As Elden Ring speedruns get faster, cheat-assisted clears are starting to crop up

Elden Ring any% speedruns are approaching the limits of the community's current methods, but some players have thought up some innovative ways to drop the time even lower – like straight-up using cheat engines.

Over the weekend, speedrunner SeekerTV set a new unrestricted any% record for Elden Ring: a scorching 6:46, a full 13 seconds faster than the first sub-seven minute clear recently achieved by Distortion 2. SeekerTV's record-breaking run polishes the well-worn "zip" method which uses carefully overlapped animations to launch players long distances, forcibly spawning and killing bosses without any actual combat. While there's still room for improvement within this method, it seems doubtful we'll see more dramatic time reductions until new glitches are found.

In the absence of any actual mechanical discoveries, some have turned to obvious cheats to speed up any% clears. Of course, even in unrestricted any% speedrun categories, you still have to play the game yourself. You can't just flip a switch in a cheat engine, clip through the entire game world, and call it a day. However, as SeekerTV pointed out in a recent tweet, a recent run – which accumulated over 150,000 views before it was pulled from YouTube – did exactly that, all while throwing up a smokescreen of markers and menu spam. 

A gag video from Mitchriz mimics the cheat-assisted clear and stresses that faked runs shouldn't take away from the accomplishments of actual speedrunners. Latching onto the joke, reputable Dark Souls sleuth Zullie The Witch shared a staggering seven-second clear of the Elden Ring menu screen. 

You can check out legit Elden Ring records on Speedrun.com, which currently separates runs into four official categories: any%, any% unrestricted, any% no wrong warp (a reference to a specific route), and routes for nabbing all the boss remembrances. 

If you're going to break the rules and camera, at least turn Elden Ring into an oddly adorable isometric game.