The Glitch that allows Zelda Speedrunners to time travel

The date was February 4, 2007, just three months after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a speedster with the username masterlinkx was practicing his move in the referee's grounds dungeon when he They encountered a strange sequence of events during their practice, accidentally drowning in the dungeon's quicksand, but instead of continuing, they opened the wii menu and pressed reset instead of returning to the game's title screen master link x I saw Link rise on the Elden Bridge, which is nowhere near the Arbiter's grounds, Link's Master Sword had been replaced with Orton's Sword and all of his other items were gone besides Orton's Sword and the Hylian Shield, finally master link At the end of the fight, Masterlink and with that sequence of events masterlink referee, they were actually sent back to the title screen, but due to the specific frame in which they reset during the link override, the game applied the link respawn animation to the title screen instead of allowing the cutscene.

Normal title screen cutoff begins once the respawn is finished. masterlink x could control the link while on the title screen of Of course, this doesn't seem like much use at first glance. All Link has is Orton's sword, the Hylian shield, and the ability to call Epona, as these are the things he normally has during the title screen cutscene, but there is no other. save file progress, so how is this useful in quick

time

races? It is not limited to the referee's grounds while it was discovered there, it can actually be performed anywhere the link can be nullified and respawned, depending on luck, it is possible to reach it. orton's bridge only 40 seconds into the game, giving us a void that we can use to go back in

time

even though link doesn't have any items, but going back in time will once again give him the sword of orton, the hylian shield and the ability. to call pona, so in this case it moved forward in time, but we still refer to it as back in time since the original name stayed after going back in time, we can save and reload our file to appear again in Orton Spring and using our newly acquired Orton sword we can immediately save tallow to skip the first two days of Orton village after hurting some annoying goats, another benefit of going back in time comes into play and

allows

us to obtain the boots of iron from the house of bose much earlier than we should be able to.

This is due to our ability to call Epona as a flag, allowing us to do this. Also activates the bo text sequence for the iron boots. Now the Iron Boots aren't particularly useful so early, but getting them now skips a few minutes of backtracking. It would have to happen later in the race, after the iron boots, the racers will also save the game to a different file for later in time, come back to save more time when the racers reach the forest temple. This dungeon requires players to save four monkeys before they can do so. Cross a broken bridge to get the Gale Boomerang, but the value used to keep track of how many monkeys have been saved is shared by other events in the game, mainly related to bosses, so we call this value the boss flag. who uses the boss flag is king bolan at the beginning of the forest temple, we can save our file and then jump to the void attack out of bounds to redo the time again if we then jump from eldon bridge press a to do transition to the file selection screen as the link is overridden and selects the save file that was created after obtaining the iron boots.

We can enter the King Boblin fight and blow up the boss flag by skipping the cutscene before the King Boblin fight. The game will set the boss flag to a value of 39, this value will decrease rapidly and eventually reach zero once the fight has successfully reloaded; However, if we interrupt the ticking by restarting the game before the fight reloads, the value will freeze before reaching zero, then we will be able to reload our Forest Temple file. Play through the short Forest Temple segment before the bridge. broken and as long as the value of our boss's flag is at least four, the game will generate a total of four monkeys and allow us to proceed to the gale boomerang room with all These uses in time save about 10 minutes in the current Twilight Princess.

Any percentage of pathing is a significant amount of time saved, but it doesn't seem like an amount that would make it one of the biggest flaws in 3D Zelda games, and it is. 'Not going back in time became a major bug due to a discovery that the Glitch Hunter MZX rules made on November 27, 2009, where they showed that time going back also works in the Legend of Zelda, the Wind Waker. , showing everyone that the bug wasn't limited to a single game, like in Twilight Princess, resetting the game on a specific frame right when the link is overridden will cause it to respawn on the starting island with the title screen logo floating around shortly.

This can then be done over typical voids or, unfortunately, by drowning in water. Going back in time in Wind Waker has never proven to be very useful - unlike Twilight Princess, Link doesn't have any equipment or items on the title screen and there's not much you can do since you've just returned to the starting island. which is the beginning of the game, although it is not useful, there are some interesting peculiarities that we can see with a complicated sequence in time. It's possible to freeze Link's action animations while he moves, which looks pretty fun. It is also possible. to transfer normal game items to the past, such as heart pieces, small keys and rupees, and perhaps one of the strangest quirks is that in Wind Waker there is actually a second method you can use to go back in time to July 2010 , former speedrunner.

Aruki discovered that if you die and reach the game over screen, you can select continue and then restart your console to activate it in the opposite time to the override method, the game over method will not place the link on the starting island, but which will place him on the map of his respawn location after the game ends, meaning it's possible to take the title screen to other maps besides the starting island, but as before, the link still doesn't have any items, So there's not much you can do on any map, so I've gone back in time working on two games that run on a similar engine and luckily for us, Nintendo decided to make use of that engine once again.

Skyward Sword was released on November 20, 2011. When the speedrunning community got the game, the first exploit everyone tried was to go back in time, although going back in time didn't seem to work, unlike Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, which is overridden in Skyward Sword, does not cause a map reload, the game simply covers the screen with a circular transition while repositioning. link to the place where he was last, meaning that going back in time would not be possible using this method one month later, on December 28, Skyward Sword Runner, the only zero was practicing the Sandship Mini Boss Scurvo during his practice , sometimes they died, which meant they could try the fight again by continuing or their shield would break, which they could only recover by restarting and reloading their file in one try.

Both of them lost their shield and died immediately after they selected to continue on the game over screen, they remembered that. to get their shield back they had to restart so that's what the only zero linked and then reappeared on the title screen since this is the game over method of going back in time from the Wind Waker that I described two ago minutes, it seems that no one had tried it. The game method ended until this accidental discovery, but now that it was known to work in Skyward Sword in the past, the community began to discover what was possible in just 24 hours.

Three main techniques were discovered in the past. The first is known as back. In time saver or bit saver for short, because the title screen of Skyward Sword takes place in Skyloft, there are some convenient bird statues that can be used to save, but if you are on the title screen and not in a file game, what exactly are you saving? the answer is simply the file that was last selected in file selection. By selecting a file and then saving a bird statue, you basically teleport your file back to Skyloft from where it was saved. Bit saving can be used to eliminate backtracking and also break the sequence.

At the beginning of the game, as this particular state of the Skyloft map has the goddess statue open earlier than normal, it is also possible to create a corrupt file in the past if you start deleting a file and then saving it during the deletion process , the resulting file now. has all save values ​​set to zero, this includes link state, so if you load a corrupt file, corrupt files are useful for dying quickly and activating over time if dying on your current file would take too long and finding most important that first day. It was a technique known as bit warping discovered by

zelda

glitch

hunter

glitch

es and stuff like that.

This technique is similar to a bit save except that we perform the actions of saving and starting our file at the same time, this causes the game to load our file on the map. was saved previously, but with the statue coordinates we saved in the past, essentially a bit warp

allows

us to teleport the link to the coordinates of a skyloft statue on almost any map in its own bit warp which immediately allowed for interruptions of useful sequence. In six different maps with just these techniques, Skyward Sword already had more uses in the past than Twilight Princess or Wind Waker, the key difference is that in Skyward Sword the title screen goes to the file selection menu without reloading the map, which which allows us to go back in time while selecting files in Skyward Sword, while the other two games will end up going back in time by loading a different map for their file selection menus.

Discoveries in Skyward Sword didn't stop after the first day, although some community members began to note that selecting files in the past sometimes caused strange things to happen, such as random scenes starting to play or files Objects on the map change their state, although it was not very clear what was causing this to happen when it was first discovered, which is why it became known as bit magic, the community eventually realized that certain events in each area of ​​the game would align with triggering certain events in the skylocked map, for example having the Skyview Temple open, saving in Farron Forest, and then selecting that file in the past would trigger the Thunderhead opening cutscene similarly, having this log pushed down into Farron Woods would open the upper doors of the academy.

These interactions are because these pairs of events each have the same relative scene flag value within their respective scenes, in other words, pushing down this trunk is the scene. Flag 27 in Farron Woods and the upper academy doors that are open is scene flag 27 in Skyloft, so when you select your Farron Woods file during the past, Skyloft reads that scene flag 27 is set and will open the doors accordingly, a very significant use of bit. The magic came in the form of an early cluster on April 13, 2012. Aruki discovered that launching a file and then triggering the scene of the cluster opening when the game faded out would cause the cluster to open in that file.

This could be done this way. before normally opening the storm cloud and thus resulting in a time of 20 minutes, another key magical discovery occurred in 2015 where a group of several runners discovered that hitting this tree in Farron Woods and then selecting that file in the past it would spawn in the seedling element of the tree of life in the pumpkin patchfrom Skylock, you can then dig up the seedling and start your file while erasing the seedling text to place the seedling in your file and save another two and a half minutes after the early life tree seedlings were obtained. silent for a few years on the end-time front, even with the roughly 50 minutes saved in time in Skyward Sword as a whole, the game's 80-speed run was still five hours long and much of the motivation to investigate in Time had dried up in recent years, but as it turned out later there was still a more powerful technique waiting to be found on May 5, 2019.

I was doing a little research back in time for a video I was planning to make to aid my research. Using a recently released tool called Dolphin memory engine that allowed me to easily see memory changes occurring in real time while playing during my research, I noticed that when making changes to scene flags in the past, those changes would always persist. until I selected a different file so I thought I'd wait, if these scene flag changes persist while the same file is selected, can I transfer them to the file by simply starting it? The answer was no, since starting a file would revert the file's scene indicators to what they were supposed to be, but I noticed that this would happen immediately after pressing Start and not after the fade transition occurred, so my Next question was: can I try to do a scene flag change during fading out of the start of a file?

The answer was yes. If you start a file in the past and then apply a scene indicator, change the scene indicator you set and it will be applied to the map it is saved on instead of the Skyloft map, for example if you start a file saved on the volcano Eldon and then Push the tombstone that opens the sky shed at night, which is scene flag 47. You place scene flag 47 on the Elden volcano instead, which corresponds to the earth temple gate being open and skip collecting the five key pieces that are normally needed to perform this action of pushing scene flags from back in time to a saved file is sort of the opposite of the bit magic that was loaded into the flag of scene. values ​​from our save file to the past, so this new technique was coined as reverse bit magic once we realized the power of this technique, the entire next week was spent documenting scene flags in each area of ​​the game to see how they aligned with the scene flags in skyloft and boy there were many meetings promised the demon aligned with the activation of the statue of the temple of time talking to professor allen at the academy aligned with the opening of the silent kingdom of lenaerus giving commitment five crystals of gratitude aligned with the opening of the silent elden kingdom collecting the loftwing prison gratitude crystal aligned with having found the sand ship and many more were discovered and the most important scene flag in the entire game scene flag 62 in the sealed grounds which opens the door to hailey's kingdom and could save 75 minutes on its own aligned with nothing, there is no interaction in skyloft that sets scene flag 62. skyloft just doesn't use it which means we can't use reverse bitmagic in Skyloft to open the door to the kingdom of Hylia, but there is an important part.

Until that last statement about Skyloft on May 31, 2019, I discovered a relatively complicated file setup using Elden's pillar of light that allowed us to finally obtain Skyloft's back-in-time state and enter the farron region of the overworld, a Once there we were able to access. the Farron Woods and Lake Floria maps, which meant that we could now also perform reverse bit magic with their scene flags and in the Farron Woods scene, flag 62 corresponds to opening the door to Lake Florian and with that we go back in time and all its uses are now saved. over three hours in Skyward Sword over the course of the next year and a half Skyward Sword continually shrank thanks to other new discoveries and realizations involving going back in time and reverse bit magic.

The current record for any percentage is around 1 hour and 22 minutes. which means going back in time currently saves around four and a half hours in Skyward Sword, as Skyward Sword is so far the last 3D

zelda

game to go back in time. The newer entries in the series don't have the same reboot capabilities that they did. It's possible in older titles, so it seems that going back in time can always be limited to these three games. Still, the past in time is a complicated and diverse problem in every game it works in, and even if we've come a long way with the past.

Over time we are likely to encounter a few more surprises as we move forward in time to understand it better. I'm gymnast86 with the lowest percentage and thanks for watching.