The speedrunner Mae set several world records for speedruns in Baldur’s Gate 3. As part of a charity event, she showcased her skills and jumped directly into a hidden area of the developers.
Who is Mae? The YouTuber Mae started her channel about 5 months ago. In her videos, she regularly sets new speedrun records in Baldur’s Gate 3. We have already reported on some of her successes:
- Player finds secret ending in Baldur’s Gate 3, has to sacrifice the most popular character, but at least is quick
- World Record: Speedrunner completes Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4 minutes by putting Shadowheart in a box
- Baldur’s Gate 3: Speedrunner sets new best time in the Steam hit after being punished by the community for it
Currently, Mae holds the official world records for what are known as Any-% and All-Act speedruns.
Any-% speedruns aim to trigger the credits in as short a time as possible. In Baldur’s Gate 3, this can happen, for example, when Companion Gale blows himself up at the end of Act 2. The important thing is that the official or developer-intended ending of the game does not need to be reached. Mae’s record currently stands at about three minutes.
If you insist on having played all acts of Baldur’s Gate 3, you are in the All-Act category. Here, the goal is to reach the developer-programmed ending of Act 3 as quickly as possible. Mae held this record for a long time as well. Her best time is about 30 minutes.
She also attempted the so-called sex speedruns: The character Lae’zel was until a hotfix very easy to convince for intimate moments. This led speedrunners to try to get her into bed as quickly as possible. Mae last achieved this in under two minutes. However, she has not yet officially participated in the race for the bear love record.
What kind of charity event was it? The charity event took place on January 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) in the USA as part of this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick
event. There, Mae streamed several speedruns in front of about 80,000 Twitch viewers and attendees in the hall. She also provided insights and explained her techniques.
You can see Mae’s appearance on YouTube here:
Awesome Games Done Quick has been held annually in January since 2010. During this event, speedrunners from various games and categories come together to showcase their skills in a livestream. During the program, donations are collected. This year they raised $2,539,432, which is intended to benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation.
Warning, Spoilers: Below you will read spoilers for Act 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3.
What about the developer room? Mae reaches the developer room after about 25 minutes of the speedrun. To do this, she puts her dead Tav into the inventory of the Act 3 enemy Orin via an inverted pickpocket when she approaches the player character disguised as a little girl.
It is important that she interrupts the cutscene that Orin usually triggers automatically with a different cutscene, allowing her to approach Orin while still disguised.
Next, Mae commands a mage hand to push Orin. At the same time, she lets her active character, a summoning-skilled Jaheira, use her class feature: Jaheira wants to teleport to the dead Tav. Since this is in Orin’s inventory, it brings the character into the secret developer room.
What is a Tav?
Tav is the default name given to a self-created character in Baldur’s Gate 3. This can be adjusted as desired later. The community generally refers to all self-built characters as Tavs for simplicity.
Developer rooms like this are used by the devs to quickly access items needed for the scene. In this case, there are some notes, books, knives, a chest, and two character versions of Orin himself.
Mae comments briefly on the visit to the room and triggers the next cutscene to skip. In fact, she also visits another developer room to show a second speedrun. In doing so, she addresses another way to bypass the complex beginning of Act 3.
Overall, Mae demonstrated during the stream that she really knows what she’s doing when it comes to speedruns. In the stream, she also explains her techniques, including the notorious shadow boxing. While she and many others try to complete Baldur’s Gate 3 as quickly as possible, others are trying ever more powerful builds: Baldur’s Gate 3: Attack deals 11,700 damage, wipes out the Act 1 boss directly
