Hi everybody, Lobsterzelda here. I'm making this thread to announce a discovery I've made in terms of new ideas for skipping the ice blast in K5 (which is the last place in the route where we need ice blast - skipping this would let us skip getting the first spellstone).

I loaded up a file in K5 which had the ground quake, and enabled infinite mana using hacks. Using this, I was able to use the walking in air with ground quake glitch to make it accross the room without the ice blaster!

I wasn't able to make a video of this, b/c dolphin crashes when I try to record a movie from a savestate (among other things), but to see what the glitch looks like in general, check out BvQr's video where he discovered the glitch here:

Currently, my way of making it across the room required somewhere around ~20 ground quakes, which is more than the upper maximum of 10 that we can do with full mana in normal gameplay, although there may be a way to get around this.

To describe what I did: First, I got on the outer wall like Zac did in this video:

From here, I did the glitch on the edge of one of the pillars, with fox facing slightly towards the wall on the other side of the pillar. From here, I did ground quakes until I landed on the other side. A similar process is needed to get past the second pillar (although you can also do the ground quakes to reach the platform past the fire instead).

If this worked out, it would save a lot of time. However, there's a lot of reasons why this is currently an unusable/unviable strategy. I will explain the issues below in my next post:

(continued)

Issues:

1. Mana Limitations - Fox moves really slowly forwards with each ground quake, so we need a lot of ground quakes to get across. The collision on the edges of the pillars is kind of wonky, so it's possible that with a precise angle, there's some spot where can land on to skip like half of the ground quakes, which would go a long way towards making this viable (but someone would need to investigate to figure that out).

2. Super Ground Quake - ...doesn't work without getting original ground quake - which means we really need to have the original ground quake in order to even attempt using this method. Staff swapping does let you use the super ground quake without the original, but you need to enter aiming mode with a staff spell to do this, (the fire blaster is the only spell which could let us do this here - besides the ice blaster of course) - and you can't do this in midair (and even if you could, you would fall well before you could pull out the fire blaster). This glitch also let's you use the mana amount of the fire blaster with each ground quake (which would also solve issue 1), but since we can't use this in midair, we again arrive at the same dead end...

For reference, here is the video showing how to do the staff swap glitch, which also shows that it let's you use super ground quake without having gotten the original ground quake:

3. Getting the Original ground quake - Getting ground quake currently requires placing spell stone 1, which in turn requires getting the ice blaster - which defeats the whole purpose of this trick. Unless we find a way to get the original ground quake without getting the moon mountain pass key, then this particular trick will likely never become a viable way to skip the flames in K5.

I'm hoping that making a consolidated thread with all of this information present will help with the glitch-finding process, in a similar way to how my K4 thread led to some new improvements to the K4 trick being discovered. Nevertheless, with how many seemingly intractable problems there are with this trick, it may wind up being a losing battle finding a way to make this all come together...

Of course, that can't stop us from trying!

TAS can skip the MM Pass Key. This might actually be faster than doing the Beacon event, it needs to be timed. It takes 2.5 minutes of swinging, but it would miss 1-2 Fuel Cells.

I am currently searching for a way to obtain Ground Quake. It seems impossible to walk up the right side of the map:

If we can:

1. Get Ground Quake
2. Skip fire in K5 shrine with Ground Quake Then TAS will not need to collect SS1, MM Pass Key, or Freeze Blast

If we could gain a little more swim height, GQ Early would be feasible. Unfortunately, the only higher water in Dinosaur Planet is in SnowHorn Wastes.

Starting at this water misses critical loading triggers, causing ThornTail not to load.

Important Update:

I found a way to get past the first flame in K5 using only 3 ground quakes! This is important, because we have enough mana in this room to perform 6 ground quakes and fire a fire blaster shot, so this would theoretically mean that finding ground quake early could let us skip spellstone 1.

Unfortunately, the 2nd flame seems substantially wider than the first one, so I can't find a way to make it to the other side using less than 4 quakes, and 4 is too many for how much mana we have.

It honestly might be easier to make it across the first flame in 2 quakes than to get past the 2nd one with 3, since the first one has a lot more leeway, and with 2, you're already kind of close to making it to the other side.

If we could gain a little bit of swim height (-638 instead of -645), then GQ early would work:

One hack used at the start to gain the needed height to clip up. If we backtrack, the terrain is too slippery to start the glitch. The OOB navigation has to start where it does in the video, as far as I can tell.

Btw, it’s worth noting that if we do a spell swap for 1 ground quake, we can actually get out 7 ground quakes and a fire blaster shot.

We can get close to the edge, shield to cancel our momentum, and pull out fire blaster, wait till the flame pushes us over the edge, and then do spell swap to get 1 ground quake in midair.

The downside of this is, the flame pushes us back, so it’s hard to get a good start to the hovers this way...

I found a way to beat K5 without using ice blaster, using just 2 mana upgrades and the ground quake spell!

This description for the video contains a summary of how the whole trick works, so I won't bother re-explaining it here.

This was the last flame that we needed to be able to skip in order to skip spellstone 1 and getting ice blaster. However, getting ground quake currently requires spellstone 1 and ice blaster, so this won't save any time until we find a way to get ground quake early (also known as GQ early for short).

However, once we find GQ early, this will be able to save about 10 minutes in the TAS!

SFA glitch hunters, take note. If we can get past one door, we can do another big sequence break!

Found another GQ early method that "almost works", but fails due to the rock being glitch-loaded.

The "Lift" button appears, but because the rock is loaded as a gray box, it does not reveal the shrine. When returning later, the rock is still unlifted.

There are no save triggers behind the door, otherwise we could save/quit here to fix it.

Figured it out. TAS can obtain Ground Quake Early! Skip to 6:30 if you do not care about the setup.

The trick is to glitch-load the door as a box, but be careful not to unload it. Then swim back near ThornTail, which fixes loading, then we go back to MM Pass. Now the door is still a box, but the rock will load properly.

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Route time comparison estimates:

Normal Route (33 minutes) -20m for DIM -10m for Freeze Blast -3m for CCE

Speeder Skip (25 minutes) -12m for DIM -10m for Freeze Blast -3m for CCE

GQE (18.5 minutes) -2m for DIM up to Flame -0m for Freeze Blast -9.5m for GQ -7m TAS OOB to skip the door instead of using the cannon OOB. If we find a new CC OOB with ground quake, we can greatly reduce this time.

We should be looking for more OOBs with Ground Quake now. We may be able to unlock DIM at the same time as Tricky now...

If we do Rocket Boost Early, we can potentially get 2x mana upgrades very quickly to help with Ground Quakes

Some ideas: https://imgur.com/a/aiOounE

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In order to get Mana #2 early, we need to swim to SnowHorn Wastes first to cause ThornTail to load the next layer:

Great work finding GQ early! And with that, ss1 and the ice blaster can finally be skipped, and we can save another 7-9 minutes in the SFA TAS!