Faith.

It seems to be a big thing when it comes to something like speedrunning practice.

I mean, how else could you put in countless hours with zero visible improvement and still keep hope alive that you’re going to eventually learn a trick.

I can finally say that, after last night’s practice session, I have finally made it through to the other side.

After a week full of torment and basically zero progress, I got the Lara Skywalker skip. Finally.

Having now done the trick a grand total of 3 times, I’ve come to believe that Shantytown is the harder trick. But the huge problem with the research base skywalking trick is that, to me, 95% of the learning is in the just-getting-it-started. Because I basically got the entire trick on my 15th attempt after I decided to learn the rest of the trick (I had delayed in learning the rest of the route, because I figured it was a waste of time until I could consistently start the trick).

15 attempts to successfully get the entire thing. Probably 200-300 to figure out a start to the method that worked for me. That is why this trick is so evil.

So, for me, I spent basically all of last week failing to start the trick. Jumping off the ledge, attempting to aim for the “notch” that you need in the rocky side. Failing. Failing. Failing again. For the times that I successfully started the trick, I never really understood what worked and I was never able to recreate it.

And then let me share another one of my problems with these hard tricks. I have to be the teacher.

Through Shantytown and this skip, I’ve basically learned that the only way that I can really learn the tricky stuff is by doing it myself. Until then, no amount of rewatching Artistic Ballistic’s explanatory run, or watching random clips of people successfully getting a trick (especially in cases where there’s no keyboard/mouse overlay) will help me to really understand how to do the trick.

I have to do it myself.

And that’s kind of where the faith comes in, because, as someone who has never done the trick, but is afflicted by the problem that they can only really learn from themself, you’re basically just taking repeated stabs in the dark until you magically land on something that works for you.

So my huge breakthrough last night was that I not only successfully got the trick started several times, but more importantly, I found something repeatable.

The video is a better demonstrator, but I basically picked a spot where I found it easier to land on the upper rock.

I think that if I can just hammer home the timing of when to jump, then the landing on the upper rock will be 100%. I don’t feel like there’s RNG/randomness involved in this part of the trick.

From the upper rock I go out far to the left, and then I scramble jump into the notch where you need to start the trick.

But basically once I make it to the upper rock, my success rate in starting the trick is probably 90-95%. What an absolute turnaround from last week’s abyssmal starting success rate.

The other cool thing I’ve learned is that, with my strats, it’s pretty easy to just pause in the so-called “upper lane”, which was something I found incredibly difficult to do when using other strats.

In this trick, the upper lane is supposed to be the better lane to get because it’s faster. And as of this point, it happens to be the only lane from which I’ve successfully done the entire trick. As of now, if I fall to the lower lane, I have a near 0% success rate at making it back up to the point that I need to be to start the rest of the trick. Instead of climbing, I generally end up crashing off the side of the cliff and into the deadly waters below.

So at this point, I feel I’m basically ready enough to use this trick in a run. The huge missing piece will be learning the cage puzzle, which involves jumping on dead bodies that are hanging from the ceiling since you can’t complete the puzzle normally without getting the rope ascender from Alex.

I may decide to be bold enough to just learn the trick inside of a run but we’ll see.

In some ways, I feel like I’ve really made it. I assume (hope) that Shantytown and the Research Base skywalking are the two most difficult tricks to learn, and though I’m far from consistent on them at this point, I feel I have them down enough to just work on them during actual runs instead of having to put hours and hours and hours more direct practice into it.

At this point, the big skips I’m missing are the monastery OoB and the intro OoB.

Frankly, since I have no plans to go for world records, I’m not too concerned with getting the intro out of bounds trick. I see so many runs that have to be restarted because the intro OoB glitch doesn’t happen quickly enough.

I’m still basically pursuing Tomb Raider speedrunning so that I can easily decide to stream an entire playthrough of the game whenever I choose. Given that, I tend to doubt that I could tolerate having to restart so many times when my main goal is to save time in the streaming session and not in the run itself.

So fun final note. Even with all of the horrible failing last week and no end in sight, I still put an entry on my September goals list that I wanted to get my Tomb Raider speedrun under 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Now, with the Lara Skywalker trick finally somewhat under my belt. It might actually be possible.