A huge Starfield speedrunning breakthrough came about thanks to a YouTube commenter who discovered a skip by accident.
We've already seen Starfield beaten in under three hours in 'glitchless' runs, where glitches and other hacks aren't permitted. A recurring problem for speedrunners, though, is that an animation where the train in New Atlantis leaves the station adds seconds, and potentially even minutes onto a speedrun, since the player has to repeatedly use the train during a playthrough.
Just over three months removed from launch, there's finally a workaround for the pesky train. In the tweet below, a Twitter user reports that a YouTube user, commenting on a Starfield speedrun, suggests jumping in front of the train and activating the train's fast travel menu, as this will entirely eliminate the scene where the train leaves the station.
Starfield speedrunning has a new timesave thanks to a YouTube commenter. pic.twitter.com/w5hPKIRBT2December 16, 2023
Everyone's pretty shocked by the revelation - including the YouTube commenter themselves, who says on Twitter that they just assumed everyone already knew about the method. It turns out literally no one apart from the commenter knew about the method, and now it's going around the Starfield speedrunning community en masse.
You can see the end result just below. The YouTuber, who also happens to be a speedrunner, jumps straight in front of the train in New Atlantis and uses its fast travel menu to propel themselves to a new district. There's no animation for the train leaving the station whatsoever.
The current glitchless Starfield speedrunning record stands at one hour, 37 minutes, and 24 seconds, according to speedrun.com. We could be about to see that time drop to below the 37 minute mark, depending on how quickly the speedrunning community gets to grips with the new skip.
Starfield is getting new patches every six weeks, and they'll add elements like mod support and brand new methods of travel.
