We are roughly 80 hours into Elden Ring with the game’s end still way off in the very far distance. The game is tough okay and we’re taking our time.

Before we begin we should warn you that the videos in this story contain spoilers for certain areas of Elden Ring, notably, end-game areas. As such, we recommend finishing the game first on your own to avoid spoilers.

Given that the game has been out since the end of February and players have been able to pick it apart, we’re starting to see some truly jaw dropping speed runs of the game, particularly in categories that allow the use of glitches.

Before we touch on the glitches let’s talk about the current world record for beating Elden Ring in the “Any% Unrestricted” category.

As of time of writing (we expect this record to be beaten) the record holder in the aforementioned category is Distortion2 who completed the game in 8:56. That’s under nine minutes not nine hours and you can watch the full run below.

Okay, so you can fly in Elden Ring? Not really, but technically, yes.

Distortion2 is making use of a glitch known as a zip which requires a fair amount of compute power as it requires, nay, demands a stable 60fps frame rate with a stable 16.6ms frame time. This can be accomplished by dropping the resolution of the game but your hardware still needs to push out pixel perfect frames.

The reason for this is that zipping requires blocking and triggering the walk animation at a specific frame causing the animation to loop. We highly recommend this video from Daravae which explains the technical details behind zipping.

If you think this is crazy, it gets crazier.

A new type of zip, dubbed a mega zip was recently discovered and it is longer and pushes the player even further. You can watch an explanation, also from Daravae, below.

So how did Distortion2 manage to complete Elden Ring using these glitches, the wrong warp glitch and all while never having to hit a boss once?

To provide the simplest explanation possible, by zipping far away from the boss fight during the fight, the arena just disappears leaving the boss to fall to their doom. You may be aware that in all From Software games, falling for 12 seconds will trigger an automatic death. To avoid this, Distortion2 uses a plunge attack during his fall to extend the timer so that the boss dies before they do.

In the final fight before facing the Elden Beast, zipping into Godfrey’s arena loads the final boss in, then zipping far away enough causes both to die leaving Distortion2 at the final marker needed to trigger the end credits.

Unfortunately, zips and mega zips aren’t all that reliable as you can see in Distortion2’s run but they do seem to work and we expect sub-eight minute runs soon

For those who prefer a slightly more normal playthrough (that does still use the wrong warp glitch) check out the Any% restricted speed run record holder Muftaay’s run below.

We suppose this is one way to avoid the Godskin Duo.

https://youtu.be/OWs2Nr0isbo