Elden Ring speedrunners have taken a game that could take well over 100 hours for a completionist and shrunken it down to less than seven minutes. How is this possible? Well, speedrunners are a special breed that can somehow discover the most obscure glitches to skip vast amounts of what would normally be required content.
The previous world record holder for Elden Ring speedruns was Distortion2, who held the record for exactly four days. But the other thing to know about speedrunners is that they’re always trying to beat each other, and now the world record holder for an any-percent run of Elden Ring is seeker TV with a time of six minutes and 46 seconds.
Overall, seeker TV performs their run about the same way as Distortion2. The first step is using the zip glitch to go from the start of the game all the way to Stormveil Castle. In case this is your first time hearing about the “zip glitch,” it’s an exploit where you hold guard and then press forward in a specific sequence. For whatever reason, doing this catapults the player forward like they were shot out of a cannon, allowing them to bypass nearly all of Elden Ring.
From Stormveil Castle, seeker TV then skips to the Four Belfries and then takes the portal to Crumbling Farum Azul for a mad dash and another zip to Maliketh. What was previously a required boss is now nothing special as seeker TV skips this entire fight with a combination of the zip glitch and a timely save and exit.
This Maliketh skip seems to be where seeker TV makes up the most time compared to Distortion2’s, beating him by a full 15 seconds. Then it’s just one necessary death at the hands of the final boss and seeker TV is now the world record holder of Elden Ring speedrunning with a final time of 6:46.
Could this time get even smaller? The zip glitch can be difficult to perform reliably, but seeker TV seemed to be able to hit his zips fairly consistently. Perhaps a few seconds could be shaved off with this strategy, or perhaps another speedrunner will find a totally new glitch to skip even more of Elden Ring.