How Speedrunners Make Robin Hood a COWARD

The whole run is incredibly intense in execution, like constantly. You basically have to be the antithesis of the Robin Hood that we all know and love. You do not steal from the rich to give to the poor, you don't help King Richard, you do not do all the good things that we expect from Robin Hood. It's not just a Robin Hood game, it's quite a lot more than that. I mean, seriously, you can skip everything. [Music] Today, I'm going to tell you the incredible story of Conquests of the Longbow speed

running, of humble beginnings, relentless ambition, and of the people who broke the game beyond anything I thought possible. But first, have you ever built a PC with high-powered components, only to use it for things like emulating 30-year-old video games? Well, if you own an RTX 3060 or better, you could put that spare computing power to work with Salad, today's sponsor. Salad is a compute-sharing platform that uses your idle resources to help out with computing projects. If you have the right

hardware, you could earn between $40 to $200 a month in rewards, which you can use on games, gift cards, and more. Become a Salad chef and start chopping. No, that's actually what they call themselves. See? Speedrunners aren't the only people with weird lingo. Check out the link in the description below and see if Salad is right for you. In the spring of 2019, I realized no one had done any runs of one of my favorite games. There were no leaderboards. I would have to be the first. So in April of

2019, I sat down and routed it out. Wish me luck. It's going to be probably very slow and very terrible. That's okay. In Conquests of the Longbow, you play as Robin Hood. The main objective is to raise ransom money to free King Richard the Lionheart. Over the course of 13 days, your actions, good, bad, or very bad, will determine your fate. On the first day, we have three things to do. Find the shooting glen, save a peasant from one of the sheriff's men, and visit the widow's cottage. The shoot

ing glen is pretty simple. First, we have to wait through a discussion with our men at camp. This takes about five and a half seconds with skipping through the dialogue. Then go a few screens north to the glen. You can practice archery here, but it's optional, so in my run, I leave immediately. To get to the peasant encounter, we have to walk a few screens left of our camp to the overlook. You might think to use the fast travel map to go back to camp and then walk left. That would save us a few

screens of walking. But if you do that, there's some extra dialogue with Friar Tuck and it turns out to be slower. So instead, we travel in a sort of zigzag pattern. At the Watling Street Overlook, a location that will become very familiar, we wait for a peasant to show up, followed by one of the sheriff's men. The good Robin Hood would take care of the situation heroically. But one of the extraordinary things about this game is that it gives you a lot of choice. So instead of saving the peasant

, you can just walk away. Yeah, the game lets you do that. But for speedrun purposes, I found that you don't even have to walk down to them. Just wait until you hear the music, see the barest hint of the peasant's dress, and map away. Go to the widow's cottage, skip the dialogue, day over. After getting drunk and lamenting his lack of female companionship, Robin dreams of a woman dancing in a willow grove. This is Marian. Robin grabs something sparkly in his dream and wakes up holding a half-har

d emerald. On the morning of day two, Will tells you the cobbler in town urgently wants to speak with you about King Richard. But to make sure you're the real Robin Hood, he needs you to bring him a woman's slipper. Oookay? You then wander around the forest until you find an evil monk accosting Marian. One arrow to the face later, and Marian conveniently drops her slipper before riding away. I did a fair amount of testing to figure out how to trigger this. There are certain screens in the forest

where Marian can show up, it's not all of them. The second time you enter one of these screens, as long as you don't enter from the top, the scene triggers. So the fastest way I found was, map to the widow's cottage, go right, go left, and then come back. It kind of makes Robin look like he forgot his keys on the other screen or something. Arrow, slipper, and then if we were a competent Robin Hood, we'd pick that thing up. But it's just so far away. If you don't pick up the slipper, you miss ou

t on points, but Much, one of your men, picks it up for you. Again, the game was sort of designed with this idea that if you screwed up, there would be fail safes where you could keep playing the game, but you just look like an idiot. Now that we've got the slipper, we need a disguise so we can sneak into nodding him and meet with the cobbler. So it's back to the Overlook to wait for a beggar. The Robin Hood of Legend would offer the poor man some coin for his clothes, but we could also negotiat

e. "Either mine to have those rags you wear. Will you give them to me, or will I add a new hole over your heart?" And I figured at the time that this was faster. I think that's going to be faster because if you don't have to pick your money up at all in this run, then that's going to end up saving a bit of time. Something else I noticed on my first run was that the game had lowered the speed setting without asking. "What? Why did the speed… Oh, that's interesting. Oh, you know what I think that

did? Ohhh." I think this is because the game's trying to make it look like you're a slow old beggar because if you put up the speed again manually, it looks a little silly. In town, we give the slipper to the cobbler and have a private chat. The evil Prince John is stealing money from the Queen meant for King Richard's ransom. A large sum of this money is going to be traveling along Watling Street in just a few days. Even so, we must bide our time until the treasure train appears and we can stea

l it back. The cobbler gives you a silver comb, which you're supposed to use to prove to Marian that you spoke with the cobbler. These people really like their trinkets. Anyway, we don't need to know any of that for the speed run, so toss a shoe at this guy, right click through the dialogue, and leave. Day 4 is a short one. We first give Marian the comb. We could show her the half heart emerald to unlock a romantic sequence later, but that takes time. Instead, we map to the overlook. There's an

encounter with a poacher and a sheriff's man. It plays out exactly like the peasant from day one. Wait for the cue and then bravely map away. Day 5 and 6 are unique. You have a choice of two different missions. After learning that the widow's sons are to be hanged, we once again go to the overlook. Two monks come down the road, traveling in opposite directions. One of them is dressed in brown robes and the other in black, just like the one who attacked Marian. Had we paused to read the dialogue

earlier, we would have learned that this is an order of evil soldier monks. And they stole something from Marian that she needs back. A scroll with an outline of a hand. We threaten him with the bow. He appeals to our sense of honor, and we can choose to fight him fairly by calling our men and then playing an arcade fight sequence with the quarter staff. But that takes too long, so it's dishonor for this Robin Hood. Our men are a little disappointed, but whatever, we've got the disguise and it's

off to the Fens, a type of wetland. At the castle, we encounter our first instance of copy protection. We have to answer three riddles by consulting the gemstone lore in the game's manual. After answering correctly, we go inside. We find Folk, the King's Jester, and vow to rescue him. Folk won't leave without his scroll of poetry, okay? So we need to get that before he shows us the secret way out. We find Marian's scroll and Folk's scroll in the opposite tower. After escaping, Folk thanks us an

d gives us a reward. His verses and a magical water ring. Thanks! Wonder how much I can sell this for. Since we did the Fens Monk quest on day 5, we have to do the Abbey Monk quest on day 6, so it's back to the overlook to wait. Just approaching the monk is enough for him to crumble in submission. Speaking of submission… This goes on… for about 30 seconds? Which in a speedrun feels like an eternity. Anyway, with the disguise, we can rescue the widow's sons from hanging. This is the longest quest

line in the game. The best way to solve this, and the way to get the most points is… Deep breath. Go to the Abbey. Grab three robes. Talk to the Abbot. Take his empty cask to the pub. Refill the cask. Play and win 9 men's morse against Harry, winning a magical amethyst. Exit the pub through the secret passageway. Think with the Abbot. Use the amethyst in your cup to avoid passing out. Steal the Abbot's money. Go to his bedroom. Find a puzzle box under one of his pillows. Go to the castle. Bribe

the guards so you can bless the widow's sons. Go back into the secret passageway, and when the guards leave, put four pennies on the table so the guards can afford drinks. Wait until they come back. Wait until they leave again. Enter the room. Tie the robes together. Have the three sons dress in the robes, leave the pub, and bless the sheriff of nodding him on your way out. You got all that? Seriously, in the current 100% world record which requires the maximum score, it takes five minutes to g

et through this sequence, and that's with skipping all the dialogue, turning the speed up, and not wasting a moment. Or you could not do any of that. This is another one of those instances where the game gives you multiple solutions if you can't figure out the harder stuff. Blow your horn at camp and pick one of your men's rescue plans which performs a frontal assault on the castle. You don't get nearly as many points, but it's still a win, and it's much faster than doing all that nonsense I jus

t talked about. However, there's a third, even faster way. Before I started the speedrun, I found a community playthrough thread on the now-archived Adventure Gamers forum. In that thread, which was kind of a group let's play, people challenged themselves to find both the maximum and minimum number of points for each day. A team machine found that after you get the monk's disguise, you can simply travel back and forth between nodding him and camp. On the third trip back, your men get tired of wa

iting for you, assume that you're dead, and attempt a rescue themselves. This means the suns are saved, and you don't have to watch the battle cutscene because you weren't there. It comes at the cost of 7 outlaws, your pride, and you gain no points. Good job Robin. On day 7, we visit the widow to get our reward for saving the boys, even though we didn't really actually do anything. The reward? A magic net that we use in the forest to catch a pixie. The pixie takes us to the great oak tree and...

Oh shoot, I did that totally wrong. Aww, how do I do that again? What I was supposed to do first was go to Marian in the Willow Grove and give her the scroll from the Fenn's Monastery. Then, she teaches us something called the Hand Code. This is a cool bit of lore where you can spell out words by pointing to the different parts of your hand. This disappears quickly, but it's also in the manual. If you skip the dialogue with right click, you'll also skip over a little tutorial that teaches you h

ow to use it. This saves a little bit of time. Now, back over to the oak. The green man, a magical being who lives in the tree, asks you riddles to prove your worth. You answer the riddles using the hand code that we just learned. If you fail three times, you get turned into a tree forever. Answer the three riddles correctly and you've earned the magical protection of the forest. On day eight, it's time for the Nottingham Fair and the arrow-splitting archery tournament. First, we need a disguise

, so it's back to the overlook. We encounter a yeoman on his way to compete in the tournament, and we offer coin in exchange for his clothes. We then enter the fair. Marian has to walk across the entirety of the grounds before the plot will proceed. On one hand, it's kinda nice to get a break in the middle of the run. On the other hand, it's slow. This'll be an interesting sequence break if someone can figure this out. Once Marian leaves, three scholars show up. We only care about one of these,

the queen's spy. It's always this one in the gray. Exactly where the scholar shows up is random, so you can lose a little bit of time if you're unlucky. To prove our allegiance, Marian told us the name of a randomized coat of arms on the previous day. The scholar shows us some pictures, and we're supposed to go to the manual and match the coat of arms correctly. Except we didn't slow down to hear Marian tell us which one it is. That's because even though the correct coat of arms is randomized, i

t's always the second one he shows you. So tell him nay, and then I, and hand over the hand scroll. The scholar then offers us some money, which we can accept. Or not. Now, to deal with the archery tournament. In this first run, I thought that leaving the fair would end the day, but no such luck. Oh, no? No? I headed back over to where it was, clicked the bow on the target, and instantly won because I had the arcade slider put all the way down. No points, but hey, this is any percent, and we rea

lly don't care. On day 9, before you can move on to anything, you have to go into the forest, trigger a chase sequence with the sheriff's men, and escape. So to evade them, we have to use the green man's protection. Throughout the forest, there are groves that will give you a picture if you look at them. What you're supposed to do is find the picture in the manual, then spell out the tree's druid name with the hand coat. When you do that, as long as you're wearing the standard outlaw outfit, you

magically turn into a tree and the soldiers can't find you. Now, you can't do this on every forest screen. It has to be a grove. The fastest way I found was this. Map to the oak tree, walk down, walk up, walk down again to trigger the chase, walk back up, and spell out the druid name for oak. D-U-I-R. DwIRRrRR. Dooooo-er. Whatever. With that done, we get on with the main business of the day. You're supposed to trick the sheriff of Nottingham out of his coin. You can use the yeoman's outfit from

the previous day and pretend to know the location of Robin's camp. Or, for more points and coin, encounter a traveling jeweler and acquire his clothes. We then go to the castle and spin a tale about finding a dragon's cave full of treasure. Either way, we trap the sheriff, take his money, have a party, and then send him home humiliated. [evil laughter] Thankfully, for the speedrun, there's yet another option. If you leave immediately after meeting the sheriff, he bans you from returning and the

day ends with you lamenting what a waste it was. At night, before day 10, Marian joins us at the campfire and hands over a puzzle box. I know I barely mentioned it, but back on day 5 or 6, there was a puzzle box we were supposed to steal from beneath the abbot's pillab. This is a failsafe in case you didn't do that. Yet another instance of the game allowing you to be completely incompetent. In the morning, it's time to open the box. There are a bunch of letters on top, so how do you know what t

o spell? Back on day 5, Folk gave us his scroll of verses. Each line in the poem has the druid name of a tree. Look at the first letter of each tree in order and that spells out the Latin solution. It's chosen at random from these 10 possibilities, and thankfully, each solution starts with a unique letter. So all you have to do is look at the first line of the scroll to know the answer. Put that in, and we have the fire ring to go along with our water ring. Once we leave the cave, Little John sh

ows up with awful news. Marian's been charged as a witch and is going to burn at the stake. We blow our horn, gather our men, and pick a plan. The one that gets us the most points is one of subterfuge. If we were so inclined, we would head to the pub, convince the owner to let us use the secret passageway to go to the abbey, and make our way through a hedge maze. At the end of the hedge maze, there's a door to the witch burning arena. Your men attack, giving you an opportunity to slip in. But al

l that takes time, so just pick any of the other plans. This takes us straight to the rescue. The only difference between them is how many outlaws you lose and how many points you earn. And we don't care about either of those things. Oh, and let's hope that you put on the fire ring before you called your men, because otherwise... [scream] Anyway, save Marian, and then combine your half-heart emeralds to heal her. Slowly go through the next set of dialogue, because Marian gives you a randomized p

assword that you need to use later. If you click too fast and miss it, you don't get to see it again. Day 11 is amazing. Friar Tuck runs up in a huff and tells us the treasure train has been sighted. You know, the one Lob told us about with all the money we're supposed to steal? We've been doing so little in the way of heroism, I wouldn't blame you if you forgot. Blow your horn, call your men, and pick a plan. Depending on the plan's competence, you'll lose a certain number of outlaws and gain s

ome number of points. You get to watch an elaborate battle sequence, after which you'll get the treasure. This takes up a good chunk of time. Unless you pick much as planned. Create panic with wild boars. This plan is so bad, all you see is an empty road and Tuck explains that the treasure train has escaped. No score, no treasure, and you lose one outlaw because he was gored by one of the boars. But hey, no battle sequence. On to day 12. The game devs liked the Forest Chase sequence so much, we

get to do it again. Oak, D-U-I-R, make like a tree. After that, go to the Overlook, where we meet the Queen's Knight. This is the person we're supposed to give the ransom money to. What you're supposed to do is use the hand code to spell out the password Marian gave us. But when you do, the Knight doesn't recognize it. Because we've played the game before, we already know this is an imposter, deserving of an imposter's welcome. Shoot in the face. And we map away to end the day. So if that was a

false Knight, where's the real one? Being held captive in the Fenn's Castle. Put on the water ring, talk to Will, wait for him to leave camp, head to the shore, and you can talk to the Will of the Wisps. These are the spirits of people who drowned here. They bring you a boat and guide you through the Fenns. On this screen, you have to wait for a bit, because they randomly choose one of these three paths. If you take the wrong one, brothers, it's an odd law. Kill him. Kill him. Once you take the

correct direction, we climb up the ivy on this tower. There's a joke death here that you can get if you talk to the monks. Excuse me, could you lend me a hand? You see, I'm nearly safe, but I thought I'd do something truly foolish instead and get myself killed. Brother, quickly, bring some rocks. There's an intruder below. But if you want to actually win the game, you need to jump in through the window. In the tower, use the hand code to give the real knight, Marian's password. If you have the a

rcade slider on anything except the lowest, you have to play this sequence where you avoid falling rocks. But since we're cowards, the game just lets us go. And that's the end of the run. Last input is clicking the middle of the hand, so that's when the time stops. My first complete run of the game ended at 26 minutes and 6 seconds. World record folks. It wasn't great. I paused a lot to make safety saves and consult my notes, and I made a lot of mistakes. Nope. The next day, I cleaned up things

a little bit. I used the speed slider to make the beggar go faster. On day 4, I saw the peasant first, and then visited Marian, the opposite of the way I did it the first time. Because if you do that, the day ends instantly when you leave the will grow. On day 7, I went to Marian first before doing the riddles, and on day 8, I didn't waste time trying to leave the fair early. Instead, I wasted time by getting thrown out of the tournament. See, if you pay the entry fee, then leave and come back,

the guards won't let you in anymore. And I thought that would be faster than watching the cutscene where you automatically win, but for some reason the game hangs here a long time, and it probably ended up being slower. Anyway, I got a 24.51, a little over a minute saved. Enough to be what I called a decent placeholder to show off the route, but I wasn't satisfied with just a placeholder. Cross your fingers. No crashy crashy? No softlocky? Unfortunately, as I began running the game faster... oh

you did it again didn't you? It started softlocking at the end of this cutscene. You're kidding me. God. Why? In this run, I tried twice to get past it, but then went for a backup strategy. Alright you know what we're gonna do guys? Just to finish this stupid game, there's another solution to this puzzle. And I'm not even joking. We can wait a minute and let her freaking die. So that's what we're gonna do. Yes, that's right. If you wait a minute and a half, Marian will die. Because I couldn't ge

t the password from her personally, I had to come back to the Willow Grove later and spell out their druid name to get it instead. I also struggled with the pixie. The direction it comes from is random, so it can be difficult to catch. And how long you have to wait for it is random as well. I was frustrated, but I still finished the game with a 2313. I lost some time chasing the Scholar around the fair, but made up for it with another discovery. I had been offering the Yeoman money for his outfi

t. But this triggers a lengthy cutscene with your men. Instead, I approached the Yeoman, causing him to threaten Robin with his bow. If you map back to camp, John will have done your job for you, and the Yeoman's outfit is waiting in Robin's cave. Oh, and this furious head shaking? We'll get back to that later. As a way of punishing you, the game also locks you out of the archery tournament. So now, you can simply leave the fair after giving over the hand scroll, saving even more time. Again, be

ing a coward paid off. I had also begun to notice that the time you have to wait for people at the Overlook is variable. When I was practicing this, the guy shows up right away, and other times, takes forever. I didn't know the exact details then, but eventually, I learned that you have to wait a random time between 10 and 20 seconds. Although there's a quirk in the game engine that means, despite the code stating 10-20 seconds, in reality it's somewhere between a little over 8 seconds to just u

nder 19 seconds. Between both Peasants, the Beggar, and the Yeoman, that's a time swing of 40 seconds between best and worst RNG. So I knew that sub-22 was possible if I could fix the softlock. A month later, after reinstalling the game, I went on to finish with a 21-22. The softlock was no more. Or so I thought. In the runs that followed, it came back. I was tearing my hair out, looking for a solution. Nothing seemed to make a difference. But after a lot of experimentation, I discovered the sof

tlock happens when you dismiss these text boxes too quickly, the ones right after rescuing Marian. Much later, Sloosebox, a scum VM developer, would discover the cause. At the same time the text boxes come up, there's also this sound effect. It's a little ding that means that you earn some points. If you close the boxes before the sound effect is done playing, the game locks up. In the current versions of scum VM, this has been fixed, but the solution back then was, wait a second, and don't clic

k them away too quickly. With that knowledge, the path was wide open for a new world record. You know, I wonder if there's a more optimal path like through the forest. I feel like there is because Robin sort of like goes around trees in a way that's sort of weird. I almost forgot this part. You can use Tab to open up the inventory. I did not know that until like yesterday. You need to shoot him in the face. Perfect. Look at that skill. Alright, time to hold under for a while. No offense to the a

rtist, but does this tree just look not as good as the rest of the background? Maybe they were under a crunch time. That happens. Big time save is coming up. Okay, just remember not to click through this. One, two, do a little bit of save scumming at the end here. I think it actually saves time. We'll see. Okay, I'm gonna give me the control again. I'm gonna do it. Did we pick correctly? Yes, sweet. I'm blanking on the password that Marian gave us. I think it's heart. I hope it's heart. If not,

I actually am screwed because I don't remember. Thank God. Sweet. That's world record. And then I took a break. I wouldn't come back to it for another year, and with that, a big time save. To understand it, we have to talk a little bit about emulation. If you buy the game on GOG, it comes bundled with ScumVM, a program for running old adventure games on modern PCs. To reduce bugs and provide a more stable experience, ScumVM sometimes throttles the games, making them slower than what they would h

ave been on a fast PC in the 90s. This is great for casual play, but not what we want in a speedrun. I had tried running the game in DOSBox at MaxCycles, but that made the game crash. Instead, I ran the game in Urquan's ScumVM. This removed the speed throttling and brought the game closer to a native DOS environment. Running it un-throttled was fine for the most part, and it even added a great feature. Robin has these head-turning animations that are supposed to happen every couple of seconds, b

ut this is tied to game cycles and not a real-time clock. Un-throttled, Robin gets super paranoid, and it looks like his head's about to fall off. Long story short, Robin moved faster. But there was a problem. Try as I might, I could not catch the pixie with the throttle off, even when it clearly walked over the net. And then I found conquests of the longbow version 1.0. Actually, technically, I had played with version 1.0 a little bit, but I stopped because I thought it might be causing the sof

tlock. So I guess it's more like I rediscovered it. There's one key difference with version 1.0 for the speedrun. You can run it unthrottled and you're able to catch the pixie as long as it enters from the right hand side of the screen. You see, you can only catch the pixie when it's on the ground, not when it's flipping around in the air. Running the game unthrottled makes it flip almost constantly. But for whatever reason, in version 1.0, the pixie only flips when it enters from the left and n

ot when it comes in from the right. This essentially means that you have a 50-50 chance of being able to catch the pixie every time it comes on the screen. Okay, that was... Oh, nice, okay. Back to camp. Pfft. Good. Bye. Wait a million years. Lions. Lions, lions, lions. Lions, lions, lions. Need to remember lions. All right. L... I... O... N... S... Cool. On July 24, 2020, I earned a 1934, about 30 seconds faster than my previous world record. And a lot of that was due to running the game unthro

ttled. And that's where I left it. I had no desire to grind further, so I updated my guides on speedrun.com and moved on again. There was only one other runner on the board at that point, MilkToast, who also goes by Amiga Runs. Like the name indicates, his thing is running games on the Amiga platform. It was great to have another runner around, but the Amiga version is extremely slow. Like, over an hour slow. And so after submitting one run, MilkToast left too. Sometime in 2021, in the comments

of my 2102 world record, a user named Tiny Teapots gave me a great tip. The Watling Street Overlook doesn't appear on your map until you find it on your own. I had just been walking there through the forest, which takes about 12 seconds. But Teapots pointed out that you can use the map to jump to the road next to the overlook and then just walk one screen right. I thanked them, put the idea in my back pocket, and promised to use the strat when I got around to it. And then, in September of 2021,

not one, but two runners would join, and everything changed. Oh, I had this game on Floppy way back in the day, you know, in the early 90s. And it was always one of my favorites going around and seeing what weird things you could do. And I was searching for King's Quest stuff on YouTube, and that led me to one of your history of the record videos. And I checked out your channel, and some of the stuff you had done was conquest. I was like, conquest, I love that game. Alrighty, who's ready for a w

orld record? Once I had everything set up, I just, you know, it all fell into place. Deathwing quickly earned in 1828 a full minute faster than my record. It was a lot of fun getting that first record and knowing that, you know, there was some competition. I was hoping that you would see it and, you know, fire back and jump back into it. And other people would join in over time. He also created a great resource for the gemstone copy protection. By this point, I had gotten in touch with Sloosebox

, the scum VM developer I mentioned earlier. Sloosebox explained that the gemstone riddles are in a fixed order. The game picks one at random and then gives you the next two. Deathwing used this knowledge and created a spreadsheet to quickly find the answers. We no longer had to sort of jump around to figure things out. Another runner, Alkars, had also joined the competition. And it's just a beautiful game. I mean, you play this game, it's like playing a painting. It's like a normal painting. It

's just beautiful and it's aged so well. Alkars and Deathwing had reignited my interest in the game, so I came back for a few runs. Good, there we go. Less than 10 seconds off world record. I can live with that for tonight. Deathwing was no slouch and on September 17th, he earned an 1814. Deathwing and Alkars had started to find optimizations. At some point we realized why are we picking up money at the beginning of the game? Like the very first action in the old world record, you're 19, is pick

ing up money. We don't do that anymore. Once we realized we only need money for the sheriff bit with the yeoman. And you get money from the scholar as long as you say yes, which doesn't take any time. Just three days later, I would be back at it. I had some great RNG in the first half. Deathwing's gemstone resource helped me get through that puzzle faster. I lost some time at the fair because of scholar placement and started to get sloppy in the second half of the run. Still, going into the last

day, I was 31 seconds ahead of my personal best. And on track for world record. That is not how you spell ransom. Flustered at having choked the final inputs, I lost a lot of time. World record lost by four seconds. Later that same day, Deathwing dropped the record even further to 1803. But the next day, on September 21st, Deathwing did this. How did he do it? Oh, yes. So that one was all cars. That one was definitely him. On the day you deal with the abbey monk, wait for him at the overlook. A

fter you walk down to meet him, walk away and then map back to camp. Tuck will be there having taken care of the matter for you. The clothes are in your cave and you've skipped that monstrosity of a cutscene. Once we saw that it worked for the monk that you could just walk off the screen, we immediately started saying, okay, well, can we avoid the other ones? You can also do the same thing when you get the beggars clothes. John puts the clothes in your cave and you don't have to see the cutscene

or mess with the speed slider at all. It should have been obvious from the beginning. I mean, it's the same thing we were doing with the peasants. But sometimes you need fresh eyes to see what's right in front of you. I did another run the next day using the new tech. It went great and I saved over a minute from my personal best. But I was still 10 seconds behind world record. More discoveries were made. We found out that you could do the same beggar strat at the yeoman. Map away to camp, littl

e John gets the outfit for you, and you skip having to walk down and get threatened. We were really starting to skip just about anything resembling heroism at this point. Not yet content with his time, Deathwing discovered how to predict the direction of the wisps. I spent a lot of time analyzing the will of the wisp patterns. I wanted to know how many patterns there are. Could you predict where they were going to go? And it turns out, yeah, there's only three. They can go certain ways. And on t

op of that, it was almost always to the right. For example, if they start out by moving to the left, they'll take the right edge. And so you could figure out just by looking where they start, where they were going to end. This means that runners no longer had to wait for the wisps to exit. Sluicebox also confirmed that there's a bias in the RNG. There's a 50% chance of right being the exit and a 25% chance for both the left and the top. Alkars and Deathwing started finding glitches too. Remember

how the game has this chase sequence? The one where you have to use the hand code and turn into a tree? So I was streaming attempts and I didn't even see it happen. He told me about this later. I apparently did not put in the full name or I misspelled it or typo-ed it or something. And he's like, "Did you notice that you didn't spell it right and accepted it?" And I look back at the video, "Yeah, I did typo that." The chase sequence happens on two separate days, day 9 and day 12. It turns out,

the second time, on day 12, you can go into the hand, then click outside of it to exit. You still turn into a tree, even though you didn't spell out anything. It seems like the game holds on to your previous input. The handcode was also useful again on day 12 with the false knight. Normally during this encounter, your map and walk icon are both disabled. But once you use the handcode, all the icons come back. You can just map away. This skips delivering an arrow to the face, so it's a little dis

appointing, but time saved is time saved. It also lets us perform this funny glitch. Unlock the walk icon, and then click south to moonwalk down the road. If you return to the screen, the night is already dead. And if you do that in version 1.0, it's not the night, but John? Who's here? Anyway. By this point, Deathwing was poking at every corner of the game. For example, he found a way to optimize the monk cycling on the day when you rescue the widow's sons. So originally, you had gone back to c

amp, like actually clicked on the map, gone to camp, and then go back to Nottingham back and forth. And I discovered that you just had to go to the minimap. So you just go to the minimap, go back in, back and forth, and it does it automatically. There was also something weird that Deathwing noticed about whichever monk you encounter second. Sometimes, he would show up instantly, which we came to call Insta-Monk. But sometimes, you'd have to wait there for a long time. As it turns out, this is ju

st the way that the game is. On day 6, you get a 50-50 shot of getting the monk immediately or having to wait. For some reason. But it turns out that if you just walk off the screen and walk back, it re-rolls it so you have that same chance of getting the automatic monk, which is still faster than waiting for him. For the next few weeks, we were all doing runs until finally, on October 28th, this happened. So you watch the video and the very first thing is someone asked me in chat, "Are you grin

ding for sub 16?" And I was like, "No, I'm just trying to get a better time." I got great luck everywhere. I got the instant pixie. I mean, my heart was racing and great execution, all the new strats, the will of the wisp thing, everything worked out and it was a great run. I was super pumped. Oh my God. We got 15. Oh my God. I was pretty much floored at that point. Oh man. And that is where Deathwing stopped. At the end of the day, the RNG was too much for me. That's four different times in the

run that you can lose 10 seconds. And one of them is the very beginning of the run, just completely out of your control and it runs over if you don't get something reasonable. And then on top of that, you have the pixie. You could have the run of your life going and you could have the run of your life going and run of your life going and left side, left side, left side. You're just standing there watching your time drift away into nothingness. That's part of the reason I stopped. Activity would

quiet down for a few months until March of 2022 with the arrival of Lemming. Something I really like about point and click speedruns in general is I really enjoy the low barrier for entry, right? Anyone can pick this game up and do a speedrun of it. And as soon as you start doing it a couple of times, you start to feel like you're really sluggish and you start getting a little obsessive about all the little ways you can speed it up. Shortly before I started running the game, the work that you,

Deathwing and Elkarz, put into the game and to the optimal route was fairly fresh. So I came at really an optimal time to take advantage of a lot of hard work that the community had already put into the game. The second part of that is that at that point in my modest little speedrunning career of mostly playing games in this same engine, I picked up a lot of little tricks to make it that much quicker, which I don't think had really been applied to the long bow runs just yet. One easy example. So

in day two, pretty simple. All you do is walk around the forest until you see Maid Mary being accosted by an evil monk and you shoot him. During that span of time where Robin is walking from point A to point B, I queue up the long bow icon. I use a action storage mechanic in the game by pressing insert or middle mouse. You can switch your current icon or inventory item back to the walk icon and vice versa. So in that screen, I'm able to just shuffle back and forth and then I'm clicking through

it while also hitting middle mouse at the right time. And as soon as that text box is gone, I'm already shooting an arrow, which saves like a few frames. I've taken my mouse over there. I saved time switching the icons up. Little things like that. If you add them to the run is where I think I really dropped a lot of time. I wonder if I should go for something under 1530. That sounds kind of nightmarish, to be honest. I took a break from the game, not because I didn't think sub 15 was impossible.

It just seemed way too hard. It felt like I had to have perfect execution. And at the same time, I needed five different RNG factors to go perfect. And the odds of that I never calculated them, but they were surely just like terrible. I did want to take a second crack at it a few months later. And fortunately, what made sub 14 much more possible was the discovery of fair tech. I was doing runs again. And to see where I was losing time, I put my personal best against Lemmings in a video editor.

I looked up and compared our days. Not surprisingly, he was just faster on most of them. Except the fair. And when I went back to look at the footage, the only thing I could tell that I was doing differently was cycling the screen. Not for any sort of purpose, just like fidgeting. And what's funny is that I distinctly remember thinking at the time, I'd like to think that going back and forth like this makes her go faster, but that's just not the case. It was. We don't quite understand how it wor

ks, but it's almost like there's a rounding error in updating Marian's position when you change screens. Regardless of the mechanics behind it, we knew two things. Constantly cycling the screen sped up her walk by about 20 seconds. And it was really annoying to watch. It does add a little bit of challenge to the fair tech where you're getting to a rhythm, you're pressing your left and right arrow key to just shimmy Robin between two screens back and forth. And you might be tempted to look away f

rom it because it is a little bit painful on the eyes, but you do want to track Marian as soon as she leaves that screen. One you want to stop and two you also want to be able to figure out exactly where that scholar landed and not get too carried away. Anything under 330 would be nice. Thank you. What a champ. All right, actually, don't ruin this for me. It's going well. All of your runs are going to reach a point where you get to the pixie and then the cosmos flips a coin and depending on how

it lands, your run is dead or you get to keep going. Nice. Get a smidge unpleasant. Okay, this could be it. I'm hoping I mess this part up. Give me the good RNG. Give me the left. Nice. Good time. Getting sets of team, it felt great. It was just an achievement of a plan, kind of a plan of action I had made after getting back into the run. I think from a stream perspective, I probably got it in maybe four or five. What you don't see there is a lot of playing the game on lunch breaks, little coffe

e breaks in the middle of my day. It's an advantage of working from home and just making sure that once you do get that RNG, you're doing everything you can to make sure you don't goof it up. There we go. When Lemming topped my run and I was like just a couple of seconds, I admit I was pretty disappointed to lose it by just a short amount of time. But then after it dropped a huge amount after that, there's new stuff. It's legitimately significantly better. It's not just a matter of, oh, he got s

lightly better RNG somewhere. So I was very happy when it went down much more than that. Activity in the game would pause once again for a few months until November of 2022. Shaw luck had arrived. How did this game not get more attention? Because it's so well put together. The puzzle design is good. There's multiple endings, alternative puzzle solutions, all stuff indicative of a great game. I don't know. I'm surprised. He progressed very quickly, starting with a 1630 on November 27th. He then b

eat Lemming's world record on December 3rd by one second. It was astonishing that he... Not that he beat it. I knew he would get there, but that it was only one second. I'm always happy to see someone come in and knock it out. That said, I will say I did have a little bit of ego that Shaw only beat it by a second. I've had world records lost before and typically I don't just lose them. I get pulverized. I mean, honestly, it didn't really feel earned. Lemming's run was better than mine by far. I

just had better RNG, like much better. So it feels like I was more lucky than good. I didn't like it. Not content with that time, Shawlok would keep pushing. As he was going for the record, he would always talk about how deceptively tricky this game was. So it's great to be validated on the challenge of it, but also see somebody have the same interest and pull it as you do. So you know you're not really alone in being kind of obsessed with a game from 1990 and making it go as quick as possible.

The entire first split fell behind by about 10 seconds, like 10 seconds and some change. But I decided to play it out just to see how my practice with the gem and the hand puzzles had gotten better. But in my mind, I was like, this run, this run's dead. Like it's probably doomed. When I shaved time off the Fenn split and the Pixi split, I realized I was still in pretty good shape. And then when the Yeoman and the Scholar were good, I then realized like I could finish the strong and actually have

something. That felt like I had actually earned it. That one felt earned. Credit goes to you, Deathwing, Lemming, and everyone else that's contributed to pre-thorough routing of a niche game. I was sure that's where this story would end. And in fact, this is where I started doing my interviews and writing my script for this video. But then something happened. And I dropped everything to see how it would play out. On January 13th, 2023, a user named Snowy commented on one of my old speedruns, an

d what Snowy told me blew my mind. Just a thought for a time save. When you need to evade the guards in the forest, instead of going to the oak tree, you could go to the edge of the forest where there are blackberry bushes. Using the hand code MUIN causes the bushes to part sideways a bit, allowing you to walk off the screen, providing a different way to evade the guards. This bypasses having to wait for a guard to walk past you. It might take a little extra time to walk to the edge of the fores

t, but it's not too long. Not sure the fastest route to get there, but one way is to walk right from the camp. Just an idea. The part of Snowy in this video will be played by this sprite of Robin from the game. Snowy is now officially a P.N.Gtuber. It's such a bizarre thing as well. The bush just translates into the other bush. It doesn't look like they really spent much time trying to implement it. It's just about hanging in the game, you know? I tested it, and it saved about 20 seconds overall

. Before long, Snowy came back with an even better route by mapping to the Willow Grove. It's less walking, and for some reason, none of the dialogue boxes show up. Shawluck then used this reroute the same weekend, and dropped the record by 30 seconds. Shawluck and all those before him had an impressive string of records, but the run would soon belong to Snowy. [So I first played it when I was about four or five years old. I distinctly remember playing the game and being somewhat frustrated abou

t having all these dialogue boxes pop up that I couldn't read, so I would just skip through them all. One of the first major interactions that I did was to shoot the oak tree, which is a death. I distinctly remember a buzz and excitement from that actually doing something. The green man just bursts out of this tree, and it's like, "What? This is incredibly exciting." And then I gradually started to read and stuff, and realised that those dialogue boxes are actually quite interesting, as that ope

ned up and made the game far more involved, and actually I understood what was actually happening. It was quite nice to be exposed to this little community and this fascination in this abstract hobby. On January 22nd, 2023, Snowy would submit a run to the Any% version 1.1 category. It was a great run at 18 minutes. Slower than Any% because of the speed throttling, but good nonetheless. And there were two strats in that run that were brand new. In ScumVM, when you press Escape, it goes to the top

of the screen, directly above the screen position of your cursor. What that means is, in many situations, pressing Escape and clicking is going to be faster than moving your mouse up. So that was neat. But Snowy had found something else, an enormous breakthrough that was even more shocking than the Blackberries. Most of the days have cutscenes at the beginning where you talk to your men. These are unskippable, and you have to wait for many seconds while they saunter off-screen. However, if you

save the game right after the screen transition, then reload the save, you get control of your walk cursor again. And if you act fast enough, you can head back into the cave, come back out, and the cutscene is skipped. It wasn't like a crazy epiphany or anything like that. Literally all I did was save the game while Robin was coming into the camp. But I just wanted to get into the cave to change my outfit. And Robin just walked in. It only works on the camp screen, however, and all of the screen

exits are still disabled, except the cave entrance. Even more bizarrely, Snowy found that any key will make Robin walk to the cave. Like, watch, during normal play, I'm going to press O. Robin walks over. Press the W key. Robin walks over. Press the L key. Oh god no! [Screaming] The strategy also works in 1.0, un-throttled, but the faster speed makes it a lot trickier. Or at least, it was trickier, for a couple of days. Because on January 25th, Snowy figured out that pressing the Insert key did

the same thing. This kind of makes sense actually because insert switches between the last icon selected and the walk icon, except it's a little more complicated than that. Insert isn't supposed to override the hands-off icon, but it does, all over the place. Normally this doesn't matter because the cursor still doesn't do anything. But the handle event method for the cave entrance is coded differently from anything else in the game. The half-broken input slips through and that interrupts every

thing else that's supposed to be happening, as long as you do it fast enough. And out of all the places in the game, the cave entrance just so happens to be the best place for speedrunning. But in any case, pressing Insert did the same thing as saving and reloading, which saved a lot of time. And Snowy immediately earned a new Any% world record. From Shawluck's 1417 to 1350. And Snowy, odds blood, he wasn't done yet. He grinded more, got better luck, and took it down to 1312. It looked like sub

13 was possible. Once I started, it's hard to stop because when you complete a run, say you get a PB, you immediately start to think how it can be improved. At least I do. I really want to see how can it be improved. Is there actually a mountain to climb? Have I actually reached the peak? And the answer is always no. And then, Snowy found two small time saves. First, I had believed it was faster to shoot the Fens Monk as opposed to running away from him. Well, if you leave the Fens Monk at the t

op of the screen, that saves a little bit of time over-exiting to the right. Also, because of Snowy skips, you can skip some of Little John's walk off-screen. With those two things put together, this was faster than the old route. And here's the second strat on the Day of the Treasure Train. Rather than blowing the horn to summon Will, you can actually go and meet Will yourself. He's at the Overlook. You can then blow your horn next to him, skipping him walking towards you. The run also had grea

t RNG, and the world record was now 1245. Once I got hooked on that, I was sort of trying to find little micro-optimizations and also just improve execution to the point where I was sort of edging out seconds, more and more seconds. On February 15, 2023, Snowy got a run with a few minor optimizations and a major one. When you return to the camp after leaving the Fens Monk, you normally can't Cave Glitch without softlocking. Lemming found that if you wait just a moment when Little John turns left

, you can Cave Glitch safely. This saves about half a second. On Day 5, Snowy found a more efficient way to cycle the townscreens. Click the castle, down arrow because the arrow keys also work for movement in this game, and double-click between the bridge and the town gate. Another Lemming improvement that Snowy used was insert storage with the comb while waiting for the poacher. This made it slightly easier and faster to give it to Marian. Snowy also started holding Enter during some of the scr

eens. It's hard to tell if you're not looking for it, but if you hold Enter, Robin will speed up. It doesn't seem very much, because if you look through the game, there are not that many times where Robin is actually walking around, but it adds up. This speed doesn't stick with Robin though, so Enter key walking only saved about 1-2 seconds. But those are the small time saves. Here's the big one. Remember how Snowy had found it faster to use the Blackberries to avoid the Sheriff's Men during the

two chase cutscenes? I believe I was trying to just check if there was any quicker way of getting to some Blackberries. I was checking whether it would be possible to get to some Blackberry bushes immediately below the edge of the bottom of the road. There should be some Blackberries on the left, because that is the edge of the forest. But for some reason, there aren't any. And then I just thought, wait a minute, there's nothing here. So I'm just going to walk through there and see what happens

. And it did the ding sound. Yeah, that skips the chase sequence altogether. This skip saves around 25 seconds. Another cool thing is that you can do it in Puck's disguise, which actually saves an additional, you know, probably eight seconds. You don't have to go back to the camp after you've evaded the Sheriff's Men. And so you can just go straight to the castle. Snowy had earned a 1202, and then on February 21st, he would break the 12 minute barrier with an 1147. I think getting sub 12 felt at

the time to be a large milestone. But I think with a lot of these things, after you cross the milestone, you realize how much better it can be. Over the next month, he would develop more micro-optimizations. He started speed walking in more places. Snowy also started positioning Robin a little differently at the pixie. You might think to just aim the net a little ahead of the pixie, which works, but that requires concentration and sometimes you miss. Instead, I found that if you put Robin here,

the pixie is forced to cross the center. So, as soon as you hear the pixie jingle, drop the net. There's something funny that goes on with the net though, almost like the pixie gets sucked into it sometimes. Anyway, Snowy took my strat and improved it. Put Robin at about 75% of the screen to the right and drop the net at Robin's feet. This means you catch the pixie faster and exit the screen faster. At the Fens Monastery, you normally leave the refectory and have to be careful not to hold enter

because you'll wind up out front again. But Snowy found that holding enter slightly to the left along the bottom of the screen will initiate a speed walk along the corridor. I just love that the world record got to this level of optimization. Snowy is just, I don't know, he's just so thorough in trying everything just to see if he can find some other way to exploit another weakness in the game. On March 17th, Snowy earned an 1134. And then, with better execution, 1130 on April 19th. You need to

move the mouse accurately and click with confidence. You don't sort of wait for your brain to think, "Oh yes, I'm pointing at the right thing. I need to click now." And so over time, I think those executional things got really good. So going from 1145 to 1130 was almost pure execution improvement. Around this same time, Samuel Stokes would join the community. I was never really considering myself to be a serious speedrunner, but I always enjoyed watching speedruns. At some point last year, I wa

s just thinking about what some of my favorite games were. And I was like, "Oh, I wonder what the fastest anybody's beat conquest of the longbow." Because that was one of my favorite games. And I never really thought of it as a speedrunning game. Until I watched some of your videos, I never really realized, "Oh, wow, there's a community that actually likes to speedrun these type of games." I was watching living runs just kind of being marveled by, "Wow, how do you do all these things so fast?" A

nd it's something I'd been watching for quite a while before I decided to try it. So I was thinking, "Oh, I don't know. That seems complicated." I don't remember everything that's happening in the game. But within a week, I was able to get it down to like 27 minutes. And I was like, "Wow, I'm way, way far away from being competitive here." Sam's gift to the community was that of song. I'm a music teacher and I'm a composer. And so, you know, I like to play and sing. [MUSIC] In addition to playin

g the guitar and singing in between runs, he would make up words for the game's instrumental passages. And honestly, I can't watch this scene anymore without Sam's words in my head. [MUSIC] I dreamed up this rock. Of course, Sam wasn't just a master of memery. He was also pretty good at the game too. And I kind of have to explain this. Most adventure game speedrunners don't engage in long, consistent grinds. They'll go after a time for a bit, then move on to something different. Maybe they'll co

me back later. Maybe they won't. But Sam, there was a time in the spring of 2023 where he was streaming conquests of the longbow speedruns almost every day. I really haven't ever seen anything like it. Yeah, I've gone through a little bit of a difficult period in life in this last year. And I think it was a really nice, just consistent distraction when I needed it. And it was, you know, something that brought me joy. And I think it was just a good thing to give me a daily routine, you know, when

I needed it. And by the end of April 2023, he had brought his time down to 12.05. Man, yeah, I brought it down by seven seconds. Well, after all the rotten luck I had last night, I don't even... Did I even finish a run? I don't think I finished a run last night. Sam would also make helpful discoveries about how the game works. For example, the Scholar location at the fair could add precious seconds to your time if you were unlucky. The Scholar can also kill your run if they appear on the opposi

te side of the fair. They can start really close to the edge of the second screen, and then you pretty much don't see them. So then you waste about four or five seconds just trying to figure out whether they're going to appear. Your run can just be killed outright. One thing that's really cool though, something that Sam found, is that you can talk to the Scholar over the fence. This didn't completely negate a bad Scholar placement, but it did help to lessen the pain. Meanwhile, Snowy kept pushin

g, and at this point, it's hard to convey just how good Snowy is. Just look at how fast he completes day five. Snowy's speed and precision was like this everywhere. In fact, let's break down a part of the run to show just how optimized things became. In this section, Snowy needs to pick up the beggar's disguise and then later use the slipper with Wob. So, how does he do this most efficiently? First, he goes to the overlook. He has to wait at least 10 seconds for the beggar. Snowy uses that time

to insert store the hand icon. He also selects the slipper from Robin's inventory and right-clicks to cycle back to the walk icon. The slipper is not insert stored, but we can now right-click to cycle to it in the future, which means we don't need to waste time going into the inventory. Once the beggar shows up, Snowy maps away from the overlook and returns to camp. He holds enter immediately to ramp up the fast walk, and then middle mouse clicks over the cave entrance. This has the same effect

as pressing insert, which switches the wait icon to walk. Pressing the insert key, however, would interrupt holding down the enter key and stop the fast walk. But mouse inputs don't do that, so with middle clicking, Robin speedwalks into the cave instead of walking normally. As Robin approaches the cave entrance, Snowy moves the cursor away just a little bit, otherwise Robin will kind of walk back and forth a bit. Since Snowy is still holding enter, the speedwalk continues without interruption i

nto the cave. He puts the cursor over the beggar disguise. Once Robin is close enough, Snowy presses middle mouse again to switch to the hand icon he set up earlier. This picks up the disguise. After that, Snowy does something I've never seen anyone else do. He holds the shift key and presses both left and right mouse buttons at the same time. You see, with a two button mouse, left click fires an action, and right click cycles through the cursors. To accommodate mice with only one button, shift

click is the same as a right click. So, shift plus both buttons counts as two right clicks at the same time. Meaning that Snowy cycles from the hand icon, to the talk icon, to the slipper, all with one simultaneous input. He then presses insert, which stores the slipper, changes the icon to walk, and exits the cave. On the map, he presses and holds enter to select Nottingham, ramping up the speedwalk. He selects lobs shop, and then Robin fast walks inside of it. Still holding down enter, Snowy p

uts the walk cursor over lob. Once he gets close, he middle clicks to switch to the slipper and gives it to lob instantly. And all of that for just 25 seconds of the run. This is the sort of meticulous planning that Snowy brought to the game. The whole run is incredibly intense execution, like constantly. And on April 24th of 2023, it all paid off. I think I got an 11.25 and I was like surprised, you know. I was like, how did that happen? You know, how is that even possible? And then I thought,

okay, my very last goal, and then I'm going to retire, is going to be sub 11.20. I'm just going to try it for a bit and see if I can do it. Having already achieved an 11.25, Snowy kept going. And on the same stream, the same night, he earned this run. [MUSIC] Something that I sort of always dread when I come to it is catching the pixie. Because the way that we do that is we save scum. And there's this possibility that in between the time of you hearing the pixie jingle and pressing F5 to save, a

nd the pixies appeared on the wrong side, your run is then dead. It's just, it's really scary thought. When you get to the riddles, like almost all of the RNG has been decided at that point. So I was incredibly excited and nervous at that point during the run. And so I consciously slowed down a little bit because all it takes is one mistake there and you've lost all of the good RNG. With most of the RNG out of the way, Snowy just needed to execute. Take it away, Sam. Robin Good and Little John w

alking through the forest, Lapping back and forth of what the other had to say. Reminiscing this and that and having such a good time. Oodle lolly, oodle lolly, golly what a day. Never ever thinking there was danger in the water. They were drinking it, they guzzled it down. Never dreaming that a scheming sheriff and a sponsor was watching them and gathering around. Robin Good and Little John running through the forest, Jumping fences, dodging trees and trying to get away. Cotton plating up and f

un escaping, finally making it. Oodle lolly, oodle lolly, golly what a day. Oodle lolly, oodle lolly, golly what a day. In 1117. So I actually did like a proper statistical analysis of this. The 1117 that I got has such good RNG that you would have to play the game about 200 times to get that quality of RNG. But let's not forget about Sam, who still hadn't given up on his own sub-12 time. He kept pushing. Stream after stream after stream. Yes! There it is folks. Too bad everybody's asleep. Woo!

It's snowy with all of his incredible discoveries, game breaking discoveries that he made. Now I've got to figure this out. I've got to completely change my muscle memory to add this new thing in. But it's all worth it because it took all of everything that he came up with for me to be able to get it under 12 minutes. That was really exciting to me because I really doubt anybody's going to get it under 11 unless there's some other major glitch that is found. That's probably the limit of the huma

n ability to play the game, at least with all we know about it now. I'm currently in fourth place on the leaderboards. Some people might not understand why I'm happy about that, but I'd much rather be fourth out of eight than first out of one. And that's where the video would have ended. Except that not long after the last video came out, someone in the comments told me about something amazing. Remember that joke death that happens at the end of the game where you climb the tower, talk to the mo

nk guards, and they throw a rock in your face? Well, to make that work, the game reuses the same assets from the arcade sequence at the very end where you climb down and they're throwing rocks at you. So what you can do is talk to the guards, go into the menu, drag the arcade slider down, and the game basically says, "Oh, you're in the middle of the arcade sequence and you just set the difficulty down to automatically win. So let's make you automatically win." The rock goes right through Robin,

ignoring him completely. Robin climbs down, gets into the boat, and the knight automatically appears. You row away, and the game's over. You won. Because of this, you no longer have to go into the tower and show the hand code password to the knight. It also means you don't have to know the password in the first place, so you can just skip past all of Marian's dialogue. Altogether this saves, well, if you're snowy, it saves about 2.5 seconds because you still have to go into the menu and fiddle a

round there. If you're somebody like me who takes longer to put in the password at the end, maybe that's a few more seconds. But it's just so exciting to keep finding things in these old games. Now there hasn't been a New World record because of this yet. Remember the RNG swing is 40 seconds, so all the RNG events put together contribute a lot more towards your time than a 2.5 second time save right at the end. But it's possible that Snowy could come back and do something. There have been some N

ew World records in the low percent category. That's where you get the minimum amount of points, and because you don't have to show the hand code to the night at the end, you don't have to get those points anymore. There was also an e-glitch that was discovered that allows you to skip the forest chase sequences and not get the points for it. Maybe that's another story for another time though. In any case, I am just so thankful for everybody who's taken a look at this. And if you know anything ab

out this game, put it in the comments. If you want to learn more about how Conquest of the Longbow works, you can check out my deep dive into the game. A huge thank you to everyone I interviewed for this project, and of course, a big thanks to all of my patrons. Take care, and I'll see you in the next one. You are doing Robin Hood things. You're stealing a lot of pants though. Like, man's a pants thief. I didn't realize that that would be his go-to, is just give me those pants.