Frogless
Frogless is a trickjump that can be used to scale the Inside Top-Hat Tower level without capturing a frog. The most prominent part of the skip is a vertical trickjump used to climb a very tall ledge near the bottom of the level.
Uses
Minimum Captures
The most prominent use case of Frogless is in Minimum Captures runs, since it bypasses the need for any captures in the tower.
Speedrunning
In two-player speedruns, Frogless is the fastest known way to scale the interior of the tower. Horizontal movement is faster without the frog capture, and Frogless also eliminates the need to skip the cutscene that normally plays when first capturing a frog (which takes roughly a second). The primary disadvantage of not using a frog is slower vertical traversal, but since two-player mode allows cap bouncing instantly without throwing Cappy, allowing the vertical ledges to be scaled faster, this disadvantage is mitigated.
Variants
Upfrog
Upfrog refers to using the trickjump to skip the first set of frogs, but then capturing one of the frogs partway up the tower to complete the second half. This is viable as a speedrun strategy since the frogs in the second group do not trigger the same cutscene as the first group, eliminating the time needed to skip it.
This strategy was previously theorized to save time in single-player runs, due to bypassing the frog cutscene skip while still enabling fast climbing in the second half of the tower. A spliced video was created that came within mere frames of the fastest segment using a frog.[1] However, since the discovery of Hydrophobia, Upfrog is no longer viable as a single-player time save.
However, in two-player mode, Upfrog is very close in speed to Frogless, which is currently the fastest method to traverse the tower. This is because Cappy can reach the second set of frogs from fairly far away in two-player mode. As such, it is not unlikely that Upfrog is actually optimal for two-player speedruns.
The name "Upfrog" is based on the word updog, which is famously used as a practical joke.