The Evolution of Minecraft Spellbound Caves Speedrunning

Spellbound Caves is one of the oldest complete the monument Minecraft maps of all time Vex made the map as the 10th installment of the super hostile series which was the first ever series of ctm maps the goal of this map is to collect 16 wall blocks for various dungeons as

Well as crafting three mineral blocks from resources found along the way and the map is beaten when all the blocks are placed on the victory Monument this map has 11 different dungeons which are connected together by three intersections and classic super hostile fashion it’s difficult from the very

Start this map is now more than a decade old and in terms of speedrunning it has received the most attention out of any ctm app ever made with nearly 20 individual Runners having earned a spot on the leaderboard and these runs span from today all the way back to when the

Map was first released as such this map has a very rich and complex speedrunning history with strategies that have been consistently improved over the years hey everyone it’s your favorite funny Minecrafter here speedycube64 and this is the evolution of the strategies used to beat Spellbound Caves faster than ever before For the first ever speedrun of spellbound caves was done about two months after the maps released by someone you might have heard of Ethos Lab while it is very cool that a YouTuber of his size has played the map in this way this video series is only technically considered speedrun and it’s

Clear that ESO had a different goal in mind not quite like a speed run though this is going to be more of a completionist run where we actually fight the mobs take out spawners and make the path clear before we advance because of this Etho doesn’t really use any interesting strategies here and

Unfortunately I’m not going to be covering it in detail in this video so I’m going to start with cilantro Gamer’s 47 minute run which was performed a few weeks after cilantro goes straight for the first room of the first dungeon the sent out of The Apprentice he backs up into the

Room with the enchanting table to slowly get rid of the mobs that spawn there after doing that he took the map Maker’s intended path to reach the wall fast forwarding to the tenuous crystals he Bridges closer to the main area and then shoots out the explosive crystals

To get rid of the gas spawners so that he can safely get the wall funny enough even though this is the intended strategy for the area I didn’t know this until I watched his run just recently I guess I’m just too much of a Zoomer anyway moving on to the University of

Arcane and chance he goes for the lower building first he gets some ender pearls then goes further into the building to get some food and some better gear he immediately uses one of his pearls to go to the upper building and then Loops the wall from there he quickly does the joke

Area fleeceception and then enters the nether the nether is a short dungeon so all cilantro needs to do is run behind the building containing the wall and dig up to collect it after another smaller dungeon Grove of the dark Willows he moves on to what I believe is one of the

Map’s most interesting Parts the rumbling Cavern what makes this area so tricky to conquer in a speed run is that there’s one wall at the top connected to the upper path and then another in the lava at the very bottom because feather falling is random simply jumping down to

The bottom has a good chance of killing you cilantro gets around this by Landing himself up on the very edge of a block and then doing a precise drop to catch the ladder on the way down he spends about a minute killing blazes before finally getting the wall he gets all the

Necessary minerals from the skittering mine and then heads towards the hardest area of the map Blackheart Citadel cilantro takes on this area by pillaring up and bridging over the buildings to avoid triggering the gas spawners once he reaches a specific point he makes a precise ender pearl throw where am I

I’m inside a block I’m inside glass perfect holy crap I aced that boom this area has a similar problem to the rumbling Cavern because there’s another wall That’s all the way at the bottom but he took the time to make a water bucket so he can slowly make his way

Down he then digs down to get the red wool after another smaller area the rattlebone Crips he only has one dungeon left in the map the blackened Library cilantro uses his water bucket to safely get across the lava to collect the wall on the bottom he uses his third ender

Pearl to make it to the upper half of the dungeon he has one pearl left but strangely enough he just chooses to take the stairs to get to the top after getting the last wall he completes the map with one pearl left over there we go all right done 47 47. 47 47.

Yes you might be thinking that this run is really unoptimized and you’d be right the next run I’m going to be showing you is done only two months later and it’s faster by over 20 minutes this is a 25 minute run done by one of the ogs of

Minecraft ctm speedrunning Alex and game right off the bat Alex takes a riskier approach to the first room instead of taking the time to kill the mobs he just runs through the room and hopes that too many mobs don’t spawn since this is one of the only dark areas close to spawn

Enemies tend to concentrate here so this part is a lot more RNG dependent than it looks especially when you’re playing in an older version on the traditional hard difficulty but fortunately this area does get a bit easier because it’s both faster and more consistent to just dig

Down from the potion chest to reach the wall box from above moving on to the tenuous crystals rather than shooting down the crystals he just drops down to loot the food chest and walks through the chaos to get to safety next up is the University where he makes a very

Strange decision for for whatever reason he decides to completely ignore the lower building even skipping the ender pearls from the chest and instead choosing to use ladders to climb to the upper building from there he heads straight for the nether portal but a gassed Fireball takes it out and he has

To stand in the portal to wait for another one to come by and relight it Alex starts off the nether by going to the stone brick room to get some bread for the rest of the run because he skipped getting the fish earlier he follows up by heading to the building

That doesn’t have the wall in it here he gets a maxed out diamond pickaxe to use later then he goes directly into the building with the wall taking a bit of a beating along the way next up is the rumbling Cavern where he attempts to catch the ladder with a riskier setup he

Doesn’t quite make the jump but feather falling RNG is here to save the day in Blackheart Citadel he uses a much safer and faster strategy he starts by digging down to get the red wall then he climbs up the building and takes the intended path to the black heart he does have to

Knock some mobs off the lower platform but once that’s done he can just pillar up and grab the black wall since he doesn’t have a water bucket he takes a series of smaller drops so that he can heal up in between them if he needs to

Also he has to slowly Bridge across the lava in the library but this is still faster than smelting the extra iron needed to make the bucket finally he pillars up to reach the upper half of the area and takes the stairs up to the top this run provided a much better

Balance of taking risks and being safe and consistent which allowed him to almost cut Cilantro’s time in half but there was still a lot more work to be done on the map some of these improvements were even pretty obvious like getting the free pearls that Alex

Skipped so it wouldn’t be long until a new record was set and the runner who did so was none other than absolute psychopath psycho is another one of the all-time greats of ctm speedrunning having made many wonderfully edited videos that are still worth a watch today besides his

Production quality he was also quite Innovative for the time his Spellbound run might not have been a huge time cut but it still had many interesting things to point out looking at the way he takes on the first room you can tell that his execution is a lot better than what

Previous Runners were capable of moving on to tenuous crystals rather than bridging all the way to the main platform he saves a bit of time by going to this upper ledge and jumping to the food chest and because he managed his hunger better than the previous record

He can get to the wool a bit faster as well as expected he gets the pearls from the first building of the University but he doesn’t take anything else psycho figured out that you can prevent gas from blowing up the portal by approaching it from the back side

The nether was the same and the rumbling Cavern was pretty similar except for a certain flashy Strat that he decided to go for in Blackheart Citadel he does a similar Strat but instead of taking the slanted path towards the black heart he just throws a pearl there instead he clips

Into the glass grabs the wall and then jumps down onto the ladders he placed earlier to avoid taking fall damage lastly he makes the library way faster by taking the upper path and jumping down to the wall then using his last two ender pearls to go all the way up to the

Top of the area he ends up beating Alex’s previous record by over four minutes with many cool new strats in place new ways to make existing strats more consistent and all four ender pearls being put to good use you might think this map is approaching his ceiling and

You’d be right for the time being in the following year the world record would change hands several times but the route really wouldn’t see too many improvements during this time next up I’ll be showing you what speedrunning the map was like at the end of this stretch and in the process you’ll be

Able to see one of the jankiest recording setups of all time this is 1738 this is 1728 by Luigi Clarin I imagine that to some of the more uncultured viewers of ctm speedrunning this run might be hard to watch but fortunately for you there aren’t too many new things

To point out this run basically had the same routing and strategies as psychos run all the way through the nether but things start to get different in the rumbling Cavern to the dismay of many lava strap fans Clarin instead went to a specific block on the upper path and

Lined up a very precise Pearl throw which landed him directly on the wall box Blackheart Citadel was the same too climbing up most of the way and then using a pearl to clip into the wall box for the black wall however since he is a pearl short in the library he uses one

Pearl to get to the upper half of the dungeon and then uses ladders to climb up the bookshelves and get to the top even though this run didn’t use menu strats it was still 3 minutes faster than the Run Cycle did a year prior but the story was still far from over

Because when Alex took the world record back a few weeks later he implemented a strategy that would change the way Spellbound Caves was run forever in the tenuous crystals Alex Bridges out as usual but instead of going to the upper ledge he Stacks up next to the

Glowstone pillar where he finds an ax with a bunch of enchantments including looting 3. with this single item the Run becomes a lot more RNG based his goal is to kill Enderman with the ax where he can get up to four ender pearls from each one he gets extremely lucky here

And almost immediately gets a combined eight extra pearls from three nearby Enderman in the University he gets the four pearls from the chest and actually goes back to getting the cooked fish from this building just because it’s faster in the nether he uses two pearls to skip climbing up the two main

Buildings then he starts to take on the rumbling Cavern by throwing a pearl to go from the starting Bridge straight to the First wall he uses a second Pearl to go right to the bottom of the area so that he can loot a speed potion that’s

Down there and he lines up one more precise Pearl throw so that he can go straight onto a platform next to the second wall box this is the first run of the map to completely skip going across the upper gravel path as similar pattern can be seen in Blackheart Citadel where

He uses one extra Pearl to skip climbing up and another to safely go down from the wall box straight to the starting path where he drinks that speed potion from earlier right when the other one is about to run out you can probably guess what he does in the library as well the

Time saved from getting extra pearls allowed Alex to beat the previous world record by a minute and a half but unfortunately the Run seemed to hit a bit of a wall here although Gunter was able to narrowly beat the record a year later it wouldn’t be until three years

Later that we’d be able to see some new strats and the runner who made these strats would later be known as an innovator of Minecraft speedrunning that Runner was none other than sea skull the beginning of sea school’s run is similar to what’s been done before but there are

A few notable optimizations first of all the inventory management in this run is a lot more optimized as shown by his execution in the first room in the tenuous crystals he Bridges around to the back side of the glowstone pillar to avoid having to break extra glowstone another cool optimization he does here

Is using the Minecarts with furnaces from the railway chest to avoid having to craft furnaces later and in the nether he digs through this wall here to get the wall a little bit faster but the rumbling Cavern is where the cool stuff starts to show up Cisco

Throws a pearl towards the upper wall box then when that Pearl is about to land he throws another one this gives him just enough time to get the First wall before he instantly teleports right next to the second one even though he skipped the speed potion that previous runs got this still saves

Somewhere in the 20 to 30 second range and in Blackheart Citadel the other cool Strat is on Full display rather than climbing up the building Cisco uses a bunch of TNT to jump all the way up to within Pearl throwing distance of the black wall box but if you thought there

Was only one TNT jump in the Run you’d be wrong because he does the same thing again to get to the top of the Library without using pearls Cisco’s luck was a bit worse than what the previous records got but these new strats allowed him to

Beat them by over a minute but Cisco had bigger plans than just getting the world record he wanted to get a run that was so good that no one else could beat it and on top of that he wanted to edit it into a video that could top the production

Value of absolute psycho so Cisco put 4 000 attempts into running this map and unfortunately he couldn’t get anything better than this run that plus the time commitment required to make such a masterpiece of a video caused sea skull to quit the grind with almost nothing to

Show for it but at least he shared this run with just enough people so that it wasn’t completely forgotten anyway let’s fast forward to 2020. the world record is still Cisco’s 1445 but the publicly known world record is a 1502 that I got afterwards the correspondence virus is in full swing

And many Industries are brought to a complete halt because of it but Spellbound cave speedrunning is not quite dead yet because in August of that year I got my first true world record on the map and on top of that managed to push it past a new minute barrier

Looking at my run the first thing you might notice is that I can hotkey items directly into my hop bar and that’s because I’m playing on 1.4 while this version has the advantage of being able to manage your inventory using hotkeys Runners hadn’t used it before because

You couldn’t skip the short cooldown in between breaking each block the trick you’re about to see would make 1.4 the fastest version of the time by putting yourself inside of a block and then reloading the World the game would automatically place you into the closest two block High space above your current

Position this trick was brought to our attention by Schmidt and although it is allowed in ctm speedrunning it doesn’t come without controversy using this trick I can instantly escape the white bolt dungeon without having to climb out and in the tenuous crystals I can use it to skip bridging and pillowing up to

Grab the ax however this exploit does have a severe limitation which is that it only works within a certain range of the player’s spawn point so in areas like the university and the nether I still have to use pearls to get up to higher spots in the rumbling Cavern I

Attempted the double Pearl that sea school did and this worked to an extent but my second Pearl landed on the upper path so I had to use an extra Pearl to get to the bottom in Blackheart Citadel I chose not to go for the TNT jumps that

Ciscoll did this is because I was just too lazy to implement them into the route on a similar note I chose not to use the TNT jump in the library either but because this area is close enough to the spawn point I could save a pearl by

Using an up warp to get to the top of the area this new record pushed the map far beyond what many people thought was possible to achieve and it would reinforce that idea by standing for over a year but eventually a new Runner would gain interest in running the map at top

Level here’s how Japan was able to add his name to the list of spellbound Cave’s world record holders similarly to the last run you’ll notice that Japan is playing on a newer version of Minecraft this time he’s playing on 1.7 which has many quality of life changes compared to the older versions

Most importantly the Sprint Key and faster Inventory management this version is known for having worse food saturation but Japan can get around this by using the hunger trick this trick was discovered by Ellie attacks who was an innovator of the pre 1.9 RSG vanilla category by hitting an entity

While sprinting in this case a boat the game allows you to keep sprinting but for whatever reason it drains your hunger as if you’re just walking so by using this trick Japan can still make it to the food chest without losing a Sprint unfortunately he had to bridge up

To reach the ax which is much slower than using the upwarp however a different trick he implemented after the nether would make up for that Japan unloads an ender pearl at the beginning of the area so that when he does fleeceception he can load the Pearl back

In to avoid backtracking this trick can be done in 1.4 as well but it’s a lot more tedious and inconsistent to do so he does this trick once more in the Grove and in the rumbling Cavern he unloads the second Pearl to make the double Pearl easier but the biggest

Change of the route comes up after this before entering Blackheart Citadel Japan takes a detour to the rattlebone Crips just to hang a pearl there then he enters Blackheart Citadel and finally re-implements the TNT jump to get up from there he can just reload the Pearl to instantly escape the area this saves

A lot of time but the only downside is that now he needs to find another place to smell his gold he also re-implements the TNT jump in the library using an extra Pearl to make it a bit easier he does have to take the time to smell his

Gold at the monument but in the end he takes the world record by Just 4 seconds due to how close these two runs were it wasn’t very clear whether it was faster to use 1.4 or 1.7 but just recently Contra knot would give this question a definitive answer although the next one

I’m going to analyze is my own all of the newest strats were implemented by Contra knot so credit goes to him the first thing you should know about this run is that I’m playing in version 1.8 the strategies used in version 1.7 work here as well but the mobs in version 1.8

Have worse AI which makes them a lot easier to deal with one of the ways I save time is by placing blocks below me in three black high hallways so that I can Sprint jump more often and move faster in the tenuous crystals I place blocks

In specific spots to move along the wall and get to the ax faster in the University it was found that digging up from the food chest gives me a good path to the upper area so that I don’t have to use a pearl to get there and before

Entering the nether I can quickly kill this ghast without losing Sprint so that doesn’t try to break the portal then I throw a pearl towards the beginning of the area right before the portal takes me through the reason why I didn’t do this after the nether will be made clear later

After getting the pick I dig through the wall to quickly get from the first building to the second without using a pearl and when I exit the nether I pull off this Strat foreign okay pretty good this strategy is known as pearl portal or teleportal and it was discovered by

Tel52 if you time an ender pearl to land on the last tick before the portal takes you through then the portal will act as if you made it there and take you to a completely different location in order to make this timing more consistent we use a tool called flow timer

In this case I can get the portal to take me straight to fleeceception where I can get the wool and then load in the Pearl from earlier to teleport out coming back to intersection 2 I entered the rumbling Cavern before the Grove so that it can unload the Pearl there to

Skip backtracking out of the Grove entirely I do a similar Pearl hang to actually collect the wool except this Pearl hang can actually be done with only one Pearl if need be the Pearl I throw to the wool box is just to save a bit of time in preparation for black

Heart Citadel I do a similar setup to what a punk did but I actually spend a bit of time in this area and get the blue wool this is so that I can overlap this segment with smelting my iron in Gold so that I don’t have to do it later

It also turns out that you don’t need to use a pearl to make the TNT jump to the black wall by standing in a good enough spot I can launch directly to the lower platform since mobs aren’t as smart in 1.8 I can usually pillar up to the wall

Box without losing much time but I got unlucky and got hit by skeletons in this run losing a bit of time I also did the TNT jump in the library but I have a consistent setup to avoid using a pearl here as well this is the current world

Record for the map but this route can be optimized further to a low 11 minute time although we’ve reached the present day we haven’t yet reached the end of the story because we have been looking into ways to make the map even faster one of the biggest leads we had involved a

Trick that had never been done before in Minecraft speedrunning this trick is currently known as lag Pearl and is done by throwing an ender pearl and then intentionally lagging the game by turning up your render distance this makes the Pearl take much longer to land than usual and allows the player to move

Away from it the whole time this trick has several advantages over doing Pearl Hanks a normal way throwing a lag Pearl allows Pearl hangs to be done in areas which are normally too cramped to do so and it only requires one Pearl instead of the usual two it even allows you to

Mimic the effects of pearl hangs and spawn chunks where it’s otherwise impossible to do such a thing but this trick doesn’t come without its downsides although it works fine for some Runners others have reported not being able to get the trick to work consistently even when they’re doing the exact same steps

And using the trick too many times in a single run can cause the game to crash besides that this type of lag can also be abused to prevent mobs from going after you and that kind of breaks the spirit of a challenge map for these reasons we’ve decided to ban the trick

In ctm speed runs for the time being so another time save would probably have to be found in order to bring the map down to sub 11. as you can see Spellbound cave has had a long and detailed speedrunning history over the past decade a variety of Runners came together to optimize the

Same route and bring the time all the way down to the point where sub 10 is starting to look like a possibility but the current world record is 11 minutes and 44 seconds the continent is still trying to beat it so make sure to follow

Him on Twitch if you want to see that happen thanks to all of the runners who contributed to optimizing this map as well as all the other players who contributed new strategies if you want to stay up to date on the progression of this map or want to try speedrunning it

Yourself feel free to join the Discord server linked below and make sure to subscribe if you want to see more content like this in the future thanks for watching and as always stay speedy peace