Post
Dozens of people working together to find the fastest path through a game, because route optimization is a team sport, even if the run itself is solo.
Routing is the process of determining the optimal order of objectives, the best path through areas, and where to use which tricks in a speedrun. While individual runners execute routes solo, the routes themselves are almost always developed collaboratively. Communities share discoveries in Discord servers, spreadsheets, and wikis. Someone finds a new skip, another figures out how to connect it to the existing route, a third tests whether it's consistent enough for real-time runs, and a fourth calculates the time save. The best routes are living documents that evolve constantly as new glitches and optimizations are discovered.
Example
The Breath of the Wild speedrun community maintains a shared routing document that maps every discovered glitch, trick, and path optimization. When a new discovery is made, multiple community members independently test and time different ways to incorporate it into the route, comparing results to find the fastest integration.
Why it matters
Community routing demonstrates that speedrunning is fundamentally collaborative even though runs are individual performances. The collective intelligence of a community will always find optimizations that any single runner would miss, and this collaborative process is what keeps decade-old games producing new records.
Related concepts