Fallout Anthology FAQ

Q: Why? This doesn’t look fun.
A: The same reason people play racing games and MOBAs. Because it is fun to do and to also see a quantitative value (i.e. time) tied to your skill in a game, and it’s cool to see your skill improve. I’ve already put thousands of hours into the Fallout games outside of speedrunning, so this is another way I can play the game to have fun since I don’t find them fun normally anymore.

Q: You’re glitching, this isn’t a real speedrun.
A: You’re right, I am glitching, but this is a real speedrun. This is the any% category, meaning that glitches and exploits are allowed (as is with every any% speedrun). If you don’t believe me, look up some other any% speedruns. However, console commands are not allowed, because that is considered to be the same as entering cheat codes. Glitches actually make speedruns more difficult, because there is more margin for error than playing a game normally. If you were to run any% for New Vegas for three days, and then run glitchless for three days, I can guarantee you’d be closer to the glitchless record than the any% record.

Q: I don’t care what you said, this is cheating. Get a life.
A: If you’re that passionate about glitching in speedruns, you should check out speedrun.com for glitchless runs. Almost every game has a glitchless category, and I even have some glitchless runs on this YouTube channel, and hold the record for Fallout 4 glitchless. So don’t worry, I like to not glitch sometimes as well.

Q: Where is Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel (BoS)? This isn’t anthology!
A: This category is Any% (Main Series). The Fallout community considers the main series to be the numbered games, and New Vegas, due to how New Vegas is received among the general public. Neither Tactics nor BoS are included in this run, because the Fallout speedrunning community does not see them as main series entries. Additionally, Tactics is considered to be semi-canon, while BoS is wholly non-canon.

Q: Why does your timer stop between runs and during load screens in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4?
A: The Fallout speedrun community (and almost every other PC speedrunning community) times our games in what’s called In-Game Time. This is the time that you’re actually playing your game, without load screens. This is because better PCs give faster loading screens, so it would be unfair to people who can’t afford really good PCs to include load screens in our time. The timer we use (LiveSplit) has a built-in feature where it reads the games’ files while they’re running, and is able to detect markers that indicate the game is loading. When the timer reads one of these markers, the timer automatically pauses. This includes time between runs (i.e. setup time) because some games vary in launch time for certain people (like how New Vegas takes a minute to launch for me). Additionally, setup time is not part of the actual individual any% runs, and should not be counted.

Q: What difficulty are these runs on?
A: All runs are done on the easiest difficulty.

Q: Where can I learn any of these runs?
A: speedrun.com

Q. What mods do you have installed?
A. None, all the runs were performed without mods.

Q: What’s the world record for Anthology? Is this still the record?
A: You can find the leaderboard for Fallout Anthology here: https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_Anthology

Q: What is this raffle you did mid-run?
A: It’s a fun little game I play on stream with Twitch chat called the Culling. When we get to a cutoff point in a run (in anthology, this is after Fallout 2), we do a raffle where the winner is what’s called the Vessel. The Vessel is responsible for all things that happen in the run, good or bad. If we do a trick successfully, it’s because of the Vessel. If something goes terribly wrong, it’s because of the Vessel. If the run dies, the Vessel gets banned from chat for however long the run lasted. If the run ends up being a record, the Vessel gets a free sub to my Twitch channel.

Q. What're your thoughts on Fallout 76 and are you going to speedrun it?
A. I'm excited for it, seems like it'll be a fun game to relax in and play with friends. I will speedrun it if it has a storyline to speedrun.

Fallout 1:
Q: How do you move so fast?
A: This is called speedclicking. In Fallout 1 and 2, you’re able to move faster than normal by spam clicking with a certain rhythm. This abuses the character’s run animation allowing you to move faster. It should be noted that the player moves faster if they play as a female due to her running animation, and that speedclicking only works going either northwest, southwest, or southeast.

Q: How do you run by everyone without fighting?
A: This is the combat glitch. The Fallout 1 enter/exit combat animation is bugged, allowing for the player to be able to spam “Enter/Exit Combat” to perpetually be in a state of combat. The upside to this is that it will always be your turn, allowing you to walk by everyone.

Q: How did you exit combat a couple times so quickly?
A: In Fallout 1 and 2, you can press 0 in dialogue with some people to immediately exit the dialogue.

Q: How do you open doors so fast?
A: In Fallout 1 and 2, you’re able to shorten the animation of a door opening by quicksaving while it’s opening.

Q: What was that warhead arming thing that took a couple tries?
A: You’re able to arm the warhead like I did, but this will cause for the super mutants by you to enter combat with you. There is a very small window where you can initiate the combat glitch that allows for you to arm the warhead and leave without fighting, but this is a very small window.

Q: What did you do after the run during the setup time? Shouldn’t that be part of the time since you’re still playing Fallout 1?
A: This is part of the verification process for Fallout 1. It is not part of the run, and is used to verify that my game files are not altered in any way to remove the rats in the cave or not have wasteland encounters. In the Fallout 1 any% rules, any submitted run under 6:00 in time must demonstrate after the run that all the rats in the cave are present, and that encounters are possible on your game file. Because anthology follows the rules of all the individual Fallout games, I must demonstrate this if the Fallout 1 time is under 6:00, which it was.

Q: What’s the world record for Fallout 1?
A: You can find the leaderboard for Fallout 1 here: https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout

Fallout 2:
Q: How did you move so fast on the map?
A: This map movespeed was present in the 1.00 version of Fallout 2, and is possible to achieve by changing your settings in the Hi-Res Patch if you’re playing on a later version like I am. Because this was doable in an official release of the game, we allow players to modify their files to achieve the same map movespeed as if they had the 1.00 version.

Q: How do you go from the middle of San Francisco to the world map by loading saves?
A: This is called savewarping. If a player makes a quicksave in the same zone as a full save that they made earlier, then load the old save, exit the world map, quit to the main menu, and load the quicksave, they’ll load into the world map as the character from the quicksave. This allows for us to quickly get to the world map after killing Ken Lee and talking to the Hubologists.

Q: How did you kill President Richardson using super stimpaks?
A: Using a super stimpak lowers your overall health. If you use enough on someone, it’ll lower their overall health to zero, essentially overdosing them.

Q: What’s the world record for Fallout 2?
A: You can find the leaderboard for Fallout 2 here: https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_2

Fallout 3:
Q. How are you running so fast? Why did you jump off a cliff repeatedly at the start?
A. This is a glitch called speed cripple. In Fallout 3, when you cripple a leg, the game does two things. The first is give you the cripple animation, and the second is reduce your movespeed by 60%. This means when you heal your leg by one of the many possible methods, the game removed the cripple animation, and gives you 60% additional movespeed, to bring you back up to 100% speed. If you make a quicksave while healthy, and then cripple your legs and quickload at the perfect time (this is why I repeatedly jump off the cliff), it's possible to load your game where you're healthy at the same time as the game giving you back your additional 60% movespeed. This means that the game gives you 60% movespeed on top of your 100% movespeed from the quicksave, making you move at 160% movespeed.

Q. How are you glitching through walls and skipping dialogues by making your screen flash black?
A. Quicksaving and quickloading allows for us to skip dialogues and clip through walls. I have these bound to my mouse buttons to be able to do it faster than with my keyboard keys.

Q. How did you grab the GECK?
A. If you go into third person and position your camera carefully, you're able to interact with objects that are out of reach or behind walls, like the GECK.

Q. Why did you shoot Jonas?
A. Jonas normally has a talk with Father as they both enter the room, but if we shoot Jonas, it skips the dialogue.

Q. Wouldn't it be faster to just leave the vault as a baby or 10 year old?
A. No, because both of these character models have very low movespeed. Staying in the vault for a little bit longer saves more time in the long run, since we move faster outside the vault. Additionally, you can't press buttons as a baby in this game, so we wouldn't be able to type 216 at the end of the run.

Q. Why are you playing in English? Isn't some other language faster?
A. English is the fastest language that was released for the PC. Japanese is actually the fastest language for this speedrun, but was never officially released for PC, so English is the next fastest option.

Q. Why did you load a save to start the run instead of pressing "New Game", isn't that cheating since you're not playing the full game?
A. The Fallout 3 speedrunning community has decided that all our runs will begin at the moment you gain control of the baby character after the opening cutscene by loading a pre-made save right at the start. This is so we don't have to sit through the cutscene of being born every run, which we can safely remove from the run since there is no speed-tech in that part. Don't believe me? Head over to https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_3 and check out the other runs to see that it is something that the community has deemed acceptable.

Q. What patch are you playing on?
A. The most recent one. All the glitches we do are possible on the most recent version of the game, plus the most recent version is the most stable.

Q. What's the world record for Fallout 3?
A. You can find the current record here: https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_3

Fallout: New Vegas:
Q. What language is it in? Why?
A. We play New Vegas in Italian because it's the fastest language for this game. Italian is 4 seconds faster than English. The time difference is during Doc Mitchell's opening dialogue, which cannot be skipped. All other dialogue in the game is skipped.

Q. How are you flying around?
A. This glitch is called reload dashing. By utilizing a bug in the engine involving one-at-a-time reload animations and swapping ammo, we're able to store a W (forward) input while we unequip our revolver, allowing us to slingshot farther.

Q. How are you glitching through walls and skipping dialogues by making your screen flash black?
A. Same way as Fallout 3, by spamming quicksave and quickload.

Q. What patch are you playing on?
A. The most recent one. Reload dashing is possible on the most recent version of the game, and actually wasn't possible in early builds of the game, so we need to play on the most recent version.

Q. What's the world record for New Vegas?
A. You can find the current record here: https://www.speedrun.com/fallout_nv

Fallout 4:
Q: What language is it in? Why?
A: Fallout 4 is played in French because it is roughly 11 seconds faster than English. The time difference in languages comes from the unskippable Vault 111 cutscene and the unskippable Memory Sequence.

Q: What patch is this on?
A: We play Fallout 4 on patch 1.1.30.0.0.

Q: Why is your framerate capped at 60?
A: The physics in Fallout 4 are tied to your framerate, so if you have a super expensive computer that can run the game at 300 frames, you’re naturally going to be able to beat the game much faster. To combat this, all runs are done at 60 FPS, so that everyone is on an even playing field, despite computer strength.

Q: Why do you pick those character presets?
A: Because I like them.

Q: How do you clip through walls like that?
A: I’m doing what’s called an item clip. There are many different forms of item clips, from the VLC clips that you see me perform with cones in Vault 111, to the Horizontal-Gun Clip that I perform to enter Fort Hagen. They consist of holding an item, looking down, and walking backwards into a wall.

Q: How did you slide across the map so fast?
A: There are two glitches that we use for this, they’re called coverslides and punchwarping. Coversliding consists of aiming around a corner and entering third person at the same time that you stop aiming. This breaks the animation of re-entering cover, and stores the position of the character at this time. The next time that you take out your gun while you’re in first person, you will get slingshotted back to that location. Similarly, you can be in third person with your gun out and spam the Pip-Boy button to enter and exit third person quickly, allowing for you to use your coverslide in separate charges and allowing for more distance to be travelled. The second glitch that we use to travel across the map very quickly is punchwarping, and this is what I’m doing everytime I do weird stuff in VATS. If you attempt to melee attack something in VATS but there is an object blocking your path, the game will take a long time to pathfind how to get you to your target. If you cancel the VATS attack while the game is still thinking about how to pathfind you to the target, the game will store the coordinates of where you were standing. The next time that you attempt to melee attack something in VATS, you will automatically be teleported to the coordinates of where you were standing.

Q: What do you keep doing in VATS with the frag mines?
A: See the question directly above about punchwarping. Frag mines make the perfect target for setting up punchwarps since you can throw them anywhere.

Q: How did you buy all that stuff?
A: This is a vendor glitch available on the patch we do our runs on. If you buy Daisy’s stack of .38 ammo, then sell back one bullet, then sell back the rest, there will be one bullet stored permanently in your inventory. If you sell about 20-30 of that one bullet, then attempt to buy back the stack from her, it will continually act as if you’re selling the stack to her, allowing you to sell the stack to her a lot and accrue enormous store credit.

Q: How did you join the Railroad so quickly?
A: We completed the Tradecraft quest (which is the loyalty quest for the Railroad) without ever meeting them by clipping into the basement of Slocum Joe’s in Lexington and picking up then dropping Carrington’s Prototype. This automatically gives us the Tradecraft quest and updates it to the end where we get to join them.

Q: How are you loading saves and maintaining progress?
A: This is called a loadwarp. If you make a quicksave, then load an old save and enter a loadzone, and then quickload while the screen is fading to black, you’ll spawn as the character from the quicksave but be in the location of the old save. This allows for us to essentially fast travel out of buildings to locations we’ve already been to.


Q: How did you get the last quest so fast (Nuclear Option)?
A: In Fallout 4, when you load a save that was made underwater, you load in at the top of the water. This is so that you won’t accidentally drown when you load a save. Lucky for us, if you enter the sewer by Greenetech Genetics where much of the late game goes down, you can quit to the main menu and load the autosave to load in at the top of the water and out-of-bounds. It also turns out that right next to where you’re out-of-bounds is a trigger for the last quest in the game. All we have to do is swim into it and it gives us the last quest in the game.

Q: Why didn’t you just coverslide or punchwarp to Virgil’s Cave?
A: You can only coverslide or punchwarp to locations or coordinates that you’ve already been to. Unfortunately, the coordinates to Virgil’s Cave are so extreme, due to it being in the far corner of the map, that there is nowhere that the coordinates overlap, meaning that we have to run all the way to the cave.

Q: Why did you go back to the Museum of Freedom (MoF) after you discovered it?
A: We needed to clear the MoF after we get the Nuclear Option quest that I talked about two questions up. Getting this quest spawns the Institute Relay Targeting Sequence on Sturges, which allows for us to pickpocket it off him.

Q: What’s the world record for Fallout 4?
A: You can find the current record here: https://www.speedrun.com/Fallout_4