September 2025 - BotW & TotK World Records

Breath of the Wild

To start this month off, I want to congratulate all the new BotW verifiers who got added to the boards this month. They've done an incredible job at keeping the queue almost permanently clear and keeping verification times down to less than a day! Verification times have been so good recently that I don't think I ended up verifying a single run over September; for the first time in the three years I've been a verifier for the game I've been able to take an actual break without worrying about coming back to a behemoth of a queue. So for that I'm extremely grateful for all the work cloud, lux, Zilano, Echecetdame and Frozen_bnk have done so far and everything they'll keep doing in the future <3

Over the course of September, Player5 had his sights set on optimising 60fps Any% and, most notably, Any% on Master Mode. It's certainly come as a surprise to see Master Mode beat out Normal Mode not just a little bit but by over two minutes! And not just that but now MM S2E is a second faster than P5's own v1.6.0 record which I don't think I would have ever expected to happen. What I also didn't expect to happpen after the drop of v1.8.0 was a return to a Magnesis-first route in an Any% world record. The 2025 state of Breath of the Wild speedrunning with far more optimised movement and routing than ever before has resulted in a much more entertaining run than the pre-BLSS MM route (that was also Magnesis-first), now featuring a BTB between Bombs and Cryonis as the Switch 2 allows for a way faster load from voiding out at the Plateau barrier to loading in outside the Shrine of Resurrection. It's a very fun and unique run to watch if you ever get the chance.

Another category that's seen it's time drop significantly has been 30fps v1.8.2 All Dungeons, having dropped over 4 hours from where the record was just a month ago. This charge to get the category down to something similar to that of pre-BLSS 1.6 runs has been led by takae and VietnamNoOoh. I've been particularly keen on following Vietnam who's come up before in a number of different categories because it's not often someone new comes along and shows such rapid progression in a category that isn't Any%.

Any% (1.8.2 Switch 2 Edition)

Player5 26:33 (-2:26)

Any% (Master Mode, 1.8.2 Switch 2 Edition)

Player5 25:55 (-0:43)

Player5 25:46 (-0:09)

Player5 24:52 (-0:54)

Player5 24:14 (-0:38)

All Dungeons (1.8.2 Switch 1 Edition)

takae 2:19:21 (-3:49:15)

VietnamNoOoh 2:02:56 (-16:25)

VietnamNoOoh 1:59:13 (-3:43)

VietnamNoOoh 1:49:04 (-10:09)

All Shrines (Bug Limit, Wii U + Switch 1)

Frozen_Bnk 7:59:43 (-17:39)

Master Sword (Restricted, 1.8.2 Switch 1 Edition)

moistgoolash 1:23:33 (-6:01)

All Kilton Medals (1.8.2 Switch 1 Edition)

moistgoolash 1:45:37 (-13:43)

Tears of the Kingdom

For TotK, September was very heavy on my personal favourite area of the game: the Great Sky Island. But first I have to mention MoldyMeatballs coming in at the start of the month to cap off the crazy record-breaking streak in All Dungeons by bringing the category down to a 2:28, unthinkable just over a year ago. Although, this would have been the end of it if Xdri33s hadn't just beaten Moldy by a second a couple of days ago! I'm patiently waiting to release this blog just once without a category having a new record.

Also in All Dungeons was MrKorok with a 3 minute improvement in Glitchless S2E. A large portion of this timesave was thanks to a slight routing change that I was really happy to see. Instead of going straight to Rito Village from Lookout Landing, he makes a stop to the Lindor's Brow Skyview Tower to gain enough height to activate the two shrines up near Wind Temple to avoid a lot of the time-consuming journey up to the temple. A number of other runs have also started doing this so it's only a matter of time before a Switch 1 record takes advantage of this big timesave.

But back onto the real important stuff. As always Lime_s1 made his monthly Switch 1 glitchless contribution, lowering the record by another 6 seconds to a 24:50. Meanwhile, MrKorok took down the glitchless S2E version below 24 minutes, which is now less than 30s slower than the glitched world record which he lowered to a 23:29. It'll never not feel weird that 23 minute times are the new normal.

And now I'm going to break my own rules and talk about a tie WR that happened and I wouldn't normally do this but I got that WR and I write this so what's anyone going to do about it? I wanted to talk about it because it marks a major route change, that being the first time a GSI 100% record has made use of Earliest Ascend which has been an idea that's been flirted with for well over a year at this point. I started grinding it when I saw that Xdri had done a couple runs with it and very quickly it became clear that the route he used would be significantly faster than the non-EA route. Despite the record only being 0.667s faster than the previous, my current sum of best of 34:21 has me very motivated to see the category go down much lower than where it's currently at.

Any% (Switch 2)

Blink22 2:47:32 (new)

All Dungeons (pre-v1.2.1)

MoldyMeatballs 2:28:22 (-1:11)

All Dungeons (Glitchless, Switch 2 Edition)

MrKorok 3:16:23 (-3:15)

Great Sky Island Any% (Switch 2 Edition)

akaWoomy 25:31 (-3:08)

MrKorok 23:48 (-1:43)

MrKorok 23:29 (-0:19)

Great Sky Island Any% (Glitchless, Switch 1)

Lime_s1 24:50 (-0:06)

Great Sky Island Any% (Glitchless, Switch 2 Edition)

MrKorok 23:54 (-0:08)

Great Sky Island 100% (pre-v1.2.1)

Cephla 36:08.033 (-0.667s)

Master Sword (Glitchless, Switch 2 Edition)

MrKorok 1:24:53 (-1:25)