Uploaded June 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
More of just a test than anything. A proof of concept if you will. I couldn't get it any faster than a meh zero cycle, but then again I only got it once, and only went for a super safe version. Getting it at all is good enough for me and I'm kinda over it anyway. I got pretty decent at it by the end though, I was getting enough velocity like every 20 minutes or so in the last hour.
Context: This is a crude RTA version of a trick involving accelerating an arrow to extreme speeds using an odd quirk of dragon knockback. And since arrows deal damage proportional to their speed, this can be used to kill the dragon instantly. If you want more information on how it works/how I make it work, I'd suggest these videos:
Original Dragon Knockback Exploration: (youtu.be/DBYgB2sESmM)
Initial Insta-Kill Test: (youtu.be/ON8c6IhE7-E)
Lamer Insta-Kill Test with Misc Info: (youtu.be/OaIesw4T7YE)
I spent the last few days reading through all the dragon movement and stuff in hopes of improving my last TAS of this trick(youtu.be/rVKx_EugxAg). But while doing so I got curious what a graph of a whole bunch of dragon paths would look like. So I simulated about 100k dragon paths up to their first target. And then I just graphed the "tickle spot" for each tick of them (idk what to call it and "tickle spot" is objectively funny. "Belly button" would be too tbf).
And it's very cool, I tried to show some of them in the beginning, but what I noticed was that quite often all of the paths converge nicely into a pretty small thin line. Now previously I had considered any version of this trick "impossible" RTA because the dragon path would just be too random or disjointed from each other to predict with enough precision(you need to be within 0.02m to even get a chance). But during these convergences this prediction isn't quite true, and it almost looked feasible. Sadly the dragon still moves like 1m per tick, so you can't know /where/ on this convergence line the dragon is(since initial angle/speed from target renders its exact position/speed unknown). But you still know it's on the line, so as long as you line yourself up on it there's at least a chance you both collide perfectly.
And that's about all I considered before spending 6 hours of my life doing this this morning. I throw a pearl right before the dragon hits me so that I don't get a velocity transfer of the dragon knockback, so I don't get launched, but other than that it's just shoot and arrow right as you pass over the spot. There's still a looaaad of rng in getting the arrow to hit one of the dragon's hitboxes, but I think you can hit any of the wings/neck/tails if you play your cards right(unlike the TAS where you can only hit the neck). I still lost like 7 400+ velocity arrows to that before this though so it's still a pain. At least that I noticed, and who know how many I just released a tick early/late
I can't really give you the setups I used since it was just kinda intuition, but initially I was just going up to either 29.89 x ~-28.9 z when the dragon was coming at me towards -Z(hence Z not being exact), or to ~27.8 x -30.885 z when it was coming at me towards -X(hence X not being exact). I just kinda went with how it felt by the end though.
I doubt this is viable for any sort of runs as is, but you could definitely get kinda good at it. I was surprised by how often I was getting close, and I've never even done a zero cycle before, so idk how actual speedrunners would do. And there's definitely faster setups too, you can see that I'm just kinda waiting around for 10 seconds sometimes, which would be like what a 35 second end fight rta? This map feels inaccurate on dragon spawn times though so idk how that would play in. Or maybe I'm just being silly. idk there were other things I wanted to say but I forgot them and I have to go be productive now oops.
Oh yeah! I realized you can throw a pearl to catch yourself with this pretty easily. Since you do get hit by the dragon almost at the end of the trick here, and you're only inside it for a little bit, your Y velocity should be mostly synced on the client and server, so you shouldn't fall faster than a pearl. (since it won't be over 3.9 and get capped)
More of just a test than anything. A proof of concept if you will. I couldn't get it any faster than a meh zero cycle, but then again I only got it once, and only went for a super safe version. Getting it at all is good enough for me and I'm kinda over it anyway. I got pretty decent at it by the end though, I was getting enough velocity like every 20 minutes or so in the last hour.
Context: This is a crude RTA version of a trick involving accelerating an arrow to extreme speeds using an odd quirk of dragon knockback. And since arrows deal damage proportional to their speed, this can be used to kill the dragon instantly. If you want more information on how it works/how I make it work, I'd suggest these videos:
Original Dragon Knockback Exploration: (youtu.be/DBYgB2sESmM)
Initial Insta-Kill Test: (youtu.be/ON8c6IhE7-E)
Lamer Insta-Kill Test with Misc Info: (youtu.be/OaIesw4T7YE)
I spent the last few days reading through all the dragon movement and stuff in hopes of improving my last TAS of this trick(youtu.be/rVKx_EugxAg). But while doing so I got curious what a graph of a whole bunch of dragon paths would look like. So I simulated about 100k dragon paths up to their first target. And then I just graphed the "tickle spot" for each tick of them (idk what to call it and "tickle spot" is objectively funny. "Belly button" would be too tbf).
And it's very cool, I tried to show some of them in the beginning, but what I noticed was that quite often all of the paths converge nicely into a pretty small thin line. Now previously I had considered any version of this trick "impossible" RTA because the dragon path would just be too random or disjointed from each other to predict with enough precision(you need to be within 0.02m to even get a chance). But during these convergences this prediction isn't quite true, and it almost looked feasible. Sadly the dragon still moves like 1m per tick, so you can't know /where/ on this convergence line the dragon is(since initial angle/speed from target renders its exact position/speed unknown). But you still know it's on the line, so as long as you line yourself up on it there's at least a chance you both collide perfectly.
And that's about all I considered before spending 6 hours of my life doing this this morning. I throw a pearl right before the dragon hits me so that I don't get a velocity transfer of the dragon knockback, so I don't get launched, but other than that it's just shoot and arrow right as you pass over the spot. There's still a looaaad of rng in getting the arrow to hit one of the dragon's hitboxes, but I think you can hit any of the wings/neck/tails if you play your cards right(unlike the TAS where you can only hit the neck). I still lost like 7 400+ velocity arrows to that before this though so it's still a pain. At least that I noticed, and who know how many I just released a tick early/late
I can't really give you the setups I used since it was just kinda intuition, but initially I was just going up to either 29.89 x ~-28.9 z when the dragon was coming at me towards -Z(hence Z not being exact), or to ~27.8 x -30.885 z when it was coming at me towards -X(hence X not being exact). I just kinda went with how it felt by the end though.
I doubt this is viable for any sort of runs as is, but you could definitely get kinda good at it. I was surprised by how often I was getting close, and I've never even done a zero cycle before, so idk how actual speedrunners would do. And there's definitely faster setups too, you can see that I'm just kinda waiting around for 10 seconds sometimes, which would be like what a 35 second end fight rta? This map feels inaccurate on dragon spawn times though so idk how that would play in. Or maybe I'm just being silly. idk there were other things I wanted to say but I forgot them and I have to go be productive now oops.
Oh yeah! I realized you can throw a pearl to catch yourself with this pretty easily. Since you do get hit by the dragon almost at the end of the trick here, and you're only inside it for a little bit, your Y velocity should be mostly synced on the client and server, so you shouldn't fall faster than a pearl. (since it won't be over 3.9 and get capped)
