Xanadu Next/Glitches and Skips
From SDA Knowledge Base
Glitchiness
General Speedthings
When you get the Gauntlet, so long as it is equipped on the item bar, you no longer need a weapon equipped in order to break wooden boxes. This removes the animation times of sheathing and unsheathing weapons and allows you to simply punch your obstacles away.
Both m&k and a gamepad are suggested. Shop screens, tight aiming, and inventory management are better in general with mouse and keyboard, and general movement and combat feels better with the gamepad (imo)
While using a gamepad (I specifically use a PS3 controller via Nefarious Productions scripts), when you enter a screen, your direction resets. Quickly stopping and starting input at the proper time allows you to continue movement uninterrupted.
While a gamepad is in use, there is an autotargeting system that allows you to only briefly pause movement to shoot spells, rather than slow direct aiming with the mouse.
While using a gamepad, pressing left on the D-pad in a shop automagically teleports your cursor to the top left item in the shop field. In the general store's case, this is the purchaseable key, of which you need around 150 to complete the run. This lets you sell bones to reduce price, then pop directly over to spam buy the keys.
When you get a feel for which rooms have locked camera angles and which direction you will be going in the next room, aligning the camera with your movement allows for slightly smoother and faster moving around.
Glitches and Skips
As shown here : Early Needle 3
This corner glitch jump allows you to get the third level of the Needle spell incredibly early. This spell is roughly 270% stronger than the first level needle spell, and thereby allows you to pew pew your way through things quite quickly for a while.
The Black Onyx item is a town portal: When used, it teleports the player to town, and creates a one-use portal back. The key here is that you return to the entrance of the room you used it in. This allows you to bypass several minutes of runaround, specifically in the treasure room of the Xanadu Labyrinth and the mechanical bridge room of Castle Strangerock.
The final boss's first form is supposed to be immune to all damage except from the weapon Dragonslayer and its affiliated skill. You can not only still hit it with the Death spell, but if you line it up properly, the death spell will proc against both the leg you are standing by and the torso. This speeds up the first phase of the battle significantly.