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Hi, I'm Kierania. I'm a TNT runner with over 10,000 wins, and this guide was made by me with some help and input from some of the best players in the game. This includes players like Domo, Shiny, Cool, and Diablo. So, I'd like to give a shout out and thank you to them for their help in this video.
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First off, I'd like to clarify what this video is about. In this video, I'll be explaining, to the best of my ability, what the main skills of TNT Run are. And when I explain each of them, I'll try to explain how you can use an understanding of these skills to understand and improve TNT Run on yourself as you go along your TNT Run journey. Keep in mind, I'm describing these and how they apply to 1v1s and not pro player parties.
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With that being said, I'd like to establish the first important concept when looking at 1v1s: the three stages of the game. They're called the early game, the mid game, and the late game. You might have heard these terms thrown around before, but what do they actually mean? The start of the early game is obvious when the game starts, of course. But when does it end? In my opinion, the definition I'm going to go for in this video is the early game ends and the mid game begins as soon as the optimal decision for a player is to use a double jump to move to a different section of blocks. This does mean, yes, that on Green Belt, the mid game can start 15 minutes into the map, or on Templar, 10 seconds into the map. The Kierania method I use, this is the definition of the beginning of the mid game, as when the mid game besides begins, decision-making becomes a relevant skill, and this can't happen until you have to make a decision: do I double jump up a layer or to a different location? The line between the mid game and late game, to me, is a bit more blue. But in my opinion, the late game roughly begins when the optimal decision is to go to a location with less than 10 blocks. The late game can be very crucial because it requires players to make decisions considering a lot of options very fast. It can often lead to players making much more mistakes as matches reach their intense finale.
Now, it's time to talk about the five skills themselves. The five skills of TNT Run are parkour, cutting, B2B, decision-making, and pathfinding.
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Parkour in TNT Run can be defined as the ability to run around in TNT Run without falling. So, every time you fall in TNT Run accidentally, whether it be a two-block jump or a hyper-jump double neo, that is a parkour error that has resulted in your weakness in your parkour ability. However, the two situations I just described are very different in terms of difficulty and frequency. In a TNT Run match, you have a hundred two-block jumps, but you may only come across a hyper-jump neo every twenty matches. This is why I like to subdivide the skill of parkour into two different sub-skills: parkour consistency and parkour mastery. In my opinion, parkour consistency is the most important thing to focus on for beginners and intermediate players, as the amount of double jumps wasted by mistakes on simple parkour is a difference-maker in many, many games. At the skill level, parkour consistency is trained by raw experience, usually, and has a higher correlation with win count than most other skills. In this video, players who, in my opinion, demonstrate parkour consistency include all players like Mr. Naropian or Chipmunk, for example, as well as, of course, all the top players in the game today who have essentially mastered this skill. Parkour mastery, on the other hand, is a much more niche sub-skill that isn't applicable in most games. It is your ability to tackle the hardest jumps in TNT Run and make them at a higher percentage. Some maps test this more than others, for example, Down Voltanios and Hyper-Jump's double neos. This is a skill that isn't easy to practice in TNT Run itself, but just like those are common in parkours that can be played, for example, in Hypixel's housing. Many TNT Run players have or know people who have housings that test these kinds of jumps. So, if you want to work on this, just ask around. Examples of players who demonstrate this skill very well are Shiny and Strong.
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Cutting can be defined as the ability to purposefully run over blocks with the intention of stopping another player from stepping on them, either to make them fall or force them to take a different path. This is a good description of cutting offense. But kind of defense, which is your ability to knock out qualified other players, is just as important, if not more important, than cutting offense. You could say cutting defense is part of cutting skills, or you could say they're fighting for parkour consistency skills, but this is an arbitrary line. Players who, in my opinion, demonstrate excellent cutting defense are Them and Diablo127. Whereas players who demonstrate great cutting offense are called Surviving, Publishing, Either. And here are some cutting strategies and terms that you should be familiar with: Hawkeye. The Hawkeye is an infamous cutting strategy where a player who is a layer higher than their opponent drops down in front of the opponent, usually on the block they're about to step on, in order to make them fall. Players who are good at this can scare the players below them to the point where they are too scared to be to be their blocks effectively. These are often done in the early game. The Cutback. This is a term I thought of for this video. It is when your opponent cuts you off, so you double jump past them and cut them back, which is possible due to double jumps moving you faster than a normal player. A particular place where cutbacks are effective can be in situations on the second last layer of Pacific Land. Control. Land control is the concept of controlling how much land you have relative to your opponent by cutting off parts, connecting different parts of the map. Cuts that are done in locations far away from your opponent are considered land control cuts. Land control requires players to be acutely aware of the situation and both their own and their opponent's position on the map, which makes it important in matches with top players. Some maps are more land control focused than others, for example, Nozzle and Relic. Cutting Door. A cutting door is when two players are close to each other and are both playing with the attempt to cut each other off and not for themselves, with both players fighting to get an advantage in some form. With all these different techniques and strategies, it can be hard to know where they begin. Practicing this skill. One tip I would add for intermediate players is to play in F5 and practice being able to play normally like this. So when you're in a cutting door, you can toggle it, and it allows you to see all the blocks around you, and for your vision to not be blocked by other players. You can use this information to move backwards or to the side, which other players rarely expect. Also, try to watch footage of great cutters to see the situations in which they're able to find cuts. And of course, like everything, practice.
Oh, B2B is probably the most controversial skill on this list because in the past, B2B was viewed as unfunded, toxic. But the community has grown to realize it should be valued as a competitive skill. B2B is short for block-to-block, and can be defined as the ability to jump from block to block as slowly as possible. In my opinion, there are two sub-skills of B2B: B2B speed and B2B consistency. B2B speed is the sub-skill of being able to B2B at a very slow pace, and it's much easier the higher ping you have, as blocks take longer to disappear. B2B consistency is a sub-skill of being able to B2B without falling. Being able to B2B at slow speeds is irrelevant if you have B2B consistency, and being able to B2B consistently isn't effective if you do it at very fast speeds. Players who are great at B2B include Shawn, Them, and LifeWW. It's pretty easy to understand how B2B works and to improve at it. In my opinion, it just takes lots of practice to try and be aware of the order your fingers press the buttons on your keyboard, whether you press spacebar before, after, or W, or at the same time, and what works best for you. This differs between players. And as a method of practice, as you are beginning to learn to B2B, you should do it on empty layers or pieces of land with no threats of players killing you. An easy way to set this up is by playing matches on big maps and B2B on the high layers and try to do it as slowly as you can without falling. This is good as it lowers the stakes and consequences if you make a mistake. But as you improve, you should start applying it to 1v1s and pro player parties so you can also improve your ability to react to players coming to your blocks and how to apply this to actual scenarios.
The final two skills I'm going to talk about are decision-making and pathfinding. Whereas parkour, cutting, and B2B are considered mechanical skills that are determined by how well you can interpret information and control your fingers, I consider decision-making and pathfinding mental or theoretical concepts. Decision-making is used to describe the decisions you make with double jumps and positioning yourself on the maps, whereas pathfinding describes the specific blocks you choose to jump on and the order you choose to clear them. Decision-making is decisions on the macro scale, whereas pathfinding concerns decisions you make on the micro scale. As I said before, decision-making can be defined as the skill of making the best decisions with double jumps and positioning yourself on the map. The classic questions of decision-making are: Do I go up? Or do I go down? Do I stay on this side or cross to my opponent? Great decision-makers are very aware of their own and their opponent's position on the map, and they're constantly re-evaluating which decisions are better in the long term and where they should go when they're done with their blocks. Each map has different trends and with what decisions you should be considering, and in those two games, are decisions you need to make exactly the same because blocks are always left in random different patterns. Like everything else on this list, decision-making is improved by focused practice. You can also gain an understanding of it by watching high-level games. It is also important to note that it is bad to always make the same decision. You should be evaluating the players and the blocks rather than just remembering something like, "Go up from second last of Mars," for example.
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Pathfinding can be defined as a skill to best decide the path of blocks to take. As a beginner, when your parkour consistency is bad, pathfinding isn't very important because to survive longer, it's better to focus on not falling by picking the easiest block to jump to. But this can often lead to dead ends and have you waste double jumps. The players at intermediate and higher levels, once you have mastered all the simple jumps in TNT Run, becomes an important skill to step on blocks in the most efficient order as to minimize double jump usage and to maximize the times it takes for a section of blocks to be used. Good pathfinding is when you choose to run across blocks in a more difficult and unintuitive order to leave the path to a different section and use every available block. It can also include decisions of which blocks to fall onto to start your path or mounting area. Pathfinding has a higher correlation with parkour skill, and once you're good at parkour, you'll improve your pathfinding by just practicing it in TNT Run. It's very important in late games and high-pressure scenarios. Another tip that was sent to me by Domitron is that when you are playing in general and you've also got good holier parkour abilities, you should consider tilting your head more upwards so you can see more of the blocks and more of the map around you. This can make a big difference in how easy it is to know which path to take. And he also provided this diagram to demonstrate some good pathfinding.
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Back in 2015, none of these 1v1 concepts were really truly understood. But the players who had thousands of wins back then, who never learned how to make decisions properly, can still be players with low win counts for one key reason: a higher level of parkour consistency skill is needed to leave the early game stage of a 1v1 with 11 double jumps left. You need to be able to last up to that point without making many mistakes, which requires lots of practice and experience in TNT Run. At certain points in this video, I said terms like beginner, intermediate, and advanced or top-level players. In my opinion, beginners should only focus on parkour consistency and practicing the simple jumps and simple blocks to clear a map. Intermediate players still have parkour consistency issues, but they make little enough mistakes that other skills influence results in their games, and I recommend these players to bring their focus to the other four skills and try to develop a solid B2B, practice cutting, and try to optimize their pathing and decision-making. Advanced players, I'd say they're about 50 right now, are so good at parkour consistency that it should not be a focus for them at all, and they should try and focus on mastering all their weaknesses in other skills and also look at parkour mastery. For one, looking back at my TNT Run career, I was in the beginning stage until around 3,000 wins. And even now, at 10,000 wins, I'd say I'm on the border between intermediate and advanced player. Immediately, I would say I'm a slower improver than average. And the very top players generally get a good haul of parkour very early on. But this can be made up for with raw experience, which can be shown through players like Cool, Survivor, Atior, and Pipey. It's impossible for me to know what's exactly best for every player, but it's a good idea to take an honest look at your abilities and evaluate this for yourself. I'm not sure what kind of video relating to this one I want to make in the future, but if enough people want it, I can make a video that's like this, but how the five skills apply to PvP specifically, or I can even dive into all the five skills individually in their own videos and have lots of specific examples and help you gain a more complex, deeper understanding of them individually. Let me know in the comments.