Speedrunning

Speedrunning is the act of playing the game with the goal of completing it as fast as possible. It often involves following a planned route, understanding the biome generation to find the next exit quickly and, depending in the category, it may incorporate sequence breaking, exploits or glitches that allow some sections to be skipped or completed more quickly than intended.

Categories

As many games, dead cells has different categories that are ran by speedrunners, each with their own routes, victory conditions and rulesets. The leaderboads are split between the main categories and category extensions. Each category also has sub categories, variations of the main category. These are often used to split the leaderboard for any game mechanic/version/limit that might cause too much difference in runs where a specific strategy is more advantageous than other strategies and thus unfair for those who want to use different methods or have slower/older hardware as that can affect loading times or other niche elements.

As Dead Cells has the option to use custom seeds, most categories have a split between seeded (Custom seed) or unseeded (random seed). Others might be related to game versions and unrestricted or No Major Glitches.

Main Categories

There are 5 main categories that are ran.

• Any% Warpless
• Any% Warps
• Fresh File
• 0-5BC Glitchless
• 5BC

All categories end at the credits after The Hand of the King, The Queen, Dracula - Final Form or The Collector. The Hand of the King is the preferred ending as it has the shortest and thus fastest route, The Collector is mandatory for any runs that involve 5BC.

Any% Warpless

Reach the credits at the end of the game, either after The Hand of the King, The Queen or Dracula - Final Form without using the any use of warps, such as the special cutscene where Time Keeper teleports you directly to the clock room. This run could be seen as just trying to complete a basic run as fast as possible and is often played on savefiles where everything is collected and unlocked.

• Sub categories:
  • Seed
  • Unseeded

Any% Warps

Reach the credits at the end of the game, either after The Hand of the King, The Queen or Dracula - Final Form. Warps are allowed. Makes use of the special cutscene where Time Keeper teleports you directly to the clock room from the Prisoners' Quarters, skipping the majority of the run. This requires a savefile where the player has beaten The Collector for the first time and has not started a new run. However, this warp only happens once per savefile, so runners use a modified savefile that makes it so the warp happens every run, even after completing a run.

• Sub categories:
  • Seeded or Unseeded
  • 60+ FPS or <60 FPS
    • FPS categories exist due to Wings of the Crows being affected by FPS rates, how depends on game versions. Before the items rework it would allow high speed movement that made it possible to cross a whole biome under a second, in current version it is still affected by sub 60 fps rates.

Fresh File

Reach the credits at the end of the game, either after The Hand of the King, The Queen or Dracula - Final Form on a fresh save file.

• Sub categories:
  • Seeded or Unseeded
  • The Hand of the King, The Queen or Dracula - Final Form.
    • Each of these bosses end a run and have different routes to reach resulting in different completion estimates.
  • <2.1 or 2.1+
    • Version 2.1 introduced the permanent timer in the game which continous through loading screens, and loading screens length is affected by computer hardware.

Most runners run on 2.4 due to the Lightspeed Unlinking trick being easier on this version of the game.

0-5BC

Playing on 2.0 version and higher, from a brand new save file, reach the credits after The Collector, while playing in 5BC. In this run, the player will need to collect all Boss Stem Cells which requires winning a run on each difficulty.

• Sub categories:
  • Seeded or Unseeded

Altough there are categories for seedeed and unseeeded, only unseeded is ran.

5BC

Reach the credits after The Collector, the credits after The Hand of the King or The Queen do not count. This run is played on 5 BSC on a pre-existing save file.

• Sub categories:
  • Seed or Unseeded
  • unrestricted or NMG(No Major Glitches)
  • <2.5 or 2.5+
    • In Version 2.5 Aspects were introduced.

Category extension

Category Extensions are runs that don't fit on the main leaderboard due to self applied limits and objectives or gimmicks to create a run or are just old categories that aren't possible anymore. These often require going out of the way of an otherwise optimal run.

Boss Rush

Using the Training Room, defeat all the bosses in any order using any equipment loadout in 5BC. Smuggling of the Collector's Panacea is not allowed.

• Sub categories:
  • QatS or Fatal Falls
    • Queen and the Sea adds 2 more bosses.

All Bosses

Beat all the bosses in the game, including DLC.

This can be run on any difficulty, altough 0 BSC might not be the most optimal because of certain shortcuts or mechanics that aren't available on all difficulties.

The last run must be run on 5BSC as the final boss must be defeated.

All Runes

From a brand new file, collect all runes in the game.

Reverse Runes

From a brand new file, collect the following runes in the order of the list:

• Homunculus Rune
• Spider Rune
• Ram Rune
• Teleportation Rune
• Vine Rune

The challenge in this category comes from the fact that sequence breaking is neccesary because the runes needed to normally be able to reach the end are collected last.

Cursed Sword Glitchless

Reach the credits at the end of the game, either after The Hand of the King or The Queen while having the Cursed Sword in the inventory during the entire run. This category is ran in Custom Mode. Damned aspect is banned from this category.

Normal mode

Using normal mode on Version 3.2 complete Reach the credits at the end of the game, either after The Hand of the King or The Queen. The use of Glitches and Aspects is not allowed.

Old categories

These categories aren't run anymore but are kept to keep the runs and leaderboard available for viewing.

• Any% Early Access
• Fresh File Early Access
• Any% Seeded Early Access
• 4BC