Most levels will either have blood at the start or a slope or walls to help get you up to speed, even if you aren't using a sword that starts you with blood. Even so, if you find yourself starting in a room without blood on some flat ground, this is how to get yourself quickly up to speed.

Without blood, walls, or ledges, the only options you have are your wasd, jump, and crouch. Crouch is different from slide, which uses blood, in a couple of ways, but if you press your slide key when without blood you will crouch instead. you can also crouch even with blood by pressing its own keybind, by default c

Basic walking speed is 15, and walking backwards is 7.5. You can increase your walking speed without jumping by strafing back and forth on the ground. you can do this by holding W and A while moving the mouse quickly but smoothly to the left, then switching to W and D while looking left. doing this you can increase the walking speed to about 18-19. however more importantly you can use this technique to do a circle jump.
A circle jump is when you strafe about 90 degrees on the ground to build up speed and then jump to keep that speed in the direction you jump if you do this well you can get about 21 speed from an initial jump. This is the best way to start bhopping.

Almost any time you jump, it will be better to do a crouch jump. It gives you more height than a regular jump, and gives a small bump in speed whenever you land into a crouch at low speeds. at high speeds they maintain similar speed to each other, but crouch jumps are still higher and more flexible.

If you bhop while crouched and just hold forward, you will gradually build up speed up until just over 30 speed, the soft speed cap of both sliding and crouching. However you can build up speed even faster by strafing and turning quickly as you hit the ground. in order for this to be effective you will need to stay grounded for a split second so that you can build up some speed with strafes, but not so long that friction starts to apply and you slow down. This is still only a very short ground touch though. With this method you can more quickly build up speed and reach up to about 40 before you stop accelerating, although by then you would most likely have reached either some blood or some level geometry which is more helpful to you.

Firstly, you cannot interact with walls to wallrun or walljump if you are looking directly at or away from a wall. Entering a wallrun will slow down your falling speed but not affect any upwards momentum you may have going into it. You do not technically have to physically touch the wall to be in the wallrun state or to be able to wall jump, you just have to be very close to it. This is why walls can sometimes feel "sticky" since you need to get a small distance away from the wall before you "detach".

Walljumps set your vertical speed to a set value, so if you walljump with a lot of vertical momentum you can actually cut your jump short by lowering your vertical speed with a walljump.

As for horizontal speed, a momentum vector is applied based on where you look and the location of the wall.

The circles show different regions you can look at when up against a wall. Only your horizontal view angle matters, you can look as much up or down as you want. If your view angle is in the red, you are looking directly into or away from the wall and cannot walljump. If your angle is in the yellow area, looking to the right of the wall, then a walljump will give momentum 90 degrees perpendicular to the right(clockwise) of your current view angle. If your angle is in the blue area, looking to the left of the wall, then a walljump will give momentum 90 degrees perpendicular to the left(anti-clockwise) of your current view angle. Note that the only effect the angle of the wall has is the angle of these zones, it does not directly affect your walljump angle. For example in both walls in the image if I were to look North East I would be looking into the yellow zone in both cases, so from both walls I would get momentum South East.

The horizontal momentum given by a walljump is added to your current velocity, unlike the vertical component, so you can use this to gain lots of speed.

Imagine you are moving quickly north along a wall and want to jump off it. The purple arrow is your view angle and the orange is the momentum given by a walljump. In the top example you are looking close to along the wall, in the direction you want to go. The momentum given by this jump sends you almost directly away from the wall, making a lot of distance from it but not adding to your speed, and possibly slowing you down, This type of walljump may be useful in reaching a destination far from the wall, but it isn't good at building speed or reaching anywhere in front of you.

The bottom example however, has you looking very far into the wall, almost as far as you can while still being eligible to walljump. This gives you momentum angled as far forward as possible, adding speed to your already northward momentum, as well as pushing you away from the wall as little as possible, allowing you to keep moving along the wall and possibly walljump again, building up even more speed.Technically you could also look 180 degrees from what I've shown here, looking almost directly away from the wall and slightly behind, and get the same effect.

Sliding is similar to crouching in some ways, but different in others. Obviously, sliding consumes blood at a constant rate, and unlike crouching which is controlled entirely by WASD, sliding is controlled exclusively by the mouse with WASD having no effect. At speeds below 30, sliding does not lose any speed to friction, although it also doesn't gain speed by itself. at speeds above 30, sliding rapidly loses speed to friction until it reaches 30 speed again.
Landing in a slide gives a small bump of speed, although unlike crouch, starting a slide also gives a small speed boost. You can abuse this by quickly spamming the slide button a few times to rapidly reach 30 speed. The same thing could be achieved by repeatedly jumping and sliding, but it's obviously much slower.

If you jump while moving up a slope you will get more height out of it. You already jump higher while sliding than normal, so you can get some surprisingly big jumps out of it.
You also get some more speed while sliding down slopes, but you can also get the same speed on down slopes by crouching, so if you're really struggling on blood you can try crouching down any slopes. Of course on flat ground you can save blood by jumping between slides instead of staying grounded.

You can turn while sliding very quickly, but not instantly, causing you to drift around turns. No matter how sharp or wide you turn while doing so you will maintain the same speed out the end of it. Similarly to walking and crouching, doing a smooth but fast turn in one direction while sliding will increase your speed temporarily. Once you straighten out however you will return back to your previous speed, even in that speed is below 30. This means you can jump out of a turning slide to gain a bit of speed on the exit.

Ultrakill players, you don't need to time the slide, you can just hold it. If you aren't holding slide as you land you can lose a lot of speed.

Airdash is done with right click by default, onto an enemy. The enemy must first be in range, causing the reticle to turn from grey to white, then it takes a second or two to lock on to the enemy, turning the reticle from white to red. The airdash itself doesn't need to be timed if you want to airdash as soon as possible, you can hold right click down and as soon as a target is available an airdash will happen. the lock-on timer can transfer between enemies without resetting, and can handle not looking straight at a target the entire time. The air dash itself is invincible, and can both interrupt and be interrupted by ground slam. You can shoot arrows during an air dash, but you can't parry. Some big enemies like the black knights take longer to lock on to and also take more blood to dash to.

Air dash gives you 50 speed, and landing in a slide preserves that speed, but since slide rapidly loses speed when above 30, you won't keep as much speed as if you had jumped as soon as possible. This is one of the best use cases for binding jump to scroll wheel imo, since you just go faster the better you can time the jump after an airdash.

To be clear if you air dash to a grounded enemy you don't actually keep momentum, you cannot bhop or walk or slide to keep speed. instead it's more like if you are holding slide as you finish an airdash to a grounded enemy, you get your speed instantly set to 50.

For a short time after pressing parry, you will reflect most attacks. killing an enemy with a parry gives twice as much blood. You can parry most attacks with the exception of the black knight's rings and melee, and the flying skulls. parrying a melee attack will do 2 sword swings of damage, and parrying an arrow will instakill (especially useful for the drowned monks introduced with the boss health bar). Any successful parry will also remove the parry cooldown that normally happens, making it possible to parry volleys of projectiles. Parries can be somewhat aimed, although they will lock on to enemies very generously.

Also if you parry an arrow at the last possible moment (a "perfect" parry) you will get launched away from the arrow. this is a bit jank since it's very dependent on the exact position of the arrow, which is very hard to precisely control. If you want to avoid these parry boosts simply time your parry earlier so that the arrow hits you near the middle/end of your parry being active.

As some general advice, parrying is completely free, and the cooldown isn't that much, so feel free to spam it whenever you feel like you're in a dangerous situation.

ground slams are very important to master if you want to get good times, mostly because of how versatile all the different tech that uses it is.

Use 1: going down really fast

Self explanatory, if you need to do this use a slam

Use 2: killing enemies

A slam does big damage to enemies in a small area, and knocks back/up enemies in a larger area.

Use 3: pseudo double-jump

Before the slam brings you down it lifts you up for a little bit, which you can use to reach higher heights or make jumps you were just about to miss

Use 4: slam bounce

Press jump right after slamming the ground to get a very high jump, you can maintain a lot of your horizontal speed while doing this so if you are travelling very fast you can tap slam and bounce and launch way up in the air. The height of the bounce scales slightly with how high you slam and maybe how fast, but it doesn't scale much. If you do a slam bounce while moving up a slope you can jump way higher than normal, probably about twice as high.

Use 5: stop and redirect momentum

Hold slam to stop your momentum, and whether or not you do you can hold slide to instantly get a bunch of speed in the direction you're looking

Use 6: slam slide jump

The focus of the first stone realm: the timing is immediately after you land. If you time the jump too early (right before landing) you get a slam bounce without a slide, giving you a high jump but without the extra speed and without redirecting you. The ideal slam slide jump is like 1 frame after you land, and each frame afterwards still gives you a boost but the speed rapidly decreases until it slows down to regular sliding speed. A good boost will get you to about 60 speed from nothing, but you can also chain them from high speed to get up to 80+

Use 7: slam vault

The focus of the third stone realm: If you vault out of a slam and spam jump you get launched. This is the other thing I like using scroll wheel to jump for. Since vaults use the speed you had before them, if you can get into a proper slam before the vault you get more speed out of it.

While holding W at a ledge you will move up the ledge and then move forwards in the direction you're looking at a small set speed. If you press jump while moving up the ledge, you will vault over it and get a burst of speed. The speed you get is based on the highest total speed you had since you last touched the ground or airdashed. Which means you could launch yourself at high speed directly into a wall, killing all your speed, and then walljump over to a ledge to vault over it and get all your speed back.
You can move your view in any direction including directly away from the ledge while you move up it, and you will then be sent in that direction when you reach the top, so you can vault in any direction, useful for redirecting speed. This doesn't apply as much to slam vaults, since if you don't vault somewhat over the ledge you could end up slamming straight down without getting much of a forward boost.

There are 2 types of arrow, the explosive arrows and the blood tether arrows.
All arrows can be shot as fast as you can input it and come out instantly with a small arc.
Explosive arrows launch you away from them horizontally, but only give a small amount of vertical speed.
Blood tether arrows allow you to airdash to the arrows, even while they're in mid-air

Both types of arrows can be parried, giving speed in the opposite direction. You could do this by pressing shoot and parry at the same time, or you could bind a button to both shoot and parry to do it automatically. if you bind these actions to the scroll wheel you can do it incredibly fast, getting massive bursts of speed. If you have a lot of speed, trying to crossbow parry may stop working when not aiming in front of you.
Also, using the blood sapper prevents you from parrying your own explosive arrows, even if they were picked up in the level, but does allow you to parry blood tether arrows.

As already mentioned, binding jump to scroll wheel can help with timing jumps as early as possible, as well as binding shoot and parry. You could even bind them both to the same scroll button if you want since most of the time you won't both have a crossbow and need to time jumps. If you don't want to bind shoot to scroll wheel It's still useful to have a button for both shoot and parry at once.

Slam is very useful and used often, so some people like to bind it to q or an extra mouse button.
Slide is also often bound to a mouse button for easy spamming and such, but tbh I mostly use default keybinds so these are just some ideas.

Keep in mind that jump and walljump are two separate binds, so if you want your scroll-jump to work with that you'll need to specify it. also W technically doesn't need to be the keybind for grabbing ledges so you can change that if you want I guess.
Honestly pretty much all this stuff except scroll wheel is optional and preference based but I thought I'd mention it.

This guide is only about the basic mechanics available to all weapons in a general setting. I didn't mention the weapons to use and how, but just look at the records for a level if you need to see which one to use. if in doubt, life harvester is probably best

I also didn't discuss powerups such as godblood or superspeed mostly because I don't know much about them beyond intuition and the obvious

routing is too much to talk about and too level specific, but I will mention that there are no requirements inherent to beat levels. you can skip kills, checkpoints, keys, as long as you reach the finish, so just think about what is actually required for each level. Also in a lot of levels the only thing keeping you inbounds is the developers faith in you, although it's mostly only useful to go out of bounds during the first third of the game

Finally, in case you didn't know, there is a secret medal above hex for each level. Go get it.