Beating The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ASAP? Boring – we’ve seen this speedrun before. Nowadays, the Speedy Gonzaleses competing in BOTW are trying to run darker and weirder runs, like the one where you see how fast you can go home and die, or the one where you run to a wedding. But the hottest speedrun of the afternoon has to be bread%, a silly category that saw a handful of new entries for its leaderboard in mid-January.
The goal is simple: take the ingredients to make bread and cook them. As usual in any type of BOTW speedrun, accomplishing this feat involves cutting out portions of the map, using whistling mechanics to move faster and, of course, a shirtless Link. The current highest score is 19: 44: 700, a time maintained by speedrunner Xeryph. In the video above, you can watch Link Shield surf over icy plains to gather the powers necessary to leave the starting area of the Great Plateau. There are many “bullet jumps” that Link uses to gain massive air through Bokoblins, along with the trick of pulling weapons while falling to cushion the damage.
From there, Link catapults to another part of the map, near the Tabantha border, where he immediately starts mowing the lawn. The goal is to find the wheat, which falls randomly – apparently, that part of the jokey speedrun can be improved, as Xeryph notes in the YouTube description that RNG wheat is “bad”.
It is unclear whether this category of speedrun will have legs in the long run, but for now, I just appreciate that we are paying more attention to the underrated portions of cuisine from Breath of the Wild. Xeryph also holds the best rake records in the lake category and is the number one in the world in killing Link quickly.