Entering a cave sets a flag in RAM. If you transition while this flag is active, the game restarts the music and teleports you to the entrance location of the destination screen. Every overworld screen has a entrance location coded in, even if there is no cave. Usually defaults to the top left corner if the devs didn't put a secret on that screen.

This is normal behaviour and how leaving a cave should work, but they re-used this flag to also prevent re-entering a cave, as we would otherwise instantly walk back into 1 after leaving it as we are standing on the cave tile, just as an example.

So this flag is not reset to 0 immediately after it got used to teleport us. It stays active until we "move away from the entrance" and that's the flaw we are taking advantage off here.

The flag only resets to 0 if we get aligned to the grid. The game has a grid offset in RAM which is designed to stay between -7.5 and 7.5. If this value ever goes beyond those values they reset it to 0 and that's when the cave flag also get's reset to 0. We get aligned to the grid this way.

Block clips mess with this grid offset so it never reaches 8 or -8 and beyond, if you block clip every half-tile on the way to the transition after leaving a cave. Which means the cave flag also stays active forever, which then restarts the music and teleports us on every transition.

Damage boosts are another way to move without getting aligned to the grid and keeping the cave flag active. For the raft skip here, it is just unrealistic to do the block clips manually while the zora tries to shoot you. A TAS could just do block clips over and over and even use it in other locations to save time. It works everywhere, even in dungeons to a degree which I don't fully understand yet.

Fun fact: If you chose a cave with a "link walks up the stairs" animation and then do the trick, the stair animation will also keep playing on every transition, in a glitchy way. He just loops around the entire screen. A giant waste of time as it takes like 10 seconds to stop "walking up the stairs" which aren't even there, but fun to see.

I made some manipulations for the famicom version.

• Up+A Save Reset.

• Press start as fast as you can on the title screen and file select screen like the MMG manip.

• Walk exactly like in the videos below. All of this is frame perfect even inside the meat shop.

• Menu to Candle one screen south of the actual trick, this does not need to be frame perfect as the famicom version is just better. During that you can look at the Zora there to know how fast your start presses were and what to do at the meat shop.

Perfect boosts every time. After the boosts you do those inputs and it should work.

• 1 frame right, sword clip (or 2 frames right, tap up/down)
• normal screen scroll
• 6 frames right, tap up/down
• 7 frames right, tap up/down
• hold right to run against the water
• left to leave screen