New to Amnesia: The Dark Descent speedrunning? This guide will cover all there is to know about the basics of the speedrun, how to submit your runs, and where you can find more help if you need it.
Introduction
Welcome to the world of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (TDD) speedrunning! Whether you're a veteran or brand new speedrunner, it can be difficult to find good up-to-date information and guides on how to approach speedruns of this game. This guide aims to make you self-sufficient when it comes to how to learn glitches and techniques, and where to look. It's recommended to join the discussion in #the-dark-descent over at the HPL Games Speedrunning Discord server to get well acquainted with the community.
The basics
Movement is pretty straight forward in The Dark Descent - you can move horizontally, vertically or a combination of the two. There are also actions such as jump, crouch, lean and interact. The most notable action Daniel can do is jump. It may seem innocent at first, but Daniel's jump is the most broken mechanic in the whole game as it allows you to gain ludicrous amount of height. More on that, as well as action rebinding, later in the guide.
Starting out
Before you even open the game there are some very important settings to adjust. You can open the configuration files with any text editor program (like Notepad), and search for entries with CTRL+F.
First and foremost it's very important to note that you are not allowed to modify any gameplay assets, such as textures, music files, entities, maps, fonts or any other game files. Speedruns are performed on the vanilla, non-modded game. You may have custom stories installed as long as they're not used. Let's start off by covering the game-specific settings before we move on to keyboard configuration and user settings. Remember, the game must be closed before applying any of these changes.
Game settings
| Game | File Location |
|---|---|
| TDD | InstallFolder\Amnesia The Dark Descent\config\game.cfg |
MaxAutoSaves = "200"
The maximum amount of autosaves the game stores before overwriting older ones is 20. It's recommended to increase this value to at least 200. This is so one can easily go back and practice segments after a full run.
FOV = "70"
If you're playing the game in a 4:3 aspect ratio, it's recommended to increase the FOV value (default = 70). If playing in 16:9, modifying the FOV is not necessary.