In one of my first runs, I spawned a warp point to planet 7 directly by the ship. I don't know how it happened. My theory is that I carried something through the warp point. See this VOD for how it happened.
(new warp point) (from before the run started)
lackattack, thanks for sharing. That's a really cool find!
I've never seen or heard about this before, so my feeling at first was that it was either a "get the stars to align" thing or there is a special setup for it that I never tried. I tested your idea just now and managed to get the warp to appear several times pretty easily by tugging the fuel cell through the warp just like you did. So I think your theory is right about that action triggering something in the code.
Without having timed anything, but just judging the path lengths, this looks in my eyes clearly slower than the route "collect shield and then go to the warp". But it also clearly looks a lot faster than the route "shoot warp, collect shield, go to warp".
If someone is making attempts, it would be interesting to see the average time difference and the success rate. Maybe it will become the preferable strat for new people to the game before learning the shield first route?
On the topic of odd things in this game, I came across something I haven't seen before a few months ago. Unfortunately, the highlight has been corrupted ( - a good reminder to not rely blindly on twitch...), so there is no evidence of what happened. But from memory, I got a double-warp on planet 1 that moved away towards the fuel cell. I don't remember if it stayed there or exactly what happened, but I remember I entered it. It just took me to planet 7 and not planet 8, as I otherwise would have expected. My memory is failing me a bit on this one, so I might be wrong on some of the details. This was clearly not directly useful for speedruns though, so I didn't bother to document it better than the twitch highlight.
