Vault

A vault is a movement technique that involves bouncing off of Cappy while Mario is on the ground. Vaults can provide lots of speed if they are chained from a ground pound roll, making them very useful for trickjumps that require horizontal distance. Although they don't provide quite as much distance as a momentum-aided triple jump, they can be performed in a tighter space, especially if an up-down vault is used.

Reproduction steps

To perform a full-speed vault:

• Throw Cappy and stall him in place by holding X;
• Jump, ground pound (or perform a buffered spinpound if extra speed is desired) and roll forward into Cappy with Y all while still holding X;
• Continue to hold the joystick forward as Mario bounces off of Cappy.

This will cause Mario to be launched in the direction of Cappy.

Up-down vaults

Up-down vaults are a variant of vaults that can be used to vault off of a platform with extremely limited space. First discovered by victoto, they involve using a midair downthrow to perform a vault that is almost entirely vertical, and are therefore only possible to execute using joy-cons. To perform an up-down vault:

• Stand at the very edge of the starting platform facing the direction in which you wish to vault;
• Upthrow, and immediately jump and perform a ground pound jump while holding the cap throw button;
• Bounce off of Cappy at the top of the ground pound jump, and downthrow at the peak of the bounce;
• Ground pound and roll into Cappy.

This will result in Mario being launched in the exact same manner as a normal vault, but using much less space.

Uses

Normal vaults don't have many applications in speedrunning aside from trickjumps such as Snow Dram and Left Side, since they can take a bit of time to set up. However, a faster variant of the vault known as the divevault enables a vault to be performed almost instantly, albeit with difficulty.