Ocarina of Time Speedrun Guide: Categories and Records

The fastest anyone has finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is 3 minutes 47.9 seconds. CountLG set it on Wii Virtual Console on 13 July 2024, and the whole route plays out in Kokiri Forest. The fastest anyone has finished it under the glitchless rules is 2 hours 9 minutes 5 seconds: Smaugy's Glitchless Any% from 26 October 2025, in a category whose documented route still clears all eight main dungeons. That is about 34 times longer, on the same 1998 code.

The gap between those two numbers comes from rulebooks. Ocarina's speedrun.com board runs nine full-game categories split across 19 leaderboards, and nearly every split comes down to how much of three things a category tolerates: wrong warps, Stale Reference Manipulation, and item manipulation. The glitchless boards ban all three and then argue over a long list of smaller tricks. Here is every board, its record, what each ruleset actually bans, and where a new runner should start.

That frame is where the clock stops in most of these categories. Speedrun.com's game rules end any run that defeats Ganon "on the first frame of the final blow cutscene." Timing starts on the first frame of movement or pausing in Link's House.

Every category and its record

These are the full-game records as speedrun.com's main Ocarina of Time board listed them on 2 October 2026. The date is the date the run was performed, as the board records it.

Read down the runner column and four names own most of it: Amateseru holds five records, CountLG four, Smaugy all three glitchless boards and zfg two. Seventeen of the 19 were set on Wii Virtual Console and the other two on GameCube. The oldest record standing is zfg's 100% SRM run from March 2021; the newest is bradyONE's 6:47 in Defeat Ganon, from 6 August 2026.

The three dials every ruleset turns

Most of the boards above differ by where they set three dials, plus a hard line on code execution.

Wrong warps. Beating a dungeon boss summons a blue warp, which tells the game where to send you next and which cutscene to play on arrival. A wrong warp interferes after the warp has set the cutscene but before you land, so the game sends you somewhere it never intended. The Any% route from before GIM's discovery in February 2015 was built on one, and it still has its own board.

Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM). ZeldaSpeedRuns, the community's knowledge base, defines it as overwriting parts of the game's actor data and code "by unloading actors and loading something else in their place." Link keeps writing position data to the actor he is holding even after that actor has been unloaded, so with the right setup he writes it into something else. ZSR describes three levels: editing an actor's variables, Function Pointer Manipulation (redirecting existing code), and Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE), which is running code the player has effectively written. Restricted SRM boards ban "Lightnode SRM, Arbitrary Writing and writing to .code data outside the Zelda Heap"; the No SRM boards ban what the rules call Carry-SRM.

Item manipulation. Bottle Adventure (BA), Reverse Bottle Adventure (RBA) and Get Item Manipulation (GIM) bend the inventory and the item-get routine. GIM, per ZSR, is "a memory manipulation glitch which can be used to modify which item you receive."

The column that matters most is the last one. Any% is the only one of the nine categories that allows ACE, and the credits warp in the next section is what that buys.

Any%: a credits warp in Kokiri Forest

ZSR's route page puts it plainly: the current fastest route "performs a credits warp using LightNode SRM in Kokiri Forest." The rules count a credits warp as finished on the first visible frame of any unmodified credits cutscene from which you can reach The End by doing nothing but advancing text.

The run starts here, and in ZSR's write-up it looks almost normal at first:

1. Sword and money. Backflip off Link's balcony, grab the Kokiri Sword, then collect every permanent Rupee in the main Kokiri Forest area. That is not greed. ZSR's route says the full set is "required for the Lightnode SRM to work," because it is part of arranging memory (the heap) the right way.
2. Shop. Buy a Deku Shield and five Deku Nuts.
3. Lock the camera. Move Mido, load the Deku Babas in the hallway to the Deku Tree, then string together two glitches, Return A and Walking While Talking. That leads to a pause-buffered backflip over a fence, which ZSR warns "must be pause buffered, otherwise the game will softlock."
4. Start the SRM. A diagonal slash, then pick up a rock. Link walks off-screen holding it, and the next stretch is played blind: runners count beats of the Kokiri Forest music, or a metronome at 145 bpm, and hold set directions for set counts.
5. Aim and warp. Link comes back holding an invisible item. Set his facing angle exactly (0xACA0 on Wii VC, Wii U, N64 1.2, Switch and Switch 2), drop the item with the shield button, and roll back over the hallway's loading trigger. ZSR's warning: the wrong angle "will most likely crash the game."

The strangest requirement comes before you press Start. Each platform needs a specific file name, spelled with the Japanese version's character set, which is why ZSR says the route "must be done on the Japanese version." On Wii VC the file is named ラんぐUVくBヲ. The N64 cartridges need three files named in set ways.

ZSR rates Any% a five-minute category for learners and a popular first run. Its own caveat is the honest one: Any% "contains almost no overlap with any non-SRM categories." You will learn a lot about memory and very little about Hyrule.

Wrong warps, and why the Deku Tree comes last

ZSR's wrong-warp explainer starts with the entrance table, "a sizable list of 1556 records" that tells the game which scene to load and where to put Link. A blue warp sets a next-entrance value and a cutscene number. Change the entrance after the cutscene number is set and the pair points somewhere unplanned.

ZSR's first worked example is Ganondoor. In Gohma's boss room, the runner uses the Ocarina Items glitch to keep control of Link on the blue warp, then opens the boss-room door on the right frame. That overwrites the destination with the Deku Tree's own entrance, the leftover cutscene number pushes the index past it, and Link loads into the inside of Ganon's Tower as it collapses. That scene has no cutscene of its own, so the game plays whatever its cutscene pointer was last aimed at. ZSR's FAQ for this trick names the usual softlock: save-and-quitting after Gohma leaves the title screen as the last cutscene played.

Defeat Ganon, Classic Kakariko Route is that idea preserved as a category. ZSR calls it route-locked: it "emulates the Any% route prior to the discovery of GIM on February 5, 2015, defeating Ganon as Child Link using the Ganondoor wrong warp." The checklist is short and specific: Kokiri Sword (or a Deku Stick on the swordless route), a bottle from Kakariko, bugs, a savewarp, Deku Shield, the Deku Tree, the 2-3-1 Scrubs, Gohma, the wrong warp, and the tower collapse. Torje's 15:07 from June 2026 now sits above two runs from 2015 and 2014, both on the Chinese iQue Player. ZSR notes the iQue version is technically fastest but "has fallen almost entirely out of use."

The same trick explains a routing quirk in the long categories. ZSR's All Dungeons No SRM route and its MST route both put the Shadow Temple first among the dungeons and save the Deku Tree, the game's first dungeon, for last:

• All Dungeons counts a dungeon as "any location with a blue warp," so the Ice Cavern is not required. The route finishes with a heap wrong warp from the Deku Tree, and timing ends as soon as you fade in because the cutscene playing "is a credits cutscene."
• MST has to defeat Ganon, so a credits warp is out. After dispelling the trials, the route warps out to the Lost Woods, clips into the Deku Tree, beats Gohma, Ganondoors into the tower collapse and fights Ganon. There is no Ganondorf fight anywhere in it.

The collapse is the normal end of the game, covered in our Ganon's Castle guide. In these routes it is somewhere you arrive from the Deku Tree.

No Wrong Warp and GSR: the warp switched off

No Wrong Warp's rule is blunt: "Manipulating blue warps is banned entirely," including triggering one and then dying or leaving. Other glitches stay legal up to each board's SRM limit, and the fastest route ZSR documents shows how much that leaves. It enters exactly one of the eight main dungeons, the Deku Tree, collects the Light Arrows there through GIM, dies on purpose to get out, and never fights Gohma. From there it skips the Door of Time ("DoT Skip" in ZSR's shorthand), uses RBA for bombs, hovers its way into Ganon's Castle and skips the trials. The No SRM record is realtimeattack64's 38:02.

GSR, the Ganondorf Source Requirement, is stricter. Before Ganon you need Ganondorf beaten, the Light Arrows, the Shadow and Spirit Medallions, magic, Zelda's Lullaby and the 30-arrow Quiver, and every item has to come "from one of their natural sources in the game." Wrong warps, RBA, BA, GIM, Carry-SRM and blue-warp cutscene skips are all banned. ZSR records its older names, No RBA/WW and then No IM/WW, which tell you what the category was built to exclude. CountLG holds it at 1:06:49.

Glitchless is two different rulebooks

The Glitchless board admits the problem in its own rules: there is "such a gray area in defining what is or is not a 'glitch' in this game" that players voted on a shared list. The result is two categories built on opposite ideas.

Glitchless Any% bans techniques, not outcomes. Its rules sum it up as "If the means are not a glitch, neither are the ends" — skip anything you like, as long as you did not perform a glitch to do it. Glitchless All Main Quests adds required goals (all eight main dungeons, the Ice Cavern before the Water Temple, the carpenters before the desert, the Nocturne of Shadow to reach the Shadow Temple, the Door of Time opened with the Song of Time, every trial dispelled with Light Arrows) and bans more techniques. Both allow savewarping and deathwarping.

The two records sit 1 hour 26 minutes apart. Even the looser rulebook produces routes that look odd to anyone raised on the intended order. ZSR's Glitchless Any% route runs the Ice Cavern and the Fire Temple before the Forest Temple, and skips Big Octo in Jabu-Jabu's Belly. If you want the order the game nudges you toward, our dungeon order guide has it.

Why the board is almost all Wii Virtual Console

On the Any% board, 136 of the 185 ranked entries were run on Wii Virtual Console, and the first Nintendo 64 run is tied for 26th at 4:18. ZSR's version-differences page explains most of it. The North American and Japanese Virtual Console releases contain "an unedited NTSC 1.2 rom" running through an emulator, and that emulator layer changes things that matter to runners: "significantly less lag overall, especially during the Tower Escape and Ganon fight," and Get Item Manipulation working "in situations where it would crash on N64." The GameCube builds share both traits, and GameCube is where the board's other two records were set.

The platform rules are strict, all from speedrun.com's game rules page:

The Switch versions are not equal either. Any% works there with a listed file name (the same one as Wii U VC), but ZSR's All Dungeons route "cannot be done on the NSO (Switch or Switch 2) versions" because heap wrong warps do not work there. ZSR also treats the Ship of Harkinian PC port as a different game, and nothing here is known to apply to the Switch 2 remake, which Nintendo describes as built from the ground up.

Where a new runner should start

ZSR's getting-started page names four main-board categories as good first runs, with times for an intermediate learner:

My pick is Classic Kakariko. It is short enough to reset without losing an evening, it is the old Any% route kept as its own board, and it teaches Ganondoor, which ZSR's MST route still finishes with. Any% is the better choice only if memory exploits are what you came for.

Whatever you pick, get gz, the practice ROM, which ZSR calls "by far the most important tool for practicing this game." On run setup, the rules allow an intro-skip file saved in Link's House. They also ban grabbing the Rupee from the pot in Link's House on the first load of that file, and you have to begin the run within 10 seconds of gaining control.

If this has you eyeing other Zelda boards, our A Link to the Past speedrun guide covers the SNES game's rulesets. And if you would rather race without memorising frame windows, the Ocarina of Time Randomizer runs its own races on racetime.gg.

Quick Action Checklist

• Check speedrun.com/oot for current records. The table above is the board as of 2 October 2026.
• Pick a ruleset by its three dials: wrong warps, SRM level, and RBA/BA/GIM. Of the nine full-game categories, only Any% allows Arbitrary Code Execution.
• For Any%, learn the Lightnode SRM route from ZSR, set the right file name for your platform, and count the blind section at 145 bpm.
• For Classic Kakariko, learn Ganondoor: Ocarina Items on Gohma's blue warp, door on the right frame, and do not save and quit after Gohma.
• Expect ZSR's All Dungeons and MST routes to save the Deku Tree for last.
• Running Glitchless? Decide between Any% (means-not-ends) and All Main Quests (required goals, tighter list) before you learn a route.
• Play on Wii VC if you can. N64 flashcarts and emulators only count for times slower than 110% of the record.
• On Switch, savestates, suspend points and Switch 2 Rewind are banned, and heap wrong warps do not work.
• Install gz before you do anything else.