Tech and glitches
Piggyback
This is one of your base moves. It's performed with a dedicated input and requires both Checkers and Marbles to be alive. While piggybacked, you can press Attack to perform a special move depending on which character you have in front.
- Marbles: Throw checkers, which can be used to hit enemies/targets, destroy breakable blocks, or perform a Shell Jump (explained further in the Intermediate section).
- Checkers: Marbles will grab you and throw you upwards, which can effectively serve as a second jump. This can also be cancelled out of with a groundpound/dropdash.
Speed Preservation
The main way to preserve speed is a combination of attacking and jumping. Attacking keeps your speed for most of the animation, but you slow down at the end, so you can jump during the animation to prevent that. Gliding and entering water can also briefly preserve speed, but will slow you down over time, so its useful to minimize these where you can.
Above a certain speed (sometimes referred to as "star speed"), a trail of stars will appear behind you (or music notes if you've completed Chime Runners). This speed can be achieved in various ways, but the easiest way is with either a spin charge or dropdash jump.
Auto-fire Cannons
When you enter an auto-fire cannon (the ones with arrows on them that fire you automatically), if you have jump held, you'll get fired about 0.3 seconds earlier than normal, which can add up across a chain of cannons.
For example, in B.V. Broadcast Tower, holding jump saves 1.9 seconds in the beginning section over not holding jump.
Spin Charge
If you hold Attack with Marbles, you'll start charging up a spin, which can be released after enough time to perform an attack while putting you at star speed (although you have to jump shortly after this to maintain that speed). This can also be done in mid-air, either by running off of a ledge while doing it, or doing a shorter spin off of a ledge and then holding it once in mid-air. Releasing a spin charge in mid-air makes you briefly stop falling, which makes it useful for crossing large gaps, or in places like Salamancer's Sanctum where it's used to get under ropes and ceilings.
Additionally, you can charge a spin charge out of another spin charge, which is sometimes used to stay in the air even longer.
Dropdash / Dropdash Jump
If you press Attack during a groundpound, or while landing from one, you'll get a boost forwards that ignores gravity, called a Dropdash. This can be cancelled out of with a jump, which puts you at star speed. This can all be done in quick succession by groundpounding and then buffering an Attack and Jump input.
You can only dropdash once before having to land or bounce on an enemy to recharge it. However, dropdashing into an enemy will recharge it immediately, letting you chain multiple in mid-air. If you try to dropdash after you've already used it up, Checkers will do a small 'fumble' animation, which gives a tiny bit of height and kills your speed.
Marbles vs Checkers (differences)
Ground Speed
Marbles is a little faster than Checkers on ground, and so is generally preferrably for stages that are mostly horizontal. Below is the code that determines your horizontal speed:
speed_H = (accel_Attack + accel_Deflect + accel_DropDash + accel_Move + accel_Run) * nerf_Speed_H
nerf_Speed_H acts as a speed multiplier, and is set to 1 for Marbles and 0.925 for Checkers, meaning Checkers moves at 92.5% of Marbles' Speed when not in water.
Swim Speed
Checkers moves about 15% faster than Marbles in water, and so is preferred for swimming sections such as in Aucora's Abyss or Shrine Of The Salamancer.
Quad Jump
It's possible to piggyback during a dropdash, even if you're in mid-air, where you can also do an additional jump (which is the case for regular dropdashes as well). By combining this with a jump and piggyback throw at the start, then another piggyback throw at the end, you can effectively chain together 4 jumps in a row, letting you get a ton of height.
The inputs are as follows:
- Piggyback with Checkers in front
- Jump
- Throw yourself upwards
- Perform a dropdash
- Piggyback during the dropdash
- Jump
- Throw yourself upwards again
Shell Jump / Mid-Air Shell Jump
When thrown, Checkers can bounce off of walls, and if timed just right, Marbles can bounce off of him for extra height, as seen in Dire Dire Ducts. However, the application of this most useful in speedruns is the Mid-Air Shell Jump.
If you get up to star speed, piggyback, jump, and throw Checkers, you can bounce off of him in mid-air without the need for him to bounce off of a wall. The timing is fairly generous, but you want to throw Checkers at around the peak of your jump to get the bounce consistently. You can get a shell jump if you do the throw really late, as shown below, but this doesn't currently have any uses.
Instant Dropdash
If a level spawns you on a semi-solid, such as in Hue's Shade or Over The Raybow, you can hold your groundpound button before the level starts (ie. during the level entry or restart screen) and immediately get a groundpound without the wind-up animation. You can then dropdash out of this, effectively getting an instant dropdash / dropdash jump with no delays.
Dropdash Fail / Checkers Flight
As mentioned before, if you try to dropdash multiple times without landing, Checkers will do a small fumble that gives a little bit of height. If you hold jump during this, it'll give more height, and with this extra height, you have enough time to do another dropdash fail without losing the height from the initial one. What this means is you can effectively chain dropdash fails infinitely to either gain or maintain height.
While this technically has an application for cheesing various sections of the game, the downside for runs is that its extremely slow. Its main uses are for gaining height or backing up a failed strat. Its also used in B.V. Broadcast Tower to scroll the screen to where the goalpost is while avoiding the cutscene trigger.
Semisolid Groundpound / Dropdash
If you go up through a semi-solid and groundpound when you're just barely above it, you'll get a groundpound without any wind-up animation, similar to the Instant Dropdash. Like with that, this can also be chained into a dropdash. The main use for this is to stop or gain speed on a dime when shooting out of a cannon, as cannon trails can be freely groundpounded out of, but it can also be used to save time over a regular dropdash in the right situations (such as in Vexatious Vents).
Clips
There are multiple ways to clip out-of-bounds, each with their own use cases.
Top corner clip :
You can clip on any 90° angle wall over you by teaming up and jumping in the angle then swapping partner. You can then spam the swap button to progress further into that wall. Note that for certain stage (with water for exemple) you need to change your looking direction before doing the 2nd swap to then go further into it. This can be used in stage like Aucora's Abyss to clip into the top right corner of the underwater train wagon.
Reverse looking one button remap clip :
You can clip throught vertical wall in multiple stage. It is used a lot in stage like Bluppo's barge, Nippa's nook, Temporal Railroad, etc... To do the clip throught a wall that is on the right side of you, you need to piggyback and hug the wall while looking to the left. You need to be sure to be hugging the wall, you can jump to do the turnaround to make it easier to not move left while turning. once you are in position you can then you need to press both Right + Swap on the same frame. An easy way to do that is to go in the control menu and rebind the 2nd fonction of both of those to a button you don't use. You then only need to press that button and it will do both action on the same frame.