How should I read the speed breakpoints table and how does it affect the game visually?

Question

Every time I research about speed breakpoints, I am pointed towards the following table, but it seems very unintuitive, and I don’t really understand how it impacts the game.

What are all these different numbers? Are there any important takeaways?

Answer 1

In Tibia, your character speed, i.e., the number you can see near your other skills, does not affect your in-game movement speed linearly.

Instead, you only get a real speed boost when the speed surpasses a specific threshold – these are the so-called speed breakpoints.

Each time your speed goes past a speed breakpoint, the time it takes for you to walk 1 sqm decreases by 50ms.

The community, based on the research that collected most of this data, named each one of these possible breakpoints with a number – those are the numbers prefixed with # on the table you referred.

Breakpoint #17, for example, is the fastest you can get (the so-called “GM Speed”), in which it only takes 50ms to cross 1 sqm. Breakpoint #16 would be the previous step, taking 100ms to cross 1sqm. This goes back up to #1, which is already pretty slow, but it is technically possible to go even slower. Here is a table connecting those numbers in a clearer way.

Breakpoint	Time per sqm	Visual speed
#1	850 ms	1.2 sqm/s
#2	800 ms	1.3 sqm/s
#3	750 ms	1.3 sqm/s
#4	700 ms	1.4 sqm/s
#5	650 ms	1.5 sqm/s
#6	600 ms	1.7 sqm/s
#7	550 ms	1.8 sqm/s
#8	500 ms	2.0 sqm/s
#9	450 ms	2.2 sqm/s
#10	400 ms	2.5 sqm/s
#11	350 ms	2.9 sqm/s
#12	300 ms	3.3 sqm/s
#13	250 ms	4.0 sqm/s
#14	200 ms	5.0 sqm/s
#15	150 ms	6.7 sqm/s
#16	100 ms	10.0 sqm/s
#17	50 ms	20.0 sqm/s

Now we get to the confusing part. Speed breakpoints vary according to the type of ground/floor you are walking over. This is the so-called friction. Friction significantly changes the required speed to achieve each speed breakpoint. This means that a character can fall into different breakpoints depending on where it is walking. 

The simulation below shows a level 200 moving over different terrains, grouped in rows by their friction (numbers to the left). You can see how the same speed value (speed 309) reaches decreasing breakpoints as the friction increases, and this affects the time it takes for this character to walk those 20sqm.

One important takeaway is that certain speed boosting items or spells might be useless depending on your level (base speed) and where you intend to walk/hunt. Comparing the simulation above with the one below, in which I included a Boots of Haste (+20 speed), we can see there were only improvements in some of the terrains – those with 100 and 200 friction – but the majority were not affected at all!

Hope this helps reading the table better now :) Good luck!

Sources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TibiaMMO/comments/7qn9sf/list_of_all_available_speed_boosts/
https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/Speed_Breakpoints
https://tibiald.com/2021/09/28/how-does-speed-work-in-tibia-1/

Comments

Amazing post, thanks! I've loved the animation and although all already knew about the breakpoints, I've never really thought about the visual sqm/s. Very interesting to note that from #16 to #17 your "effective speed" (or the resulting visual speed) is doubled!

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Love it! Thanks for sharing <3