Mortal Kombat Trilogy - Tower Manipulation Guide

Mortal Kombat Trilogy features 6 different Master Towers which contain the order of opponents to fight against. You can find an in-depth description of each tower in the tower guide written by DWednesday here:

https://www.speedrun.com/mkt/guides/eckkn

Unfortunately, each of these towers feature a differing amount of characters to fight against and it is random which tower you get upon character selection. Additionally, one of these towers rises above the rest as the fastest as it has the least amount of opponents to fight against: The Smoke/Sindel Tower. This guide will explain how to "force" the Smoke/Sindel Tower to appear every time, depending on which character you select.

How to manipulate the tower selection

It is possible to manipulate which tower you get upon character selection as the game seeds its RNG based on a counting variable from the moment the game resets. This means if you can consistently select your character on an exact frame, you can force the tower to be whichever one you want it to be. This sounds like it wouldn't be humanly possible, however all of the inputs you press up to character selection can be pre-buffered to ensure they are accepted on the first possible frame and are frame perfect.

E.g. If you press down on the character select screen and then immediately hold left, the character select icon will move on the first possible frame and be a frame perfect movement.

The tower manip method will be different for every character and different for whether or not you are playing on P1 side or P2 side. We have found many different tower manip methods for the P2 side as that is the side that was being played the most when this trick was discovered (due to AI advantages). If you find more methods of manipulation that are not listed, feel free to get in touch with me/tell us about it on discord and I will add them to this guide.

The ones we have so far were discovered by pure trial/error and brute force. We have no other known method of discovering them (i.e. looking at game memory/TAS), but it is probably possible.

To perform a Tower Manip:

• Restart the game (hold Select+Start)

• Be holding High Punch IMMEDIATELY after restarting. Hold it all the way up until the game starts a new game from holding the punch button. Then be already holding the correct directional input as soon as the character select screen appears to start the sequence.

• Be ready to perform the appropriate inputs to select your character as listed below - making sure that every input is held as you leave one square and enter the next square.

• Every single input MUST be held down before the game accepts your input to ensure that it is frame perfect. This includes left/right/up/down movements around the character selection screen.

E.g. To Select Scorpion you must move all the way to the left, then be holding down to go to the next row and then immediately hold right to go right in short sequence so there is NO pauses. If there are any frames of pause then it will not work consistently (but you may still get lucky to get the Smoke/Sindel tower, you are just leaving it to chance).

PC Tower Manips:

Smoke/Sindel Tower Manips (from P2 side):

• Sub-Zero (Unmasked): All the way to the left, All the way to the right, left over to Cyrax, Down 1 to Sub-Zero
• Reptile: Immediate 1 left to Raiden, 1 down to Reptile
• Liu Kang: Down to Smoke, All the way left to Sektor, All the way right to smoke, All the wat left to Sektor, 1 right to Liu Kang
• Scorpion: All the way left, Down 1, All the way right, All the way left to Scorpion
• Sheeva: All the way left, All the way right, left to Sonya, Down to Sheeva
• Rain: All the way left, All the way right, Left to (Sonya, Cyrax or Baraka), Right to Rain
• Smoke (Robot): all the way left, right to Rain, down to Smoke
• Sonya: Straight Left to Sonya
• Noob: All the way left, down to Kitana, all the way right, up to Shang Tsung, left to Noob.
• Sindel Left to Noob, Down to Sektor, Right to Smoke, Left to Sektor, Right to Smoke, left to Liu Kang, down to Sindel
• Cyrax: (Holding Select as you move over Raiden) - straight left to Cyrax
• Kano: all the way left, All the way right, Left to Noob, down to Kano
• Johnny Cage: (Holding Select as you move over Raiden - all three times) - all the way left, all the way right, all the way left to JC
• Kitana: Down to Jax, Left to Kano, Right to Jax, Left to Kitana
• Ermac: Left to Noob, Right to Shang, Left to Cyrax, Down to Ermac
• Jade: Down to Jax, Left to Kano, Right to Jax, Left to sub-zero, down to Jade
• Mileena: right to Shang Tsung, down to Mileena
• Nightwolf: Left to Noob Saibot, then down to Nightwolf. Hold Select as you pass over Raiden but let go of select before you pass over Kano.
• Sektor: Left to Noob, down to Kano, right to Jax, up to Rain, Left to Noob, Down to Sektor. Hold Select when passing Raiden, Kano, Jax and Raiden (a second time) then let go of select before passing Kano a second time.
• MK1 Raiden: (Make sure Raiden starts as MK2 Raiden) - Holding Select when passing Raiden the first time, all the way to the left, down one, all the way to the right, up one, left to Raiden.

PSX Tower Manips:

• None yet

Saturn Tower Manips:

• None yet

If you have discovered a tower manipulation method that is not listed, please contact us and let us know and we will add it to the guide - crediting you for the discovery. (Only characters that don't have manips yet will be needed unless you find an easier manip route for one of the already discovered ones).

Credit goes to DWednesday for discovering the tower manipulation method

Credit goes to myself, BadNewsNate and Dwednesday for various different Manipulation route discoveries for each character.