Mission records

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Thanks to the Replay feature introduced by the WA Updates, some players are recording their mission attempts to show how some missions can be completed in record times with the use of ingenius methods or mesmerising skill. Below is a table of these "world records". Click the links to download the replays.

If you have a replay in which you completed a mission in a record time or record number of turns, please send it to Deadcode (or a WKB SysOp) with your WormNET nickname so that we can upload it here.

"replays" directory
(contains archived speedruns)
Unassisted speedruns Tool-assisted speedruns
# Mission Medal Record holder Method credit Turns Time Record holder Method credit Turns Time
01 Pumpkin Problems Gold Nonentity Lex, BarmaN, Deadcode, KINOMAN, Nonentity 1 6.20 Deadcode Lex, BarmaN, Deadcode, KINOMAN, Sycotropic 1 2.54
02 Operation Market Garden Gold Mablak (Silver) c0o1, Mablak 3 5.16 Lex Lex 2 0.00
03 All Quiet in the Library Bronze Mablak ChuCha, Mablak 3 15.28 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode, Lex 3 4.60
Gold Deadcode Deadcode 3 15.94
04 Cool as Ice[1] ChuCha Run, Deadcode 1 1.46[2] Deadcode Run, Deadcode 1 1.16[2]
05 Do the Locomotion Gold Alex13 c0o1 2 30.60 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 2 20.80
Deadcode M3ntal, Deadcode, Lex 2 3.48[3]
06 Sand in Your Eye Gold ChuCha (Bronze) c0o1 3 32.72 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 3 9.02
07 Not Mushroom Out There Silver Deadcode Deadcode, Quasi Qubit 1 6.74 Deadcode Deadcode 1 0.54
Gold Deadcode Deadcode 1 3.34
girderless Deadcode Deadcode 1 10.66
08 Big Shot Gold SpideR zippeurfou, SpideR 2 42.06 Deadcode Wyvern 2 21.74
09 Water Surprise Gold Nekton (Bronze) Deadcode, Bloopy, Nekton 3 40.36 Deadcode Deadcode, Bloopy 3 15.44
Deadcode Deadcode 3 12.10[4]
10 Jurassic Worm Gold Lex M3ntal, Lex 1 3.72[5] Deadcode M3ntal, Deadcode 1 2.62
11 Chemical Warfare Silver Mablak Mablak 4 51.58 Deadcode Mablak 4 20.82
Gold Deadcode Lex, Mablak, Deadcode 5 27.80
12 No Substitute Gold Lex c0o1, Lex, Deadcode 2 5.46 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 2 1.24
13 Who Left the Flood-Gates Open Mablak Mablak 4 45.74 Deadcode Mablak, Deadcode 3 3.54
14 Super Sheep to the Rescue! Gold c0o1 (Bronze) Deadcode 1 4.04 Deadcode Deadcode 1 3.18
15 Hot Stuff Silver KINOMAN Lex, Deadcode 1 14.22 Deadcode Deadcode 1 2.68
Gold
16 Trouble on Mount Wormore Gold Mr.Bad (Silver) Deadcode 1 12.02 Deadcode Deadcode, Wyvern 1 7.08
17 Chateau Assassin Bronze Wyvern Wyvern, Lex 2 29.00 Deadcode Deadcode, Lex 1 14.02
Gold Deadcode Deadcode 3 13.52
18 Rescue Agent Dennis Silver Mr.Bad Sprek, Djoszee, Lex, Wyvern 3 6.20
Gold Mablak Mablak 3 25.56 Deadcode Mablak, Deadcode 2 1.40
19 Horny Nuke Bronze Wyvern Sprek, Lex, Wyvern 5 41.30
Gold Deadcode Sprek, Lex, Deadcode 4 9.38
20 Rumble in the Farmyard (WA ≤3.6.29.0)[6] Mr.Bad c0o1, Face 4 20.84 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 4 8.34
Rumble in the Farmyard (WA ≥3.6.30.0) Mablak c0o1, Mablak 4 38.78 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 4 10.84
21 Wooden Ambush Bronze Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 2 11.30
Gold Mablak c0o1, Mablak 3 16.44 Deadcode c0o1, Mablak 3 6.98
22 Go Bananas Gold Lex Deadcode 2 6.94 Deadcode Deadcode 2 5.30
Deadcode Deadcode, Lex 2 2.32[7]
23 The Drop Zone Bronze Mablak Mablak 2 10.54 Deadcode Mablak 2 + 1 CPU 3.32
Deadcode Lex 2 + 2 CPU 3.10
Gold Deadcode Mablak & Syc, Deadcode 3 28.16
24 Countdown to Armageddon Gold KINOMAN (Bronze) c0o1, Lex, Mr.Bad, KINOMAN 3 + 12 CPU 1.26 Deadcode Lex, Deadcode 2 + 13 CPU 3.20
Mablak Mablak 4 + 3 CPU 29.00 Deadcode Mablak, Deadcode 4 + 3 CPU 4.48
Deadcode Lex 4 + 4 CPU[8] 0.00
25 Mars Star Gold KINOMAN (Bronze) M3ntal, Deadcode, SpideR 1 3.54 Deadcode M3ntal, Deadcode, SpideR 1 3.04
Deadcode Deadcode, Lex 1 1.94[9]
26 Mad Cows Gold Wyvern (Bronze) Lex, Wyvern 3 7.00 Deadcode Deadcode, Lex 3 0.00
Mad Cows (with bug)[10] c0o1 c0o1 2 28.68
27 Bazooka on the Rocks Gold Mr.Bad Deadcode, Lex 2 0.00 Lex Deadcode, Lex 2 0.00
28 Stolen Goods Gold Mr.Bad (Bronze) c0o1 2 12.88 Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode, Lex 2 6.26
Deadcode Deadcode, Lex 2 2.56[11]
29 Sinking Icecap Gold Mablak Mablak 2 + 1 CPU 22.88 Deadcode Mablak 2 + 1 CPU 11.32
Mablak c0o1, Mablak 2 + 2 CPU 13.06 Deadcode and Lex c0o1, Deadcode, Lex 2 + 2 CPU 6.78
30 Aim Long, Aim True Silver c0o1 c0o1 4 12.04
Gold Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 3 0.08
31 Goody Two-Shoes Gold Lex Lex, Deadcode 3 15.70 Deadcode Deadcode 3 7.48
32 Trouble in the Toy Store Silver Mablak Face, Mablak 3 81.16
Gold Sprek (Silver) Sprek 4 61.32 Deadcode Deadcode 3 2.36
33 Spectral Recovery Gold Mablak Mablak 6 [12] 73.80 Deadcode Mablak, Deadcode 5 [12] 26.06

Notes

  1. Note that in v3.6.30.0, a change was made that inadvertently affected this mission:

    • There was an extra 1.26 second delay between turns during Sudden Death with water rising disabled. This is because it took one second to raise the water by zero pixels, and a quarter of a second to linger while the camera savoured the moment.

    Missions #4 and #20 start in Sudden Death without water rise. Starting 1.26 s sooner changes the first turn's wind, as the current game time affects the PRNG. In WA ≤3.6.29.0, the first turn wind on Mission #4 was 0.5 blue, but in ≥3.6.30.0 it is 2.5 red. Blue (leftward) wind increases the chances of the crate boom fire drowning the enemy worm.

  2. 2.0 2.1 In both replays, a parachute is deployed to skip the landing animation, enabling the uzi to be fired 0.36 seconds earlier. The unassisted record beats Deadcode's old tool-assisted record, which had a time of 1.56 seconds.
  3. The second tool-assisted replay is thought to be humanly impossible, because it requires a girder to be placed instantly to avoid losing momentum on the bungee.
  4. The second replay involves a carefully-timed backflip through a mine's trigger-area (which the mine checks every 0.2 seconds), a task impossible for a human to judge. However, it is possible on luck alone. Also, avoiding this mine without passing through the trigger-area hasn't been ruled out beyond doubt yet.
  5. Interesting note: The current unassisted record is faster than Deadcode's first tool-assisted record of 4.22 seconds.
  6. In v3.6.30.0, two changes were made that inadvertently changed this mission:

    • The CPU AI would sometimes walk through an area, jump back and walk through the same area again.

    With this fix, the third turn of c0o1's 4-turn method no longer works.

    • There was an extra 1.26 second delay between turns during Sudden Death with water rising disabled. This is because it took one second to raise the water by zero pixels, and a quarter of a second to linger while the camera savoured the moment.

    Missions #4 and #20 start in Sudden Death without water rise. Starting 1.26 s sooner changes the first turn's wind, as the current game time affects the PRNG. In WA ≤3.6.29.0, the first turn wind on Mission #20 was 2 red, but in ≥3.6.30.0 it is 2 blue. With the former, a straight-horizontal maximum power Bazooka shot from the first worm's exact initial position was able to inflict 47 hp of mine damage on the enemy's third worm. With the latter, there does not appear to be any Bazooka shot at any power from the first worm's exact initial position that can get the mine to do that, although many shots can get the mine to do 44 hp damage.

  7. The second tool-assisted replay is thought to be humanly impossible.
  8. This beats Lex's previous tool-assisted replay, which had a turn time of 0.04 s. The round time of this new replay is longer than that of the older replay, but that is only due to a game logic change in newer versions; compensating for it, the new round time would actually be shorter than the old one.
  9. The second tool-assisted replay is thought to be humanly impossible. Note that in the first tool-assisted replay, the player's worm survives, whereas in the current unassisted replay it does not.
  10. This record exploits a bug whereby one of the CPU worms is placed randomly.
  11. The second tool-assisted replay is thought to be humanly impossible.
  12. 12.0 12.1 Although the mission is not complete until the crate is collected, turns that are instantaneously skipped while waiting for the crate to land have been discounted. The record replay and the TA replay are therefore considered 6- and 5-turn solutions respectively.

Understanding this table

Method credit

Getting a record is not simply a case of speed and reflexes. Missions can be completed in a large variety of ways, some faster than others, and some less obvious than others. As well as those that achieve records through their skill, so should players who have developed a new method (or part of it) deserve credit for their ideas.

Medal

When a mission attempt fails, the Attempts counter is incremented. The medal awarded for a successful mission depends on the value of the Attempts counter when the mission was started: 0 = Gold; 1-3 = Silver; 4 and higher = Bronze. A successful attempt resets the Attempts counter to 0 (so after any failed attempt, two successful attempts in a row are required to get Gold).

Most missions give some bonus crates at higher Attempts counts, to make those attempts easier. In most cases, the threshold is 1 or 4 Attempts; this makes it straightforward to categorize the bonuses under those medal names. Because the nature of the mission can be altered significantly by the presence of bonus crates, the mission records listing is now categorized by medal, allowing the variants of each mission to be speedrun separately.

When the Medal column is marked "—" it means that mission doesn't have any bonuses. (And in the case of Mission 33, the "bonuses" are just Morse code messages, not crates.)

In some cases the bonus crates (or text messages) conditional on a certain minimum Attempts counter only would have appeared at a turn later that what is contained in the replay file. In these cases, the Medal column contains the effective medal at which the mission was completed, considering the run as self-contained. The actual Attempts counter that constructed the mission script stored in the replay file is not necessarily what is shown in the Medal column. For example, Mission 26: Mad Cows, the bonuses only appear on turn #5 (the player's third turn) and turn #11 (the player's sixth turn). So even though the Attempts counter for c0o1's 2-turn "with bug" replay had a value of at least 5 (Bronze), turn #5 is never reached, and the replay is considered to have been played at Gold.

The ability to adjust a mission's Attempts counter manually after achieving Gold in that mission was only added in WA v3.6.29.0, released 2008-07-28. Many of the mission records are from before that, when there was no easy way to do multiple attempts at the same medal tier level in a row for any tier other than Bronze. So in the case that a mission was played as if it were a higher-tier version, but was actually played at a lower tier, the actual medal tier is placed in parentheses next to the speedrunner's name / replay link. This is because the bonus crates (and even Morse code messages) still have an effect on the game logic, even if they're not collected or used (and in some cases they're blown up, causing even more of an effect).

Turns and Time

The time counted for these speedruns is the human team's total turn time, not including retreat time. The time taken for enemy worms to take their turn, crates to land, health to be deducted, etc, is not counted. An easy way to find this time in a replay of your own is to export a log of your replay by right-clicking it and choosing "Export Log", open the resulting log file (which will be in the same folder with the same file name as a "*.log" file) and check the time displayed after the first instance of "Turn:", which is near the end of the file.

The number of turns used is always considered first when determining the best run of a mission. This is to prevent players from using an indefinite number of 0-second turns to win missions.

Tool-assisted speedruns

These tool-assisted speedruns are similar in nature to tool-assisted speedruns for console games, such as the ones hosted at TASVideos, which archives complete speedruns of various classic console games. However, special tools were developed by Deadcode specifically for Worms Armageddon, because there is no emulation system which runs WA with tools already built in. The tools are still in development, and are not nearly as powerful as they could be yet.

These tool-assisted speedruns are played frame-by-frame, with trajectory mapping, power-angle-scanning, multiple undos (similar to the use of "savestates" in console tool-assisted speedruns) and useful indicators, allowing the player to perform actions and make shots precisely without reliance on reaction speed. These tools will not necessarily tell the player what the quickest way to complete the mission is, but they will allow the player to try out different ideas without having to rely on fast reflexes. There is often room for improvement, so no particular tool-assisted replay should be considered the fastest that is theoretically possible. Sometimes, when a new glitch is found in the game, it can be exploited to improve the time in a tool-assisted speedrun. Tool-assisted players often make use of luck manipulation, which involves a deep understanding of the game's pseudo-random number generator. This luck manipulation can affect many game elements, including the wind on subsequent turns, the trajectories of a clustered explosive, and the falling patterns of flame bits.

Tool-assisted speedruns can sometimes be regarded as goal times for unassisted players to strive for in their attempts.

Further reading about the details of the TAS build can be read on the TASVideos forum, in the Worms Armageddon discussion thread started by Lex.

Highlighted

Highlighted table elements indicate the most recent updates. For a list of pre-2009 updates, view this page's source code.

"All Missions" unassisted speedrunning

There is a page on speedrun.com dedicated to leaderboards for unassisted Worms Armageddon speedrunning categories, including the "All Missions" category. To qualify for placement in that category, players must follow the posted rules visible when clicking "View Rules" on that page.

For strategies and tricks used to improve such unassisted speedruns, see Mission speed strategies (Worms Armageddon) and/or the Missions Speed Run forum on TUS.

Round Time

In the table above, the runs are optimized for least number of player turns and shortest total player turn time (where number of CPU turns and round time can be tiebreakers). In this table, the runs are optimized for shortest round time, like most speedruns of other games. This number is the timestamp shown before the message "••• Game Ends - Round Finished" in WA's Export Log output. Number of turns and total player turn time are tiebreakers.

"replays" directory
(contains archived speedruns)
Unassisted speedruns Tool-assisted speedruns
# Mission Medal Record holder Method credit Time Record holder Method credit Time
01 Pumpkin Problems Gold KINOMAN Lex, BarmaN, KINOMAN 0:12.54 Deadcode Lex, BarmaN, Sycotropic, Deadcode 0:11.10
02 Operation Market Garden Gold
03 All Quiet in the Library Bronze Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode, Lex 2:02.38
Gold
04 Cool as Ice (WA ≤3.6.29.0)[1] Deadcode Run, Deadcode 0:19.28 Deadcode Run, Deadcode 0:18.26
Cool as Ice (WA ≥3.6.30.0) Deadcode Run, Deadcode 0:18.22 Deadcode Run, Deadcode 0:17.42
05 Do the Locomotion Gold Deadcode M3ntal, Deadcode, Lex 0:42.22
06 Sand in Your Eye Gold
07 Not Mushroom Out There Silver
Gold
girderless
08 Big Shot Gold
09 Water Surprise Gold Deadcode Deadcode 0:53.04
10 Jurassic Worm Gold
11 Chemical Warfare Silver
Gold
12 No Substitute Gold Deadcode c0o1, Deadcode 1:11.78
13 Who Left the Flood-Gates Open Deadcode Mablak, Deadcode 1:43.84
14 Super Sheep to the Rescue! Gold
15 Hot Stuff Silver
Gold
16 Trouble on Mount Wormore Gold
17 Chateau Assassin Bronze
Gold
18 Rescue Agent Dennis Silver
Gold
19 Horny Nuke Bronze
Gold
20 Rumble in the Farmyard (WA ≤3.6.29.0)[2]
Rumble in the Farmyard (WA ≥3.6.30.0) Mablak c0o1, Mablak 2:24.14 Deadcode c0o1, Mablak, Deadcode 2:00.98
21 Wooden Ambush Bronze
Gold Deadcode c0o1, Mablak, Deadcode 1:18.84
22 Go Bananas Gold
23 The Drop Zone Bronze
Gold
24 Countdown to Armageddon Gold
25 Mars Star Gold Deadcode Deadcode 0:19.68
26 Mad Cows Gold
27 Bazooka on the Rocks Gold
28 Stolen Goods Gold
29 Sinking Icecap Gold
30 Aim Long, Aim True Silver
Gold
31 Goody Two-Shoes Gold Deadcode Deadcode 1:24.34
32 Trouble in the Toy Store Silver
Gold
33 Spectral Recovery Gold

Notes

  1. In v3.6.30.0, a change was made that inadvertently affected this mission:

    • There was an extra 1.26 second delay between turns during Sudden Death with water rising disabled. This is because it took one second to raise the water by zero pixels, and a quarter of a second to linger while the camera savoured the moment.

    Missions #4 and #20 start in Sudden Death without water rise. Starting 1.26 s sooner changes the first turn's wind, as the current game time affects the PRNG. In WA ≤3.6.29.0, the first turn wind on Mission #4 was 0.5 blue, but in ≥3.6.30.0 it is 2.5 red. Blue (leftward) wind increases the chances of the crate boom fire drowning the enemy worm, and of the worm drowning sooner. And all else being equal, the round time of a ≤3.6.29.0 replay will be 1.26 s longer than that of a ≥3.6.30.0 replay, due to the first turn starting 1.26 s later.

  2. In v3.6.30.0, two changes were made that inadvertently changed this mission:

    • The CPU AI would sometimes walk through an area, jump back and walk through the same area again.

    With this fix, the third turn of c0o1's 4-turn method no longer works.

    • There was an extra 1.26 second delay between turns during Sudden Death with water rising disabled. This is because it took one second to raise the water by zero pixels, and a quarter of a second to linger while the camera savoured the moment.

    Missions #4 and #20 start in Sudden Death without water rise. Starting 1.26 s sooner changes the first turn's wind, as the current game time affects the PRNG. In WA ≤3.6.29.0, the first turn wind on Mission #20 was 2 red, but in ≥3.6.30.0 it is 2 blue. With the former, a straight-horizontal maximum power Bazooka shot from the first worm's exact initial position was able to inflict 47 hp of mine damage on the enemy's third worm. With the latter, there does not appear to be any Bazooka shot at any power from the first worm's exact initial position that can get the mine to do that, although many shots can get the mine to do 44 hp damage.

Credits

This page was originally maintained by Run as a page on his website (earliest known snapshot from 2006 on the Internet Archive), and was moved to the Worms Knowledge Base in May 2009.

We would like to thank:

Run for creating and maintaining this page all these years
Deadcode for introducing the replay feature
Lex and CyberShadow for helping Run with this page
M3ntal for starting the whole thing off with his Jurassic Worm replay
And everyone and anyone who's participated!

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