Minecraft speedrun route: the Any% splits explained

The Minecraft speedrun route for Any% (beat the game by any means) runs the same legs every time: a quick Overworld start, a portal made from lava and water, a Nether fortress for blaze rods, ender pearls, eyes of ender to find the stronghold, then the dragon ^[1]. The order is fixed; what changes is how fast each leg goes in your world. Below are the splits, what each one needs, and the honest numbers from Nixi, an AI that plays the same route on her own, far more slowly.

What “Any%” means on the leaderboard

On speedrun.com, the main Java Edition category is Any% Glitchless, with random seed and set seed as subcategories and separate boards by version range: pre-1.8, 1.8, 1.9–1.12, 1.13–1.15, 1.16–1.19 and 1.20+ ^[2]. Peaceful runs have their own categories ^[3]. The board ranks by in-game time by default ^[3], and the run ends when you enter the portal out of the End after the dragon dies ^[2].

For scale: the fastest random-seed glitchless run on the 1.16–1.19 board, as of today, is 6:39.813 in-game, by skycrab1 on 27 July 2026, played on 1.16.1 ^{[4, 5]}. Random seed means every world is new, so a route is a plan of milestones, not memorised coordinates ^[1].

The route, split by split

Most runners and split timers mark the same milestones. The details below are from the wiki’s speedrun tutorial unless another source is named.

1 · Overworld

Get about four logs, make a wooden pickaxe, then cobblestone for stone tools ^[1]. Villages help: hay bales craft into wheat for bread. The goal here is a bucket and a way to light a portal, not a base.

2 · Enter the Nether

Runners don’t mine obsidian, which drops only for a diamond pickaxe or better ^[6]. Flowing water turns a lava source into obsidian ^[6], so they cast the frame in place, block by block ^[1]. A Java portal frame is at least 4 wide and 5 tall, and the corners are optional ^[7]. That frame has 14 edge blocks, so leaving out the 4 corners needs 10 obsidian. Light it with flint and steel or a fire charge; fire spreading from nearby flammable blocks works too ^[7].

Every block you walk in the Nether counts as eight in the Overworld ^[8]. That ratio is why the Nether legs set your pace: a long Nether walk is a very long Overworld walk.

3 · Fortress and blaze rods

On Java, runners locate the fortress with the debug pie chart, then find a blaze spawner ^[1]. A blaze drops a rod half the time, at most one without Looting, and only when a player or a tamed wolf kills it ^[9]. The tutorial suggests leaving with 8 rods ^[1]; each rod crafts into 2 blaze powder ^[10], and each eye of ender takes one powder ^[11]. Our guides to this leg: how to find a Nether fortress fast and how to get blaze rods safely.

4 · Ender pearls

Pearls come from killing endermen, which are common in warped forests, or from bartering gold with piglins. Golden armour stops piglins attacking you, but brutes ignore it ^[1]. The odds and the best places are in how to get ender pearls fast.

5 · Eyes and the stronghold

An eye of ender is one blaze powder plus one ender pearl ^[11]. A thrown eye has a 20% chance to break ^[11]. To find the stronghold, runners throw one eye, walk sideways (the tutorial says 17.5 blocks), throw again and cross the two lines ^[1]. The full method is in how to find a stronghold.

The End portal has 12 frames, and each frame already holds an eye 10% of the time ^[11]. So you need at most 12 eyes, and the tutorial treats 12 as the usual target ^[1].

6 · The End

Bring food, a water bucket, blocks to climb, something to break the crystals with and a weapon ^[1]. Beds explode in the End, and four of them can kill the dragon even with the crystals still up ^[1]. Our Ender Dragon guide covers beds, crystals and arrows on Java 1.21.

Strategies change the middle of the route

The legs stay the same, but which order and which source of pearls changes by version. The wiki lists several named strategies [@mcwiki-tutorial-speedrun]:

• Bartering (1.16.1): pearls from piglins, which trade them more often in that version. The top three runs on the 1.16–1.19 random-seed board are all on 1.16.1 ^[5].
• Hypermodern (1.16+): a different Nether plan; the tutorial lists at least 16 pearls, 21 obsidian, 48 string and Fire Resistance for the blazes.
• Older routes: villager trading for eyes (pre-1.9), TNT and beds (1.14.4), and an Insomniac route on 1.15.

If you play a current version such as 1.21, your runs go on the 1.20+ board ^[2]. The current bartering odds are in the pearl guide.

Nixi’s route: 16 phases

Nixi is an openly AI VTuber whose bot plays Java 1.21.4 survival on her own, on Easy with keepInventory on, live on Twitch. Her route is the same route, cut finer. Her planner has 16 phases, each with what it must hold before it moves on:

1. wood — a crafting table and a wooden pickaxe
2. stone — a stone pickaxe and a furnace
3. food — 8 food
4. home — a bed
5. iron — an iron pickaxe
6. smith — 2 buckets, flint and steel, an iron sword, a shield and full iron armour
7. diamonds — a diamond pickaxe
8. portal — a water bucket and 10 obsidian
9. bow — a bow and 32 arrows
10. nether — into the Nether
11. fortress — golden boots and 6 blaze rods
12. pearls — 12 ender pearls
13. eyes — 12 eyes of ender
14. stronghold — the portal room found and filled
15. end — into the End
16. dragon — the dragon dead

Where a runner skips things, she doesn’t. Her portal phase mines ten obsidian instead of casting a frame, so she needs a diamond pickaxe first ^[6]. A bow and a bed are phases of their own too: her route notes say blazes and end crystals are out of sword reach, and a bed means a death wakes her up at home. Six rods make the twelve powder for twelve eyes, with no spares, so a broken eye means more pearls.

Run 1’s splits

Run 1 started on 27 September 2026 at 16:16:15 CEST. These are the server’s clock times from the first join, so they include restarts and stops; they are wall-clock time, not in-game time, and can’t be compared with the leaderboard.

The dragon died on 3 October at 23:12, after 179 deaths. One honest asterisk: the stone pickaxe on day 1 was crafted by hand while debugging, which her logs record.

The gap to a human run isn’t reflexes; it’s the middle of the route. The fortress took almost 18 hours after the Nether, the first rod nearly 15 hours more, and all six about 73 hours after the fortress. Fighting next to the spawner kept killing her, so her rules changed to a walled bunker a short way off.

Run 2: fast, then stuck

Run 2 started on 3 October at 23:27:38 in a fresh world. Her run card shows the Nether at 3:28:05, the fortress at 9:47:38 and the first rod at 9:53:00. Her logs show all six rods 12.9 hours in and the twelfth pearl 44.1 hours in, both far ahead of run 1.

Then the rods went. At 21:31 on 4 October, her fishing skill used a bundle she was holding, and the six rods ended up in a pond. The second rod hunt ran 37 hours for none, from a bunker spot where she almost never saw a blaze. Run 2 was stopped on 9 October at 23:21 in the fortress phase, 11 of 16 phases done; its run card showed 78 deaths that afternoon.

The lesson for a route: a split you’ve made can be lost. A speedrunner resets; an AI on a 24/7 stream has to notice what went missing and go back for it.

FAQ

What is the fastest Minecraft speedrun?

On speedrun.com’s Java Any% Glitchless board, random seed, versions 1.16–1.19, the top run as of 18 October 2026 is 6:39.813 in-game, by skycrab1 on 1.16.1, dated 27 July 2026 ^[4]. Other categories and versions have their own records ^[2].

How many blaze rods and ender pearls do you need?

You need up to 12 eyes of ender for the End portal, and each eye is one pearl plus one blaze powder ^[11]. A rod gives two powder ^[10], so 6 rods and 12 pearls cover 12 eyes. Eyes can break when thrown ^[11], so runners bring spares; the wiki suggests 8 rods ^[1].

When does the timer stop in a Minecraft speedrun?

For speedrun.com’s Any% Glitchless, the time ends when you enter the portal to leave the End after the dragon dies, and the board ranks by in-game time by default ^[2].

Do you need diamonds for a speedrun?

No step of the speedrun tutorial’s route requires them: the portal is made from lava and water, and stone or iron tools are enough ^[1]. Nixi’s route mines diamonds anyway, because it mines its obsidian, which needs a diamond pickaxe ^[6]. How long each pickaxe lasts is in how many blocks each pickaxe mines.

Can an AI speedrun Minecraft?

AI agents have killed the dragon: one, running Claude Opus 5 through the Mine AI MCP server, played a fresh 1.21.4 world through to it in one session ^[12]. Nixi’s runs are measured in days, not minutes, and bot runs aren’t leaderboard runs. How her bot decides each move is in AI playing Minecraft on its own.