"The holy grail of DLC skips": $10,000 Elden Ring speedrun competition blows the whole scene wide open with a new gravity-defying strategy that lets you float past bosses

An incredibly useful Elden Ring speedrun strategy that lets you walk through the air and skip through certain areas has been discovered, all thanks to a Shadow of the Erdtree bounty competition hosted by prominent speedrunner Distortion2.

The competition has a massive prize pool of $10,000 (and counting, thanks to the bonus prize pool), so needless to say, entrants have been giving it their best shots. Competitors have to adhere to certain rules, for the most part - they aren't allowed to quit out of the game in the middle of their run, for one. A few exceptions to this rule are proving popular, though, such as the new 'Legasus' or 'Sleepwalking' strategy.

"In the past few days there have been some crazy discoveries, one of which is called 'Legasus' or 'Sleepwalking,'" Distortion2 writes in the competition's Discord server. "This allows us to directly fall into the later section of Abyssal Woods, and also potentially opens up new routing options within the DLC due to the ability to fly via Lulling Branches and Torrent."

You can take a look at an example of the glitch in action below, which was first found by a player called Joo. There are a few ways to perform it, but it revolves around interrupting the animation that plays when you summon Torrent – for example, by immediately hitting a Site of Grace, or by building up the Sleep status effect on yourself. After that, you've got to make sure you don't enter your idle animation, which you can avoid by blocking with a shield. 

If performed successfully, it can be used to reach faraway areas, and from there, as long as you touch the ground, you can quit and reload the game, and find yourself in that spot. In some cases, you can seemingly launch yourself at a Stake of Marika so that even when you die from fall damage, you'll respawn in the area you traveled to. 

Distortion2 writes that "this glitch does come with some intricacies," notably requiring a stable framerate, so "fps capping/swapping will be allowed ONLY for increasing consistency of the glitch. You may also quit out while performing the glitch."

It's still early days, so we'll just have to see how far speedrunners can take the glitch, but it's already being used to bypass the Jori, Elder Inquisitor boss at the entrance of the Abyssal Woods as part of a move that Distortion2 is calling "the holy grail of DLC skips."

New Elden Ring patch just made Torrent way easier to use in frantic fights, all thanks to a tiny tweak to the most annoying pop-up in the game.