I started speedrunning Minecraft a while ago. It’s an interesting niche with many tutorials and a helpful community, so all the information you need is freely available. But I used to struggle a lot, because it wasn’t clear to me how to learn to execute this stuff – partially because my hand-eye coordination and reaction time suck, but also because most of the advice on improving mechanics is literally “play more”, and for me personally familiarity doesn’t easily translate into improvements.
I think I found an approach that works for me, and I want to share it here. Since it focuses on how to deal with stuff mentally rather than on MCSR specifically, I think it should be applicable elsewhere in case traditional approaches fail for you, so hopefully it’s going to be useful to more than one person.
This a common novice mistake, but I never saw anyone talking about it and it took me a long while to figure out myself.
The purpose of speedrunning is to beat the game as fast as possible. From here, you might infer that you need to push yourself out of the comfort zone bit by bit, and as you do so, your skills will grow and you’ll get faster. This doesn’t work.
My mental model for this is that your brain has a fixed bandwidth at which it can process information. When you panic or push harder than usual, you’re increasing the input without increasing your processing capabilities, so your brain starts to lag behind. If you try to build skills this way, you will condition yourself to never quite understand what’s going on at the moment, and any skills you’ll obtain will be bound to this situation. Your entire modus operandi will revolve around praying your muscle memory can resolve everything without including your consciousness in the process.
Instead, only do the things you’re confident in, at the speed at which you’re comfortable. Not technically achievable, but comfortable. And then, calmly, experiment, learn tips and tricks, and inspect your mistakes. This will grant your confidence to do things faster, and that’s something you can integrate into your runs.
I can’t improve simply by doing stuff. Every time I improved, it was because I was missing something, and then I had an “aha!” moment and realized what it was.
If I had to explain the point in one sentence, I’d say this: if you can’t achieve something consciously, there is no point in training your muscle memory, because it won’t succeed either. Instead, try to improve until you can do the thing while focusing on it, and then delegate that to your muscle memory.
Here’s an example on how to apply this to dealing with mobs.
Each mob has an attack distance, and there is a certain distance at which you can attack the mob, but it can’t attack you. Learn how this distance looks visually and maintain it. It may be difficult to both keep distance and attack at the same time, so you can focus on the former first – it’s more important! This keeps you safe and should give you confidence so that you don’t panic and make more mistakes.
After that, you can add attacks. Each mob type has a fixed health that can be translated into the number of attacks. For example, a creeper can be killed with two iron axe crits and one normal attack (let’s call this
That’s a lot to learn for such a simple action! And this applies to everything – you can’t wing it and hope for the best, you have to understand it. But the benefit is that you know how to make things work out, so you stop panicking and making rushed decisions, and have more mental effort to allocate towards trickier tasks. The less stuff you have to do on the fly, the better – your end goal is to execute a perfect algorithm and reserve on-the-fly thinking to things that are really specific to the run.
Here are some other useful details, with shorter descriptions.
For a long time I couldn’t do ender pearl clutches because I couldn’t place the block under myself consistently: if I pointed too low, I would get out of reach distance, and if I pointed too high, I’d place the block inside myself. So I went in creative, flew next to a wall, found the angles between which placing the block is possible, then translated that to pixels. This taught me that, if I stand in the middle of a block, throw a pearl, and then point at a position 3 pixels from the edge of the block, I’ll be able to place the block consistently. After that, I could train my muscle memory to maintain this angle.
My top TNT in the Desert Temple used to be very inconsistent, and I constantly blew myself up. Turns out that you are supposed to crouch, and that lets you break TNT much more easily!
Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks, not breaking or placing blocks. When navigating terrain, you’re supposed to combine two approaches instead of choosing just one. For example, you can break a block if you need to climb a 2-high wall, and place blocks if you need to climb a taller one.
If there are piglins in your way aggroed on you, simply throwing gold will attract them towards the point where you throw the gold, i.e. before you, which is not something you want. Instead, you can throw gold to the side to make them give way. For example, this can be is useful in Treasure if there are piglins next to where you want to make a hole.
If you often die to hostiles during terrain nav to the bastion, chances are you didn’t pause after entering the Nether. We don’t just do that to reduce lag, but also to load more chunks to a) let mobs spawn farther from you, b) fill up the mob cap with bastion mobs. Pausing for a bit makes nav safer.
Learn the sounds. They give you a way to determine if the dragon is perching while doing half-bow without looking at her, along with more obvious benefits, like knowing whether piglins are aggroed and digging towards silverfish.
Know your spikes. If you get a clean spike that you can nav towards 70% of the time, but 30% of the time you have no idea what to do, chances are there is a spike, but not the one you’re used to. There are three different spikes that occur in different conditions, and you need to know at least two of them.
If you sometimes miss stronghold, it’s not because you’re unlucky. Is your sensitivity correct? Did you enter the boat and wait for the position to sync? The two are not exclusive: if you enter the boat while in the portal animation, you can’t throw the eye immediately. Taking a couple seconds to make sure is less of a time loss than mismeasuring.
If you point at a block and start holding left click, you won’t be able to hit entities until you re-click, only blocks. For example, in the overworld, you can break grass to light animals fire without accidentally hitting the animals by pre-clicking a grass block nearby. Same for punching out fire in the Nether.
When lit on fire, chicken take enough damage to die. You don’t need to chase them if that’s difficult, focus on other tasks instead.
Placing full blocks inside of items causes them to jump out towards air. We use this to get Housing backups all the time, but it’s useful in a lot more cases, most commonly in bottom Housing and Stables and when getting the gold block from the top of a Ruined Portal. You can also place two gravel and then quickly break the top gravel to get items out of the piglin hole without killing piglins. When possible, prefer block elevation over walking towards the item – this makes your movement cleaner.
I’m probably missing a lot! I might add a couple more points if I think of something.
I learned most of this stuff from listening to top runners. They usually don’t explain stuff (save for Feinberg, I guess), but you can find some gems in training sessions for Midoffs and such; and for bastions specifically, Silverr’s tutorials have lots of useful details as well. Good luck :)
