Tutorials/Speedrun

A speedrun is a play-through of a video game performed with the intention of completing it as fast as possible. Speedruns may cover a whole game or a selected part, such as completing all achievements/advancements or killing a certain boss. Players attempt speedruns mainly to challenge themselves and to entertain and compete with others. For experienced Minecraft players, speedruns add a new challenge and sometimes ignore or subvert established game principles, such as never digging straight down.

While most games have an end or definite goal, Minecraft is an open-ended game and has no specific goal or end. However, killing the ender dragon and entering the exit portal is a common goal for Minecraft speedruns. Other goals may include killing all three major bosses or earning some or all of the advancements/achievements.

Types
In addition to the goal of the speedrun, the rules can vary as well. Some of the most common types of speedruns are as follows:


 * Set seed: The player enters a known seed before starting the world, presumably exploring the world beforehand to find location of loot, nether fortress, stronghold, etc. Players might run one seed repeatedly trying to reduce the time.


 * Random seed: The player starts new world using a random seed. However, it is not against the rules to start a new world, look around for a village or other useful features and restart with another new, random world if necessary.


 * Glitched/Glitchless: The player chooses whether to take advantage of glitches in the game (which is very common in speedruns for other games) or not. In Minecraft, the most useful glitches duplicate items or blocks and many of the these have been eliminated in recent versions, so speedruns using glitches are less common in newer versions.


 * Difficulty: The player chooses the world's difficulty setting. Peaceful worlds do not spawn endermen and usually require players to buy Ender Pearls from villagers and runs in peaceful difficulty are considered a separate category from Any%.


 * Version: Minecraft speedruns are divided in three further categories according to the version used for the speedrun:
 * Pre 1.9, usually played on 1.7.
 * 1.9 - 1.15, usually played on 1.14.4.
 * 1.16+, usually played on 1.16.1.

There are also other types of speedruns. There are co-op speedruns, which is where multiple players work together to kill the dragon, All Advancement/Achievement speedruns, where the goal is to complete every single achievement or advancement, and category extensions (catexts), which are where the player tries to complete a different goal, usually obtaining an item or getting an advancement. Some catexts are All Bosses, Obtain All Sword s, Arbalistic, and How Did We Get Here?

The goal of the majority of this article is to provide guidance for glitchless speedruns on random seeds with the goal of killing the ender dragon. This is also referred to as Any% RSG.

General tips
Just as golf can be described as a nice walk spoiled by a little white ball, a glitchless speedrun can be a fun challenge spoiled by a little green pearl. Obtaining ender pearls is almost always going to be the most time-consuming part of any speedrun. Therefore, priority should always be to kill endermen, and it's never too early to get your first ender pearl. After getting a weapon, listen for endermen in any caves you explore. Especially after entering the nether, look around for endermen as you search for the fortress. Endermen can be easier to hunt in the nether because there are fewer other mobs to fight, there are frequently a lot of easy places to fight without being hit (such as standing in a 2 block high space), and they can be abundantly found within warped forests. Leaving the nether with your blaze rods and at least one pearl will help you start traveling in the direction of the stronghold right away.

Finding a village early in your speedrun will always provide a fast source of food. If you don't see a village right away, increase your render distance and head for higher ground to look around. Villages can also provide easy access to wood and cobblestone, a crafting table, and furnaces and loot if it has a blacksmith building. For your first few attempts at a speedrun, you may want to keep trying random worlds until you find a well-stocked village, or look up seeds with a village near the spawn area.

If you have plenty of iron, using shears to cut leaves can be the fastest way to get blocks for pillaring up.

Generally, you'll need a flint and steel to enter the nether. However, once you have a flint and steel you can also set mobs on fire before you kill them. This is a very fast way to get cooked meat without waiting for a furnace. This is very critical early game, but less so later as you will have time to wait for food to cook.

While it's commonly called the number one unwritten rule of Minecraft, many players consider it normal to dig straight down during a speedrun, especially early in the run. This can save a lot of time, and you will not die if you are playing set seed and dig somewhere you know is hazard-free.

Think about the items you will need and gather these along the way as many resources can suddenly become rare when you need them. For instance, you will need gravel for flint, lava to make a nether portal and snowballs if you plan to use them to destroy the end crystals. Grab these items or make a note of their location as they can be hard to find when you need them.

If you need to travel in the overworld before making your nether portal, travel east or west to increase your X coordinate. Starting further east or west in the nether can make it faster to find a fortress.

Especially when looking for important things, such a lava to make a nether portal, blazes or other nether fortress mobs or silverfish to find the end portal, turn your volume up and turn on subtitles. This will help you know when you are close and give you a hint on their direction.

Press to turn on the debug screen and always know exactly where you are. When playing set seed, this also makes it easier to find any specific block or generated structure you found before.

Two or three golden apples can be of great help when fighting the dragon. When chopping down oak/dark oak trees, look for apples and keep an eye out for gold ore when mining or looting. It's also possible to find golden apples or enchanted golden apples as loot.

TNT can be a quick way to destroy the cage around the end crystal and the end crystal itself at the same time. Place water on the ground, pillar up to the cage, place the TNT on it, activate it and drop down into the water.

Progression
Your time goal will affect your choices and your style of play a lot: if your goal is to complete the game in less than 30 minutes you won't have time to gather not strictly necessary resources such as armor, diamonds etc.

One of your first decisions may be whether to mine or not. The fastest speedruns use lava on or near the surface, a bucket and water to build a nether portal, but this means you will be traveling through the nether and killing several blaze with minimal equipment. You may want to gather some basic items, then dig down to the lava level or below to find more iron, diamonds, gold, etc. Mining will definitely increase your time, but it can also increase your survivability, up to and at the dragon. Anecdotal evidence shows that finding a nether fortress isn't affected by the Y level of the overworld portal.

Your first task is to get a full set of stone tools (the sword is optional and the hoe is only useful in 1.16). Get 4 logs from the nearest tree and craft a wooden pickaxe, then get enough cobblestone to craft the stone tools you need.

If you start near a village, hay bales are the best source of food (if you're playing a version after 1.14) as you can craft bread with them. In earlier versions you will need cooked meat, if there are pigs, cows or sheeps in the area, kill some of those, but if you didn't light them on fire first, you may want to wait to cook the meat until you enter the nether or while fighting blaze. If you're playing a version after 1.14 you might want to kill the iron golem to get some iron (4 ingots are needed to build a nether portal). Get all the beds as they will be useful to kill the ender dragon.

If you haven't spotted any lava and you don't plan to mine, you may want to gather other materials, make food, get flint or complete other necessary tasks while waiting for sunset. Once it starts to get dark, lava pools are much easier to spot from a height. Don't forget a blacksmith building has two lava source blocks if you happen to come across a smaller lava pool.

Make sure you have enough food and materials, then create a nether portal. Even if you have a diamond pickaxe, with some practice you can make a nether portal using a bucket, water and lava more quickly than mining 10 obsidian. Dig out a frame for the nether portal, if necessary, or pillar up 5-6 blocks and place your water source using the bucket. Now scoop up lava and place it next to the water to make obsidian. Keep adding lava until you have the 10 obsidian blocks in place to make the portal. If your lava makes cobblestone next to it instead of turning to obsidian, move the water source block until it's flowing next to the lava.

After you enter the nether you may want to set up a furnace to cook or smelt anything you didn't have time to before. Remember that if you leave a furnace in the overworld it will stop smelting shortly after you enter the nether so it won't be finished when you get back.

Take note of the coordinates of your portal in case you get lost.

Make sure you thoroughly understand how nether fortresses are generated and search accordingly. You are more likely to find a fortress quickly if you head east or west until X 200/-200 and then search north or south. Listen and keep an eye out for blaze and wither skeletons. Magma cubes also spawn at a higher rate in a fortress, so if you see one it might indicate a fortress nearby. Turn up your render distance, if possible, to see further. Remember to watch and listen for endermen and kill any that you find. Dig a quick tunnel two blocks high and 2 blocks back, look at the enderman and kill them from just inside the tunnel. If you travel very far to find the fortress, use torches or overworld blocks, such as cobblestone, dirt or leaves to mark your path back to the portal.

Once you find a nether fortress, you may want to search the interior first. The potential loot may help you survive the blaze and later parts of the game. A saddle is especially valuable later when you hunt endermen in the overworld. However, ultimately you want to find a blaze spawner. Ideally, you want a blaze spawner surrounded by netherrack so that you don't have to worry about blaze flying up or a ghast shooting at you. If the blaze spawner is out in the open, you may want build a quick roof and walls to keep the blaze in and protect yourself from other mobs. Building a two block pillar near the spawner can also help to block some blaze fire attacks while you kill the others. You usually want to leave with 8 blaze rods, more if you plan on making a brewing stand. If so, don't forget to get nether wart before you leave the fortress. While gathering blaze rods, you may want to keep them in your hotbar so you can see how many you have.

Finish exploring the fortress to get any additional loot, if desired, and head back to your portal. Get any items from the furnace and portal back to the overworld.

Your next two priorities are finding the stronghold and gathering ender pearls. If you have already managed to get an ender pearl, convert your blaze rod to blaze powder and make an eye of ender. Use the eye of ender to get the general direction of the end portal and start heading in the direction, unless you are in a good area for hunting endermen and it's night. It's ideal to use a triangulation calculator to minimize the number of pearls needed to find the stronghold. Write down your X and Z coordinates and the direction you are facing when looking at the eye of ender in the air (f). Two eyes of ender thrown from about 500 blocks apart in a radius around the stronghold will provide a very accurate location.

Remember that a saddle is very valuable? The fastest way to hunt endermen is riding a horse in the desert or savannah. Endermen won't spawn in the rain and therefore the lack of rain in the desert and savannah biomes is helpful. These biomes are also usually flat which makes it much easier to spot them. You can quickly ride far enough to reset the spawn, meaning you will have many more chances for endermen to spawn, riding in a large circle around the biome.

Most speedruns in the 1.9-1.15 category are played in 1.14 to exploit the fact that villagers restock immediately. Ideally you should use the 9 TNT hidden in desert temples to blow up the houses in a savanna village to get about 6 stacks of wood. Then you should craft the wood into sticks and trade them with fletchers, using the emeralds you get to level up a cleric villager, which has a chance to trade ender pearls.

Once you reach the area of the stronghold, you can start digging, unless it's night and the surrounding area is good for hunting endermen. If not, dig a pit for your horse and head underground. You might want to dig straight down, or dig stairs since you will likely be returning to the surface. Turn up your volume and turn on subtitles to help find silverfish, which spawn inside the end portal room. Strongholds can be vast, so keep track of your progress. Open wooden doors are a sign you have already been there, but use your pickaxe to remove iron doors, or else mine down the wall next to it. Use torches or other blocks to mark areas you have explored. Once you find the end portal, place any eyes you have already and figure out how many more you will need. Many players bring an extra ender pearl to teleport off the platform in the end, if necessary.

A very valuable item is a book with looting. These can be found in a few places, including libraries in a stronghold. If you find one and you have enough iron to make an anvil, this will drastically increase the number of ender pearls you can gather.

Once you have found the end portal, return to the surface the way you came or by digging a new set of stairs. Keep hunting endermen until you have enough ender pearls. During the day you can hunt for more loot in the stronghold or the overworld, gather additional resources, such as snowballs, flint to make arrows, food and golden apples.

When you have enough ender pearls to make eyes of ender and complete the frame, get ready to fight the dragon. You'll likely need good food, a water bucket, projectiles for the end crystals, blocks for pillaring up and a good weapon or several beds. Removing the end crystals is frequently more dangerous than killing the dragon. Once they are gone, killing the dragon isn't too difficult. Also, if you aren't using beds, remember that a stone axe deals more damge than a diamond sword. (Netherite swords work too, but are rarer due to the fact you need ancient debris, and ancient debris is quite rare, especially when you need four of them. You'll also need a diamond sword too, as well as a diamond pickaxe to mine it.) Waiting until the dragon is perched and jumping to get crits will kill the dragon in 3-4 perches.

After the dragon is dead, jump through the portal and check your time. How did you do?

Tower strategy
This strategy is used to gather ender pearls quickly. It is based on the fact that mobs despawn if no player is within 128 blocks and that the player, upon death, is teleported to their spawn point.

First, find a flat area in a desert, then gather some sand, at least 2 and a half stack of leaves, ladders, a chest, a lava bucket, a bed and 12 wooden slab. Then build this structure, sleep in the bed to set your spawn point but leave it immediately.

Now drop off the tower, stop your fall with the ladders you placed and place all your items in the chest. At last, kill yourself with the lava you placed. Once you respawn, drop off the tower again and look for endermen, if no one is in sight kill yourself, if you can see one look at it and enter your structure to avoid being hit by the mobs, then take your sword from the chest and kill any enderman you looked at, then place the sword in the chest and kill yourself again. Repeat the process and get all the pearls the endermen dropped.

TNT and trading strategy
This is the 1.14 strategy for obtaining enough pearls to locate and fill in the end portal. It utilizes a phenomenon in this version that lets you trade infinitely with villagers. It is risky, because there's about a 30% chance that the villager you'll trade with will not give the pearl trade. However, if you are going for a record pace, it is extremely fast, faster than killing endermen, and is worth the risk. It is also the most common strategy among speedrunners. Use 1.14.4 for this, as other versions have bugs that can easily ruin your run.

First, you'll want to get into the habit of resetting for good world. A good world for this strategy would include: A desert (even better if you can find a desert pyramid nearby) One of these: a savannah/frozen plains village, dark oak forest, or a jungle. Any village, including the same savannah village.

If you find all 3, you have a great world! First, locate and enter the desert temple. Break the block under the pressure plate so you don't set off the TNT, and then carefully mine and gather all 9 TNT. The chests will often have good loot. Next, go into the nether and obtain enough blaze rods. You can also save time by mining a lot of gravel at the start, then mine it by the spawner when there aren't any blazes nearby. Get one more than you usually would. This is so you can make a brewing stand. Finally, exit the portal and head to the savannah village, dark oak forest, or jungle. Empty or remove enough items in your inventory (about 7-12 slots, depending on what you have), and then use the TNT to blow up the trees or village. If you are in a village, head to the houses with the most wood. Blow them up by placing a block in the center of the house, placing the TNT on top of it, and then blowing it up with a button (using flint will make the villagers give worse trades- they don't realize who blew them up if you use buttons!). Gather the logs, stripped logs, and planks, and throw out anything from the houses you don't need. It is a good idea to also collect beds from the village, as beds decrease the time the end fight takes by an extreme amount.

If you use a dark oak or jungle, place the TNT closer to the top of the trees. The top area generally is more crowded with logs, and less dirt/grass will be blown up, which lets more logs be blown up. Collect at least 6 stacks of logs, which is about 24 stacks of planks, or 48 stacks of sticks. Once you have enough, head to the village, and then, if you are not on the second day yet, sleep in a bed. Find an unemployed (brown coat with no decorations) villager. Craft a fletching table, with 4 wood and 2 flint, and place it by that villager. When he becomes a fletcher, see if he has the sticks trade (32 sticks -> 1 emerald). If he does not, break the table, wait for it to become unemployed, and then place it again. Do this until he offers the stick to emerald trade.

When he does, empty some more slots in your inventory. If you do it right, this process will be quick, so you do not have to worry about your items despawning. Turn a few logs into planks, then craft them into sticks. Trade with the villager quickly by holding the shift key, and spamming the spacebar and left click. Do this over the slot where the villager sells the emeralds. This will quickly trade your sticks for wood. Once you run out, craft more sticks and repeat. You will probably have a few emeralds to spare. The best choices are arrows and bows- while you can make do without either, having at least half a stack of arrows and one bow will be great. This helps to attack the dragon and shoot at the end crystals.

Next, find another unemployed villager. Craft a brewing stand with the extra blaze rod you got, and place it next to him. This will turn him into a cleric, and you will have to level him up by trading with him until he reaches the pearl trade. Be careful doing this, as you don't have enough emeralds to just blindly trade. First, buy 20 redstone from him (buy it 10 times.) You won't have any use for this, so throw it away. Wait for pink particles to appear around him, then open his interface again. Next, buy 12 lapis lazuli. You won't have any use for this either- throw it away. Wait for pink particles, then trade with him again. Buy 10 glowstone, and hope RNG is on your side. The villager has a 2/3, or about 67%, chance of unlocking their pearl trade at this point. Scroll down the trades. If he unlocked the bottles and scute trades, then you must do the entire process again. If you are going for WR pace, the run is dead, and you must restart. However, he most likely will offer pearls. It is best to buy at least 10, and smartest to buy at least 12- there is a good chance the eyes of ender can break on the way to the stronghold, and also, there is a very high chance that the portal will not have any eyes already filled in.

If you completed this process correctly, the TNT process should take about 3-5 minutes, and the trading process should take 2-4 minutes. Overall, this is a very good choice for 1.14.4, because it should take about 5-9 minutes total.

Looting strategy
This strategy is used to obtain blaze rods and pearls much faster. Unlike other strategies, it combines the process of heading to the stronghold with the process of obtaining pearls, which is why it saves so much time. It's not commonly used, due to the amount of times you'll have to reset for it. It is best to run this in 1.14.4, because you can choose to do the trading strategy if you don't find a Looting book, weaponsmith villagers can be used for that, because they can sell enchanted iron swords. This isn't recommended in 1.16+, because there are much faster ways to obtain pearls in this version. While it was often discussed in the speedrunning community, it was brought to more people's minds by fruitberries, who talked about it on Twitter as part of a list of speedrunning strategies, and DreamWasTaken, who got a former WR with this method. Don't use this method if you are not good at PvE, as it requires attacking endermen, which can easily kill you in a few hits.

This also requires a desert pyramid. Mine the TNT and search the chests for a Looting book. Looting 1-2 will work if you're not going for WR, but if you are, it's best to reset for Looting 3. Locate a large cave, and blow up iron ore veins with the TNT. About 5-7 TNT should do the trick. It is good to also blow up at least 1 coal ore vein, for fuel. When you have collected at least 31 iron ore, it is time to smelt it. Craft furnaces with the cobblestone that got blown up with the iron, then split iron ore and coal into each furnace. When it is done smelting, craft 3 iron blocks, and make an anvil with it. You should've already crafted a sword or axe for combat, but if you didn't, craft one. You can use excess iron to make a shield, armor, tools, weapons, etc. If you have enough levels, you can enchant it now. If you don't, you can obtain some more in the nether.

Skip this part if you have already applied Looting to the sword: After going into the nether, mine enough quartz until you have 6 levels. Enchant your sword with the anvil. If you have 7 or more levels, you can name it.

Use excess TNT to blow up netherrack. It's best to do netherrack instead of other blocks because it has a very low blast resistance, meaning the TNT will be able to blow up more than if you blew up, say, stone or dirt. Use the looting sword on the blazes. This can cut the blaze fight from 2-4 minutes to 20-40 seconds. If you are on good pace, you'll be out of the nether around 10 minutes, which is when nightfall starts. DO NOT SLEEP. If you exit the nether closer to 8-9 minutes, you should go back into the nether, in search for an enderman. If you have a pearl, you can craft an eye and start going towards the stronghold. If night has started, and you don't have a pearl, search for an enderman, kill it, and head towards the stronghold.

Once you are on the path to the stronghold, search for skeletons and endermen. Make sure to memorize the path, as you will often stray off it when killing these mobs. Make sure you use your looting sword. It is important to kill skeletons, because they may drop bows and arrows. Kill endermen, crafting eyes of ender as you follow the path. If you found the stronghold and you have enough pearls, it is time to locate the portal room and fill it in. If you haven't, that's ok! Endermen spawn in strongholds because they are not well lit. A helpful hint during this strategy is to turn on subtitles and put hostile mob noises on maximum. This will help you locate skeletons and endermen.

This strategy reduces the blaze fight by at least 2 minutes, and reduces the common, TNT-trading pearl strategy by over 3-6 minutes. The downside is that this run can easily be ruined by monsters, bad endermen and skeleton spawns, and chest loot, and is almost impossible if you are bad at PvE combat.

Bartering strategy
This strategy was shown to be extremely efficient, however it is heavily RNG dependent. This is practically the only way to get a good speedrun in 1.16, because villagers barely reset their trades in 1.15+. If you are very lucky, you can get BOTH enough blaze rods AND enough pearls within a few minutes. One runner, Korbanoes, got enough pearls from just 5 gold, and set an extremely hard to beat record of 14 minutes and 56.8 seconds.

First, you want to obtain enough gold. If you found some in a shipwreck, desert temple, or other structure, you're on the right track. You don't need any gold from the overworld, however. Gold ore is found in the nether in 1.16, and you can also find gold ingots in nether fortresses and bastion remnants. All you have to do is find an adult piglin, and interact with gold in your hand or drop gold in front of it. If you are going for WR, you should drop a bunch of gold by the piglin, then kill blazes while it barters. Also, you should only give it single digits of gold bars if you are going for pearls, unless you already have a lot. Trying to mine lots of gold will take too much time. If you aren't going for WR, it is best to kill enough blazes, then barter. This is heavily based on RNG, so the amount of gold you need could range anywhere from 2 ingots to over a stack, or even more! It is best to mine gold as it barters and check on it periodically. You don't want to spend all your time mining half a stack of gold if he ends up giving you enough pearls in just a few gold. Don't just stand and wait either, because it goes both ways- you don't want to just stand there looking at the piglin, because then if he ends up taking a while to give you pearls, you could've saved time by mining some while he bartered.

Finally, even though this works in all versions, do this in 1.16.1. In other 1.16 versions, the loot tables are different, and it will take almost forever to get gold. This method isn't hard to mess up, and if you get lucky, you'll be in and out of the nether within 3-6 minutes with all of the items you'll need to get to the stronghold. Try to get beds on the way there, which will shorten your end fight.

Warped forest strategy
This strategy is not recommended stand-alone if you are going for a world record or are bad at PvE. This ties in with the Looting strategy, however, it is not required to have Looting for this. It can be very helpful if you want to get more pearls while the piglin barters.

First, look for a warped forest. It is easy to spot, with giant aquamarine trees and unnatural green foliage. When you arrive, look for and kill endermen, until you have the desired amount of pearls. If you are bad at PvE, you can pillar 2-3 blocks and then look at them to anger them, and if you are being chased by one and are low on health, you can try and jump up into a Twisting Vine to escape it.

This can take anywhere from under 3 to over 5-6 minutes, depending on spawn luck, pearl drops, skill at PvE, and whether or not you have looting.

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