What are Minecraft speedruns and how do players complete them?

Minecraft speedrunning can be defined as attempting to beat the game in the fastest possible time. Speedruns are a prevalent passion for some and exist in many other games. Due to Minecraft's procedural generation, speedruns have become a bit more tricky.

Speedruns are extremely popular in Minecraft, garnering millions of views on YouTube and other social media platforms. Due to their competitive nature, players can beat the speedrun world record at any time. Currently, most top speedruns were set one or two weeks ago.

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How to complete Minecraft speedruns

Speedrun Categories

Shown: The Minecraft section on Speedrun.com (Image via Speedrun.com)

Minecraft speedruns have two categories: Set Seed and Random Seed.

Set Seed

Due to Minecraft's randomly generated worlds, it would be hard to have a competition on fastest completion due to some worlds being easier to complete than others. Thus, Set Seed speedruns were born.

Set Seed speedruns consist of all competitors using and attempting to get the highest completion on the same seed. Due to set seeds being studied, they will always have a faster world record than random seeds.

The current world record for Set Seed runs is 2mins 15secs by Ontricus.

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Random Seed

Random Seed speedruns consist of all players competing on a random seed. This will result in a true test of players' skills, as they won't have an exact knowledge of where to go on the map.

Random Seed runs have a much longer time of completion due to this fact, and the current world record is six times as much as the current Set Seed record. The current world record for Random Seed runs is 12mins 15secs by TwoLetterName.

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Glitchless

A Steve who is content with glitching speedruns! (Image via Mojang)

Since Minecraft is a video game, it will always have some glitches and bugs. However, sometimes these glitches can give the players an advantage in speedruns. Thus, Glitchless speedruns were created.

Glitchless speedruns don't take advantage of certain glitches that exist or existed in Minecraft. For example, there used to be a glitch that would make it so that the player could just skip past the Ender Dragon without beating it, shaving off minutes of time from the speedrun.

Here is a video of Dream attempting to beat a speedrun world record: