so I'm not sure how the timing should work.

Please update the rules so I know what I am doing.