Hi everybody. I noticed that there are multiple different threads which discuss K4 early ideas, but there's no centralized spot which contains all of the current info, research, and ideas about the trick. As such, I decided to make this thread to fix that. I will first list ideas which currently don't work for K4 early, followed by the only known way of currently doing the glitch.

Memory Leak Glitch:

It has been discovered that we can introduce memory leaks into the game by zooming the camera in repeatedly while out-of-bounds near the warpstone. This causes heap slots to be occupied without ever getting deallocated, which causes objects to fail to load in certain maps.

Ideally, we would want to use this to prevent the gate in front of the K4 shrine entrance from loading, but make sure that the warp portal object loads.

Unfortunately, this does not appear to be possible as a result of a few facts:

1. The game goes through a list of objects to load in a pre-defined order when you enter a map.
2. The gate object loads before the warp object, so if the game completely ran out of heap slots before loading the gate, the warp object also wouldn't load.
3. The gate object is smaller than the warp object in memory, so we can't just make sure that the game has enough memory slots to load the warp portal but not enough for the gate.
4. Savewarping from inside the gate/on top of the warp portal will respawn you at the entrance to Snowhorn Wastes, and not on the warp portal (you have to enter the warp portal and then leave the K4 shrine and savewarp in order to respawn in the cage).

Based on all of this, it doesn't look like there's any way to make this trick work. It is worth noting though that if you walk through Snowhorn wastes out of bounds (using hacks) in an odd way, you can make it so that neither the gate nor the warp portal object load when you reach them. However, it's unlikely that there's a way to get just the warp portal to load and not the gate (since it seems to either load all objects in the area or none), so this information probably won't prove to be particularly helpful...

Void Walking:

If you enter a cutscene you aren't supposed to enter at a given point in time, such as watching cutscenes which involve tricky when you don't have tricky with you, then the game enters into an odd glitched state. You can start falling through the floor, and then you can sort of move through the air without falling very much, and collision with water is disabled. So far, it is only known how to do this from a point which is too low down on Snowhorn wastes to get past the gate. However, if we could activate this glitch from the top of Ice Mountain, then we should be able to just fall into the K4 shrine, since the ceiling only has 1-way collision. After that, collecting a fuel cell for the first time in the cage disables the glitch, and lets us continue normally from there.

However, this trick also has some issues. Most of the cutscenes that make this trick work require not having tricky, which means you can't die after beating K4 to ESW out. You could do a RESW to get out, but this means that your other file would become locked behind the gate instead, which in turn would block all future ESW, and make K3 early impossible.

Basically, to do this trick, we need to find a way to get void walking with tricky present, and we need to find a way to do it from the top of Ice Mountain. Otherwise, this isn't really a viable way to save any time.

Airswim Cancelling:

If you are swimming through out of bounds water and touch the right point on a wall or ceiling, the game can be tricked into thinking you are standing on it, which cancels your airswim. If we could do this in the K4 shrine, this would let us fall into the shrine.

We can get into an airswim state inside the K4 shrine entrance using barrel clip to get out of bounds. However, the walls appear to be the wrong type to cancel an airswim on, and there is no water which is high enough up to be able to potentially stand on the ceiling.

Thus, this also appears unviable.

Underwater Slashing With Fuel Cell Airswim Cancel:

Finally, we arrive at the current only known way of performing K4 early. To do this, we first clip out of bounds using barrel clip. Then, we navigate out-of-bounds to the edge of one of the water planes. We then roll and fall into the next water plane, and start slash-swinging when we hit the floor (by doing this on the frame that we hit the next water plane, we will slash our staff instead of starting to swim). By doing frame-perfect staff swings from here on out, we can slowly move forwards while not starting to swim (which would make us float upwards until we reached the water plane height that we rolled off of, which is above the fuel cells in the K4 entryway).

While we do this, we take hypothermia damage from the cold water at a rate of 1 hit every 5 seconds. To make it to the K4 shrine, we need at least 1 Badamded to revive us along the way. When we get close enough to the fuel cells in the K4 entryway, we stop staff-swinging, and let fox swim upwards until he hits the fuel cells. Since this is our first time collecting a fuel cell, it plays the "you got a new item" cutscene, which cancels our airswim, and lets us fall into the shrine.

From here, we beat K4 normally. When we get out, we make Tricky clip into the cage, and then we use him to die to perform an ESW which takes us to Dark Ice Mines. From here, we then fly back to Thorn Tail Hollow from DIM, which takes about 2 minutes - and with that, the trick is complete!

The whole trick can be seen here:

(continued in the next post)

Issues and Timesave Ideas:

This trick has a lot of things about it which make it slow.

1. We can't collect any fuel cells until after we reach DIM. This means we have to buy our fuel cells from the shop, which introduces an extra trip to the shop to buy fuel cells, which takes about a minute.
2. After doing the trick, we need to spend another 2 minutes flying back to Thorn Tail Hollow.
3. The staff swinging section itself is really slow - it takes up like 2-3 minutes of time.
4. Currently, it is believed that we need around 8 hearts to make it to the K4 entryway. Since we do this trick with 4 hearts to start with, if we get 1 bafamded, this gives us exactly 8 hearts to work with, which is extremely tight. To get more bafamdeds, we have to go to the shop to buy the bafamded bag and buy another bafamded, which wastes about a minute and a half (including the time to be revived by the extra bafamded).

Workarounds:

Ideally, if we can't find another way to reach K4 early, then we should figure out how to minimize the issues described above. Here are my ideas for each of the 4 issues in order:

1. The fuel cell issue is impossible to solve, since you can't ESW before you reach DIM, you can't reach DIM without fuel cells, and you can't have picked up a fuel cell on the ground before doing this trick, or it won't work.

2. At first glance, you might think we can skip the extra flight back from DIM by ESWing in ThornTail Hollow. However, this is impossible. The reason why is that you can't ESW in thorntail hollow until you release the 3rd krazoa spirit. To get+release the 3rd krazoa spirit, you need to get the rocket boost upgrade. Getting the rocket boost upgrade requires going to the well, which disables the "you-got-a-new-item" cutscene for fuel cells, making the K4 early glitch not work. Thus, K4 early has to be done before K3, meaning we won't have access to the ESW point in ThornTail Hollow...

3. The staff swings are more or less necessary, since the water planes are at terrible heights to try to reach the shrine. It might be possible to find a point which is slightly closer to K4 to start the swinging, however, which could save a small amount of time. However, this would probably be on the order of magnitude of a few seconds, not a minute.

4. This part is the one I am most interested in. There are some issues with it, however. If we clip out of bounds using barrel clip, it takes 3/4 hearts to do so. Thus, if we start off with 4 hearts, then we will only have 3 + 1/4 heart left + a bafamded to make it through the staff-swinging (a total of 7 + 1/4 heart). I don't think there are any enemies which pass close enough to out of bounds that they could be killed for an energy refill (although someone might want to check this to confirm), so I think we're stuck with this amount to make it across. Doing this with only 1 bafamded also assumes that we can make it to the point where we start the staff swinging without taking any hypothermia damage in the water beforehand, which may or may not be possible. The current best movement through the staff-swinging section (using hacks to prevent taking damage) takes 7 + 3/4 hearts of damage (although including the 10 second post-bafamded invulnerability, this becomes equivalent to about 7 + 1/2 hearts of damage). Close, but it's not clear if there's a way to do this fast enough to make it through.

We could also try going out of bounds through ThornTail Hollow instead to avoid taking damage to start off with. However, we would have to swim against the current to reach snow horn wastes, which would probably cost us like 2 minutes or so, which is longer than the amount of time it would take to just buy more bafamdeds.

Another idea is that we could wait till we beat Cloudrunner fortress so that we have 5 hearts. However, this would require making 2 extra trips to the shop for fuel cells, which would cost us about 2 and a half minutes, which also makes it slower than just buying the bafamdeds.

To be clear, doing K4 early (as it's currently known) saves approximately 10 minutes compared to collecting spell stone 3, placing it, getting the Snownhorn Artifact, and entering K4 (the way you are supposed to), which means it's definitely worth it to do this trick in a TAS. The question is really just what the best way to approach it is. The extra trip to the shop for the bafamded bag purchase is the most likely thing that could be eliminated to save time. However, this trip is only like a minute and a half or so, so it's not a huge time difference (meaning whatever alternative strategy we do has to be faster than this to be useful).

Basically, if we can get to the K4 shrine starting with 4 hearts and 1 bafamded using the barrel clip in Ice Mountain route, then we can get the 1.5 minute timesave. Otherwise, the next fastest strategy is to just buy the bafamded bag and 2nd bafamded and then go do the barrel clip in Ice Mountain.

I am hoping that someone can look into this to see how viable it is to make it to K4 this way (i.e., what is the closest point to the entrance that we can start the staff swings, is there a way to refill any health we lose in the fall down the mountain, and can we make it to the start of the staff-swings from the top of ice mountain without taking any hypothermia damage?)

This probably isn't helpful, but you can reach DIM "without" collecting Fuel Cells with a same-file ESW. The side-effects of this are that you have to re-collect those Fuel Cells later, and fly to DIM again before going to CRF.

Also I think the cannon clip will always cause at least 1 heart of damage. Explosive barrels hurt a lot.

Yeah, looking through other videos of Cannon Clip, I noticed that all of them seem to do 2 long falls, which would cost fox 1 heart of damage (and since the exploding barrel does 1/4 heart of damage, this would leave fox with 2 + 3/4 hearts and a bafamded/4 extra hearts). It would be extremely unlikely for us to be able to make it to K4 with this low health, so hopefully, we can either find a spot where we can skip past the first out-of-bounds ledge that we land on, or we can land on the water in the second fall (ideally both, but idk if there's a practical spot in the out-of-bounds geometry to even get close to being able to do that).

Some sort of collision viewer for out-of-bounds would probably make this easier.

Btw, if you do the cannon clip, is there a spot where you can float back up to the out-of-bounds rocks by where you get the Ice Mountain wallet upgrade? I noticed that doing this clip seems to put you in the out-of-bounds water below this area, and I'm not sure whether or not you can get back up without taking hypothermia damage.

All in all, it's looking like we're going to need the bafamded bag...

On an unrelated note, the one other idea I have for K4 early is to fall into the K4 shrine from out-of-bounds in the speeder race section, but I'm assuming either: A: There's no spot on the race which is directly above K4. B: If you fall from the middle of the race, you won't make Snowhorn Wastes load.

Lastly, one more timesave idea I have for this TAS is to wait to get the ice blaster until after getting spellstone 2 and releasing K3. Then, once we get the ice blast, we could ESW back to thorntail hollow to skip walking back from Volcano Force Point Temple. However, given how complicated ESW is and how many catches and exceptions there are to it working, it wouldn't surprise me if there's some reason why this is impossible...

Ah I missed that the damage is from cannon damage, not barrel damage. Barrel damage normally does 1 full heart, but the cannon does 1/4.

Falling directly is not an option, horizontal distance is too far. The speeder bike might be able to make the distance, but it is bound to Ice Mountain, and causes a crash if leaving that area.

And yes, you can get back up to the wallet area:

This is how the alternative DIME K4 route works. No way to float that high though, have to walk.

Some other ideas to consider:

1. Flip the current switch on the way to ThornTail
2. There may faster ways to swim against the current. Swim left first to cut across, then backtrack half way to hit loading triggers (I believe)
3. It may be possible to kill an enemy while OOB and have an egg drift into you to heal to full health.

Actually yeah, reviewing the original video, there are several opportunities to kill enemies:

And I'm 100% sure you can do this with only 2/4 hearts of fall damage, potentially 0.

@zcanann That one water worm enemy at 3:00 in the video you linked looks like the best bet for an enemy you can kill to get more health. It looks like it should be close enough for an egg to hit you with a favorable bounce (though I'd have to test that to be really sure - could be just slightly out of range). I'm not sure if there's another enemy that's close enough to kill for more health, but there's probably more.

Either way, with all of this information, it would almost certainly possible to make it to K4 without the bafamded bag, provided that there's also a route that lets you make it to the start of the staff-swinging point without taking any hypothermia damage.

Yep, no fall damage is possible:

Also this is not just a blind fall. I'm using the left/right directional stick to make corrections while falling

Not sure about damage from other parts of this route.

@zcanann Woah! Nice find! Now, if we can pick up the health from the water worm thing, then skipping the bafamded bag and saving a minute and a half is practically guaranteed! (this will take the total time needed to do K4 setup + K4 trial + releasing K4 (with the cutscenes that immediately follow that) down from 21.5 minutes to about 20 minutes (by comparison, the extra time it would take us to actually get Spell Stone 3, place it, get K4 normally, and release it, would be about 30.5 minutes).

EDIT: I wonder if it's possible to manipulate the water worms to drop a PukPuk egg, since this recovers twice as much damage as the usual Dumbledang Pods that enemies usually drop?

No eggs are required, Staff swinging is viable with 5 and 3/4 hearts.

The time save comes from starting at the northeast side and swinging east. By going under the terrain there, Fox drops even further down. This is crucial for two reasons:

1. This allows us to swing underneath the river without changing water planes, which is a more direct route.
2. This lets us cancel the staff swing early and replace staff swinging time with swimming time, which is faster.

(I recorded the game at 60% speed and then sped it up with editing, so the video time could be wrong)

Some napkin math:

• 1/4 hearts from cannon clip
• 1 and 1/4 hearts from swimming into SnowHorn wastes (hypothermia is based on Zone, not the body of water itself)
• 1/4 hearts after dropping into water from above (Fox will take hypothermia at least once before being able to stand again, I believe)
• 5 and 3/4 hearts from staff swinging

Should be doable with 7 and 2/4 hearts. It may be possible to optimize further, but it doesn't matter.

Nice! You've done some great work on this glitch! Not only does this skip the bafamded bag, but since we perform much fewer staff swings, we save another large chunk of time on the trick itself being faster as well.

And finally, I no longer consider K4 early to be a painfully long glitch to perform/setup!

K4 early is possible in RTA, with a similar setup to GQE (minus staff swinging). Also, this is faster for TAS, and we no longer need staff swinging or Fuel Cell discovery to get K4 early.

This should result in 15+ minutes saved in Any% (blank mem card)

Note: Low-swim is not required, it just avoids needing a precise swim height if doing a normal high-swim.

First, get the camera OOB on the north side to enable glitch-loading.

Next, hit the middle trigger, but avoid the water trigger on the way to SHW. Failure to do this will cause SHW to load normally.

DIME is now viable. We'll also want to make sure we are not swimming against the current for this part, or it will be way too difficult.

Also, Bike Skip in DIM is viable now too on v1.0 (maybe v1.1, not sure). But this is hard to execute and only saves a few minutes.

Any% route guide updated.

Changes:

• Cutscene overlap during the Garunde Te event is obsolete now.
• DIME routed in (note the save/quit warp to return to TTH!)
• Bike Skip routed in (saves 5m in DIM), but do not do this trick until we learn consistent strats.
• K4 Early routed in.
• VP #2 eliminated (and associated ESW tricks).
• We are forced to fly from TTH to TTH before DR, due to how this game handles flight.
• WC1 & WC2 are now combined.
• SS3 eliminated.
• We should be able to avoid the WC2 Orbit bug.

We now collect these Fuel Cells:

• 2x Cells in bike room.
• 4x Cells from the river gauntlet in SHW.
• 1x "return wind tunnel" in MM pass link BEFORE breaking the central tunnel.

We NO LONGER collect these Fuel Cells:

• 2x in the sewer
• 2x behind the Ice Blast gate in VP (we still get Disguise/bridge Cells)
• 1x near SS3 Warp
• 2x at the end of the SHW Trials

I found a fast strat for getting Tricky into the cage

Steps:

1. Walk forward, hotkey Call when it is available
2. Flip camera around
3. Use Call once
4. When Tricky gets nearby, L-Target and walk forward a few steps (but do not get on top of shrine). Can release it intermittently to check if he is inside.
5. Press Call a few times on the way (unconfirmed how many are needed, but 3 works well for me)

Having your back turned to the cage is critical. I think when objects are out of view, they partially unload, allowing Tricky to enter easily. L-Target helps with this a bit.

I think I made it even more certain. We don't have to press the button multiple times. I didn't know what you liked, so I put four methods into the video, but basically it's best to use the camera zoom.

I wonder if this strat can be used in Dragon Rock to make Tricky come faster before flaming the CloudRunner cage

I have noticed that Tricky can preliminarily stay near the flame. But there is almost no time savings. Comparison with single file WR.

Here is a faster TAS-Only version of K4E that me and Zac came up with (I came up with the idea to cancel the airswim in TTH and walk around the map to save time, Zac came up with the idea to fall into the tunnel instead of starting a 2nd airswim at the back of the TTH pond).

This saves time over the RTA method, since we do a lot less swimming here (and swimming is painfully slow in this game).

Also note that I don't do the zoom glitch at all here. In fact, I only press Z at the entrance to the sewers and the entrance to SHW in order to make the next areas load, but never anywhere else. Consequently, a lot fewer textures are messed up than they are in RTA. Nevertheless, K4E still works with the things that are box-loaded.

I determined that it's impossible to do K4E by getting the camera OOB at the top of Ice Mountain, since the warp portal will crash when you try to use it in this state. Note that the collision for the tree that you shoot down also doesn't load in this state, which is why I airswim all the way to the ledge by K4.

Be sure to read the description of this video! :P