How Speedrunners Beat Hollow Knight in under 5 Minutes: A (Brief) History of Any% All Glitches

The tricks, jumps, and strategies that make up the routes in Hollow Knight's speedrun categories always have a story behind them. As a long-time game speedrunner, nothing fascinates me more than that gradual process of discovering, understanding, and implementing the constant cycle that is constant. pushing each category a little closer to its limits and never in my two-plus years of speedrunning have I seen such a genuinely fascinating, untold story as the one I will explore today, this is the story of our Hollow Knight players who

beat

the game . In less than 5

minutes

, a story of how two clever discoveries allowed the shortest speedrun of the entire night to be cut in half;

In other words, a

brief

history

of the

hollow

knight

, any speedrun world record percentage, as you may already know, glitch speedruns are often overlooked in comparison to their non-major glitch counterparts, this mainly has to do with the fact that they generally have a higher entry bar and are considered very complicated and confusing for newer players as well as the general casual audience, because of this I will try to keep this video relatively simplified while you try to explain things with a decent level of depth, there you go, get out your wonder journals and let's get to it because you'd like to wonder about it and it's also an element in Hollow Knight, no, no, oh.

Well, then I guess my puns are too wonderful for you. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Well, I'll keep going for a while longer. Any failure rate. Speed ​​Run for Hollow Knight was played in patch 1.0.2.8 and lasted around 10

minutes

, but what allows the game to be defeated so quickly? Well let me ask you a question, what do you really need to

beat

Hollow Knights? Your usual run percentage goes like this, you get Vengeful Spirits, you get Dash, you get a Claw, and then you pick up Dream. Clove, you fight the Watcher Knights, kill Lurian, go back to get C Dash, fight Umu, get Monomon, then go to Beasten and get Hera and from there you fight the Hollow Knight in a glitch speedrun, however , you can skip almost all of that.

The requirements to beat the game end up being the three dreamers and the dream nail, in other words your requirements to enter the Black Egg Temple, but how exactly do you do this? The underlying principle of Annie's percentage running all the bugs has historically been a bug called main menu storage also sorry I need to take a second to dispel this stupid rumor I've been seeing floating around like every day. I get a comment saying that runs with

glitches

are cheating or anything that uses

glitches

is cheating, that's so stupid you know? There's a reason we have multiple rulesets for speedrunning glitches: it's to allow everyone to play however they want with even competition.

It really bothers me when people completely invalidate someone else's achievement, someone else's hard work by saying stupid like this and you know what happens if people who think failures are cheating for whatever reason? When I go into my comments and complain, honestly, do that. I really do not care. I guess you're giving me more input, very well played too. I just want to point out that glitch runs are usually much harder than major glitch runs, so what are you talking about? Honestly, yeah, sorry to interrupt the video, let's move on to the main menu. Storage or MMS is a failure of the Storage subcategory. are glitches where you manipulate the values ​​from zero to one of your player's states, for example a state like being grounded, having control of your character, having your inventory open, or being submerged in liquid, main menu storage , as it sounds, allows you to store the main menu itself. on top of the game or on top of itself with the main menu save, you can launch multiple save files on top of each other, causing a variety of strange things to happen.

Allows you to merge saved files. move progression between saved files. maintain multiple hard banks. save points to teleport to cheating rooms on top of each other, the list continues in the main menu saving is by far the most broken glitch in Hollow Knight, so broken in fact that when the old ruleset was discovered of bugs had to be broken two, one said that there was no storage in the main menu where it is not allowed and the other said that all the bugs were where they are, but how does the main menu storage work in practice until the end of 2021?

The main practical use of main menu storage had to do with keeping multiple heart saves in the bank. At the same time, in addition to doubling the dreamers in Hollow Knight, the number of dreamers you need to open the black egg temple is counted as a value of one to three. The game does not distinguish between dreamers as individuals, as long as you have three. You're set because of this, you can get the same dreamer into three separate save files and the main menu storage, merge them into one big stack that you've now reduced to minutes and minutes of traversal boss fights and all that. is needed to get between the three dreamers if you combine this with movement glitches and room trickery, there you have it, the game is over in 10 minutes.

This is obviously a very simplified version, but in a way this was pretty much what the 80 fails route looked like. As for most of the time, notable racers during this era of the category were Cry Thumb Zero Go Fast Five Brain and Enoki. Until now any percentage of crashes had been run on patch 1.0.2.8, the reason for this was that it was a very early version. of the game and many of the glitches were available to the player because mainly in this part of the game the player always had access to the quick map key which is an easy way to open his player inventory at any time and earn money .

Storing and early checking fail very easily, generally the later the patch is updated the less glitches you have access to and because of that the current game patches weren't really considered for the category it was until late 2021, where many runners began to stumble. About something quite interesting,

speedrunners

have known for a long time that main menu saving has never been patched, it was feasible in the latest version of the game and around the end of 2021,

speedrunners

realized something very clever and it has to do with the godseeker from the Godmaster DLC. mode, as you may already know, godseeker mode is the third playable mode for a

hollow

knight

save file that is unlocked after beating pantheon of the sage.

A Godseeker File launches you into God's Home immediately with every piece of equipment and every skill. Now, what happens if you launch a The new God Seeker file stores the main menu and runs a normal playback file on top of it. I think you're seeing where this is going. Speedrunners tested this and it turns out you were able to do exactly that. Hollow Knight now had a de facto New Game Plus mode, just 40 seconds into the race you can now enter King's pass with every ability in the game. How does this work? It's a little complicated, but let me explain what you do.

You channel your inner gorb and say: well, sorry, wrong explanation, the race begins when the player opens a new God Seeker game file, once loaded into the game, player C races towards the main God Home area to get a hard save from here they go back to the menu the runner then performs the main menu save by spamming through the menus with a mouse in a very specific way for those curious about how this works the first thing you need to do is open quickly the message to exit the game by pressing the lowest option in the main menu. menu by closing that menu in the same frame as you gain control you can trick the game into loading both menus at the same time, this means the player will now have two main menus loaded on top of each other.

Notice how the player has to start deleting their save file in order to get to the game start message in the bottom menu. This is why a mouse is required. You must be precise, so the player has two instances of the main menu loaded on top of each other. another one from here they open their recently created God startup file and continue creating a new save file in the second instance of the menu, so you do it like this. Notice how the mode selection window appears just as the game fades to black. It's a little hard to see, but as soon as you squint and you can barely make it out, that's when the second save file is created, the Knight loads into the house of God on the bank they were saved in with difficulty and then, like that, the opening scene of the game. plays once all the opening scenes are completed, the night is loaded into King's pass with all the skills in the game as well as two Nifty glitches, noclip and bank storage, these two glitches are achieved because actually You didn't finish leaving the bank you now have.

Controlling your character while the game thinks you are still sitting on a bench, therefore collision does not trigger and you can open your inventory and equip amulets whenever you want. Racers obviously use this in various parts of this race, there are some really interesting properties for a God Seeker file once you go out to Hollownest in the godom files team Cherry disabled things like picking up Geo because it's just not relevant to the home of God when you walk on a piece of Geo, the player will pick up the Geo without removing it from the ground, allowing you to infinitely duplicate Geo.

This is useful in the race, on the one hand, to open the deer station at the junction, which will be very useful later and not for the reason you are guessing, in short, the discovery of God. Saving the main start menu allows the player to create a de facto New Game Plus save file just 40 seconds after running, which led to a completely new route for speedrun with all the glitches. Now it ran on the latest version of the game and not In that error, you'll see that the reason glitched speedrunners often update the patch to older versions of the game is so they can have access to more glitches.

Team Cherry has fixed many of the bugs that speedrunners have used over the years, and compared to patch 1028, the race. is essentially glycerin-free, the race has now been reduced to doing the main menu save in the house of God at the start of the race and then using float and clipless to travel around Hollownest and catch the three dreamers when they reach the Hollow Knight At the end of The Runner simply equip the fastest and most powerful nail and wax the thought to death. These completely different routes only ended up being marginally faster than the previous route, but it was much easier and more consistent;

However, this new discovery led to an increase in activity in the category and the competition for the world record ended up being a three-way between Chrysum Staxis and Five Brain, all of whom raced over the following weeks. Staxis finished on top with a time of 9 minutes and 12 seconds, which at the time was 24 seconds faster. of what could be achieved with the previous route, other months passed with almost no competition in the category and just at that moment was when the second Discovery shook this category. Speedrunner Marcy August was playing on the stream on January 13, 2022 and that was when she discovered something quite interesting while playing with a deer station, she was able to control her character while selecting a deer while playing with this, she left the room while had this control early and Marcy August had discovered a way to cheat the room in the current patch of the game, as the old strategy to cheat the room had been patched years before.

Runners have been looking for a way to do this for quite some time and now room cheating is a pretty complicated topic, so I'm going to take a little time to discuss it in detail here, as outlined in the current patches. The game is achieved by having control early on a deer menu and leaving the room at the same time the game takes you away to travel with the deer. You have now entered two transitions at the same time, causing the game to load the next two rooms on top of each other connected in the bottom left corner of each room.

Now, like I said, the main reason for duplicating rooms is to give yourself the ability to duplicate dreamers, saving you minutes and minutes of travel time between Hera lyrion and monomon, but perhaps the most interesting part of this is which can actually save time in traveling to the first dreamer, as well as instead of simply traveling tothrough rooms normally or well not normally since you don't have a clip but that's beside the point, now this might be a bit complicated to understand but I'll try to explain the mechanics of room cheating in Hollow Knight and the best way. to do this is to give you a workable example of the race itself at any rate of fast failures the racer gets the deception state of the crossroads deer room, in other words they open the deer, give each other control while interacting with it, travel to Dartmouth and then exit the room at the same time as the corridor has now duplicated the Dartmouth stack room with the room outside the Stag station.

Now I know this is a little confusing, but try to think about the map and what transitions are traveling to the map. It works exactly the same way and you end up in the right places from here. The quickest way to get to monomon, which is a dreamer they will reach, is to go through the crossroads, the fake night room, the runners use a full Dash build as well as float and clipless to quickly move around the room the only things that can interact with the player are the hazards and transitions of their room once the player has gone through this transition the oldest loaded room will be replaced by the new room once they enter the next room the rooms that are loaded are the crossing guard corridor, as well as the Dartmouth deer station.

Now here come the smart pieces. Traveling through this long room will take quite some time, even with the full structure they have available, so what can they do? instead you travel back through the same transition, this replaces the Dartmouth stack room which is the older loaded room with the previous Crossroads room and most importantly the runner enters that room from the left.a clip from Five Brain, a top glitch runner where he explains this, can we get in here so the load we want to hit, uh, the load we want to hit is this one here?

We want to go to the fake night room because we're trying. To go left, we're trying to go from here to Monomon, so we want to go left through the fake night room, past the Acid Larva, and then down into the Mist Canyon. Now it would be very slow to walk straight through this. the whole room and one of the powers of the room tricks is that if you want to go left you can go left by going right and the way it works is I'm going to come back here and now you'll see because we went through En a transition to the right, we are on the left side of the room, but the charge we want to reach is still there because the other room was not unloaded, so we can go left by going right and that warps us towards the left side. of the room, this principle is repeated several times to drastically reduce the travel time between point A and point B, when the runner reaches monomon with a fooled room state, that is when the real time saving begins by entering sleep e immediately plunging into the void.

The runner can load another instance of files while keeping the dreamer's room loaded. When this is repeated three times, the runner can load three instances of the dreamer's room and two instances of files on top of each other, since they are all linked at the bottom. In the left corner of the room, the dreamers are essentially stacked on top of each other, this allows the player to simply hit them as usual, focus on their Essence and you have now collected three dreamers from here. The runners were removed to eliminate the state of the room and sleep. door back to the Black Egg Temple where they placed a dream gate at the beginning of the Race, as you can see the Blackheck temple opens even though the player has not collected Hera and Lurian, this is because the game counts dreamers by quantity and not by individual.

You can collect three dreamers, whichever they are, and the game will allow you to enter the Black Egg Temple. From here, the runner gets a bug called bank storage and enters the Black Egg Temple as they break the chains, equip a full spike construct with Fury of the Fallen, as you may remember, due to the main menu storage in the house of God, they have everything in the game including full nail and spell upgrades, the fight starts and the runners take Fury down immediately and then fight the boss as usual. It didn't take long and that was the new route for the category.

While sharing this discussion with others on the speedrun Discord, other runners went crazy and this sparked a new wave of glitchy runs. Staxis himself said that he had been looking for this for a long time. For a long time, but he had not been able to find a way to do it, he also very accurately predicted that the race would be halved anyway. The runners got to work and before a few days had passed even a new route for the race had been built. any percentage category, the two main glitch racers at the moment, staxis and five brains immediately went to work for a few days, fighting back and forth over who could get the first five-minute time on January 17, 2022 , staxis was the first.

The runner broke the five-minute barrier with a run of 4 minutes, 44 seconds and 550 milliseconds. Five brains made it too and the runners came and went a little more. Three months later, the current world record for the category was achieved by staxis a time of four minutes, 36 seconds and 480 milliseconds with five brains just 6 seconds behind and to this day that is where the category stands, but who knows, maybe a massive new discovery shakes up the category just as it has done several times in the Personally, I find it absolutely remarkable that a complicated Giant game like Hollow Knight can be beaten in just 5 minutes.

It's shocking and since January of this year I've been absolutely fascinated with the story, so before I finish this video, I want to give a big shout out to glitch runners like Marcy August 5, Brain Stasis, Enoki krytham, etc. ., many of these people help me with research and help me with questions I had and they don't get enough praise for their enormous accomplishments. in Hollow Knight also lastly I want to say that I regret not having been uploading anything. I've been trying to do a video a month but well the video just happened to be like four months ago and I've been super exhausted and tired I started the Swedish equivalent of high school and it's been stressful and stuff so I hope I have the energy to work on more videos.

I've been getting a lot of good ideas for videos, but I just haven't had the energy to make them, so bear with me, new video soon. I don't know, thanks for watching, although no, no, I must resist, I must resist, no, I will do the blue hand reveal Sr in 100K Subs.