Elden Ring is a 2022 action RPG developed by FromSoftware and published internationally by Bandai Namco Entertainment, released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam. Its speedrunning identity comes from how quickly the game lets runners turn an enormous open world into a narrow, purpose built path. The early access to fast travel checkpoints, the freedom to approach challenges out of the intended order, and the depth of combat options make Elden Ring a game where planning and execution matter as much as raw movement.
Elden Ring speedruns tend to optimize three things at once: traversal through a world built for detours, rapid early power spikes that make later fights shorter and safer, and consistent boss execution under pressure. Routes often revolve around securing a small set of key tools, upgrades, or movement advantages early, then leveraging that setup to minimize required encounters and downtime. The open structure also encourages risk management. Runners weigh faster but fragile lines against slower, more stable alternatives, especially when navigation, enemy patterns, and item acquisition can introduce variance between attempts.
What makes Elden Ring distinct from earlier Souls style speedgames is the scale of meaningful routing choice. Instead of a mostly linear sequence of areas, the run is defined by intentional pathing through a wide map, choosing which challenges to engage and which to bypass, and using skips and sequence breaks where rules allow. The scene’s category ecosystem reflects that variety, with multiple leaderboard goals tracked publicly through speedrun.com, letting the same base game support very different kinds of optimized play.
Elden Ring’s speedrunning scene formed almost immediately after release, building on an existing network of Souls runners who were already used to documenting routes in public. Early attempts circulated through Twitch streams and YouTube uploads, then consolidated as the speedrun.com page went live and became the central public record for submissions, rules, and verification.
The earliest “standard” goal for a full-game run was straightforward: reach the ending and trigger the credits, with routes focused on reducing required bosses and cutting travel through a world that normally invites long detours. As the leaderboard matured, that core idea expanded into clearer category endpoints and splits. You can see that evolution in how the modern board separates completion targets like “Two Gods” and “Defeat Consort,” and how it preserves focused variants through subcategories and archives.
From the beginning, Elden Ring’s routing identity was shaped by what the game’s patch history allowed. Some of the most aggressive early lines leaned on high-impact movement and teleport style glitches, and later updates removed or altered parts of that toolkit, forcing runners to either adapt routes or adopt version policies. That pressure is a big reason the community formalized restricted and unrestricted subcategories and, at times, kept older versions in the conversation when certain techniques no longer worked on the latest patch.
Timing norms also stabilized quickly, which helped the leaderboards scale. The community’s baseline standard uses the game’s built-in timer, with the run ending when the credits appear, and runners showing the final time through accepted display methods. On PC, a community timing plugin is also recognized, while console runs rely on the stock timer and a clear post-credits proof screen.
Elden Ring’s speedrunning community organized quickly around a familiar set of hubs that many action RPG scenes already used. Run discussion and troubleshooting tended to happen in real time through Discord, alongside the everyday visibility of Twitch streams and archived videos. speedrun.com served as the public record, since it centralized leaderboards, rules, and the reference materials that new runners look for when they want to learn a route or confirm what is allowed.
That “public record” role also shaped how verification culture settled. Runners submit a run to the leaderboard with the category, time, and proof, and moderators review whether the category goals and timing requirements were met and whether the evidence supports the claim. Speedrun.com’s moderation guidance leaves room for each game’s team to set board specific expectations while still following shared standards for what verification means in practice.
Knowledge preservation in Elden Ring has leaned on a mix of curated pages and community maintained documentation. Speedrun.com’s resources and news posts point runners toward the main Discord, plus a dedicated external wiki and tools that support practice and routing. Over time, forum threads, pinned Discord references, and public guides become the searchable trail that keeps techniques, rules clarifications, and route conventions from getting lost as categories evolve.
On speedrun.com, Elden Ring’s leaderboard identity is built around a handful of clear completion endpoints rather than a single monolithic Any% board. The main families include Any%, Two Gods, All Remembrances, All Remembrances (No DLC), and All Achievements, with a separate Console hub and a DLC-focused endpoint listed as Defeat Consort. Runners typically think of these as different answers to the same question: what is the minimum required progress that still produces a verifiable “this run is complete” finish state, whether that is reaching the credits quickly, defeating a defined set of remembrance bosses, or completing a full achievement checklist.
The community largely measures performance using the game’s own timer rather than pure real time, which is why the timing standards emphasize consistency in how that in-game time is captured. On PC, runs can be timed with the stock in-game timer or a community-accepted modified in-game-time plugin, while console runs rely on the stock timer. Runs end when the credits appear, and runners are expected to show a final time through accepted proof methods such as a timer pause display or a save-file time screen.
The biggest rule decisions show up as subcategory splits that tell you which kinds of breaks the board is trying to measure. For Any% and several other endpoints, you will see subcategories such as Unrestricted, Restricted, and Glitchless, plus additional splits that isolate especially route-defining techniques, including a Zips subcategory for Any%. In practice, Unrestricted is the “anything goes” space where version and glitch freedom are part of the category’s purpose, while the more constrained boards exist to keep the run legible, comparable, and repeatable when specific skips or warps would otherwise dominate the route.
Platform and verification policies are also baked into the structure. Console runs are submitted under the Console hub and then matched to the appropriate completion endpoint and subcategory. Across categories, the baseline competitive standard expects offline play, visible HUD, and no gameplay-altering modifications, and it draws hard lines against macros or multi-action bindings while still allowing certain practical setup steps needed for timing and practice tooling on PC.
Elden Ring’s speedrun routes tightened as runners learned how to convert a vast open world into a short sequence of mandatory progress checks. Early optimization focused on travel planning, because cutting detours is often worth more than shaving seconds off a single fight. As routes matured, they converged on repeatable opening patterns that secured a small set of high-impact tools quickly, then used fast travel and deliberate checkpoint positioning to reduce long rides and risky traversal.
The biggest paradigm shifts came from discoveries that changed what “skipping the game” could mean. Techniques such as wrong warps and zip-style movement pushed the fastest categories toward radically shorter completion paths, which in turn encouraged clear subcategory boundaries so the leaderboard could preserve multiple styles of play without flattening them into one dominant route. That evolution is visible in how the board tracks distinct rule sets and even maintains archived variants when a category identity no longer matches the modern meta.
As unrestricted lines grew more technical, restricted and glitchless play developed its own kind of sophistication. Instead of relying on world-skipping tech, those routes became a study in consistent combat solutions, safe positioning, and efficient setup. Runners refined repeatable boss strategies and routing plans that trade raw speed for stability, and community guides increasingly framed the run as an execution challenge built around standardized equipment and reliable kill patterns rather than one-off improvisation.
Tooling helped make that growing complexity manageable. On PC, timing and splitting commonly run through LiveSplit paired with SoulSplitter, which reads the game’s in-game time and supports autosplitting for Souls-style runs. Those tools did not just standardize timing, they also made practice feedback cleaner by keeping comparisons anchored to the same clock.
Practice workflows matured alongside routes. PC runners often rely on offline utilities that speed up repetition, including dedicated practice tools and save management software that make it easier to drill specific segments without rebuilding an entire run attempt from scratch. Over time, that kind of infrastructure turns advanced tech from “something only top runners can grind” into shared knowledge that the wider community can learn, verify, and teach through documented setups and repeatable training routines.
One early milestone for Elden Ring speedrunning was the point where the community proved the open world could be collapsed into a short, repeatable credit roll route. The first widely recognized record era was defined by runners learning how to turn travel freedom into sequence freedom, then using high-impact routing concepts like wrong warps to remove huge sections of intended progression. That shift changed the public perception of what the game “required,” and it pushed the scene toward more formal documentation and shared route language.
A second, even more dramatic milestone came when zip-style movement and related exploit families rewrote what a fastest-category run looked like. These techniques were not just faster tricks inside an existing route. They were route-replacement tech that made whole legacy lines obsolete and forced the community to talk seriously about category identity, not just execution. When the fastest path becomes “reach the credits by breaking world traversal itself,” the milestone is not only the time barrier, it is the permanent change in what runners practice and what viewers expect to see.
As those breakthroughs arrived, another landmark was governance and standardization. Patch behavior and technique availability pushed the community toward clearer rule language and more explicit splits, so that different styles of play could coexist without constantly invalidating each other. On the leaderboard, you can see that institutional memory in the presence of structured subcategories like Unrestricted, Restricted, Glitchless, and Zips, plus archival space for older category definitions such as “Any% No Wrong Warp.” That kind of structure is a milestone because it stabilizes competition and makes verification legible to newcomers.
Visibility milestones also mattered, especially when Elden Ring began appearing in major marathon showcases. A run on a Games Done Quick stage signals that a category has become watchable, teachable, and verifiable at a high standard, even when the underlying game is massive and mechanically complex. Elden Ring’s presence at events like Summer Games Done Quick 2024, and the later novelty showcase where Dr. Doot performed an Elden Ring run using a saxophone at Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, broadened the audience beyond active runners and reinforced Elden Ring as a long-term speedrunning fixture.
Karlitto (France) — Any% (Glitchless) — 52m 38s — 2 days ago — PC / v1.07 — Death’s Poker route; a modern “post-route-maturity” benchmark that reflects how weapon choice and consistency-focused routing became central to this category family.
Distortion2 — Any% (Glitchless) — 56m 55s — 2 years ago — PC / v1.07 — Bloodhound’s Fang route; a widely watched, verification-clean run from a runner whose early Elden Ring attempts helped define what “fast but reproducible” looked like for major categories.
FirstTwoWeeks — Any% (Unrestricted) — 19m 49s — 3 years ago — PC / v1.02 — Weapon Swap/Chainsaw Glitch; explicitly labeled as the “World’s first sub 20,” and a snapshot of the early-days explosive skip discovery phase.
HYP3RSOMNIAC — Any% — 3m 56s — 3 years ago — PC / v1.04 — Wrong Warp route; emblematic of the era where single-trick routing (warps/zips/credits access) could redefine what “Any%” even felt like to spectators.
catalystz — All Remembrances (No DLC) (Unrestricted) — 1h 17m 47s — 3 years ago — PC / v1.02 — Sword of Night and Flame route; one of the clearest early “full-boss-core” standards, with a flagged Twitch VOD at risk, which is a useful reminder to archive landmark runs when possible.
Qttsix — All Remembrances (No DLC) (Unrestricted) — 1h 32m 45s — 3 years ago — PC / v1.02 — Sword of Night and Flame route; a historically meaningful reference point for the early Unrestricted shape of the category before later meta refinement.
Iridium_ore — All Remembrances (Restricted) — 2h 55m 02s — 2 months ago — PC / v1.12 — Death’s Poker/Rolling Sparks route; shows how “Restricted” categories often preserve a different kind of craft, balancing safety, damage consistency, and rule-bounded skips.
NuclearPastaTom — Defeat Consort (Glitchless) — 59m 56s — 1 year ago — PC / v1.16 — Great Stars route; an anchor run for the DLC-endpoint era, representing the community’s push to standardize a long, boss-forward finish under glitchless constraints.
Xeill — Any% (Glitchless) — 1h 11m 12s — 4 months ago — PC / v1.07 — Death’s Poker route; an example of the route lineage that sits between “established strats” and “top-end execution,” useful for showing what a strong, verifiable run looks like outside the #1 slot.
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Bandai Namco Entertainment. “ELDEN RING Patch Notes Version 1.16.” October 17, 2024. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/news/elden-ring-patch-notes-version-116
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speedrun.com. “Any% Glitchless Guide – Death Poker [EN].” Guide. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://www.speedrun.com/eldenring/guides/qb7b6
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veeenu. “eldenring-practice-tool.” Repository. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://github.com/veeenu/eldenring-practice-tool
Games Done Quick. “Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree by blanxz in 26:06 (Summer Games Done Quick 2024).” YouTube video. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhY7L1y4HgU
Games Done Quick. “Elden Ring on Saxophone by Dr. Doot in 29:22 (Awesome Games Done Quick 2025).” YouTube video. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaCvZd7iOkM
PC Gamer. Rich Stanton. “Elden Ring speedrunner slashes world record to 19 minutes, as community split over patches.” March 28, 2022. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://www.pcgamer.com/elden-ring-speedrunner-slashes-world-record-to-19-minutes-as-community-split-over-patches/
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GameSpot. Gabe Gurwin. “Let Him Solo: Dr. Doot’s Elden Ring Saxophone Run Was AGDQ’s Big Moment.” January 15, 2025. Accessed February 12, 2026. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/let-him-solo-dr-doots-elden-ring-saxophone-run-was-agdqs-big-moment/1100-6528825/