Bastion/Basic Mechanics

Movement

It is important to set your control style to "Mason-Style" (mouse and keyboard, not using WASD). With mouse controls, rolling while holding down your mouse button causes you to move about 30% faster than in other control styles, because the game adds the speed of walking to your roll travel distance.

The fastest movement method in Bastion is rolling (called Evade in-game, with Space being the default keybind), just because it is much faster than walking. Throughout the entire speedrun you want to roll as much as possible - and since you can't buffer the roll input (if you press roll while in the animation of your previous roll, you won't roll again), the best way to achieve that is chaining your rolls: pressing roll as soon as the animation for the previous one ends. Having a good rhythm to your rolls helps optimize your movement.

A crucial part of a Bastion speedrun is avoiding falls. In Bastion, most of the ground in every level forms up as you approach it. The problem with that is that the levels very often form more slowly than you can move through them, which might cause you to outpace the terrain and fall, wasting about 2.5 seconds. This can be avoided by slowing down your movement by walking instead of rolling. More advanced players will curve their roll paths at points where the ground forms slowly so that they move faster, but take a less direct route - in total, you can move more quickly this way, but you must have good mouse control.

Experience and Levels

Killing enemies, picking up certain items (cores, mementos) or Blue/Black Tonics when you are already full on this type of a Tonic (a Blue Tonic will first heal you if your HP isn't already full) will make you gain experience. Once you fill out the experience bar, the Kid will level up, causing a couple of things to happen: Your HP and both types of Tonics will be restored fully, the Kid will do a short animation of leveling up (causing you to lose control for a while), and an explosion around the Kid will cause enemies nearby to take a lot of damage. This has some uses in All Story Levels runs and is knowledge you need to have to understand the any% experience route.

Fragments

Fragments are the currency in the game to pay for Forge upgrades or recovering missed items in the Lost and Found. You can find them almost everywhere well as receive for completing some challenges. In all major categories they are completely useless since NG+ already has everything it needs in its file and NG doesn't ever buy anything.

Cores, Shards and Game Progression

Cores and Shards are objects you can find in some levels that allow you to unlock building slots in the Bastion, unlock levels and are necessary to complete the game. Whenever you put one of the first six Cores into the Bastion Monument, you will unlock a building slot and every time you store one of the first six Shards, you will be allowed to upgrade one of the existing buildings. One of the most important things to understand about cores is that to complete the game, you don't need to complete the last level of the game - you merely need to store 7 Shards and 7 Cores. After using the Monument for the 14th time, you will trigger a screen transition that will take you to the Heart of the Bastion, letting you select an ending and end the run.

Buildings

You can find some of these buildings in certain levels (most notably in the Wharf District where you are forced to open the Arsenal and the Distillery) as well as build them in the Bastion to be able to access them between levels.

• Arsenal: Allows you to switch out weapons and skills.
• Forge: Grants access to weapon upgrades. NG+ categories have upgrades already completed.
• Lost-and-Found: A store to purchase things you missed in previous levels and bonus skills.
• Memorial: Awards Fragments for Completing Vigils (various challenges)
• Shrine: Allows you to enable Idols (increasing the difficulty of the game)
• Distillery: A place to equip Spirits that provide passive buffs to combat.
• The only buildings used in the main categories are the Arsenal and the Distillery.

Combat Weapons and Skills

There are a number of combat features that, even after a casual playthrough, you may not be aware of. To really improve in Bastion, you need to be able to use all of the facets of combat properly!

Weapons

• The Bullhead Shield: Holding the block button (LSHIFT by default) will block any attacks from a radius in front of the kid. The kid will block in the direction of the mouse cursor, unless an enemy is within targeting range. Then, the kid automatically turns to face the enemy. You can combine this with weapons to aim automatically with both ranged and melee weapons. If a block is timed properly, just before the attack would hit the kid, the attack is reflected, dealing massive damage.
• The Cael Hammer: When fighting with the Cael Hammer, there are two types of attacks: moving and stationary attacks. Moving attacks are faster but while stationary, the hammer does bonus damage. This is used to quickly dispatch enemies in the early stages of the game. When standing, the hammer alternates between overhead and uppercut attacks. Overhands do even more damage.
• The Fang Repeater: The only notable thing about the repeater is that it's damage is random. At the beginning of a NG file, it will either do 3 or 4 damage per shot, randomly. Squirts have 4 health, so the randomness can be the difference between needing a few or many shots to clear out a pack of them.
• The Scrap Musket: The musket is a spread weapon, that does significantly increased damage when you are very close to the enemy. This increase continues all the way until you're practically inside of the enemy.
• The Brusher's Pike: The pike is a long range melee weapon that has automatic targeting - whenever you use the pike, it will correct your aim and attack the narget nearest to your cursor, if applicable.

Secret Skills

• Whirlwind: Whirlwind is one of the hammer's secret skills. It is used to deal damage in early game fights and to clip past a gate in Wharf District
• Trip Mine: Found in Melting Pot, this is a mine that triggers when an enemy gets near it and does a ton of damage.
• Grenade: A throwable explosive that does massive AOE damage. This ability is particularly useful when targeted, as it will take a low arc and quickly blow up a large amount of enemies. A grenade thrown without targeting takes a long time to land and will travel a long, fixed distance.
• Pike Vault: In NG+ Categories, we use one of the pike's secret skills, the pike vault. This ability flies you into the air. When paired with a well timed roll, you can use this ability to cross gaps.

Distillery Spirits

• Werewhiskey: +100% Critical hit chance when below 33% Health. Dangerous to use, but very valuable! Critical in NG ASL levels.
• Cham-Pain: +25% Damage, -1 Chance to Carry on if Defeated. Only available in New Game Plus mode, used to kill some bosses faster and to save time during the Ura Invasion Skip.
• Black Rye: +2 Black Tonic Capacity. Used in NG+ ASL only to grant extra safety in Prosper Bluff and to give extra secret skill charges at the end of Tazal Terminals.

Load screens

At the start of every level and after every screen transition that has a loading screen, the Kid's HP and Tonics will be fully restored. This is only important in certain levels, and most of the time means that there is a rarely reason to use Tonics conservatively or worry about your health too much.

Freeze Frames

Every time you hit an object or an enemy with a melee weapon, the Kid remains frozen for a couple of frames for each object that you hit. This makes it important to avoid hitting anything that you don't need to kill with your melee weapons.

Recovering

Some effects in the game, such as Skybridges and Queen Anne, will knock the Kid up into the air. During this you can press Evade to roll mid-air, which in turn allows you to perform some minor skips and save time.