Livesplit is a fantastic and essential tool for serious speed runners who want to work on improving their runs. Creating splits is easy but in this guide we help you create SUB splits to bread the speed run down even more – we’ll also give some test cases of when sub splits might be handy.
How do you make sub splits in livesplit?
Step 1 – Create a Split
In Livesplit, just create a new split like normal. If your intention is for it to have subplits then name it appropriately for that such as “Disk 1” or “First Area”.
Step 2 – Create the sub split
First you need to go to Edit Layout > Add Component > Lists > Subsplits. In Edit Layout check the option for contextual.
Now, here’s where it can get tricky. Inside a split, mark every subplot except the last with a “-” (hyphen). For the LAST subsplit you need to put the name of the SPLIT starting with { and ending with } (curly brackets) followed by the name of the final subsplit.
We’re going to give you an example from Final Fantasy 7, a game we feel works well with them.
-Guard Scorpion
-Materia Keeper
-Demon’s Gate
-{Disk 1} Jenova Life
So these are four bosses which all appear in Disk 1.
Inside Livesplit, it looks like this
That’s it! That is the easy way to add subsplits to your live splits! Happy speed running!
Do you need sub splits?
Most people don’t use sub splits because most games are too short to need to break it down that much. But, longer games which may last more than 3-4 hours or so can be made a little easier to navigate. We used the Final Fantasy VII example because it uses 3 disks, so you could have all discs as splits and then stuff that happens within that disk as a sub split.
Another idea would be multi game marathon suns such as Resident Evil, where a game is a split and events inside that game is a sub split. 100% runs of games such as Breath of the Wild, Metroid Dread or even Dark Souls could be used.
Generally speaking sub splits aren’t that common but it might be useful for you to improve your runs.
