Room Duplication: The Deku Stick Upgrade Crash

While room duplication is a trick that has been known for ages, there are many mysteries to this glitch that haven't been looked into. Today I looked into one of those mysteries...

MikeKatz45: oh yeah I randomly remembered something in case someone is curious enough to investigate
MikeKatz45: so for some reason
MikeKatz45: the dupe to get the 30 deku stick upgrade in lost woods crashes if you enter lost woods from goron city or zora's river (white transition)
MikeKatz45: and it doesnt with black transition (sacred forest or kokiri forest)

Taking it all in, my first thought was that Mike had to be wrong about the crash being dependent on the transition animation, since only the only transition known to crash is the "sandstorm" transition since it relies on non-global assets. Rather, the fact that the crash seemed to occur due or not depending on where you spawn suggested that the crash depended on where the room file is allocated during duplication.

Getting Stuck in the Water Temple - The "Solutions"

A few years back, I took a look at the layout for the "Vanilla" version of the Water Temple, in an attempt to see if the general design of the dungeon itself was flawed. While I was able to determine that the intended design was sound, I realized that there were a few glitches that could potentially be utilized by a low skill player that would make the dungeon unbeatable, as long as they lack the knowledge of some other tricks.

Fire Temple to Forest Wrong Warp in 100%: Bolero Crash explained

The following explanation is based on an analysis of the NTSC 1.0 version of Ocarina of Time, and may not be immediately applicable to other versions of the game.

Recently, the 100% route has made a seemingly minor route change where the wrong warp from Fire Temple to Forest Temple uses the Bolero Warp Song cutscene instead of the Title Screen as the last cutscene pointer. However, this change opens things up to a potential crash, as seen below.

So what causes the crash?

The Truth Spinner

Make my beak face the skull of truth. The alternate is descent into the deep darkness.

 The "truth spinner" puzzle is designed to stop the player from attempting the Shadow Temple without the Lens of Truth. On the surface, it looks as if there are five possible skulls to pick from, and thus a 20% chance of getting the correct skull first try. But having looked into it deeper, it turns out that there's a particular skull with a 44.4% chance of being the skull of truth.

Dampé's Heart-Pounding Gravedigging Tour

Ah Dampé. What happened in your life that made you so cruel?

After hearing a lot of conflicting info about the guaranteed heart drop recently, I decided to open up Nemu and take a closer look into how things are working behind the scenes.

Things I'd Like to Look Into More

It's the new year, so I figure I'd list a bunch of oddball things that I'd like to know more about when it comes to Ocarina of Time, in no particular order.

Double Zelda Paradox

It turns out that it's possible to "spawn" two different Zeldas during the Tower Collapse sequence, and even lead the second Zelda into a trigger to unlock one of the gates. The way it works is pretty simple.

The scene that covers exterior portion of the tower actually spawns Zelda four times. Each one checks the spawn id variable (used to identify which spawn Link used to enter the scene), and unloads itself if the id doesn't match up with the one it is suppose to be bound to. From top to bottom, the following is a list of entrance indexes that will spawn one of the Zelda's:

• 0x043F, spawn id 00 (Death Cutscene, from Ganondorf Boss Room)
• 0x032C, spawn id 02 (From Tower Collapse Interior, Boss Room Floor (Lower))
• 0x0334, spawn id 04 (From Tower Collapse Interior, Burning Rocks (Lower))
• 0x051C, spawn id 06 (From Tower Collapse Interior, Stalfos Fight (Lower))

Since each one is bound to a different spawn id, only one Zelda should be spawned at a time. However, the top-most Zelda also checks to see if the "Ganondorf Death/Tower is Collapsing" cutscene should play. If so, the Zelda remains spawned so that she can take part in the cutscene.

In other words, if Link enters with a base entrance index of 0x032C, 0x0334, or 0x051C, and the game warps him up to the top to play the cutscene, two Zeldas will remain spawned. In the video above, it looks as if a base index of 0x032C was used.