I've been an SDA fan for a few years now but have never considered myself much of a speedrunner as I tend to lack the required patience and discipline. Nonetheless, DLC Quest gave me "the speedrun itch" because it is so short, and rather caters to speedrunning with its in-game timer and leaderboards. It's also a hilarious game with clever writing, so if you haven't checked it out I highly recommend it.

Naturally the insane times on the leaderboards got me curious, and I watched the 4:35 run on SDA by David Heidman Jr., among others online, to get an idea what kind of tricks were discovered. After playing around with these tricks for a while it became pretty clear that I could improve on the existing Bad End run on SDA. I managed to beat it numerous times, but I wasn't going to be happy until I got a run that beat it by 10 seconds and didn't make me cringe repeatedly. That led to the 4:24 run you see now.

The Bad End run involves obtaining the Finish the Fight Pack, then finishing the game without buying the Armor for your Horse Pack, resulting in the bad ending.

Two tricks are used in this run:

High Jump

If you press the jump button a second time rapidly after initially jumping, you will essentially double-jump, without needing the Double Jump Pack. (Credit to David Heidman Jr. for explaining this in his run's comments, which is where I first learned it from, and Zyre for coining the term High Jump.) For optimum height, the second jump needs to be performed on the 8th frame after the first.

Falling Jump

After falling from a platform, there is a margin of a few frames where you can still perform a jump.

The High Jump allows you to get to areas earlier than you would ordinarily, and thus amass enough coins to obtain the Map Pack to progress to the Night Area without needing to encounter Random, collect the Psychological Warfare Pack or the Double Jump Pack, etc.

The Falling Jump allows you to navigate a couple of areas more efficiently, e.g. the jump from the platform with the sheep at the top of the map to the hidey-hole leading down to the Sexy Outfits Pack.

One thing notably missing from this run but seen previously in David's is attacking Smith (the gun NPC) with the sword to get him closer to the exit. As far as I can tell this is not possible to do on the current version of the game on PC. This might save half a second if it were possible.

Here's a run-down of the route:

1. Buy the Movement Pack from Nickel (required to jump and move left)
2. Talk to the blacksmith and use the grindstone 10 times (required to unlock the Time is Money Pack); collect 20 coins
3. Buy the Time is Money Pack for 20 coins; return to the grindstone and grind another 10 times to get the sword
4. Continue left and collect all possible coins (32) without going far enough to trigger Random
5. Go to the right past Nickel, cut the bush, and perform the High Jump to reach the upper area
6. Collect enough coins to have more than 90 before dropping down to collect more
7. Go to the right to unlock the Map Pack, return to Nickel to buy the Map Pack (for 140 coins), then move on to the Night Area
8. Immediately turn left to unlock the Night Map Pack, then head right to collect coins and visit the Troll to unlock the Gun Pack; the goal is to have 155 coins before returning to the entrance
9. Buy the Gun Pack and Night Map Pack from Dime (for 75 coins each), return to the first area to get the gun from Smith, then come back to the second area, shoot the Troll, and "finish" the game...except oh not really
10. Buy the Finish the Fight Pack from Dime for 5 coins, then proceed past the Troll's resting place again to get the Bad End

Notable mistakes:

• It takes me 3 tries to perform the optimal-height High Jump. I'm not at a point where I'm inhumanly consistent, given that as far as I know it's frame-perfect. This is still fewer tries than the previous SDA run though. I've managed to get it on the first try a couple of times, but in those runs I made some other cringe-worthy mistake that tanked my time instead.
• I miss the correct timing on a Falling Jump coming out of the second hidey-hole underground, so I waste a bit of time jumping up to get out. There are also a couple of jumps on the way into that section that, if timed right, avoid hitting any walls, saving perhaps a few tenths of a second.
• I could have climbed the cliffs more efficiently on the return trip from the Troll in the Night Area.

Given those mistakes, I could probably fathom a 4:21 at best if everything went without a hitch. I'm a bit worn out on this for the moment though, and achieved my goal of beating the existing run by 10 seconds. I do hope to eventually do an any% Good End run and maaaaybe a 100% run, but those will take a lot more patience, so I may take a break first. :)

Hello and welcome,

I bought DLC Quest in early October 2015, after seeing it on YouTube. So i just played casually through the game. Then I saw that I missed two achievements. I looked up and now I had a goal. Playing through DLC Quest 100% in under 12 minutes. After a few hours in, I got a 11:58. I was not done! So I played a little bit longer and after around 5 hours in total speedrunning this game my best time was 11:46. Now I learned how to High Jump. And my first run with this new knowledge was a 10:28. I was hyped and started to grind more. 12 days and 26 hours later, I had a 9:50.933. With that I was 1.8 seconds faster than the current record. My sum of best showed that I could save at least 5 seconds more. With every new time I got, there was still time to save. Nearly one year later. I am presenting a 9:21.741. This is still not the perfect run. Sub 9:20 is possible, but I’m done for now. Until someone else comes close to my time, I will try to get Live Freemium Or Die on this site.

The two main tricks I use in this run are:

1.    High Jump: done by pressing the jump button twice. Second press must be around 7-9 frames after the first press.

2.    Double Button Spamming: you can skip text and buy things from the shop with the A and Start button. By spamming both buttons repeatedly, you can save a lot of time.

There is one more trick, that I didn't use in the run: the Double High Jump a frame perfect trick with which you could save another 0.8 seconds. Right now this trick is way to hard, comparing the time you can save. But maybe, we will see this in the future?