After 8 years of being in the game I have finally added Frosty Plains and Fright Zone as their own leaderboards. Unlike the main story, there will not be individual chapter categories for either side story, since they are each only 2 chapters long and all of their levels are shorter than typical story levels. Additionally, the levels from each campaign have been added to the pool of individual levels, excluding Fright Zone's battle stages as they do not have an in-game timer (though I am open to including them if there is enough demand).

The Frosty Plains category requires you to play through all 6 levels of its campaign, starting at Frosty Plains 1-1 and continuing along the main path until Frosty Plains 2-3. As with the main story, the time star is not required for 100%. Frosty Plains runs are Hard difficulty by default, with Normal difficulty only being possible on versions 1.0.9 through 1.2.5.

The Fright Zone category requires you to play through all 6 levels of its campaign, including the two battle stages, starting at Fright Zone 1-1 and continuing along the main path until Fright Zone 2-2. The time star is again not required for 100%, however you must obtain 3 stars on both of the battle stages (ie a score of 55000 on B1 and 60000 on B2). All runs will be counted as completed on Normal difficulty.

As Fright Zone is the first campaign to require battle stages, here are the (load removed) timing rules for arenas: time starts upon releasing the go button on the vortex shop to enter the arena, and ends the moment that the arena complete message displays. To get the total load removed time for a level with multiple arenas, do this process for each arena and add up the time. (This doesn't matter for any level on the leaderboards, but all time spent watching a cutscene in the arena or watching an ad in the arena, which is possible in special event levels, is removed from the load removed time.)

Happy running everyone!

Dan the Man has been famously terrible to speedrun at top level, in part because loading times are inconsistent across devices (better devices will load faster and give a free advantage), and because if you really want to be at the top you have no choice but to get premium (either by buying it which is unfair on the users, or getting a cracked game which is unfair on the devs). We're going to change that.

As of now, all categories that require real time (Full Story, individual chapters and Prologue (new game)) will now be sorted by real time without loads (LRT) as opposed to the standard real time (RTA) that we had previously been using. (Don't worry, you won't need to try to time this yourselves. You can just submit a guess for the time with loads and leave the LRT field empty, we'll do the rest.) You will of course still be able to see the RTA time on the leaderboards and on individual runs.

There is of course the question of "What counts as a load?" Our rationale is that anything that every runner will have to experience during their runs that will always take the same amount of time will count as a load. This means that the time taken to enter a shop or watching your character's death animation should not be deducted from the overall run time, but the time spent in a cutscene or time spent waiting for the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint should since that depends on your device specs or not having premium respectively. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of what will and will not be counted as a load in story levels.

Counts toward final run time:

• Time spent with the controls or HUD visible (ie you are playing the game) except after the cutscene in 8-4-2 (you are not playing the game in this particular instance)
• Time spent entering, browsing and exiting an in-level shop
• Time spent during the revival potion animation and death animation (up until the first frame of fade-out)
• Time spent on the pause menu (and settings submenu in the pause menu)
• Time spent navigating the map (counted from the first frame that the map is fully visible to the frame after a button is pressed to leave the map, such as a chest on the map, the character selection button, back button, adventure button, survival button, shop button, or play button on a level)

Does not count toward final run time:

• Time spent watching a cutscene
• Time spent on a loading screen / black screen / fade-in or fade-out
• Time spent on menus other than the map, pause screen or in-level shop (this includes the character selection menu, costume selection menu, main menu, and all others)
• Time spent on the "No internet connection detected" screen (unless you are still able to move while this screen is up)
• Time spent waiting for an ad to load, watching an ad, or watching the cassette cutscene at a checkpoint
• Time spent on the "Revive?" screen (from first frame of player showing the damage animation to first frame after the vendor disappears from the bottom left corner)
• Time spent on the level end screen and level intro screen
• On runs that were done on low end devices on v1.6.20 and below only, time spent frozen before a checkpoint/other freeze times if it is particularly noticeable (in 1.7.0+, the game will do multiple frames' worth of calculations if it detects that it's missed frames, meaning there are technically no pauses in gameplay)
• Time spent on the hospital continue screen (normally only visible in v1.4.44 and below after dying, but sometimes appears after dying in 8-4-2;1)

In arena levels, timing is as follows: time starts upon releasing the go button on the vortex shop to enter the arena, and ends the moment that the arena complete message displays. Time that is spent doing one of the things listed in the above list before seeing the arena complete message will also be removed from the final run time.

Happy running everyone!