Glossary of Speedrunning Terms

Use Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac) to search specific terms on the page! Don't worry if the amount of jargon here seems overwhelming; this glossary is aiming to be exhaustive of general speedrunning terms, and is definitely more than you need to get started in the hobby!

  • Categories and Rulesets
    • Any%: A speedrun to beat the game, with any amount of completion percentage, hence, any%. This is both the default category and the most popular category in almost every speedgame.
    • Category Extensions: Categories that are less serious, less optimized, and generally off the beaten path of a speedgame. Extensions are housed on their own separate leaderboards from the main categories for games popular enough to support two separate leaderboard pages, and are housed in grungy spreadsheets for smaller games. Sometimes referred to as meme categories, both derisively and affectionately.
    • IL: Individual Level -- a speedrun that does not beat the game, but instead completes a specific subsection. In some cases you may also see IW for "Individual World".
    • Low%: The speedrun to beat the game with the fewest amount of ~things~ possible, where "things" can be defined differently by different communities. Notably, cutting a ~thing~ (an item pickup or a boss, for instance) from a low% run is *always* more important than saving time, so a 17 hour run that picks up 2 things is ranked above a 2 hour run that picks up 3.
    • No Major Glitches (NMG)/Restricted: Two terms that broadly mean the same thing; some community-agreed-upon glitches are banned from this category. The choice between the two is almost entirely arbitrary, as there is no objective marker for what is a (major) glitch.
    • Glitchless / Bug Limit: More terms that mean basically the same thing as the above; they tend to be used less for indie games than NMG/Restricted, and tend to connote a higher level of restriction than "NMG" (but litigating what is and is not a glitch is still in fact subjective).
    • No [x]: Sometimes, especially glitchy games will have a ruleset that bans a specific glitch or glitches, but otherwise let the runner do what they like. A common use of this is No OoB, which bans going out of bounds only.
    • Seeded/Unseeded: Some games will let you specify a "seed", the initial condition used for the game's random number generator. Playing two runs on the same seed means the randomness will play out the exact same way each time, and Seeded runs can be used for games with high degrees of randomness to focus on skills other than reacting to the RNG.
    • (No) Source Requirement: A ruleset term used to specify that you (don't) have to pick up an item from its intended location in the game. A source requirement prevents techniques like item duplication.
  • Livesplit Terms
    • Split: A subdivision of a speedrun, used for making run comparisons easier. Used as both a noun ("the lava monster split") and occasionally a verb ("remember to split after the pickup here").
    • Gold (Split): The fastest time you have ever completed a given split, so-named because by default in livesplit your split time is displayed in gold when it beats your best split.
    • SoB: Sum of Best -- The sum of all your best (gold) splits; represents the theoretical best time you could possibly get on a given speedrun, playing to your known limit.
    • Comsob: Community Sum of Best -- The sum of all the best times across every single runner, representing the theoretical best run any human could pull off. Can also refer simply to the best known time in the community for a given split ("By implementing this new timesave, I got the world 1 comsob yesterday!")
    • BPT: Best Possible Time -- not to be confused with Comsob, this is an actively-updating comparison that tells you what your time would be if you golded (tied your best) for every remaining split in the run. So, at the start of your run, your BPT is equivalent to your sum of best, but as you run, it slowly grows, until it equals your run time at the end.
    • IGT: In-Game Time -- a timing method, where whatever the video game itself says your time is, that's what it is for run purposes.
    • RTA: Real Time Attack -- a timing method, that looks at the actual real-world time your run took in a single sitting. Also sometimes used to refer to any run done by a human, as opposed to a TAS. In Japanese-language communities, "RTA" is also used interchangeably with "speedrun".
    • LRT: Loadless Real Time -- a timing method, that uses real time as a base but independently removes PC-variable loads (often achieved through the use of community-built plugins for Livesplit). LRT is preferred to RTA timing for PC games where possible, because of how much variance different quality PCs can have in their load times.
  • Speedtech and Glitches
    • ACE: Arbitrary Code Execution -- a glitched state where the game is tricked into reading player inputs (or other controllable things like filenames, inventory order, etc) as executable code, allowing players to essentially tell the game to do whatever they want. As soon as it gets found for a speedgame, further development is basically impossible, as if you can execute arbitrary code, you can simply tell the game to warp you to the credits, meaning further optimization is only about getting that code to execute faster. As a practical matter, ACE is impossible for current-gen PC indie games, mostly being found in older-school titles like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or Paper Mario.
    • BLJ: Originally "Backwards Long Jump", the most iconic trick in all of speedrunning, from Super Mario 64. HOWEVER, in certain indie running circles exists a temptation to find any trick that can possibly be given the acronym BLJ, and contrive a way to call it that. Sort of a community in-joke. Specific iterations of BLJ will be defined in game-specific glossaries, where it comes up.
    • Buffer / Buffering: An input leniency in many, many games, where a player attempting to input an action "too early" will instead have that action execute on the first available frame it could be input. Of particular note is Pause Buffering, where players repeatedly pause and unpause to essentially create a buffer window to execute very precise inputs.
    • Coyote Frames / Coyote Time: A common quality of life feature in platformer games where your character has a short window after they've left the ground where they're still able to act as if they are grounded (including jumping). Named after Wile E. Coyote's ability to walk on air until he remembers that's not how physics works.
    • Cycle Skip: Many in game events are deterministic and repeating, like platforms moving up and down or guard patrol patterns. When a speedrun has to interact with one of these events, you can only save or lose times in terms of these cycles, which in some cases can be quite a lot of time! Cycles can either be global, meaning they start as soon as the game is booted up and are always active, or local, meaning they only begin when the player/camera is close enough to them.
    • Damage Boost: Taking intentional damage for player benefit -- most commonly by exploiting the brief invincibility you get in most games after being hurt. Can also refer to skips that exploit the physical knockback the player receives when getting hit by something.
    • Deathwarp: In games with a save location system, often times the fastest way to travel is by intentionally dying to respawn at the location you last saved.
    • Dupe / Duping: Duplication -- a broad category of glitch where you make one thing into many things. The most common and straightforward variant by far is Item Duplication, however, you can also dupe slightly more esoteric things, like enemy kills or rooms.
    • OoB: Out of Bounds -- being anywhere outside of the intended level geometry.
    • Sequence Break: A nebulous term that refers to playing the game in an unintended order for some benefit -- for example, skipping to a late-game powerup in order to trivialize early combat arenas. Also gets bandied about in discussion of "glitchiness" as a term that means something is clearly unintended by the developers but doesn't rise to the level of a "glitch" (whatever that is).
    • Storage: An incredibly broad class of glitch, where you are in a gamestate at any other time than you're supposed to be in it. For example, a common variety is Menu Storage, where you are able to have a shop or inventory menu up onscreen while retaining control of your character.
    • Wrong Warp: A glitch that teleports the player to a location unintended by the game. The most powerful version of this is the Credits Warp, where your destination is the end credits and so the end of the run.
  • General Terms
    • Marathon/No-Reset: Refers to a run that the runner will finish without resetting to time-loss, or to safer and slower strats used for a run that has to be done in one take. The term "marathon" comes from speedrun marathon events like Games Done Quick, where resetting is not an option and the run must be completed in one sitting.
    • Splicing: The practice of stitching together footage from many different runs of a game into one ideal run. This is banned from competitive speedrunning since runs must be done in one sitting; however, occasionally communities will deliberately splice together community best times into a showcase video.
    • Turbo: A controller function or external program that auto-presses inputs repeatedly very quickly. This is allowed in some speedgames that would otherwise require extremely fast mashing of inputs, in order to protect runners' hand health.
    • VSync: A graphical setting that forces your game to run at the same frame rate as the display framerate of your monitor.
  • General Acronyms
    • FPS: Frames per Second -- the speed at which the game updates the screen and polls for inputs. The most common FPS values you will see are 60, 120, and 144, and games often behave differently (sometimes *wildly* so) at different FPS.
    • GDQ: Games Done Quick, the largest and most popular speedrunning event organizer. GDQ's main event is a biannual speedrunning marathon where over a week of continuous speedruns are livestreamed on twitch.tv to raise money for various charities.
    • KBM: Keyboard and Mouse -- one of the input methods of all time.
    • PB: Personal Best -- your best speedrun time. Also used as a verb ("I already PB'd once today, but I still felt like running some more!")
    • RNG: Random Number Generation (or Generator) -- broad descriptor for anything handled by chance in a game. Often personified as "RNGsus", a fickle entity who blesses and curses runs at his whim.
    • SRC: Speedrun.com, the main website that hosts competitive leaderboards for speedruns.
    • TAS: Tool-Assisted Speedrun -- a speedrun done not by a human player, but by recording inputs with the aid of save states and frame advance tools to arrive at the "perfect" run. The rarer acronym LOTAD, or Low Optimization Tool-Assisted Demonstration, is occasionally used for proof-of-concepts of a route or run that are not aiming for inhuman input perfection.
    • WR: World Record -- the fastest known time for a run. Also shortened as "rekky".