RTA Guide/New Players
Welcome to Ukikipedia, the Super Mario 64 community wiki and resource hub!
This page will help you get started with concise beginner-friendly tutorials, equip you to navigate Ukikipedia and find other community resources, and showcase some of the many ways to enjoy Super Mario 64 and the speedrunning community.
Why Super Mario 64?
Super Mario 64 is an iconic title and watershed moment in gaming, but at its core, the movement is what keeps people playing to this day. Mastering the movement is an endless journey and a whole lot of fun.
The mechanics are fluid and satisfying, the skill expression is amazing, and advanced techniques raise the skill ceiling to impossible levels. In addition to the vanilla game, lots of people love to create and play mods because its 3D platforming foundation is so good.
Getting Started
This 7-minute video by SeanRaider covers the basics of setting up and a lot of frequently asked questions about about versions, controllers, categories, practice, splits, and recording your runs!
Join the Super Mario 64 Speedruns Discord! There are lots of other resources there and community members who can help point you to whatever you're looking for.
The rest of this page is meant to give you just enough detail to get started.
Emulators
Speedrunning
Emulator is the easiest way to start speedrunning, and it's free! Follow wermi's guide to set up Project64 v1.6, the approved PC emulator for speedruns.
If you are not on Windows, you can find your platform's approved emulator here: RTA Guide/Emulator
ROM hacks / Casual
If you are interested in playing ROM hacks (mods), there is a huge variety of fun and impressive new hacks being made all the time! For example, Mario Builder 64 (Super Mario Maker-like level creator), SM64 Randomizer or IronMario 64 (IronMon-like hardcore randomizer challenge), and many original experiences!
Parallel Launcher for the ParallelN64 emulator is super easy to use and lets you generate and play a ROM file by simply double-clicking a patch file. ROM hacks download as a patch file because you need to obtain the vanilla ROM on your own. If you just want to mess around with SM64 a bit, you might find this quicker than setting up Project64. Popular ROM hack creator Kaze shows how to set it up in under 2 minutes:
Practice ROM
Excited to start playing? We highly recommend the Usamune Practice ROM. It's a very powerful ROM with a lot of features, and virtually every SM64 speedrunner uses it. You can also play around in it just for fun.
Open the link and scroll down a bit to the "Download" section to get the patch. Here is a video explanation of how to install and use it:
Note: The first ~1:30 of this video is slightly outdated. You now just download an HTML that you can open to patch the ROM, which the Google Doc explains.
If you're not sure what to do at first, try out the presets! They range from vanilla to practice mode.
Splits
Most speedrunners use an awesome free program called LiveSplit to time their runs and add personality to their splits! SmallAnt made a great tutorial about how to set it up.
There are a few different autosplitters for Super Mario 64. One is simply called SM64 LiveSplit Autosplitter by Franck, and you can follow this tutorial by Remedy to set it up. Another one is AutoSplit64 by Synozure, and you can follow his tutorial to set it up.
Gameplay Tutorials
Feel free to explore Super Mario 64 to your heart's content, but if you are looking for some guidance, here are some great videos to start out:
Movement guide
This video by SeanRaider covers the various movement options and how they work together. It's a great resource for any new player to get a better understanding of the game.
Here are a couple tips we hope will help you starting off!
- Mario moves with a lot of force, but most actions lock you into the direction that you are facing. With great power comes great responsibility!
- Especially when you are starting out, line up your angle and check your spacing when performing actions.
- When swimming or flying, small movements around the neutral zone will often give you enough control. It's very easy to overcorrect, especially when flying.
- The camera is weird and hard to use at first (and sometimes later on), but once you make friends with it, you will find it can work really well in a lot of cases. The geometric game design combined with the camera angles allow you to do a lot of movement in the 8 notched directions (if your controller has notches).
- The left and right C buttons feel inverted from most modern games because you are actually controlling the camera's position, not Mario's perspective!
- For a general-purpose camera, try Mario Cam C-down. It will pan to follow behind Mario and you can press C-left or C-right twice to turn it by 45 degrees.
- If the camera is stuck somewhere you cannot see Mario, try double-tapping R to go into and out of Mario cam to reset it.
Drogie and Squeex 16 Star walkthroughs
This tutorial by Drogie walks through the entire 16 Star speedrun for beginners, and by following along, most people can complete the run from scratch in a couple hours!
This tutorial by Squeex (the wonderful 2024 Best Speedrun Streamer award winner) also walks through the entire 16 Star run with super simple strategies to help new players do their first runs. "All good 16 Star runs begin with a perfect bridge skip and a great attitude. Let's figure out how to do one of the two."
One of the sayings we have is "strats save seconds, movement saves minutes." Learning the fundamentals as a beginner is super important, and trying to learn a big timesave might not be as helpful to your improvement early on! There's no harm in trying advanced movement, but if you're getting frustrated, go back to doing what feels right for you. There's a lot to get used to, and it's easy to overwhelm your brain.
When you make mistakes, remember that lots of people have played for thousands of hours and still make mistakes all the time! That's what makes great players so impressive.
Ukikipedia speedrunning guide
Want to dive deeper into speedrunning Super Mario 64? Check out the main page with guides to all the speedrun categories and links to lots of other great community resources: RTA Guide
RTA stands for "Real Time Attack", and it is an acronym created by the Japanese speedrunning community that we use to refer to runs performed in a single segment, rather than segmented.
You can see all the stars at the bottom of the main page, or click on whichever category you're playing to see the route. Most stars have videos for different levels of strategies and input displays that you can try to follow, and some have commentated tutorials!
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to enjoy SM64, and it stands on its own merit as a game. But, it's also given many of us a shared space for social connections, growth, cooperation, and competition. If you want to get involved in the community, try watching some Twitch streams, chatting in community spaces, or participating in races and tournaments.
Looking for more content? There are always streamers live on Twitch in the Super Mario 64 directory, and great YouTube videos for entertainment, information, inspiration, and everything in between. Check out this playlist of some great SM64 videos by many different content creators!
Whatever brought you here, we appreciate you taking the time to read this page and see a glimpse of what Super Mario 64 is all about.
- Badroenis, GTM