Star Fox Adventures TAS Thread
2 years ago
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Some of you might be wondering why the original part 13 I posted was deleted, and why I posted a new part 13 up above. The reason for this is that Fuzzyness found that we can feed Tricky at the tunnel to the well in TTH in order to set up a faster camera-lock, which was much faster than what I originally did (which was saving+quiting in MMP, switching to the TTH file, getting cam-lock at the Shop entrance, switching files, and rolling towards the MMP Link map to get in position to lock the camera in place).

Additionally, I also found some faster strategies to make Tricky teleport/spawn where I wanted him to, which saved me a few seconds.

All told, this new part 13, is 35 seconds faster than what I originally had. All of these changes occurred in what was originally the last 4 and a half minutes of the segment (which has now been cut down to be the last 4 minutes of the segment). That cuts out 1/9th of the total time of Ground Quake Early. Not too shabby!

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Since the route has changed a lot since I last did a full-game test TAS, I did another test TAS just now to make sure that the route works. I confirmed that my TAS route fully works (with no unexpected softlocks), and I was also able to beat the game in under 3 hours (which proves that this TAS will finish in under 3 hours).

Here's a pastebin of the most up-to-date route for the TAS: https://pastebin.com/ZrN89pJ0

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Hello everyone!

I have now finished my longest segment to date (which is also, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining segments of the TAS so far).

In this section, we do the Krazoa Spirit 4 Early Glitch (also known as K4E), get K4, release K4, unlock Dragon Rock, and fly to Dragon Rock:

The route for this section is:

  1. Do the K4E glitch to reach a box-loaded SnowHorn Wastes.
  2. Use Tricky to flame the ice wall in SHW.
  3. Shoot down the log to get to the K4 warp portal.
  4. Warp to K4.
  5. Blow up the wall in K4, escort the barrel to the end of the K4 trial, and then blow up the wall to the Krazoa Spirit.
  6. Beat the Test of Strength (the button-mashing challenge) to get K4.
  7. Get the 2 fuel cells next to the K4 Warp Portal, and Save+Quit to set up an ESW back to ThornTail Hollow.
  8. ESW back to ThornTail Hollow with K4 (last ESW of the TAS - and the last time we switch to a different file).
  9. Warp to Krazoa Palace, use the portal opener to open the door blocking where you release K4, and release K4.
  10. Shoot the bomb plant by the WarpStone, grab the 2 fuel cells in the cave (last fuel cells of the TAS), and grab a 1-heart health refill from the crate in the cave.
  11. Talk to the ThornTail Gatekeeper to unlock Dragon Rock.
  12. Enter the Arwing to spend the fuel cells to fly to Walled City, and then, once in orbit, fly back to ThornTail Hollow (this can't be avoided - the reasons for it will be explained in the 11:07 timestamp listed below).
  13. After landing in TTH, enter the Arwing again in order to spend the fuel cells to fly to Dragon Rock, and then, once in orbit, fly to Dragon Rock.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This video starts right after we die in MMP in order to ESW back to ThornTail Hollow (specifically, it starts right before we respawn back in ThornTail Hollow with the Ground Quake in our inventory). From here, our next goal is to get Spellstone 4 - which requires traveling to Dragon Rock. In order to unlock the option to fly to Dragon Rock, we have to first get and release K4...

...Here's where we would run into issues: normally, to get K4, Fox would have to go to Walled City to get Spellstone 3, go to the Volcano Force Point Temple and place Spellstone 3 (which requires having already gotten Spellstone 1 as well), save ThornTail Hollow when it's under attack, buy the SnowHorn Artifact from the shop, go to SnowHorn Wastes, complete the SnowHorn trials to open the gate to K4, and then use the K4 warp portal.

This all takes up a lot of time - probably around 45 minutes of extra gameplay compared to if we could just walk directly to K4 right away and the gate was already open. Wouldn't it be nice if we could actually do all of that? If we could literally enter SnowHorn Wastes and walk straight through where the gate blocking K4 would be, and then use the warp pad? It turns out, we can actually do just that by using the largest sequence break of this TAS: Krazoa 4 Early (also known as K4E for short).

This trick has actually evolved to be substantially faster since it was first discovered, so I'll give you all some brief lore on this game's equivalent to barrier skip: the first version of the trick required Fox to get out of bounds in SHW via an airswim, staff-swing under the water (where Fox moves forwards by the amount he inches forward when he swings his staff frame perfectly - which prevents Fox from entering a swimming state while swinging, but is painfully slow), and then touch the fuel cells next to the K4 Warp Portal to make the item-discovery prompt play, which would cancel our airswim. This would require us to not have gotten any fuel cells up to doing K4E, which would mean we would need to buy all of our fuel cells from the shop prior to this. Additionally, we would take hypothermia damage while staff-swinging, which means we would have needed to get some Bafomdads to revive Fox when we die (which in turn would require us to buy the Bafomdad bag to allow us to hold more than 1 Bafomdad).

This first version of K4E, which was discovered by BvQr, was both ingenious and very important for the fact that it proved that K4E was possible. It was also painfully slow - requiring about 15 extra minutes compared to if we could just walk straight to the K4 warp portal.

Later on, Zac Cannan was able to make some refinements to BvQr's strategy. By doing some precise falls at the top of Ice Mountain and some precise staff-swinging, Zac was able to avoid needing to get the Bafomdad bag and an extra Bafomdad - which saved a minute or 2.

Then, Zac Cannan found a different way to do K4E that was so much faster than any previous method that it completely blew them out of the water. By starting an airswim in ThornTail Hollow and swimming to the sewers, we could swim around certain loading triggers, get the camera out-of-bounds to glitch-load the next area, and then enter SnowHorn Wastes. This would make a lot of objects in SnowHorn Wastes fail to load, including the gate blocking the K4 warp portal. However, the K4 Warp Portal still worked, letting us use it right away - no staff-swinging required! This ultimately saved about 15 minutes over the previous method, since we were now basically just airswimming straight to the K4 Warp Portal.

Later on, I got the idea that we could cancel our airswim in ThornTail Hollow while out-of-bounds, and then walk around the map and start another airswim (since walking is much faster than airswimming in this game). Zac also pointed out to me that I could start my next airswim in the sewers (originally, I was planning to start my 2nd airswim in the back of the pond in TTH near the WarpStone). This in turn saved about 20 seconds. I also discovered that glitch-loading SnowHorn Wastes by getting the camera out-of-bounds had no effect on the trick working - the only thing that really mattered was skipping a certain load trigger for objects in SnowHorn Wastes in the sewers. This in turn saved another 4 seconds or so.

After all of this, we discovered a video posted by Kazooie in 2010 where he entered SnowHorn Wastes after skipping the load trigger in the sewers during an airswim (which causes a lot of objects in SnowHorn Wastes to load as boxes). If he had just walked over to where the K4 Warp Portal was, we could have discovered K4E 11 years earlier than we did! Much like how Kazooie discovered SRM in Ocarina Of Time 13 years before people realized what it was/how much time it could save, Kazooie also found the holy grail of sequence breaks in Star Fox Adventures without anyone (including him) knowing it. Actually, hearing about this video inspired me to look through Kazooie's other old videos, which included the camera-lock video. When I showed that to Zac, he was able to discover all of the camera-lock glitches mentioned in the previous post. Kazooie strikes again!!

With that history lesson out of the way, let's describe how K4E is actually performed in this TAS:

  1. We start an airswim at the waterfall in ThornTail Hollow.
  2. We cancel our airswim out-of-bounds in TTH, and then navigate around the map to the sewers.
  3. We start another airswim using the water in the sewers.
  4. We swim to and hit a loading trigger in the middle of the sewers. This trigger is responsible for the map of SnowHorn Wastes itself loading, so if we don't hit this, the next map won't load when we get to where SHW starts, and we will just get frozen in place there.
  5. We swim around a loading trigger for the props/objects in SHW. Normally, you can't avoid hitting this trigger. However, since we are swimming out-of-bounds in the sewers, we can go around where the trigger is. As a result of this, when we enter SnowHorn Wastes, a lot of the objects will box-load (appearing as rainbow boxes, with many missing parts of their functionality and collision).
  6. We then cancel our airswim and enter SnowHorn Wastes. Although SHW is box-loaded, it's not fully glitch-loaded like it would be if we got the camera out-of-bounds. When that happens, even the terrain on the ground becomes rainbow-colored. Don't worry, however - you can see an example of that when we reach Cape Claw 3 at the end of the TAS.
  7. We use Tricky to flame the ice wall by where the blue Mammoth normally is, which still has regular collision.
  8. We shoot down the log to make a path across the water (which fortunately for us also still has regular collision).
  9. We then walk past where the gate that normally blocks the K4 warp pad is. Fortunately for us, the collision for this gate fails to load when SHW is box-loaded like this. This lets us walk right past it! Interestingly enough, there's an identical gate which blocks where Garunda Te is near the main entrance to SHW from the sewers, and this gate has it's collision loaded even when the gate is box-loaded, which means that that gate can't be skipped by box-loading. This in turn makes it even more fortunate for us that the 1 gate that fails to load out of the 2 is exactly the one that we need to skip in order to do this sequence break!
  10. We then enter the K4 Warp Portal, and warp to K4. Fortunately for us, the K4 Warp Portal here also works normally when SHW is box-loaded like this. What a lucky break!

Now then, with that lengthy preamble out of the way, let's get on with the rest of these notes, shall we?

0:10 - We start off the K4E glitch with a standard airswim on the TTH waterfall. Nothing too exotic.

0:31 - We now arrive at my one contribution to K4E! By canceling our airswim on the ledge here, we can walk around the edge of the map instead of swimming around the map. Because swimming is so slow in this game, this saves about 20 seconds compared to swimming straight to the sewers! Now, our goal is to fall half in-bounds into the tunnel that leads to the sewers.

0:53 - At this point, we are now right above the tunnel, so we fall off the ledge and to the left. This tunnel is pretty hard to land in half in-bounds: it has the same geometry as the tunnel in Ice Mountain that needs to be fallen into to get to where Tricky is without starting the race. However, if we fall onto the top seam of the ceiling of this tunnel, the game will give us a huge speed boost forwards. By constantly readjusting the angle we're holding on the control stick every few frames, we can maintain this speed boost for a long time, which lets us shoot really far forwards really fast. We then fall down half in-bounds, and continue onwards from there.

0:58 - Because we skipped certain loading triggers (due to not climbing up the ladder leading to the sewers), we need to enter first-person mode (by pressing Z) in order to make the sewers load at the edge of the map.

1:02 - Remember over an hour ago in the TAS when I did BribeClaw Skip? This part is essentially the same as the ending to that trick, but now in reverse. I cut the corners as tight as I could without falling down. Fox just barely can't make it if you try to run straight forward across the gap and avoid falling, as opposed to turning right and following the hallways of the room.

1:09 - We wait as late as possible to hit the water (since swimming is so slow). At the point where we do finally touch the water and start another airswim, the water extends so far out that even if we fell off the out-of-bounds collision completely holding left, we still couldn't avoid touching the water. We have never been in-bounds in the sewers, which means we've never switched the direction of the currents (which means they are still set to their default state of pushing Fox towards TTH/away from SnowHorn Wastes). Even if we hadn't done BribeClaw Skip, we still couldn't have changed the currents, since the currents always flip back to the way they were originally if you change them before Tricky runs away from you and you watch the "Mission Accomplished" cutscene with the Queen (one of the cutscenes that BribeClaw Skip skips - so don't be shocked if you can't remember this cutscene! :D ). Luckily for us, we barely need to swim against the currents here, since we can go around the Sewers map the opposite direction that you're expected to (the Sewers map is effectively a square, and the entrance leading to TTH is in the bottom-left corner of it. Instead of swimming to the right along the water/towards where you're supposed to swim and where the currents are, we swim straight forwards, where there's no currents). Our goal at this point is to hit the loading trigger near the halfway point of the sewers map which allows the SnowHorn Wastes map to load. Additionally, we have to avoid hitting the loading trigger that loads the objects in SHW, which is in the middle of the last waterway of the sewers that leads to where SnowHorn Wastes is.

1:18 - We have to go left here to avoid clipping back in-bounds. I show off the fact that this is a TAS by swimming just one inch to the left of the point where Fox would clip back in-bounds!

1:23 - I keep slightly to the left here, which lets me avoid entering a current that would push me backwards/towards the SHW entrance.

1:24 - I move right here, which lets me enter a current that pushes me forwards/away from the SHW entrance - saving about 2 seconds. I actually didn't notice this current when I first TASed this segment, so I ended up needing to re-do the next minute of the TAS in order to incorporate this timesave. Let it never be said that I don't redo segments in this TAS to include newly discovered timesaves!

1:31 - This is the part where Fox hits the loading trigger that enables the SnowHorn Wastes map to load (and prevents a softlock from happening when we reach the entrance to SHW). More specifically, the part where Fox veers to the right/towards in-bounds (and is at his closest point to clipping back in-bounds) is where I hit the loading trigger. The range for this trigger is a horizontal line perpendicular to the water currents, which covers the entire in-bounds portion where the water is, and extends just barely up to the point where Fox is half inside the wall here. Below, I have included an overhead picture of the sewers, which has the location of the trigger circled to make this easier to visualize. Remember that the range of the trigger is really a line perpendicular to the water currents, as opposed to just being a box as is shown here:

https://i.imgur.com/QSPddn5.jpg

1:38 - I move a bit to the right here to avoid getting pushed backwards by the currents. Also, the trigger which loads the props/objects in SHW (which we need to avoid) is located about halfway down this hallway, and is a line perpendicular to the currents that covers all in-bounds water, and extends to half in the wall. Avoiding this trigger is what prevents the K4 gate from loading.

1:42 - I move a bit to the left here in order to get a boost forwards from the currents. Then, I cancel my airswim on the land, and start walking towards SnowHorn Wastes.

1:51 - Because we skipped a load trigger for SHW's objects earlier, SHW won't load until we enter first-person mode at the edge of the map, which also causes a huge lag spike. We have to avoid rolling into the edge of the map, since Fox freezes in place when he hits the edge of the map, and we can't enter first-person mode mid-roll (which would cause us to softlock). When this is all said and done, SnowHorn Wastes loads - but with many of its objects missing. When the game can't find the data for an object on version 1.0, it displays a rainbow cube as a default placeholder for the object. On version 1.1, it uses a gray cube as a default placeholder. As you can tell by all of the rainbow cubes in this map, this TAS was made on version 1.0

1:55 - If you look closely, we are actually half in the pillar when the next map loads, since the collision for this pillar didn't exist until we entered first-person mode. Think of it like we walked into an empty void, and then the pillar/room loaded on top of us. We leave the pillar in less than a second however (it doesn't save time to walk through the walls here, and also we can't go through the wall from the pillar, since we're to the right of where the collision for the wall starts - which means we can't actually get out-of-bounds even if we wanted to).

1:59 - Remember that BribeClaw we skipped paying earlier in the TAS? Even though you can't see him or pay him when he's box-loaded like this, it turns out that his collision still exists and works normally. You would think that this would present a formidable issue for us. Fortunately, however, it does not. If you're past the BribeClaw and walk towards him, the game gives you a massive boost forward (I think it actually teleports you forwards a certain distance), since the devs never thought you could get past the BribeClaw without paying. This boost is so extreme that by angling slightly to the right, we can actually get pushed out-of-bounds and clip back in-bounds past where the BribeClaw is. Isn't that convenient? This also skips climbing up the ledge near the BribeClaw and a little bit of walking, which means doing BribeClaw skip over an hour ago let us save a few seconds here. And to think, you thought that all of the timesave for that trick was accounted for by now! :P

2:01 - Now we enter the part where it's extremely hard to see. I used 2 methods to TAS this section. First, I TASed through this section without SHW being box-loaded, so that I could see where everything was and what inputs to do. Gyoo then made me a helpful recording which showed all the inputs I did in this section, and where I did them. Additionally, while I was TASing this section, I often turned on wireframe mode in Dolphin. This makes all of the objects besides Fox transparent, which allowed me to see if Fox was moving forwards or getting pushed back by a wall. Additionally, you can see the outline of various walls and pieces of collision in this mode, which made it easier to avoid obstacles.

Here is Gyoo's video. I cut some turns a little tighter in my actual TAS of this area, and some of the objects which have collision in this normal TAS don't have collision when SHW is box-loaded, which altered my movement accordingly:

2:21 - We now need Tricky to flame the ice wall up ahead, since the ice wall loads normally. We want Tricky to teleport closer to the wall before we press the flame command, however, in order to reduce the distance that he has to run/to save time. As such, I turned and targeted and called at a precise angle/position to make Tricky appear at the closest spot to the ice wall that he could teleport to, and then immediately pressed the flame command. I have a few seconds to kill waiting after that, since my movement while waiting for the wall to break doesn't make any time difference.

You can see a snapshot here of what this area looks like when it's normally loaded, along with where the various triggers are. Note that the blue Woolly Mammoth (and its associated collision) completely fails to load in box-loaded SHW, so we can walk right through it. The giant red triangles/arrows on the ground represent triggers that Tricky can teleport to when you call him:

https://i.imgur.com/o03zxOo.jpg

2:26 - I show the Ground Quake in my sub-menu here - just to prove that I really do still have it in this file.

2:30 - This tree still works normally while SHW is box-loaded, so we can shoot it down like we normally could in order to get across. Note that the lizard enemy that would normally pop out of the ground in front of where Fox pulls out his fireblaster completely fails to load in box-loaded SHW.

2:45 - Another lizard enemy that would normally pop out of the ground here fails to load in box-loaded SHW.

2:46 - This water has a current that pushes us to the left. As such, we enter the water to the right of the spot where we want to pop out of the water on the other side. That way, we can swim straight across the river, and when we get to the other side/on land, we will be in the exact spot we wanted to be on the other side of the river.

2:49 - There's an invisible tree blocking the left half of the ground a few feet in front of the gate in normal gameplay. The collision for it actually still works here (even though the tree is invisible), so it looks like I'm dodging nothing. To see what I'm avoiding, check out 0:49 in the video Gyoo made that I posted above.

2:51 - This blue and red box you see on the ground in the entryway here is the box-loaded gate object, which renders as a rainbow cube since the game failed to load it properly (due to missing the object load trigger in the sewers). Fortunately, the collision for the gate doesn't work when it's box-loaded, so we can just waltz on into the cave where the warp pad to K4 is.

2:53 - With that, we enter the warp pad to K4! Luckily for us, this warp pad still works normally when SHW is box-loaded this way. Interestingly enough, if we were to box-load SHW from the top of Ice Mountain and then airswim down the mountain to where the warp pad is, then while the gate would still be gone, the warp pad would crash when we tried to use it. It's fortunate for us then that the warp pad is usable after going through the sewers, since it's faster to go through the sewers to reach K4 then it is to get there from the top of Ice Mountain.

(continued in the next post)

Edited by the author 2 years ago
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(continued)

3:13 - The key thing you have to remember about this area at the start of K4 is that I am waiting for a robot-arm-thing that picks up explosive barrels to reach a certain point in its back and forth cycle. This robot gets initialized to its starting position and starts moving as soon as you warp into K4. Even if I went through the next section as fast as possible, I still wouldn't even come close to making it to the next cycle (I would be more than 10 seconds too slow - even with impossibly fast movement). However, I have about 18 seconds worth of time that I can lose compared to doing the fastest movement where I will still make it to the fastest possible cycle.

3:35 - Since I have some time to kill, I go out and kill these 2 birds with my staff (I could have shot them with my fireblaster if I was in a rush, but this saves 2 fireblaster shots' worth of mana). When the birds touch an explosive barrel, it blows up immediately. If you try to take the barrel across without killing the birds, they will always hit you/the barrel, so we have to kill them first (if they hit Fox, he throws the barrel, which also makes it break - and that's ignoring the fact that we have such low health that one hit would kill us now anyways).

3:46 - If Fox tries to walk over a gap while carrying an explosive barrel, he will throw it. This is supposed to make navigating through this tiny path difficult (even moreso considering that the ground in K4 also has ice physics). However, using TAS-precision, I come as close as possible to each corner I encounter without falling off (which is why Fox looks like he does a sort of stutter step on each turn). Once we get to the other side, we break the wall open, and then run back to get another barrel. This next barrel needs to be escorted all the way to the end of K4.

4:12 - Even though I wasted time by not using the fireblaster on the birds, I still made it to where I needed to wait for the robot-arm with a huge amount of time to spare to make the fastest cycle. I spend this time running circles around the spot where I need to place the barrel. Hope you don't get dizzy watching this! :)

4:19 - If Fox starts to fall off of an edge, he will throw the barrel. This includes the ledge right in front of me by the water. I make Fox turn around as he slides over the edge. This causes Fox to throw the barrel in the direction he's facing as he goes over the edge (which is towards where the pad on the ground is). Then, the robot grabs the barrel in mid-air, since you can actually throw a barrel to the robot when it's hovering over the pad and it will pick it up (you're normally supposed to place it down). Finally, my forward momentum lets me clip back up on top of the ledge, which prevents me from falling into the water while I showboat. Note that none of this affects how long it takes for the robot to start moving again, as long as you don't wait until the last second to place the barrel (which I made sure to avoid doing here). Now the robot can carry this barrel across the water for us.

Note that it's actually possible to pick up the barrel as the robot is picking it up, and then walk forward and put it back down. This causes it to shoot up really high in the air. However, this can only make it 3/4 of the way across the water at it's furthest, so this can't be used to get the barrel across the water faster. It's also possible for the barrel to clip out of bounds through the ceiling while doing this, but that also doesn't allow for any sequence breaks.

4:23 - I wait until as late as possible to turn the switch, just to show off. If I turned the switch a frame later, the flame would hit the explosive barrel and make it explode.

4:28 - The time that I turn the switch for the last time actually does matter, since as soon as I turn the switch for the last time, I no longer need to wait for the robot arm cycle. In other words, once I reach the earliest point where I can turn the switch, my movements DO affect how fast I can proceed through the level again. As such, I turn the switch as early as I can here - which is why the flame looks like it goes straight through the barrel. It seems like the flame can be closer to the barrel when you're starting a flame vs. stopping it - which I assume is because the actual hitbox of the flame takes longer to shoot out than the visual of the flame, whereas when you stop a flame, the collision is active until the flame fully vanishes.

4:31 - These whirlpools create strong currents that can drag Fox backwards. However, I use them to my advantage to push me where I want to go. It's possible that this swimming section could be faster - this is just the fastest I was able to get it after hours of testing, but that doesn't mean it's perfect.

4:45 - We walk into the wind tunnel with the barrel instead of pressing A to throw it, since we automatically throw it without stopping when we walk into the wind, whereas Fox stops in place for 2 seconds if you press A to throw the barrel. After we throw it, we try to get out of the wind tunnel as soon as possible, since Fox moves a lot slower through the wind than on the ground.

4:51 - Idk why, but I find the way that the Sharpclaw slams face-first into the explosive barrel here to be really funny. Credits to BvQr for giving me the idea to do this by doing the same thing in his TAS.

4:54 - At long last, we blow up the wall blocking the Krazoa Spirit, and then talk to the spirit to start the test of strength.

5:05 - The test of strength is pretty simple - we just mash A every other frame until we beat the Sharpclaw. The timer starts to count down with 1 minute remaining, and we beat the Sharpclaw with 53.02 left on the timer. This is an even simpler version of the LightFoot Village MuscleFoot event, since in that event, your opponent pushes back much harder when you're close to beating them, but in this event, the Sharpclaw always pushes back with the same resistance. Additionally, the Sharpclaw can be beaten with a way slower mashing speed than the LightFoot Village one, even though this occurs later on in the game... In any event, we skip the LightFoot MuscleFoot event, since we got K3 already without doing the LightFoot trials, so you won't be seeing that event in this TAS.

5:26 - After a lot of effort and glitching, we finally grab K4! Our next major goal is therefore to go to Krazoa Palace to release K4. The fastest way to do that is to ESW back to ThornTail Hollow, since that will put us a few feet away from the WarpStone, and will skip going all the way back through SnowHorn Wastes, through the sewers, and across ThornTail Hollow.

5:52 - ...But before we do any ESWs, we grab the 2 fuel cells by the K4 Warp Portal. We can't pause for about a second and a half after regaining control of Fox after we spawn on the warp portal. This means that we can grab these 2 fuel cells before we even have the chance to pause - which means these 2 fuel cells also cost us literally 0 extra time to get compared to not getting them.

6:09 - We hit the ESW trigger near the dinosaur in TTH almost immediately. However, the game won't let us pause for the first 2 seconds or so after loading a file, so we waste that time just rolling forwards aimlessly - at which point we quit and switch files.

6:25 - By now, you may be wondering how we're actually going to die here for the ESW. This isn't Ocarina Of Time, where Fox could just pull out a bomb to kill himself. There's no enemies in the cave by the warp portal, or any height to take fall damage on. Furthermore, after getting K4, the game sets our save respawn position to be on top of the warp portal, and disables us from using the warp portal ever again. Most importantly, the gate blocking the K4 Warp Pad is now loaded normally, and since the gate has collision on both sides, we are now trapped in this room! Any ideas how we can escape?

The answer to this question is the same way we were able to die for our last ESW - we need Tricky. There's just one problem - Tricky spawns outside of the gate when the map loads, and Fox can't hit him through the gate. Still, we have ways to get around this...

We first get close enough to the gate for Tricky to load, which makes the option to call Tricky appear (which is initially disabled when we first load the area, since Tricky hasn't spawned yet). After this, we roll away from the gate while targeting, which makes the camera face in the opposite direction. When the camera is facing far enough away from Tricky, we can press call, which makes Tricky spawn at a Tricky spawn trigger which is conveniently located inside this cave on the same side of the gate as us!

From here, we just need to hit Tricky 6 times to make him flame us. We again only have 5 or so frames to spare to get in all of the hits without requiring a 7th one. I angle my slashes in a way that Tricky blocks me from moving through him, which prevents me from missing or needing to move back (which in turn would have required a 7th slash, since even with frame-perfect slashing, we only have 5 frames to spare to make Tricky flame us in 6 hits).

After Tricky flames us, we die and save+continue. Since we hit the ESW trigger in TTH and haven't hit any save triggers since then, we are set to respawn in TTH. Additionally, since we saved when we died, the game copies our inventory flags over from the file which just died. As a result of all of this, we respawn in ThornTail Hollow with K4 and the fuel cells we picked up next to the warp pad!

6:43 - As you can see, it's a very short walk from where we respawn after dying to where the WarpStone is. After talking to the WarpStone here, we are warped to Krazoa Palace.

7:28 - We spawn in the same spot in Krazoa Palace that we did when we warped here to release K3. Going up the elevator here is the same as well - we just hold up so that Fox clips up onto the platform above faster.

7:37 - We take a shortcut here to get to the spot where we release K4. Normally, you are supposed to use the first wind lift to get to another wind lift to the right. Then, you use that windlift to reach a platform, and then walk in a circle around the map until you reach the portal door in front of where you release K4. Instead, we use the first wind lift to land on the edge of a higher up windlift. We then walk around that windlift (without getting picked up by the wind) and fall onto the platform on the other side, which is right next to the portal door in front of where you release K4.

Since moving in the wind is slow, I entered the wind at the point where I could spend the least amount of time in the air before falling onto the edge of the next windlift (which is why I didn't just walk straight forward into the first windlift like I did when I was here to release K3).

7:44 - We use the portal opener for the final time in this TAS in order to open the portal door here. After that, we are able to walk into this little alcove behind where the door was and release K4! That was all a lot less effort than getting K4, now, wasn't it? :P

Also, the audio glitches out when we open the portal door, and plays sound effects that play when the WarpStone raises up the platform Fox stands on when he talks to him - not really sure why that happens...

9:19 - Releasing K4 changes the state of ThornTail Hollow. In this state, we can talk to the Gatekeeper of Dragon Rock to unlock Dragon Rock (which we couldn't do before). This also causes a few other minor side effects: the dinosaur near the egg event moves back to her original position blocking the path, the ESW trigger in TTH no longer works, and we can't unlock Walled City in this state (which is why we had to unlock it earlier). We are done with ESWs for the rest of the TAS, however, so none of these side effects really affect us. Before we go unlock Dragon Rock, we still need 2 more fuel cells to be able to reach Dragon Rock, so we go to get those now.

9:22 - This bomb plant we planted earlier is still there because where bomb plants are planted gets copied with inventory flags whenever we do an ESW. We finally blow up the plant, and enter the cave to grab the last 2 fuel cells of the TAS. We now have 27 fuel cells - the exact amount we need to beat the game. We also grab 1 heart of health from the crate in the cave, which will save time by allowing us to take damage in Dragon Rock. We couldn't have gotten health earlier because we needed 1/4 heart left when we got K4 in order to die for the ESW, and there wasn't anywhere to quickly get health in Krazoa Palace.

Also note that the textures are really messed up in this cave - for some reason, none of the textures here load properly when ThornTail Hollow's textures are glitched like this.

9:30 - We are able to roll off the edge of the waterfall holding left and make it on to the platform below, which saves a little bit of time.

9:39 - We now talk to the Dragon Rock Gatekeeper. After a very sad cutscene, Dragon Rock is unlocked!

11:00 - We now want to head over to the Arwing to go to Dragon Rock. We move to the right to avoid going deep enough into the water to start swimming (again, because swimming is really slow).

11:07 - Now to fly to Dragon Rock... Right?

It turns out, we can't fly to Dragon Rock quite yet. To understand why, we need to go over how the game determines when you can fly to a new location. The process works like this:

  1. Initially, all areas are locked besides the flight to ThornTail Hollow/Dinosaur Planet. If you try to see the names of the other areas, they show up as question marks, and can't be selected as a flight option. Additionally, entering the Arwing normally just brings up a prompt asking you if you want to enter orbit, which doesn't spend any fuel cells, and doesn't unlock any new areas.

  2. Once you talk to an area's Gatekeeper (or, in the case of Walled City, open the Portal Door which contains the Gatekeeper's power behind it), the game puts the area into an "unlockable state". What this means is, when you look at the area in orbit, you can now see its name instead of question marks, although if you enter orbit with no fuel cells, you still can't select it as a flight option at first.

  3. To fully unlock the ability to fly to the new area, you need to enter the Arwing in ThornTail Hollow with enough fuel cells to reach the next area. This will cause a prompt to appear that says "You have enough fuel cells to reach X". Once you press A to enter orbit, Fox will spend those fuel cells, and will then enter orbit with the place fully unlocked. Now, you can select the place as a flight option and fly to it like normal (you also don't need to spend those fuel cells ever again to fly there).

It's worth noting that the option to unlock a new place at the Arwing only appears when you enter the Arwing in ThornTail Hollow (i.e. you can't enter the Arwing in DIM or something and unlock a new place). Additionally, the option to unlock a new place will only appear if all previous places (in the order you're supposed to play the game) have been unlocked. This means that the option to unlock CloudRunner Fortress won't appear until after you've unlocked Dark Ice Mines, the option to unlock Walled City won't appear until after you've unlocked CloudRunner Fortress, and the option to unlock Dragon Rock won't appear until after you've unlocked Walled City.

Furthermore, you can only spend your fuel cells on unlocking one new area when you enter the Arwing (since it should be impossible to enter the Arwing in normal gameplay with 2 places in the "unlockable state" without having spent the fuel cells to fly there yet). The area you unlock when you enter the Arwing (when there are multiple valid candidates) will always be the earliest of the possible locations.

What this means for us is, since we have both Walled City and Dragon Rock in the "unlockable state" already but haven't spent any fuel cells on either of them yet, the next time we enter the Arwing in ThornTail Hollow, we will spend 12 fuel cells, unlock Walled City, and enter orbit. However, Dragon Rock still won't be unlocked at this point, and won't be selectable as a flight option. As such, we need to immediately fly back to ThornTail Hollow, and then enter the Arwing again. This time, when we enter the Arwing, we will spend our last 15 fuel cells, unlock Dragon Rock, and enter orbit. Now, we will be able to fly to Dragon Rock normally.

In short, this all means we need to do a dumb extra flight here which goes from ThornTail Hollow to ThornTail Hollow (in order to unlock Walled City). Note that if you pause the game at 11:08 and advance frame-by-frame, you can see that the prompt specifically says "You have enough Fuel Cells to reach Walled City." This is telling us which place we will unlock when we enter the Arwing.

Hope you like the flight to TTH, because it makes an extra appearance here!

11:40 - There's not a lot different between this flight and all the other flights to ThornTail Hollow, although I do finish with a new high score of 2,105 points, due in part to using barrel rolls to move left and right faster.

12:01 - One cool thing that I do differently in this flight compared to previous flights, however, is that I use a well-timed bomb shot to blow up most of the asteroids on the screen here. When a bomb hits an object, it destroys most of the nearby objects, which lets me rack up a lot of points quickly.

12:59 - As soon as we land on ThornTail Hollow, we enter the Arwing again, which spends 15 fuel cells and fully unlocks Dragon Rock for us. Now, we can fly to Dragon Rock normally. Note that if you go to 13:00 in the video and advance a few frames, you can see that the prompt on screen says "You have enough Fuel Cells to reach Dragon Rock.", which tells us that we will unlock Dragon Rock when we enter orbit this time.

13:30 - We have reached the ultimate flying-section test: we now need to get all 10 gold rings to open the Gatekeeper's force field! Fortunately, this is a TAS, so that won't be too hard for us to do.

13:45 - There's enemies outside of this tube - which is odd, because you need to enter this tube to get the gold ring, which you need in order to reach Dragon Rock (maybe they're jebait enemies?). In any event, we fire a bomb at the wall at the edge of the tunnel, which lets us blow up the enemies through the wall, along with destroying some asteroids inside of the tube.

13:57 - I figured out that I can just barely make it through this door as it opens without slowing down or taking damage, which saves a little bit of time over BvQr's TAS (where he took damage there, which loses about 3-4 frames).

13:59 - This gold ring up ahead is one that we have to shoot to make it appear.

14:02 - This section has some very tight movement - I shoot the enemy as soon as possible, and quickly barrel roll left to reach the gold ring. Then, I barrel roll right to get the bomb, fire a bomb at the cluster of enemies, grab the next gold ring, and fire my last bomb at the enemies outside of the tube. After that, I barrel roll right to just barely make it inside the tunnel without slowing down or hitting into anything. Note that it's just barely impossible to get both the silver and gold rings here without slowing down (holding 5 units higher up than I do on the control stick in the TAS gets the silver ring but not the gold ring, and any lower down either gets nothing or only gets the gold ring). As such, I only get the gold ring here.

14:20 - And, with a final score of 1,715 points, we finally make it to Dragon Rock!

14:49 - I end the video before you can see this, but I have 0 fuel cells left after landing in Dragon Rock, since I had 27 to start with, and then spent 12 to unlock Walled City and 15 to unlock Dragon Rock, and 12+15 = 27.

And that's all she wrote! I have now TASed over 2 hours of gameplay, which means I'm over 2/3rds of the way done with everything. Join me next time to see Fox take on Dragon Rock!

Edited by the author 2 years ago
United States

Hello again!

I have now finished the next segment of the TAS. In this section, we free the EarthWalker in Dragon Rock, we free the HighTop, and then we complete the HighTop autoscroller in order to unlock the final section of Dragon Rock:

The route for this section is:

  1. Place the explosive barrel on the pad, and then turn the switch to make the robot-arm start moving.
  2. Damage down to 1/2 hearts left while waiting for the robot-arm to reach the explosive barrel.
  3. Pick up the explosive barrel as the robot-arm is grabbing it, and then put it down a few steps further forwards so that it shoots up onto the ledge above Fox.
  4. Use the explosive barrel to blow up the wall.
  5. Turn the switch to free the Dragon Rock EarthWalker.
  6. Die on the flames, and save+quit.
  7. Walk over to the Dragon Rock EarthWalker to trigger his cutscene.
  8. Get on the Earthwalker, break the 4 shield generators, and get off in the center of the map.
  9. Shoot and destroy the 4 robots (each requires 4 shots - so 16 shots total).
  10. Shoot the 4 switches to free the HighTop, and grab a yellow mana gem as the shots are in mid-air about to hit the switches.
  11. Complete the HighTop autoscroller in order to open the gate to the final section of Dragon Rock.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This video starts right after Fox lands in Dragon Rock. The way Dragon Rock works is this: we need to free the Dragon Rock EarthWalker first. Then, we ride the EarthWalker, and use him to break the 4 shield generators for the robots. After this, we can destroy the 4 robots, which opens the gate where the HighTop is. We then shoot the 4 switches to free the HighTop. After this, we do an autoscroller section where the HighTop crosses the plain in order to open the gate blocking the final section of Dragon Rock. In this final section, we free the CloudRunner. We then use the CloudRunner to destroy the spires protecting the central tower, which lets us reach the boss Drakor. We then kill Drakor in order to get SpellStone 4.

We start this segment off by walking over to where the switch to free the EarthWalker is.

0:20 - We move through the flames here without slowing down. This is why we grabbed 1 heart of health back in ThornTail Hollow!

0:31 - If you look to the top-left of the screen here, you can see a breakable wall. The switch to free the EarthWalker is behind that wall, and we need to throw an explosive barrel at that wall in order to break it.

0:43 - We also have enough health to make it through the flames here without slowing down.

0:45 - We grab the explosive barrel here.

0:46 - When I first TASed this segment, I thought it was impossible to make it through the flames here without waiting for the next cycle. However, I figured out that I could keep all the way to the left and just barely make it through without taking damage (if you take damage, you automatically throw the barrel).

0:52 - The game only lets you place the barrel down on certain spots - like the pads where the robot-arm sucks the barrel up. I put the barrel down as soon as the game will let me here, and then I turn the switch to make the robot-arm start moving. Note that I tried turning the switch before going to get the explosive barrel in an earlier attempt to see if that would be any faster - and I confirmed that it doesn't work, since even with perfect flame cycles, you end up needing to wait an extra 10 or so seconds for the robot-arm to get back.

0:56 - We have some time to kill waiting for the barrel to get picked up by the robot-arm. We use that time to grab 1/2 heart from the crate, and then we take flame damage to get back down to 1/2 heart left. This is the ideal amount of health to have here for a deathwarp that we are going to do soon.

1:02 - We also have time to move the barrel forwards a little bit here from the far-away spot where we first put it down, which will save us a little time later on.

1:05 - If you pick up an explosive barrel as it's getting picked up by a robot-arm and then put it down somewhere else, the game will try to apply the original speed/direction of the barrel's movement from the new location, which can cause the barrel to shoot past the robot-arm entirely. In this case, the barrel is initially behind where the robot-arm is (meaning it's initial velocity is moving up and forwards). I then pick the barrel up and place it down far enough forwards that it misses the robot-arm entirely, and lands on the ledge up above the ladder. This all saves time, since we can pick up and throw the barrel way faster than the robot-arm can carry it over to the breakable-wall.

1:10 - I actually made the barrel land on the switch up here, which is why the first flame is stopped. I didn't need it to land there - I just thought that it looked cool (although landing this far forwards saves a few frames, since we move faster walking normally than we do when we're holding the barrel) :D

1:14 - We throw the barrel here to destroy the breakable-wall. Note that if Fox walks off the edge of the platform while holding the barrel, then he will drop it. However, the barrel travels way less distance when Fox drops it, and in this case, the explosive barrel won't be close enough to the breakable wall to blow it up if Fox drops off the platform with it. Thus, we have to throw it here instead.

1:21 - We wanted to have 1/2 heart left so that we could take 1 hit from the flames in this room. If we only had 1/4 hearts left, then we would either have to go counter-clockwise/the long way around the room, or shield in place until the flames passed through us - both of which are slow.

1:23 - We turn the switch to free the EarthWalker here.

1:26 - Our next goal is to talk to the EarthWalker. The fastest way to get to him is to deathwarp out of here. As such, we run into a flame here to die. We then save+continue, which makes us respawn next to the Arwing with the EarthWalker freed (note that if we didn't save after dying here, then the EarthWalker wouldn't be free after we re-spawned).

1:36 - The EarthWalker cutscene will trigger as soon as we get close enough to the EarthWalker. We equip the fireblaster here, since we can't equip it while riding the EarthWalker, and we want to use it as soon as we get off the EarthWalker later on. Additionally, we intentionally take 1 hit of damage from the robot while on the way to the EarthWalker. This will leave us with 1 heart left - which we will later use to die after hitting an explosive barrel once for a deathwarp (which deals 1 heart of damage).

1:50 - We talk to the EarthWalker here... "Now get on my back! Let's do some damage!!!!!"

2:40 - Our next goal is to break the 4 shield generators. After they are destroyed, we can kill the 4 robots and free the HighTop (each robot is invincible before you break their shield generator). We can actually climb onto the EarthWalker without going up onto that little ledge if we roll next to the edge of the platform - which we do here to save a little bit of time.

2:43 - The controls on the EarthWalker are pretty simple - hold the direction you want to move, and press A to do a tusk attack to break a shield generator when you're near it.

2:54 - We break the first shield generator here. Note that the order I break the shield generators in is the fastest order (there's really only 1 alternate order that could be done by swapping the 2nd and 3rd ones, but this is slower. Any other combination is obviously much slower).

3:00 - We swerve back and forth a few times here to make this robot miss. If a robot hits the EarthWalker, he gets frozen in place/stunned for a second, so we would lose a lot of time if we got hit.

3:06 - We destroy the 2nd shield generator here. Then, we turn clockwise to turn around, since we're already facing at about 2 O'Clock, which makes this about a second faster than turning the other direction to turn around.

3:09 - I manipulate this robot to just barely miss hitting me.

3:15 - We destroy the 3rd shield generator here. It looks like we can pass through the gap between the wall and the rock near us, but for some reason we can't (I'm not sure if going through there would have saved time anyways, tbh).

3:21 - We destroy the 4th and final shield generator here. Our next goal is to get off of the EarthWalker. The game only lets you dismount if you press A near one of the mounting-pads. There are 2 mounting pads in Dragon Rock: one is where we first got onto the EarthWalker, and the other is right next to the last shield generator we destroyed. As such, we head towards the mounting pad near the last shield generator.

3:22 - We do some careful maneuvering here to dodge the robot's shot, and then continue on our way to the mounting pad.

3:24 - We dismount from the EarthWalker here.

3:26 - We fire 4 shots right after we get off the EarthWalker in order to destroy the first robot. We then start moving towards the next robot.

3:34 - I should probably explain how shooting these robots from so far away works: basically, the fireblaster shots can go a certain maximum distance from the position where Fox last held the fireblaster in his hands (in aiming mode) before they despawn. If Fox is within that circle of the robots (the circle whose radius is this maximum distance and whose center is where the robot is), then he can shoot at the robots. Otherwise, his shots will despawn before the robots are hit. Adding onto this, if the camera is facing too far away from the shots (in both direction and position), then the shots can also despawn, so this needs to be kept in mind as well. There's also one more peculiarity in all of this: Fox takes a step back when he puts his fireblaster away, and this causes the game to register the position that Fox last held the fireblaster as 1 step back from where he fired the shots. This means that we actually need to be 1 step past the edge of this circle, or we won't be able to put the fireblaster away and move around while the shots are moving (since this would cause the shots to be considered too far away from their starting point - making them despawn before hitting the robot).

We fire 4 shots at this point, which is at the outermost edge of the circle where we can hit the robot. Then, after 3 frames of delayed movement, we can move at full speed towards the 3rd robot, and the robot we shot at will be fully destroyed!

3:43 - We fire 4 shots to destroy the 3rd robot here from the edge of the range where it can be hit. In this case, we don't need to delay at all before we keep moving. We can destroy the last robot while on the way to the gate to the HighTop, so we don't have to go out of our way at all. We shot the first robot as soon as we dismounted, which means that only the 2nd and 3rd robots have some ambiguity as to where the best place to shoot them could be.

3:55 - We fire 4 shots to destroy the 4th and final robot here. We also roll as the cutscene of the gate opening is playing, since Fox maintains his roll momentum during this cutscene. Now that the gate is open, we can get into the area where the HighTop is.

4:07 - To free the HighTop, we need to shoot the 4 switches around him. Each switch has a time limit, where it unsets (and the rope/chain comes back out) if you don't hit all 4 switches fast enough. Of course, since this is a TAS, that time limit won't be an issue for us at all. You're also supposed to rocket boost up before you shoot the switches, but nothing stops us from doing it from the ground below in order to save time (this would normally be harder for a player in real-time, but again, since this is a TAS, it's not an issue).

There's sometimes a long delay after you shoot the 4th switch before the cutscene of the HighTop breaking free starts. Rena looked into it for me, and found out that the delay is caused because each rope object/some object near them has a random chance of playing a deleted sound effect. If a deleted sound effect plays, the cutscene won't start until it's finished playing (but since the sound effect is deleted, you can't hear it). Fortunately, Rena also discovered that if we shoot the switches from right to left (instead of left to right), then there will be no delay between when we hit the last switch and when the HighTop breaking free cutscene starts. Thus, we shoot the switches from right-to-left here. Why does this work? Who knows?

4:09 - While the fireblaster shots are on their way to hit the switches, we quickly roll, pull out our staff, and start swinging at the mana gem plant. The cutscene of the HighTop breaking free starts playing when Fox is part-way through his staff-swinging animation. However, the game lets Fox finish his staff-swinging animation if he's in the middle of it when this cutscene starts, so we still hit the plant. Then yellow mana gem then falls off the plant and lands directly on top of Fox, and seemingly goes right through him. It may look like we didn't collect the mana gem, but in reality, when this cutscene ends, you can see that this refill was added to our mana meter, which proves that we really did get the mana gem (and we did so with 0 added time to collect it, since we were waiting for the cutscene to start anyways).

4:53 - We now arrive at the 2nd and last autoscroller of this TAS (the first one was the egg event). In this section, we need to shoot the missiles to protect the HighTop while he walks around the map. When he reaches the gate, a cutscene will play where he will unlock it, and the autoscroller will end. If you look at my mana bar here, you can see that we successfully got the refill. For some reason, the HighTop chooses to walk counter-clockwise around the map, even though if he walked clockwise he would only have to walk around 1/5 the circumference of the map instead of 4/5 of the circumference of the map.

I originally wanted to shoot the missiles before any of them appeared. However, while the timing for when missiles appear is scripted, where the missiles actually spawn is RNG, and aiming the fireblaster and shooting it all manipulate RNG. To hit the missiles on the frame they appear, we need to fire a shot 40 frames before they spawn (since that's how long it takes for the shot to travel far enough to hit it). The odds of firing in a certain spot and hitting a missile aren't great. They're definitely 1/6 or less, which makes anything more than hitting 2 missiles that spawn at the same time on the frame they appear impractical. Thus, I only hit the first few missiles on the first frame that they appear.

I also wanted to at least shoot the missiles as fast as possible once they were all on screen. However, when I watched back my TAS, I saw that the constant jerking of the fireblaster for 3 minutes straight was really dizzying and nauseating. As such, I adjusted this segment so that I aim the fireblaster pretty much as slowly as possible for each shot.

5:02 - We can shoot the blue GrubTub on the ground here, although this doesn't really do anything.

5:40 - You can also shoot the EarthWalker on the ground while you pass by here. This lets you see the animation that plays when he gets damaged. Note that he can't move while this animation is playing - which is why I would have lost time if I had taken damage while riding him earlier.

7:20 - This is the final barrage of missiles. As such, I decided to shoot all of these missiles as fast as possible once they had all appeared on screen.

7:28 - This is one of the few version differences between versions 1.1 and 1.0. On version 1.1, the autoscroller would end right here, and the cutscene would play now. Since this TAS is on version 1.0, however, the cutscene doesn't play for another 12 seconds. This means version 1.1 might make for a faster TAS - although barrel clip in Ice Mountain doesn't work on 1.1, so the timeloss from that would have to be weighed against the timeloss here. The only other version differences that affect this TAS are that areas with unloaded objects have rainbow cubes in 1.0, as opposed to the gray cubes they would have if this TAS was made on version 1.1.

7:37 - No missiles are fired during this 12 second gap, so I just spend this time looking around. If you look to the right, you can see the HighTop's head for a few seconds while he's turning.

7:40 - We are now at the end of the HighTop autoscroller. The HighTop opens the gate for us here, which allows us to reach the last area of Dragon Rock (the CloudRunner is located beyond this gate). And with that, this segment is over!

And that's all she wrote! Join me next time to see Fox beat Dragon Rock and collect SpellStone 4 - our final SpellStone of the TAS!

United States

Hello again everybody!

It's been a while since I posted my last segment. I had the 'rona, so that kind of ended up delaying my progress. However, I'm pleased to announce that the next segment is done!

In this segment, we beat Dragon Rock, collect Spellstone 4, and fly back to ThornTail Hollow:

The route for this section is:

  1. Kill the 2 flame dinosaurs to open the lifeforce door (each requires 8 shots - so 16 shots total).
  2. Throw the explosive barrel through the wall so it lands on the ledge up above.
  3. Climb up the ladder, pick up the explosive barrel, and use it to break the wall above where the CloudRunner is.
  4. Turn the switch to move the CloudRunner's cage.
  5. Have Tricky flame the CloudRunner to free him on the same frame that we die from an explosive barrel to skip the cutscene of the CloudRunner breaking free.
  6. Save+Continue, and walk up to the CloudRunner and talk to him.
  7. Destroy the 4 spires.
  8. Kill Drakor - which gives us Spellstone 4 and 7 hearts.
  9. Fly back to ThornTail Hollow.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This video starts right after we finish the HighTop autoscroller section and unlock the last section of Dragon Rock. Our next goal is to free the CloudRunner, since we need him to reach Drakor. In order to do this, we need to kill the enemies to unlock the lifeforce door. Then, we need to bring an explosive barrel to the upper level, break a hole in the wall, and turn the switch to make the CloudRunner's cage start moving. From there, we can have Tricky flame the grate to free the CloudRunner.

0:12 - The first thing we need to do is to open the lifeforce door. To do this, we need to kill the 2 Fire Crawlers near the explosive barrel generator. There's a third Fire Crawler at the start of this area which we don't kill - for some reason, it isn't required to unlock the life force door (which was probably a mistake by the devs, tbh). The way these enemies work is that after you hit them once, they curl up into a ball. One second later, they then become vulnerable to your attacks, and hitting them 7 times in this state will kill them.

In this case, I fire 1 shot at the nearby Fire Crawler, followed by 1 shot at the far-side Fire Crawler. I then wait a second for the first Fire Crawler to be vulnerable to damage again. After this, I fire 7 shots at the near Fire Crawler and 7 shots at the far Fire Crawler in order to kill them both. I then put the fireblaster away and roll towards the explosive barrels as the cutscene of the lifeforce door unlocking plays, since you carry your momentum through this cutscene.

Note that I tested all 4 combinations of stunning and shooting the Fire Crawlers (stunning close first vs stunning far first, followed by killing close first vs killing far first), and determined that stunning close first, then stunning far, then killing the close one, and then killing the far one was the fastest option - but only by 1 frame (all options were basically the same total amount of time).

0:20 - Now that the lifeforce door is gone, we need to get an explosive barrel onto the upper level. The way that you're supposed to do this in regular gameplay is as follows: You step on the switch next to the explosive barrels, and a robot-arm starts moving. It picks up the explosive barrel when it reaches it. Then, you shoot the switches to turn the flames off while it carries the barrel across, with the barrel eventually being dropped off at the upper level.

Instead of doing all of that, we simply throw the explosive barrel through the wall. This causes it to reach a windlift which is inside of that wall, which pushes the barrel up onto a platform - thus bypassing this whole barrel escort, and saving about 40 seconds.

0:26 - We need to call Tricky here to manipulate his position. This will be important when we do a Tricky teleport later on (by using the call command facing the right direction), as this is necessary to move Tricky far enough along that we can do the teleport. Otherwise, Tricky would be too close to the camera when we call him later on for the teleport to work, which would lose us time. Also, Tricky doesn't move or respond to call commands at all while Fox is on the upper level, which is why we need to do this before we go up the ladder.

0:40 - It's faster to take damage on the flames here, and we have the health to spare, so we do just that.

0:44 - After we pick up the explosive barrel, we walk into the wind tunnel, which causes Fox to throw it without stopping (if we pressed A to throw it, Fox would stop in place for a second while throwing). I tried to get the explosive barrel to land on the opposite ledge when I was doing my throw through the wall earlier, but I couldn't find any way to make that possible (and I don't even know if it's possible at all).

0:50 - We finally throw the explosive barrel and break a hole in the wall.

0:54 - We turn the switch up here, which makes the CloudRunner's cage start moving. In order to free him, Tricky has to flame the grate while the rope on the CloudRunner's cage is lined up with the hole in the pipe. In normal gameplay (and in speedruns as well), most people will turn the switch twice: once to make it start moving, and once to stop it from moving when it's lined up with the hole. However, using fast TAS-strats, I can just barely get Tricky to flame the CloudRunner before it moves out of range of the hole. This in turn saves 4 seconds, since it skips waiting for the cage to move and turning the switch a second time before jumping down.

0:57 - Now, we do the Tricky teleport that I mentioned earlier. Normally, Tricky would be visible on screen here when I turned right, which would stop him from teleporting closer. However, calling Tricky earlier on kept him far enough forwards to be out of view, which makes this work. Tricky teleporting saves 70 frames over calling him normally, which it turns out is necessary in order to get Tricky to flame the grate before the cage moves past it (thus, we need to make Tricky teleport in order to skip turning the switch for the 2nd time as well).

We call Tricky 2 times in mid-air, which makes him spawn relatively close to us/near the grate. We then use the flame command next to the grate to make Tricky start running over to flame it.

You can see in this picture approximately where Tricky spawns after we do the 2 call commands, which is also the closest point to the grate that we can make Tricky spawn:

https://i.imgur.com/EcgYuW5.png

1:00 - You might think that after telling Tricky to flame, we would just do nothing and wait for the cutscene of the CloudRunner being freed to start. However, that is not the case! Instead, we run over to the explosive barrel, and slash it with our staff on the right frame so that Fox dies on the same frame that the cutscene of the CloudRunner breaking free would start. This in turn lets us completely skip the cutscene of the CloudRunner breaking free, which saves about 17 seconds! All we have to do now is save after dying in order for the game to keep the CloudRunner freed (it would be un-freed if we didn't save, since we would lose all of our progress since we got off the HighTop in that case). We can then walk over to the CloudRunner after re-spawning and talk to him, which lets us start the section where we destroy the spires.

This is actually one of the few tricks/skips that I discovered in this game completely on my own. I tested dying at the start of pretty much every cutscene in the game, and found that this was the only one that could be skipped by dying as the cutscene starts. Hitting the explosive barrel does 1 heart of damage, which is why I wanted to make sure I took at least 1 hit of damage before reaching this spot (I had 1 + 1/4 hearts right after my earlier deathwarp right after I freed the EarthWalker in Dragon Rock). I hope you enjoyed this sequence break! :D

Here is a comparison video which shows how much faster it is to skip this cutscene as opposed to watching it normally. Technically, I use a slower Tricky spawn in this video, but it doesn't matter, since both videos have Tricky flame the cage on the same frame, and the movement is perfectly optimized after that for both videos, which let's you see the full time difference between the two methods:

1:21 - We talk to the CloudRunner here, which lets us start the spire section. Actually, the whole point behind everything we did so far in Dragon Rock was to reach this spire section - We freed the EarthWalker in order to reach the HighTop, we freed the HighTop in order to reach the CloudRunner, we freed the CloudRunner in order to do the spire section, and we will do the spire section in order to reach Drakor - who we kill to get Spellstone 4.

This section of destroying the spires was the bane of my childhood, and I was stuck on it for months. This made it all the more satisfying for me to destroy the spires as fast as I did here! :D

1:34 - There are 4 spires, and each requires 20 hits to destroy. Special thanks to Rena for finding the addresses of the health of the spires for me! The health of each spire is initialized to 20, it goes down by 1 when it's shot, and at 0, the spire explodes.

1:35 - We quickly fire 20 shots to destroy this spire - which is normally the 4th/last spire that would be destroyed during casual gameplay.

1:40 - We fire 20 shots up-right from us, which lets us destroy the spire that would normally be destroyed 2nd in casual gameplay.

1:43 - We fire enough shots to destroy the spire which most casual players would normally destroy 1st. We still can't reach the final spire until the CloudRunner has made 1 turn, however.

1:54 - I shoot the 3 blue grubtubs on the ground just to kill time while waiting for the CloudRunner to turn.

2:00 - We fire 20 shots up-right to destroy the last spire here (which most casual players would destroy 3rd). Note that we don't need to blow up any of the missiles here, since we destroy the last spire 20 frames before we would take damage from the missiles fired by the 2nd tower.

With all 4 spires destroyed, a cutscene plays, and we enter the Drakor boss fight!

2:52 - Drakor's hitbox is really weird. He basically has 2 hitboxes: a big one covering/extending out from his arm cannon, and a small one in the center of his chest. Here is a picture with collision viewer enabled showing what Drakor's hitboxes look like which was made by Rena:

https://i.imgur.com/B0ATJbx.png

Since Drakor's collision on his cannon is a cone extending outwards, if he points his cannon across his body, then his hitbox can extend across his body. Basically, the devs programmed Drakor as a meme when they were rushing to finish the game - which is also why your health doesn't get refilled at the start of the fight (and if you save+quit, you will have that health whenever you re-load the file).

In any event, the way Drakor is programmed is that his health is initialized to 50, and goes down by 1 each time he is shot. Drakor dies when you hit him when he has 0 health left, which means it takes 51 hits total to kill him. Special thanks to Rena again for finding me the memory address of Drakor's health, which made this fight way easier to TAS!

2:53 - We start shooting Drakor on his cannon/chest as fast as possible. We are blocked from shooting him 2 times when we fly under some pillars, but we go back to shooting him as quickly as possible once we get out from under them. This is one of my favorite parts of the TAS, because we kill Drakor so quickly that his intro cutscene is more than 5 times as long as the fight was. In the end, we kill Drakor before he even completes his first turn out of the first hallway, lmao!

2:59 - And with that, Drakor is killed, and we collect Spellstone 4.

3:33 - The game gives us 7 hearts here, and refills all of our health as well.

3:51 - The end of this cutscene takes us straight to orbit, and skips the usual cutscene of Fox getting into the Arwing and flying off, which saves us a nice bit of time. Our next goal is to fly back to ThornTail Hollow so that we can place Spellstones 2 and 4 in the Ocean Force Point Temple.

3:56 - We start yet another flight to ThornTail Hollow here... Have you seen the earlier flights to ThornTail Hollow? Well then you've seen this flight too!

4:48 - We finish this flight section with 2,025 total points (we get a 200 point bonus for finishing with all 10 gold rings), which puts us in 2nd place out of all of our flights to ThornTail Hollow, and is less than 100 points away from first place.

5:02 - Part of the reason why I included the flight back to ThornTail Hollow in this segment is that, in an earlier route I made, the game would crash when Fox entered ThornTail Hollow unless we saved and quit once in Dragon Rock. This no longer happens in the current route - the issue is caused by the memory leak at ThornTail Hollow that results in the messed up textures, and is also based on how many times you've saved+quit before you next try to load ThornTail Hollow. In this route, the textures are still messed up when we land, but the game doesn't crash, so we're good to go (when it crashed, the screen would just stay black at the end of the flight section and then nothing would happen, and the game would just be stuck there).

That's the end of this section! I now have over 75% of the TAS finished (by total gameplay time). Join me next time to see Fox finally travel to the Ocean Force Point Temple to start his quest of placing Spellstones 2 and 4!

Edited by the author 1 year ago
zcanann and josejavier1158 like this
United States

Do you enjoy swimming sections in video games? Do you find yourself wishing that you could swim out of bounds into the void for several minutes? Then boy, have I got the segment for you!

Welcome back everybody! It's been almost 2 months since I last posted a new segment. However, this segment is basically the same length as most of my other segments. The reason for the long delay is that I spent a lot of this time testing things out, routing, writing new Dolphin scripts, and getting help from Zac on executing certain tricks (to be explained below).

Here are the things that me and Zac did which took a while:

  1. Coming up with a damage route. -It saves 10 seconds to die at Krazoa Palace after releasing K5 instead of saving and quitting. -This makes finding a fast way to take enough damage to die here very important. -Some enemies are impossible to manip to take damage, and others can be manipulated if you look at their code. -I originally wanted to take damage on the Giant Sharpclaws, since their lunge does 1 heart of damage. -However, all 3 took about a second to lunge at Fox, and from looking at their code in the reverse-engineering tool known as Ghidra, I determined that they lunge when Fox is a certain distance range away from them and a timer which reaches 1 once every second reaches 1. This means that in most cases, including the time it takes to stand far away from the Sharpclaws to be in lunge range and the timer that is set when the enemy first loads (and which never changes), all 3 of them took between 45-60 frames each to take damage on with optimal movement from when they loaded up to reaching them. This made them not viable. Special thanks to Rena for helping me learn how to use Ghidra, and for explaining how the types and functions in the game work (without this, I couldn't have figured this out).

  2. Manipulating the electric tile puzzle: -When you enter the Ocean Force Point Temple (going past the sliding door), the electric tile puzzle gets set to a random pattern. The fastest possible pattern would be 111 111, where all 6 switches are in the first column. There are 4 columns in each row, and which one is selected is RNG, so there's a 1/4096 chance of getting this pattern. To get around this, Zac wrote a custom Dolphin build which could insert arbitrary D-pad presses, C-Stick movements, and Y presses over a pre-existing movie. The script would load a savestate before loading OFPT, and the movie would end shortly after loading the next area. The script would then check that Fox made it to the end, and output the resulting movie file when the electric tile puzzle had a 111 111 pattern. Using many, many hours worth of this script, I was able to manipulate the 111 111 pattern with no timeloss! Also, credits to Zac for not only figuring out how the electric tile puzzle works, but also for determining that in OFPT 2, the default pattern is always used, which is 123 000 000 (where 0 lets you walk through any tile). Technically, I discovered this while TASing earlier, but Zac figured out why this actually works. It's convenient that this is the pattern we get, since trying to manipulate 111 111 111 to happen would be pretty horrendous.

  3. Redoing old work: -After finishing the 111 111 manip in OFPT, I discovered that I could take damage by falling into the fire gem room, while only losing 1 frame. As such, I went back and re-did everything from when I fell into the fire gem room up to and including the 111 111 manip. I used a DTMEditor to help with this (and I also made a custom dolphin build that enabled re-loading movie files on command, since Dolphin normally reads the movie file once into memory and then never goes back to look at the file in the disk), although it only really worked up to the savewarp with the fire gem. After that, I used an encode of inputs made by Gyoo to quickly re-TAS the next section. Special thanks to Gyoo for the help! :D

  4. More RNG Manip: -For my route, I also discovered that taking damage on the lizard things that come out of the ground in the beach was pretty fast, if they spawned at the right spot. Where these enemies spawn (who are called Kooshies in the game) is pure RNG, although it's basically a circle of coordinates within a maximum possible radius/distance from their pre-defined starting point. I modified Zac's script to make a new script which could do random inputs and compare the distance of the enemy to a desirable spawn point I chose. The movie that produced that spawn point would then be written out to a folder if it was faster than the previous closest attempt. I made use of this script in this section, and I will use it one more time later on (spoiler alert!)

...OK. With that all out of the way, let's get onto the segment description. In this section, Fox travels to Cape Claw using an airswim, collects the fire gem in Cape Claw, enters the Ocean Force Point Temple, and warps to Ocean Force Point Temple Interior 1:

The route for this section is:

  1. Grab 2 blue Grub Tubs in TTH.
  2. Start an airswim in the TTH waterfall.
  3. Cancel the airswim at the edge of TTH.
  4. Walk half in the wall around the TTH link map, and then start a 2nd airswim in the water there.
  5. Swim through Light Foot Village.
  6. Move the camera out-of-bounds in Light Foot Village (this makes Cape Claw glitch-load).
  7. Swim into the glitch-loaded Cape Claw.
  8. Swim to the objects/props-loading trigger at the start of Cape Claw.
  9. Swim to the statue's mouth, and cancel Fox's airswim on the corner of the mouth.
  10. Walk around the fire gem door room half in the wall until we hit the save trigger after the fire gem door.
  11. Fall down to the room below the fire gem door, and take 1/4 heart of damage in the process (down to 6 + 3/4 hearts left).
  12. Navigate around the flames trigger in the room below the fire gem door, and grab the fire gem that's down there.
  13. Savewarp back to past the fire gem door.
  14. Enter the OFPT link map, and do Indiana Jones Skip (skips solving the block puzzle).
  15. Do the RNG manip to get the 111 111 electric tile pattern.
  16. RNG manip the Kooshy to take 1/4 heart of damage on it (costs us 2 frames, and gets us down to 6 + 1/2 heart left).
  17. Open the Spellstone gate.
  18. Walk through the electric tile puzzle, enter the water, and take 1/4 heart of damage on the water enemy (gets us down to 6 + 1/4 hearts left).
  19. Turn the switch to make the colored flame turn on.
  20. Do window jump to get to the platform with the warp portal on it.
  21. Grab a blue grubtub while waiting for the flame to turn green (last blue grubtub we collect in the TAS).
  22. Shoot the switch to activate the warp portal, and press A on the frame that the cutscene of the orb being hit starts in order to start warping to OFPT 1 during this cutscene.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This segment starts off right after we fly back to ThornTail Hollow with Spellstone 4. Our next goal is to reach the Ocean Force Point Temple. Once there, we can place Spellstone 2, which sets the flags that let us use the warp portal to place Spellstone 4. After that, we can place Spellstone 4, which sets the flags for Walled City 2 to load when we get there, which is what allows for us to use the warp portal to reach Krazoa Spirit Trial 5 (which we need to beat the game). The entrance to OFPT is in Cape Claw, so that's where we're headed now.

...Of course, we still can't walk directly to Cape Claw. For one thing, we never got the big scarab bag, so we can't open the gate in LightFoot Village. Additionally, we never opened the fire gem door, so we need to airswim past it (in other words, we need to airswim into Cape Claw itself, and not just cancel our airswim in the well like we did when we went to Cape Claw 1). Fortunately, we can solve both of these problems by airswimming directly to Cape Claw. There's just one problem: the Cape Claw map won't load unless you hit a load trigger in the Cape Claw Well which is too far below our airswim height for us to reach. Surprisingly, there's a way around this - which is that we can swim through LightFoot Village into a secret entrance that loads the Cape Claw map. While it is true that the Cape Claw and LFV maps are adjacent, it makes no sense that there's a certain spot on this map that will let you load the Cape Claw map (when you enter a map cell without hitting the right loading triggers, you generally just freeze in place - which is what would happen if we tried to swim through the well exit into Cape Claw). But it's a good thing that it works, because it makes this next section a lot faster! The only other way to reach Cape Claw in an airswim would be to staff-swing for 5 minutes through LFV until we reached the bottom of the Cape Claw well, which would be painfully slow.

With that all out of the way, we now head over to the waterfall in TTH one last time in order to start an airswim.

0:06 - But before we do that, I quickly grab 2 blue grubtubs with 1 staff swing. We only need Tricky to flame 1 more time in this TAS, but we need him to be full later on in order to do a cam-lock. This means that we will still need to collect 1 more blue grubtub before the end of the TAS in order to have enough for the trick.

0:15 - Just like several times before, we start an airswim on this waterfall.

0:36 - Once again, we cancel our airswim on this ledge.

0:42 - I didn't realize this until I finished TASing up to the Ocean Force Point Temple, but I could have taken fall damage here by rolling on the same frame that I fell to the ledge. This would do 1/4 heart of damage, and would only cost me 1 frame. As such, it would have saved me 4 frames if I took damage there instead of the slowest point in my TAS where I take damage. However, I would have needed to re-do the whole section to include this change, so I decided to leave this as an improvement for a future TASer. :)

0:50 - This part looks different than it did the last time I did an airswim to Cape Claw. A few months after I TASed going to Cape Claw, Fuzzyness discovered that Fox could land on the ground collision which is next to the water, and then run around the water. Because swimming is so slow in this game, this saves a little bit of time. Strangely, though, if Fox doesn't move a little forward to the right of the corner of the ledge, then when he drops down to the left, he will always miss the collision on the ground and fall into the void. To fix this, we move diagonal up-right for about 3 frames, then roll back down-left for another 3 or so frames, and then back forwards/up-left.

0:55 - We start our final airswim for this trick here. We make sure to land in the water as low as possible since this minimizes the amount that we have to turn to the left prematurely to avoid clipping back in-bounds while we float up. The spot where we land in the water also hits the loading triggers for LightFoot Village, which lets us swim directly into LightFoot Village without a lag spike happening and us needing to zoom in first-person mode to make the next area load. From here, we swim directly into the LFV link map.

1:05 - We load the LFV link map here. Our next goal is to swim into LightFoot Village. However, we need to get past the gate to LightFoot Village before we swim into LFV, since otherwise, we will load some objects/props that will block Cape Claw from loading.

1:13 - Now that we are past the LFV gate, we swim to the right to enter LFV. Cape Claw's map cell is located at the far end of LFV. We can't go directly across/under LFV, however, since there is water on the edges of LFV, which will make us both change water height to be too high to cancel our airswim in Cape Claw and will make us clip back in-bounds. Additionally, we also can't swim in a straight line from LFV Link to the corner of the LFV map, since the 2 maps alternate which one is loaded at a certain point when Fox is close enough to the corner of the LFV map. As such, we enter LFV at the spot closest to the corner that we can enter without the area unloading and causing us to get stuck in the water/needing to enter first-person mode to load the next area.

1:22 - We enter LFV here, so we are now able to turn left to start swimming towards the corner of the map.

1:36 - This water that's above us near the corner is a water height which is close enough to our current water height that Fox's swim height would get set to the top of that water if we swam directly under it, which would make us float up to the top of the water (which would ruin the trick for the aforementioned reasons). As such, I cut this turn around the corner as close as possible without actually going under this water. You can see how close I got to going under the water here!

1:37 - Now that we are past the corner of the LFV map, we turn towards the direction where the entrance to Cape Claw is, and start swimming directly towards it. We are going to enter Cape Claw from the back of the map (near the HighTop who collects our gold bars), which means that we want to enter Cape Claw as low down on this side of LFV as possible in order to minimize swim time (if we entered further up, we would have wasted the time it took to swim up, and would also have to swim that same distance down once we enter Cape Claw, which would further waste time). As such, the spot that I enter Cape Claw is waaaaaaay earlier than when RTA runners would be comfortable doing (since entering Cape Claw even a frame earlier would be too far down to use the secret entrance to Cape Claw, so the map wouldn't load and we would be frozen OOB forever).

1:57 - In order to get from OFPT back to TTH at the end of the game, we need a way to escape from behind the fire gem door in OFPT. To do this, we need to collect 1 of the fire gems. The fire gem in the room under the fire gem door is the faster of the 2 to collect, so we get it in this route. There's just 1 issue: the props/objects of Cape Claw won't load when we enter it from this secret entrance (and that includes the fire gem). If we enter CC through this secret entrance and then hit the props trigger at the start of CC to load the objects, then the game will crash, since it wasn't expecting to load certain things in this order (or something like that). To get around this, however, we get the camera to swing out-of-bounds here at the edge of LFV, before we enter CC. This will cause Cape Claw to glitch-load when we enter it (everything will be rainbow cubes), which will let us hit the props load trigger without crashing the game, which in turn will let us get the fire gem.

2:01 - We need the camera to be facing LFV in order for us to enter the Cape Claw map. As such, I turn and L-target here, which makes the camera turn to face LFV without Fox needing to enter first-person mode (which saves us the time that it would take to cancel first-person mode). After I target, a lag spike occurs, and Cape Claw glitch loads.

2:08 - Now for the big reveal - everything in Cape Claw is rainbow boxes! This is a side effect of the glitch-loading of Cape Claw we just did (as a result of the camera going OOB, the next area we enter is glitch-loaded), and also a result of playing on version 1.0 (the rainbow boxes are gray boxes if we aren't playing on version 1.0, although this cosmetic change doesn't affect the trick).

2:14 - After we enter Cape Claw, we can't swim straight to the props load trigger. To see why, take a look at the following diagram that I've made:

https://i.imgur.com/XRMgTFE.png

The lower of the two red dots in the lower right-hand corner represents where we enter Cape Claw from (this spot touches the LFV map), and the higher of the 2 red dots is the spot where we turn left. The diagonal line on the left side of the diagram is the props/objects load trigger. The dark blue solid areas around the edges of the diagram are all considered by the game to be OOB, and Fox will freeze in place and softlock if we touch them.

Basically, since this weird rectangle juts out at the bottom right corner of Cape Claw, it touches LightFoot Village. Conveniently, we are able to load the CC map if we go through that area with the triggers we hit/miss while swimming through LFV (which is not the case for the edge of the Cape Claw well where it borders Cape Claw). However, to avoid getting frozen OOB, we need to swim up for a while to reach the spot where this rectangle meets up with the bottom of the main wall on this side of Cape Claw. After that, we can turn left, and start swimming towards the props trigger.

This timestamp corresponds to when Fox starts turning left to swim to the props trigger (which is also when we've hit the edge of the rectangle/the higher of the 2 red dots).

2:57 - This is the spot where we hit the props loading trigger, which loads the fire gem object. If we didn't glitch-load Cape Claw, then the game would hard-crash when we hit this point. The exact moment where Fox clips back in-bounds is when we hit this trigger, which is angled in an odd way relative to the walls. To show you what I mean, I've made a close-up diagram that shows were the props loading trigger is:

https://i.imgur.com/knobqfh.png

Note that once we go back in-bounds to hit this trigger, we can't go back OOB through the normal CC entrance, since the game will freeze if we enter it without loading the well, causing a softlock. We do need to get back OOB to get around the fire gem door, however. Fortunately, we can do that by swimming over the waterfall - which we start swimming towards now.

3:10 - Since our swim height is high enough, we can swim over this waterfall to get back out-of-bounds. This waterfall has a height which is slightly less than our swim height. Actually, with a certain position and angle, Fox can cancel his airswim on this waterfall, but we don't want to do that, so we avoid doing that here.

3:15 - At this point, we have 2 goals: we want to hit the save trigger after the fire gem door, and we want to grab the fire gem which is in the room below the fire gem door. It's worth noting that if we canceled our airswim and tried to enter Ocean Force Point Temple right now, we would freeze in place and the area wouldn't load, causing a softlock. As such, we need to save+quit after hitting the save trigger, since when we re-load the file, we will be past the fire gem door and Cape Claw will no longer be glitch-loaded, which will enable Ocean Force Point Temple to load normally. Of course, since the room with the fire gem is below the fire gem door, once we clip back in-bounds and grab the fire-gem, we have no way of getting back up to the save trigger by the fire gem door. The last important thing to note is that our swim height is too high to hit the save trigger after the fire gem door - we need to cancel our airswim in order to be low enough down to hit that save trigger.

Based on all of the above factors, we can tell that the following is the order of steps we must do:

  1. Fox cancels his airswim.
  2. Fox hits the save trigger after the fire gem door.
  3. Fox falls into the room with the fire gem in it, and collects the fire gem.
  4. Fox savewarps to get back past the fire gem door with a fire gem and with Cape Claw loaded normally.

But where can we cancel our airswim? Stay tuned to find out!

3:24 - There's a weird piece of geometry here at the edge of the statue of the Krazoa's face. By facing the right direction and having the right position, Fox's feet will touch the wall here, which counts as standing on it, which cancels our airswim. We then fall and land on part of the Krazoa wall's face which is half in-bounds (I tried to go back and see if I could take fall damage here, but for some reason, I always fell off the edge when I tried to take damage here, so IDK if that's even possible). From there, we fall down again and land half in the wall on the ground of the room with the fire gem door. This last fall was extremely precise, as almost all fall angles either cause Fox to get pushed slightly to the left and to void out, or to start another airswim on the water in the room.

3:28 - We now start navigating around the room to the fire gem door save trigger.

3:32 - We hit the save trigger which is past the fire gem door here. After this, we then turn and fall down so that we are half in the wall of the room below the fire gem door (where the fire gem is).

3:34 - I ended up re-doing a lot of this segment in order to include taking damage here (it costs 1 frame and takes 1/4 heart of damage, down to 6 + 3/4 hearts left). We now need to navigate around the room half OOB, since there is a trigger we will hit if we go in-bounds which makes flames appear to block the statue containing the fire gem. In normal gameplay, you enter this room, the flames appear in front of the statue when you're 20 feet away from it or so, you use the ice blaster to put the flames out, and then you collect the fire gem. However, since we don't have the ice blaster, we stay half in the wall to avoid hitting this trigger, which prevents the flames from appearing (and also skips the CS of the flames coming up as well). Once we are past the flames trigger, we go back in-bounds, and press A in front of the statue to grab the fire gem.

3:38 - Grabbing the fire gem here plays a glitchy cutscene. Additionally, since we are in Cape Claw 3, grabbing this fire gem doesn't lower the water in the room before the fire gem door (in normal gameplay, when you grab this fire gem, you are in CC2, and the water lowers when you grab the fire gem). This is actually convenient, since CC3 has rubble blocking the mouth of the Krazoa wall, which would normally require using ice blaster to reach the cannon to clear it (meaning we would be trapped when we tried to leave OFPT later on). Instead, we can later on swim to the top level of the room, and then roll out past the rock which is supposed to block the upper entrance in CC3 by the SharpClaw door (which actually only blocks Fox from entering, not exiting). This fire gem will be necessary to get past the fire gem door, which can't be opened outside of CC2 even if we wanted to open it here.

The sound effect of water flowing plays after grabbing the fire gem, for some reason (even though nothing happens). We than savewarp to get back up (this is also the last time the TAS will pause).

3:57 - We respawn at the last save checkpoint we hit, which is the one after the fire gem door. We also now have the fire gem in our inventory, and Cape Claw is now loaded normally.

4:01 - The only abnormal thing about Cape Claw's state now is that we need to zoom at the edge of the map to force the game to load the OFPT link map (normally, when you hit the save trigger, the edge of this map would already be loaded, so you wouldn't see the void).

4:06 - We now arrive at a trick which was theorized by Zac and proven to be possible by me: Indiana Jones Skip. This is the trick where we skip the block-pushing puzzle, which saves about 25 seconds. Note that we needed to get the fire gem to be able to do this, since the cutscene of the gate re-opening will always play when we come back to this room from behind, which means we can't use cam-lock to escape from OFPT and also do this trick. Our goal is to maximize the amount of time before the gate closes. To do this, we need to step on the switch 3 times (we need to hit the switch when the gate is at it's peak. After the first time hitting it, the cutscene ends after the gate is past its peak. However, after hitting it twice, we can hit the switch when the gate is at it's highest point on the 3rd time in order to make it stay open long enough for us to get under there). Before we start, we make Tricky stay, since he'll get in the way otherwise.

4:19 - I shield twice here to manipulate RNG (no joke). I originally didn't shield here. Me and Zac tried to do the RNG Manip for 111 111 in the electric tile puzzle after this, and even though Zac ran 50 instances of Dolphin at max speed in parallel for several hours, we never got that pattern (even after getting 95% of patterns that had only 1s and 2s in them). To re-seed the RNG dramatically, I went back, added in shielding here, and then re-TASed the rest of the section up through reaching the sliding door. From here, I was able to get the 111 111 after only one hour of running the script with 1 instance of Dolphin (of course, I had to use the script again later on, since I re-did everything again to take damage in the fire gem room, but that's another story...)

(cont. below).

Edited by the author 1 year ago
josejavier1158 likes this
United States

(cont.)

4:26 - We need to haul ass if we want to make it through that gate before it closes. As such, Fox now moves as fast as possible towards the gate.

4:32 - We make it under the gate with just enough time for Fox to reach back and grab his hat before the gate shuts! This is even closer than it looks, since the gate has to be above Fox's height when standing up normally in order for Fox to roll under it (even though rolling appears to make Fox closer to the ground, it doesn't let you get under the gate when it's at any lower of a point - so we just need to be really fast). Don't worry about getting stuck behind this gate - the devs were worried that they might have messed up when making this puzzle, so they put a trigger next to this gate that re-opens the gate when you're coming back from OFPT if the gate was shut.

4:33 - I used Zac's script to start doing RNG manip here, and waited until I got a 111 111 pattern for the electric tile puzzle. My position at the end was slightly to the left of where I wanted it to be, so I modified Zac's script to make a version that changed none of my inputs except randomly choosing frames to move the control stick slightly to the right after I got past the sliding door until I got the 111 111 pattern again with the correct position (This was much faster than the RNG manip, since RNG would still be the same value like 10% of the time even after moving, so after an hour of attempts, I had a good set of inputs).

4:39 - This point where Fox starts falling off the ledge is the exact moment that the electric tile puzzle pattern gets set, which is based on the results of the next 6 calls to the RNG function (which occur in a row). Essentially, the earlier RNG manip manipulated the starting seed of RNG to be such that the next 6 calls to the RNG function would return a number which would have a remainder of 0 when divided by 4 (the next random number is calculated using the previous random number, and (randomNumber mod 4) + 1 gives the tile that works for the given row).

4:40 - Oh, wait a minute! Did you think that the RNG Manip was over? Hahahahaha! Not quite! Now, I used a script that I wrote to do more RNG manip until the enemy up ahead (called a Kooshy) spawned as close to the ladder as possible. The enemy can't damage you except by firing lasers at Fox, and it fires them a fixed number of frames after it comes out from the ground. Thus, we want the enemy to be as close to the ladder as it can be, since this makes it so the enemy is about to fire right when Fox reaches it. I took 1/4 heart of damage on the Kooshy, and it cost me 2 frames compared to not taking damage here (down to 6 + 1/2 hearts left).

4:48 - I prove that I really do have the fire gem in my inventory, and I hotkey Spellstone 2. Note that Spellstones 2 and 4 are different objects, even though they have the same icon. Thus, I can't use Spellstone 4 to open the gate up ahead, since I'm in OFPT Exterior 1, where the game has it set that only Spellstone 2 can open the gate.

5:04 - RTA runners can easily take damage here, since they usually reach the lunge distance of the Sharpclaw on the right frame in its animation without needing to slow down or go fast (the timer for the Sharpclaw's animations gets set to 0 when it's initialized, which happens when you go past where the top ladder was). However, the TAS is so much faster than this that we would have to wait a few frames in order to make the Sharpclaw lunge at us, which is kind of slow. Thus, we skip taking damage here.

5:06 - As mentioned earlier, I can only open this gate with Spellstone 2, since I am in OFPT Exterior 1. Note that you can't use the Spellstone when the Sharpclaw is close to Fox, annoyingly, so I had to manipulate the Sharpclaw to swing his weapon so that he wouldn't run towards Fox, so that I could use the Spellstone as soon as possible.

5:19 - This last ramp is so steep that I need to delay one of my rolls by a few frames to avoid the game canceling my roll and putting Fox in the falling animation, which can happen when Fox is too far above the ground.

5:22 - A quick note about how the electric tile puzzle would normally work. Whenever you press the switch in this room, it changes the pattern of the tiles, and shows you the new pattern. Failing the puzzle sends you back to the start of the first row in the puzzle, but it doesn't change the pattern. The pattern is initialized in OFPT Exterior in the spot mentioned earlier. In OFPT 1, this is initialized to a random pattern. Additionally, due to a programming error, it is always initialized to 123 000 000 in OFPT 2 unless you leave and re-enter the area multiple times in a row without going to a new area, or something like that. You need to touch the correct tile in each row (of the 4 possible tiles) in order to avoid getting electrocuted and thrown back to the start of the puzzle.

And now, you can see that those earlier weird inputs weren't done because I'm crazy - we really did get a 111 111 pattern. Now how unlikely is that? Not unlikely at all with the power of infinite re-records and savestates of course!

Oh, one last thing: for some reason, if you touch the left-most edge of the first tile in a row before touching the rest of the tile, then the game electrocutes you like you touched the wrong tile and sends you back (even when the first tile is the right tile). This occurs because the collision for where the first tile starts and the left edge of the puzzle which is outside of the first tile but still considered part of the puzzle has a gap in it (basically, the devs did a terrible job programming this puzzle).

5:27 - Taking damage on this giant Sharpclaw would take 45 frames, so I skip it (all of the damage I take until the end of the game combined only costs me 20 frames).

5:35 - We take damage on the water enemy here (1/4 heart, down to 6 + 1/4 heart left). This costs me no time, and I actually didn't even realize I would take damage here, since this enemy was always nowhere close to me in my testing. I think this enemy's position/movement direction is controlled by either RNG or a global timer, which would explain why this worked here.

5:41 - You can jump through this blue flame, btw. As you can see, it doesn't do any damage. Also, you can finally see me using my fuel cell detector in the lower-left corner of the screen (I activated it when pressing random D-pad directions earlier).

5:45 - We turn the switch here to make the colored flame turn on. We need to shoot the flame when it's green (which makes the fire blaster shot turn green) and have the green fire blaster shot hit the orb (which is also green). This will activate the warp portal, which will let us warp to OFPT Interior 1.

5:58 - We now do one of the few tricks that's allowed in glitchless. With a carefully angled jump, we can land on the platform by the warp portal. This trick is known as window jump. Also, I skip turning the 2 switches to stop the water currents, since I measured it to be at least 3 seconds faster to just do window jump twice (once now and once when we come back for OFPT 2).

6:01 - I tried so hard to make this cycle of the flame. I ended up missing it by like 1-3 frames. To give you some perspective, I hit the flame when it was the right color and with the right angle to hit the orb in the earlier cycle, but then the flame changed color while the fireblaster shot was still in it, which apparently changes the color of the shot as well. Basically, I missed the cycle by the amount of time it takes for a fireblaster shot to pass from the start of the flame hitbox to the end of it's hitbox (and maybe less time than that). In any event, since I now had some time to kill waiting for the next green flame to appear, I used this time to grab my last blue grubtub of the TAS, and to climb on top of the warp portal and start aiming at the flame.

6:05 - I shoot the flame as early as possible, and then cancel my fireblast stance.

6:06 - I press A to warp on the same frame that the warp portal is activated from hitting the orb. Normally, you have to wait for the cutscene of the orb being hit to finish playing before you can warp, but if you press A while standing on the warp portal on the same frame that the cutscene would start, then you can start warping during the cutscene of the orb activating, which gives you a glitched cutscene, and saves you the time you would normally have to wait for the orb cutscene to finish playing (which is 93 frames).

This is a new trick that I discovered! However, it's hard to do RTA, since it's frame perfect, you have to be at the back-most edge of the warp portal to hit the flame and orb, and the control stick angle to hit both the orb and flame from this high up is pixel-perfect. However, RTA could do a different strat which is easier - roll against the warp portal, then shield and pull out fire blaster. Shoot the flame, (press A and B at the same time), and hold up while Fox is putting away the fireblaster to climb up as soon as possible. Now, while Fox is climbing up, mash A. If you hit A on the right frame, you'll get the trick and save 93 frames.

6:20 - Since we haven't placed Spellstone 2 yet, this warp portal takes us to OFPT Interior 1. To place Spellstone 4, we need to use the Spellstone 4 warp portal, which is only active in OFPT Interior 2, which can only be reached by using this warp portal after placing Spellstone 2. This is the reason why we need to place Spellstone 2 first.

And that's all she wrote! Join me next time to see Fox place Spellstone 2!

Edited by the author 1 year ago
United States

Hello again everybody! After delivering only 6 minutes worth of content in 2 months of work, I decided that I would make up for it by finishing this segment a lot faster. As a result of that, I finished 9 minutes of content in 2 weeks :D

In this segment, Fox completes OFPT Interior 1, places Spellstone 2, warps to OFPT Interior 2, completes OFPT Interior 2, and places Spellstone 4.

Or, to simplify things: in this segment, Fox places Spellstones 2 & 4:

The route for this section is:

  1. Take 1/4 heart of damage on the Jellyfish in OFPT Interior 1 (down to 6 hearts left).
  2. Turn the switch to lower the water, activate the disguise trigger, turn the switch to open the door, push the block to get back up, turn the switch to raise the water, and enter the next room.
  3. Use Tricky to flame to start the first flame puzzle.
  4. Use 5 fireblaster shots to win the flame puzzle and collect 1 red mana gem. Also, take 1/4 heart of flame damage from Tricky during this (down to 5 + 3/4 hearts left).
  5. Beat the first block puzzle (requires 4 shots).
  6. Rocket boost up to the upper level, and grab the red mana gem next to where you land.
  7. Shoot the switch through the flame when it's green to activate the warp portal.
  8. Warp to the Spellstone chamber, and place Spellstone 2 (this warps us back out to OFPT 2 Exterior).
  9. Use Spellstone 4 to open the Spellstone gate in OFPT Exterior 2.
  10. Solve the electric puzzle (has 123 000 000 pattern).
  11. Take 1/4 heart damage on the water enemy (down to 5 + 1/2 hearts left), do the window jump again, and use the warp portal to warp to OFPT 2 Interior.
  12. Do ledge-grab cancel to get into the water quickly.
  13. Take 1/4 heart of damage on the big Sharpclaw before the ice block (down to 5 + 1/4 hearts left).
  14. Push the ice block, climb up onto the ledge, turn the switch to open the door, step on the disguise trigger, and turn the switch to raise the water.
  15. Jump in the water, take 1/4 heart damage on the water enemy (down to 5 hearts left), and swim to the next room.
  16. Activate the 2nd flame puzzle, take 3/4 hearts of flame damage from Tricky during the flame puzzle (down to 4 + 1/4 hearts left), and use 5 fireblaster shots to both win the puzzle and grab a yellow mana gem from the ledge up above.
  17. Use 5 fireblaster shots to win the 2nd block puzzle.
  18. Rocket boost up to the 2nd level.
  19. Shoot the switch through the flame when it's blue to activate the warp portal.
  20. Warp to the Spellstone chamber, and place Spellstone 4.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This section starts off after we warp to OFPT Interior 1. Our goal is to place Spellstone 4, but the game will only let us do that if we use the warp portal in OFPT Interior 2 in order to warp to the Spellstone Chamber. Furthermore, the trigger to load OFPT Interior 2 is placing Spellstone 2, so we now need to go through OFPT Interior 1 and place Spellstone 2 before we can continue. Once we place Spellstone 4, the flags to be able to warp to K5 in WC will be set, which will let us fly to Walled City and beat the game.

TLDR: Beating OFPT Interior 1 -> Lets us place Spellstone 2 Placing Spellstone 2 unlocks OFPT Interior 2 Beating OFPT Interior 2 -> Lets us place Spellstone 4 Placing Spellstone 4 unlocks ability to warp to K5 Ability to warp to K5 -> Let's us beat the game.

...With that explanation out of the way, let's go beat OFPT Interior 1!

0:09 - We take 1/4 heart of damage on the Jellyfish here, which gets us down to 6 hearts left (remember, we still need to deathwarp near the end of the game after releasing K5). This costs us 4-5 frames compared to not taking damage on it. Technically, this wasn't necessary, since I figured out a way much later on to lose only 1 frame by taking damage somewhere else, but it was with something that I didn't think was possible for me at the time (and I still don't understand how the game decides that enemy's movement patterns). I'll explain that part when I get to it. Of course, since I didn't want to re-do 2 weeks of work just to save 3-4 frames, this damage source stayed in. Wadaya gonna do?

0:13 - We make Tricky stay here, since he tends to get in our way otherwise. Actually, Tricky gets in out way a lot in OFPT. It's almost like the closer we get to the end of the game, the more Tricky tries to block us from moving forwards!

0:18 - We turn the switch to lower the water here. This is necessary in order to turn the switch that opens the door.

0:21 - We activate the Sharpclaw disguise switch here, which opens the door to the ice block (we need to use this later on to get back up to raise the water after opening the door). I actually activate the trigger before the water has drained enough for Fox to stand on the ground, so I'm still in the swimming state when I hit this trigger.

0:25 - I took a picture which shows where Tricky is during all of this:

https://i.imgur.com/k5gyXMD.png

0:27 - I turn the switch to open the door here. Now, our goal is to get back up to the center platform so that we can raise the water and reach the next room.

0:35 - We can only climb the ice block when it's in the spot near the center of the platform that plays the "puzzle-completed jingle" when you push it there. As such, we start pulling it to reach that spot. Fox moves the block at the same quick rate when pushing it forwards and backwards, but moves it extremely slowly when pulling it from side-to-side (i.e. to the left or right). As such, we always make sure to change which side of the block we're standing on so that we're never dragging it to the left or right.

0:42 - Tricky's stay command wears off because Tricky is too far away from Fox. Fortunately, Tricky can't push Fox/get in his way while Fox is pushing the block, so we can just pass right through him. We also can't use the stay command while pushing the block, since this will make us let go of the block (even if we press Y to use the stay command), so I wait until I'm done pushing the block to use the stay command again. Note that if we didn't make Tricky stay here, then he would try to climb up the middle platform when the water raises, which would block us from falling into the water for about a second.

0:53 - We raise the water back up. We are now able to reach the next room.

0:57 - This spot right here is why I made Tricky stay. If you don't make him stay, then Tricky will try to enter his "climb-up" animation to get on the ledge. This blocks Fox from moving over the edge for about a second, and is really slow - which is why we avoid that.

0:58 - ...Of course, we need Tricky to flame in the next room, so we call him to get him to come right behind us once we get in the water. It turns out, the next room has no good Tricky teleport spots (places where Tricky teleports to when he's far enough away to be off-camera when you turn around and press call), so it's faster to make sure that Tricky is right behind us when we climb out of the water (specifically, I timed it to be over 2 seconds faster to call Tricky before getting out of the water). Tricky reaches the point where he's as close to Fox as he can get by the time Fox climbs out of the water, so we don't lose any time by having made Tricky stay further back earlier on.

1:08 - We use Tricky's flame to start the first flame puzzle here. This is the last time Tricky will use a blue grubtub in this TAS (although we're still going to feed him twice more at 2 later points to set up camera-lock one last time). While Tricky is starting to use his flame, we run over to the other side of the room, and shoot the red mana gem plant as the cutscene of the puzzle starting begins. Shooting this plant causes the mana gem to fall onto the ground below (credits to Fuzzyness for being the first person to come up with the idea of shooting the plant, I think). This prevents us from needing to climb up to slash the plant. Note that the mana gem doesn't always fall on the floor below, since where it bounces is RNG-based. However, it usually does fall right onto the floor, and in this case, I didn't even need to do any RNG-manip to make it happen. Of course, after manipulating a 1 in 4096 chance event to happen earlier (the 111 111 electric tile puzzle), doing RNG-manip to make a 2 in 3 chance event happen would have been pretty trivial :)

1:28 - We collect the red mana gem that we shot down before the cutscene started. We then slash Tricky a few times to get him closer to flaming us. After that, we enter fireblast mode and start waiting to shoot the first switch. If you shoot the switches immediately, they will finish blowing before the flames reach them, so the flames won't get extinguished. As such, we need to wait like ~4 seconds before firing the first shot. We also shoot from right-to-left in order to minimize wasted time after firing the first shot (as opposed to shooting in the center, then the right switch, and then the left 2, or any other slow combination). The way these statues blow out the flames is kind of dumb. They shoot out lots of tiny particles with huge gaps between them, and lag affects how long they shoot out particles for or whether a given particle collides with the flame, which extinguishes it if they register as having collided (credits to Rena for figuring this out). This made it difficult to find the optimal time to shoot the first flame - especially since shooting a 2nd switch could sometimes cause the 1st statue to not extinguish a flame when it otherwise would have (and exiting fireblaster mode could also change if/when a flame got put out). You'd think for how difficult this section is to do even if everything was programmed correctly, the devs would have made the statues smooth and consistent, but no... Basically, the devs did a shitty job programming this part of the game, so I just did my best here...

1:33 - After shooting the 4 switches, I go back to wailing on Tricky in order to make him flame me, which does 1/4 heart of damage (down to 5 + 3/4 hearts left). I also turn and target away from the flames for a while, which makes them get extinguished a little bit faster, for some reason. Once the flames are extinguished, the block in the block puzzle in the next room spawns. Technically, we can enter the block puzzle room right when we first warp to OFPT 1 Interior. However, we can't beat the block puzzle without first unlocking the block, which requires beating the flame puzzle, which involves going through the room before that with the Sharpclaw disguise/raising the water as well. Also note that the cutscene of Fox beating the flame puzzle warps both Fox and Tricky to the same position, regardless of starting position, which is why if you pause the video as the cutscene starts, it looks like Tricky's flame is coming out of nowhere.

1:38 - If you look closely, you can see that the statue's blowing kills the Jellyfish. This is because the statue's blowing is programmed to deal 1/4 heart of damage, for some reason. However, the statues are blowing too high up for Fox to take damage on them. Likewise, the Jellyfish is too high up for it to damage Fox.

1:51 - Tricky likes to get in the way of the block puzzle, so I make him stay here.

1:52 - For the first shot, we hit the block down.

1:55 - We fire 3 shots in quick succession here. The first shot hits the block so that it moves left past the wall it's up against. the 2nd shot makes the block move forwards so that it moves towards the wall on the upper-right corner of the screen, and the third shot moves the block to the left so that it goes into the goal and completes the puzzle. This works because the direction the block moves is based on the angle that the Fireblaster hit it and the starting position of the fireblast, so by standing in a certain range of locations and using shots which are angled to the right spot on the block, we can make the block move in different directions despite not moving from our starting position (credits to Zac for discovering this trick, which is used both here and in the block puzzle in OFPT Interior 2 in order to save time).

Since it's a little hard to see which way the block went for each of the 4 shots, I've made the below diagram. Each arrow represents 1 shot and the associated direction that the block moved, starting from the block's starting point and ending with the block hitting the goal (Fox is positioned where he would be when he fires his 1st shot. Also, these arrows are drawn where the bottom-right corner of the block would be at each shot):

https://i.imgur.com/Y5PJjyz.jpg

2:01 - Beating the block puzzle unlocks this rocket boost pad, which is needed to reach the upper level of OFPT Interior 1.

2:13 - We rocket boost up to the next floor here.

2:17 - We quickly grab this red mana gem before continuing on our way.

2:30 - We need to shoot the switch through the flame when the flame is green in order to activate the bridge to get across. However, we arrive at the mid-point of the flame's cycle. This means we'd need to be like 40 frames faster to make it to the previous cycle (which is unlikely to be possible). We wait for the flame color to change, and then shoot.

2:39 - We enter the warp portal to warp to the Spellstone Chamber. The way the Spellstone Chambers work in this game is that there are actually 2 Spellstone Chamber rooms - one in the Volcano Force Point Temple map (which lets you place Spellstones 1 & 3 only), and one in the Ocean Force Point Temple map (which lets you place Spellstones 2 & 4 only). Additionally, each of the 2 temples has 2 different warp portals. Which warp portal you use to enter the Spellstone Chamber determines which Spellstone you can place in the chamber. However, since the Spellstone 4 warp portal can only be triggered to activate after placing Spellstone 2, we need to do this first.

3:00 - And with that, we place Spellstone 2! Note that each of the 4 holes in this chamber can only accept 1 Spellstone. Also, since the game thinks we should be placing Spellstone 2 now, Spellstone 1 is already placed in this wall (even though we never collected it or placed it), and none of the other ones are placed yet (and none of the other holes will accept Spellstones besides the one for Spellstone 2, even if we currently have other Spellstones with us).

Btw, even though this area looks like a separate map, as you can see from the map image below (and as I mentioned above), it's literally a separate room in the same map as OFPT Interior, lol (I drew a green rectangle around the Spellstone Chamber room). This is the room you get sent to when placing Spellstones 2 & 4:

https://i.imgur.com/XlbF1cX.jpg

Also, even though we never really go into Volcano Force Point Temple in this TAS (besides the VFPT link map in order to get the Ground Quake), to prove that both VFPT and OFPT each have their own Spellstone Chamber rooms, here is a picture of the Spellstone Chamber room which is in the Volcano Force Point Temple map (I also drew a green rectangle around the Spellstone Chamber room here). You only get sent to this room when placing Spellstones 1 & 3 (which we never do - thus we never go here):

https://i.imgur.com/JPfxIcK.jpg

Also, you can see by how much more complex the Volcano Force Point Temple is compared to Ocean Force Point Temple Interior that the devs got kind of lazy when designing this part of the game, tbh, but that's irrelevant...

(cont. below...)

Edited by the author 1 year ago
United States

(cont.)

3:30 - Once we place Spellstone 2, the game warps us back to OFPT Exterior. Additionally, since we've placed Spellstone 2, the game sets OFPT Exterior 2 to load when we spawn back in. Normally, this would mean that we can't go right back into OFPT Interior, since a Spellstone gate is now blocking the path forwards, which can only be opened with Spellstone 4. Fortunately, however, through the magic of glitches and TASing, we already have Spellstone 4 with us! What're the odds?!?!?!? :D

With that, we can now start heading back towards the warp portal to OFPT Interior, which will now send us to OFPT 2 Interior and let us place Spellstone 4.

3:31 - Oh, also, I accidentally kind of lied in the write-up for my last segment - I implied we would do RNG-manip to take damage on the Kooshy here, but since we took flame damage from Tricky during the first flame puzzle, we didn't need to take damage here (I didn't discover this until I actually TASed up to the first flame puzzle, and it saved us 5 frames).

3:51 - For some reason, the big Sharpclaw spawns in this area already walking around, instead of appearing on the map when we get close to him like he did in OFPT Exterior 1. This isn't just because we climbed back up the ladder right after placing Spellstone 2, btw - the same thing happens in a glitchless run, which comes back to this area at the very end of the game to place Spellstone 4. As such, it seems like this enemy is just programmed to spawn right away in OFPT Exterior 2, for some strange reason.

3:53 - This is the gate I mentioned earlier. Even if we had somehow kept Spellstone 2 after placing it, it wouldn't be usable here - only Spellstone 4 can open this gate in OFPT Exterior 2 (and this area will always load as OFPT Exterior 2 once we enter it/warp to it after placing Spellstone 2).

4:09 - Since we are in OFPT Exterior 2, there are now 9 rows to the electric tile puzzle instead of 6. Additionally, due to a bug in how the developers programmed this area, when you enter OFPT Exterior 2, the puzzle is always initially set to a pattern of 123 000 000, and this won't change unless you step on the switch that shows the puzzle's pattern. When a row is programmed with a 0 in it, then Fox can pass through any square without getting electrocuted. As such, we hit the 1st column in the first row, the 2nd column in the 2nd row, the 3rd column in the 3rd row, and then we proceed to just walk across the tiles towards the water.

I actually indirectly discovered this, since the TAS never presses the switch to see the puzzle pattern (since it's slow), but RTA always did. This revealed that RTA runners could have skipped needing to remember/solve the electric tile puzzle in OFPT 2 Exterior for years if they just never touched the switch, LMAO!

4:13 - You can see that for some reason, when we step on tiles that have a 0 in their row, no switch gets pressed down. However, once we reach the end of the puzzle, all rows get forceably pushed/set to being down. I guess the devs probably didn't think it was possible to beat this puzzle without having pushed down 1 of the rows!!!!

4:14 - This giant Sharpclaw is annoying, but we can get around him and go into the water. It's 5 seconds faster to do window jump twice instead of turning the switches to stop the water currents in OFPT Exterior 1 (which you're supposed to do in normal gameplay), which is why we are swimming back towards the area with all the skinny platforms and switches.

4:23 - We take 1/4 heart of damage on the water enemy here (down to 5 + 1/2 hearts left). In all of my testing, this enemy was never in a position where I could take damage on it, so I don't know why it was in the right position here. Either way, if I had known this, I could have skipped taking damage on the Jellyfish in OFPT Interior 1, but so it goes...

4:36 - We do the window jump again, and then enter the warp portal (fortunately, we don't have to shoot the switch through the flame again). Since we are in OFPT Exterior 2, the warp portal now takes us to OFPT Interior 2!

5:01 - In OFPT Interior 2, the water level here is now high enough up that we can swim to the doorway on the left-side of the map (it was much lower in OFPT Interior 1). Additionally, the door we entered on the right originally when we first reached OFPT Interior 1 is now shut, just so we don't get tempted to go the wrong way.

To start off this section, I roll at the edge of the platform to do a ledge-grab cancel, which skips grabbing the ledge before falling in the water (and saves about a second). Then, I swim as far towards the next doorway as I can before Fox surfaces from the water - at which point I grab onto the ledge to get out of the water ASAP.

5:06 - Dodging this blue Grubtub was kind of annoying, lol.

5:08 - This big Sharpclaw is kind of in my way - which means that making him lunge actually gets him out of my way faster here. In other words, it's faster to take damage here than to not take damage. As such, I take 1/4 heart of damage on the big Sharpclaw (down to 5 + 1/4 hearts left). I only need to delay 2 frames of movement to make the Sharpclaw lunge at me, btw, which is why it's faster to make the Sharpclaw lunge at me here than it is to otherwise go around him without trying to slow down.

5:12 - We now arrive at the best block-pushing segment of the game (JK - this part is garbo programming)! Basically, we can't push the block all the way past the edge of the next hallway right-away, since the block will get stuck on the wall on the other side. This means the fastest strat is to push the block as far forward as it can without getting stuck. Then, we switch sides of the block, push it forwards a little so it's past the edge of the diagonal wall, pull it to the right an inch to get it past the wall, and then continue pushing forwards (it's faster to push it sideways for a second than it is to switch sides of the block, since we pull it sideways for such a short amount of time here). Then, once we're past the edge of the corner, we need to push the block a little to the left so that it's pressed against the edge of the wall in order to be able to make it past the other wall which is up-right from us (if we pushed it less to the right, it would get stuck on the wall. When we push it as much to the right as we did, it will get stuck on the next wall if we don't pull it left for a second - top tier programming, devs!).

Once the block is pushed into the right spot and the "puzzle-completed jingle" plays, we are able to climb up the block and continue onward.

5:26 - We turn the switch to open the door here. Now, we need to raise the water in order to reach the next room.

5:33 - We use the Sharpclaw Disguise for the last time in this TAS in order to activate this disguise trigger, which opens a door with a staff-switch behind it. Note that we move a little past the switch here, since Fox keeps his roll momentum during the cutscenes of Sharpclaw doors opening. This is the first and only time this works against us in the TAS - but fortunately, it's only by a small amount, so it's still faster to do this compared to shielding and losing all of our momentum.

5:38 - We jump off the ledge at the earliest part where a jump trigger is programmed (Fox only jumps off parts of ledges that have jump triggers programmed over them - and the jump trigger only extends along the part of the edge of this platform which is near where the Sharpclaw door was).

5:40 - We turn the switch to raise the water level here.

5:41 - I intentionally make Fox bump his head on the edge of the wall here, which stops Fox from jumping (my only intentional bonk of the TAS!). This makes Fox not fall as deep into the water, which makes him surface sooner. I try to time it so I fall off the edge of the platform at the perfect distance from the doorway such that Fox will surface on the first frame that he's close enough to the door to cancel his swim. Also, I ended up taking damage on the water enemy here for 1/4 of a heart (down to 5 hearts left), even though this enemy never came close to me in my earlier testing. Why did this happen? Who knows! Either way, it lets me skip taking damage somewhere else in the TAS, which in turn saves 4 frames.

5:50 - The reason why I don't take damage on this big Sharpclaw is that his lunge timer is initialized when he spawns (when Fox gets close enough to him), and I would need to pause for 30-40 frames while I'm the right distance away from him in order to make him lunge at Fox. As such, it's faster to just roll around him.

5:57 - We turn the switch to activate the 2nd flame puzzle. This flame puzzle is different than the last one - now, each flame can only extinguish the flame which is the same color as the rectangle under the statue. As such, the fastest strategy is to shoot the switches for the blue and green statues at about 2:56 left on the clock. Then, we shoot the switches for the red and yellow statues at about 2:49 left on the clock in order to put out the last 2 flames.

6:15 - Since we have a few seconds to kill, we shoot the yellow mana gem plant above us, which then falls down to the level that we're on. Note that Tricky spawns at the opposite end of the map, and there's no Tricky teleport point near us here, so we can't use this initial time to slash Tricky. However, Tricky starts swimming over to us as soon as the cutscene of the puzzle starting ends, so he'll reach us soon enough.

6:16 - I shoot the green switch and then the blue switch here, and I shoot them at the earliest frame where they'll extinguish their flames. I also made sure before I entered fireblaster mode that I was far enough from the edge of the platform I was standing on that Tricky would have room to climb up (otherwise, he won't climb out of the water).

6:18 - Now that Tricky is out of the water and I have some time to kill, I start slashing Tricky to make him flame me. Once I've hit Tricky enough times, I grab the yellow mana gem that I shot earlier, and then I enter fireblaster mode to prepare to shoot the next 2 switches (while also staying close enough to Tricky that his flames will hit me while I'm in fireblaster mode). Note that I get the camera as far to the left as possible before I shoot the switch on the right. This lets me move the fireblast cursor to the switch on the left as fast as possible after I shoot the switch on the right (unfortunately, I didn't have time to both grab the yellow mana gem and do that for the first 2 switches AND take damage on Tricky during this). I shoot the red switch first, and then the yellow switch. While this is happening I take 1/2 heart of flame damage from Tricky (down to 4 + 1/2 hearts left), since Fox stays on fire long enough after being set on fire and standing still in order to take the 1/4 heart of flame damage twice.

6:27 - Since I have some more time to kill, I start slashing Tricky again, which makes him flame me a second time. This does 1/4 heart of damage (down to 4 + 1/4 hearts left). I also turn the camera in a way that manipulates the last 2 flames to get extinguished as fast as possible. Or at least, as fast as I could figure out - I spent 3 days TASing this flame puzzle, so this represents the fastest strategy for putting out the flames that I could figure out.

With that, the flame puzzle is beaten, which causes the next door to open, and makes the block in the block puzzle spawn (just like in OFPT Interior 1, we can enter the block puzzle right at the start, but the block won't spawn unless we go beat the flame puzzle, which requires passing through the room before the flame puzzle as well in order to reach the flame puzzle).

Also, once again, the cutscene of beating the flame puzzle teleports Fox and Tricky to a fixed/pre-defined position, regardless of where they were before the cutscene started.

6:43 - Once again, Tricky will get in the way of us during this block puzzle if we don't stop him. We use the stay command to keep him out of the way.

6:46 - We start off by shooting the block downwards. In total, we'll use 5 shots to beat this block puzzle.

6:47 - Unfortunately, we need to move an inch forward after firing our last shot in order to make the block move to the right. The reason for this is that when we fired our first shot, we were at the minimum point we can be at when we shoot the block in order for it to go down. However, we need to be 1 inch further down in order to be able to shoot the block to the right. Canceling and re-entering fireblast mode takes about 60 frames, and as a result, we end up hitting the block for the 2nd shot 20 frames after the block is ready to be hit again (which means this costs us 20 frames).

In any event, once Fox has moved an inch forward, we go and fire off 3 quick shots. The first shot moves the block forwards/away from Fox. The 2nd shot moves the block downwards to get around the wall, and the third shot moves the block forwards again once it's past the wall. We can't shoot the block down from this angle, so we need to move to the right before we can do our 5th and final shot.

6:50 - We fire 1 more shot here to push the block down into the goal.

Since it's hard to see where the block goes for each of the 5 shots, I've included a diagram here which uses arrows to show where each shot of the fireblaster sends the block, starting from the block's initial position, and ending when the block is in the goal (note that Fox is in the lower-right corner of the diagram below the scarab counter, and this spot corresponds to where Fox is standing when he fires the first fire blaster shot. Also, these arrows are drawn where the bottom-right corner of the block would be after each shot):

https://i.imgur.com/g02Pxec.jpg

6:54 - Beating the block puzzle activates this rocket boost pad, which lets us reach the upper level of OFPT Interior 2.

7:05 - We rocket boost up to the upper level here - which is also the last time that we'll use the rocket boost in the TAS.

7:11 - That thing you see to the left is a Bafomdad. They're this game's equivalent to fairies in Zelda. Picking it up would trigger a cutscene, since we haven't gotten one before. As such, we don't grab this (getting it would be out of our way, anyways).

7:22 - Unlike last time, we reach this flame in the perfect spot in its cycle to shoot the switch immediately, without needing to wait (since the flame is blue when we get there). As such, all of our movement up to this point matters. Additionally, we want to shoot the switch as early as possible, even if it means we will hit it while standing further away from the platform edge - since we have more than enough time after shooting the switch to get to the edge of the platform before the bridge extends out. Take a look at how far away from the switch my fireblaster shot hit - this is close enough to count as hitting the switch!!!!!

7:30 - We step into the warp portal, and warp to the Spellstone Chamber. This particular warp portal is only activated in OFPT Interior 2. Additionally, using this warp portal puts the Spellstone Chamber into a state where we can only place Spellstone 4 there.

7:47 - Tricky once again spawns perfectly in our way. I tried using the stay command to see if I could stop him, but you can't use it for the first 15 or so frames after the first frame that Fox can roll, so using the stay command didn't slow Tricky down enough to save any time in my tests.

7:49 - We place Spellstone 4 here. And with that, we have now set the flag to be able to use the warp portal to reach K5 (more specifically, Walled City 2 will spawn when we fly there, which is the only version of Walled City that has the warp portal to K5 usable)! Note that the other 3 slots in the chamber are filled with Spellstones, even though the only other Spellstone we placed in this TAS (or collected, for that matter) was Spellstone 2. Once again, this is because the game is expecting us to place Spellstone 4 here, based on the warp portal we used to reach the Spellstone Chamber. As such, even if we theoretically had some other Spellstone besides Spellstone 4 in our inventory, only Spellstone 4 could be placed in this room after we warp in.

8:35 - And with that, Fox has saved the world, and we have beaten the game... or have we???? :O

Also, Fox's line here "Are you seeing this." should end in a question mark, not a period.

8:41 - Fox's line "What's going on." should also end in a question mark, and not a period.

Typos and punctuation mistakes in the game kind of annoy me, tbh, since they're so easy to avoid. Like, just have someone proofread your script before you write it. There's only like 5 pages' worth of dialog for cutscenes in this game that advance the story line, anyways...

9:10 - After placing Spellstone 4, the game warps us back out to OFPT Exterior. Also, the game sets that we hit a save trigger which is at the location that we spawn at here. This is convenient for the devs, since they made placing Spellstone 4 a temporary flag for some reason, which means it will only be included in our next save file if we hit a save trigger after we set the flag and before we next save the game (this makes it impossible to un-place Spellstone 4 by just saving+quitting after we spawn in OFPT Exterior, and this also prevents us from being able to ESW back to TTH, since that would unset the flag that we placed SS4 - meaning that WC 2 wouldn't load).

9:19 - I included a few extra seconds at the end just to show that we no longer have a Krazoa Spirit or Spellstone icon at the top of the screen. That hasn't been the case since we collected K3 some 1 and a half hours ago!

And that's all she wrote! We are now in the home stretch of this TAS. There are less than 25 minutes left in the game until we win, and we are over 85% of the way done with the game! Join me next time to see Fox finally fly to the Walled City!

Edited by the author 1 year ago
BvqRzxi5 and josejavier1158 like this
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Hello again everybody. We're in the home stretch of the TAS now!

In this section, Fox walks back to ThornTail Hollow from the Ocean Force Point Temple, flies to Walled City, collects K5, and flies to the Krazoa Palace:

The route for this section is:

  1. Do Fire Gem door clip to get past the Fire Gem Door.
  2. Roll past the rock blocking the doorway near the Sharpclaw Door.
  3. Collect the yellow mana gem at the start of Cape Claw (our last mana refill of the TAS).
  4. Take 1/4 hearts of fall damage in the Cape Claw Well (down to 4 hearts left).
  5. Feed Tricky on the same frame we grab the Well ladder in order to set up camera lock.
  6. Feed Tricky at the edge of the ThornTail Hollow map to enable camera lock and skip the cutscene of the Queen EarthWalker talking to Fox.
  7. Take 1/4 heart of damage on the poison mushrooms in TTH (down to 3 + 3/4 hearts left).
  8. Enter the Arwing, and fly to Walled City.
  9. Do the glitch to raise the temple in Walled City (taking 1/4 heart of fall damage in the process - down to 3 + 1/2 hearts left).
  10. Enter the warp portal to warp to K5.
  11. Step on the switch to open the first gate in K5, and take 1/2 hearts damage on the flames (down to 3 hearts left).
  12. Do 7 Ground Quake hovers to clear the flames in the next room (does 2 hearts of damage - down to 1 heart left).
  13. Shoot the switch with the fireblaster to open the gate (our last mana use of the TAS).
  14. Step on the switch to open the last gate in K5, and take 1/2 hearts of flame damage (down to 1/2 heart left).
  15. Complete the test and collect K5.
  16. Enter the Arwing, and fly to Krazoa Palace.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This segment starts off right as the cutscene ends after we place Spellstone 4. Placing Spellstone 4 unlocks the ability to warp to K5 in Walled City. We need to collect K5 to beat the game, so our next goal is to reach the Walled City. Right now, you might be thinking, "Lobster, why don't you just ESW back to ThornTail Hollow to save time?". To that I respond - if only things could be that simple...

As I've mentioned in previous segments that have ESWs, there are 3 pieces of memory/information that are copied when we do an ESW. They are:

  1. Low memory flags (which are copied from where our last save was before we died).
  2. High memory flags (which are copied from the file that hit the ESW trigger).
  3. Savewarp respawn location (which is set to wherever we would respawn after a savewarp in the file that just died to activate the ESW).

Almost all major permanent game flags and the contents of Fox's inventory are stored in the low memory flags, while temporary values that would get reset if you savewarp before hitting a save checkpoint with them set are stored in the high memory flags.

For some unknown reason, the flag that Spellstone 4 was placed happens to be stored in the high memory flags. Since a save checkpoint is activated when Fox warps back to OFPT Exterior after the cutscene ends, this flag is copied to the save file right away (which prevents you from being able to savewarp to undo having placed Spellstone 4).

Since the location we warp to during an ESW is based on which ESW trigger we last hit, if we hit an ESW trigger in TTH in another file which hasn't placed Spellstone 4 before, it will copy the flag of having not placed Spellstone 4 before once we die for the ESW. As such, we would need to hit an ESW trigger in the file which has Spellstone 4 placed in order to be able to ESW without losing this flag. However, there are no ESW triggers on Dinosaur Planet except for in ThornTail Hollow (and that trigger doesn't even work this late in the game anyways - although it wouldn't save any time to use this). As such, we have no way to both ESW and copy this flag - meaning we need to walk back to ThornTail Hollow normally.

0:19 - I timed out going to the left to get up to the sliding door and going right, and both were identical in time down to the frame. As such, I randomly decided to go right here.

0:26 - Even though we never solved the block puzzle to make the gate stay open, the devs put a backup trigger behind the gate that would open it whenever Fox hits it and the gate is shut, in order to ensure that you couldn't accidentally softlock yourself. This cutscene will play every time we exit and re-enter this map from OFPT (unless we solve the block puzzle), and it would cancel any camera lock state if we had set one up earlier. As such, since we skipped the block puzzle earlier, we can't use camera lock to skip past the Fire Gem Door in Cape Claw.

0:34 - I display which items I have in my red inventory menu here while walking back.

0:45 - This is how we escape from behind the Fire Gem Door, despite the fact that we never opened it! The trigger to place the Fire Gem in the statue extends a bit beyond the Fire Gem Door. Once Fox places a Fire Gem, he enters a cutscene that teleports him to the front of the statue. As such, placing the Fire Gem here teleports us past the door, which lets us escape from the Ocean Force Point Temple Link map. We never lowered the water in this room, so we will enter a swim as soon as the cutscene of Fox placing the Fire Gem ends. Note that the Fire Gem Door couldn't be opened in Cape Claw 3 even if we met all other requirements, since it's programmed to only be openable in Cape Claw 2 (which would require us to not have killed Drakor before).

0:55 - In Cape Claw 3, this rock sits on top of the Sharpclaw Door trigger, and blocks Fox from going into OFPT through where the Sharpclaw door was (it also prevents Fox from opening the Sharpclaw door in CC3 if we haven't already done it). However, for some reason, this rock only fully blocks the path going into the Fire Gem Door room, and not out. As such, by rolling against the wall here, we can clip out past the rock and get pushed out of this room! Note that if we hadn't opened the Sharpclaw Door in Cape Claw 2, we still wouldn't be able to get past the Sharpclaw Door in front of the rock (which would effectively trap us in this room) - now you can see why we did a complicated series of ESWs to open this door an hour ago!

1:05 - An hour and a half ago, right after we entered Cape Claw 1, we shot the switch under the Waterfall to make the bridge appear. We never used the bridge, however - until now! Extending the bridge finally serves its purpose, as we make it across to the other side faster. Note that if we shot the switch right when we reached the bridge, we would need to wait for it to extend outwards, so shooting the switch an hour and a half ago instead of now saved us a few seconds.

1:15 - I would need to delay about 45 frames in order to take damage on this Sharpclaw, which is more than twice as long as all of the delays caused by all of the damage that I take between when I get Spellstone 4 (which refills my health) and the end of the TAS. As such, we don't take damage here.

1:20 - We grab a yellow mana gem here. This fully refills our mana bar, and this is the last mana refill that we grab in this TAS.

1:33 - We roll on the same frame that we land in order to take fall damage while only losing 1 frame (this does 1/4 heart of damage, and gets us down to 4 hearts left). Note that I tried to fall onto the railing on the left in order to cut my turns tighter, but I couldn't find a way to get enough momentum to make it onto that.

1:50 - Tricky teleports right next to the ladder. We want to set up another camera lock here, so we make Tricky stay when we reach the top of the ladder. Tricky's stay command will wear off when we get too close to him, so we press stay again when we are next to him. When Tricky has first entered his "stay mode", his range where you can feed him extends out much farther for a second or so. This allows me to feed Tricky on the same frame that I grab the ladder without losing any time! I then hold L-target as the feeding cutscene ends (and as Fox grabs the ladder to climb up) in order to cancel this initial camera lock state (which is necessary in order to make the camera lock when I next feed Tricky). The reason why we need to use camera lock is that it will let us skip the cutscene in TTH of the Queen EarthWalker telling Fox to go to the Walled City. That cutscene is 45 seconds or so, so after taking into account the setup time for this cutscene skip, we are able to save around 40 seconds using camera lock.

1:56 - I use the time while I'm climbing up the ladder to show off all of the items in my inventory - since this is what my inventory will look like from now until the end of the TAS.

2:18 - The objects in LightFoot Village here are not properly loaded, since we skipped some load triggers while airswimming to Cape Claw 3 earlier. Basically, the game sets LightFoot Village to the state it was last in to save time/energy when you re-enter the map from the Cape Claw Well, so if you never loaded the objects on the way into Cape Claw, the objects won't load on your way out (their only load trigger is on the other side of the LFV map).

2:25 - Normally, since we placed Spellstone 2, a cutscene would play here where Fox is attacked and tied up by the LightFoot, which would waste about 3 minutes. However, this doesn't play here - likely because us airswimming into Cape Claw 3 skipped loading the triggers into this map that would be needed to activate the cutscene when we reach this spot in the map. How convenient!

3:05 - We need to feed Tricky soon to enable camera lock to skip the Queen EarthWalker cutscene. As a brief refresher, Camera Lock has 2 parts: the set up (which must be done first), and the activation (when we use it). The set up is completed when we feed Tricky on the same frame that we grab a ladder, grab a ledge, or enter a tunnel (which we did using the ladder in the Cape Claw Well earlier). Camera Lock is disabled whenever we enter a cutscene that moves the camera - although we never hit any such cutscene after entering the well, so this isn't an issue for us. In order to activate the camera lock (after setting it up), we need to feed Tricky again on a different map from the one that we set up camera lock on. In this case, we set up camera lock in the CC Well, and we will feed Tricky in the LFV Link map, which are 2 different maps. To skip a trigger in 1 map, we need to activate camera lock at the edge of an adjacent map. Then, we can walk into the beginning of the next map without hitting a certain trigger (in this case, the Queen EarthWalker cutscene trigger, which gets placed there once we place Spellstone 4). We use the stay command here so that Tricky will be far enough away from us that he will teleport when we next call him, since this is faster than waiting for him to catch up to us or running back towards him. The image below shows the 7 Tricky spawn triggers that are closest to the TTH entrance underlined with red lines (the arrows on the map are the spawn triggers). The opening at the bottom middle of the map is where ThornTail Hollow's map starts, and we want Tricky to spawn at the trigger closest to TTH to save us time:

https://i.imgur.com/8gKPHo5.png

3:09 - We press call here to make Tricky teleport to the spawn trigger closest to the TTH entrance. We then need to press stay in order to get Tricky into a feedable state right away (otherwise, we would need to wait about 2.5 seconds after Tricky teleports before the earliest point that the game would let us feed him even if we were standing right next to him, which is much slower than pressing stay). We start rolling forwards right before pressing stay in order to get as close to TTH as possible while waiting for the stay command to appear. Then, we press stay and feed Tricky at the edge of the LFV Link Map, which activates the camera lock. We then walk into TTH and move past the cutscene trigger for the Queen EarthWalker cutscene, at which point we target to get rid of the camera lock state. As you can see from where the camera lock ends, we can walk right next to the Queen without activating the cutscene - the trigger is a small band like 15 feet away from the Queen that horizontally covers the whole entrance to TTH. As an aside, this is the last time we use/interact with Tricky for any purpose in this TAS.

3:19 - We take 1/4 heart of damage on the poison mushrooms here. This costs us 0 frames, and gets us down to 3 + 3/4 hearts left.

3:24 - We enter orbit here. And with that, we will never enter ThornTail Hollow again in this TAS!

4:02 - We now enter our last unique flight section of the game - the flight to Walled City.

4:15 - If we grabbed this gold ring, we would slam into the gate that opens and shuts up ahead, which would cost us 4 frames (we arrive at the gate at a bad spot in its cycle). However, we only need 7 of the 10 gold rings to reach Walled City. As such, we move down-left in order to get under the giant pyramid thing, which skips the gold ring and lets us avoid taking damage.

4:23 - Firing this bomb here is the only way to destroy the 2 mines that are near us and grab the gold ring here without taking damage, since we can't move to the right fast enough to hit them with a normal shot without taking damage, and they will blow up on us if we are close enough to the gold ring to grab it.

4:30 - We arrive at a bad point in the cycle of this gate opening and shutting as well. As such, we once again go down-left under the pyramid to avoid taking damage. Unlike last time, however, we have a way of grabbing the gold ring that's inside this pyramid without taking damage...

4:34 - There are various holes in the top of the ceiling of this area. We are able to just barely fly down through one of these holes without taking damage in time to grab the gold ring in the pyramid.

4:46 - And with 9 out of the 10 gold rings collected, we make it to the Walled City!

(cont. below)

josejavier1158 and zcanann like this
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(cont.)

5:14 - Our first goal in Walled City is to get out-of-bounds next to the MoonStone Temple. This will enable us to perform a trick where we hit certain object triggers to make the entrance to the K5 warp portal rise from the temple, which will let us reach K5. Fortunately, due to a developer oversight, it's pretty trivial to get out-of-bounds here.

5:26 - We jump up-left off the edge of the waterfall, and land on this rock in the waterfall. The jump trigger for the waterfall mistakenly overlaps with the edge of this rock. As such, by rolling up-right, we are able to jump off the edge of the rock. This gives us enough height to just barely make it past a spot on the side of the waterfall that looks like we could stand there (but doesn't have any floor collision that we can stand on) and onto a spot that Fox can stand on. With that, we are now out-of-bounds. We now proceed to make our way towards the MoonStone Temple. You can look at the image below to see where the plane of the jump trigger on the waterfall is (which is the yellow plane in the image), and how the devs mistakenly made it overlap with the rock. The rock we jump to is the one on the left of this image:

https://i.imgur.com/Woe19Jb.png

5:32 - We fall and land half in the wall here. We also take 1/4 heart of fall damage in the process, which costs us 1 frame and gets us down to 3 + 1/2 hearts left.

5:34 - By falling in an extremely precise spot, we can land half in the wall below us. RTA runners normally start an airswim here to make it easier to get out-of-bounds below the MoonStone Temple here. However, since this is a TAS, I can make the precise fall - which in turn saves us a nice chunk of time, since swimming is really slow in this game. :D

5:39 - We are now ready to do the glitch that will raise the entrance to K5 (which makes it so that we can reach it/enter it). This glitch was discovered by Zac Canann, and replaces the earlier strategy - which involved doing multiple airswims to collect and place the Sun and Moon stones, which in turn would make the K5 entrance rise (the new strategy saves over 6 minutes). In order to understand how this trick works, we need to take a look at the 3 object load triggers which are at the MoonStone entrance - which can be seen on the ramp that starts in the top-left corner of the image below:

https://i.imgur.com/kIXll0y.png

The loading triggers are the boxes labeled "Trig Area". To make explaining this trick less confusing, I will refer to the left-most trigger as the 1st trigger, the middle trigger as the 2nd trigger, and the right-most trigger on the ramp as the 3rd trigger. Each trigger has an onEnter() method that is called when you enter them from the front (the side near the exit to the MoonStone Temple) and an onLeave() method that's called when you hit them from behind/while leaving the temple. These triggers are used to save memory/space when you load the MoonStone Temple objects, so they unload objects from the main map when you enter the MoonStone Temple (and put some objects like the K5 entrance in a default state - which is raised up), and they re-load objects from the main map and overwrite default values when you leave the MoonStone Temple. Below, I summarize what the onEnter() and onLeave() methods for each of the 3 triggers do:

1st trigger onEnter() - Raises up the entrance to K5 from the temple, and also unloads the EarthWalkers on the map and the cutscene trigger for the King EarthWalker. 1st trigger onLeave() - Lowers the entrance to K5 from the temple (if you haven't raised the temple yet the intended way by placing the sun and moon stones), and it loads the EarthWalkers and the cutscene trigger by the King EarthWalker.

2nd trigger onEnter() - Makes the sky turn a weird shade of blue. 2nd trigger onLeave() - Makes the sky go back to normal. Hitting vs avoiding the 2nd trigger thus has no impact on the glitch, since this just controls weather effects.

3rd trigger onEnter() - Unloads the door blocking the MoonStone puzzle. 3rd trigger onLeave() - Loads the door blocking the MoonStone puzzle (if you haven't already opened the door normally by watching the cutscene).

From this, you can see that we need to activate the 1st trigger's onEnter() method without activating the 1st trigger's onLeave() method, and we need to activate the 3rd trigger's onEnter() method without activating the 3rd trigger's onLeave() method. Doing this will raise the temple entrance up, remove the King EarthWalker cutscene trigger and remove the door blocking the MoonStone puzzle, which will let us walk right up to the K5 warp portal.

5:40 - We briefly turn around here to activate the 3rd trigger's onEnter() method. We then turn, roll to the left, and roll back forwards to avoid activating the 3rd trigger's onLeave() method on our way up. This unloads the MoonStone puzzle's door.

5:41 - We briefly turn around here to activate the 1st trigger's onEnter() method. We then roll up-left in order to avoid activating the 1st trigger's onLeave() method on our way out. This sets the temple entrance to its default state (which is having the K5 entrance raised up), unloads all of the EarthWalkers on the map, and unloads the cutscene trigger for the cutscene where the King EarthWalker talks to Fox when we first reach the ramp up the temple. We are now ready to walk to the K5 warp portal!

5:42 - We clip back in-bounds here.

5:51 - There would normally be a door blocking us from leaving the MoonStone Temple here until we watched the cutscene of the King EarthWalker talking to Fox. However, since we activated the 3rd trigger's onEnter() method without activating its onLeave() method on the way out, this door is unloaded - allowing us to escape.

6:01 - As you can see, all of the EarthWalkers are now unloaded, and the King EarthWalker cutscene trigger is gone. This is a result of hitting the 1st trigger's onEnter() method without activating the 1st trigger's onLeave() method.

6:05 - The fastest route up the temple is going right, left, left and left.

6:28 - Normally, this structure at the top of the temple is not raised up until Fox places the sun and moon stones. However, since we activated the 1st trigger's onEnter() method without hitting its onLeave() method, the temple entrance is set to its default state - which is to have the entrance to the K5 warp portal raised up. This is what lets us reach the K5 warp portal.

6:30 - We enter the warp portal and warp to K5. Note that the trigger for this portal to be usable is if we are in WC2, and the trigger to be in WC2 is only set when Fox places Spellstone 4 (otherwise, we could skip collecting and placing Spellstones 2 and 4). If we tried doing this glitch in WC1 (such as right after we unlocked Walled City), we could still raise the temple entrance up like we did here in order to reach the K5 warp portal. However, once we climbed up onto the warp portal and pressed A, nothing would happen, since the warp portal is in an unusable state in WC1.

7:10 - We step on the switch to open the gate. Then, we take 1/2 heart of flame damage in this room (down to 3 hearts left), which costs us 0 frames. Note that in practice tests, I always took 3/4 hearts of damage. I'm not sure why the flame cycles were different here, but it doesn't really matter, since I can take 1/4 heart of fall damage in Krazoa Palace to make this up while only losing 1 frame.

7:28 - This room right here is the only reason why I got the Ground Quake earlier on. If I didn't get the Ground Quake, then the only way to get through this room would be to collect Spellstone 1, use Spellstone 1 to collect the ice blaster, and then use the ice blaster to put out the flames in this room. Using the Ground Quake skips all of that, and saves us around 15 minutes or so. This is the one major sequence break that I've discovered for this game!

Ground Quake Hovering itself was discovered by BvQr years ago. The way it works is, if Fox presses Ground Quake right after going over the edge of a platform, he will be suspended in mid-air. Then, there is a 1-frame window at the end of the Ground Quake where Fox can roll, immediately followed by pressing Ground Quake on the next frame in order to move a little forward and again get suspended in mid-air. Fox loses a tiny amount of vertical height with each roll he does following a Ground Quake, but this is negligible compared to the forward distance we gain. For a while, this technique had no known uses, since Fox moves such a small amount with each Ground Quake. However, I had the idea to try using this technique to get past the flames in K5 without the ice blaster. It required a lot of testing in order to find the right angles/positions, but I was eventually able to find a way to make it across the room with the amount of mana that we have from getting 2 mana upgrades.

This is very tight, mana-wise. We need to do exactly 7 Ground Quakes to get across the room, and we also need to fire 1 fireblaster shot in order to open the gate for 15 seconds or so. Starting with a full mana bar after getting 2 of the mana upgrades, this leaves us with only 1 extra fireblaster shot worth of mana left over.

Actually, the 1st flame requires only 3 GQs to clear, while the 2nd one requires 4 to clear. If the 1st one also required 4, then we would have needed to find a way to get the 3rd mana upgrade in Cape Claw in order to have enough mana to get across (technically, there is a way to get the 3rd mana upgrade - it would just cost us like 3.5 minutes, since it normally requires having the ice blaster to get that mana upgrade). This works because the devs didn't center the hitbox on the first flame very well. Since the hitbox skews to the right, we can roll at the left-edge of the flame in order to move a few units further forwards before we go off the edge and need to press GQ to avoid Fox entering his falling animation. The pictures below show the hitbox collision for the 1st flame and the 2nd flame respectively, which explains why we can clear the 1st flame in only 3 GQ hovers (the center of the hitbox is the red rectangle in the pictures):

https://i.imgur.com/4Qg8vbw.png

https://i.imgur.com/XsSDxyC.png

7:38 - When we roll up-right after our 3rd GQ hover, Fox is just barely far enough to the right/inside of the hitbox for the side of the ledge that the game makes Fox clip-up onto the ledge. If we were a little further left here, then the game would instead push Fox outwards and away from the ledge. We take 1 heart of damage skipping this flame, which costs us 0 frames, and gets us down to 2 hearts left. As you can see from the above image, the 2nd flame's hitbox is also not perfectly centered, and it leans a little to the left. As such, we do our GQ hovers for the 2nd flame on its right side in order to maximize our distance.

7:52 - We are just barely able to clip-up onto the ledge with our last roll up-left here. Skipping this flame cause us to take another heart of damage, which costs us 0 frames, and gets us down to 1 heart left. Once we are past the flame, we pull out our fireblaster and shoot the switch to open the gate. This is the last time we use mana in this TAS.

8:01 - We step on the switch to open the gate, and then take 1/2 heart of flame damage in this room. This costs us 0 frames, and get us down to 1/2 hearts left.

8:11 - We talk to the spirit here to start the test to get K5. This requires us to place 6 items in spots corresponding to the levels where the items were located. The TAS actually skipped ever using 5 out of 6 of the items in this test, so I'll briefly explain what they each are.

8:17 - As an aside, I built a program a while ago to simulate through all 720 possible orders of picking up the items here (6 time 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1 = 720). My program estimated the adjusted distance we walked when carrying an item to be 10% more than the distance when not carrying an item (since we move 10% faster when we are able to roll/are not carrying an item). Based on this I concluded that the fastest order for the items was Blow Horn, CloudRunner Flute, Moon Seed, Wooden Block, Asteroid, and Golden Tooth - which took a total adjusted distance of 4,669.3 units. This was already the route that RTA runners had been using for K5 for years, so I guess I sort of re-invented the wheel on this one - but waddaya gonna do?!? :P

If anyone was curious, I also found the slowest order as well, which was Moon Seed, Golden Tooth, Asteroid, Wooden Block, CloudRunner Flute, and Blow Horn - which took a total adjusted distance of 5,707.7 units. To see the distance of each possible route order ranked in order from first to last (along with their adjusted distance value), you can check out the following pastebin below:

https://pastebin.com/Uw7naUux

8:18 - I have to wait a while before the items spawn/become pick-up-able, so I use that time to get as far away from the Blow Horn as possible while still being in its grab range, and then I turn to face the spot I am going to put it down. This item is normally picked up in Dark Ice Mines, but we skipped that part of the game. Oddly enough, we still have that item in our inventory, since we hit a trigger in Dragon Rock that put it in our inventory.

8:25 - The CloudRunner Flute is normally given to Fox by the Queen CloudRunner in CloudRunner Fortress in order to save her babies. However, since we did Baby CloudRunner Skip, we never picked up this item.

8:33 - The Moon Seed is normally picked up by Fox in Moon Mountain Pass after placing Spellstone 1 in order to reach K2. K2 is normally needed in order to get a bigger wallet to open the path to Cape Claw. However, since we do the Cape Claw Early Airswim to get to Cape Claw without collecting K2, we never get this item.

8:40 - I timed it out, and it was 10 frames faster to roll along the side of this ledge than to roll off the ledge in a straight line towards the next item. Our next item is the Wooden Block, which we would normally pick up in LightFoot Village in order to get K3. However, since we did K3 Early, we never got this item.

8:48 - This is an object we actually did encounter - which is an asteroid from outer space.

8:55 - This is a Golden Tooth, which we would normally acquire/place in Walled City 1 in order to reach the boss and get Spellstone 3. However, since we did K4E, we skipped collecting Spellstone 3 entirely - which means we never collected this item.

9:00 - I finish this event with 33.92 seconds left on the in-game timer. Eat your hearts out, RTA runners! :D

I also pick up the last item again during the fade-out to the cutscene of getting K5, just to show that your last animation gets played at the start of the K5 cutscene. There's no point to this - I did it just to show off.

9:26 - And with that, we finally collect K5! Our next goal is to reach the Krazoa Palace to release K5.

9:31 - When we collect K5, the game normally plays a cutscene of Fox saying goodbye to Tricky. However, since we never spoke to the King EarthWalker, the trigger for his cutscene overlaps with where Fox spawns for the cutscene of saying goodbye to Tricky. This makes both cutscenes happen at the same time. The dialog spoken and in the subtitles is from the King EarthWalker cutscene, along with most of Fox's movements. However, some of Fox's movements/actions are taken from the cutscene of saying goodbye to Tricky, which causes some bizarre visual effects.

10:03 - "Annie are you OK, are you OK, are you OK Annie? You've been hit by, you've been struck by - a smoooooth criminal!" XD

10:14 - As you can see, watching this cutscene is how we are normally supposed to open the door blocking the Moonstone Temple.

10:17 - This occurs after the King EarthWalker cutscene ends, but before the cutscene of Fox saying goodbye to Tricky ends. As you can see, since the cutscene of Fox saying goodbye to Tricky is a few seconds longer than the King EarthWalker cutscene, watching the King EarthWalker cutscene here doesn't cost us any time (since we'd have to watch the cutscene of Fox saying goodbye to Tricky after releasing K5 anyways).

10:33 - We now enter the Arwing to fly to Krazoa Palace. Fun fact - if we fly to Dragon Rock right now, we will cutscene void on arrival, since Tricky is no longer with us but the game expects him to be there.

10:59 - Once we have K5 in our inventory, trying to fly to ThornTail Hollow will cause us to land in Krazoa Palace with the flags set that we can place K5. The game normally gives you a message when you go to fly to TTH after collecting K5 that Peppy re-programmed your Arwing to fly directly to Krazoa Palace, but since we skipped a lot of flags/items in the game, General Pepper gives us a message that we never collected K5, for some reason. Either way, this section works as you would expect - trying to fly to TTH will indeed send us to Krazoa Palace.

12:00 - We finish this flight section with a new high score of 2,145 points. Since a lag frame happens to occur on the frame where we would normally press A to stop the high score screen from coming up, you can actually see the high score screen here for 1 frame (which is the only time in the TAS where you can see it). Just don't blink or you might miss it!

12:19 - We land the Arwing in Krazoa Palace, and with that, this segment is over!

And that's all she wrote! It's been a long ride, but there's only 1 more segment left in this TAS. Join me next time to see Fox finally beat the game!

Edited by the author 1 year ago
josejavier1158 and zcanann like this
United States

Since the route has changed a lot of times since I started this TAS, I've decided to post an updated route for my TAS. This pastebin lists the final route which was actually taken in my TAS, and it supersedes all earlier routes that I've posted in this thread:

https://pastebin.com/ssGbwwec

zcanann and josejavier1158 like this
United States

Hello again everybody. After over a year of work, my TAS is finally finished!

In this section, Fox releases K5, gets K6, releases K6, kills Andross, and beats the game. The video below shows the last segment. It also includes the credits as well, which is why the video is so long:

The route for this section is:

  1. Take 1/4 heart of fall damage onto the side of the wind-tunnel (down to 1/4 hearts left).
  2. Release K5.
  3. Deathwarp on the Sharpclaw next to where K5 is released (this is why we've been taking damage for the last 40 minutes!)
  4. Enter the K6 warp portal.
  5. Do the Scales Cutscene Skip, and collect K6.
  6. Release K6.
  7. Kill Andross/Beat the game.

Now, I'll list some timesaves, optimizations and highlights for this segment, along with a timestamp for where to find them in the linked video:

0:00 - This segment starts off right after Fox lands at Krazoa Palace with K5. Our next goal is to release K5, as releasing K5 will unlock K6, and releasing K6 will take us to the final boss fight against Andross.

We walk towards the wind-tunnel that leads down into Krazoa Palace (the other wind-tunnel pushes Fox up to the roof where we already are).

0:14 - I made sure to bump Fox slightly into the wall as he fell off the ledge. This stopped all of Fox's upwards momentum, and made him fall down immediately. Additionally, I took 1/4 heart of fall damage on the side of the wind-lift (which got us down to 1/4 heart left, and cost us 1 frame to do).

0:17 - It's a little faster to stay on the railing while we walk in a circle around this floor to where the K5 release spot is. The reason for this is that we're essentially walking in a circle which has a smaller radius than if we were outside of the railing, which means we're walking less total distance.

0:25 - Taking damage on the Sharpclaw here would have been slow, which is why it was left out of my damage routing.

0:30 - The wind-tunnel in this room is programmed to not activate until Fox actually has K5. That way, you can't reach the area where you release K5 before you've actually gotten K5.

Actually, this ledge before we enter the wind-lift is kind of annoying, since the left-most quarter of the ledge has a grab trigger on the edge that forces Fox to grab onto the side of the ledge instead of just falling off. As such, we need to roll off the edge of the platform a little to the right of this to prevent Fox from getting caught on the edge (which would waste like 3 seconds). RTA runners definitely know what I'm talking about here! :)

0:38 - We now release K5, which triggers the gate to open that was blocking the warp portal to K6. Note that if there was a way to clip past the gate blocking K6 early, then we could beat the game much faster by collecting K3, reaching Krazoa Palace, using the glitch to get into the warp portal, and then collecting K6. We could then ESW back out past the gate, and then go back to Krazoa Palace and release K6 to go to the Andross fight. But alas, there's no way to clip past this gate...

1:11 - The fastest way up to the K6 portal is to deathwarp back to the top of Krazoa Palace (where the Arwing landed). Deathwarping is 10-15 seconds faster than savewarping. This is the reason why we've been taking damage for the last 40 minutes! It only cost us about 20 frames to take all of this damage, so we basically save all of the 10-15 seconds that we could possibly save from deathwarping.

While the screen is still black after the cutscene ends, Fox rolls so that he is the perfect distance away from the Sharpclaw to make him lunge at Fox (the Sharpclaw has a timer that resets to 0 every 60 frames/1 second. If Fox is like 88-110 or so units away from the Sharpclaw when the timer is at 0, then the Sharpclaw will decide to lunge at Fox on the next frame). Fox dies so quickly that you barely even see what killed him, which I find pretty funny! With that, we save and continue to go back to the top of KP (if we didn't save, we would go to the top of KP without K5 being placed and with the gate blocking the K6 warp portal still up).

1:27 - We now warp to the K6 shrine.

2:02 - Normally, Fox is supposed to go to the center of the room. This triggers a cutscene where General Scales falls from the ceiling and says "I've been waiting for you Fox McCloud!" After the cutscene ends, when you press A to pull out your staff, it triggers a cutscene where Andross stops the fight and forces General Scales to give you K6.

However, we can actually skip this first Scales cutscene with a clever glitch. To understand how, take a look at this image, which shows where the objects in this map are located when Fox first enters the room:

https://i.imgur.com/eQOlVVp.png

As you can see, General Scales exists out-of-bounds before his cutscene starts. He's just chilling there out-of-bounds on the left side of the map (the left side relative to where Fox is facing when he enters the room). The trigger for the cutscene with Andross is just Fox having his staff in hand while close enough to General Scales that the game triggers "Combat Mode" (when you lock onto an enemy and see their health/heart appear over their head).

We will therefore manipulate General Scales to move close enough to us through the wall in order to trigger the Andross cutscene.

2:04 - To start things off, we need to touch this spot in the center of the water wall (we could also touch any spot to the left of this along the wall, but touching the right-most spot that we can is the fastest for our purposes). This makes Scales start focusing on Fox. If we didn't do this step, then he would never start walking towards us.

2:05 - After hitting this spot, we immediately turn to the right and start moving towards a certain spot on the ground. There is a place we can stand where Scales will start walking towards us (if he's already focused on Fox).

Once we reach that spot on the ground, we shield, and then pull out our Staff (since the cutscene won't trigger unless Fox has his Staff in hand near Scales).

2:07 - Once General Scales is almost in range to trigger the cutscene, we roll to the left to get close enough to him to start the cutscene, since Fox can move a lot faster than General Scales can walk. Once we get within the right distance away from him with our staff in hand, the Andross cutscene automatically starts.

Rolling right before the cutscene starts saves about half a second. Additionally, doing this cutscene skip saves 10.5 seconds compared to going through this area the intended/glitchless way.

Just for fun, here's a picture showing where General Scales would have been a second after the cutscene started if we didn't pull out our staff and just stood still:

https://i.imgur.com/nVZdVEZ.png

3:02 - The trigger for the first General Scales cutscene is still active, and Fox hits it during this cutscene at the point where the music abruptly cuts out. You can see that the game tries to force Scales to stand up, his sword to be in his hand, and for Fox to fall to the ground. This first cutscene ends up overlapping with the end of the Andross cutscene. However, since this first cutscene ends before the Andross cutscene ends, it doesn't cost us any time.

And with that, Fox now has K6!

3:34 - We now release K6. This is the trigger to go to the final boss fight against Andross (so if a glitch were to be found to get K6 right away, we could beat the game very quickly).

Now, we get to watch 3 minutes of cutscenes - after which we'll enter the final boss fight.

6:28 - The Andross fight has 5 phases. In the 1st phase, we shoot out Andross's eyes and Jewel. In the 2nd phase, we shoot out his hands. In the 3rd phase, we go back to shooting out Andross's eyes and Jewel (but this time, they each have more health). In the 4th phase, we go back to shooting out Andross's hands (which also have more health). Then, a cutscene plays where Falco appears, and we enter the 5th phase. In the 5th phase, we collect a bomb, shoot it into Andross's mouth, and then shoot out/blow up his brain to kill him.

6:29 - In this 1st phase, each jewel/eye takes 10 shots to destroy.

6:36 - In this 2nd phase, each hand takes 15 shots to blow up. We also barrel roll after blowing up the 1st hand in order to reach the 2nd hand faster.

6:40 - In the 3rd phase, we can start shooting Andross's eye as soon as it becomes visible on screen (while he's turning around). In this phase, each jewel/eye requires 15 shots to destroy.

This was definitely the hardest phase to TAS, since it was almost impossible to avoid Andross's hyperbeam wave attack. He always aims for where you just were on screen, so I needed to quickly move back and forth in order to make him miss me, which let me just barely destroy all 3 jewels without getting hit/shoved to the side or slowing down.

6:50 - In the 4th phase, each hand takes 18 shots to blow up. Once both are destroyed, a scripted section happens where Andross tries to suck Fox into his mouth and Falco saves us. I held R while waiting for Falco to appear, since this makes the ship turn sideways (which you never got a chance to see in the rest of the TAS).

7:14 - Admittedly, I got kind of lazy with this part of the fight. I just put the game on 30% speed and pulled out a turbo controller to shoot the asteroids here, since none of my movement here affects how fast the fight goes (and it would have taken me like a week to TAS hitting all of the asteroids).

7:23 - I make up for my laziness a little bit by shooting out all of the missiles here one by one.

7:30 - ...And now I go back to being lazy! :P

7:34 - We grab the bomb here.

7:40 - We shoot the bomb into Andross's mouth on the earliest frame that it will register. Andross can take damage at most once every 6 frames, and can only take 1 HP of damage at a time (in other words, he has 6 frames of invulnerability after each hit). For some reason, the bomb exploding into his mouth at the side of his mouth I aimed at makes him take about 5 shots of damage in a row, starting on the first frame he could possibly take damage, and continuing once every 6 frames for 30 frames. After this wears off, I start shooting at Andross's brain.

7:41 - Andross's brain has 80 HP total. Every TAS and RTA speedrun up to this point has always taken 2 cycles to destroy Andross's brain. However, in a historic first, this TAS kills Andross's brain in 1 cycle, which saves 41 seconds!

The key to this is that I used a RAM Watch to make sure that I was causing Andross to take damage with every shot that I fired, and I made sure that I was firing as fast as possible.

It's also possible to manipulate which way Andross's brain lunges/how hard/fast he lunges, since this is RNG based. As such, I did random actions to get him to lunge as hard as he could to 1 side of the screen, and then lunge to the opposite side of the screen as hard as he could on the next lunge when he zoomed in for the attack. This let me get right up to the side of the brain without taking damage and to keep shooting at it while he was attacking me as well.

To explain better how this works: Under normal circumstances, to get to the side where you can hit Andross's brain during a lunge attack, you normally need to hold left or right for a while. However, this also makes you aim your blaster to the left or right, so your shots usually miss. However, by making Andross do such extreme lunges, I was able to make him miss me without moving. This let me shoot at the side of the brain while still facing forwards.

Ultimately, the extra shots provided by hitting him while he was lunging were what made the difference in being able to 1 cycle him (I had less than 100 frames left at the point where I fired the last shot before his brain would have gone back to being invulnerable).

7:47 - This is one example of me manipulating Andross to miss during the lunge attack.

7:50 - TIME! The TAS ends when Andross's death cutscene starts (which is about 10 frames after our last input of the TAS, which was to press A to fire the last shot at Andross). This fight was a perfect swan song to cap off the TAS: We took no damage, and skipped a whole cycle at the end of the Andross fight which no one had ever done before!

9:33 - This is the closing cutscene of the game. And to think, some people claim that true Fox love is dead!!!!!

11:45 - And with that, we've now reached the credits!!!!!!!!!

Before I end this post, I'd like to take the time to thank some people who made this TAS possible:

Zac Canann - Zac discovered like 85% of all glitches in this TAS which were found after BvQr's TAS was made in 2016. To give a partial list of some glitches he discovered that were used in this TAS: there's K4E, CC3 Airswim Through LFV, Ground Quake Early, Queen Earthwalker Post SS4 Cutscene Skip, Sun and Moon Stone skip, and many more. This is what ultimately cut down the length of this new TAS from being over 4 hours long to being less than 3 hours long. He also did a lot of debugging to figure out how various glitches work, and to find RTA setups for tricks - which in turn lead to a renaissance of Star Fox Adventures speedruns. Furthermore, he helped me figure out how a lot of tricks/glitches worked when I asked him, which I was in turn able to use to save time. Lastly, he built the RNG Manip script that allowed me to get a 111 111 pattern in the electric tile puzzle in OFPT 1.

JubJub62 - JubJub was the person who first got me interested in Star Fox Adventures speedruns when I discovered his streams of the game back in 2016 or so. If it weren't for him, I might have never gotten the idea to make this TAS.

BvQr - BvQr made the first full game TAS of Star Fox Adventures in 2016. This established a baseline route for a TAS of the game, and also introduced a lot of TAS-only tricks that BvQr discovered (like walking off grabbable ledges without grabbing onto them, which was used several times in my TAS). BvQr also discovered a lot of the important pre-2016 sequence breaks in the game, such as Baby CloudRunner Skip (I think he discovered this - he can correct me down below in the thread if I'm misremembering). His discovery of Ground Quake Hovering is also what lead me to discover Ice Blaster Skip years later, which saved over 15 minutes in my TAS. In short, BvQr was one of the early pioneers of Star Fox Adventures TASing, and he paved the way for what came next.

Rena Kunisaki - Rena decompiled much of the game over the course of several years, which in turn allowed Zac and other glitch hunters to discover many of the glitches they found in the game. Additionally, I used his RAM-Viewer script to find where objects were stored in memory, and he was able to find me the health addresses of the Dragon Rock Spires, Drakor and Andross when I asked him - which made TASing those sections much, much easier. He also figured out the pseudocode/logic for how Tricky decides when to attack/flame Fox, which I used multiple times in my TAS.

Dark X-Rane - Dark X-Rane helped me figure out how to TAS Star Fox Adventures without it desyncing all the time (since he had figured it out while he worked on a TAS of the game a few years ago that he hadn't finished). Basically, I needed to start playback from a savestate that was made during a cutscene in order to avoid the next section desyncing. Then, after TASing up to the next cutscene, I could play the TAS back from power-on and create a new savestate in the next cutscene and continue TASing from there. Thus, this painstaking process allowed me to get around Dolphin's terrible desyncs. Additionally, he informed me of the optimal roll movement pattern (shielding on the 29th frame after a roll and rolling on the 30th frame after a roll), which was used literally everywhere in this TAS where Fox could use his staff. At least, this better be the optimal roll timing, since I already made a whole TAS using that as my standard!!!!! :D

Fuzzyness - Fuzzyness really helped increase interest in the game once he started doing speedruns of it. He also advanced the standard of the world records by including tricks like Bike Skip, which forced other runners to learn that trick in order to keep pace in the World Record Battle. Fuzzyness also discovered several optimizations/timesaves which I used in my TAS, like rolling along the wall during the airswim to Cape Claw instead of immediately entering the water (this was only used right before starting the 2nd airswim to CC3 at the end of the TAS, since this hadn't been discovered when I TASed the earlier airswims). Fuzzyness also gave me the idea to shoot the mana gem plants during the flame puzzles in OFPT in order to get mana without having to climb up the wall.

Celestial Derp - Celestial is the glitchless WR-holder for the game, and he's also traded the Any% No Void Travel record (the category that this TAS is in) back and forth with Fuzzyness several times (he currently holds the WR as of me writing this post, but I'm sure he or Fuzzyness will get a new WR to beat it very soon). He's basically the king of movement optimizations in this game - many of which were incorporated in RTA-routes, and later in this TAS. He also informed me about the mana gem cutscene overlap after killing the 4 Sharpclaws right after Fox picked up the Staff, which saved 5 seconds. Also, more generally, because he's played the game so many times, he was able to answer a lot of my questions about what rare patterns/events were possible, and of how certain events in the game worked - all of which helped me to make this TAS much faster than it otherwise would have been.

Gyoo - Gyoo repeatedly played my TAS back from power-on at several points in my TASing process to verify that it synced on his machine. This was very important - since a movie can't be accepted to TASVideos for publication if it won't sync on anyone's machine besides the original author. As such, if Gyoo didn't verify the sync, I would have had to wait to find someone else to be able to verify it before I could continue working on it. He also made some encodes for me with input display active which let me see what my movements were when I had to redo certain sections, which saved me a lot of time and energy to re-TAS!

StarFalco64 - For general encouragement with the TAS, and for some cool Any% NG+ runs.

JoseJavierGud - For general encouragement with the TAS.

...Lastly, I want to thank you, the viewer, for watching through my TAS and offering feedback. If you read through all of this thread's humongous wall of text describing the TAS, then you are no doubt a Star Fox Adventures expert by now - complete with encyclopedic knowledge of all of the game's inner workings. I hope you've enjoyed the ride, and I'll see you in my next TAS!

Final Time of the TAS: 2 hours 51 minutes and 49.53 seconds. Final rerecord count: 175,914

Edited by the author 1 year ago
josejavier1158, Koopary and 4 others like this
United States

Hello again everyone. I have one last update for this thread:

Me and Fuzzyness performed commentary over a playback of my full TAS, which can be found here:

Also, I've included a commentaryless video of the TAS which is just the game right here:

Lastly, I've submitted this movie to TASVideos for publication. You can see the submission for the TAS and the discussion thread for it over here:

https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/23519

I wouldn't have been able to finish this TAS if it wasn't for all of the help and encouragement that the people in this thread have provided. Thank you all so much, and thank you to everyone for watching my movie! I'll see you in my next TAS!!!!! :D

Edited by the author 1 year ago
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