Dustforce DX

SS All Levels

Dustforce DX is an indie 2D platformer released for PC and later some consoles and handhelds. You play as a team of 4 acrobatic ninja-like janitors who are tasked with cleaning the world. Dustforce is known for its vast array of movement techniques, high skill ceiling, beloved soundtrack, and challenging difficulty.

Details of the run

Windows version is used, as consoles lack TAS tools and suffer from severe lag issues. As well, PC is the most competitive and up-to-date version of the game; the PC version is the only version of the game that received the DX update, which added 19 new levels (and removed 1 level), a completely redesigned overworld (known as the Nexus), and minor bug fixes and mechanic changes.
Goal of the run is SS All Levels, starting from a fresh save. This is essentially the 100% category of the game. SS refers to the two score metrics used for each level, S completion (for dust collection), and S finesse (for maintaining combo meter). This requires collecting all dust (including defeating/cleaning all enemies) inside every level without dropping combo (via dying, being hit by an enemy, or taking too long between dust collection). While the goal sounds simple, Dustforce quickly ramps up in difficulty as the game progresses. Of note, only around 340 people have SS’d the final level in the 14 years the game has been released, and very few people can consistently SS every level in the game in an RTA setting. This category is easily the hardest of the main categories of the game and even on the extreme end of what can be considered an RTA viable speedrun category for human players. The combo drop maintaining requirement/limitation prevents our ability to use any strategies involving intentionally getting hit by enemies or deathwarps.
“All Levels” refers to the 75 levels in the main game, accessible through individual doors/consoles from one of the three primary nexuses. This means that, for example, levels from the Community Map Pack are not included, since they’re accessed from a list of levels displayed at a single terminal.
Aims for the fastest “Real-Time” rather than ingame time (IGT), as some levels can be completed with a faster IGT using a different character at a cost of slower overworld movement. While IGT was considered due to the game’s highly competitive IL base, more unique strats can be showcased when nexus movement is a consideration.
As a whole, rules for this run have been defined exactly the same as the RTA SS All Levels speedrun category. The run is done on a new game save file with all levels locked, and the timer ends when the ingame time freezes upon completing the level Yotta Difficult. The usage of replays and custom levels are banned, as they can be seen as external tools that can only be used when the player is playing online. Accessing the level editor is banned, as it can lead to several major glitches which would greatly trivialize the run and overall make it much less entertaining (e.g. enabling the “editor everywhere” glitch, which quite literally allows the player rebuild the nexuses, which would skip all nexus movement and door unlocking).
The game has nearly zero downtime, and is purely about movement and routing optimizations, as pre-planning our dust spreading and collecting, Super usage and location, and managing air charges is the core to moving efficiently through a level. Our speed is generally not capped or gained in discrete integer values, speed is very granular and momentum is preserved or decays slowly, our positions are also similarly non-discrete floats, this allows many opportunities for counterintuitive or non-obvious ways to make tiny optimizations movement to save time in totality. We use a LOT of tech to go fast… No seriously like A LOT of speed tech. While many of these techniques are undoubtedly “glitches” in some sense (and some not discovered until TASing developed), some were also intended advanced movement mechanics, and some are just creative combinations of intended mechanics in unintended ways, and others further are maybe a grey area in between. While none of these glitches really “break” the game or result in significant sequence breaks, there is essentially no moment where we are NOT actively using some non-trivial movement to save time in ways a naive first playthrough would not. If that qualifies as heavy glitch abuse by your own personal definition, then I think we probably satisfied that categorization.
Double Tap Dash must be enabled in the keybindings settings prior to starting the run.
A prior TAS run of this Category was originally completed in 2019. This TAS run has now been updated and improved for 2026. Original SS All TAS from 2019 was 145125 frames, expected run time 40:18.750. Due to the IL-nature of the game, improvements are isolated so constant iteration of even the earliest parts of the run are always possible and on the table. We “finished” the 2019 version at a time when we believed there were no known improvements left, after we had all tried everything we could think of over a 3.5~ year period of time. The 2019 version was authored by BrotherMojo, Riokaii, Freshmaniac, Arbitraryasian, Zaandaa, and one anonymized author who asked to be excluded. It’s fun looking back now to see just how much timesave was still out there for us to manifest.

Tags

Sync instructions

WHERE TO EXTRACT THE MOVIE FILE TO (after you downloaded it to wherever you want):

  1. Find your Dustforce/Dustmod install directory, usually programfiles/steam/steamapps/common/dustforce
  2. Inside the “dustforce” directory, right click to create a new folder, name it “tas”
  3. Extract the .dft INTO the “tas” folder you just created. Now there should be a folder inside of tas with a name matching the movie.

BEFORE PLAYBACK:

  1. Must be playing on Windows OS
  2. Install Dustmod
  3. Set game screen resolution to 1080p
  4. Launch Dustmod, press Any key to get past the intro screen
  5. Press Escape, go to Dustmod, in "About" in the top row check that your version number is 26.6.1 or later. If needed click the "Download" on the rightside on the "Update Dustmod" row.
  6. Additionally, ensure in the "About" section that your "dustmod release type" is currently set to dev
    1. This is due to a late inclusion of the "restart" keybind, so an additional column of inputs was added to the nexus scripts, which currently only the latest dev version will read and process properly for synced playback. A stable release update is coming soon.
  7. Press Escape, use the arrow keys(or mouse with left clicks) to move the menu cursor to “Options” and then the top panel “Controls”. Set your keybinds to defaults (Jump to Z, Light to X, Heavy to C), rebind dash key to V. (The Virtual Keycode order is important for the scripts to playback properly without desyncs, it affects the priority of which inputs are processed in which order)
    1. This virtual keycode should be the same regardless of keyboard layout, so even if these keybinds make no sense and seem awkward because you are using a dvorak layout or something, you should still use these bindings as the virtual keycode order is what matters
  8. Enable double tap dash (Make sure the box is filled with an X). press escape or the X in the top right to close the menu.
  9. Press Escape, go to Dustmod, in Display in the top row of tabs, and then Overlay in the 2nd row, make sure “Swap Dustmod Menu” at the bottom is filled in with an X. Press escape to close the menu.
  10. OPTIONAL: Press Escape and go to “Dustmod” and under “Display/Overlay” you can enable “Show Input Display” by making sure the box is filled in with an X. (You can adjust the size too)
  11. OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED: Press up (on your keyboard arrow keys) to enter Beginner tutorial and then press some dash and heavy attack buttons, jumps and double jumps to test your sound levels. To adjust press Escape > Options> Game> SFX, Music, and Ambience Master volume sliders until they are to a satisfactory volume.
    1. Recommended to Max SFX volume, Setting Music volume around halfway (around the R in the word “Master”), and Ambience also around halfway (around the A in the word “Master”)

TO START PLAYBACK:

  1. Press Escape> go to Dustmod>Tools in the top row tabs>Save in the 2nd row of tabs> NG Reset Save (click or press enter on “NG”)
  2. You should be Dustman (blue) Standing in front of the Beginner Tutorial console with x0 of All types of Keys and black (empty) progress bars underneath all of them.
  3. Press Escape> go to Dustmod> Tools in the top row tabs> Frame Adv. in the 2nd row of tabs> at the top of the list, make sure the box on “Enable Frame Advance” is filled in with an X> At the bottom of the UI window in the“Load Nexus Script” text box, type the exact filename of the movie inside of the “tas” folder, INCLUDING the folder directory AND the file extension.
    1. For example “SSALL26/main.txt” (without the quotation marks)
  4. Press enter in the text box to start the movie.

Dustmod Fixes

There are technically changes to game logic behavior within Dustmod, these are disclosed here for transparency, they were concessions that were fairly forced for the sake of reliably consistent reproducibility.

Author Comments

BrotherMojo- I actually first discovered this game by seeing the thread on TASvideos. My first impression was that this would be an extremely satisfying game to TAS, and the game did not disappoint. Over and over as we’ve worked on this TAS, we’ve found new tech to take advantage of, new pitfalls to correct for, and new strategies that completely revamp levels. I have to be thankful for the way each level stands on its own, as repeatedly revamping levels to save a couple of frames would’ve been nightmarish if we also had to manage RNG and player resources between levels. A big thanks to Hitbox, and to everyone else who’s been a part of this project!
Riokaii- This TAS has been a dream of mine for years, and it’s crazy to see how much farther we’ve come since I first began work on the TAS 11(!) years ago. Dustforce always matched and met my passion for perfection and digging deeper with more to find and more factors to consider and think about. TAS’ing this game is complex and scratches an itch in my brain like nothing else really can. My biggest desire is to share the treasure of this game with anyone who will listen and writing the bulk of this submission text to accompany this TAS is the best way I could think of to accomplish that. Thanks to the rest of the team of TASforce, more eyes on the project always led to better results in the end.
Anonymous Author- As a top RTA/IL runner of the game, I had always been interested in TASing to learn more about the game and how I could apply various things I learned into my play. I always tuned into Riokaii’s stream for the early days of TASing the game, and was really impressed with Mojo coming largely out of nowhere and cranking out mindblowing IL TASes, but could never force myself to sit down and try it myself. I finally gave it a try after feeling frustrated with several IL grinds, and since then it’s been by far my favorite thing to do in the game. Most of my work was spent being a second pair of eyes for various IL TASes as a TAS had been created for every IL by the time I arrived, meaning my contribution is largely various ideas or route changes across a majority of the levels. Thanks to msg555 for all the fantastic tools he’s developed, Mojo for enduring my questions when I first learned to TAS the game (and enduring my downdashes without holding down…), and anyone else who contributed to the run, no matter how minor it was.
Freshmaniac- I fell in love with Dustforce because of its fluid movement and seemingly endless potential for optimization. I joined this project late, first contributing by suggesting ideas to the much more talented TASers, and eventually morphing from an armchair expert into a pretty good TASer. Anyway, I'm grateful to have been able to help and watch the run evolve over time. Thanks to Mojo for being an incredible source of knowledge about the game, msg555 for being a swell dude who made all this possible, Hitbox for making a game that's just as fun to TAS as it is to play, and everyone who’s helped keep this game alive.
Arbitraryasian- In basically every game that I play at least somewhat seriously, I love diving into the low-level technical details: frame data, hitboxes, glitches and exploits, what causes things to work the way they do, finding optimal and ways to circumvent them, etc.. Usually I’d just apply this to how I’d play in real time, but since Dustforce has such amazing TASing tools, I ended up working with all the other guys here. It’s been one crazy journey, from my very first IL TAS which was barely a second faster than the level’s RTA record, all the way up to the group’s finalizing collaborations for the SS All TAS, and I’ve picked up so much knowledge and know-how along the way. Shoutouts to Hitbox Team (for making this beautiful game and generally being a bunch of cool guys), msg555 (for making the TASing tools, and Dustmod as a whole for that matter), the rest of TASforce (for hanging around for the years that this project has taken), and the Dustforce community at large (for playing this cool-looking game and being awesome).
Zaandaa-
Magmapeach-
Sasha-
Contributions in strats and ideas also from Angecide, idyll, Jvcpro, and Conscious
-Thanks to the tasvideos site staff for working with us in regards to submitting this TAS.
-Thanks a TON to msg555 for his work on making the dustmod tools used to make this TAS possible, and just being an overall programming wizard. While he didn’t want to be included as an author of the TAS as he has 0 inputs in the run, he is the #1 reason this TAS was possible. He created dustkid.com, and Dustmod tools such as the replay composer, debug tools, save states, frame advance, nexus scripting, input display, along with helping us track down several useful techniques via the game’s source code. We’ve come a long way from calling cheat engine timescaled ILs tool assisted runs.
-Additional thanks to Alexspeedy for the creation of Dusted, a TAS-Studio-like program aiding in TAS creation
-Thanks to Hitbox Team for making a game we have all collectively fallen in love with. And a special shoutout to Lexie, for his coding of the movement which resulted in this huge emergent depth.
-Thanks to the rest of the Dustforce Community whose passion for the game kept us motivated to make this project a reality. Many people also contributed small ideas all over the place that would be impossible to credit individually.

Game Mechanics Overview

Basics

There are 4 directional keys for movement and 4 additional individual buttons for Dash, Jump, Light attack, and Heavy attack. Jumps from the ground can be a shorthop or a fulljump if the jump button is held through jumpsquat. Characters can jump or dash in midair at the expense of an air charge, downdash to rapidly begin falling (aka fastfall, despite being called a downdash, as it is performed using the dash button, it does NOT consume an aircharge to do so), run up walls briefly, jump and dash off of walls (These also do not consume an air charge), slide or run along ceilings briefly and slide on slopes. Light and heavy attacks can be used freely, but a Super attack (Light+Heavy) requires a full combo meter (100 dust) and depletes the meter on use.
All levels contain dust in the form of some combination of surface dust, dustblock tiles, and enemies. Dust and dustblocks can be cleaned by touching them or attacking them, but enemies can only be cleaned through attacks. Nearby ground dust is also cleaned by hitting the ground fast enough to “slam”, and nearby dustblocks break when falling at high speeds. All of the dust must be cleaned to get an S completion score at the end of the level. Levels are ended by cleaning the enemies tied to the end trigger (except for Beginner Tutorial, whose end is triggered by reaching a certain area).
Tile Geometry names https://imgur.com/6UVkjIr

Attacks

There are up, down, and side variations of the light and heavy attacks, and grounded/aerial variants for the up heavy, down heavy, and down light. https://imgur.com/a/Qad21 Each attack has a windup animation, a single active subframe, and a recovery period. Every attack applies time dilation throughout the windup, hits on dustblocks or enemies apply hitstop, and hits on lighter enemies will knock them back in the direction of the attack. The amount of time the attack takes depends on the character. Both time dilation and hitstop primarily just waste time, so minimizing the number of attacks and maximizing each attack’s value is an important consideration when going for speed; sometimes it’s optimal to juggle enemies into other enemies to make attacks hit as many targets as possible, and occasionally it might be fastest to just wait for a cycle to line up that will allow you to clear the enemies in less attacks.
Cleaning an enemy with an attack or using a super (even without hitting an enemy) will restore all of your air charges, so enemies can be used as jump/dash refreshers. Midair attacks that hit dustblocks or enemies each apply a y-speed cap. This means that attacks on dustblocks will stop a fall, and attacks on enemies (or a super attack) will give you a little upward speed if you’re rising slowly or falling. This is known as Hitrise, and allows attacks to extend our airtime and set up for Airdash Boosts (ADBs).
Light attacks are quick (5-12 frame windup), have small hitboxes, and deal 1 damage to enemies. Light attacks also have no recovery, which allows you to chain multiple attacks quickly without needing to jump or dash in between. This in combination with hitrise and knockback allows you to carry enemies (and yourself) through the air with successive lights.
Heavy attacks are slower (16-20 frame windup), have long/large hitboxes, and deal 3 damage to enemies, but have a lengthy recovery. The recovery can be canceled with a dash, jump, ceiling grab/run, or wall grab/run. Because of this, heavy attacks can be easily chained on the ground with dashes, but doing so midair will require expending air charges or proximity to walls or ceilings. If a heavy is the final blow in cleaning an enemy, it spreads dust a short distance on surfaces in the direction of the attack, so attacks are often aimed to avoid problematic spread or spread more dust in our path to build up meter for a super.
The super attack is an extremely powerful and versatile tool that is a focal point of many IL routes. The super attack cleans all enemies, dustblocks, and line-of-sight surface dust within its range. A super requires a full meter (100 dust collected) to perform, but the dust cleaned by the super will be added to your combo after the super finishes, so it will contribute to building meter for another super. Supers replenish all air charges regardless of whether anything was caught in the attack. The length of a super increases by 7-8 frames for each enemy in it. However, if there are no enemies in the super, we get a fast Empty Super that’s less than half the length of a super with only one enemy. Often it is faster to clean weaker enemies with a few heavies and do an empty super than to super everything at once. Supers also zero out your y-speed instantly, so they can be used to control your height in some scenarios.
Attacks also have a variety of minor and/or unintuitive uses that are explained in further technical detail later on:

Characters

The 4 characters have different properties that make them situationally good in different levels.

Dustman (blue)

Dustgirl (red)

Dustkid (purple)

Dustworth (green)

Enemies

The enemies have no names ingame, instead the dustforce community has affectionately given them names, a picture of them all is here: http://imgur.com/a/mF3HC
Enemies have a set number of HP to be cleaned.

Terminology Overview

(full explanations of tech are included after level commentary)
Frame/Subframe
Dustforce runs at 60fps, inputs are polled on full frames, but each frame is subdivided into 5 subframes for physics calculations, similar to SM64's quartersteps
Aircharge
the counter tracking how many times a character can jump or dash in midair.
Downdash/Fastfall
pressing dash while inputting down in state hover or fall will give a boost of speed downwards, this does NOT consume an aircharge.
Light, Heavy
the two strengths of attack available to each character.
(word)boost
gaining speed via impacting level geometry (groundboost, slopeboost, etc.) or abusing other mechanics (Airdash Boost/ADB, Magnet Hijack Boost/MHB, etc.)
(word) Cancel
Attack recovery cancels are common to resume movement faster after an attack.
Ledge Cancel
a faster way to land after climbing over a ledge and gain speed sooner by downdashing to land sooner and then dashing ASAP upon landing.
Mantle
Using an airdash to climb over and land from an edge faster than a ledge cancel, but at the cost of an aircharge.
Super
the wide-area special attack usable only after having filled the combo meter with 100 dust.
Empty Super
a fast super hitting no enemies, used to clean only surfaces and dustblocks.
Hitrise
Damaging an enemy (or using a super) gives the player a minor amount of vertical speed nudging them upwards for a short duration.
Seam Attacks
attacks can sometimes clean dust via the “seam” between adjacent blocks.
Time Dilation
the way supers and attack startup slow the relative timescale for the player.
Time Manipulation
taking advantage of how time dilation subtly changes movement.
Land-cancel
aerial downlights are automatically aborted shortly after landing on the ground. This is typically used to buffer a dash on landing when we still have an air charge. Sometimes called Land Cancelled Downlights (LCDL’s).
LedgeJump
Jumping at the edge of a ledge immediately interrupts jump startup, allowing you to avoid ground friction while jumping or do jumps with virtually no startup jumpsquat.
Early exit
menuing and selecting “exit level” before the level finishes, but late enough that the level end triggers during the fadeout.
Mouse exit
when exiting a level, clicking “yes” with mouse input rather than navigating with the keyboard or controller sends the player directly back to the Main Nexus.
Early start
New tech not included in the 2019 version which saves 15f~ on every single Individual level. This time is NOT included in the table comparison.
Cycle
enemy positions according to time and path taken through the level.
Air DashJump
a simultaneous dash and jump in the air with only one aircharge.
Ledgeclip
the game nudges the player up/down when approaching a corner from the side
Slopejump
an instant startup ground jump from slope slide state.
Spikejump
a safe jump off of 45 degree spikes.
Walltap
grabbing a wall for one frame or less (often 1 subframe) to clean dust or reset x speed while falling.
Superdrop
using attacks to clean walls while falling past them as quickly as possible. (unrelated to regular Supers)
Left friction
air friction is much more intense when travelling left.
Updash
avoiding friction by delaying a wallrun after dashing from a slope up a wall.
Air Ceiling Slide (ACS)
the player can briefly remain in ceiling slide state after the ceiling ends. Also sometimes called Extended Ceiling Slide (ECS).
Invisible/Air walljump
after grabbing and sliding off a wall without wallrunning, the player can still walljump in midair during state raise.
Infinite walljump
left friction allows for repeated jumps off left-facing overhanging walls.
Dyno
walljumping and regrabbing the same wall by jumping at the point where it transfers from vertical to an overhanging slant.
Jorf
a 1 unit~ area near the edge of a spiked surface which can be touched safely. (1 Unit is roughly equal to 1 pixel on a 1080p screen)
Jorfboost
Getting a groundboost or slopeboost via landing on a Jorf.
Spikestand
similar to a jorf, but a bit larger in size due to the slanted corner of wall and ground. Usually around 5~ units instead of 1.
Deadleg
the bottom left half of your character’s vertical hurtbox is immune from colliding with spikes, only on the left side.
Mapler/Mapler Slide
a technique to retain speed longer on ceilings.
Reverse Ledgejump (RLJ)
By starting a jump towards a ledge in the opposite direction you want to move and then reversing the jump immediately, you can get a jump with no startup that moves in the opposite direction of the ledge.
Ledge Slip Jump (LSJ)
Getting instant ledgejumps in the opposite direction of a ledge by “slipping” off. Similar to an RLJ, except you get dash speed out of the jump but often takes longer to set up (as slipping off a ledge requires you to be moving above the ledge in the opposite direction).
Droof
a technique to gain great horizontal speed by falling next to a slanted wall.
Taildash
a technique to rapidly turn around or gain a small amount of speed on a slope.
Slopesurfing
technique used to dash on a slope but cancel the dash immediately, allowing for faster slope sliding acceleration and unintended state transitions.
Raiserun
a tech that enters the wrong state when jumping, allowing an earlier wallrun.
Ladder light/heavy
under certain circumstances it’s possible to attack while wallrunning.
Downward Slant Tech (DST)
achieving instant walljumps on overhanging slanted walls by downdashing while initiating a jump.
Corner Wall Jump (CWJ)
Getting instant walljumps by downdashing during walljump startup and crossing over a bottom corner of a wall.
Super Displacement
Downdashing between enemy hits during a super allows the player to drop very slightly during lengthy supers, causing the two hitboxes of the super (the enemy hitbox and the dust hitbox) to misalign slightly.
Ceiling Break State (CBS)
Sliding off of a ceiling while in certain ceiling states gives you a two pixel increase in height, while letting go of a ceiling lowers you by two pixels.
Quill/Spine
Porcupine enemies shoot a projectile, we can redirect it by attacking the quill(s) into enemies to instantly kill/clean them.
Early Unlock
Using a key to unlock a door and beginning the “door opening/unlocking” countdown period of delay, while we then go enter another level, so that we can return to this first door later and have 0 delay to enter it.
Nelson
using slopeslide speed to get a moon-shoes higher jump than is normally possible from a slope.
Deathzone
If your hitbox touches this trigger area, you die. This includes enemies which touch the trigger area (and they count as Cleaned for Completion Score purposes). Mostly used inside air control levels or empty pits/gaps instead of a spiked floor.
Tera Drop/Tera Jump
a 1 wide gap with spikes on both side walls, these have a 4~ unit width which can be safely moved through without touching the spikes on the walls. If there are only spikes on one side of the wall these are often called “Half Tera’s”
Zetta Slopes, Giga Walls, Peta Blocks
Unique level geometry that is the “identity” challenge of that corresponding level.

A Quick Foreword

“You want me to wrap up Smash as a whole, like the whole thing?!” That's a quote from the opening sequence of “The Smash Brothers” and I (Riokaii writing this) feel a similar way as I’m working on this submission text. This is most of y'all's introduction to Dustforce, so we have a LOT to cover. We targeted our submission date to be July 13th, which marks the 11 year anniversary of Dustforce TASing becoming possible and is the day my first IL TAS of Beginner Tutorial was created. The bulk of this is very technical, academic, and non-personal, but allow me this brief reflection paragraph. In writing this, I’m attempting to summarize not only those 11 years of TASing history of this game and this one run, but also the prior 4~ years of knowledge, strats, and other details uncovered by RTA players, including myself, before TASing was even a possibility. I don't know if I should be warning you how long this whole thing is, and if so, even where the best place to do that would be (You’re already on page 12 of the draft of this submission text in google docs for comparison, so this is probably a bit late, but we had other more important basics to cover first!). I’ve spent weeks trying to proactively answer every question I could think of, even if you have literally zero background knowledge of anything beyond like… what a TAS is, so that you can see this game through our eyes as best as we can hope to accomplish through text form. The reason our first 2019 version took 3.5 years to be “finished” is the depth to the movement within Dustforce, it's just one of those games where there's seemingly always new optimizations to find and even with a larger group of people it took that long for us to reach a state we were satisfied in our perfectionism of the end product the first time. And then over the 7 years since 2019 we ideated and discovered even more optimizations all over the place. If I was to be as thorough and detailed as possible in all levels, I would be writing this for forever, and I would still miss half of the decisions and options we considered, tested, and iteratively refined. Personally, I can’t easily write in a way that is both entertaining and clinically informative simultaneously, so I’m choosing to prioritize the latter in most cases. I’ll transfer some of this into a game resources page eventually, but it makes more sense to me to detail and explain it here first, since this is the first TAS on the site, and lets be honest very few people (outside of dustforce TASers) are probably gonna be reading the game resource page much or at all. Hopefully I am prophylactically granting the gift of shorter submission texts to our future-selves. We believe the quality of the movie is self-evident visually, as well as through the following comparison table and through this thoroughly detailed submission text, that the audience can understand the level and collective scale of technical effort, passion, and attention to detail put towards this project. Regardless, It is our only hope that you enjoy your own journey through our discoveries and are satisfied by the end product to a similar degree that we experienced while making it over these 11 years, and thank you in advance for however long it takes you to watch and/or read all this <3.

IL Comparison Table

Rerecord Count?

Unfortunately rerecords are not tracked at all by our TASing methods within Dustmod, replay composer, or Dusted (a TAS Studio-like external tool for Dustmod). It’s safe to say the number is officially “a lot”. We had 8-10~ ish+ people working on this project semi-actively for 11 years, and levels were often completed from scratch and/or redone multiple times over, across those 11 years. Rather than ludicrously guesstimate, we can compare to our previously unpublished TAS version from 2019, the current RTA IL WR (as of July 13th 2026), and a time capsule of the RTA WR from July 13th 2015 when TASing dustforce first became possible. Action Count is also included as Dustforce is very input-dense, and some way of numerically representing that aids in showing how underneath the game’s visuals flowing together gracefully, we are often doing many inputs to gain singular individual frames constantly. It's worth noting that we mildly tried to minimize action counts within reason too, we did not artificially add inputs that do nothing to influence this metric intentionally.
Level Name2015 RTA WR FramesCurrent RTA WR Frames2019 TAS IL Frames2026 TAS IL Frames# frames improved to 2015 RTA# of frames improved to Current RTA WR# of frames improved to 2019 TASRunning Total Saved to 2019 TASPercentage improvement to 2015 RTAPercentage improvement to Current RTAPercentage improvement to 2019 TASAction CountActions Per Second
Beginner Tutorial24552330220221932621379910.7%5.8%0.4%2677.49
Combat Tutorial2430210518101783647322273626.6%15.3%1.5%2679.27
Advanced Tutorial239422462119211228213474311.8%6.0%0.3%1915.57
Downhill82580177977946220435.6%2.7%0.0%766.3
Shaded Grove1107106410051001106634479.6%5.9%0.4%1257.93
Firefly Forest228921601930192536423555215.9%10.9%0.3%2387.64
Valley2225212419871955270169328412.1%8.0%1.6%2267.14
Dahlia73570959358914612048819.9%16.9%0.7%9710.90
Tunnels18621771168216522101193011811.3%6.7%1.8%1977.40
Fields1250120411331121129831213010.3%6.9%1.1%1337.49
Dusk Run23142155199119403742155118116.2%10.0%2.6%2227.07
Atrium5154744584556019318411.7%4.0%0.7%527.80
Secret Passage13041224113211101941142220614.9%9.3%1.9%1528.64
Alcoves1219111910171014205105320916.8%9.4%0.3%1599.95
Mezzanine1718162115551541177801422310.3%4.9%0.9%1767.11
Knight Hall2017186416991696321168322615.9%9.0%0.2%2268.26
Archive17731677156315502231271323912.6%7.6%0.8%1485.94
Store Room4684013813739528824720.3%7.0%2.1%529.81
Moon Temple23552162193719244312381326018.3%11.0%0.7%2668.54
Ramparts40043718346333966083226732715.2%8.7%1.9%3826.86
Tower16341485136713552791301233917.1%8.8%0.9%1486.83
Ghost Parapets27942664243524073872572836713.9%9.6%1.1%3318.44
Observatory11151037919919196118036717.6%11.4%0.0%1278.82
Cliffside Caves40453843360935425033016743412.4%7.8%1.9%4327.43
Caverns28102575235023114992643947317.8%10.3%1.7%2456.52
Library35093105279327787313271548820.8%10.5%0.5%3507.71
Courtyard32603043278027495112943151915.7%9.7%1.1%3427.62
Vacant Lot524493477477471605199.0%3.2%0.0%527.39
Park20251955183718222031331553410.0%6.8%0.8%2558.66
Landfill1100107110341025754695436.8%4.3%0.9%1026.31
Development5535214824827139054312.8%7.5%0.0%7410.40
Construction Site598546507486112602156418.7%11.0%4.1%8311.56
Abandoned Carpark1111103399499012143456810.9%4.2%0.4%1247.96
Apartments165815971520150115796195879.5%6.0%1.3%1586.56
Warehouse21841916176517324521843362020.7%9.6%1.9%2157.69
Forgotten Tunnel29312656239223525793044066019.8%11.4%1.7%3418.91
Basement1883166314051399484264666625.7%15.9%0.4%2189.73
Scaffolding21541978187318453091332869414.3%6.7%1.5%2207.37
Rooftops16011544141614061951381070412.2%8.9%0.7%1797.95
Clocktower987950903887100631672010.1%6.6%1.8%13910.02
Concrete Temple35373291294829276103642174117.2%11.1%0.7%3517.33
Alleyway462455437437251807415.4%4.0%0.0%436.75
Hideout21952129187518473482822876915.9%13.2%1.5%30210.11
Control10601020960948112721278110.6%7.1%1.3%1268.47
Vats21291995188218103191857285315.0%9.3%3.8%2026.91
Ferrofluid901833745735166981086318.4%11.8%1.3%11910.50
Server Room1174111110411028146831387612.4%7.5%1.2%1297.96
Titan1020929893878142511589113.9%5.5%1.7%1188.60
Satellite Debris137913091257124513464129039.7%4.9%1.0%1376.91
Research29772641238323506272913393621.1%11.0%1.4%3288.58
Security21261924177917553711692496017.5%8.8%1.3%2187.69
Wiring244222852103202541726078103817.1%11.4%3.7%35010.66
Backup Shift2638257324282420218153810468.3%5.9%0.3%2917.38
Containment67765260960473485105110.8%7.4%0.8%606.56
Power Room155714761387135819911829108012.8%8.0%2.1%1416.49
Core Temple301327802472241160236961114120.0%13.3%2.5%3137.97
Access1812167115421559253112-17112414.0%6.7%-1.1%1927.66
Dome251823892116208143730835115917.4%12.9%1.7%2266.69
Abyss203819131786173830017548120714.7%9.1%2.7%1635.81
Grass Cave162515241410139423113016122314.2%8.5%1.1%1798.02
Ascent213820271853183830019117123814.0%9.4%0.9%2879.66
Summit194118551694167226918322126013.9%9.9%1.3%29510.95
Night Temple277426902424237340131751131114.5%11.8%2.1%3208.28
Ancient Garden12881234112311171711176131713.3%9.5%0.5%1407.91
Overgrown Temple1253119911311123130768132510.4%6.3%0.7%1407.87
Ruins369534783099300868747091141618.6%13.5%2.9%4088.29
Wild Den444398397385591312142813.3%3.3%3.0%539.64
Kilo Difficult155513371241121134412630145822.1%9.4%2.4%1618.36
Giga Difficult245422652065203342123232149017.2%10.2%1.5%3099.37
Peta Difficult1113100388686924413417150721.9%13.4%1.9%977.15
Mega Difficult193217811614157136121043155018.7%11.8%2.7%2248.87
Tera Difficult11851138105598120415774162417.2%13.8%7.0%1338.62
Exa Difficult141813501210119822015212163615.5%11.3%1.0%1417.40
Zetta Difficult219120591889187231918717165314.6%9.1%0.9%1996.57
Yotta Difficult759668866034587217241014162181522.7%14.7%2.7%8989.26
This leaves the remaining 299 frames of timesave to be sourced from menuing/character selection and nexus movement /level ordering improvements.
A further 1123 frames were saved via the new Early Start menuing tech found which saves 15f on each individual level. With the exceptions of Atrium and Basement: previously we could input 1 more frame of gameplay after early exiting, however when using Early Starts, this extra input frame is no longer possible. They were previously taking advantage of that quirk to do a late input after the early exit, now the early exit must wait for that input, so the Early Start only saves 14f for these 2 levels in particular.

Additional Comments Per level

Beginner Tutorial
The tutorial levels function mostly like a regular level, with a few exceptions: there are NPCs standing around the level with text boxes explaining basic controls and mechanics, and our character choice is hard locked to Dustman. However, all controls and movement techniques are available even before they’ve been explained, so we start taking advantage of them to save time immediately. This level is fairly straightforward, Slopeboosting and Groundboosting during the earlier sections to gain and keep higher speed while moving horizontally, and you get a taste of how useful attacking is to collect dust. If you are experienced with platformers, our movement might look unusual in how we frequently seem to slow ourselves down by jumping or other setups, but these are often in service of boosts, so they do save time overall. Ironically, we spend such little time in the tas moving at the “normal” non-boosted maximum run speed of 522 that these boosts become hard to notice by comparison, as you are not calibrated to the normal speed of movement as a viewer. The TAS route isn’t much different from the RTA route besides several small optimizations. The first example of the TAS-only tech of a Ledge Slip Jump (LSJ) occurs around 8.5s. A raiserun makes its first appearance near the start of the level after the long groundboost, which saved a couple of frames over having to heavy attack the dust. The most notable difference can be seen in the final room where we perform the upper right alcove in reverse to get a small slopeboost moving left before we use an empty super to clear some out of the way dust near the floor. Normally early exits in the tutorials do not work, but pressing escape a 2nd time to close to pause menu actually makes the exit go through properly, this was unknown back in 2019 and is a new addition already saving time. As each of the levels are isolated, we were able to constantly iteratively improve on them in isolation without worrying about resyncing future portions of the movie. Dustforce also lacks gameplay-impactful RNG, further aiding this endeavor. Within a singular individual level, some aspects of movement such as a ledge climb might look like they normalize your character position, but they often do not. Fractional decimal unit positions exist, speed values are a float, and subframe movement means that even minor alterations often do not have “easy” re-sync points within an IL, so manual future adjustments must be made to ensure resyncing. This was still generally accomplish-able, but saving an initial handful of frames occasionally results in costing 1 frame back later down the line due to the specific granular differences in positioning that compound over time. Normally it’s only possible to open doors or enter levels while in state “idle”, but attacking on the ground forces the character into “idle” state, so you’ll often see us attacking as we reach terminals and doors in the nexus so we can open them and enter more quickly.
Combat Tutorial
After a relatively tame start, this level is an explosive showcase of numerous movement techniques. The level features floating prisms for the player to clear, which will only be seen in the next tutorial and then the final hub of the map. Smaller prisms can be cleared with any attack, while large prisms can only be destroyed by heavy attacks. While very little surface dust exists in the map, defeating an enemy with a heavy attack will cause dust to spread on any nearby surface, and is a huge hassle especially for the large prisms where we cannot avoid this by using a different sequence or type of attacks. This level also contains some of the most extreme cycles in the game in regards to the movement pathing of the prisms, this level can be extremely obnoxious to play quickly in real time. TAS however, can make use of several MHBs (one via hitrise storage) to achieve huge ceiling boosts seemingly out of nowhere, and convenient placement of prisms allows us to even chain several MHBs and ADBs together. Originally, we would collect dust throughout the level, routed to give us 100 dust right as we entered the 2nd to last room to super 4 prisms, but with TAS precision it is much faster to clear the prisms normally, especially when considering the time saved not collecting dust throughout the level. This level has a trigger in the ending room which gives you a full super regardless of your combo meter (for the purpose of tutorializing using it to the player, forcing its usage to end the level) so dust collection is unnecessary. Still, there are many times dust spread is unavoidable, so we use heavy attacks that spread the least out of the way dust.
Advanced Tutorial
Despite being the most difficult tutorial for new players, Advanced Tutorial is the most straightforward and simple to optimize, being almost entirely linear and focused heavily on long Groundboosts and Slopeboosts. The ending of the level demonstrates keeping a boost through attacks via dash cancelling… besides that, not a whole lot worth talking about. On the way to the nexus, we specifically dash back to the left after opening the door so we can enter the door on the leftmost side. This is to set ourselves up for the movement up to the Virtual Nexus later (64 levels later). Unlike the tutorial consoles, doors need to be opened then entered in two separate steps, so we use door opening time to position ourselves for the following future segment of nexus movement as standard practice.
The nexus is where the majority of the levels are located, grouped into 4 areas (Forest, Mansion, City, Lab) with a cohesive visual theme. Some doors are locked with keys which can be acquired by SSing a lower tier level. There are 4 unlocked doors in each area, which grant a Wood Key which can unlock any Wood-Locked door (even in another area). Wood levels grant Silver keys, Silver levels grant Gold Keys, and Gold levels grant Red Keys. So each themed area will eventually give us 4 Red keys individually, with 4 keys each per area and 4 areas, there are 16 Red Keys in total. We will need all 16 Red Keys to access the final area so we have to SS all 16 levels in each of the 4 areas, progressing our keys along the way, 64 levels in total in order to move on. In between the doors and levels, our overworld “nexus movement” is done using the character that was selected to complete the previous level, so routing the nexus was a complex task and one of the greatest optimization difficulties of the run. It was necessary to test many permutations of possible characters used for each level and the order in which levels should be completed to best visit all levels while acquiring the necessary keys. Essentially it's a giant 64 node Travelling Salesman Problem, with 4 edges connecting every pair of nodes (actually 8, from A to B and from B to A are not identical). The problem is constrained by the keys so we begin with only 16 valid starting nodes, so it is not quite that extreme in practical reality, but was definitely a major undertaking and several reroutes took place over the course of the progress of TAS development.
Alternatively, you could finish a level, and then re-enter that same door to switch characters immediately if the level-character and the nexus-movement-character are different, but this is very slow and not really worth doing due to how much time it would take to ever be a viable option. Every door is designed to be reachable in a reasonable amount of time by any character so the disparity in suboptimal character A vs Character B is never large or drastic enough for this option to be considered.
Downhill
This level is extremely hard to optimize, as there is no point in the level to easily “segment” progress.. Your speed from the previous section carries into the next section the entire way, thus making changes to the level often requires adjusting the rest of the level in several ways. Going too fast also causes problems in a few places as the character can overshoot slopes or bump their head on ceilings. Previously a super was used to finish the level, but it was found that with a good ending cycle, Dustgirl could end the level with two heavy attacks by taking advantage of her slightly taller upheavy hitbox, saving several frames.
Shaded Grove
This is the first instance of Dustworth in the run, as his higher jumps really shine for the vertical nature of the level. Ceilings are used to both keep large ceiling boosts, as well as set up large groundboosts. Overall, a very straightforward level. While Dustman is actually quite viable on Shaded Grove, he unfortunately cannot get up to Firefly Forest directly using this route, which makes him lose way too much time overall.
After completing Shaded Grove, we unlock the level Valley while on our way to the level Firefly Forest. Entering locked doors has 2 states, the door begins locked and must be unlocked which takes time, and then once unlocked can be entered. The door unlocking animations take a sizable amount of time, so if a locked door is nearby and you have extra keys available, it can be worthwhile to sidetrack to unlock a door early. This makes it so that when you reach that door later, the unlocking process has already taken place, overlapping it with the time you were already going to be having to wait unlocking the primary door you were already going to be entering next, saving time overall. These are known as “Early Unlocks”. Now is also a good time to mention that we use this downtime during unlocking to pre-position ourselves for the next-nexus-movement that we will be doing upon leaving this level after it is completed, as the doors do not re-center you to the door upon leaving, you will leave at the position you entered the door, with a moderate area available. This downtime isn't enough to allow for playaround in most cases, and the tutorials don’t have the same unlocking delay so it's relatively minor, but this has already been happening on every single level in the run (and will be for every future door also).
Firefly Forest
This is the first level that has dustblock tiles, which in this case are used as pillars blocking your way. These can be cleaned with attacks but are not enemies and so will not refill your aircharge(s), but using an attack to hit a dustblock causes 1 frame of hitstop to occur. New strats were used for just about every room, the most impressive of which is a different strat for an alcove midway through the level similar to the one seen in Beginner Tutorial. During the fight with the large totem, the last few attacks are light attacks to avoid spreading dust while allowing us to be positioned as far right as possible. We even do a tiny MHB in between the lights to give us more speed going into the next section (pixel and subframe perfect… and saves only a frame here!). For the long boost at the end, we light attack the wolf once to manipulate it into chasing us, allowing us to clean it in the final super. It would save quite a bit of time for the ending if we could use a Seam Super, but the quadrant the level is located in doesn’t allow for it. After exiting, we move to Valley, which has already been unlocked during the previously mentioned Nexus movement from Shaded Grove, saving us about a second here. With the cost of unlocking it earlier, the early unlock saves around half a second overall.
Valley
Dustgirl is used here for a taller sideheavy. To clear dust on walls, we utilize walltaps and falling attacks (often referred to as a “superdrop”) in order to keep as much falling speed as possible while collecting dust. This is also the first instance of left friction being a large issue, as several boosts would be cut short in the air, which forces us to try and spend as much time either on the ground or in dash state as possible. As a result, we do several reversed attacks to clear dust behind us that we fly over while fighting left air friction. An MHB was added since 2019 which saved around a quarter of a second. The upheavy through the floor on the small totem allows us to clear the enemy later and faster, and just barely avoids spreading dust on the ceiling.
Dahlia
Dustgirl is used in this level, Kid is also quite competitive but the ceilings are too low for Worth’s jumps to be of much benefit. Kid (and worth)’s slower falling speed is also a drawback. Kid’s small attack range prevents her from using the same strat as Dustgirl along the top of the map using a downheavy to clear some dust while maintaining a boost horizontally across. While some parts of other levels had aspects of nonlinearity (Firefly Forest) This is the clearest first example where the level has 4~ main possible routes, going left or right first, and then clockwise or counterclockwise from there. The routes lack clear segmenting comparison points to each other so you kinda need to loosely route all 4 and figure out which one(s) have promise or which are easily discardable using the various knowledge of how to gain and keep speed relative to certain geometry. Generally moving right is faster than moving left, and moving down is faster than moving up, so avoiding climbing from the bottom of the level and trying to complete it “top down” can eliminate 2 possible paths fairly easily. When in doubt, don’t fight gravity. An MHB at the start of the nexus movement to Tunnels preserves an aircharge to jump up to the wall, saving a sizable amount of time.
Tunnels
Dustgirl is used as she has a 2 frame advantage from the level starting with a long fall, and her heavy attacks are better suited for the turkeys at the end. When travelling left, we use ceilingboosts to get and keep boosted speeds rather than fighting left friction in the air. We attempt to minimize our speed and align ourselves with the corner before using an empty super, this gives us hitrise storage and allows us to reach the wall to climb up while regaining our aircharge, allowing for a much faster climb, this is also a new strat that was not in the 2019 version. After the left side empty super, the first slope and wall are climbed with a rapid-fire sequence of slopesurfs, slopejumps and a raiserun that are difficult to follow in real time. The TAS ends up going so fast that the ending turkey cycles do not line up as favorably; we must use 3 heavy attacks to clear them all. Despite requiring three heavies, using an empty super to clean wall and floor dust during the upper left side climb saves more time than supering the final enemies. Originally we used a modified starting section to manipulate loading the ending enemies for cycle purposes but this was eventually improved to be unnecessary and tied either way.
Another MHB during Nexus movement allows us to save our aircharge again.
Fields
Another level emphasizing boosting. The starting area was changed since 2019, avoiding the left slope and adding a ceiling boost into a better MHB which keeps speed longer, saving around a quarter of a second overall. After the second turkey is cleared, rapid slopejumping is used to progress uphill faster than boosting across the floor, and also set up for an airdashboost onto the next ledge. Dustgirl is used for her taller sideheavy to more quickly set up a 1-heavy on all of the turkeys at the end.
Dusk Run
The first few seconds of this level lean heavily on several techniques that aren’t immediately obvious and save a huge amount of time by preserving our boosted speed. After the big slopeboosts at the start, we need to carefully adjust our speed coming up to the raised platform so that the ledge doesn’t clip us upward before our vertical speed drops enough that we can get a good angle to airdashboost. Then, when we slopeboost left over the big pit, left friction will rapidly destroy our speed, so we want to remain in dash state as much as possible, yet also want to line ourselves up with the next platform. A slightly delayed heavy attack against the turkey, followed by a downdash late in the attack’s startup allows us to accomplish aligning ourselves. After backheavying the two turkeys, we gain a new MHB since 2019 into the alcove area prior to climbing back up, and after that we utilize a new super location. In both RTA runs and older drafts of IL TASes, we would downheavy the next turkey in the alcove area and empty super the dust that spread, also clearing the dust on the ceiling after this short climb. However, directly collecting all of this dust instead allows us to move the super to clear a wall far out of our way, which saves around half a second of backtracking. A new addition since 2019 is a ladder Heavy to collect some wall dust and then the first jorf of the run is also seen here, which is used to restore our aircharges at the top of this climb to greatly speed up the cleaning of the ceiling, it's actually a jorf LSJ. This change in super location forces us to spend a little time collecting extra dust in the scaffolding section for the ending super, but was still well worth it. Ceiling boosts in the scaffolding section was surprisingly slightly faster than setting up new groundboosts..
For those of you playing along at home, we uhh, skipped a few levels in Forest. Naively, it is optimal to SS an entire hub of levels before moving onto the next area/theme, just due to proximity and avoiding backtracking. All 4 sub-area themes of the nexus are interconnected into a giant loop, and in this case, the Mansion layout is particularly awkward in terms of its door placements and their corresponding key levels. We would have a lot of backtracking inside of mansion if we were limited to building up the wood, silver, and gold keys from within only the mansion levels themselves (If we completed Forest in its entirety, we would only have Red Keys leaving forest, which are not useful until we acquire all 16 Red Keys). What this route allows us to do is use the extra lower tier keys acquired from Forest already, to invest them towards our Mansion routing and level order, allowing us to save a handful of seconds in totality compared to a naive route. We will complete mansion, then city, then lab, and then use the convenient position and connection of the end of Lab to move back to Forest and complete those remaining Forest levels at the end.
Atrium
Worth is the only character who can use an upheavy underneath each of the starting platforms to clear all the dust on top, enabling an entirely different route from other characters. Using time manipulation from the starting upheavy we grab onto a ceiling that would normally be out of reach, allowing us to quickly change directions to the furthest left platform. The right side of the map actually received a large overhaul when it was discovered you could clear the top right platform from underneath while losing very little time, allowing for a much more straight line to be taken to the ending. The entire level is finished only touching the top of a platform once, really showcasing the power of Dustworth’s vertical movement and huge hitboxes.
Secret Passage
A predominantly vertical level means Dustworth is the obvious choice here. This level is another showcase of putting Dustworth’s ridiculous attack range to use, as we reach far away dust that would take a long detour to collect in several places. An air walljump makes its first appearance at about 7 seconds, allowing us to get onto the left wall and setup for a cornerboost while preserving our aircharge. A new route before the ending saves around a quarter of a second over the 2019 version.
Alcoves
Dustman/girl and Dustworth are somewhat close for this level in terms of character choice. Worth is very strong for the climbing sections at the start and the end, but the slopeboosts in the loops make Man and Girl very strong contenders despite that. In the end, it comes down to a ceilingboost that Man and Girl can get coming out of the loop section. Girl is located closer to Dustworth so she saves 2 frames on character selection, but Man’s larger sidelight hitbox and better maplers and friction properties save him a few frames over Girl inside the level. Finally, since we’re going left at the end of the aforementioned ceilingboost, continuing into an air ceiling slide is preferable so as to avoid left air friction as long as possible.
Mezzanine
This level is fairly straightforward. The awkward positioning of gargoyles combined with the arched ceilings forces us to downheavy every gargoyle to avoid spreading dust. Dustworth is used for his faster climbing via his high jumps. This level is primarily about climbing optimization and groundboosts while dealing with the previously mentioned gargoyles, and as a whole the level doesn’t allow for very much strat variation at all. The ending room has some spread out dust, but the alcove in the bottom corner is quickly handled with a raiserun into a cornerboost and air ceiling slide, the middle left alcove is relatively easily dealt with via a super. We early unlock the Archive door on our way to Knight Hall.
Knight Hall
A fairly linear rightward level filled with enemies. Every single top RTA run of this map uses either Dustman or Dustgirl, but Dustkid can abuse several of her mechanics to clear several sections of enemies without touching the floor; touching a floor while attacking will put you into state idle, causing a ton of friction which slows you down, so being able to completely avoid this friction is fast for obvious reasons. Being able to downdash while light attacking allows us to reposition ourselves throughout the level, ensuring we still are able to collect the dust on the floor despite hitrise bumping us upward. Before the large slope at the end of the level, the usual method for clearing these enemies is a super attack, but it leaves you slightly short on dust as you approach the end of the map, forcing you to do a bit of meter farming. Kid can again clear the enemies and dust on the floor very quickly while still getting a sizable slope boost, saving a very large chunk of time that is not really possible for RTA players.
Archive
TAS can utilize some very interesting techniques here that aren’t viable for real time. While Man would normally be the choice for ceiling-heavy levels, we actually want fewer frames of frictionless ceiling cling to utilize more Air Ceiling Slides to allow us to preserve more speed off of the several ceiling boosts in the map. The first super is usually done near a huge wall of dust in the middle of the level, but with TAS precision we can clear the wall while falling using walltaps to save super for a much more convenient location. A huge ceiling boost from some specific geometry allows us to keep a ton of speed through the next section, and an empty super is done after cleaning a gargoyle to allow us to do even more Aerial Dash Boosts to keep this boost as long as possible. This super also gives us a bit of dust spread from the gargoyle, barely giving us enough dust for a super at the end of the map.
Store Room
Dustworth is usually the choice on other combat maps due to his larger hitboxes, however Kid makes extremely short work of this level with her faster attacks and multiple aircharges that allow her to weave through the brutal diving books. Originally, a route that started on the right side of the map was thought to be faster, but it was discovered you could quickly juggle the knight into the cluster of enemies on the left using a couple of light attacks, allowing you to clean it along with all the other enemies. The other route forced you to slow down to clean the knight while on the way to the left section of the map, so being able to avoid this with only a little bit of setup time means this route saves just under half a second. As a result of this route, this level passed Wild Den as the shortest map in the run.
Moon Temple
This level features many unique sections that each character excels in, but ultimately Man or Girl was found to be the best choice due to the amount of falling and boosting, and while girl would save 4f in character menuing, Man’s character differences save him around 6f inside the level. The climb at the start is quite awkward; we can’t easily land on the top of the overhanging platforms as there are no walls to climb to allow us to downdash earlier, so it was best to opt for the lowest jump possible that would put us on top of the platform as soon as the jump ended. The multiple superdrop sections are a definite highlight; instead of doing wall jumps or dashes in several sections, we opt to use jorfs to refresh our aircharges skipping the lengthy walljump and walldash animations. Between the two large falls in the map, our super is used to clear out two alcoves and some dustblocks extremely quickly, saving tons of time. The ending super cleans two knights that are slightly off screen. In the nexus we can get a slopeboost and reverse it to speed up our movement to Ramparts.
Ramparts
Coming in at just under 1minute, Ramparts sits at the 3rd longest IL. The level has a lot of climbing and some really awkward dust placement, so Dustworth is used to abuse his strong vertical movement and large attacks. The route here uses several creative super locations, the first clearing an gargoyle we had previously left behind, the second clears a large amount of dust we would have to spend a long time detouring for, and the final super clears several enemies through the floor to end the level. This three super route does require us to spread extra dust via heavy attacks, but the gargoyles just after the 2nd super make this doable, and creative routing makes it possible to clean all three with minimal backtracking.
Tower
Tower has virtually no platforms of ground to use, so we are in midair for almost the entirety of the level. Dustworth unfortunately struggles with the dust at the start of the map; other characters can easily set up groundboosts without missing dust, but Worth’s giant jumps force him to do a backlight to clear a few tiles that would otherwise be left behind. The primary optimizations are somewhat limited by enemy cycles, as we want to hit as many enemies in as few attacks as possible. After the first super, a variant Reverse Ledgejump is performed on a slanted jorf, allowing us to regain our aircharge and ceiling boost on the slanted ceiling. The last group of gargoyles in particular use a series of 3 very precise heavy attacks to clean them and end the level.
Ghost Parapets
This level is a fairly basic platforming level, though the platforms are few and far between, meaning we spend a large amount of the level in the air as well. Dustkid is used here for the nexus movement towards Observatory, and her additional air charge is useful in maintaining boosts through the air across the long gaps between platforms. There are several fitboosts used to gain speed on the small platforms that we can’t easily groundboost on from above. A slopeboost turnaround can be seen early in the level, where we use it to keep a terminal velocity slope boost through a couple of platforms, saving just 2 frames at the cost of 14 extra frames of setup; it also looks really, really dumb. A few seconds after the climb that marks the midway point of the level, we do some really awkward movement to set up a huge groundboost going into the final, large ceiling. Hilariously, it was found to be possible to get a groundboost going into the next section only if you kept a large enough boost through the ceiling, and the placement of dust on the earlier platforms makes this speed a pain to achieve. Still, despite time lost to awkward setup this absurd groundboost manages to save a handful of frames as well as make for an impressive centerpiece to the route.
Observatory
This level is primarily vertical, so Dustworth is the clear choice. His large attacks are also useful in clearing dust on the walls in some creative ways, allowing us to take a more direct route upward with fewer detours. Jorfs allow us to quickly refresh aircharges to help us ascend as quickly as possible, and a Deadleg is used to walljump off of a spiked wall. Dustworth’s higher jump plays against him in several parts of the map, most notably the end which has several platforms that are awkward to land on, but regardless he is easily the best choice for this map.
Cliffside Caves
One of the longest levels in the run, unfortunately it’s also a largely linear and flat level, which means saving time is almost entirely about optimal boosting and climbing, both of which are not particularly visually interesting. Dustgirl saves a huge amount of time at the start here, since not only does she get a about 2-frame headstart on the initial fall, the exact speed at which she falls lines her up almost perfectly for a near-max speed groundboost given horizontal dash speed. Falling at terminal velocity, Man skips directly over the ideal height over the course of a single frame, so he loses time either getting a less optimal boost or using a setup such as a walltap or attacking to dilate time to manipulate his height spacing relative to the frame boundary. While normal RTA runs super the first walking gargoyle, it was surprisingly much faster to clean him with attacks as we set up a groundboost into the slope to the right, and a taildash followed by repeated slopesurfs allows us to get a slightly larger boost over the course of the slope. After the first super a sequence of back-to-back airdash boosts allow us to preserve much of our slopeboost speed over the uneven platforms, saving a significant amount of time over the lower route live runs take. An empty super towards the end grabs a bunch of dustblocks that are in a pretty out of the way spot, and there’s barely enough dust to get one last super for the ending, the positioning of this super was adjusted since 2019 to save around a third of a second. In the end, we finish just under 1 minute, and while this level is still the second longest map in the game (Yotta beating it out by over 30 seconds) pushing it under one minute was an exciting milestone.
Caverns
Top RTA runs for this level use Dustworth, since he’s the only character that can jump high enough to enable the super strat near the three punch-gargoyles which, since we’re using Dustgirl, never appear onscreen. While only Dustworth can jump high enough to clear all the dust in that area with one super, other characters can preserve enough height with the help of the flying gargoyles, but doing so means they don’t drop low enough to trigger the camera node which allows the camera to pan to the left. As such, we need to spend almost four full seconds offscreen, making this strategy unreasonable for live play. In exchange for ditching Dustworth, we save nearly half a second just from falling at the start of the level, can more quickly set up some key groundboosts in the middle of the level, and can reduce time spent repeatedly switching characters through this section of Mansion. The combat on 4 floating gargoyles in the middle of the level was improved since 2019 saving nearly half a second. The 2nd super used to be positioned a bit further to the right, but moving it a bit further left allows for a smoother climb and a bit extra dust for the ending super, only saving about 8 frames. The nexus movement after this level is a massive highlight, unlocking the Courtyard door early and reversing a large slopeboost keeping high speed through the maneuver.
Library
This level is known for its many book enemies, and also features a lot of dustblock tiles. Dustworth’s large attacks are very useful for clearing large sections of dust from far away, allowing him to take a much more concise path through the map. For the first long dustblock bridge seen in the map, RTA runs use a couple of attacks to break the end of the bridge, allowing the player to start falling and clearing the right wall earlier. However, TAS has a small but significant boost through this entire section, which surprisingly saves 1 frame over the RTA method despite even needing to slow down to avoid colliding with the wall. The following dustblock bridge forces some awkward movement to get a small groundboost, as Worth can easily break the dustblocks while falling, and the first dustblocks in the bridge must be dealt with or we’d miss them while jumping to set up the boost. Dustworth makes short work of the vertical sections of the map, and a new setup for the first super allows Worth to complete this section without backtracking at all.
Courtyard
A late change to this level changed it from Dustworth to Dustgirl. This was primarily from doing both alcoves to start the level in reverse, giving Dustgirl’s superior slopeboosts more opportunities to save time. The first super is an empty super used to clear a bunch of dust that is very difficult for Dustgirl to grab quickly, and the super is not very valuable to us anywhere else in the level. After reaching the far right of the map, left friction becomes our primary concern, using the gargoyles and our super allows us to maintain dash state for speed conservation to fight as long as possible to delay left friction for as long as we can. The Split-Forest Nexus routing of Keys also enabled using Girl here to not affect the nexus movement within the Mansion area, where her slower climbing in comparison to Dustworth was previously a timeloss drawback.
Vacant Lot
This level is simple, boring, and all around awful. Heavying the 3rd turkey while standing on the platform was actually discovered accidentally by an RTA runner trying to find easier fullgame run strats, and while it saves a bunch of frames it unfortunately cycle-locks the level so hard it essentially turns a 7 second level into a 4 second one. For a very long time, this was the least improved TAS by a large margin (sitting at 3%), but we managed to get an earlier cycle than RTA with 0 frames to spare. Unfortunately, this cycle only saves 6 frames, but was a significant improvement given the level.
Park
Gotta Go Fast. This level is all about slopeboosting. Initially, we avoided Dustgirl on this level due to her shorter uplights losing her small amounts of time in various spots, but her “worse” maplers are actually favorable to get extended ceiling slides in places Dustman could not. At the start of the level, a groundboost into a taildash followed by repeated slopesurfing is a bit faster for the initial slopeboosts, compared to strats that would jump onto the slope after cleaning the dust on the floor. In the indoor section after the starting slopes, we take a different route that cleans the alcove on the right with a sideheavy as we fall, which saves a bit of backtracking at the cost of a slower climb overall. Besides this, we exploit being able to keep speed out of a super towards the middle of the level, and after a huge extended ceiling slide at the end we clear out the left alcove with the tire inside. Normally for RTA runs, this alcove is cleared with a super, and the turkey at the top was cleared with a heavy attack after climbing the wall, but it was found to be much faster to avoid the tire and then super both enemies given TAS precision.
Landfill
This level has tons of dustblock tiles. Clearing these quickly with attacks is the primary way to save time in the level. Besides an MHB about halfway through the level, this level is done very similarly to top RTA runs, except for a seemingly random downheavy while we’re falling at the end of the level. The downheavy actually hits a cluster of 3 turkeys, which saves 8 frames due to having to super less enemies, even after considering the extra hitstop from the attack.
Development
A primarily vertical level with lots of dust to clean, Dustworth is the clear winner for his climbing speed and large attacks. This level spent a very long time being one of the least improved TAS ILs in the game when compared to RTA, but a new route was found that saves about half a second. Much of this level involves cutting corners whenever possible via the usage of attacks, especially apparent in the bottom right and top left of the map. Top RTA runs opt to go over the platform in the middle of the map, and while it might seem to be the most direct path, the time spent climbing and hanging in the air waiting for attacks to come out made it well worth it to switch to going under the platform and using an uplight to clean it from underneath. Unfortunately, the level really doesn’t have a lot of wiggle room as far as the dust routing goes, making this heavy into super the only viable option for ending the level. Notably the dust routing includes an oddity of a 2-tile high ceiling with dust on the ground and the ceiling, if you ceiling run in this area you will clear the dust on both surfaces simultaneously for Completion, but your combo meter will not be added to properly, and you will end up short on dust for the final super. Instead we make sure to collect all the ceiling dust via our light attack and then dash on the ground through this section instead.
Construction Site
One of the more unique levels in the game, this level has several blocks with dust on every side, making for a very open ended routing puzzle. Using creative use of attack hitboxes to clean this dust through the blocks. We aim to clear the upper sections quickly, while leaving behind some dust intentionally, as it will be cleared by the super used to end the level. This level had several iterations of wildly different routes, and different characters used. Ultimately this Dustworth route was the fastest as it has minimal climbing compared to the others, and a precise groundboost further helped this route push ahead of the others.
Abandoned Carpark
Dustworth’s climbing speed and large attacks are very useful on this level… but honestly, not much is going on here that is super exciting. There’s not even any enemies or slopes to play around with :( . Of note, the large cluster of turkeys at the end of the level is usually cleared with a single precise heavy attack, actually cycle-locking the ending of the level. This cycle remains loaded in the entire level, preventing any loading manipulation. In this case we are able to beat the ideal cycle by enough that we need a light attack to push a turkey towards the clump to re-enable the possibility for a one-heavy ending.
We Early Unlock the Warehouse door on the way to Apartments, this is a slightly adjusted level order which adds a new Early Unlock which was not present in the 2019 version.
Apartments
This level is actually a close contest between Dustworth and Dustkid; while the level features several longer slope boosts, only Worth and Kid can manage to keep a boost out of the first super. Worth excels at the several lengthy climbing sections in the map, but Dustkid’s niche advantages are actually very useful for keeping speed through the air horizontally in several different spots. This level fluctuated between Dustkid and Dustworth several times, with Dustkid eventually winning out due to slightly faster nexus movement and a major improvement to the long boost after the first super to allow us to keep nearly all our speed out of the huge groundboost. As a whole, the level is just climbing and boosting optimization; nothing super interesting. The first super is done as an empty super, and we use upheavies to spread dust on the ceilings to give us enough dust for the ending super.
Warehouse
This level has a very unique route that is only feasible for Dustworth. At the very start, we use attacks to clean dust above us rather than climbing up initially as in RTA. The climb at the start is very awkward for Dustworth; buffered walljumps will eventually cause him to jump too high and clip the wall on the opposite side, so doing a few ledgecancels for aircharges was preferable to speed up this climb. In the box room in the top left, we can do a reversed jump out of a boost to keep most of our speed in the opposite direction, while still having our facing direction be to the right. Because of this, we can initiate a heavy to the right while jumping left without having to slow down at all (pressing right to manually reverse the heavy would slow us down), which saves tons of time over RTA in this section. Past this, the aforementioned unique route occurs, where Dustworth can utilize his absurd attack range and jump height to clear this section without backtracking at all. We found it was much faster to ride the dustblock slope at the end of the map rather than falling through it and walking to the right, as while it is very weird to set up, the time it saves makes it easily worth doing. The enemies at the ending of the level are poorly placed for a super attack; it is impossible to super the turkey on the far left with the trash can on the far right, meaning it is impossible to clear everything in one super. We leave the turkey on the left as the final enemy, as it takes the least time to clear.
Forgotten Tunnel
Dustworth's large attacks and high jumps continue to make him the best choice. The fall at the start uses some creative and precise attack placements to clean all the dust without going into the looped alcoves as intended, including a Nelson at the bottom before we move into the right section of the level. This level utilizes a significant number of techniques and strategies not used in the top live runs, with multiple raiseruns, precise attacks to clean inconvenient surface dust, and various other high-precision techniques.
Basement
This level has 3 clusters of enemies that are loaded in essentially the entire time, meaning several route adjustments had to be made as we pushed the level faster and experienced different enemy positions. At the start of the level, we do a Shorthop Airdash Boost off the first dustblock ramp to keep a significant boost into the first climb section, which saves about half a second compared to setting up a new boost. The cluster of 4 turkeys can easily be cleared in 1 heavy, but unfortunately the faster cycle results in dust being spread on the left wall that we cannot deal with without wasting a bunch of time. Thus an alternate strategy was developed to clean the lowest turkey separately.The next 4 enemies can also be cleared with just 1 super, but it’s preferable to do the super just before the drop to clear some awkwardly placed dust on the way down. By reaching these enemies fast enough, they are still close enough together to allow heavy attacks to hit both trash golems simultaneously, reducing the number of attacks and allowing us to fight left friction in this section, saving time overall. Finally the ending enemies need to be aligned for a sideheavy to hit all 3. This is one of the only IL’s in the run which needs to delay the early exit by 2 frames to wait for the late downdash.
Our nexus movement after this level involves taking a vertical zip in the nexus which quickly moves us upwards towards scaffolding, saving some slow climbing movement backtracking.
Scaffolding
This level has some really strange geometry in places, essentially locking our character choice to Dustman; Dustgirl’s fall acceleration loses her tons of time at the start of the map, and numerous dustblock platforms rule out Dustworth and Dustkid, the latter of which is surprisingly viable for several sections of the map. As for the level itself, this level has similar sections of tiny platforms that we maintain various boosts across, similar to Ghost Parapets. The cluster of 5 turkeys in the middle can be cleared with 3 very precise heavy attacks, allowing us to complete this section without having to stop or backtrack, and allowing us to keep our boost onto the next platform. The ending also features several TAS-only strategies, with an MHB and a jorf greatly streamlining the approach to the final climb.
Rooftops
Despite looking fairly smooth the whole way through, the Rooftops route is actually full of sections that require a great degree of precision. For example, the sequence at the start involving dashing off the second platform and air jumping directly to the third... If the third attack is an uplight rather than a sidelight, iteration order causes a difference in time dilation which makes it impossible to reach the platform in one jump; one frame worth hits his head on the ceiling, the next and he’s too low to reach the platform. Other spots throughout the level are similarly tight, with sections working or not coming down to subframe timings.
Clocktower
All of the characters are very close time-wise (all within ~20 frames of each other); Worth made short work of the large climbing section, Man/Girl cleared the ending much faster than the other characters, and Kid’s multiple aircharges and quick attacks allowed for several small corner-cutters throughout the level. Kid was slightly better than the others inside the level, however, the nexus movement coming up involves a very long slopeboost into the air while going left, meaning Kid’s multiple aircharges will avoid a great deal of brutal left friction. As a whole, the level isn’t that technically interesting, but a really precise ending is used to superdrop the final sloped wall rather than slowly sliding down, saving a lot of time; we even leave behind some dust for the final super to collect. Amusingly, as we continued optimizing the level, we went from 3 jorfs down to 0 over time, as they often took too much time to set up for minimal gain, but the strategies used are still very unfriendly in real time due to the mashing required for the superdrops along with very tight air control in the ending.
Concrete Temple
Concrete Temple is another level where Dustkid was found to be the fastest character in TAS despite the RTA IL leaderboards being historically dominated by another character (in this case, Dustworth). However, unlike many other such levels, her route turned out to be significantly more replicable in real time and she has since taken the majority of top 10 spots on the leaderboards, including #1. However, the TAS isn’t without a significant helping of inhuman optimizations, packed with four jorfs and a multitude of ridiculously tight boosts. Kid’s extra aircharges and fast attacks allow her to tear through the first spike tunnel at ludicrous speeds, quickly set up fast groundboosts throughout the level, and make short work of the level’s multitude of air control sections.
Alleyway
While the trend of combat levels being extremely short holds true, the routing for Alleyway has the simple goal of collecting 100 dust for a super as fast as possible. Every attack in the map either collects a bunch of dust or is spreading more dust, which allows us to get a super very quickly. Overall, the route for this level seems very solved; there is tons of dust that must be cleaned through the floor, forcing us to go to both halves of the map, and the slope is the best way to do this. Since we must collect all the dust through the floor, this sequence of attacks has been unbeatable by both RTA and TAS, causing this level to have one of the smallest margins of improvement. The most noteworthy difference between TAS and RTA is a different strat for the bottom left of the map, where we skip grabbing onto the left wall by doing a ceiling cancel with a few different attacks.
Hideout
This level is infamous among novice players as the largest roadblock in the game to reaching the difficults, as the level demands some pretty tight control of your character, and is arguably more difficult than a few of the difficults despite being a gold key level. Kid is actually a surprisingly viable character despite the level being notoriously unfair to her, as jorfs make up for her shorter jumps being out of range of a peg early in the level, but Girl is used for nexus movement and her heavy hitboxes saving time in several sections. The nexus movement to Control involves a one-way gate clip/zip which often eats a lot of the slopeboost speed you have.
Control
Shortly after the second blob, we time an airdash such that Girl gets her head stuck in the ceiling. This is advantageous since she continues moving sideways at airdash speed as the ceiling clips her downward, letting her move about 40% faster than she would be going if she were just running along the ceiling. Aside from this and other similar precision movement optimizations, the route is very similar to the RTA IL, though we added an MHB for the ending movement. Girl is used because her taller sideheavy saves a few frames when hitting the blob in the top left.
Vats
Another level mostly about boosting. There is an unusually high amount of dust in this level for it’s length, allowing the use of several supers. There is also a series of 3 spring blob quick kills using perpendicular light attacks to clean them in only 2 hits instead of their normal 5hp, Stretch then Snip/Cut.
The very first strategy and improvement found after the 2019 version of the TAS was found here, where a lower IL player’s replay was coincidentally watched and was found to get a large boost coming out of the falling section around 5s in the level, due to colliding with a slant at high falling speed at just the right height/timing. That player’s name was “Puppetsock1” and so this boost was eponymously dubbed Sockboost. It saves around a third of a second.
Later in the level, a reroute of the room where we Super several paintcans was enabled by beating a cycle where we previously used dash invulnerability to get past a paintcan’s attack, allowing us to get an MHB and boost faster across the top, collecting some dust differently using attacks.
Ferrofluid
Early on, we assumed Dustman was the clear winner for this level due to numerous slopeboosts and alcoves present in the level, and while we were eventually correct, the level had a ton of progression and route changes. When we got around to making a Dustworth run, a much larger focus was placed on abusing his large attacks to completely skip going around some of the alcoves, which saved a bunch of time; our first (very rough) draft of a Dustworth TAS beat the Dustman TAS by a few frames. Changing the route to be more similar to Dustworth, along with implementing other optimizations and improvements, Dustman pulled ahead again. We eventually applied some of these changes to Dustworth, which didn’t make Dustworth faster… until we managed to get a 1 heavy ending for Dustworth! Worth was a fair bit slower than Man up until the 1 heavy, meaning we immediately went to work trying to get a favorable cycle for Dustman to land a 1 heavy ending, and after a ton of minor optimizations and the discovery of the Downdashless Taildashing trick, we BARELY managed the 1 heavy ending for Dustman. And THEN after 7 years had passed we came back to the level and found MORE improvements to Dustman which made the 1 heavy cycle impossible, so we ended up having the fastest version go back to a 2 heavy ending. The level itself is self explanatory, the craziest part being our use of reversing a slopeboost after falling in the 2nd alcove to give us a large and fast slopejump Nelson to leave the alcove. Alongside it is the downdashless taildash in the 3rd alcove that was mentioned earlier, which allows us to pop off the slope and immediately downdash onto the slope after clearing dust on the ceiling.
Server Room
Dustgirl was used here due to the fall at the start where she saves around 3 frames due to faster falling acceleration. While the level is very stagnant and boring in real time, we managed to find some small timesavers here and there along with a pretty major new route. After the fall at the start, we take an unusual route around the large spiked block in the middle of the level, and clear the left side of the level before clearing the dustblock slope in the middle. Instead, we break the dustblocks on our way to the right; this causes us to get a bigger boost into the left section, and avoid a bit of backtracking. The slanted climb features TONS of DSTs, and afterwards we do one last light to clean up dust one would normally get on the intended route for the level. In the penultimate room it was found that an empty super was faster here, saving some time from the 2019 version.
Titan
Welcome to the next huge slopeboosting map in lab. This level has several small climbs with one blob at the top, which will spread dust in awkward places if not dealt with properly. It was significantly faster to just collect the dust that the first blob spread rather than doing a backheavy to avoid the dustspread; immediately after we wallcancel our dash to drop to the slope earlier. The climb to the next blob went through several iterations, but we found it best to clean the dust it spreads on the way down after wallcanceling our dash cancel. Not much to be explained in the level otherwise; using 2 heavies for the ending was several frames faster than a super, and Dustman’s wider upheavy makes him save a few frames over Dustgirl.
Satellite Debris
Downhill in space! Not a lot to this level; we keep a small boost on the upwards slant before the small climbing section by jumping at a perfect angle to land on the slant. We get a pretty huge updash going into the ending climb, which largely contributed to the small percentage improvement for the level; RTA WR time dropped by half a second in under a month as a result of this technique, which is seriously impressive for how short and boost heavy this map is. But yeah, this level isn’t super interesting otherwise.
Research
In 2019 this level was Dustworth but improvements to the Dustman version have now switched to Man being ahead by around 13 frames, as he also reduces character switches in this string of levels, but losing 3 frames in nexus movement, resulting in only around 10f total savings. Research’s opening section has a flurry of movement tech to move faster in these tunnels, Nelson, fitboosts, lowboosts, slope reversals, slopesurfs. The platforms are cleaned suping supers and attacks while keeping boosts as much as possible. The paintcan room is the largest bottleneck in the run, as we run up against the bobbing cycle of the can to be hit by a sideheavy, cycle locking this section as we want to keep our large slopeboost speed to move back left through this room towards the ending. A very unique level which is a definite highlight in terms of TAS-only strategies and optimization.
Security
This level has lots of enemies in the way of a lot of flat ground that would be otherwise a fairly straightforward level. But with so many enemies to kill along the way interrupting us, it gets a bit trickier, the positions and enemy cycles aligning for some of the multi-hit attacks are fairly precise. The staircase climbing section uses a lot of reversed attacks to avoid going back and forth along the ceilings and instead just climbing as quickly as possible.The last few end room enemies are nicely positioned to be hit by a well placed super to finish them all off. Girl and Worth are somewhat close here but Girl reduces character switches and is already faster inside the IL.
Wiring
Dustgirl is primarily chosen here due to her faster falling acceleration at the start of the level. This level has some really unique geometry; lots of skinny tubes with sloped tiles. After using some Nelson-boosted jumps at the start to maintain ceiling boosts, we do a bunch of slopejumps to the left, which is a fair bit faster than using the ceiling to get a boost, and then shortly after set up a fitboost to the right. After a longer climb, we empty super the blobs at the top, and then do a reverse MHB into the next set of horizontal tubes. The next climb has some really interesting movement; this climb was really awkward until we realized we didn’t need to wallclimb to get the dust on the lower section of the wall, as wallclimbing on the wall above it magically will pick up the topmost tile. At the very top of the climb, it’s marginally faster to use a clip here, which unintentionally has a zip out of bounds up to the tiles of dust on the wall. This strat was one of first really mindblowing and silly strats we found, and it’s funny to see how normal it seems compared to many other strategies we’ve found later into the life of the TAS.
Backup Shift
Worth was the original pick for this level, and Kid actually loses over 80 frames relative to Worth on the level’s three climbing sections, but she saves over two seconds elsewhere in the level coming out to a 40+ frame savings overall. Dustkid’s extra aircharges granting her the ability to keep boosts of speed while fighting left friction are very powerful in such a constrained linear level.
Containment
The last combat level of the run; Dustworth is used due to faster climbing in this rather vertical level, and is also much faster for the Nexus movement that follows. Since 2019 however, we now execute this level going clockwise after the first bottom platform, where previously we were routing counterclockwise. This new route is adapted from Dustkid who is faster in the IL but Kid is much slower in nexus movement, saving 5f from the previous counterclockwise version.
Power Room
Pretty uninteresting level; lots of vertical movement and left friction to worry about. Dustworth is used again for the aforementioned climbing. The climb abuses a low 2- tile high ceiling to be able to instantly ledgejump and reset aircharges. After that, nothing worth mentioning. We Early unlock the door to Access on our way to Core Temple. This level order adds another Early Unlock not present previously in the 2019 version. Dustworth also speeds up the climbing to Core Temple.
Core Temple
The first half of the level uses some of the most unique platforming in the game, lending itself to several short MHB’s. This level features a use of both a GAH and a GAL, which allow us to zero-out our y speed while keeping a boost in x speed from a slope. The clip geometry in the middle of the level happens to be able to grant us a good burst of speed via slopejumping and ceiling running right after. The positioning and speed from this clip is important to be able to pop out and not die on the spikes on top of the diamond blocks. The following room uses several well placed attacks to essentially clean the room in reverse compared to the “intended” path. A spikejump allows us to skip the left wall and fit through a gap in the spikes to make it up into the final room.
Access
While Man/Girl are significantly slower than Dustworth on this level, Because our next Nexus Movement is to Dome, which involves falling and a slopeboost fighting left friction, Despite Girl being around 24f slower inside this IL, she ends up saving 28f~ in nexus movement, making the overall tradeoff worth it, and because we are Man already coming from core temple we also save a few frames not having to move as far to select girl compared to worth in character selection. This makes it the only IL where we lose time within the level itself compared to the 2019 TAS, but we make up for it by the overall time saved in Nexus movement, which is harder to track and easily compare for inclusion in the table earlier. The route inside this level is a bit awkward to minimize backtracking, but we use attacks to clean dust and shortcut a lot of back and forth movement around these blocks before climbing up. The top left features a good corner boost into ceiling boost transition called an “Access Boost” which gives a large amount of speed into a long groundboost. Girl’s taller sideheavy is useful in the final fall, able to clear all the dust on the slope to our left before dropping into the ending room.
Dome
The start of this level is quite ridiculous and a definite highlight of the TAS. We use a Nelson to jump off the slope to reach the ceiling dust early to eliminate backtracking in the intended route of riding the slimeblock ceiling upwards. When we fall and boost back left we space our dashes precisely to dash off the tip of the slope and then utilize the time dilation of the attack to land on the upper slope while maintaining a huge portion of our speed across the gap. The remainder of the level is fairly straightforward in terms of speed, using MHB’s, ADB’s and many slope boosts, spike jumps, and jorfs across large gaps.
Abyss
A level focused on downwards falling movement makes Dustman and Dustgirl relatively clear picks here for their higher terminal velocity. This route is fairly linear until we drop into the room with 7 slime blobs and several dustblock platforms, but we have already built a super by this point which handles this entire area allowing us to immediately continue moving, there are a few dustblock tiles leftover but we can use them to ceiling boost and avoid left friction. From there the level forces some backtracking left and right horizontal movement which we can boost on the dustblock tiles and diamond blocks before a falling section on the left into the ending slime bears.
We use some spike jumps to speed up our movement towards a vertical zip which links back up to the Forest area to continue that hub from where we left off earlier, but in a more advantageous key-routing which avoids some backtracking.
Grass Cave
While people familiar with the level would expect Dustgirl to be the best character, Dustman wins out thanks to a few different strats, namely changing up the fight with the wolf in the middle of the level. Coming into the two totem room, we do three slope surfs in a row, the first of which is in the opposite direction to immediately drop the large slopeboost we have, and the third of which is to allow us to buffer a downdash at the end of the slope despite not being airborne. We need to slow down to clear the dust on the right wall, so being able to instantly turn around twice allows us to lose this huge boost in 2 frames, rather than having to wait several frames to slow down. It is much faster to clear this room in the way we do, as we don’t have to wait for totem cycles to line up and we can easily clear the right wall without touching it at all. A wallcanceled airdash is also used to cancel our momentum on the leftside fall to get a faster slopeboost. The two super strat is enabled by hitting a porcupine and three quills with a heavy attack to collect enough dust to gain the second super at the end. Each quill gives 3 dust, and the porcupine gives 1, while also cleaning the wall and re-spreading dust on it. In total this one heavy attack is used to gather 16 dust.
In the next section of nexus movement an MHB is used to propel us sideways before the slopeboost into the ramp. The game’s hover mechanics make it comparatively straightforward to MHB at corners from flat to angled ceilings, but it’s still possible in the reverse. However, rarely does level geometry align in a manner for doing so to be worthwhile.
Ascent
This level was blatantly designed with Dustworth in mind, whose further attack range and higher jumps completely outclass any other character here. Climbing can be tricky to optimize, aiming to maximize vertical speed from every wallrun and every jump, as well as managing your air charge(s) while doing so. After a bit of climbing, we grab a short ceiling boost off of a sloped ceiling which is surprisingly much faster than just walking to the right. Triple lighting the first turkey allows us to get a larger ceiling boost into an ACS, also saving 1 frame. A taildash shows up about a second afterwards, which gives us a much larger boost off the slope. TAS also uses a super to clean some out of the way dust and speed up climbing and manual 3 heaving the end Bear, who is quite close to hitting us. We do this level 1 frame slower than the IL record in order to early exit 2f sooner, saving 1 frame overall.
The nexus movement to Summit was pretty infamous for being really awkward, but was made much more manageable as we found tech while working on the run. Namely the discovery of slope surfing and raiserunning.
Summit
A focal point for Forest nexus routing is the awkward positioning of Night Temple and Ancient Garden. If keys were not an issue, a natural route to reach them would put them first out of the harder forest levels, since it’s straightforward to climb directly to Ancient Garden after playing Tunnels, and climbing from Ancient Garden to Night Temple is fairly quick. However, since both of those levels require gold keys, it’s necessary to play at least two silver key levels before this point, which makes routing around them much more awkward if you want to play Ancient Garden first out of the pair. However, it’s just barely possible for either Dustkid or Dustworth to reach the Night Temple platform from Summit, which radically smooths out the key route through forest, so we use one of them here rather than Dustman or Dustgirl, who are faster for the individual level.
Of these characters, Dustkid is the faster choice since, though she and Dustworth have the same terminal velocity, her better fall acceleration allows her to reach it much more quickly and thus she gets much more benefit from the level’s many slopes. Her two aircharges also allow her to keep speed very effectively across the multiple wide pits in the middle of the level.
The wolf enemy in the middle of the level will lunge jump at you and fall into a death zone, so we do not need to clean it manually to achieve S Completion for the level. We do however intentionally spread dust with heavy attacks on the turkeys earlier, and attack the wolf to gain extra dust to build super meter for the bear later in the level. Immediately before the first bear, we grab the ceiling for a single frame to clean the dust from it and also cancel its magnetic stickiness property so we can preserve our slopeboost speed horizontally over the bear’s head. Doing so requires lining up our dash precisely, as we can’t grab the ceiling while in dash state. At the end of the level, we updash to reach a high enough point on the right wall to get line of sight for all the ceiling dust when we super.
Night Temple
Four seconds in, a very precise Reverse Ledgejump can be seen off of a jorf to reduce the starting lag of the jump as well as continuing movement to the left; for this to occur, the dash needs to come out on the last possible subframe, as otherwise the jump will happen in the air, causing us to lose a very valuable aircharge. The only seamheavy of the run is used to clear some otherwise slow-to-reach dust, as a jorf can be used to avoid having to climb the lower wall at all. At the start of the zig-zagging rooms midway through the level, Dustworth’s high jump really plays against him; he is unable to touch the first ceiling in the room, as a full jump would put him way above the ceiling into spikes, and a shorthop barely misses the ceiling, even with time dilation from an attack. This entire section of the map is extremely unfavorable for Dustworth, as he is often stuck at his base dash speed (495, as opposed to 522 for other characters) and there are few opportunities to get boosts to put him above this speed. The indoor climb in the lower left area of the level is somewhat awkward to optimize, as Dustworth’s high jumps also do not allow us to quickly regain air charges. The top section utilizes several Aerial Dashjump Boosts, along with a few clever jorfboosts to progress as quickly as possible. The long fall near the end of the level uses a “superdrop” which involves attacking while falling and walltaps to clear the dust on the walls while still maintaining near terminal velocity downwards speed.
Ancient Garden
Due to a complex combination of properties, this level turns out to be a close contest between Man, Girl and Dustkid. Utilizing a sloped spike tile at the start of the map, we can get a jorfboost and carry it through a huge portion of the level, thanks to Aerial Dash Boosts off of hitrise from cleaning enemies. While Man and Girl get a much faster initial boost than Dustkid, Kid’s multiple aircharges allow for way more speed to be conserved. Sadly, Kid’s upheavy has tiny vertical range, forcing her to slow down to clear dust from underneath a platform at the end of a level. In the end Man is 1f faster than girl inside the IL, but loses 2f in character selection, so using Girl saves 1f overall.
Overgrown Temple
The start area was overhauled after it was found that a favorable ledgeclip allows a downheavy to clear the dust immediately to the right of the start position through the floor rather than having to clear it with a stationary side heavy at the start of the level. Two Jorfs are used, to give us an extra aircharge at the start and to give us more speed going into the slope section in the middle of the level. A Ladder Heavy is used to streamline the climb on the left side at the start. The first small totem we encounter does not need to be cleaned via attacks, as it will fall into a deathzone on its own, which the game considers to be “cleaned”. Late in the level, a Droof allows us to get a large groundboost going into the ending. The end super requires fairly precise positioning, and we must hit the leftmost totem to prevent it from moving out of range.
On our way to Ruins we early unlock the Wild Den door, the nexus movement here uses a Dyno to climb slightly faster up to the island platform of the Ruins door.
Ruins
Girl is used for higher terminal velocity as there are several long falls. We use one attack just before the large fall in the top right which cleans zero dust, but it cancels our dash and allows us to downdash sooner, and also slows us down so that we can avoid colliding with the wall to our right as we fall, which would also slow down our falling speed. The first super is used to fight against left friction, keeping our boost going left as long as we can. There is a cluster of turkeys after the first large fall on the left which cycle lock this portion of the level, Girl has 2 frames to downheavy them without spreading dust, while Man has only 1f that works. At the second super we specifically attack the turkey to allow us to empty super rather than simply cleaning that enemy with the super, saving around a quarter second. Late in the level, using attacks to clean the dustblocks saves significant time, but climbing up without the use of those dustblocks requires a quick jorf to regain our aircharge and reach the wall above.
Wild Den
While porcupine quills were extremely valuable to us in Grass Cave, their use in this level is even more important. Hitting quills with an attack will redirect the direction they travel, and each redirected quill will one-shot any enemy they hit. Dustworth helps us use this to great effect to clean far away and high health enemies extremely quickly. As such, the time we achieve on this level is actually gated by how fast we can get the porcupines to attack us. With TAS precision, it’s completely possible to clear the two turkeys in the top left of the map using attacks and an extra quill, which RTA cannot do, opting to clear them after the two bears on the bottom are cleaned. This allows us to make the 3rd porcupine shoot as soon as it possibly can, meaning we have a ton of time to bait the large totem into jumping left for a quicker quill hit, as the quill has to travel a much shorter distance to hit it. Unless there is a way to activate porcupines earlier, it is very unlikely for frames to be saved on this level. It is also possible to use a single quill to hit multiple enemies if their hitboxes are overlapping properly, as normally using a quill to 1-shot an enemy results in the quill immediately being consumed upon hitting the enemy. The “Shotgun-heavy” on 3 quills is also possible for Dustman BARELY, and he is the fastest IL character, however after this level we are exiting and climbing up to the difficults, so Worth’s climbing advantages for nexus movement make him win out overall.
Kilo
The first of the difficults is a great showcase of things to come; squeezing through teradrops, jorfs everywhere, and all around an absolutely absurd route that a human could never pull off. Since the 2nd half of the level is largely vertical, Dustworth is by far the best character, and he is the only character that can make the route at the start of the level work out anyway. After a large groundboost out of the slanted ceiling at the start of the level, we get rid of all of the dustblocks in the next room, and then terajump up to the wall to collect dust that partially is off screen. The intended route for this level has you zig-zagging around and gradually climbing upwards, but the terajump here allows us to finish this section without backtracking at all. After a few jorfboosts, we continue climbing upwards to a weird formation of dustblocks, which can luckily be cleared very quickly with just one light attack. The level is pretty straight forward after the huge ceiling boost through a small spiked tunnel; the last dustblock in the level is actually a major pain to land on, as Dustworth is very prone to break the tile if he downdashes too early. The climb at the end has a CWJ to get a bottom corner walljump, and ends by sideheavying the cluster of prisms through a wall; something only Dustworth can do, which saves over half a second compared to other characters who must climb all the way over the wall.
Giga
Dustkid is back! This level was a tight competition between Dustkid and Dustworth for a while; Dustworth’s huge attacks and larger jumps absolutely break everything past the early section of the level, but Dustkid’s multiple aircharges ultimately proved to be too good to be beaten. Since the majority of the level involves moving to the left, we placed a great focus on staying in dash state in the air as often as possible. The starting section is pretty self explanatory; we make quick work of the superdrop, and then deal with the 4 prisms afterwards by going under the block, which allows us to keep a small groundboost for just a tiny bit longer. We do an RLJ on a spikestand a bit afterwards, which makes quick work of the cubby before the slope. The level gets really crazy after the slope; Dustkid’s multiple aircharges are put to great use to weave between spike blocks and climb surprisingly fast for a character who is balanced by having tiny jumps. The top of the climb features an empty super to clear out the dustblocks, and then continue into the next section without needing to touch the floor at all. The walls at the end of the level (infamously known as “giga walls”) normally require you to slowly climb over and walldash between them… but with TAS precision you can just jorf off of them and use downlights to clear out the dust. Lastly, it should be noted this level saw several different route changes in the ending section, as there were several ideas of what could be done with the super. RTA runs are a bit of a mess of different routes as different characters; some players follow basically this same route, some players clear out the intended area for super and then jump over the next section and use super to clear out the 4 prisms in the room below (which requires one to clear out a bit of extra dust during the climb), and some players even opt to immediately climb up to the intended super spot, clear everything out, and then use super to clean out everything left behind just before entering the room with 4 prisms before the Giga Walls. The routes were fairly close, but ultimately the route used here (which ironically, is the oldest of the routes and most commonly used by Dustman and Dustgirl, the two slowest characters on this level) was the fastest.
Peta
This level features “Peta blocks”, and surprisingly spike jumping is often not faster here as one might initially expect. Dustworth’s large hitboxes make clearing the dustblock tiles from further away easier, and the level does start out low and require climbing which also favors Dustworth. A spikestand below and then a Jorf around 8s speed up the slanted wall climb section, and then a well timed downlight during the fall to the left allows us to groundboost to fight left friction and start shortcutting by climbing the right side of this room with a conveniently placed small prism, which the camera can’t follow. We ride a ceiling under the ending Heavy prisms and break some of them from below to speed up the ending super and for extra dust to finish filling our super meter . Finally we reach far enough left to super the remaining prism while collecting all of the remaining dustblock tiles, skipping the majority of this forced-backtracking section entirely.
Mega
This level is a spiritual successor to Backup Shift, with similar horizontal tunnel sections where careful height management of Hitrise is the main challenge for RTA players. Character choice here is a bit strange but although the level is somewhat climbing based, it also has many ceilings that actually impede Dustworth from taking full advantage of his superior climbing speed, while the falling sections lend themselves more favorably to Man/Girl. With TAS we can jorfboost through the tunnel section, avoiding hitrise management. The highlight of this level is at 16s where we “megasqueeze” ourselves between two offset diamond spiked blocks in a way that absolutely does not look like we should not be able to fit through, but with precise positioning and using a legeclip with a dashjump, we can clip upwards through the lower block and the instantly spikejump off the top of it to avoid touching the left diamond, somehow surviving. After several more ceilings and climbing we have a section with many dustblocks, but using a super to clear prevents us from having to backtrack and do some slow climbing, allowing us to just fall towards the end prisms, clearing some remaining dustblocks along the way.
Tera
This level is the famous origin for “Tera drops” where a 1 tile-wide gap with spikes on both walls still has room (around 4~ units wide, 3 integer unit positions plus like 0.5~ on each side, sometimes people say 3 units wide for this reason, kinda confusing) to fit through without dying to spikes. In a level similar to Abyss which is all about falling efficiently, we try to minimize our left/right movement (as it’s the limiting factor delaying us from moving downwards sooner) and maximize our fall lengths so that we spend as much time at terminal velocity as we can, which makes Dustman/Girl the optimal characters here for their superior falling speeds. We utilize jorfs to regain aircharges in several places where you are normally depleted of them so that we maintain our air maneuverability. The large number of prisms at the bottom would take a long time being cleared by a super, but we need to jump back up after hitting them so that the range of our super gets the prism we left behind.
Exa
A full air control level with no checkpoints or ground to stand on. Worth’s high jump heights allow us to reach the upper prisms at the start earlier and clean them from below, avoiding some backtracking over the top and enabling us to fall sooner to the bottom section of the level. The camera loses track of us slightly but we use some jorfboosts for very minor speed increases which luckily also reattaches the camera to follow us. The rest of the level is fairly straightforward in terms of wanting to minimize attacks by double hitting some prisms, while also climbing quickly by expending and re-gaining air charges efficiently using jorfs, deadlegs, and Dustworth’s large hitboxes to access prisms from as far away as we can.
Zetta
Introducing: Zetta Slopes. The upward cannons of a ceiling which we can launch and fling ourselves along with high speeds of a slope boost combined with the magnetic effect of ceiling geometry transitions. This transfer of momentum is also when enables MHB’s, and so we also take advantage of those in a few places. Dustman and Girl’s falling speeds directly translates to faster Zetta slopes due to the slopeboost, so they are the obvious choice for this level. Several of these slopes actually contain dust on a ceiling, and we are unable to ceiling grab or ceiling run while in dash state, which causes RTA players to sometimes accidentally leave dust behind when getting high speed slopeboosts into a Zetta Slope, but TAS can use some light attacks to clean this dust we would otherwise miss. We use an empty super to skip a slope entirely and then fitboost on the upper portion of a dustblock slope following it. The single lone large prism around 17s is very tight to hit without a super as Man/Girl, requiring a very good slope boost and dash spacing to maximize your speed conservation upward and rightwards enough before gravity prevents you from reaching. Being able to upheavy this prism also enables moving the super to be used earlier, allowing for more significant level rerouting, although this level is still very linear. We have such high speeds in the final slopes that we need to maintain dashing and can backheavy the ending prisms without supering.
Yotta
The final level! This level is an absolute monster that acts as a remix of all of the difficult levels, even having a scrapped prototype level that was slightly edited and inserted into the middle. In terms of raw time saved, this is far and away the biggest timesave compared to the current RTA IL record (over 17 seconds), largely due to absolutely impossible route changes and strats you would never dare to attempt on a very difficult two minute level. Dustworth and Dustman are both very close here, but ultimately Dustman won out by around a third of a second. For clarity, formatting, and sanity, we’ve broken the explanation of this level into chunks, and there’s a LOT to explain. The sections are themed as "identity" subsections of the previous difficult levels.
Kilo: This takes advantage of several jorfs and rising spikejumps via jorfs. With very tight positioning, you can squeeze through the two spiked diamonds and even keep the speed from a fairly large jorfslopeboost, making short work of the end of the section.
Mega: After the last prism in the tunnel, we do a reversed spikejump off of the floor to begin our climb up the dustblocks much earlier, and everything left behind can be easily cleared out just by falling near it. We carefully manipulate our speed to MHB The cluster of 3 prisms at the top can be cleared in 1 heavy by both Dustman and Dustworth, but it is still very tight.
Tera: The most infamous section of Yotta for human players, but one of the more simple areas for TAS to optimize; not that the strats are even close to viable for a human, though. Hitrise from prisms delays downdashes, but using clever walljorf spots scattered through this shaft we can wallcancel the hitrise and downdash immediately. Dropping out the left side of tera saves having to dash to the right and weave past a spike block towards the end, saving a substantial amount of time.
Peta: Like RTA, an empty super is done to clear out some dustblocks on the right side, as well as giving us back aircharges to enter the peta tube a bit earlier. The peta tube features TONS of DSTs to rapidly ascend the right half of the tube. At the top of the climb, we jorf to refresh our aircharges to allow us to dash off the large slanted wall earlier, starting us off in the next section with much more height.
Exa: Lots of jorf RLJs allow us to get multiple prisms with one attack while still quickly ascending. The super use here on the heavy prisms was found to be best, Yotta is a weird level that doesnt really have any intuitive satisfying places for super, this and the earlier one in peta are the best we have found surprisingly.
Proto: After the large drop, we leave behind a lot of dustblocks that will be collected with lights on the way out of this section, and also collect the dust on the wall in a rather unique way that greatly streamlines everything. Exiting this section with a stylish superdrop
Zetta: Wheeee! Not much to this section, just mapler slides and setting up for the next slope or groundboost.
Giga: The final and hardest checkpoint in the entire game, complete with triumphant music… that we do not hear because we jump over the music trigger. That’s a shame. Lots of the ceilings here have dust that needs to be collected, but prisms are conveniently placed to clear all of this dust without much extra effort. The giga walls are dealt with in a similarly ridiculous way compared to when they were last seen; jorfs and downwards attacks that barely collect everything. A super is used to collect tons of scattered dustblock triangles, and we can barely gain enough height to reach the last zetta slope platform which transitions into the climb.
Climb: As the name implies, a very vertical section, with tons of slopejorfs are done here to quickly give us extra aircharge refreshes for more jumps, allowing us to use much less attacks and cut corners much closer. All of the rapidfire jorfs, quick jumps, and absolutely insane air control makes for a very exciting end to the TAS, ending with a huge cluster of prisms that are cleared with two heavies and a light. The ending platform is reached using a vertical Zip, the geometry of tiles here if entered from the side just nearly-instantly zips you to the top of the platform, this is moreso used in custom levels but it makes a rare appearance here in the stock levels of the game to warrant an explanation. Ironically, the one speed/entertainment tradeoff of the run is seen right at the end; going by TAS timing, timing could be ended around half a second earlier by just supering the prisms instead of using multiple attacks, as timing could end immediately after the 1 frame of super input. However, it wastes TONS of real time, and frankly makes for a very unsatisfying and confusing ending to those not familiar with the rules of TAS timing. Though there is merit to ending time earlier in other tool assisted runs (leading to interesting strategies where players are damage boosted or otherwise reach the end condition in a hilarious or unexpected way while seemingly doing nothing), we felt pretty strongly against implementing this timesave.
This section is kinda a Library of Alexandria info dump of as much of our relevant knowledge as we can think of, it does not need to be read to understand the TAS, but the information will be very useful for anyone attempting to improve the TAS in the future.
This mostly only includes tech relevant to SS, it omits a few other tech oddities for side-categories that are generally useless and irrelevant for standard gameplay purposes.

Character and Unit Sizes

Your character hitbox is 48 units wide and 96 units tall.
A 1x1 block tile is 48 units wide and 48 units tall.
Speed units in debug data are in units per second (per 60 frames).
Terminal Velocity aka Maximum falling speed
Man/Girl- 2304
Kid/Worth- 1843

Character States

Your movement abilities generally correspond to a state that you will be put into that lasts for some duration. These states, and the transitions between states are what makes up a large portion of the movement techniques seen within the TAS.
Dustforce accepts inputs at 60 fps, however for the player, physics steps are done at a rate of 5 per frame, we count each of these physics steps as 1 “subframe”. States may not last a “clean” whole frame number, and instead might end on a subframe instead. Inputs are only registered on a full-frame basis, but manipulating our inputs so that a specific event occurs at a specific subframe is still often possible.

Dash

When you dash, first your speed is converted to horizontal (possibly with some loss) if in midair, then if your speed is below your character’s dash speed it is increased to that value. After these conversions occur, your velocity is locked in (barring collisions with surfaces) for the duration of the dash (12.5 frames, which due to subframe counts rounds up to 12 frames and 3 subframes under normal circumstances).
When your character has a boost, dashing to lock the speed value is very important. Dash inputs will buffer for the remainder of the frame on which the input is sent. Due to the input buffering, this allows a new dash to begin directly after the previous dash ends, even when that occurs on a subframe that normally does not accept inputs. This is what we call “perfect dash rhythm” and results in a repeating sequence of 5 dashes. This rhythm normally follows a 12-13-12-13-13 pattern due to the three subframes of spillover each dash. If your dash input is processed on the first subframe, your dash will always begin at the beginning of the sequence. If your dash input is buffered, you can start anywhere in the sequence, based on what subframe the dash started. When you have an available air charge to use, buffering a ground dash is normally only possible if you would land within one subframe, as otherwise an airdash occurs. If it’s not possible to buffer a dash or precisely time your landing, you may undergo up to 4 subframes of landing state friction before you can dash, significantly reducing your speed, though this can sometimes be reduced to 1 subframe through use of a land-canceled downlight. This means buffered or timed dashes are usually much preferred for keeping maximum speed.
When dashing in midair, if your speed vector angle before the dash is within 18 degrees of horizontal, in either direction, 100% of your total speed is transferred into the dash, giving you a horizontal speed boost. This is known as Aerial Dash Boosting. When outside of this 18 degree range, you still keep a portion of your speed (1-change in angle/90°) so it’s still possible to airdash faster than normal dash speed when travelling at a sharp angle, but a significant amount of speed will be lost. Has 2 frames where your character is invulnerable to enemies during the dash

Ground Jump

When not in slopeslide state, a ground jump has 7.5 frames (rounding up to 7 frames and 3 subframes, like with dashes) of startup. This startup will end immediately if the player would become airborne, leading to a “ledgejump.”
If the player is still holding jump when jump startup completes, the player gets a “fulljump,” if not then a “shorthop” will occur. A shorthop normally gets slightly less initial upward velocity, and experiences significantly more gravity during the rising part of the jump.
At the start of the jump, your upward velocity is increased to your character’s jump velocity if it is less. However, if you already have more upward velocity (almost always because of a significant speed boost which you have transferred to an upward ramp), then you will instead keep your current Y velocity, even in the case of a shorthop.
When jumping from the ground, your total speed is converted to X velocity in the direction of the jump, then capped based on your new Y velocity. This means that when travelling up or down slopes, you may gain some X speed because you no longer have the angle of the ground working against you, and when turning around as you jump you can most maintain a sizable portion of your speed in the opposite direction. However, friction during jump crouch will significantly reduce your speed, and the speed cap usually limits horizontal velocity to not much above dash speed (exactly how fast depends on your character’s initial jump velocity), even if you were previously going much faster.
In the case of a “ledgejump,” however, the jump doesn’t consume an aircharge, but uses the airjump rules for X velocity. (See below.)
You must wait 5 frames after a jump before you can jump or dash, and must wait 10 frames before you can enter a Wall Grab state.
Ledge jumps can be used to reduce your jumpsquat total length, allowing you to leave the ground sooner and begin moving upwards. In cases where upwards movement is the highest priority, but the nearest ledge is “facing” the opposite direction your are trying to move horizontally, you can still use the property of the ledge by beginning your jump such that instead of instantly jumping on the same frame, your jump input is 2 frames long, the first frame is spent moving towards the ledge, and then you can input the opposite horizontal direction to the ledge on the 2nd frame, giving you a jump with 300 X speed similar to an Air Jump, these are called Reverse Ledge Jumps, often shortened to RLJ’s.
The unique properties of the ledge climb state allowing downdashing are particularly useful for setting up our movement such that we can land on a subframe boundary and then be moving towards the ledge, such that we “slip” off the ledge on the following subframe which is on a different “whole/full” input frame. This allows us to dash and ledgejump simultaneously “into” the ledge jump in the opposite direction of normal fullspeed ledgejumps, while still keeping the majority of our horizontal speed. These do take more time to setup than a traditional ledgecancel, so they are not always faster, but these are a TAS-only tech that saves significant time and is used in many places throughout the run. These are known as Ledge Slip Jumps, often shortened to LSJ’s.
LSJ’s are normally dependent on the subframe you climb over the ledge at, to be aligned for the fastest setups, but these fastest setups are often multiple frames faster so adjusting your climb to be slower to be aligned for a better subframe you climb over the ledge is often better than using suboptimal LSJ setups.

Air Jump

A jump perform in midair has no jumpsquat or startup delay, and thus occurs instantly. As such, jumps in midair cannot be a shorthop and will always give the same height as a “fulljump.” At the start of an air jump, your Y velocity is set (or left alone) using the same rules as with ground jumps, above. However, your X velocity is set according to what direction you’re pressing:
If pressing neither left nor right and your X velocity is between positive and negative 300, it’s immediately set to 0. Otherwise, it’s left at its current value.
If pressing a direction, then your X velocity is set to a minimum of 300 in that direction if it’s less (or in the opposite direction). If it’s already 300 or greater in the appropriate direction, then it’s left at its current value.

Air Dashjump

While in hover state, which begins in the air when a character no longer has upward velocity and ends when falling faster than a certain speed, the order in which inputs are checked allows the player to both dash and jump on the same frame in the air, even if the player has only one aircharge. In this case, the dash is applied, setting the player’s horizontal speed to dash velocity, then the jump is applied, immediately cancelling the dash and giving the player the vertical velocity of a jump. This allows the player to gain significant horizontal speed in the air without sacrificing the ability to airjump (or, in the case of Dustkid, airjump twice). These are very useful when wanting to change movement direction in midair while also needing to jump.
As with normal airdashes, a speed conversion is applied at the start so it’s also possible to get an Airdash Boost when performing an Aerial Dashjump, which is known as an Aerial Dashjump Boost.
However, since the dash state is immediately canceled, the speed will not be locked in as it would be with a normal Airdash Boost.

Ceiling Grab

Also known as “Ceiling Cling” or “Neutral Ceiling Run”
The first 10 frames are frictionless, allowing full speed conservation, this is increased to 15 frames as normal Dustman as mentioned earlier.
Can be transferred into Ceiling Run, which gives the 10, or 15 frictionless frames of the ceiling grab, followed by the 20 frictionless frames of the ceiling run, allowing a larger amount of time spent on a ceiling to have no speed reductions. This technique of transferring between a Ceiling Grab and Ceiling Run is known as a “Mapler Slide”, sometimes shortened to just “Mapler”, named after the player who pioneered the technique.
Once friction has started to apply, releasing from the ceiling has a 10 frame delay, this occurs regardless of the ceiling tiles ending, so can be extended into midair, this is known as an “Air Extended Ceiling Slide” (Or sometimes just Air Ceiling Slide, often shortened to ACS). Notably this ceiling run friction is frequently a smaller penalty to your speed than leftward air friction or, if travelling at an upward angle, gravity, so it is still intentionally used and saves time occasionally.
This tech is where some character downsides can actually become upsides. Girl has only 10 frames of frictionless slide on her Ceiling Grab, so she is able to ACS in 11-15 frames where Man cannot, sometimes enabling her to get an ACS that is otherwise impossible or slower for Man to achieve. The ability for different character properties to be both advantageous and disadvantageous depending on the situation is partially how the depth and complexity of optimization can be challenging and counterintuitive at times.
While in state Ceiling Cling or Ceiling Run, you will not collect ground dust while inside a 2 tile-high corridor. This can be seen in the level Development (or rather, we avoid it by releasing the ceiling to ensure we collect the dust so that it counts towards our meter for acquiring a Super to end the level)

Ceiling Run

Started by holding up and forward. You can only ceiling run in the direction you already have velocity, so e.g. holding up and left will leave you in Ceiling Grab state if you have no sideways velocity or X velocity toward the right.
Sets you to 522 (all characters’ run speed) if your speed is less, and is frictionless for the first 20 frames.
Same rules for releasing the ceiling apply as with Ceiling Grab state. Air Ceiling Slides can be performed after either state so long as you have reached the point where friction is applying.

Head Bonking

Also known as Ceiling Bonking, hitting your head on a ceiling without clinging to the ceiling, is useful when the ceiling is close to your current height, as you can jump cancel and downdash sooner than a dash cancel would allow. Ceiling boosts can be achieved without clinging to the ceiling, meaning in some circumstances it’s best to just briefly bonk the ceiling to get a small ceiling boost rather than having to actually grab the ceiling.

Wall Grab

Grabbing a Wall can actually be used to cancel several different states, most notably dashes and attack recovery. Walls can be used to cancel heavy attack recovery or perform a followup attack in a normally disallowed direction (seen on Dahlia and Archive), cancel aerial dashes to immediately let you downdash (seen on Titan), and cancel hitrise out of attacks that hit enemies (seen on Exa Difficult and Yotta Difficult).
Wall Grab itself may be canceled immediately by simply pressing away from the wall. When you do so, if you have downward Y velocity and are not holding down, your Y velocity is set to 0. If you have upward Y velocity or are holding down, you keep your current Y velocity.

Wall Run

Initiated by pressing up during a wall grab, wall runs immediately set your speed to 522 in the direction of the wall if it is less. During the first 21 frames speed decays linearly, after which it begins a significantly faster logarithmic decay.
Unlike Wall Grab, Wall Run cannot be canceled by pressing away from the wall, only by walljumping, walldashing, or reaching the ledge or ceiling at the top of the wall.

Wall Slide

When touching or inputting towards a wall, you can slide down it, most frequently done via “Wall Tapping” the wall while falling, or simply by sliding down a long slanted wall such as in the ending of Archive. Speed of the wall slide will vary based on character, directional inputs, and the angle of the wall.

Wall Jump

Has 5 frames of startup before jumping off of the wall,These give you the same height of a regular grounded or aerial jump, but usually give you only 348 horizontal speed and radically limit your air control until the peak of your jump. When jumping off an overhanging slanted wall, however, you receive significantly more horizontal speed, actually slightly over dash speed..
If the player is close enough to a wall when inputting a jump in midair, they will be immediately pulled over to the wall and start a walljump instead of an airjump. This can be used to save some time by walljumping before actually reaching the wall, but can also be fatal if the nearby wall has spikes on it. When performing an “early” walljump like this, if the player has upward velocity in the air and is holding up and toward the wall, the player will actually get some slight upward speed during the beginning of the walljump startup, as they would if they started a wallrun immediately before walljumping.
Can be edge cancelled, similar to a ledgejump, which is usually done at the top of a wall as we are wallrunning up it, and at the bottom of a wall as we fall past it, or if we are climbing from below and near to an edge, we can buffer a walljump combined with a downdash to give us an instant walljump. These downdash+walljumps on the same frame are called Corner Wall Jumps, shortened to CWJ’s. Walljumps have no startup when performed from “wall grab idle” state, but reaching that state requires hanging on a wall for so long this is almost never useful.
It is possible to walljump and touch the floor at the corner of a wall and floor, this gives you a jump with fewer startup frames than a grounded jump, but restores your aircharge unlike a walljump. It does limit your jump trajectory but this is very rarely a “best of both worlds” useful factor to be aware of.
Walljumps also have no startup in several situations with slanted walls, if you do not spend enough time touching the wall before jumping you can jump off the wall without collecting the dust on the slanted wall.

Wall Dash

Has 5 frames of startup before releasing from the wall, these can be edge cancelled however, though it is rare to be able to do so. If you also have an air charge to use, you can wall dash and then airjump to jump with significantly higher speed than most walljumps would grant you, at the cost of an aircharge of course. However, during the very beginning of this dash, you’re still close enough to the wall to be able to walljump off of it, cancelling your dash and returning you to the wall.
As with a walljump, walldashes can be performed when only near a wall, but unlike a walljump, walldashes cannot be performed while holding toward the wall, only with a neutral or away horizontal direction input.
As with walljumps, walldashes have no startup from “wall grab idle” state, but this basically never useful.

Air Walljump/ Invisible Walljump

An interesting oversight in the code means that if you grab a wall with vertical speed, and then your vertical speed carries you off the top of the wall without wallrunning, you can store the ability to walljump in midair, with no wall nearby. This stored ability to walljump only lasts while you remain in the “raise” state, so once your vertical speed hits 0, you can no longer walljump in midair. This is used only once in the entire run.
Hitting 0 Y speed ends state raise, Otherwise raise state ends after ~16 frames (not 100% sure this is true but hard to test)
This does not work to enable a walldash, you will simply Airdash and consume an air charge.

Infinite Walljump

One reason for the extra horizontal speed when jumping off an overhanging slanted wall is to push the player further away from the wall to prevent them from repeatedly walljumping off the same wall. However, with left-facing overhanging slant walls, left air friction rapidly reduces that speed below 522, so all characters other than dustkid will still be close enough to the wall to walljump again after the 5 frames during which you can’t jump or dash at the beginning of a jump. This process can be repeated indefinitely as long as the slanted wall continues, though having to repeatedly undergo jump startup means it usually isn’t very fast.

Ledge Climb

When wallrunning, if you reach the top of the wall you will climb over the ledge and enter a special hover state. Your Y value is modified through a special separate variable so that you are still able to downdash and dashjump while moving upwards, which is normally not possible. Ledgeclimbs are nearly always cancelled via Mantling or Ledge Cancelling. They are rarely useful to gain a small amount of additional height for an attack or before Aerial Dashjumping.

Mantles and Ledge Cancels

Whenever we climb over the top of a wall, we can avoid spending a lot of time floating above the ground by either using an air charge to mantle (air dashing at ground height) or ledge canceling (downdash -> dash). Mantles are faster than ledge cancels, but are used somewhat rarely since there are usually more prudent uses for an extra air jump or air dash. Mantles are sometimes combined with an ADB to maintain speed onto a higher platform however, keeping high speed from a prior-existing boost.

(Surface) Boosting

When a character hits a surface, they lose some portion of their speed based on their angle of incidence (pic here: http://i.imgur.com/LznJaKP.png ), and the rest of their speed is converted to line up parallel with the surface they’ve run into. This is used most frequently to convert falling speed into ground speed (referred to as Groundboosting for flat ground and Slant- or Slopeboosting when taking advantage of advantageous ground angles), but also applies to collisions with walls and ceilings.
These are only boosts-in-name and for the relevant vector of the surface, they don't actually increase your overall speed, they just covert/combine vertical and horizontal speed into ALL only horizontal speed for example, still with a penalty multiplier (like 80% for slopeboosts) it just happens that the multiplier penalty is generous enough that you can exceed your normal maximum runspeed even after the multiplier is applied.
Most groundboosts attempt to use the higher incidence angle of 71 for a higher speed boost, but in cases where there isn't enough room to setup the larger boost, or the boost isn't able to be maintained for very long, the smaller angle of 45 is occasionally used instead (or often if we already have a significant slopeboost, to maintain it to a lower ground section after a drop in terrain). These are often described as “lowboosts”.
Boosting on a slanted or sloped ceiling by walljumping at the point where the wall and ceiling meet is often referred to as a “Corner Boost” and is a reliable way to get a fast ceiling boost. When jumping from an overhanging slanted wall, the extra horizontal speed makes for an even faster boost.
Even without an advantageous slope it’s possible to get a boost on a ceiling, but the fact that you need to be moving upward rather than downward means that these sorts of Ceilingboosts generally aren’t as significant as other boosts, as the amount of upward speed we can get is usually very limited.
The most common kind of Wallboost is when transferring a ground speed boost into a wall with the help of a slope or a slanted wall. However, when jumping into a wall, jump timing and the resultant angle you hit the wall at can have a dramatic effect on your upward speed after the collision. Occasionally, it’s even possible to get a downward Wallboost when trying to fall quickly.
Its often better to avoid walls when falling to avoid the magnetic properties of walls and to avoid unfavorable collisions which actually reduce your falling speed.
Lastly, though most boosts center around converting a high amount of speed in one direction into less speed in a more useful direction (e.g. fall speed to sideways speed), it’s also possible to get a “boost” by aligning your movement as closely as possible with a surface. For example, if jumping upward at a 45 degree angle toward a 45 degree upward slope, it’s possible to land with a near-0 degree angle of incidence, keeping almost all of your total speed. Once the ground levels out, this converts to about a 40% increase in horizontal speed. This style of “boost” is referred to as a “Parallel Boost.” or “Fitboost.”
When Ground-, Slant-, or Slopeboosting, it’s sometimes possible to fall slightly past the surface in question and gain extra falling speed, then ledgeclip (see below) up onto it for a better speed boost than you’d normally be able to get from your initial height. This is sometimes referred to as a “Clipboost.”

Slope Slide

When the tile of ground beneath the player is 45 degrees, you can press down to begin a slope slide. While in slope slide state, the character will asymptotically approach their slope slide speed (1400 for Man/Girl, 1260 for Kid/Worth), so slope slides allow the character to gain much more speed than simply dashing or running, and are better than running or skidding at preserving speed when going even faster than that.
Landing on a slope from a large fall allows the player to gain even higher speeds (see Boosting) and once the slope ends at the bottom this speed can be fully transferred into horizontal speed.

Slope Jump and Spike Jump

As mentioned earlier, a jump from slopeslide state has no startup. As such it can never be a shorthop. It is also a grounded jump, so X speed conversion happens as with other ground jumps. Notably, it’s possible to transition from hover or fall state, to land state, to slopeslide state, and then jump all within a single subframe. This means that in the case of a spiked slope, it’s possible to actually land on the spikes and jump back off before the game checks if the spikes should kill you. This is known as a “spikejump.”
Spikejumps normally require buffering the jump input and thus requires that you have used your aircharge, but with precise positioning it’s possible to spikejump even when you still have an aircharge by aligning yourself to land on the first subframe.
Similarly, dustblock slopes can be jumped off of before the game checks that you should collect them. However, you will always collect the surface dust from a solid slope even if you jump off it immediately.

Ledge Clips

The corners of ledges are not completely solid, and can be clipped into and used to push yourself upwards or downwards slightly by doing so. These are abused in various ways: to gain a small amount of extra height, to airjump/dash slightly earlier than should be possible when falling past a ceiling, to get extra falling speed or better align certain boosts, etc.
Ledgeclipping is sometimes important to avoid or delay, however, since when ledgeclipping up to a higher ledge than you technically should be able to reach, you retain your velocity when the ledgeclip bumps you upward, which can actually delay the time you can land on that ledge as you get stuck in hover.
When used to get a higher speed boost, these are often called Clipboosts.

Super

  • Enemy Hitrange is a Square
  • Dustblock hitrange is a circle
https://imgur.com/7oKQjdX
  • Dust on Surface hitrange is a circle requiring Line Of Sight (same circle as dustblocks)
Grants Hitrise upon coming out of the Super
Applies time dilation during startup
Boosts can be preserved through a super, Including reversing the boost.
Using a special attack that hits no enemies is referred to as an “Empty Super”. The special attack takes a variable amount of time depending on the number of enemies it hits. Generally, the amount of time one enemy adds is fairly small, so you need to be cleaning several enemies per attack to make it worth using heavy attacks to reduce the number of enemies a super will hit. However, there’s a base amount of time that a super takes, and this base amount is doubled if the super hits at least one enemy. In the case where a super is primarily being used to clean surface dust or dustblocks, the super will come out much faster if it’s not hitting any enemies.
Seam Super’s also exist in the same places that allow for Seam Attacks.
It is possible to downdash in between hits of a super to disjoint the enemy hitrange from the Dust-clearing range. This extra movement from disjointing is extremely minor and rare to save time however.

Attacks

Attacks have 3 phases, Startup (aka windup), hit, and recovery. Light and Heavy attacks have three possible angles, Up, Down, or Neutral.
At the beginning of attack startup, the attack’s direction, either in terms of left/right or up/down, can be changed via directional inputs. The period where these changes can occur lasts 2 frames for light attacks, 4 frames for vertical direction changes to heavy attacks, and 8 frames for horizontal direction changes to heavy attacks.
Once the player has attacked “behind” them, their attack facing cannot be changed again, even in followup attacks, until they’ve completely recovered from attacking. In order to attack “forward,” they must either wait to completely finish attack recovery, or cancel recovery with an action other than attack (such as grabbing a wall or jumping).
During attack startup, the character’s time rate is adjusted such that they move and accelerate less during each subframe, as though time was moving slower for them. Only 70% as much time passes for the player during attack windup. This is referred to as “Time Dilation.”
During this time, shifts in subframe boundaries and the granular nature of movement/acceleration calculations can produce a slightly different end result in movement that should theoretically just be the same movement but iterated through more slowly. Taking advantage of these calculation differences to produce a more favorable result is referred to as “Time Manipulation,” but this is done fairly rarely since the Time Dilation itself will always have a time cost.
Time Manipulation is most commonly used when moving upwards to gain minor amounts of extra necessary height. The reason for this is the riemann sum of 0.7 * (0.7 + 1.4 + 2.1 + 2.8 + 3.5 + 4.2 + 4.9 + 5.6 + 6.3 + 7) is less than (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7) but not actually much less and its effects are kind of unreliable because there are hard cutoffs during your ascent where the acceleration of gravity changes based on your current velocity and though in general gravity's effects are less harsh because of that riemann sum stuff, it could mean that you end up crossing that boundary at a slightly more or less advantageous time.
Notably, attack startup on the ground forces the character into idle state, which has stronger friction than even holding opposite to your current movement direction, and thus allows you to slow down more quickly. Idle state also allows the character to open doors while still moving.
One exception is on a ground slope, where holding down will keep the character in slopeslide state rather than idle state, which is preferable when high friction is not a desired effect of the attack. At the end of startup, the attack makes a single check to see what the attack hits, with no lingering hitbox. When an attack connects with enemies, if the character is in midair, their upward velocity will be increased to a certain minimum if it is less. This slight upward nudge is referred to as “Hitrise.” When the player hits dustblocks in midair, they don’t get an upward nudge but their vertical velocity will be set to 0 if they were travelling downward.
Also when the attack hits an enemy or dustblocks, the character (and the targets in the case of enemies) will be “frozen in time” for a period of time based on the attack and what was being hit. This is referred to as “hitstop,” and it lasts 1 frame for hits on dustblocks, and 2.5 or 7.5 frames (0.5 rounding up to 3 subframes as with dashes) respectively for light and heavy attacks on enemies. This hitstop begins one frame after the character detects that the attack has finished, so there’s usually one frame when the player can input actions that cannot be performed during attack startup (e.g. ground dashes) but before hitstop occurs. Hitstop will still apply afterward as normal, but in particular it is often highly favorable to dash immediately upon an attack connecting to minimize time spent outside of dash state, and sometimes to convert the hitrise to forward speed via an Airdash Boost.
Though the attack will hit enemies after a consistent amount of time, the character will react to the hit having completed (and clean surface dust) dependent on the Iteration Order of the attack hitbox in comparison to your character. This can sometimes be manipulated favorably via Iteration Boundaries
Attack Recovery can be cancelled via Jumps or Dashes. This is Known as Heavy Cancelling, or Light Cancelling. Cancelling recovery is used on nearly every single attack in the entire TAS. (Sometimes these are referred to also by the action used to cancel, so a Wall-Cancelled-Heavy or a Dash-Cancelled Light, sometimes the attack type is left out of the description but it still usually refers to cancelling attacks, although it is sometimes used in reverse as attacks can also cancel a ground dash)
Light or Heavy attacks can be completely canceled during startup with a walldash or super attack input, and downward-angled aerial Light attacks are cancelled by landing on the ground. Cancelling attack startup with a super input can be useful for time manipulation and positioning, and cancelling light startup by landing can be helpful to buffer certain ground actions from the air, though a light attack canceled in this way always results in at least one subframe of “land” state which has fairly unfavorable friction properties.

Hitrise

Occurs when hitting an enemy with a damaging attack, or after a Super. Total Height gained upwards is based on the characters fall acceleration (you are set to a fixed value and then your fall acceleration determines how quickly it reduces to 0)
When grabbing a ceiling at very low (near 0) speed as you gain hitrise, you can store the upwards speed to be used after you ceiling run, while converting your horizontal ceiling run speed into upwards speed (proportional to how slow you were moving before hitrise, the closer to 0, the better for full speed conversion) allowing you to gain height around corners and reach walls without having to expend an aircharge. This is called Hitrise Storage and is done via a super in Tunnels

Air Friction

Applies when X speed is over 522, adjusts your speed based on how far away your X speed is from POSITIVE 522 speed (meaning moving rightwards in the X direction). This results in significantly stronger speed penalties when moving left (at negative values greater than 522) and will actually decelerate you to below 522 speed. This “left friction” problem complicates leftward air movement and often shifts optimization strategy from trying to get the most speed to trying to keep a lower speed for longer through better dash spacing, manipulating speed before air friction applies so that the speed after deceleration is as close to 522 as possible, or sometimes avoiding momentary/small speed boosts to avoid dropping under 522.

Ground Friction

Does not have the same left vs right issue that air friction has (thankfully)
Still applies when speed is over 522

Seam Attacks

Normally, attacks on surface dust are blocked by impeding walls. The direction of the attack matters for this check, so a downward attack can clean dust on the far side of a wall as long as the attack isn’t blocked by a ceiling above it, but a side attack won’t normally be able to clean dust on the far side of a wall. However, under certain circumstances, it’s possible for the line-of-sight raycasting calculations performed to squeeze through the seams between adjacent tiles and clean some dust on the far side. This only works when the relevant coordinates are negative (e.g. if Y coordinates are negative, there’s a slight gap between vertically adjacent tiles), but by lining up attacks this way it’s sometimes possible to reach dust much further away than would normally be possible, since a side heavy attack or a super will have much more horizontal reach than the up/down heavy which you would normally need to use to clean dust on the other side of a wall.
Also applies to Dust Spreading in rare cases, and can cause dust to spread in an unreachable location through a wall.

GAL/GAH

Grounded Air Light/ Grounded Air Heavy is a technique where we begin an attack while grounded (usually sliding on a slope with a boost) and time the attack to complete and fire the same subframe you leave the ground, you will zero-out your Y speed, while keeping your boosted X speed. GAL’s are more restrictive in their use cases because downlights will be cancelled upon landing, so they need a long length slide to be used, while GAH’s can work pretty much wherever needed.

Droofs and Magnet Hijack Boosts

Walls and ceilings in this game have a “sticky” property where coming in contact with them makes it a little difficult to move away from them until the character grabs then releases the surface. In some situations this can be problematic, but it can be used to gain speed in certain situations.
When your character gets stuck to a wall but hasn’t actually grabbed it, they remain in the appropriate airborne state (jump, raise, hover or fall) and are affected by gravity as normal, but their left/right motion is forced to remain in line with the wall in question. For overhanging slanted walls, this can actually give the player great horizontal speed as the character falls as per normal, but is pulled along sideways by the stickiness of the wall above them. For somewhat arcane reasons, this maneuver is known as a Droof.
At the exact moment that a ceiling changes angle, your character’s speed will be angled to line up with the new angle of a ceiling. If simultaneous to this your character does something that makes their movement not line up with the angle of the ceiling, this will be overridden. In particular, if your character downdashes, giving them significant downward velocity, precisely at a corner on a ceiling, their new speed including the velocity of the downdash will be calculated then angled to line up with the ceiling. This gives a significant speed boost, often at an upward angle, without requiring use of an aircharge. This is referred to as a Magnet Hijack Boost or MHB. Taking advantage of MHBs requires fairly specific ceiling geometry, but when possible it can quickly generate high speeds in situations where that would otherwise be impossible without the use of an aircharge.
The same Magnetic sticky phenomenon used for MHB’s is also how Zetta Slopes work.

Facegrinding and Toegrinding

During the first 10 frames of jump state or during an attack, the player cannot grab walls. If the player is adjacent to a wall during this time and presses toward the wall, the mechanics for speed conversion upon hitting a surface will be run every subframe, causing the character to lose a significant amount of vertical speed per frame, and when this property was discovered it was called “facegrinding” (particularly when travelling upward) because of the harsh speed loss. This is usually a situation to be avoided, though occasionally it’s necessary to slow the character down so that we have an opportunity to grab a wall before the character passes it completely.
Toegrinding is basically the same thing but used for falling.
Anti-Toegrinding also exists when magnetted against a wall while falling, as every subframe your speed is being redirected to line up parallel with the wall, so if you hold away horizontally from the wall you gain a tiny bit of speed which gets transferred into downwards falling speed, this is fractions of units of speed and rarely saves enough time to matter.

Superskid/Skid

A different state for grounded friction that isnt idle/run/dash
Superskid decays your speed asymptotically, where regular skid has more linear speed decay. Superskid applies when you have speed above 522, otherwise skid.

Jorfs

Named after the player who discovered it, there’s a small oversight with edges of spiked platforms which allows for 1 “pixel” of leniency where you can stand on the platform without the spikes killing you. This “Jorf” pixel is extremely handy for quick platforming, as you essentially have another platform to utilize to jump, regain aircharges, or even get a boost (often called Jorfboosting). This applies to ceilings, floors and walls, regardless if they are sloped or flat. Slanted and sloped jorfs are especially noteworthy, as the window of leniency is significantly wider due to the angle of the ground and, with a downhill angle, can be particularly effective for generating boosts.
Your input subframe alignment might need to be considered in order to dash while still “on the ground” of the Jorf, rather than it coming out as an airdash.
Coordinate rounding makes the quadrant relevant. In negative X coordinates (relative to the origin) to land on a Jorf on the RIGHTSIDE corner of a block requires being on an EXACT whole unit position. This unfavorable case is called a “nulljorf”, as it turns a regular 1 unit area into a <0.001~ unit area. It is still possible to land on nulljorfs via moving across them during the course of a subframe, but aligning yourself is much more difficult compared to “regular” Jorfs. However in these negative X coordinates, Jorfs on the left side corners of blocks become 2 units instead of just 1.
For the purposes of Nulljorfs and Double-sized Jorfs, the coordinate of exact 0 at the origin, is negative. You heard it here first.
Due to a separate oversight, the lower left corner of your character does not detect spikes on walls at all, so there is a much larger window of safety near the top right of spiked walls. Despite the difference in cause and size, these are still often mistakenly called walljorfs, The more accurate term we use for this oddity is a “Deadleg”. Because of their great size (a full tile, rather than only one pixel) they can much more easily be used to walljump or wallcancel, and they allow for a brief wallrun as well.
Jorfs on a Dustblock tile will NOT clean and consume the tile, only touching outside the jorf will do so.
Gorfs- These are named after a custom level called “gardener” (The term being a combination shortening of Gardener Jorf) where their usefulness was popularized. A 1 tile high gap in spikes can sometimes be used to (dash+) jump out of and regain air charges.

Tera Drop/Jump

A 1 tile Wide Gap with spikes on both sides is known as a tera gap. These have a 4~ unit wide gap that the character can fit within without dying.
Can be Jumped up between, or fallen through (Known as a Tera Jump or Tera Drop respectively)
A gap with spikes only on 1 side is known as a Half-Tera
1 Tile wide gaps without spikes have their own quirks

Bad State Transitions

Some errors in state transition logic mean that state transition checks can be run for states that the player has already transitioned out of, allowing for a variety of abusable effects:

Slope Reversal

This seems to be more of an unintended consequence of how idle state works than the more arcane state abuses below, but pressing left or right from idle state will transition to run and keep all of your speed (at a minimum of 300 units) even if the new direction is in the opposite direction you were originally travelling. For a long time this wasn’t useful as the only known ways to reach idle were standing still, releasing forward to slide at low speeds, attacking on the ground (which doesn’t allow transitioning to run until the attack finishes), and waiting out skid/superskid/land states. Of all of these, waiting out land was the only promising option since the state is normally reached setting up slopeboosts and has only moderate friction, allowing much of the speed to be kept. Even still, this method required so much runway, uncommon level geometry, and setup time that this technique went completely unused until slopesurfing provided a way to reach idle instantly from slope_slide.
This idle->run transition quirk doesn’t technically need to be used to reverse speed and is used once to drive-by unlock Wild Den by slopesurfing at the top of the slope left of the door, sliding in front of the door in idle, and then starting a new dash as the door is unlocked.

Itay Dash and Taildash

When simultaneously pressing dash and jump from slope slide state, slope slide transitions to jump and then to dash despite already having transitioned to jump state, resulting in a horizontal airdash from the slope despite normally not being able to airdash for the first five frames after jumping. This is known as an “Itay Dash,” and is used rarely during some nexus movement.
When in state skid or superskid on a slope, simultaneously pressing down, the direction facing downhill, dash, and jump gives us an Itay Dash-like instant airdash and also does a bad state transition from skid/superskid to hover, from which we instantly downdash, ultimately giving us an instantaneous downhill speed boost. This is referred to as a “taildash,” and is useful for rapidly getting a modest slopeboost. Note that the same bad state transitions occur if you try to do this up the slope, but there is no known use for it since it essentially just lands you on the slope with a poor boost angle.
Using Double tap sideways we can also do the Taildash inputs without inputting a downdash, resulting in a “slope pop” where we separate ourselves from a slope without locking us into being unable to downdash.

Slopesurfing

When in slopeslide state, pressing dash and heavy simultaneously results in both occurring and then immediately cancelling each other, putting the player into idle state which then immediately can transition to slopeslide or run depending on direction input. This is referred to as “slopesurfing” and has a variety of applications.
By pressing down+dash+heavy, one can get to dash speed and immediately resume slopesliding and accelerating. This generally isn’t as useful as a taildash, but can be performed in many situations where a taildash isn’t immediately possible. Alternatively, when accelerating downhill, the nature of the bad state transitions also results in you accelerating very slightly faster (one subframe gets double the acceleration, so since you can only input every other frame, results in 10% faster acceleration overall). Lastly, this “consumes” the grounded dash input but still sends a downdash input, which will be used if slide off the bottom of the slope later this frame.
By pressing left/right+dash+heavy, one can dash, then go into idle state followed by run, then we can release forward and enter skid next frame, enabling Taildashing and Raiserunning (see below). Lastly, by pressing no directions when pressing dash+heavy, we can enter idle state, which we can transition into run next frame. That transition to run converts all our speed into movement in the appropriate direction, allowing us to almost instantly reverse a speed boost with comparatively little speed loss.

Tailboosting

This is really a combination of the previous three techniques but is used frequently enough that it warrants its own entry. By performing a taildash, using a slope surf to enter state idle, and then doing a slope reversal immediately, one can quickly gain a speed boost going up the slope. If set up with minimal backtracking this gives a respectable speed of 705 for Dustkid/Dustworth and 779 for Dustman/Dustgirl (which is faster than an average groundboost).

Raiserunning

When going from skid to slopeslide to jump (via slopejumping) in one subframe, a bad state transition occurs where the skid logic notices that you have become airborne and, assuming that you’ve skidded off an upward slope, puts you into state “raise.” Unlike the “jump” state, “raise” state has no restrictions on jumping, dashing, or most importantly, grabbing walls.
This allows us to transfer all the speed of the wallboost we get, usually close to or even higher than the character’s initial jump speed, into a wallrun, which decelerates much more slowly than a jump would.
Another way to incorrectly enter state “raise” is by airjumping the subframe your character crosses over a ledge. While it sounds powerful, it ends up being extremely rare to be useful since it forces you to burn a precious aircharge and cannot be done out of dash state, meaning it cannot be done immediately out of a ledgecancel, for instance.

Ladder Attacks

From hover state, the check for entering wallgrab state and the check for starting an attack happen with an odd timing, allowing the character to do both simultaneously if circumstances permit. This allows for the character to attack while running up the wall, potentially an extremely useful combination. Unfortunately, since it helps with ascending while attacking, but requires a non-ascending air state to trigger, there are comparatively few situations where it ends up being beneficial overall.

2 Tile High Ceiling runs

These will remove dust on the floor and ceiling for S Completion score purposes, but will NOT award you the combo meter for super properly, This is an issue in the level Development that must be avoided to acquire 100 dust properly.

Updashing

By dashing into a wall at a less than 90 degree angle (e.g. from a slope into a flat wall), a surface collision occurs, generally reducing your speed to 80% or 50% what it was before and aligning your velocity with the wall. However, if you’re not pressing toward the wall, you don’t enter wall grab state and instead remain in dash state, which means your (admittedly reduced) speed stays locked in either for the remainder of the dash or until a wallgrab is started, at which point the player can begin a wallrun as normal.
In the cases where this conversion results in a favorable speed up the wall, this functionally adds some frictionless time to the start of the wallrun.
Notably, while in dash state the player will not collect surface dust or break wall dustblocks, and if the wall changes angle again another collision will occur while the player would seamlessly change directions while wallrunning.
Since the most common state which allows for Updashing (a slope next to a vertical wall) also allows for Raiserunning, it’s often necessary to weigh the two options against each other and determine which produces the most favorable result.

Early exits

If we finish the level during level exit fadeout, we still receive credit for completing the level. This will be done on nearly every level in the game, as it both starts the fadeout as soon as possible (usually saving 17~ frames per level) and skips the extremely slow score screen. Early exits do place some restrictions on what actions can be done during fadeout and sometimes a slower IGT is obtained as a result of saving real time from allowing a sooner early exit.
When exiting a level, clicking “yes” with mouse input rather than navigating with the keyboard or controller sends the player directly back to the Main Nexus, instead of the inner nexus, accomplishing 2 menuing exit-area’s in one. This is called a “Mouse exit”.

Buffered Wallrun

If you have already consumed your ability to wallrun upwards, you can buffer a wallrun while sliding down a wall, which will occur as soon as you touch the floor, even if the floor is covered in spikes and would otherwise kill you. I don't remember if this is used anywhere in the TAS but it could potentially be useful so it is worth including and documenting here regardless.
Doing this DOES regain your aircharge, as you do touch the ground briefly, which enhances its usefulness.

Head stuck dashing into 45 degree sloped ceiling

This is used in the level Control

Upcrapping/ Phantom slope nonsense

You can land on a slope and then immediately pop off of it into hover by aligning VERY precisely, we don’t have good consistent setups for this. It is also possible to encounter phantom slopes where 2 slopes meet, even if covered in spikes, and enables a slopeboost ledgejump. The cause of phantom slope behavior is the raycasting to detect if you are touching the ground, which can give false positives and make you "touch the ground" briefly in midair. A phantom slope is used in the Backup Shift to Containment nexus movement.

Double Tap Dash:

Double tap dash is not so much a technique, but more of an obscure control scheme in the game. By enabling double tap dash, quickly pressing left, right, or down twice cause the player to dash in that direction. Honestly, the inclusion is really strange - it is terribly awkward to utilize, poorly programmed, and never really mentioned anywhere else in the game. To be more specific with the poorly programmed part: the interval for valid double tap inputs goes off of real time rather than some ingame counter, dash inputs and downdash input are separated, pressing any key of a higher keycode than the direction you are double tapping will disable the double tap (eg: if ‘A’ is a higher keycode than left, pressing A between the left taps will cause the double tap to fail, including if A is bound to NOTHING…). The second part is the important thing though - separating downdash inputs from dashes allows for some otherwise impossible techniques:
1 frame ledgecancels: By double tapping a downdash and then pressing the dash key the next frame, a ledgecancel with no frames of delay can be executed. This doesn’t always save a frame over 2 frame ledgecancels - the player has to actually touch the ground early enough for the dash to register, meaning this often only saves a subframe or two. This is also useful for faster LSJ setups in a few situations, or also for keeping significantly larger boosts in some sections (saved multiple frames on both Basement and Concrete, as they allowed us to immediately dash to lock our speed rather than having to wait through an extra frame of friction).
Buffered Downdashes: Double tapping a downdash will allow you to buffer a downdash off of a ledge. Usually, trying to downdash the instant a player crosses over a ledge will either result in dashing on the platform, or an airdash off of the platform; downdash inputs usually cannot be done without the game first checking for a valid dash input, so the game usually sees you as still on the platform, and thus dashes instead of downdashing. Since you can input a downdash without a dash input, you can avoid this and instead downdash immediately, saving anywhere from 1 to 5 subframes. Downdash-less Taildashes: Definitely the weirdest usage of double tap seen in the run: by executing a taildash without the downdash input by instead double tapping the desired direction while pressing down and jump on the last frame of the double tap, the player enters a weird state transition similar to an itaydash. However, unlike an itaydash, you can actually downdash immediately out of the technique without having to wait out the entire airdash duration, meaning this is basically an objectively better way to pop off of a slope. Still, being better doesn’t make it good, and was only found to be useful in one level, Ferrofluid.
Overall, including double tap was a little controversial. The RTA/IL community had a pretty solid gentlemen’s agreement not to use it unless absolutely necessary (eg: a short level that leans heavily on multiple ledgecancels, giving a significant time advantage to players simply because they can mash faster), because it is quite unwieldy and could turn several levels into very miserable grinds for top IL slots… essentially if one player gets a fantastic WR time on a level using double tap, everyone wanting to contest this WR would also have to use double tap. However, people warmed up to the idea of using it, and it certainly does raise the skill ceiling of the game. As well, implementing it into the TAS was difficult, as double tap was registered by real time passing, meaning the frame window for it could vary by a frame making it difficult to find a way to include it in our replay composer and nexus scripting. Still, the technique was included late in the life of the 2019 run, as ultimately there wasn’t a good enough reason not to use it; it’s included in the game and saves time (likely a couple seconds), human limitations shouldn’t really be a consideration for tool assisted runs (especially when we do things like frame perfect mashing of slope surfs to save single subframes…), and ultimately “it doesn’t feel right” isn’t really a valid argument. The timesave is often very minor to the point where you wouldn’t notice the difference in 90% of the instances we utilize it, so you can also just pretend it isn’t there!

Infini Difficult?

This is a level which also exists and is sorta a stock level but also sorta not. While it is a level included in the DX update and made by Hitbox Team, It is not reachable in any nexus or tome in any normal means via a door. It was an ARG (Alternate/Augmented Reality Game) secret using letters found in cosmetic secrets and apples within the standard stock levels for exploration-curious players and as a community. These letters result in a code which can be used to access this level. Infini is meant to be a separate challenge and not included as part of speedruns, as it would be generally even more prohibitive to the majority of human players and was definitely made to be a challenge on its own, not a challenge alongside the rest of the game. As this category matches the RTA playerbase and the developer's intent (+ mercifulness to human players) and the unique abnormal way of accessing this level compared to the others, this level was excluded from the goals.

Countdown Frames

Upon entering a level, before the timer starts counting, there are 55 frames of no-input allowed. Some ways of creating TAS scripts allow illegal inputs during this time, so you should double check before publishing or uploading a script that your first input and movement takes place on frame 56 or later, with the level timer showing 0.033. (Timer on 0.016 is where inputs are polled on frame 55, but they will not take effect until frame 56 with the timer showing 0.033).
The level comparison table includes these 55 frames, but the ingame timer does not, so that's the reason for any visual disparity noticed there. This only applies inside levels with the “3…2…1… Let’s Dust!”-Countdown delay with a timer in the bottom left. Nexus movement scripts do not have this restriction.

Early Start

The newest tech found which the explanation of is being kept secret for now to be a surprise reveal for the community. The explanation will be updated and added on July 18th.

Enemies

Dust gain from Invincibility: Heavy prisms, Knight Shields, Apples, Quills, Rooted Slime springbacks
Hitting invincible enemies grants “more” dust than you would intuitively think, allowing you to more quickly fill your combo meter for a super.
Being Parried by attacking a Knight’s shield can sometimes make you fall faster, This is not well understood and is weird.
Enemies will be knocked back and stunned in the direction of your attack upon being hit. This delays them from retaliating with attacks of their own, and can be used to adjust their positioning, so long as they have health remaining.
HomePages/Riokaii last edited by Riokaii 4 days ago
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