Minecraft Speedrunning/Getting Started

Welcome to Minecraft Speedrunning!

Philosophy of speedrunning
Speedrunning is a mode of playing in which a player learns full mastery and understanding of a game's systems over time. A player may decide to speedrun a game for fun, for personal improvement, or to compete with likeminded individuals. There is an extensive Minecraft speedrunning community scattered around the Web, who collaborate on strategies and improvements. This book will give an overview of optimal strategies for new Minecraft speedrunners. However, the core of speedrunning is constant practice. We recommend you do not reset your run whenever something goes wrong, but instead just attempt to beat the game as many times as possible, hopefully improving over time.

Top players, who have been speedrunning Minecraft for hundreds of hours, may be able to beat the game in a manner of minutes. However, just being able to beat the game in an hour is already extremely impressive!

Preparation
The first decision you may want to make is the version you decide to play. The most commonly played versions of Minecraft are "Java Edition" (for PC) and "Bedrock Edition" (for various platforms). PC speedrunning is generally considered optimal, as it is easier to record or stream and allows for external tools such as timers or live splits. However, you can speedrun on any version you like. You are unlikely to set a world record of Minecraft Bedrock Edition playing on iOS, but you may still enjoy the experience and improving your personal bests, if this is the platform available to you.

Generally the fastest and most popular versions of Minecraft for speedrunning are 1.16 and 1.16.1. You can opt to play in the "Random Seed" or "Set Seed" categories. The "Set Seed" category requires memorization and constant repetition, and is therefore more similar to most other speedrunning games. "Random Seed," meanwhile, requires more creative on-the-fly thinking, as the player has to respond to randomly generated terrain and structures. In "Random Seed", you will find that the success of a given run is highly dependent on luck, but you can still consistently improve your own execution. This guide is largely written from the "Random Seed" perspective, as it covers responding efficiently to the randomness of Minecraft's procedural world generation.

General rules
The ruleset of speedrunning can be defined by any group, but the larger Minecraft speedrunning community has established a consensus for various requirements. Submissions are only accepted on the speedrun.com leaderboards if the runs are played on "Survival" or "Hardcore" worlds, for example, and world generation settings must be set to "default." "Peaceful" difficulty setting is vetted, and the game must be played on an official major release of the game from 1.0 onwards. To submit a run on public leaderboards, you must record video footage and denote the world's "seed". For more specific rules, you can check the leaderboard or contact individuals in the Minecraft speedrunning community. However, you are of course free to speedrun a game on "home-rules," if you are ambivalent about leaderboards. Playing your first runs just for yourself, with a stopwatch by your side, can be an excellent way to get into speedrunning.