The 9 Quest Types Tim Cain Described — And How to Use Them to Speedrun Games

Stop wasting hours on filler quests — master the nine quest archetypes Tim Cain described and cut your RPG runs down to minutes

If you speedrun RPGs or just want to finish a campaign without getting bogged down, you know the pain: dozens of quests, a mountain of side objectives, and the nagging question of which tasks are worth your time. In 2026 the stakes are higher — communities expect pixel-perfect routes, tool-assisted optimizations, and routing that accounts for live patches and RNG changes. Tim Cain, co-creator of Fallout, famously boiled RPG quests into nine archetypes. Understanding them is one of the fastest ways to optimize runs and make smarter routing choices.

Below you’ll get a practical breakdown of each of Cain’s nine quest types (paraphrased for clarity), concrete examples from modern RPGs, and speedrun-focused tactics you can use right away — from simple skips to advanced RNG and tool-assisted tips. This guide assumes you know basic speedrunning concepts (splits, routing, TAS) and want to turn that knowledge into faster, cleaner RPG runs.

As Tim Cain warned, "more of one thing means less of another" — meaning game designers trade quantity for polish. We’ll turn that trade-off into an advantage.

Quick playbook: The top-level strategy (inverted pyramid)

• Identify the quest archetype: classify every quest in your target run into one of the nine types below.
• Rank by time-to-value: estimate how much actual progress toward your goal each quest gives versus time cost and variance.
• Find skips and sequence breaks: look for geometry, AI, or scripting that lets you avoid full completions.
• Optimize RNG and deterministic actions: reduce variance with manipulation, saves, or TAS where allowed.
• Document and test: record practice splits and share findings with your category community.

The nine quest archetypes — descriptions, modern examples, and speedrun tactics

1. Fetch / Collection quests

What it is: Obtain X items and return them. The classic time sink — many developers use them to stretch content without heavy scripting.

Modern examples: Item hunts in Fallout titles, ingredient runs in The Outer Worlds, gem/fragment collection in open-world RPGs like Elden Ring’s legacy mechanics.

Why speedrunners care: These scale with item count and spawn rules. They’re high-effort but low-combat — great for route pruning.

• Route tip: Prioritize items that can be looted passively while traveling—combine fetches with main-path kills or vendor visits.
• Skip technique: Look for entity merge or container duplication bugs; in many games you can pick up one stacked item to satisfy multiple quest flags.
• RNG control: Learn spawn windows and persistent container states; in 2026 community tools like deterministic map-trackers (created as Speedrun.com plugins) can help predict spawns for live routing.
• Practice drill: Time single-item pickups around your route to identify hidden movement costs and optimize pickup order.

2. Kill / Eliminate quests

What it is: Defeat specific enemies or groups. It’s often the fastest way to gate progression — or the slowest, if enemies are tanky or scripted.

Modern examples: Boss hunts in Baldur’s Gate 3 (some encounter variants are faster), bounty hunts in Fallout and Cyberpunk 2077.

• Route tip: Use area-of-effect exploits or high-damage chokes. In modern RPGs with companion AI, pairing high-aggro companions to manipulate enemy positioning can shave minutes.
• Skip technique: Boss skip via skip-glitch (clip through arena geometry) or flag corruption that marks a boss as dead when it isn’t.
• RNG control: For fights with random criticals or unpredictable AI, practice consistent hit windows and use consumable buffs only when deterministic windows are open.
• Practice drill: Time attack runs of the same enemy with different skills/loadouts to find the most consistent kill route.

3. Escort / Protect quests

What it is: Keep an NPC or object alive until the objective is complete. These can be notoriously high-variance due to NPC AI.

Modern examples: Escorting faction leaders in many Fallout-era RPGs, caravan protection missions in some open-world 2023–2025 titles, and companion protection sequences in narrative RPGs.

• Route tip: Identify safe choke points and drag enemies into narrow corridors to reduce flank AI. If possible, move the escort NPC into a saferoom before you trigger aggressive spawns.
• Skip technique: Use pathfinding exploits to force the escort NPC to teleport or enter a non-combat state. Many modern engines still allow this through navigation mesh glitches.
• RNG control: If the NPC’s survival depends on random damage, heal timings and temporary invulnerability frames (from scripted cutscenes) are your friends.
• Practice drill: Recreate the escort with minimal loadout to understand the NPC’s chase radius and combat triggers.

4. Delivery / Taxi quests

What it is: Move an object or yourself to a location. These lean on travel time or scripted encounters.

Modern examples: Fast-travel dependent missions in many live-service RPGs and courier tasks in Fallout and other open-world titles.

• Route tip: Replace travel time with warp skips or sequence breaks. In 2026 many single-player titles have community-discovered geometry tricks to bypass roads and cut straight to objective areas.
• Skip technique: Trigger checkpoints remotely — in a surprising number of games, leaving and re-entering a cell can trigger the delivery flag without full completion.
• RNG control: If NPC responses vary, use save/stow tactics to reload the world to the optimal state. With TAS, you can force deterministic responses where live runs can’t.

5. Investigate / Recon quests

What it is: Gather information: talk to NPCs, read logs, scan areas. These are essential to narrative progression but often flexible about how you complete them.

Modern examples: Dialogue-heavy investigation beats in Baldur’s Gate 3, quest-log scanning in modern Fallout and narrative RPGs, and detective-style missions in Cyberpunk 2077’s patches post-2023.

• Route tip: Prioritize dialogue that unlocks critical flags. Use dialogue shortcuts (answers that fast-forward) — many RPG engines skip lines if you spam the confirm button.
• Skip technique: Exploit flag-based dialogue systems: trigger the end-state flag by manipulating related quests or using companion actions that set the same flag.
• RNG control: For branching investigations, create a small decision tree and test which choices set the minimum necessary flags to progress.

6. Puzzle / Trial quests

What it is: Solve environmental or logic challenges. These can be either annoying (time-consuming) or elegant (skill-checks for speedrunners).

Modern examples: Shrine puzzles in action-RPGs, lock-and-key puzzles in modern remasters, and trial sequences in party-based CRPGs.

• Route tip: Memorize solutions and rehearse the fastest input sequences. In 2026, many speedrunning communities publish optimized input scripts for common puzzle types.
• Skip technique: Bypass puzzles by manipulating the puzzle’s outcome variables (e.g., setting a door flag via console commands or forcing puzzle-complete scripts through sequence-breaking moves).
• Practice drill: Time your fastest completion, then optimize movement between puzzle elements — shaving off movement is usually the biggest gain.

7. Choice / Moral quests

What it is: Decisions that affect narrative branches. They’re interesting for runs that prize story, but they can also be used to skip content.

Modern examples: High-impact choices in Baldur’s Gate 3 and narrative RPGs; faction-alignment decisions in Fallout-style games.

• Route tip: Identify the minimal decision that triggers your desired world state. Sometimes an NPC dialogue line alone sets a global flag without the expected follow-up quest.
• Skip technique: Use fast decisions to trigger a later cutscene (which often marks the flag as completed) without doing the intermediate tasks.
• RNG control: Human reaction time matters in conversation checks—practice the input to avoid RNG-based failed persuasion checks when possible.

8. Skill-check / Mini-game quests

What it is: Non-combat tasks that test a mechanic (lockpicking, persuasion minigame, timed skill taps). They can have high variance but often are repeatable with practice.

Modern examples: Hacking minigames in Cyberpunk, persuasion and stealth mini-games in 2024–2025 RPG updates, and lockpicking in every major Fallout installment.

• Route tip: If possible, respec or equip modifiers that automate skill checks. Many modern RPGs allow temporary buffs that auto-succeed checks.
• Skip technique: Force a check to auto-fail into a deterministic fallback that is faster than succeeding the minigame — sometimes losing fast is better than winning slowly.
• Practice drill: Record frame-by-frame inputs to build consistent successful attempts; share these as community presets for newcomers.

9. World / Event quests (dynamic encounters)

What it is: Dynamic world events or emergent quests that pop up as you explore. They can be unpredictable, high-value, or outright ignorable.

Modern examples: World events in live RPGs and emergent NPC states in sandbox RPGs that gained traction in 2023–2025 updates.

• Route tip: Decide if dynamic events are consistent and valuable. If an event regularly drops a critical item or flag, route it. If it adds variance, skip it in timed categories.
• Skip technique: Manipulate respawn timers and cell transitions to avoid triggering low-value events that add time and variance.
• RNG control: Some dynamic events are seeded by in-game days; forcing a day skip (fast travel, wait) can make events predictable.

Applying the archetypes to categories and route design

Not all categories value the same archetypes. When you plan a category, classify every quest into Cain’s types and ask these questions:

• Does it reduce the remaining objective count? (High priority)
• Does it gate essential items or flags? (High priority)
• Does it add high variance or long travel time? (Low priority unless skipable)
• Can it be bypassed with a sequence break or exploit? (Immediate research target)

Example: For a New Game+ speedrun, kill and fetch quests that drop scaling items might be faster than investigating all story branches. For a 100% run, you’ll be forced to include most archetypes — but the same classification helps you schedule which quests to stack together efficiently.

Advanced strategies for 2026: tooling, AI, and routing innovations

The speedrun landscape shifted significantly after late 2024 and into 2025–2026:

• Communities embraced AI tools to generate initial routes. In 2025–26, LLM-assisted route drafting helps you identify candidate skips and which archetypes to prioritize; always validate AI suggestions via testing.
• Tool integration matured. LiveSplit and community overlay plugins support automated splitter checks for flag-based quest completion — meaning you can safely test whether a skip legitimately advances the run without manual verification.
• Deterministic TAS became more accessible for practice. Many runners now use TAS to explore corner-case flag states for puzzle or delivery quests, then try to replicate viable techniques in real-time runs.
• Modding frameworks (legal in many communities when used for research but disallowed in race categories) let you experiment with quest flags to discover route shortcuts. Always disclose research steps when submitting routes to your category’s moderators.

Case studies: Real routes where understanding archetypes made the cut

Baldur’s Gate 3 (post-2023 patches)

Investigative and choice quests dominate. Speedrunners identified that many choice flags can be set via single dialogue lines — treating these quests as choice archetypes with investigative subcomponents made it possible to prune dozens of minutes off optimized runs by skipping optional investigations that weren’t flag-critical.

Fallout-style open world

These games are fetch-heavy and dynamic. Runners reorganized routes so that fetches and deliveries occur while moving along the main path, and exploited navigation mesh clips to skip escort triggers. Classifying quests into fetch/delivery/escort archetypes highlights which to combine and which to avoid.

Practice plan: 6-week program to route any RPG

1. Week 1 — Map & classify: Run the game once and tag every quest by archetype.
2. Week 2 — Time trials: Do single-quest runs for the top 10 time-sink quests to get baseline splits.
3. Week 3 — Search for skips: Focus on geometry and AI quirks for escort, delivery, and fetch quests.
4. Week 4 — RNG reduction: Work on deterministic techniques for kill and skill-check quests; test save-reload windows.
5. Week 5 — Consolidate routes: Combine smaller quests efficiently and rehearse transitions repeatedly.
6. Week 6 — Mock runs and community feedback: Submit VODs to your category and iterate on discovered tricks.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Avoid overfitting to a single skip. If it’s inconsistent, it can cost more than it saves in races. Always have a robust backup route.
• Don’t assume designer intent equals immutability. Many quest flags are set in multiple ways; test alternate flag paths before discarding them.
• Document every test. In 2026, speedrun adjudicators expect rigorous documentation for novel skips and category changes.
• Respect rules. Use mods and TAS for research, but be transparent. Most leaderboards require live-run legitimacy for rankings.

Actionable takeaways

• Classify every quest: Use Cain’s nine archetypes as tags in your route spreadsheet.
• Prioritize time-to-value: Only play quests that provide meaningful progress or a consistent advantage.
• Stack archetypes: Combine fetchs, deliveries, and kills when traveling through the same zones.
• Exploit RNG & tools: Use save/load windows, deterministic mod tools, and community splitters to reduce variance.
• Share findings: Publish tests, VODs, and TAS demos so your community can verify and adopt improvements.

Final thoughts — why Cain’s archetypes still matter in 2026

Cain’s observation that RPG quests are reducible into archetypes gives runners a powerful mental model for route optimization. In an era of AI-assistance, deterministic tools, and an increasingly competitive speedrunning landscape, this kind of classification helps you cut cognitive overhead and find repeatable savings. Remember: a single archetype-focused optimization can cascade — shaving minutes off many quests at once.

Ready to speed up your run? Start by tagging the next RPG you play with these nine archetypes and time a single representative quest from each — you’ll find the low-hanging fruit in your first practice hour.

Call to action

Try it now: pick a target game, classify five quests, and post your top find in your game’s Speedrun.com discussion or Discord. Share a short clip and tag it "Cain9" — I’ll highlight the best community-discovered skips and post follow-up routing templates. Want a template for your game? Send your top three quests and I’ll help map an optimized route.

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