The connections between cubing and speedrunning

[Waffles]

So I’ve seen a lot of cubers doing speedrunning (on assorted games, platforms, etc) and thought that there should be a discussion thread talking about this - what could the connection be? What are the similarities? etc.

 

[Matt11111]

I think it checks out, speedcubing and speedrunning both require a similar set of skills. I've been doing videos about both topics for a while because I figured if people are interested in one, they might be a fan of the other. Some people just like doing stuff fast so it makes sense that there'd be some overlap

 

[Christopher Mowla]

You probably will enjoy some of the comparisons made in this (relatively recent) thread.

 

[ruffleduck]

I recently got into speedrunning, and I do think the mindset is quite similar to cubing.

 

[Cuberstache]

I think the biggest difference is that speedrunning is usually more deterministic, depending on the game of course. Most games have a fixed world or group of levels or whatever that you already know the fastest way to get through ahead of time. I speedrun Celeste, which notably has absolutely zero RNG, so it's all about your strats and execution. Speedcubing more so requires you to react to different situations. But I have seen lots of cubers that are also speedrunners, and I'm even part of a discord server for cubers who speedrun Super Mario Odyssey, which has like 15 or so members.

 

[GodCubing]

Reseting for 3bld wr

 

[Cuberstache]

Reseting for 3bld wr

Oh yeah, resetting is another thing I completely forgot about. In cubing, it's rare for me to stop a solve because it's bad. That's not the case with speedrunning. Speedrunning definitely focuses more on getting a PB run and not on consistency. There aren't any averages of 5 or anything.

 

[EvanCuber]

I Speedrun Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario World Advance 2. I just like it because I like doing anything that is timed, kind of like cubing

 

[abunickabhi]

A lot of BLDers are into speedrunning. Shivam, Graham and Scalpel come to my mind.

Although I am a BLDer, I don't enjoy doing speedrunning as much as watching it.

 

[Matt11111]

Oh yeah, resetting is another thing I completely forgot about. In cubing, it's rare for me to stop a solve because it's bad. That's not the case with speedrunning. Speedrunning definitely focuses more on getting a PB run and not on consistency. There aren't any averages of 5 or anything.

Well I mean, you kinda have to be willing to reset a speedrun because of how much longer they can take. Super Mario Odyssey, just as an example, takes about an hour, and if I were to run it I'm not about to fall several minutes behind and keep it going when I know I can do way better. Cubing uses averages mostly because they can, most events range from a few seconds to a few minutes, so you're able to get a lot of solves done in the same amount of time it would take to speedrun a game. So it's usually not gonna be worth your time to find out how quickly you can beat a game on average. Most people care about their single fastest time anyway

 

[Christopher Mowla]

So it's usually not gonna be worth your time to find out how quickly you can beat a game on average. Most people care about their single fastest time anyway

But if you're trying to break a really fast speedrun record, if you can subdivide the run into sections (identify the timestamps for you to arrive at the first fourth of the distance, 2nd fourth, etc.), then it may be useful for you to know (on average) how much time passes for you to pass that certain fourth of the run. That way you can decide if you want to reset the run or not.

But I guess it depends on how hard the WR actually is to beat (or how hard it is to beat it by the margin that you want to beat it by so that it makes it really hard for someone else to beat it later).

 

[Matt11111]

But if you're trying to break a really fast speedrun record, if you can subdivide the run into sections (identify the timestamps for you to arrive at the first fourth of the distance, 2nd fourth, etc.), then it may be useful for you to know (on average) how much time passes for you to pass that certain fourth of the run. That way you can decide if you want to reset the run or not.

But I guess it depends on how hard the WR actually is to beat (or how hard it is to beat it by the margin that you want to beat it by so that it makes it really hard for someone else to beat it later).

Yea completing a few runs is good for finding out what your splits generally are, but I think it's gonna vary a lot from runner to runner how often they want to reset.

 

[Lucas Garron]

Turns out that getting lucky can be a crime.

 

[Matt11111]

Turns out that getting lucky can be a crime.

Dream eventually followed up on that, he says that a mod he had enabled for other videos was accidentally also left on for his speedrunning streams. And that mod did alter the RNG, which is where the absurd luck came from.