13%

13% is the lowest amount of items needed to beat the game by defeating all major bosses while staying in-bounds, but possibly with use of L+R Walljumping or Draygon ammo underflow.

Completed Categories

There are currently three 13% categories that have been completed RTA, which is 13% xCharge, 13% PbPb, and 13% IcePb. See these pages for a discussion of these specific categories. Also see this spreadsheet for a current list of all 14% and 13% records.

Theoretical Other Categories

Here, some other theoretical options for itemsets in 13% are considered.

13% xPb

Traditional rules across the speedrunning community ban the use of simultaneous Left+Right inputs, since this usually requires hardware modification. Given that suitless Maridia without the use of Left+Right requires either Ice Beam, Gravity Suit, or Hi-Jump Boots, the next most likely candidate for human-completable 13% categories under these conditions is based on the 14% xChargeless category that uses Draygon ammo underflow. This is the same as IcePb, but with a harder Maridia. If the goal is to avoid L+R, then some strange shenanigans may be required that would be quite time-consuming. Thus, IcePb was the first focus.

13% Speed (TAS)

This is the fastest TAS option. Sniq authored the currently published TAS for the category, obsoleting the previous two Low% branches, which used the item sets from 14% Ice and 14% Speed. The following are the colledted items:

• Morphing Ball
• Bombs
• Charge Beam (for bosses)
• Speed Booster (for Zebetite skip, and building Spike Suits for Mt Everest, pre-Botwoon Hallway, and for exiting Draygon's room)
• Varia Suit (to survive MB2's rainbow beam)
• 2 Energy Tanks (to survive MB2's rainbow beam)
• 1 Reserve Tank (to survive MB2's rainbow beam, and to make the Everest Spark possible)
• 2 Missile Packs (Awakening and Moat) (to open red doors and defeat MB1)
• 2 Super Missile Packs (Early and Wrecked Ship (Left)) (to open green doors and defeat MB1)
• 1 Power Bomb Pack (Red Brinstar Elevator (Lower)) (to open orange doors)

The biggest obstacle towards human completion of the TAS branch of 13% is the spikesuit generation in Colosseum, given that it involves multiple instances of speedkeep movement in order to maintain dash speed in building the short charge.

It should be noted that this is one of the most likely categories for an RTA completion without L+R Walljumping or underflow. There are five hangups:

1. Getting to Fish Tank. This is solved by a gravity jump from the broken tube with a flash suit.
2. Climbing Mt. Everest. This is solved by Everest Slopespark, which has a triple frame perfect RTA setup.
3. Getting to Botwoon. There is a TAS method (used to make 13% Speed possible on PAL) done by clipping into the ground, and then using double knockback from a Puyo and a bomb to destroy the ground you are clipped into to "slopespark" in Botwoon Hallway, destroying the speed blocks while maintaining a flash suit. This has not been looked at RTA, but would at best be as difficult as Everest Slopespark.
4. Getting past Botwoon ETank. The current RTA setup for Everest Slopespark needs 1+2 Energy+Reserve Tanks. Thus, this either requires an RTA setup for Everest Slopespark with fewer tanks (by lining up health drops), or a suitless slopespark setup in Botwoon Energy Tank Room to clear the speed blocks.
5. Climbing Halfie Climb Room and getting out of Draygon. With the above setups, you can either spark up Halfie Climb Room or use L+R Walljumping and then spark out of Draygon. So either a slopespark setup needs to be found to get to the top of Halfie Climb Room (potentially using Zoa and the closing door), or an RTA method for charging a spark in Colosseum needs to be found.

The combination of these things would make this category more than twice as hard as 13% PbPb, and by far the hardest category ever completed by a human.

13% SpeedPb

This would be an amalgamation of the IcePb and the Speed options. The spikesuit in Colosseum would not be needed, since a flash suit is gotten from the crystal flash at Draygon. Thus this is more humanly viable, but is much harder than the Pb-Pb option.

Hypothetical Categories without L+R or Underflow

There are no theoretical categories at this time that can avoid both L+R and underflow. There are three options for this that still have a road block preventing it from being possible. All of the following categories would utilize the 10 missile Zebetite kill.

• 13% GravCharge: This would be similar to 14% Ice, except Ice Beam would be skipped. However, there isn't a known way to get through Botwoon Hallway without Ice, Speed, X-Ray, or a Power Bomb. Moondance in a 2-tile opening will eventually gain too much speed to fall back into the opening and continue moondance, but won't gain enough speed to clip through the pipes below. TAS dance is a subpixel away from clipping through, but again can't gain enough speed.

• 13% xCharge: If a way can be found to ascend Halfie Climb Room in Maridia with only X-Ray and Bombs, the current 13% xCharge could be done without L+R. However, there isn't a way to do this, since all means of traversing the room require either Gravity, Ice, Grapple, a spark, or L+R. It's conceivable that a unique form of x-mode could solve this, but a solution has yet to be discovered.

• 13% Speed: A human version of the 13% Speed TAS is another option, but it still has barriers from even being theoretically possible. The biggest obstacle for is the colosseum shortcharge (on NTSC) or a weird double knockback thing with a bomb and a puyo (on PAL), which aren't humanly possible yet. A triple frame perfect slopespark in Mt. Everest is required and to avoid L+R, the resulting sparksuit would need to be converted into a bluesuit. That means that pre-maridia spikesuit, tube grav jump, fish tank underwater walljumps no L+R, slopespark → bluesuit conversion, and pitless Colosseum need to be done in one go without saving. This may be the most likely to become possible for humans, but would be the hardest category ever completed by a human.