All 10 SpeedRunners 2 Pickups: What Every Item Does

Pick-ups are the chaos layer of SpeedRunners 2: racing alone is a movement game, racing with pick-ups is a combat game where the person behind you has a missile. This page catalogs the ten launch pick-ups, explains the one confusion every new player hits (movement grapple vs. golden hook), and lays out when to hold an item and when to throw it — using only what official sources confirm.

The Ten Launch Pick-Ups at a Glance

The Golden Hook Is Not Your Grapple

The single most common launch-week confusion, worth its own section:

• Your grappling hook — free, unlimited, always equipped. Hooks grapple points and blue ceilings to swing you. Covered in the movement guide.
• The golden grappling hook — a pick-up. It targets the runner ahead of you and drags them back toward you. Defensive? No — it’s an overtaking tool: yank the leader, take their line.

If you hook a ceiling with the golden hook and nothing happens, that’s not a bug — you’re holding the wrong tool.

When to Hold, When to Throw

Strategy survives without numbers, because the underlying logic is positional:

• Hold when you’re leading. A missile does nothing for first place — the threats are behind you. Keep the map clean between you and the pack.
• Throw early when you’re chasing. Damage in SpeedRunners is about forcing mistakes: a hit that makes the leader flinch mid-swing is a position gained.
• The catch-up cushion is real now. Patch 1.6 (October 12) made pick-up stun duration position-based: “Players further behind receive significantly shorter stuns, up to 60% reduction for the last-place runner”. Hits land hardest on runners ahead of you — one more reason chasing throws beat leading throws.
• Traps go behind you, always. The race loops; the runner you drop it for will meet it coming around.
• The golden hook is a timing item. Best used where the runner ahead has no alternate line — right before a choke point or a lever-forced detour (see maps).
• Freeze effects punish committed movement. A frozen runner mid-swing loses everything — aim where the target can’t bail out of the arc. (Exact freeze behavior in SpeedRunners 2 is still being verified against the live build.)

Learning Pick-Ups Fast: Bot Races

The tutorial teaches movement, not item play. The fastest self-teaching loop in the game:

1. Start a bot race (offline, no queue, no stakes).
2. Don’t try to win — follow the pack and throw every item you catch, immediately, at anything.
3. Watch what each hit does to the victim’s movement. That pattern library is what you’ll actually use online.
4. Graduate to holding items deliberately: one full race where you never throw first.

New Items: What We Know So Far

Lightning Watch and Plasma Blaster are the two confirmed-new pick-ups, named in the August playtest announcement. The naming question is now settled: developer notes had referenced a “Plasma Pistol,” and the September 18 patch notes use the settled name — “Plasma Blaster balancing” — while shipping the pass itself (reduced stun, reduced knockback, easier to dodge). The same patch also carries the first patch-note mention of a Drill item — the bug-fix line “Fixed Bots not using the Drill item enough” — name-only for now, effect details unpublished. The stun mechanic moved again in Patch 1.6 (October 12): “Stun duration now adjusts based on the player’s position. Players further behind receive significantly shorter stuns, up to 60% reduction for the last-place runner”. Numbers ride the patch cadence — 1.6 landed just eleven days after 1.5 — and this page re-verifies with each.

Related Pages

• Rocket — the missile pick-up, achievement-confirmed
• Freezing Ray — the freeze pick-up, achievement-confirmed
• Superspeed — the boost pick-up, achievement-confirmed
• Movement techniques — the other half of every race
• All characters — the twelve-runner roster