SPEEDRUN STRATEGIES

Finish a ruined portal's broken frame, light it and you are in the Nether without mining obsidian or casting a whole portal from lava. Ruined portals generate in every Overworld and Nether biome except the deep dark, and the chest beside one often has something to finish the job with: obsidian, flint and steel or a fire charge.

Use a village to collect iron, food and beds on the way to the Nether. The weaponsmith chest is the one to find, since it can hold iron ingots, diamonds and obsidian, and hay bales take care of food. Nothing here needs a technique you have to practice first, which makes it the most beginner-friendly Nether entry.

Find a bastion remnant, take its gold and barter with the piglins for ender pearls, obsidian, string and fire resistance potions. Modern Any% routes visit the bastion before the fortress, because bartering covers most of what the rest of the run needs: pearls for eyes of ender, obsidian for portals, string for beds and potions for the blaze fight.

Cover the distance to a stronghold in the Nether, where every block counts for eight in the Overworld, and only come out when you are close. Blind travel means choosing a spot in the first stronghold ring before throwing any eye. Educated travel uses information: throw eyes first, work out the distance, divide it by 8 and travel that far in the Nether.

Throw two eyes of ender a short distance apart, measure both angles and work out where the lines cross, instead of following eye after eye. Since November 2021 speedrun.com has allowed tools that read the angles and do the math, and the Java rules name Ninjabrain Bot as allowed.

Use the debug profiler, better known as the pie chart, to find monster spawners, chests and crowds of mobs before you can see them. The chart breaks down where the game spends its time, and a blaze spawner, a buried chest or a bastion full of piglins makes the entities or blockEntities slice jump.

The 1.16+ Any% route that starts at the ocean: shipwreck or buried treasure loot, a magma ravine portal, then bastion, fortress and stronghold. It is more complicated than plain bartering at every step, and higher-level runners still have to learn it, since it has become the standard route for 1.16 and later.

Kill the ender dragon while it is still flying: climb an obsidian pillar, build a setup on top and blow the dragon up with beds as it passes. You never wait for a perch, which takes perch luck out of the fight, and that is exactly why zero cycles have become more common. They are also the hardest dragon kill to learn.

Kill the ender dragon during one perch on the exit portal by blowing up beds or respawn anchors under its head, without destroying crystals first. It works from 1.14 on. Four explosions are the minimum, and they also keep the dragon from settling on the fountain, where it would fly off after taking more than 50 damage.

Get blaze rods from a fortress's blaze spawner quickly: without rods there is no blaze powder, and without powder there are no eyes of ender. Blazes only spawn in fortresses and drop 0 or 1 rod without Looting, so the fight comes down to killing as many as you can close to the spawner.

Spend less of the run in menus: let the recipe book fill the crafting grid, craft everything you need in one visit and use the inventory shortcuts the game already has. None of it depends on the seed, so every run gets the same saving.

Find a buried treasure chest without the map: spot the chest's spike on the pie chart, walk to block 9, 9 of its chunk and dig down. TheTalkingMime came up with it for hypermodern runs, so a beach without a shipwreck can still give you iron, TNT, food and a heart of the sea.