Elden Ring Gameplay Speedrun Full Game

How to Approach Elden Ring Speedrunning

I started running Elden Ring casually after getting tired of watching streamers struggle through the same bosses for forty minutes each. Within a few weeks I had my first sub-3-hour any% attempt, then spent months grinding it down to the 2:15 range. The route is straightforward once you internalize it, but there are a lot of small decisions that compound into big time gains or losses. The basic Any% category just requires reaching the ending cutscene. You don't need to beat every boss. You don't need a specific build. What matters is knowing which bosses to fight, which to skip, and the exact sequence of moves that gets you from point A to point B without wasted frames. The current top routes hover around 20 to 25 minutes for the full game when executed cleanly, though most players doing their first organized run will land somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours depending on familiarity.

Elden Ring Gameplay Speedrun Full Game

Here is how the standard glitchless Any% route breaks down, starting from the very beginning. Exit the Cave of Knowledge and head straight for the first major checkpoint. Do not stop to level up. Do not explore the Lands Between yet. The first few minutes are about reaching Stormveil Castle and pushing through Margit, the Fell Omen, as efficiently as possible. Margit is the earliest hard gate on the route. If you can skip him via the back entrance into Stormveil Castle through Scenic Island, you save roughly three to five minutes, but that requires specific positioning and a well-timed jump off a specific cliff edge. Most people just fight him cleanly. After Margit comes Godrick the Grafted. This is a mandatory boss. Beat him, take the key item, and immediately move toward Raya Lucaria Academy. Skip Mohgwyn Palace. Skip Haligtree. Skip Malikah and Radahn unless your specific route demands them. The run is about forward momentum, not completionism.

When you reach Raya Lucaria, you have two main paths to the next gate. The direct route goes through Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, and requires you to defeat her to obtain the Great Rune needed for progression. The alternative involves skipping straight through to Leyndell by manipulating certain map transitions, but that requires frame-perfect inputs and multiple reloads if you mess up. For a first organized run, just take the direct route. Learn Rennala's second phase. Learn when to roll through her magic attacks instead of blocking. From there you head toward Leyndell, Royal Capital. This is where most runs start falling apart. The capital has multiple optional areas that look exploitable but aren't. You need to move through the eastern section, hit Morgott, the Omen King, and then proceed to the Erdtree Gateway. Morgott is mandatory. You cannot skip him in a clean Any% run. Fight him. Use fire attacks if your build allows. He is vulnerable to them. This saves roughly thirty seconds per phase compared to pure physical damage. After Morgott the run splits into the final stretch. You go through Crumbling Farum Azula and fight Malenia or Rykard depending on your route choice. Most top runners favor Malenia because her fight has more predictable patterns for speedrunners who have practiced her extensively. Rykard is faster on paper but has more RNG in his third phase. Pick one. Practice it until you can beat it without thinking.

The final boss is the Radahn boss or the encounter depending on which ending you are going for. Glitchless Any% targets the "To Be an Elden Lord" ending because it is slightly shorter. The cutscene is about forty seconds less than the other endings. This matters at the level these runs are measured at. I hit a specific wall during my twelfth attempt that nearly made me quit the route entirely. I kept losing forty-five seconds at a single transition near the border between Leyndell and the Altus Plateau. Every time I attempted the wall jump that bypasses the first group of soldiers, I would misjudge the landing and fall into a cutscene trigger I hadn't accounted for. The fix was simpler than I expected. I stopped trying to make the jump on the first attempt and instead used a single attack animation to cancel into the roll. The attack itself does zero damage to anything relevant. It just gives you the animation cancel you need to hit the correct landing zone. Once I started doing that, every run after that lost about fifty seconds at that specific spot. Here is something beginners consistently miss. Leveling up in a speedrun is usually a net negative. The stats you gain from leveling a few points into Vigor or Endurance rarely save you enough time in boss fights to offset the twenty or thirty seconds you spend at a Site of Grace. If you are running any category that requires fighting bosses, the optimal strategy is almost always to enter the first boss as weak as you legally can and rely on skips, positioning, and known attack patterns rather than raw survivability. Only invest in specific utility stats like Faith for fire incantations if your route heavily relies on them.

Another thing nobody talks about enough is RNG manipulation for boss spawns. Certain enemies in Leyndell and around the Erdtree have spawn timers tied to in-game clock ticks. If you sit at a Site of Grace and wait for the clock to tick over to a specific time, you can sometimes force a boss or enemy to spawn in a more favorable position. This takes practice. It also requires you to memorize the in-game clock. But when it works you can shave three to eight seconds off of traversal segments that would otherwise require backtracking or extra fights. For tools, the community generally uses tool-assisted speedrun records generated with emulators to plan out routes down to the frame. These are invaluable for learning route optimizations, but you should not run the actual game through an emulator on console. Speedrun.org verifies console runs, so you need to practice on real hardware. Use TAS videos for learning the route. Use a real console for the attempt. The main limitation of Elden Ring speedrunning as a category is that the game simply does not have as many consistent skip tools as darker souls games do. Dark Souls 3 has well-established skip sequences that reliable reduce boss encounters to thirty-second affairs. Elden Ring boss fights remain relatively intact even in skilled hands. This means the route is longer and there is less room for error. A single mistimed roll in a boss fight costs you more here than it would in a game with more forgiving hitboxes and i-frames.

If you are just starting out, I recommend running through the full route once without caring about time. Just learn where every skip is, where every wall jump lands, and which bosses are mandatory versus optional. Then run it a second time focused on transitions. Then a third time focused on boss efficiency. By the fifth run you should have a realistic idea of where your time is going and what parts need the most work. Recording software is helpful. Use it on every attempt. Watching your own run back reveals mistakes you never noticed while playing, like accidentally walking into a specific NPC dialogue trigger or taking a slightly wrong path at a split intersection. These things add up fast. The Elden Ring speedrunning community is spread across a few Discord servers and the Speedrun.com forums. There are active subcategories for Any% and Glitchless. Submitting your run requires video evidence and often a split log. Make sure your recording captures the full run from the title screen to the ending credits rolling. Cut videos are instantly disqualified.

Most importantly, treat the first few runs as learning experiences rather than attempts to set personal bests. The route is long enough and the consequences for small mistakes are significant enough that trying to go fast before you know the route will just teach you bad habits. Learn it slow. Run it clean. The times will come.