Speedrunner Aurilliux
Speedrunning Highlight: Beating EarthBound live in front of 100,000+ viewers
So you’ve decided to speedrun a 30-hour game, huh? EarthBound runs are filled with potential time-saving exploits as well as potential end-running catastrophes. Sometimes the difference between ants and slugs can determine whether a speedrun’s worth continuing, and that’s just within the first few minutes of the game.
Aurilliux’s current best times are 4h 03m 39s for Any% Glitchless, and 1h 09m 20s for Any%. He doesn’t currently hold the world record, but he does know the game inside and out, and demonstrated his thorough mastery over every inch of Eagleland (and beyond) for over 100,000 livestream viewers during a 2016 charity marathon.
The road to competitive speedrunning wasn’t easy, but it didn’t hurt that EarthBound was a childhood favorite of Aurilliux’s. “My initial runs for EarthBound were quite long! I had played the game many times for fun, and figured I could probably play through the game in one go. I did a few searches online, found an old set of notes, and did my first glitchless run. It took nearly seven hours for me to finish, with quite a few deaths along the way!”
“For new runners, it can be very discouraging to have your entire party die,” says Aurilliux. “I’ve seen many runners reset because their party died, even though they easily could’ve still gotten a Personal Best (PB) time. Just make safety saves throughout the run to help mitigate your mistakes. For experienced runners, the Onett section of the game is extremely execution-heavy due to luck manipulation, or ‘RNG manipulation’. Resets are common in the early game. Due to this luck manipulation route, Ness is extremely under-leveled for the following sections, making those riskier as well.” Speedruns make heavy use of the game’s rolling HP meter, which, in the right hands, allows for Ness to defeat bosses and reach areas that would otherwise be impossible early on.
Aurilliux shares his best tips in the following pages, as well as some additional advice for would-be runners: “Speedrunning a game for the first time can be a fun (and sometimes frustrating) experience! Some streamers choose to do their first speedrun of a game “blind”, meaning they choose to do no research whatsoever. This is often amusing to viewers, but is the hardest (and potentially the most frustrating) way to get into a new speedrun.”
“When learning a speedrun, don’t be afraid to dig around and ask questions,” Aurilliux says. “Watch other speedruns for the game. Ask questions of the runners (most are quite responsive to questions regarding their runs). Some communities have put together guides to help new runners learn the basics of their games, be sure to ask around and see if your game of interest already has an existing guide. It’s very easy to settle into believing that the current route is the fastest, but small optimizations here and there throughout a long run will make a big difference in total time saved. Speaking to individual runs and improving times, no one has ever had a “perfect” run where luck has made everything go as fast as possible, so that allure to grind runs for better luck always exists. Menus are an oft-overlooked place to save time. Each menu optimization may only save a few frames, but a lot of time is spent in menus in EarthBound, and again, those frames add up quickly. Knowing exactly where items are in your inventory (as to avoid spending precious seconds searching for them) is important for the fastest times!”
Basic
Despawning Enemies
EarthBound only keeps a small number of sprites in memory at a time. Only the enemies on-screen, and those just barely off-screen, remain loaded in memory. The game randomly determines whether enemies should be spawned each time a new area is loaded into memory. By walking back and forth, and unloading and reloading an area, enemies can be removed from most areas of the game. Some areas are harder to despawn than others, due to their location, or due to the probability of enemies being generated. Very few areas have a 100% enemy spawn rate, though, so look to get rid of these random enemy encounters whenever possible. Every battle avoided is typically between 15s saved (in the event that you get lucky and run away immediately) to upwards of multiple minutes for some particularly nasty fights. Each extra fight is also a strain on your limited resources (HP, PP), so the chance of death rises with each additional extra fight. Don’t get into extra fights if you can help it!
Terrain Use
Enemies in EarthBound generally move predictably. Keeping that in mind, it can be easy to get enemies caught on trees, walls, presents, sprites, and anything else that blocks movement. This saves even more time than despawning enemies, if you can manage it! There are many places throughout a run that this can be done, but one of the most common is to have enemies that swing side-to-side, such as crows or UFOs, caught on a wall. Since they have to swing away from you in order to approach you, they’ll be stuck on the wall and unable to reach you.
Item Duplication
This is considered a glitch. Due to a quirk in the game’s programming, it’s very easy to duplicate food items. Buy one (or more) condiment item(s) (salt packet, ketchup packet, etc.). These can be found in Burglin Park in Twoson at the earliest. Acquire the item you’d like to duplicate. (Rock Candy can boost your party’s stats to very high levels, but takes too long for speedrunning. Brain Food Lunch is an excellent healing item, and can be duplicated. BFL duping was used in the older any% routes, pre-luck manipulation.) Make sure that the condiment item is “above” the item you’d like to duplicate in your inventory. Then, use the item you want to duplicate while in battle. The condiment will be consumed, but the item to be duplicated will be untouched.
Out of Bounds – The Easy Way
This is definitely considered a glitch. This exploits another quirk in the game’s programming, this time regarding how stairs work. Walking on stairs puts your party into a special movement routine, and escaping this routine in a way the programmers didn’t account for results in some unexpected behavior. The easiest way to exploit this is by getting your party killed while on stairs.
There’s no way to fight enemies while standing on stairs, though, so we have to be a bit clever.
Get all but one member of your party killed. Get the final party member afflicted with a status effect that deals damage over time (cold from zombies in Threed or a UFO in Peaceful Rest Valley, poison from enemies in Dusty Dunes Desert or a zombie dog, and sunstroke from wandering the desert are all good options). Save the game. Walk onto a set of stairs, and stay on them (prison in Threed is the earliest available set, but there are some easily accessible ones in Summers). Allow your last party member to run out of HP. At the death prompt, say “No”, then “Yes”, to go back to the file select menu without resetting. (For the first prompt, you can just press B. For the second prompt, you have to actually arrow over to the Yes option, you cannot just press A or L.) Next, load a save.
You can now move around the map while ignoring walls and sprites! You can end this by touching a door. You can load other areas of the map by using either the Town Map, if the area is within a town, or by using the Sound Stone, as long as you still have it. Move into a dark area, and use the Town Map or Sound Stone to load that area. The game’s entire map is laid out on one gigantic map, so you can get from one place to anywhere else, as long as there is a door to touch. Just remember that you can’t go out of bounds again once you’ve hit a door. You can also make a copy of the save you made earlier, and copy it into a new file. Use that file to have your party die on the stairs, and load another file, to keep going out of bounds!
Advanced
Stutter-stepping
Enemies in EarthBound have different movement patterns. In this case, it’s possible to exploit enemies that only move when the party moves. By tapping the directional pad, it’s possible to move small distances without these enemies moving at all. Experiment with the timing, but approximately six to eight taps per second is optimal for trying to skirt past these kinds of enemies. This skill is useful in the Giant Step cave to avoid antoids and rats, and very useful in the Mole Cave to avoid snakes and ants—it’s hard to despawn the enemies there but easy to stutter past them.
Out of Bounds – The Fast Way
This trick requires opening a text box while getting onto a set of stairs. However, the game blocks your controller input during the window of time where the party is walking onto the stairs. So, this requires a way for the game to decide to open its own text box, while the party walks onto stairs. Calling for Escargo Express, or ordering a pizza, and then going to someplace where the delivery guy cannot reach you, is one way to get a text box to pop up. However, it’s difficult to time those boxes properly. The most reliable way to get a text box is to use the low health prompt, when one of your party members has a status effect that deals damage over time, and their health is getting low.
This glitch often goes hand-in-hand with luck manipulation, but one area doesn’t require luck manipulation to execute this glitch reliably. In Summers, save in the Museum with (at least) one of your party members having a damage-dealing status effect, and low HP. Save as far right as possible when looking at the phone; the game saves your exact location when making a save, so this is important. When reloading the save, immediately walk out and down onto the stairs. It’s a very tight window, but it’s possible for the text box to appear right as you begin walking onto the stairs.
If done correctly, you’ll be able to walk out of bounds! In this case, however, there is one additional quirk that does not occur in the easier version of this glitch. There is an invisible horizontal line drawn by the top of the stairs (or bottom, depending on where you entered). If you pass this line in any way (by simply walking through it, or entering a door that places you above it on the world map), you are teleported back onto the stairs, and the glitch ends.
Expert
Luck or “RNG” Manipulation
EarthBound generates “random” numbers to determine what should happen in combat, how NPCs should randomly walk around the map, whether items drop in combat, and anything else that has a “chance” to happen. However, the random number generator (RNG) can be abused. The game always begins in the same state at power on; if the inputs provided to the game from power on are always the same, then the same output is achieved. There is a small amount of leniency, thankfully. Inputs do not always need to be identical down to the individual frames, but successful luck manipulation takes a lot of practice.
Current EarthBound glitchless routes do luck manipulation through all of Onett, and current any% routes do luck manipulation for most of the game. Thankfully, it’s not terribly difficult to watch a runner’s route and duplicate it, with enough practice. Just remember that if there are NPCs on screen, you cannot delay with regards to your inputs; and conversely, if no one’s HP is rolling down during combat, you can take all the time you need to do your inputs correctly.
