Breath of the Wild players do speedruns for baking bread

Beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as fast as possible? Boring – we’ve seen this speedrun before. Nowadays, the Speedy Gonzales in competition BOTW try more obscure and weird races, like the one where you see how fast you can get home and die, or the one where you rush to a wedding. But the hottest speedrun of recent times has to be bread%, a silly category that saw a handful of new submissions for its ranking in mid-January.

The goal is simple: get the ingredients to make a loaf of bread and bake them. As is customary in any type of BOTW speedrun, accomplishing this feat involves slicing up parts of the map, using the whistle mechanism to move faster, and, of course, a shirtless link. The current score is 19: 44: 700, a time held by speedrunner Xeryph. In the video above, you can watch Link Shield surf the frozen plains to muster the powers needed to leave the initial Grand Plateau area. There are a lot of ‘ball bounces’, which Link uses to gain air through Bokoblins, as well as the trick of pulling out weapons while falling to mitigate damage.

From there, Link catapults himself to another part of the map, near the Tabantha border, where he immediately begins to cut the grass. The point is to find wheat, which falls at random – apparently this part of the jokey speedrun can be improved upon, as Xeryph notes in YouTube’s description that RNG wheat is “bad.”

It’s unclear if this category of speedrun will have any long-term legs, but for now I just appreciate that we’re paying more attention to the underrated cooking portions of Breath of the wild. Xeryph also holds the best records for the rake in the lakes category and is the world number one to kill Link quickly.