(FWR) A Dark Room Hyper% in 30:47

Note to moderator: I am Whoname on speedrun com. Thanks! This beats the glitchless world record of 38:11 by c1nnamonFox. Update: This run brought about a brand new "glitched" category. Update 2: This run was beaten by JohannesViator with a 29:57 (1/2/26). I would've been shook at the time of my PB to know that such a time could happen. The volcanic strats shown in this video are a result of big brains and unworldly fortune. I was surprised to randomly check the leaderboard about a month ago to see a new world record by a minute. Storm's former world record seemed fast already. I wondered if any new strats had been discovered, but upon looking at the run, I honestly wasn't that impressed. I had already considered speedrunning the game again, and that gave me a little more motivation. A while ago, in scheming to beat Storm's world record, I thought of using weapon strats to save time, since the world record punch strats can be slow. There's not enough space to describe my plans, but I do think it was clever. The route wouldn't have saved a ton of time, but it would've theoretically given me a decent edge. One of the tricks used involves reloading the page, since it resets map progress while preserving obtained items. It can be used after a borehole to avoid needing to return home, which I do in this run. I also realized I could export a save of the world before exploring to avoid depleting my items while simply searching for the ship location. I had it planned out. When I revisited the game a bit ago, I found out that the game was apparently unexpectedly updated about a year ago. Most relevantly, it fixed bolas, which really sucked. Before the update, I'm pretty sure bolas was bugged, where it would stun for much longer than intended. It was the key method to defeat any enemy. With the fix, the worst enemies could still barely be defeated, except for one: the feral terror. Its damage output was simply too high. I figured this out while practicing, and I determined that I basically had to hope to avoid them, as the former world record did. It was a very frustrating setback, though, and I desperately searched for a way to bypass it. In my desperation, I stumbled upon a glitch that I will call Chronos killing. When pressing the save (or share) button during a battle, the fight will pause, but your cooldowns would actually continue. This allowed me to use a second bolas to barely survive. It was a very helpful discovery, but it hardly made the fights comfortable. I remember thinking, "If only there were a way to completely avoid battles or something." While testing Chronos killing, I had tried saving right as the battle ended, and while the screen overriding that followed was interesting, it didn't seem that useful. Thankfully, I retried it later and found that you could move around the world afterward. At first I was just confused by the bugged UI in new encounters, but when I realized what was really happening, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the trick I needed: instakill, as I will call it. It not only nullified any enemy, but also saved a lot of time by speeding up encounters. I quickly realized that I didn't need iron armor (which just so happens to be the most expensive iron tool) nor my weapons route. I decided to get the desert rat perk using reloading during the extra time, so that I could avoid needing outposts while exploring. I was excited to practice and destroy the world record, and today I did just that. c1nnamonFox is also a new speedrun com moderator, probably since Storm isn't active. My strats are still at their mercy; this run might get rejected. Nothing I do is explicitly disallowed in the rules, and I do think these techniques are relatively tame compared to ones in other games, but we'll see. This run is my second attempt of runs after practicing. Decent luck and decent execution. My first attempt was also a world record of 32:24 (there's an unlisted video that you can find in my public playlist), but my luck wasn't great and I made some mistakes, so I tried again. In both runs, I mess up the ship skip at the end, and I still have no idea why that happens. I tried to test it, but the testing didn't align with the real runs. It's unfortunate that I lost sub 30 in this run to it, but that's okay. There's also supposed to be an event at the start that for some reason no longer appears, and I don't know why that happens. It might be related to the update. Thankfully, there's enough time at the start of the run, so it's not that consequential. It's sad that I didn't get sub 30 this run, but at least I can wait for the run to get verified (or rejected) before going for it. Or I'll be too lazy to try by then. This game is fun. Hopefully there are crazier time saves yet to be discovered. I'm happy to get a world record in this game, at least for a bit. I might actually try doing 100%, since it should only take a couple of hours or less, in theory. We'll see if I'm motivated enough.