By holding control stick and alternating Roll and Shield every frame, Fox can hover.

I think this works by slowing his fall speed. It eventually gets canceled if Fox goes too far, or if Fox has nothing under him.

This cannot be used to cross gaps. Once the game recognizes there is no ground below Fox, a fall animation plays.

Here is another example. We can get pretty far, but not far enough. In this video I do a pattern of 2 frames of rolling, 1 frame of shielding.

And another example over solid land. Eventually the game forces Fox to fall:

This cannot be used to skip GQ for K5 I think, Fox starts to fall when he is not above ground anymore. But it might reduce the # of ground quakes needed.

This can also apparently be interleaved with Ground Quake for a (faster?) Sun Stone route:

I wasn't able to do this without Ground Quake (needs verification).

I think if Shield Hover just slows Fox's fall speed, then this might be optimal: Shield Hover (to get off the ground) > Ground Quakes > Shield Hover

Not confirmed what pattern is best (roll roll shield vs roll shield)

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Some ideas that I couldn't figure out:

• OOB in Cape Claw.
• OOB in Ice Mountain without cannon clip.
• OOB at the top of CRF. Might be possible to get on the fence and skip the intro cutscene, but it's very unlikely (and possibly useless)

Update:

I found a way to get out of bounds in snowhorn wastes without using any ground quakes. This means we can unlock Tricky and DIM in one trip to SHW, and get ground quake later in the game so that we can ESW out of MMP back to Thorntail Hollow.

Can be used to get Garunde Te Fuel Cell, before we save/quit.

One of these Fuel Cells is fake though, it shares an ID with a Fuel Cell near the blue mammoth. I still think this could be an option to get this Fuel Cell in TAS.

I figured out how to get onto the railing by the sunstone for sunstone early using just shield hovers (with no ground quakes). I've also made a video showing what this looks like: