Last night speedrunner Tomatoangus flew through all of the main Fallout games in just over 2 hours and 16 minutes, and he pulled out all the stops to do so, including an actual prop to explain how to glitch through an elevator in Fallout 4.
While all of the Fallout games have a fascinating litany of bugs that can be exploited for speedrunning, Fallout 4 has some of the most interesting ones. There’s punch warping, where players can create a wormhole of sorts between locations by attacking at the right time during a VATs animation, as well as a way to stack multiple sets of armour in order to boost movement speed and endurance.
Waiting until his character was safely ensconced in a story scene, Tomatoangus, who recently added the “g” in his handle to make it family friendly, pulled out a pair of orange solo cups glued to cardboard to help illustrate one of the game’s more convoluted glitches.
Early on, Fallout 4 sends the player down into a vault that’s connected to the surface by a long elevator shaft. Rather than take it back up on the way out, Tomatoangus explained that it’s actually possible to glitch out of bounds and have the game teleport you back to the top of the elevator shaft to exit the vault more quickly.
The top piece of cardboard represents the floor of the vault, while the corresponding solo cup represents the elevator shaft. The bottom piece of cardboard represents the out-of-bounds floor beneath the vault. (The bottom solo cup is just there for spacing.) If a player falls down onto the floor beneath, they respawn to the part of the in-bounds vault floor directly above them. In order to respawn above the elevator shaft, the player needs to go even farther out of bounds, outside the limit of the invisible area—the second piece of cardboard—as well. Falling through that second out-of-bounds area makes it easier to get directly under the vault elevator, where the player is then teleported to the loading zone at the top.
“That saves about 40 seconds,” Tomatoangus said to applause from the crowd at the end of his long-winded mini-seminar. “It takes much longer to explain than it does to save time.”
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