Wow, this game really came down from being a 5-6 hours run to a 30 minute run? Some time ago I watched some runs and checked speedrun.com because I actually thought this had great potential to be broken. But this is just awesome! Great job guys! :D

The Blow Horn locations get loaded under the Krazoa 4 gate. As far as I know, they can only be accessed with hacks. They appear to be inactive, so even if we discovered a way to get to them, they are not usable.

They probably get warped to their correct locations and activated when the event starts.

Edit: To be as thorough as possible, I decided to look into the mechanics of the blow horn:

Seems one pad exists to start the event, and the other one just teleports around. Exploits seem unlikely.

I doubt I'm the first to find this, but I didn't see it elsewhere. This is a way to swim at a much lower height than a typical waterfall swim setup. This provides an alternative way to Dark Ice Mines Early.

Cons: Slower than a standard DIME performed without mistakes. The clip through the waterfall wall is kinda tricky, and the out of bounds navigation is fairly slippery. Pros: No longer need to get the perfect waterfall setup to clip through the ceiling in the sewer.

I have not found any other uses for this yet. It does not seem to be very useful for Cape Claw Early, as this setup will miss most of the loading triggers and inevitably softlock.

In terms of getting the lower airswim at ThornTail Hollow, this method is actually something I was trying to find a while back but couldn't find any ways to get the lower airswim in that particular area. I've posted a video awhile back of a different way on getting an airswim with that water plane as an alternate route for Queen Earthwalker skip by using different area to get that airswim. However, this method is far more risky to take as you barely softlock yourself while dropping down to get this airswim.

In terms of this being used for DIME, as you may or may not know, DIME is currently something that we cannot do in Any% as we'd softlock ourselves during the Snowhorn Trail since a particular part of the Wastes that we need to go to remains locked since we skip getting a key from the Queen with DIME.

If a method for clipping into this cage was discovered, it could cut ~2 hours from the run.

The route would then become "Get any Krazoa spirit (except #1 or #5), warp to Krazoa palace, clip into cage, defeat Andross"

In this video, after obtaining Krazoa #6, the game will glitch and play the cutscene for Krazoa #5 (2:20 in the video). This will cause Star Fox to warp to his ship and escape the cage! This makes the glitch much more theoretically feasible.

However clipping into things in this game seems exceptionally difficult. If anyone has theories, I'm all ears.

Edit: Unloading the gate doors might also be worth trying, but as far as I can tell the warp would be unloaded too.

Even if K4 early was discovered, there are no meaningful escapes that I've found.

Death, revives, and save/reloads are not enough to get back out. In my personal opinion, K4 early is not viable without a way to warp out of the cage.

Getting to K4 by navigating the edges of the map is stopped by the cage. The cage extends very far out of the walls.

I'm also working on recording all water plane heights. To swim into the K4 room, a swim level between -536.0 and -517.0 is required. There are no water planes that meet this requirement:

Tricky Pool: -75 Snow Wastes Platforms Top: -402 Snow Wastes Waterfall: between -558 and -561 Snow Wastes Waterfall end (OOB): between -588 and -592 Snow Wastes Drain/Reservoir: -558 Waterfall Glitch: between -646.5 and -645 Sewers: -777 Low Swim (Starting River): -797 Frozen Wastes Waterfall bottom: -974 North maze pool: -1070 South maze pool: -1070

Note: Depth != PlayerY. The player will actually be 21 units above the surface depth.

I'm currently finishing up a spread sheet with all water depths. I'll post it in Guides when it's done.