Baldur’s Gate 3 has had a pretty active speedrun community, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar enough with its more immersive-sim elements. There’s the vaunted sex% speedrun, the any% speedrun which focuses on making Gale blow up as quickly as possible, and the “any% all acts” speedrun. Spoilers ahead, of course.
So, here’s the deal. If you want the golden die reward for beating an Honour Mode playthrough without dying, you can’t do that “Gale goes boom” strategy, since it finishes the game at Act 2. This means that any Honour Mode speedrun is, by definition, also an all acts speedrun. Them’s the breaks.
The non-Honour Mode version of this run heated up back in November when, powered by raw spite, prolific speedrunner Mae shaved off 12 minutes from the World Record. While their power is not to be underestimated, the current world record holder goes by the name of Chronos. Coincidentally, they’re also the person who’s about to make you feel bad for dying during the intro like three times.
As spotted by TheGamer, Chronos has not only beat Honour Mode in under 40 minutes, but they might be the first person to have beaten it, period.
While Chronos has claimed the title of Honour Run champion, the run itself is gloriously dishonourable. The Ketheric fight in Act 2, for example, is beaten by parking his character’s gnomish butt on a ledge a good few feet away, casting Witch Bolt, and slowly melting the poor sod to death while he stumbles around, unable to stop his slow doom.
This is despite the fact that, as part of Patch 5, a lot of combat exploits were squished for Honour Mode particularly. Clearly not enough.
Things do get a little intense by the end when Chronos arrives at the Netherbrain with 19 squidjins and 19 popdrakes in his inventory. Both of these things deal 3-18 damage a pop—3d6 fire damage, to be precise. Meaning all 38 of them dish out a whopping 114d6 damage That’s anywhere from 114 to 684 points of incendiary hurt, and the Netherbrain has 450 hit points.
This strategy is bold, and that’s putting it lightly. If you don’t kill the Netherbrain with that first blast you’re basically screwed. Hit the lower end of those damage dice, and it’s back to the start for you. Chronos sets their rigged bomb alight, it explodes, and—the brain’s left with two hitpoints. Mercifully, the burning damage ticks over on its next turn and ends it for good.
Claiming victory, Chronos goes ahead and flaunts their fancy new dice. As for whether Chronos is the first to beat Honour Mode, it’s extremely likely. According to their own Reddit thread, Chronos claimed their golden snitch about 8 hours after the update was released. I struggle to think of anyone, even a fellow runner, who would’ve routed and beat the game in that amount of time.
In case you feel scandalised by the fact Chronos dared to use glitches in a speedrun, they’re also working on a glitchless variant that’ll be “probably a few hours long, about 2-3 hours or so, will take a while to route it as I work full time”, though we can expect it in a few weeks.