/arbguide

In-depth explanations of the more difficult and mainly less self-explanatory strats for the All Red Berries Category.

Celeste ARB - Advanced Strat Guide

by buhbai

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Table of Contents

Introduction

This guide will be giving a detailed rundown on the advanced strategies that aren’t fully self explanatory in the ARB run. It is not a full route guide, but you can watch the Celeste All Red Berries Speedrun Tutorial Series curated by profnyan, Xenoras and Tiyo98 here if you would like a full route guide for ARB: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4uRzak8ww7PVFLNFNcSUF2NsviHd65ft.

This guide however is aimed at runners that already have experience with the game itself, either with ILing or with running Any%, therefore I will not be explaining the speedtech and basic mechanics of the game and assume you know all of that already.

I will be labelling each screen by its ID denoted in debug mode (screens that are visited more than once or are large that need specifying where in the screen the strat is are shown with “(x)” next to their ID). If you have any questions about anything specific that needs more elaboration than I’ve already given here, then DM me on discord @buhbai#3333. This guide is a constant WIP - if you feel like a strat needs to be further explained and deserves to be in the guide then also DM me and I’ll consider adding it.

Celeste Speedrunning Discord: https://discord.gg/wgNC54H

Celeste ARB Leaderboard: https://www.speedrun.com/Celeste#All_Red_Berries

Berry mechanics

Berry collection

To quote euni: “To collect a berry you must:

  • Be on safe ground for 9 consecutive frames
  • Be on safe ground for 18 total frames if you had another berry when you picked up the berry you’re trying to collect.”

This means that collecting more than one berry at once ends up taking twice as long as as collecting just one, which can throw off your timing and potentially lose a berry by retrying or returning to map too quickly for instance; keep this in mind.

Winged berry

Floating berry that flies away once you dash on that particular screen. The hitbox of winged berries oscillate up and down on a cycle as opposed to the static hitbox of normal berries.

Seeded berry

A berry that spawns once all the berry seeds that make it up are collected on that particular screen. You can skip the cutscene of the berry spawning.

Berry seeds

Floating seeds that are dropped when you come into contact with the ground. You have 9 frames on the ground for seeds to reset, but they'll reset immediately if you move upward from the ground, e.g. dash up/diagonal dash up or jump.

Heart route

Collecting 4 hearts is required in the ARB run to access the Core and collect the final 5 berries and complete the run. The recommended route for beginners was collecting the hearts in 1A to 4A as they are the quickest of the A-Sides. This allows you to do 6A which is a lot more forgiving and is more comfortable for most runners than 6B as it is part of the current recommended Any% route.

However, 6B is used in the heart route that is considerably faster than the beginner route simply because you skip having to collect a heart in the A-Side for the same time frame, since 6B is just as fast (if not faster, depending on what you get for 6A times on average) than 6A and 6A doesn’t contain any berries. This is why we can go to 6A, collect the cassette and quit to play 6B and unlock Summit that way.

If you plan on running with 6B, the slowest of the 4 A-Side hearts is Old Site, which takes around 19.3s to collect. This means that doing the 6B route, as long as you get a time that is equivalent to a time doing the 6A route, saves at least 19.3s, not including the time you can potentially save over better execution of 6B over 6A and what not.

A question that comes up a lot is “So when should I be playing 6B?” I would say the best time to start playing 6B would be when it’s difficult for you to improve your 6A average anymore and when your 6B time is up to the level of your 6A at least. This means you can either start playing 6B from the get go and get a headstart at getting comfortable with the level or wait until you’ve gotten a few PBs under your belt; the choice is yours.

Closing words and credits

Hopefully this has been useful to you and has made the majority of these strats easier to learn and implement into your own runs. Good luck!

Thanks to Evansfight for proof reading and koralreef for suggesting a good chunk of strats to be added.

Thanks to czyys' dustforce guide for inspiration of this format and using github in general - a lot better to format than google docs.