Hollow Knight's Most Broken Charm, Explained (And How One Great Hopper Changed Everything)

Hollow Knight speedrunning is downright fascinating, every strategy and jump route has a story behind it and as a speedrunner I could talk about this for hours, so today I chose one of the

most

interesting stories in all of Hollow Knight speedrunning. Hollow Knight speed to make one. delves into the story of Hollow Knight's

most

broken

charm

and the story of how one

great

jumper

changed

everything

, let's get into it. If you are an average gamer or know how to read the video title, you may notice that there is something slightly strange about this image. In particular, there is an amulet in the s level that looks like it doesn't belong, yes, that's right, today I will tell you why the shaman stone is the worst amulet in the game, yes, no, this is the story of the amulet that could solve a problem absolutely A ridiculous amount of damage could multiply your geo game dozens of times and kill bosses before even entering the arena.

This is the story of the spell that was patched over and over and over and over again, but somehow remained incredibly powerful today, I'm diving deep. on what makes this amulet the most

broken

amulet in the game to this day and how it has come to be useful in Hollow Knight speedruns in a variety of categories and patches despite how team Cherry tried to fix it time and time again. again and again and again and you get the point, this is the story of the Fluke Nest Fluke Nest is strange, to say the least, other than that you get it from beating that thing.

Oh wow, it's actually a unique amulet, there's no other equippable in the game that can alter the core mechanics. of one of your main spells, but before we get to the fun stuff, let's clarify some quick facts. I'll try to be brief about this so we can get to the really interesting part of this video. I promise that chance replaces that of the player. horizontal spell cast with a shotgun-like burst of 9 to 16 provincial spirit flukes and shadow soul respectively, this leads to a total damage of 36 for the former n64 for the second as the flukes deal 4 damage, each fluke nest It is also enhanced by Shaman Stone, just like normal spells with Shaman Stone equipped, each chance deals 5 damage instead of 4, increasing the total damage to 45 for basic spells and 80 for Shadow Soul, oh, and it also costs a full three notches, which is a steep price right now. you would be completely right to dismiss this spell because why would you spend three extra notches to drastically reduce the range of your spell when you could just shadow double soul strikes and deal 80 damage anyway if this is what you're thinking now same? you would be right, let me explain to you if this was all there is to the spell you would be absolutely right to dismiss it but here is the problem: what I just described is how the spell is supposed to work, the reality is that the Chance's nest is far from a properly functioning amulet, the breakdown of chance over the years is a very interesting story to take a look at.

I sat down and researched the changes made to the amulet in each patch and beta of the game and this is what I found, let's get into it. Part 1, broken beginnings during the first half year of the game's release. The Chance Nest was an overlooked amulet, dealt weak damage, and was generally not worth the trouble of equipping something to consider, even though the amulet only cost two. notches compared to the current day three, however,

everything

changed

overnight when team Cherry released the Hidden Dreams content update. Hidden Dreams truly had everything a person could hope for: two incredible new boss fights with a new soundtrack to accompany them.

Dreamgate, a new deer station and Of course, a huge improvement by chance, the damage of the

charm

s had been significantly improved. Quick side note: The official patch notes released by William Pellen on August 3, 2017 did not specify how big this improvement was, which I think is part of the reason why no one really knew how powerful it had become. , which no one except the speedrunner chance nest was now dealing 112 damage per full cast without shaman stone and 144 damage with shaman equipped for some perspective if you had max nail buff and both strengths. and fury active at the same time, you would only deal 56 damage per spike, exactly half of what a non-shaman stone, let me repeat, a non-shaman stone fluke would deal in a single throw, but there's more, here comes the spicy part while the charm is polished.

Team Cherry somehow dropped a big plate of spaghetti code on top and a weirdness ensued, since weirdness is somehow a fluke. He now had the ability to kill the same enemy multiple times. You could now, for example, kill a single observer 6 different times with a single cast of Flukes which would trick the game into thinking that six separate observer

knight

s had been defeated and would instantly end the fight. The same bug in the Flukeness code also made it possible to multiply geogane from an enemy like Gorgeous Husk, for example, by killing it with Flukes. Earn thousands and thousands of geo with a single cast of the spell.

The Cherry Spaghetti Code team's powers had granted the speedrunners a miracle and use it. They needed Geo 6000 Geo from the beautiful shell that appears. You are in the coliseum of. Fools, I dope everything. I don't know, I don't know what's going on, I can't explain this to you, I literally don't understand what's happening on the screen right now because everything is so broken and strange and touching Hollow Knight had a new, more powerful charm and the glorious reign of Fluke Nest had started. The glorious reign of the Fluke Nest lasted about three days when the Cherry team realized their mistake and probably fixed all the oddities in the 1.1 update. 1.6 the spaghetti hadn't been spilled, the f's were out of the chat, the runners had had fun and it was time to move on or was it that the spell was still ridiculously powerful with or without the double kill it failed and quickly became part of the new chance meta remained completely unchanged during the grim troop update until the lifeblood updates.

This is an important detail to mention, since most of the major categories are running on patch 1.2.2.1. The final patch of the grim troop dlc, the most notable use of chance is actually seen in tier 106, which is the equivalent max completion tier for that patch, part two, area one, two, two, one, the golden age without major flaws, the fluke nest, along with the multi-death glitch team patch, cherry, also weakened the charm by a shaman stone. In other words, the spell now deals 112 casting damage with Shaman Stone and only 80 without. Despite this, it was still a ridiculous amount of damage and worth the cost, especially considering the fact that it only cost 2 notches and cost nothing.

You might have guessed it, unknowingly, Team Cherry somehow managed to break the spell again in a slightly more subtle way, this time by changing the mechanics of the spell to fix the issues mentioned above along with a bug that made the chance just happen. will not interact with some bosses. Team Cherry inadvertently broke it again, now the flukes did not add to the bosses' staggered combo count and thus failed to wake up the bosses who were astonished. This may seem like a minor thing, but it was able to cause absolute carnage on the boss. In fights, for example, you could stagger a boss like Hornet 2, spam some flukes, and voila, 350 health gone.

Some bosses like Nosk and the brooding Malik might even die before you entered the arena. This was because they had their hitboxes. exposed before the fight started, since chance didn't interact with the stagger values ​​at all, you were free to just throw some chance at the boss from a safe location, sometimes ending fights before they even started, I could go on listing quick flu strategies forever, man, they are so fun to watch, like for example this mom, where you shoot two fins into the corner and she just flies straight away and dies immediately. For those who want to see some more of these, I recommend checking out Scruffy's World 106. recording things is crazy, but then, one dark night in April 2018, the Cherry team released the vital update.

Speedrunners watched in shock as their beloved speed glitches and strategies were taken away. I really don't know how to explain this. Go ahead. This was a

great

selection of failures, but worst of all is what they did to the poor Fluke Nest. Team Cherry had finally seen what the spell was capable of and decided to end it right then and there. Ultimately, they did it in patch 1.3.1, also known as vital updates. The chance nest was repaired on the ground. 80 damage with shaman stone 64 no more broken interactions. The speedrunners begged: will you at least let us keep the two-tier costs now that the charm is literally useless nuh-uh the cherry team said that three cherry teams had put their foot down.

The chance nest was now so incredibly unusable that everyone just forgot about it, but hey, look at this cool boss, they added the third part, the dark ages after the lifeblood patch. Sunk back into the shadows, it's now a wrinkled shell of its former self, which is a strange description because it already looked like a wrinkled shell before, of course, speedrunners could still be patched, but by chance Nest passed by. from being a top contender among charms to being considered one. of the worst pieces of garbage in the game, which is very generous considering the existence of a strong hit, oh, now you're clicking on the video.

Can't insult a hard hit, huh, this term literally sucks in every way except name. because god makes this spell blow hard like it really blows other spells out of the water quite a bit when it comes to literally decreasing your nail damage by pushing enemies away from you, yes I know it lowers the bosses' stagger criteria but It's great, you can do it. stun the blocking mosque in any way nice waste of notches sorry I got a little carried away moving by chance the nest stayed in the shadows for a long time all the blood patches came and went and so did Godmaster's after the patch 1.4.3.2 released.

On August 27, 2018, Hollow Knights would not receive another update for over two and a half years, the game was already finished and racers knew there would never be another era of glory by chance, or so they thought, as Team Cherry , being the cherry team, had broken down. the charm again in time for Godmaster and forgot to include the changes in the patch notes because of course they did the best their team could because they didn't include anything that mentioned chance and the patch notes no one bothered to look, but as the years went by it was only a matter of time until this groundbreaking discovery was made between the years 2018 and 2021.

Fluke Nest became something of a meme among current patch runners and since there were no new updates of the game that they could mix things up, it was a bit forgotten, no. One tried to figure out if the spell was still viable in some way because there wasn't really a reason for it to ever be as good as before and no changes were being made to it anymore. Where did this great jumper I mentioned come from? I used to fit this image, well, let's talk about the big jump. It took the speedrunning community almost three years to discover the coincidence, the new efficiency discovered on June 6, 2021.

Speedrunner early knot posted a clip of themselves dealing an unusual amount of charm damage while fighting. a high jumper had somehow early failed to kill a high jumper with a single cast of flukes even though the flukes dealt 80 damage and the jumper had a full 130 hit points. A mix of confusion and emusian arose in the speedrunning community, of course Team Cherry had done it. to break the spell again, now it was just a matter of figuring out what was happening and how to take advantage of the break for combat. After analyzing the images and testing the spell runners, it was concluded that something strange was happening with the chance hitboxes that the

hopper

had. was hit initially and then somehow fell onto the cast hitboxes which remained for an unwanted period of time, this meant that the flugness projectiles could apparently damage a single enemy multiple times if the enemy in question was potentially moving their impact boxes on the fins. dealing over 300 damage per cast in certain situations, this was an absolutely huge find; the first runnersThey assumed this change had occurred as part of the new 1.5 beta that the Cherry team had recently been releasing, but they soon discovered that this had been around ever since.

The God Home dlc was originally released three years prior, looking back it's absolutely crazy that something so big was going on under everyone's noses for so long. Either way, the runners got to work testing which bosses were effective in discoveries that showed incredible time savings could be made. On most bosses, but especially those like the white defender and the nosk, if you knew how to use chance correctly, the strategies were gimmicky, but once you learned to understand the hitboxes, you could unleash total carnage on both the bosses and the bosses. runners of 107 percent as for the 112 of all categories of leaders of the pantheon.

I started theorizing about adapting to fluke routes once again, but the first to do so were the pantheon runners, very soon the use of fluke nests began to appear in the pantheon 1 individual level world records and it was clear that flukenist is here to stay despite everything. After attempts to patch and fix here, it was once again used at a higher level, it took a while to get the plutonist to the big 100 categories and because of the path to getting fluency early, it didn't save as much time as many expected. Twelve percent of all Panther Valley speedrun world record Go was the first to implement the fluke route in the category.

It was estimated to be a matter of half a minute at most and that brings us to the current day where we thought we would never see the day where chance was viable in the current patch again, but here we are, I guess the only thing that matters about this story is as follows: always try chance after a gap Knight update, even if it's not in the patch notes, historically it has always worked, thanks for watching. Oh, and always remember to kill big jumpers for no reason, who knows what you'll find.