The $10,000 tournament held by Elden Ring speedrunner Distortion2 has come to an end, and the winner submitted the winning run just hours before the deadline.
For a quick primer, the goal of the tournament was to kill all Shadow of the Erdtree Remembrance bosses and Bayle the dragon at level 1 using only DLC weapons, with the additional caveat that you can only gain one Scadutree level each time you beat a boss. Runners could also use any of the items available on the premade character save files, most notably talismans. A few glitches were allowed, especially those that skip areas like the newly discovered pegasus walk, but this wasn't your typical any% clear where runners just zip to the end and kill bosses with gravity.
The winning run comes from Spicee, who one-upped second place runner Blanix in "the final hours" of the tournament, as Distortion2 announced in Discord. Spicee managed a 1:14:41 run, while second place clocks in at 1:17:05. That might not sound like much, but a 144-second lead is actually the second-biggest time gap apart from the 9th and 10th placements, with last place coming in at 1:29:14. With the way the tournament prize was divided up, Spicee will walk away $4,000 richer.
Naturally, the whole run was streamed and recorded. The opening minutes are among the most fascinating. Spicee goes for the Blade of Mercy DLC talisman, which boosts damage after a critical hit, and the Great Katana from the opening swamp. They also snag the Firespark Perfume Bottle, the Repeating Crossbow, a couple of Scadutree Fragments, and some thin beast bones to craft throwables which come in later.
Spicee submitted several other runs before ultimately taking first place, and you can see the refinement that went into their routing. The little optimizations add up to precious seconds saved. Throwing knives are used to distract some enemies in order to snag items like the Carian Thrusting Shield and Flame Spear Ash of War, for instance, with the latter coming in clutch on the Great Katana against the first two bosses of the run: the Golden Hippopotamus and the Scadutree Avatar.
With the Avatar down, Spicee grabs the Shadow Sunflower Blossom weapon and, using the materials available on the save file (named "Fun" for good measure), maxes it out. This weapon makes short work of Commander Gaius, whose arena unlocks another batch of Scadutree Fragments, and the Putrescent Knight, who gets flat-out stunlocked. As you'd expect, Radahn, Consort of Miquella is the final kill, and Spicee notes they had "insane Radahn RNG" on his attack choice. "Fourteen baby!" our long-silent runner shouts after the final blow. "Holy shit!"
Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength, two core damage-boosting incantations, put in a lot of work throughout the run. A more surprising pick is Unseen Form, a niche sorcery that makes you harder to detect – impractical in normal gameplay, but invaluable in speedruns. And if you're wondering how Spicee is able to use all these weapons and spells despite being level one, we can thank stat-boost talismans and Physick tears for that.
The aforementioned pegasus walk comes in around 1:05:00, when Spicee just skips straight to the end of the Abyssal Woods to get to Midra much faster. This method saves a ton of time, and its discovery was one of the biggest turning points for the competition.
With the tournament over, Distortion2, who jokes he "can't offer $10K all the time" in a Discord post, is offering $500, $325, and $175 respectively to the first three players who can beat Spicee's time using "the anvil route I developed."
"Quite frankly I'm not sure if three people will even claim this, but if anyone wishes they could've finished a deathless run, and wants to put all the practice they did to use, now's your chance," Distortion2 says.
"Hopefully in the future I can do a bounty like this again, and potentially even find a sponsor to endorse it! I would've loved to compete with all of you guys so having that as an option in the future would be lovely. Until next time everyone, and best of luck to anyone considering attempting the Anvil Route."
