This 17 minute Stardew Valley speedrun starts with destruction

Games Done Quick draws to a close tomorrow and one of the best runs from the past week was for Stardew Valley. Speedrunner Olenoname finished the farming simulator in 17 minutes by using a mixture of glitches and extreme skill.

For a sense of what the expect, the run begins with the player exploiting a bug to bring up the inventory menu during a cutscene, so they can throw away their farming tools. Although arguably it starts even before that, with the protagonist being named after a long string of item codes.

There are glitch and no-glitch speedrunners, but I tend to prefer the former. It might seem on the face of it that it would be easier to complete a game quickly with exploits, but the exploits speedrunners find tend to be both bizarre and difficult to perform. Also, it’s just more fun watching a Stardew Valley player complete the game by, for example, immediately blowing up their garden the second they see it for some reason.

Awesome Games Done Quick is a speedrunning marathon organised twice a year, with charity donations taken during the stream. It’s been running for nearly a week now and at the time of writing it has raised $2.3 million (around £1.6m). You can see what speedruns are still to come at the full AGDQ schedule.