Speedruns in Spelunky are continuously getting shorter. On 13th of April, Kinnijup achieved the Any% world record with the time of 1:39.716, improving the record with a bit more than 400 milliseconds. Previous record was 1:40.145 by D_Tea, uploaded to youtube exactly 40 days earlier. Any% has seen some quick improvements, since SpelunkyGod's record of 1:41.499 eight months ago.

Being the first to ever finish a run below 1:40 is an awesome feat. With a shop at the start of 1-2 containing all the necessary equipment after a good enough first level, he was on a great start. The following levels were all well balanced, some straight down, and some diagonal. They had in common that they all were finished quickly, thanks to his skill with the teleporter. The Olmec fight was nearly perfectly done, with the first bomb exploding merely some tenths of a second after Olmec stomped down, resulting in a 28 seconds long fight. If the first bomb explodes before Olmec gets the chance to stomp down, one less layer will be destroyed, resulting in a longer fight.

The end of the run had some really tight moments. The whole 4-3 was filled with enemies and traps, requiring quick reactions and level reading. Both the arrow from the arrow trap and the bullets from the shopkeeper came within pixels of killing the run. Olmec was equally scary when a blue frog spawned on his side, forcing Kinnijup to teleport upwards early.

With each consecutive world record, we are approaching the limit of the in game timer, a time of 1:30.000. The game has  several built in methods to prevent cheaters, some of which are the hardcoded lines for the timer and the score tracker. Finishing a run below 1:30.000 will just result in a time of 99:00.000 on the leaderboards. A high score of $3 000 000 was also seen as cheating before the community proved that a score that high was possible. Not long after, BananasaurusRex achieved his $3 105 850 score run from a plasma canon in a crate on 1-1.

Congrats to Kinnijup for finishing the first ever run in under 1:40 and securing the any% world record!

Krille

Hey spelunkers, another batch to go over!

First, we have denis1080 that submitted his second run, this time a first time completion on All Shortcuts + Olmec. Keep going!

Veteran BumCommando has been grinding All Journal Entries quite a bit lately and finally got the WR with a very nice 40:09. He unlocked the 114 journal entries while going over only 7 seeds! We just started keeping track of this category on Mossranking and our friend AlphaChannel released a very nice Journal Tracker which makes running this category so much smoother. I expect some activity on this category, which can be a nice change of pace from the way we usually play Spelunky.

STAR League runner Kvec finished a speedlunky Hell% run with a sweet 7:46. Nice!

SAIBOT removed another 20k penalty from his total points by finishing a 20:31 Big Money and a 22:36 Max Hell. He is very active and working hard on removing penalties. He is also very close to nailing runs in very hard categories. I think we'll hear a lot more from him! A must follow on twitch!

One of the current most impressive rise on the ranking leaderboard is Sedoxa which is sitting in 13rd place. He finished a breathtaking 12:46 Big Money where he got in touch with 3 shopkeepers He also nailed an impressive win on the April 11th Daily with a $1,852,650 score, leaving him with only the 2.5M requirement to get the subreddit champion flair! With that run, his daily average his now above the $1M mark! Awesome plays Sedoxa!

gjchangmu finished a 17:46 Hell% run. He is often streaming on twitch, give him some love on his channel.

My friend bootsthatshoot is on fire. He completed a very impressive 5:49 Hell% run and an unorthodox 13:26 Olmec finish Big Money run! He his now sitting with more than 350K points, racking up points along with a few runners that are exchanging positions back and forth in the 18-24 positions.

MikeIsMyIke keeps going and submitted a quite nice 7:20 speedlunky Hell% run. That’s the 4th Hell% run of this batch! Keep it up Mike!

Spelunker Nightharvester has been very active lately. Finishing a 25:43 No Gold Hell and a 25:59 Max Big Money jetpack-less run! He only needs a Low% Hell to get rid of his last 10K penalty. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him rise above the 600K points mark in a near future.

Kinnijup is still going strong. Two days after losing the Score world record, he ironically grabbed the No Gold record with a very impressive 2:00.311 run. A 3 seconds improvement over dtea’s run. Awesome Kinni! //

Lastly, we have SpelunkyGod’s Score world record. Krille went over his amazing run in an in-depth analysis that you can read here.

That’s it for now! /

-saturnin55

This Saturday, a new world record was broken in Spelunky. SpelunkyGod achieved a High Score of $3 445 975, breaking the previous record of $3 404 400 by Kinnijup which stood for half a year. An improvement of $40 000 may not seem like much, but with High Score being such an optimized category it is huge.

The seed started out with low mobility, only climbing gloves and a cape in 1-2. He still managed to successfully maneuver the ghost around the level over every single gem. The resources were plentiful throughout the seed, with several mattocks and a crazy amount of bombs. 72 bombs and a mattock in the 2-2 black market was really generous, made it possible to mine most gold chunks in the jungle.

The Jungle was the only weak part of the run. The rest of the areas were all above average, with the Ice Caves being craziest of them all. He managed to gain $81 000 to the previous record in Ice Caves alone, which already had good Ice Caves. The temple was also good, even though there was no chance to ghost Olmec, with the lack of altars on 4-1 and 4-2, which would have significantly increased the score. The splits can be seen here.

The most nerve wracking part of the run was 5-3, when he brought perma ghost and the Ball & Chain from the 5-2 altar to ghost Yama. The level started in a tight corner, with the ghost quickly appearing from the right side. Several spikes, a blue devil and four spike balls nearly ended the run there, but quick thinking and precise movement saved him.

All of this was done without having the Kapala, making every danger a possible threat for the run. Past the Moai Head, the health situation stayed on 6 hearts for the majority of the remaining levels, a feat on its own.

All in all, SpelunkyGod did a great job finishing this challenging seed and securing the High Score world record!

 
Krille

Hey there. We have 15 runs to go over this time!

Grooomp hit a nice score PB - 1.58 mil. It is looking more and more like he will get the coveted 3 million run. Good luck, Grooomp! He also hit a nice Hell PB, a 5:43. Lastly, he got a 10:01 Max Hell PB. Getting some solid PBs lately, Grooomp. Keep at it!

denis1080 joins the ranking with a 17:08 Any% run. Nice to have you, denis!

Linkruler nailed a solid Big Money run, a nice sub 9. He hit an 8:55. Great job, man.

Saibot got a score PB on a daily. He managed a 658k run. Keep it up, Sai!

NightHarvester has been extremely active lately, and it's great to see. For this update, he submitted a pair of All Shortcuts times. He got a 21:31 Key delivery split and a 26:43 Olmec finish. Getting close to 25 minutes here.

I (Kinnijup) had a pretty good couple days. I got a 3:47 Max Low%, a 6:07 Big Money WR, and a 4:15 Haunted Max Low% record.

saturnin55 finished his last remaining challenge run of the 15 Mosstier categories - an 18:04 Big Money run with a late cape. Nice job getting to 0 penalties, sat!

Lastly, we had a big daily happen. 3 people finished with a 2.9mil+ run, which only ever happened once before that I know of (I probably just didn't notice it in the past though). d_tea edged me out to get the highest score on it, a 3.168mil. I got a 3.159mil, and twigglefly got a 2.936mil. twiggle's score was a bit lower because he did a slightly different strat (bombed temple and CoG instead of using ball and chain) but still impressive nonetheless, and his 2nd highest daily! This daily pushed him ahead of Kenneth for a top 5 position in daily average. Congrats, twiggle! You can see the leaderboard for this daily here. Of note also is this pushed d_tea's daily average above 3.05 million! Way to go, tea!

That's all for now. Great job, everyone! /

- Kinni

The month of March has been really active in the Spelunky community! Here you can see a summary of some of the biggest highlights:

The 4th of March, d_tea achieved the world record in any% with the insane time of 1:40.145, beating SpelunkyGod’s time of 1:41.499 by a bit more than one second. He now holds the record in every speedrun category, being the 4th ever to do so (pibonacci, latedog and bananasaurus_rex being the other 3). 1-1 teleporter in a crate into a teleporter/jetpack/compass shop in 1-4 made this possible, though the seed only got faster from that point. A mixture of great skill and a seed that worked out made him able to finish this one and take home the world record!

There have been several daily challenges who have been generous with the score this month. The best one were the 20th of March, which was insanely hard to finish. The normal strategy is to save a hired help who can hold the plasma canon into 4-2, making it possible to use it in City of Gold. It was not the case here, instead heavy use of the Ball & Chain was needed to achieve the highest scores. The Ball & Chain was used from the 2-3 altar into 3-4, from 4-1 to Olmec and from 5-2 into Yama. All these early altars made the seed harder, but they allowed to ghost all bosses, significantly increasing the score. Sadly no top-runners finished the daily, with d_tea being the closest dying on 5-2 with a score of $2 847 550, while still having some of 5-2 left. If 5-3 were $140 000, it would have broken $3 300 000 and possibly achieving the place of the world’s highest daily, currently sitting on $3 301 250 by krille71 from last December.

The creator of Spelunky, Derek Yu, wrote a book about Spelunky that came out 29th of March. The book is about how he made Spelunky, design decisions and what inspired him. The book with the title Spelunky is $14.95 for a Paperback copy and $4.95 as an ebook. You can see a review of the book here.

The key to cascading may have been found, with the upgrade to windows 10. Cascading, for those who don’t know what it is, is when you place several paste bombs in one spot, where the bombs falls down the hole the first bomb made, quickly making a perfect hole. It is possible to do on all consoles, but it is glitched on a minority of the PC users, which has caused a lot of problems. A newly found strategy made the Olmec fight way faster and safer, on both any% runs and hell runs, from the use of cascading. It is therefore important that we may have found a setup that works for everyone, but further testing needs to be done before we can say for sure that windows 10 fixes the problem. Help us find out by answering this survey.

The new Olmec strategy utilizes max ranged bomb cascading. With the help of 6 sticky bombs, it is possible to make a hole for Olmec all the way to the lava, killing him really quickly. The strategy even exceeds the old TAS strategy, used in Bum's Tool Assisted Speedrun. The charm with max ranged bomb cascading is that it is even more usefull on hell runs, possibly saving more than 10 seconds on some seeds.

Three new records have been set in challenge runs, all three in the maximum categories! The first record was maximum any% in 2:10.289 by SpelunkyGod, improving his record by close to 10 seconds. The second one was maximum hell in 4:27.592 by Kinnijup, this time with an improvement of 12 seconds over his last record in the category. Lastly, SpelunkyGod took home the record in maximum low% with the insane time of 3:28.416, an improvement close to 30 seconds!

That was the highlights of March, looking forward to another active month in the Spelunky community!

Krille

Heya! Over 10 more runs to give you the run down on (see what I did there?) ...Anyway, here we go!

First up, we've got Sedoxa with some impressive improvements. He nailed a 6:11 Hell run and a 6:33 Max Low% with a tricky dark temple level. Max Low% is a great category and I'm really excited it's getting this much attention!

Speaking of Max Low%, we had two other submissions for the category. Saibot finished an 8:38 and NightHarvester finished a 14:13. This is not an easy run to complete (even at a safer pace) so these guys deserve a congrats as well. Congrats :D Saibot managed to breach the top 20 with these PBs, reaching 333k Mossranking points. Way to go, man! The activity from rank 16 to 30 is just awesome :D I hope everyone is having fun.

NightHarvester also improved his Low% PB. He's now got a 3:15! Great job, Night! The epic Sub 3 is looking more and more doable for him.

MikeIsMyIke submitted two runs the last couple days. A 6:56 Max Any%, and a 13:15 Big Money run. Hope you're having fun with all the categories, Mike! The Big Money run is also currently counting as his hell run. So he is getting some points for that, though clearly he can improve it on it's own.

ShinGraywords got some more runs in as well. A 14:56 Max Hell run ( max hell) and a 9:07 Max Any%. He now sits just under 300k Mossranking points, and just outside of the top 20 (21st).

kvec hit a new hell time, a 9:23, and a 4:06 Low% (which also counts as his Any%). Getting close to that sub 4 run. He also started streaming some of his runs, so give him a follow - www.twitch.tv/kvec

Grooomp is getting some really impressive times now. He is just on the cusp of breaking a lot of impressive berriers. This time, he submitted a 4:12 Low% No Gold run. Look like he will get under 4 soon.

Lastly, I wanted to direct everyone to 2 super impressive runs d_tea submitted. They are old runs, but deserve some attention as they only now have a section on Mossranking and are the fastest done in their respective category. They are a 2:55 Max Any% No Gold run and a 4:40 Max Low% No Gold run. Great job getting through those runs without taking gold, tea :D

That's all for now, have a nice day :D

Kinni

Hey hey hey, we've got another 10+ PBs to go over. Let's jump right in! 

Saibot got a big improvement to his Low% No Gold time, which also counts for Any% No Gold. He hit a 5:44. Saibot has been doing some impressive runs lately, including making it to Yama on Low% Hell. I think we can expect some big things from him in the future.

Grooomp finally got around to finishing a Big Money run. He did a 14:28 run to gain 10k points :D

Abob71 submitted a Max Hell% run, a 14:40. This also counted for Max Any%. Nice job, Abob!

pj submitted a nice 5:38 Max Any% PB. This category is getting a lot of attention lately as it is accessible on almost every seed. The list has 25 submissions currently, which is great for a challenge run.

saturnin55 got a 10:03 Haunted Max Any% PB. I am really glad the Haunted categories are getting more attention. They are really neat :D

Linkruler submitted a run that gained him a lot of points. He got a sub 5 Max Any% No Gold run - a 4:57! Of note is it was a normal Max Any% and No Gold PB as well. Great job, Link!

Yoshimitsu524 showed up after a long absense of PBs. He got a 24:50 No Gold Max Hell run. It counted for Max Any% and No Gold Hell%, so this run gained Yoshi plenty of points. Yoshi is one of those guys who deserves a much higher spot on the ranking than he currently has, so hopefully we will see more from him. Great to have you getting PBs again, Yosh!

Lastly, gjchangmu made an appearance this week to submit an All Shortcuts run (a 23:10) and a Low% No Gold run (a 11:43). The latter run also counted for Any% No Gold. Great to have you around, gj :D

That's all for now :D

Kinni

Hey gang, the submissions keep comin'!

AlphaChannel has always had some strong runs, and now he is working on the challenge runs. This week he did a 28:03 All Shortcuts + Olmec run. GG, Alpha :)

SAIBOT and I (Kinnijup) each got a Low% No Gold PB, 8:20 and 2:59, respectively. My run was the 2nd ever under 3, and I was very happy with it. SAIBOT's also counts for regular No Gold Any%, so he gained 20k Mossranking points removing his penalties. He's nearing the top 20 on the main ranking now, currently sitting at 22nd. Keep it up, Sai!

Grooomp hit 2 runs that helped boost him to 15th overall. He managed a 5:49 Any% Hell run and a 13:54 No Gold Hell% run (done to remove the penalty). We all knew he could do a good hell run. I have seen him die late in hell on pace for sub 5, so I have a hunch we will see more from him soon here.

curticus2 submitted a Haunted Max Any% run, a 3:18 done with the teleporter. Haunted runs are really cool and should get some more love :)

Alcoer hit a nice Max Hell% time, nearing sub 10. He got a 10:51. Nice job, Alcoer.

That's all for now :)

Kinni 

Hey 'lunkers, this news article features 6 new mosstier submissions and a big daily by Curticus! Lets get started!

 To start off, we have a 3:02.736 Any% by PJ. He accomplished this admirable time with the jetpack, compass, and mattock.

Next, we have a 23:19 AS+O by MikeIsMyIke. Way to go, Mike!

All Shortcuts + Olmec (AS+O) is a great category for people who are competitive, people who can beat Olmec, or people who need a break from grinding individual runs. AS+O was made popular by Bumcommando, and was featured in the French speedrun challenge "The Ultime Décathlon 2". Additionally, it was run at the first ever AGDQ to feature Spelunky!

Curticus did a big daily this week, scoring in at $2,560,175! This brings his daily average up to $2.2m, quickly approaching $2.5m. Great job, Curt!

Finally, we have three challenge low% runs.

First, Kinnijup getting a 4:33.683 "Haunted Max Low%" run, being the third person to ever submit a run and grabbing the Record while he was at it. Nice job, kinni! To read more about what this challenge entails, along with who else has completed it, click here!

Second, we have a fantastic 5:29.932 No-gold low% submitted by Sedoxa. This challenge is really difficult, so congratulations on the PB Sedoxa!

Last, we have the highlight of todays news. An absolutely bonkers Max low% World Record (WR) - 3:28.416 - by Spelunky_God! This run is simply incredible, featuring a 22 second worm, and an 11 second mothership. This is an improvement on the previous WR by almost 30 seconds! Wow! Congratulations SG!!!  

Thanks for reading this additions of the news. Good luck in the caves, Spelunker!

-Twiggle

Derek Yu (creator of Spelunky) has recently released a book simply titled "Spelunky". Click here to check it out!

-Twiggle

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