Movement is everything in modern gaming. If you’ve ever spent hours in a sandbox title or an open-world RPG, you know that the "intended" way of getting around is often the most boring way. That's exactly why peak climbing glitch speed has become such a massive talking point in speedrunning communities and casual forums alike. It’s that weird, jittery, slightly broken feeling of scaling a mountain at Mach 10 just because you found a specific angle where the game's physics engine simply gives up.
Honestly, it’s a mess. But a beautiful one.
When developers design a climbing mechanic, they usually want you to feel the weight. They want the stamina bar to matter. They want you to look at a cliff face and plan your route. Then, some kid in a basement discovers that if you spam the jump button while angled at precisely 47 degrees, the game forgets gravity exists. Suddenly, you aren't climbing; you're surfing stone. This is the essence of what players call peak climbing glitch speed—the absolute maximum velocity achievable by exploiting vertical movement bugs.
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How Physics Engines Actually Fail You
Most games use a state machine to determine what your character is doing. Are you "Walking"? Are you "Falling"? Are you "Climbing"? The glitch usually happens in the transition.
Take The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom as the gold standards here. In these games, the "Whistle Sprinting" or "BTB" (Bullet Time Bounce) glitches aren't technically climbing, but they redefined how we view verticality. However, the true peak climbing glitch speed often comes from "clamber" overrides. This is where the game thinks you are starting a climb, resets your downward velocity to zero, but doesn't cap your upward momentum.
If you can trick the game into thinking you are "starting" a climb fifty times per second, that momentum stacks. It compounds.
It gets fast.
Engineers at places like Ubisoft or Bethesda have talked about "clipping" issues for decades. In Skyrim, the infamous "horse climbing" wasn't necessarily a glitch in the code, but a failure of the friction constants. The horse simply had a friction value that exceeded the gravity pull on certain slopes. You weren't glitching the speed; you were just exploiting a math error. Real glitch speed, the kind that gets you banned from competitive leaderboards or lauded on Speedrun.com, involves frame-perfect inputs that break the animation loop.
Why We Chase the Glitch
Is it just about going fast? Not really. It’s about mastery.
There is a specific dopamine hit that comes from breaking a game’s rules. When you achieve peak climbing glitch speed, you are effectively telling the developers that their boundaries are suggestions. You’ve probably seen it in Genshin Impact or even older titles like Quake. In Quake, it was "strafe jumping." In modern titles, it's often "slope swapping."
I remember watching a runner named Narcissa Wright years ago—though she was focused on Ocarina of Time—and the way she manipulated the "Extended Super Slide" was a precursor to how we think about climbing glitches now. It’s all about the displacement of the character model. If the game moves you 1 unit per frame normally, but a glitch moves you 10 units, you’ve just increased your efficiency by 1000%.
Speedrunners call this "Time to Peak."
The goal is to reach the highest point of a map in the shortest duration. If a mountain takes 5 minutes to climb normally, and you do it in 4 seconds using a ledge-clip, you’ve achieved a legendary status in that specific subculture. But it’s finicky. One wrong input and you’re back at the bottom, or worse, clipped inside the mountain geometry, falling into a gray void for eternity.
The Technical Reality of "Ledge Canceling"
Let's get into the weeds for a second. Most of these glitches rely on something called "Velocity Transfer."
- You approach a vertical surface at high horizontal speed.
- You trigger a climbing animation.
- You immediately cancel that animation with a jump or a specific item use.
- The game struggles to convert that horizontal speed into vertical speed.
In many engines, the math looks something like $V_{final} = V_{initial} \times \text{SlopeFactor}$. If the SlopeFactor is bugged or becomes a negative value for a split second, the velocity can skyrocket. This is how you see characters "zip" up a wall. It’s not a smooth climb; it’s a teleportation-adjacent lurch.
Misconceptions About Frame Rates
People think faster hardware means faster glitches. That’s actually a lie.
In many cases, peak climbing glitch speed is tied to frame rate, but not in the way you’d expect. In games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, certain glitches only work if you lower your frame rate to 30 FPS. Why? Because the physics engine checks for collisions every frame. If you have fewer frames, there are more "gaps" in the world where the game isn't checking if you're touching a wall. This allows you to slide through or up surfaces that would normally stop you.
On the flip side, some "super-glides" require 144Hz+ to hit the specific window where an animation overlap occurs. It’s a hardware-software tug of war.
The Most Famous Examples in Recent Memory
You can't talk about this without mentioning Apex Legends. The "Superglide" is the holy grail of movement tech there. It involves a frame-perfect combination of a jump and a crouch at the very end of a mantle (climbing) animation. It flings the player forward at a speed that is significantly higher than a standard sprint. It’s so effective that Respawn Entertainment has had to decide whether to "fix" it or leave it in as a high-skill mechanic.
Then there's the Source engine. Half-Life and Portal are basically made of glitches. "Abh" (Accelerated Back Hopping) is the sibling to climbing glitches. While not strictly climbing, it uses the same logic of tricking the ground friction. If you turn around and jump, the game tries to slow you down by adding negative speed. But because you’re moving backward, it adds that speed to your backward velocity. You go faster. And faster.
In Mirror's Edge, the "kickclip" allowed Faith to gain vertical height by interacting with walls in ways DICE never intended. It’s a rhythmic, almost musical way of playing.
Is This Cheating?
Depends on who you ask.
If you're in a ranked match of a multiplayer game and you're using a peak climbing glitch speed exploit to get to a sniper nest that is supposed to be inaccessible, yeah, you're probably going to get reported. It ruins the balance. Developers call this "Unintended Map Navigation."
But in the world of speedrunning, it’s the entire point.
There’s a clear distinction between "Any%" runs and "Glitchless" runs. If you’re running Any%, the glitch is your best friend. It’s a tool. It requires more practice than the actual game mechanics most of the time. Hitting a frame-perfect climb glitch under the pressure of a live marathon like Games Done Quick is harder than beating any boss in Sekiro.
Actionable Tips for Finding Your Own Movement Tech
If you want to dive into the world of movement exploits, you can't just mash buttons. You have to be systematic.
- Watch the "V-Sync": Often, glitches are tied to your refresh rate. Try capping your FPS at different levels (30, 60, 120) to see if the physics behave differently.
- Look for Seams: Modern games are made of "tiles." Where two mountain textures meet, there is often a tiny gap in the collision box. This is where most climbing glitches start.
- The "Crouch-Jump" Legacy: Almost every game since Half-Life has some variation of the crouch-jump. In many modern engines, crouching mid-air raises your "feet" hitbox, which can trick a climbing trigger into activating earlier than it should.
- Recording is Vital: Use software like OBS or Shadowplay. When you accidentally fly up a wall, go back and look at your inputs. What was your stamina? What frame did you hit jump?
- Join the Discord: Seriously. Every game has a "Decompilation" or "Speedrun" Discord. People there have already done the math. They’ll have spreadsheets on exactly how to hit peak climbing glitch speed.
The reality is that peak climbing glitch speed is a testament to human ingenuity. We take these polished, multi-million dollar digital worlds and we find the cracks. We find the places where the math fails and we use those failures to fly. Whether it's a "zip" in Metroid or a "super-bounce" in Halo, these glitches remind us that games are just complex sets of rules—and rules are meant to be tested.
Next time you’re stuck at the base of a massive cliff in a game, don't just look for the path. Look for the glitch. Look for that one jagged rock that looks just a little bit "off." You might just find yourself at the summit before the music even kicks in.
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To master these techniques, start by practicing "ledge cancels" in a controlled environment. Focus on the exact moment your character's hands touch the geometry. That transition window is the key to unlocking the physics engine. Once you find the rhythm, the speed follows.