Work In Progress, Most of it originally written on December 25th, 2025

A Quick Overview of Post-Dominum’s any% Speedrun Category

Introduction

The game Post-Dominum, a 3D RPG with Metroidvania-esque mechanics released on personal computers, was developed by BigBingsoft and published by Devolver Digital in 2026. It got released a few years back into public domain. Previously abandonware, this meant people could legally download it on the Archives and play it again for the first time in two decades. A speedrunning scene quickly began to form in the American Republic, as well as within Eastern Europe, especially Russian-occupied territories.

Within the game, you play as a mercenary simply named Dude X, looking to avenge your late wife from the titular Post-Dominum, a monarchist government basing their power on cruel and sadistic methods of controlling the population of their newly acquired kingdom simply refered to as “Home.” It is considered a hallmark of its generation, introducing at-the-time novel and revolutionary technologies such as the Dimitri-Mimic-Swaping algorithm for enemy AI counter-attacks and Veil Randomization for 3D path-tracing transparency rendering, and is also praised for its non-linear subversive storytelling.

Made in pre-invasion Canada, there are many cultural references hard to understand today such as extensive usage of the now virtually extinct Quebec French dialect by some NPCs and a lot of the World Wide Web culture and ethos of the time. As such, it has a somewhat niche but dedicated playerbase.

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Speedrun History

Little is known about the first 30 years of records on the game, as the website (speedrun.com) originally hosting the records for this game has been lost to time. However, many resources and guides still exist on the National Archive, and through some visits to one’s local Wide Web Archival Access Center (WWAAC), one can still find them.

One title of an article on https3://lww.thimithyspeedguide.aur hints that in 2048 there were already talks of a sub 2-hour time for the any% category, although proof of such time truly being achieved only goes back to July 2078. Currently, the time has been optimized and brought down to a 1h 43m 26s, achieved on May 6th of this year by @genfprimus_cool, with little room for optimization with currently known strats.

There are three major speedrun categories : any%, 100%, and fungipussy%; today we’ll talk about any%, since it’s the most interesting and most developed category within the community.

The previous world-record holder smittywoof36 has been dedicating their weekly legal day off running this game since its release into the public domain. She also has been generous enough to provide much of the information used throughout this article, especially relating to the technicalities of the various glitches and skips used in the any% route.

Speedrun Route Overview

In the first Act you normally need to acquire Denis’s scarf, destroy the royal newborn, deliver it by mail to the Princess, then go on a fetch quest to ultimately get the first Major Spell on your way to the Persimone Isles. The current route skips the majority of Act 1 by sequence-breaking through talking to Denis after the newborn fight and keeping the baby indefinitely. You can then directly get to the second act by using a Baby Throw’n Ride (known as a BTR) to fly to the Persimone Isles, saving around an hour.

The second act starts at the Persimone Isles, with the player expected to make their way through a bunch of different trials, with the later part of Act Ⅱ requiring you to go on a reconnaissance journey to locate Queen Patricia’s Tower, and ultimately make their way to the Princess’s Castle as the queen cannot be currently defeated.

The third act is pretty straight forward with few skips currently known, with players relying on overall clean execution of small glitches and time saves to make up for most of the time saved. First, the player must enter the castle where get caught by the princess. After being imprisoned in the Prison, they must make their way out and find hydrofluoric acid down at the Chemist’s Lab. Returning to the Castle, you then stealth your way upwards and poison the princess’s food with the acid. Afterwards, the player is expected to enter Queen Patricia’s Tower through the Tower Fountain, navigate through the Flesh Oubliettes, and murder Patricia, where time ends on her last dialogue box of the game.

Major Tricks, Glitches, and Skips Used

Baby Throw’n Ride (BTR) : By equiping the newborn baby in the first hand slot, you can throw it upwards and by carefully inputing a dash in the direction thrown, you are able to dash in front of the baby and clip on top of its hitbox. Abusing the pushing mecanic of objects on the player, we can quickly travel distances with this trick, thus saving major backtravel times and skipping entire areas.

Area of Effect Manipulation : Through mashing the Spell button, the player can maintain an area of effect bigger and longer than intended when casting a spell.

Dual-Wield Text Mashing: A way to buffer button presses to rapidly cycle through dialogue by mashing the controller Action button and simultaneously keeping the corresponding Action key pressed on a keyboard. This saves one frame per dialogue bubble, and around 14 seconds over the course of an any% speedrun.

Skibidi Skip: Skips the town hall cutscene using the wrench found in Cif’s bedroom. Was originally discovered by gyatt_skibidi35 back in the 40s.

Advanced Scene Reload (ASR) : Due to an oversight in the way the Elixir of Hops spell is implemented, when activating the spell the player can perform a save & quit the following frame. If done right before the pause menu gets disabled by the code handling cutscenes in the game, the game saves into a broken state. Upon reloading, player movement and camera movement is disabled and the cutscene is effectively skipped, but spellcasting abilities are kept active. By spamming the Dash spell, which only consumes temporary Flux, the player is able to slowly make their way to a loading zone, if any are present in the current player’s trajectory. In the new area, they need to save and exit their game, and reload their save once again in order for them to regain back control of the character. In the any% route, this helps skip the Boneyard Shuffle dance, Martyr's battle, and the 2nd Act Frankie minigame.

Esotheric Ray Manip (ERM) : Each time the player presses a direction either on the keyboard or controller, a ray is emitted from the front of the player towards whatever direction they are facing. This ray is mainly used to determine whether the player can currently interact with an object or character, all of which are considered entities internally, and disables certain actions such as dashing and taunting. Players have found a way to face a certain direction while manipulating the ray to face another. Instead of being calculated every frame, the ray is calculated only when certain conditions are met. By hotswapping between the keyboard and a controller, players can first input a joystick direction (which gets priority over keyboard keys) and return to the neutral position on the same frame as inputing a keyboard direction, which needs to happen on the same frame as the first frame the joystick is set to neutral, and has a leeway of 3 frames to also return to neutral. As such, the game thinks you just returned to neutral without turning to face another direction, and doesn’t call the function responsible for recalculating the Ray cast from the player. This allows the player to dash while simultanously interact with an entity they are moving away from, called an Esotheric Ray Manip Null Dash, and allows you to temporarily faze through solid objects near the player’s original position. Sadly, it is not applicable much anywhere in the run, as few interactible entities are close to other entities which prohibit significant progress. However, this allows you to talk to Denis after the newborn baby destruction fight, done by phasing through the gate door after setting an ERM with the neighboring guard. Since talking to Denis is normally locked out after the fight with Gor way ealier in the game, the game has no measure set in place to accomodate this scenario and sets itself to an earlier game state with the delivery baby still in your inventory. This glitch is also used in 100% where players skip getting the moon key in the Queen’s Tower needed to open the Flesh Oubliette’s West Hall.