Hi! Apologies if I’m not supposed to make a new thread but I don’t quite know my way around the site yet. I’m brand new to the speedrunning community (not BOTW in general) and just completed a roughly 34 minute great plateau any% bug-limited run on a stream. However, I believe I made a few technical errors and was hoping for some guidance before I submit the run.

First and foremost, I accidentally paused the timer during the cutscene where Link runs out onto the cliff edge because I accidentally pressed the pause bind while I was trying to move to the next split on LiveSplit. I noticed a few seconds later and unpaused while it was panning to the old man, but I don’t want to gain an unfair advantage if that’s against the rules. I don’t think I gained really any more than 5-10s but the margins in the 30-40 minute range are pretty tight and that could cost someone a top 75 bug-limited spot. However, I don’t want to have the trash the whole run because of that, so I’m wondering if there’s any way I can salvage it by adding an estimated time penalty or something along those lines and the run still be valid. Despite the errors and rookie mistakes I am still very proud of this run as my first practice run was all the way up at 1 hour and 2 minutes.

Also, I paused during the shrine loading screens with a gap of a couple seconds on either side (paused a couple seconds into loading and unpaused a couple seconds before it went back to player control) because I’ve heard that some emulator speedrunners use a game timer to subtract the load times from their final time. However, I was running on a normal switch through OBS and had to do this manually, since as far as I’m aware LiveSplit doesn’t support autosplits for capture card-streamed games. I was also wondering if that is against convention and/or if there is, again, a way to salvage that by docking seconds or if it can just roll.

Also, another thing I’m worried about, my splits on the timer were incorrect. I had them organized according to how I’d done my practice run and forgot to update them because of nerves (again just a rookie mistake ig) so my shrines were out of order and I skipped a split I had labeled as optional and then finished that portion under a different split. I know everyone does their splits differently so it may not matter much, but I also didn’t run through my final split on the timer because I got hyperfocused on finishing my run, but I don’t think it affected my final time. I ran the timer after I touched the ground outside again by running through the last couple splits and it added a few seconds to my final time, but I’m not worried about that.

I think that’s all, just hoping for some guidance on whether this run is salvageable or if I’d be better off just locking back in and redoing the whole run. Hoping I don’t have to because I’m not sure if I can replicate that and I’m super proud of my first proper run being so much faster than my practice run. Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Here's the link to my run video if it would be easier to give feedback based on that. As I said lots of technical and rookie errors but I'm trying my best to figure things out being brand new

Also I did just realize that I did use whistle sprint so I guess I can probably toss the run being bug limited anyways.

The livesplit timer itself doesn't matter, verifiers will re-time the run based on actual time elapsed and rank the run as such. If you accidentally pause it doesn't invalidate the run, it'll just be re-timed

Emulators are also not allowed for BotW runs, so you also don't need to worry about weird load time calculations or differences, since there are no runners using emulators. Just keep the timer running throughout the run and don't pause during load times, loads are part of the run after all, every runner has to deal with them all the same

The one thing that does potentially invalidate the run is the editing, since your video starts after pressing new game. I believe all runs need to start from the switch home screen to be valid, so you might have to reupload your run for it to be verifiable. Otherwise I don't see anything else that would make your run invalid :) gg btw

Also btw, whistle sprinting is allowed in the bug-limit category, alongside fall damage cancels. Feel free to check out the category rules for more details

I see. I’ll probably have to rerecord the run then anyway. I checked earlier and OBS tweaked out and didn’t actually record at all, it only streamed to twitch, which itself didn’t start until after the game was started. I’ll submit the existing one anyway just to see but I think I have some areas I can shave off time anyway so it probably won’t hurt to put it another run or two later today. Thanks!

Follow-up: I just finished recording a run that got split in half by a disk space error. I paused immediately and fixed it then resumed the second recording immediately from the same pause frame. Would that also invalidate the run since normally only segmented runs are allowed to have recording splits?

I noticed in the site rules that "spliced" runs could be handled on a case-for-case basis if unclear, and that submitting multiple separate videos is also allowed under certain cases, so would it be better for me to edit the the two splits together or upload them both separately and specify in the run description what happened?