Sorry for the intermittent quality issues. I know more about playing Sheep Raider than I do about bitrates and video encoders.
Although this run is still far from perfect, it’s a hell of a lot cleaner than the last one. I avoided a couple of costly deaths from the previous run, and there were some tricks that worked this time that didn’t before.
There are countless little issues throughout the run that could be cleaned up, but the biggest areas for improvement are:
- In Level 2, I used the old route instead of the slightly more risky Sam Trap glitch.
- In Level 5, I bumped into the terrain and died while attempting to perform the respawn warp.
- In Level 9, I used the slower elastic route to get past the alligator instead of the slightly faster mailbox jump or fence jump. I also missed the sheep on the first bounce and had to try again.
- In Level 13, I chickened out of using the lettuce to bypass Yosemite Sam. Instead, I used the old route where you distract him with a gold coin. Depending on your RNG, you could save ~25 seconds here.
- In Planet X, I decided not to use the newer, faster route to reach the alien near the black holes. I was already on pace for 44:XX, so I decided to play it safe.
- I mixed up the order on a couple of aliens. I was trying to change my plans on the fly and I ended up confusing myself.
- I died in the three-button room again. But I died twice last time, so this is technically an improvement?
I mentioned some of the new strats in my previous run, but since it’s such a short turnaround, I’ll go ahead and point them out again.
9:33 — You can make contact with the next area’s respawn zone just before you die.
10:07 — If you fall into the water directly below the see-saw, the game mistakenly teleports the sheep up on top of it, triggering the next respawn zone.
25:16 — If you walk along the very edge of the bridge, you can cross without causing it to break apart.
25:38 — If you distract a sheep with some lettuce, you can delay it from re-centering itself on the platform long enough to clip it through the floor above.
26:22 — Same thing here. If you distract the sheep, you can clip it through the third platform and get past this room without having to use the robot.
27:54 — You can manipulate this ghost’s movement pattern to order the ghost costume without having to use the vacuum.
30:04 — By slingshotting the sheep’s attention from the lettuce, to the button, then back to the lettuce again, you can reach the upper area with two lettuce instead of three.
39:48 — You can abuse the hitboxes for the low-gravity and normal-gravity zones to reach this alien without having to move the boulder.
40:46 — If you move away from this alien’s area as you fall, you won’t have to capture it again after you die. It’s faster to die and respawn than it is to swim all the way back.
41:27 — Again, it’s faster to die and respawn with the vacuum back in your inventory than it is to circle back and collect it yourself.
I’m a lot happier with this run, even if there are still a few glaring issues. This run brings us to a total of 3:38 taken off the record in the past couple of days, and I think you could save another 60-90 seconds if you fixed the biggest mistakes and followed the new route the whole way through. After that, it’s going to start getting a lot harder to bring the time down. I'm probably going to cool it on the runs for a bit now that we've reached sub 45, at least as far as Any% is concerned. I might try All Levels and 100% again sometime, but I don't have any specific plans at the moment.
Shout out to @ast6r, @ZeddikSpeedrun, @47mvp89 , and everyone else in the Sheep Raider discord whose efforts have helped push the game to this point. If you’re interested in running the game, or just want to check out the PC version in all its HD/60fps glory, check out the Discord server. https://discord.gg/n3EuF78tDJ
You can also check out Aster's Advanced How To Play video for tips on how to speedrun the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70WJl2OEUP8