We've witnessed a handful of Elden Ring Runes speedruns already, featuring people winning the game without ever dying a single number of times in Lands Between, among other challenge runs. One person who's set records in the world for the latest Souls-like game from FromSoftware with the fastest time possible has returned with a brand new high score.



YouTuber and well-known Souls speedrunner Distortion2 shared a video that shows their record-breaking time of 18 minutes and 57 seconds. It's insane! In the latest game, Distortion2 made use of an exploit that is game-breaking called "The Zip"," which teleports your Tarnished around the map, which lets you avoid entire sections that are part of the game. According to various posts around the community on Reddit to YouTube it's difficult to determine the timing of the glitch. In order to do The Zip, you're supposed to guard and move forward at precisely set intervals, making it tough to execute with any sort of regularity. There are automatic hot keys that you can utilize to make The Zip a bit easier, however, they appear to be limited to PCs.



Aside from making frequent use of The Zip exploit--like employing it to move from the first Site of Grace to Stormhill's Stormgate within two or three seconds -- the rest of Distortion2's course is pretty well-known to any player who's participated in Elden Ring or watched any of the numerous insane speedruns. Distortion2 took a zipped route from the Stormgate Site of Grace, in which Melina provides you with Torrent and then to Liurnia of the Lakes to acquire a few items like The Icerind Hatchet for the nerfed Hoarfrost Stomp weapon skill while not bothering with all enemies they came into contact with, and sparingly using both the Wrong Warp and Zip glitches to navigate the Lands Between. Distortion2 also utilized an airborne Torrent exploit to quickly get to the Academy of Raya Lucaria, which is usually regarded as a way to get access to the Volcano Manor.



Their previous record was a sub-30 minute timed run that was 28 minutes and 59 seconds. The run was published on the 14th of March. That run was their fifth straight world record for the "Any percent" Elden Ring speedrun.



The Leaderboards on Elden Ring on Speedrun.com have been unlocked. While Distortion2's run isn't yet marked the sub-20-minute time, it is easily the fastest for any category. The same is true for the Dark Souls-dedicated speedrunning website SpeedSouls.com with Distortion2's run overtaking all the others. Distortion2 was so dedicated to their sub-20-minute run that they even noted in the description of the video through Twitter that they "changed the flight and ran 15 hours of stream" just to try and publish this incredible time.



I love watching folks perform incredible feats of gaming. That's the reason I love esports. However, the Elden Ring Items buy speedruns are becoming too for me. I'm not able to keep up! I'm hoping that someone will glitch from the beginning in the Limgrave region until the final boss and the beat the game in like, I don't know, 60 seconds.