Skyrim Speedrunner Reveals Bizarre and Brilliant Method to Reach Level 80 and Kill Infamous Ebony Warrior in Under 10 Minutes

10.05.2024 - 13:59 / ign.com

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a sprawling role-playing game that usually requires hundreds of hours of gameplay before players can reach Level 80 and fight the infamous Ebony Warrior, but one player has condensed all that down to less than 10 minutes.

Speedrunner and YouTuber nucular uploaded his record-breaking Skyrim Ebony Warrior speedrun (which can also be viewed below) where he defeated the foe, which only appears at Level 80, in just nine minutes and 55 seconds. How the heck? Well, it's complicated.

Speaking to IGN, nucular broke down his extensive strategies and reason for doing so, explaining the run was conceptualised by legendary Skyrim speedrunner Waz, who held the previous world record of 14 minutes and 27 seconds.

But the methods used by Waz could be improved upon, nucular said, as they used an outdated version of something called the Restoration Loop, Skyrim's best-known method of gaining a bunch of levels really fast.

The Restoration Loop works by drinking several Fortify Restoration potions in order from weakest to strongest, which multiplies their effectiveness exponentially. Items with a Fortify enchantment then get a serious buff due to Fortify being classed as a Restoration effect.

"By crafting and drinking a Fortify Restoration potion, re-equipping your Fortify Alchemy gear, and repeating, your Alchemy and Restoration effect multipliers will buff each other in a positive feedback loop until you can make extremely powerful potions," nucular explained.

"This will give you an extreme amount of XP; enough to instantly raise your Alchemy from 15 to 100, so you can then reset it to 15, allowing it to be raised again." Myriad items and gold are required to make these potions, of course, but a couple of simple vendor glitches allow these to be acquired easily.

Levelling in Skyrim is based on these skill increases, and once maxed out skills can be reset to gain experience from them again. Level 80 can therefore easily be attained using this method of gaining and resetting levels, but moving through the myriad animations required to do so can slow things down considerably (in the context of speedruns).

It's this element that nucular focused on when he set out to beat Waz's time. "All of the techniques in Waz’s run are essentially standard practice in Skyrim speedruns," he said. "Since the run had no major mistakes, I needed to get creative if I wanted to beat it."

But nucular detected two shortcomings in the strategy. "First, his Fortify Restoration loop could’ve been made faster simply by making more than one potion each time he used the alchemy lab," he said. "It’s not entirely necessary to re-equip the Fortify Alchemy gear every time you craft a potion, and doing so would require duplicating the