The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a sprawling role-playing game that usually requires hundreds of hours of gameplay before players can reach Level 80 and fight the infamous Ebony Warrior, but one player has condensed all that down to less than 10 minutes.
Speedrunner and YouTuber nucular uploaded his record-breaking Skyrim Ebony Warrior speedrun (which can also be viewed below) where he defeated the foe, which only appears at Level 80, in just nine minutes and 55 seconds. How the heck? Well, it's complicated.
Speaking to IGN, nucular broke down his extensive strategies and reason for doing so, explaining the run was conceptualised by legendary Skyrim speedrunner Waz, who held the previous world record of 14 minutes and 27 seconds.
But the methods used by Waz could be improved upon, nucular said, as they used an outdated version of something called the Restoration Loop, Skyrim's best-known method of gaining a bunch of levels really fast.
Restoration Loopy
The Restoration Loop works by drinking several Fortify Restoration potions in order from weakest to strongest, which multiplies their effectiveness exponentially. Items with a Fortify enchantment then get a serious buff due to Fortify being classed as a Restoration effect.
"By crafting and drinking a Fortify Restoration potion, re-equipping your Fortify Alchemy gear, and repeating, your Alchemy and Restoration effect multipliers will buff each other in a positive feedback loop until you can make extremely powerful potions," nucular explained.
"This will give you an extreme amount of XP; enough to instantly raise your Alchemy from 15 to 100, so you can then reset it to 15, allowing it to be raised again." Myriad items and gold are required to make these potions, of course, but a couple of simple vendor glitches allow these to be acquired easily.
Levelling in Skyrim is based on these skill increases, and once maxed out skills can be reset to gain experience from them again. Level 80 can therefore easily be attained using this method of gaining and resetting levels, but moving through the myriad animations required to do so can slow things down considerably (in the context of speedruns).
It's this element that nucular focused on when he set out to beat Waz's time. "All of the techniques in Waz’s run are essentially standard practice in Skyrim speedruns," he said. "Since the run had no major mistakes, I needed to get creative if I wanted to beat it."
But nucular detected two shortcomings in the strategy. "First, his Fortify Restoration loop could’ve been made faster simply by making more than one potion each time he used the alchemy lab," he said. "It’s not entirely necessary to re-equip the Fortify Alchemy gear every time you craft a potion, and doing so would require duplicating the ingredients only one or two more times while greatly reducing the number of times Waz needed to go through the slow animation of entering and exiting the alchemy lab.
"Second, as soon as he was able to make extremely strong potions there were faster ways he could use that to power level some skill other than Alchemy. Some others pointed out that he could make a batch of extremely valuable potions at once and sell them individually to repeatedly increase the Speech skill to 100."
Superstacking
The 14-minute run still required a lot of time, effort, and practice, of course, so no-one attempted to beat it themselves. But nucular's attention was grabbed when YouTuber Sickliff outlined a technique dubbed "Superstacking", which was claimed to be "an easier Restoration loop."
Superstacking has players repeatedly click an enchanted item in their inventory to stack its enchantment effects, meaning if, for example, a Fortify Health +40 Ring was clicked 100 times, the player would gain 4,000 health.
"This sounds extremely useful, and can potentially be used to significantly speed up the Fortify Restoration loop by reducing the number of alchemy cycles, but it has some hefty requirements," nucular said.
Players must be a Werewolf or Vampire Lord before they're able to use Superstacking. This is because no pieces of apparel have valid meshes for these character models, and there are four specific items which don't have valid meshes for specific races. This essentially means certain items can't be equipped properly while in these forms and a bug is triggered that duplicates the enchantment.
Three of the four items, the Bone Hawk Amulet, Falmer Gauntlets, and the Worn Shrouded Cowl, are relatively hard to get in the context of speedruns, but the fourth is a simple Gold Ring, which can be crafted with just a Gold Ingot. Gold Rings don't have valid meshes specifically with Khajit Vampires, and this obscure bug would lay the foundation for nucular's first unconventional speedrunning decision.
Standard practice sees players choose the High Elf race because they have the highest movement speed of all Skyrim characters at 1.08. Male Khajits have a movement speed of 1.0 while female Khajits have a speed of 0.95, meaning nucular's choice of race already put them at a disadvantage on paper.
So it Begins
Skyrim speedruns begin when players gain control of their character's movement, "which is just a rule the whole community agreed on a long time ago for convenience, so we don’t have to sit through the whole carriage ride at the beginning of every speedrun," nucular said.
His unconventional decisions didn't stop with choosing a Khajit, however, as choosing to become a vampire also set them on a different route. Skyrim speedrunning typically sees the player literally jump out of the starting town of Helgen via a hole the dragon Alduin makes in a tower, instead of having to follow the typical route of moving through the sewers to emerge in a cave near Riverwood.
The usual speedrun route sees players escape to a nearby cave and use a technique called Load Warping to essentially trick Skyrim into thinking their bound hands from the start of the game have been untied by replicating an old save. The player can therefore continue as normal, running for a horse in anticipation of the next step.
The new technique changes things up though, as nucular instead heads straight for Haemar's Shame to perform the Load Warp, as this is where he can become a vampire. While this is a lot farther than the usual spot, it's right next to a horse "so it's actually only a few seconds slower", nucular said.
Horses aren't needed for their natural speed increase, however, as by this point nucular has already performed a sprint glitch by pressing sprint, quick saving, releasing sprint, and quickloading in succession. This allows jumping while sprinting and stops stamina being consumed too. Horses are instead required for a movement glitch dubbed Horse Tilting, which lets the player move at supersonic speed across the map as long as there's a body of water at the end for safe landing.
Now nucular had to decide on a destination, but as Gold Ingots or Gold Rings aren't sold by any blacksmiths or jewellers or even equipped by any of Skyrim's non-player characters, he had to think outside of the box again. Thankfully, an island to the north east of Windhelm has a random pile of Gold Ingots sitting on it.
Unprecedented Levels
The route to this island came with the added benefit of passing over Windhelm, meaning nucular unlocked the city's fast travel point while shooting over it on a sound barrier-breaking horse. He therefore could travel back to Windhelm immediately after obtaining the Gold Ingots and carry out the rest of the speedrun there.
Now it was time for nucular's own version of power levelling. It started the same as standard speedruns do, by brewing some potions, but instead of using the Restoration Loop, nucular used the exploit to make one super powered Fortify Smithing potion and one super powered Fortify Health potion, raising his Alchemy skill to Level 100 in the process. He then used the smithing potion to craft an incredibly powerful weapon (taking his Smithing to Level 100 too), gave it to a hired follower, provoked them, and survived the incredible hits with the Fortify Health potion.
"I could level my Block and Heavy Armor skills to 100 in a single hit," nucular said. "This reduced the number of times I needed to open the Level Up menu from 18 to eight, since I’d already levelled Alchemy and Smithing to 100, so I just needed to level Block and Heavy Armor eight times each.
"I could quickly reset them both too in the same menu, because they’re conveniently right next to each other in the skill tree. I already made my super weapons, so once I hit Level 80 I can just walk outside and one shot the Ebony Warrior."
This is an infamous, incredibly strong enemy in Skyrim who only appears once players hit Level 80, challenging them to a duel to the death. But instead of accepting his invite to meet later for the battle, nucular's single attack brings the Ebony Warrior down before he even gets a chance to speak.
Using this unconventional strategy, nucular achieved a time of 14:27 and thus achieved a new world record for the Ebony Warrior speedrun, but unsatisfied with that alone, he then dropped it to 13:50, 11:47, and 11:25 in just a few days. But crossing the 10 minute mark required a bit more tweaking.
Just Riften
After experimenting with Horse Tilting further, nucular discovered a route which would take him right over Shor's Stone, unlocking its fast travel point, on the way to the Gold Ingot island. Riften guards patrol this area, so doing something illegal would have nucular quickly taken to the city's jail.
There was some risks with going to Riften though. Only one vendor sells enchanted gear, and just one at a time, meaning if nucular couldn't get the Fortify Alchemy equipment on the first attempt he'd lose time resetting it. Additionally, the only follower in Riften is the magic-wielding Marcurio, meaning nucular would instead have to reverse pickpocket a regular NPC and provoke them into attacking, which could take some time.
Some of these concerns were soon mitigated, however, as the blacksmith in Shor's Stone actually had a much better chance of stocking the required gear than the one in Riften. The city also has easily accessible ingredients for the Fortify Health and Fortify Smithing potions.
Reverse pickpocketing an NPC, meaning placing an item on them instead of taking one away, was still a challenge though. "It was surprisingly difficult to find a suitable NPC for this," nucular said. "You want them to have a maximum Confidence value so they don’t flee from fighting you, but they can’t be already holding a weapon that they prefer it over the weapon you give them.
"I settled on the blacksmith in Shor’s Stone since he was right next to a grindstone where I could make the super smithed weapons, but since he doesn’t have a maximum Confidence value, I had to buy the Courage spell and cast it on him so he kept attacking me."
But despite these additional complexities, nucular's strategy worked, and he was able to drop the time to 10:17 before finally reaching his goal of getting under 10 minutes with the 9:55 final time. This is without loading times, a common mitigation in speedrunning communities so PC performance doesn't affect results, but with loading times it came to 10:52.
"Getting under nine minutes without loads (and under 10 minutes including loads) is possible with my current route, and I do have a few ideas for how a time under eight minutes could happen eventually, but I’m taking a break from Ebony Warrior for now," nucular said. "If someone beats my time, I’ll come back."
What's Next?
In the meantime, nucular has his sights set on more of Waz's records. "I'm going to beat as many of Waz's times as I can," he said. "A lot of his speedruns that are still world records actually used outdated techniques."
But beyond that, nucular wants to plant his flag in the first serious take on an all Achievement run of Skyrim. This "is a category that no one has really taken seriously before," he said. "No one has taken the time to plan out such a long category before. At least no experienced Skyrim speedrunner has done so, so I'll be the first."
An all Achievement run, as the name suggests, means unlocking all 75 Steam achievements for Skyrim, a feat which takes 80 to 100 hours of dedicated regular gameplay. It's unclear how long nucular will bring it down to, but it will certainly be a lot shorter than that, and you can keep up with his progress (and other speedruns) on his YouTube page here.
Speedruns are one of the many ways players are still entertaining themselves with the 12 year old game. But as The Elder Scrolls 6 is still several years away, Skyrim will have to last a little longer. New technology is one way to keep things interesting, with one player creating a mod which lets their Twitch chat voice NPCs and another adding haptic feedback suits to an already $15,000 set up, letting them feel real pain when hurt in game.
The most sentimental of fans recently booted up their old Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s to "retire" their original characters too, showing how much Skyrim has remained in player consciousness in its more than a decade on the market.
In our 9/10 review of the beloved RPG, IGN said: "Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced."
Image and Video Credit: nucular on YouTube
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.
