Alright, just paid off
my first home loan, now let's go talk to Nook
and get that first house upgrade! and... oh... ♪ Today's topic is about a glitch in Animal
Crossing that actually crashes your game just by simply paying off your home debt. But this glitch goes way beyond just crashing the game... If you set it up right, you can also abuse this
to warp yourself to a normally inaccessible beta testing map, all possible on a vanilla console. Now, a few people have reported on this glitch before, but, frankly, they've gotten a lot of information
incorrect and there is a lot more to this glitch that nobody's ever talked about. So, I thought I'd explore this glitch a little further
and explain it in detail to clear up some confusion. Now there's a lot to talk about, and this video may end up
a bit long, so grab a drink and I'll try to keep things interesting. First, this glitch was originally discovered
in 2014 by a speedrunner named Bosby. While doing an "all-debts" speedrun,
Bosby entered the post office at the exact same time the Spring Sports Fair event was scheduling a cutscene. Following this, he then paid off his
first home debt and went back outside... and... this happened... [Bosby] "What?!" "What?!" As you saw, Bosby's villager model was placed in the floor
and then he teleported front of Nook's Cranny. What exactly is even happening here? Well, let's break it down. ♪ First, this whole glitch is tied to the way that
the game handles "event cutscenes." In this particular case, Bosby was running the game
with his date set to March 20th, which is the date that the Spring Sports Fair event takes place. During this event, from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., there are
various activities that take place every two hours. 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. is the morning aerobics, 11:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. is the foot race, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. is the ball toss, and 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. is the tug o' war. All of these are held at the wishing well
and to handle the transition between these activities, the game usually loads a cut scene at the train station
announcing the commencement of the next activity. So, for example, when the clock hits 3:00 p.m.,
the ball toss activity is unloaded and the tug o' war actors are loaded instead. Also during this cutscene,
our exact player position coordinates and acre are remembered so that the game can place you back exactly
where you were after the cutscene. So, for example, if I'm in acre A1 with these coordinates... the game will remember this and place me back
exactly where I was after the cut scene plays. However, by entering the post office at the exact same time
this cutscene is supposed to take place and paying off our debt, we can actually interrupt this entire sequence and, in turn,
prevent some crucial flags from being updated. See, by talking to an NPC we can actually pause any
time-based cutscene from occurring until after we're done talking to them. This typically works fine, and the
cutscene normally play right after you finish talking, but since we're paying off our debt, the game instead
loads a new cutscene of our villager celebrating being debt-free.. and we actually end up replacing the train station cutscene from ever finishing. This effectively cancels all the remaining flags
that were supposed to be set by this train station cutscene. Thus, when we walk outside, we actually end up in this glitchy state
where the game thinks we watched the cutscene and attempts to place the back where they were before... but it actually doesn't have any reference to where
our position was originally since we interrupted the process. And, since the game does not have
a reference to this original player position, the game fail-safes and warps us to our last save position. This is typically right in front of your house where you
appear after loading the game, but in Bosby's case this is right in front of Nook's Cranny because he
had never saved and reloaded that specific file. Attempting this glitch on a file that's already
been saved does indeed warp you in front of your house. Now, this type of glitch where your player is teleported
is actually more common in video games than you might think and is known as a "wrong warp," for... obvious reasons... Now, Bosby didn't really explore this
glitch much further, but once you warp, the game is actually in a very weird state
where the Sports Fair cutscene never got to finish. Going to the wishing well in this state will reveal
all the villagers spawned in their default positions, but you cannot actually move or interact with them... And attempting to leave this acre will crash the game... ...and also destroy your ears... However, if you perform this glitch and avoid
the wishing well acre, we have effectively obtained a form of "cutscene storage" in Animal Crossing, and
this is the first time I've ever heard someone talk about this. Now, you may have heard of 'cutscene storage'
before in games like The Wind Waker, where speedrunners often have Link "store"
the cutscene of him getting an item in a chest, which impacts his collision in beneficial ways. This glitch appears to work similarly in Animal Crossing, and in this
game state we can actually enter a building and reload the overworld to trigger the two cut scenes we interrupted previously; those two being the debt-free celebration cutscene and the Sports Fair transition cutscene. These two cut scenes are effectively stored in memory
and won't play until we exit a building and reload the overworld. We can even do this on the island and force these
cutscenes to play hours after their scheduled time. You may also choose to save the game while
having cutscene storage, which will clear memory and allow you to effectively skip watching
the debt-free celebration cutscene. I suppose this could save a few seconds on a
speedrun which requires you to save, like the 100% category, but we're talking, like, seconds off of a 16-hour run. Maybe cutscene storage will be more useful in the future,
but for now I can't really think of any further applications of it. Anyways, back on the topic of the main glitch, Bosby's
accidental discovery was actually pretty huge and players quickly tried to replicate it. They set their dates to March 20th and
attempted to enter the post office at exactly 3:00 p.m., but they found that exiting either crashed their game immediately, or, even crazier, warped them to an entirely new map. For this to work, it's mostly the same as previously described,
but there are two additional conditions. First, the post office must be in acres A1 or A2. And second, you cannot have the game in a
state with an active Sports Fair activity. That is, no activities should be loaded
by the game when you do this version of the glitch. This can be achieved by having the time you enter
the post office be the start of the Sports Fair at 9:00 a.m. or by loading your save file five minutes or less before a scheduled event. With these conditions satisfied, performing the
same glitch again will not warp us to our default saved position, but will instead warp us to an entirely different
beta testing map using our current player coordinates as a reference. This crazy glitch occurs because this time we do not have
that text appear that interrupts the cutscenes when we exit the post office. Remember when I said that the train station cutscene
attempts to place the player back where they were? Well, with these cutscenes actually scheduled to play now, our player
position coordinates are appropriately handled by the game this time. But the game attempts to update our position at the exact same
time our town map is unloading to play that train station cutscene. Since the game is attempting to place us on an unloaded chunk of the map, the game instead defaults to the first map it has in its files -- which just so happens to be this beta testing map. Now, the reason why the post office must be in acres A1 or A2
is because our coordinates when exiting the post office in these acres align exactly with actual collision on this beta map. Attempting to do this glitch with the post office
in acres A4 or A5 will actually crash your game... since acres A4 and A5 do not actually exist in this beta map. Using hacks to bypass the crash handler, you can actually see
that the game does attempt to warp you to the beta map when you use acre A4 or A5... ...but you end up stuck in the void indefinitely. Anyways, once you're in the beta map properly,
there are a number of things to explore here. Most notably, there's a bunch of pitfalls and you can also interact
with these villagers with glitchy names. Sidenote, this is actually the default name for all
villagers and is left untranslated from Japanese. When converting these buggy names into hexadecimal
and then comparing it to the Japanese version, we actually get the placeholder named "Johnny B,"
which is the equivalent of something akin to "John Doe" in English. Quick shoutout to Cuyler for discovering this detail a few years ago. Anyways, you're free to talk to some of these villagers, but they all
default to saying the same thing except for the villager in the campsite. You can can wander around further if you'd like -- look at every type of tree, play with the ball, get stuck in the pitfalls... but be careful not to open the map on invalid acres
since, you guessed it, that will crash the game. See, your player position does get updated to the beta map,
but your UI map position still references your own town. So for example, in my original town, acre A2 is actually
the furthest north you can go as you cannot go any further up. But on the beta map, you actually can go further north by one, and since our original town doesn't expect you to be above acre A2, the game isn't really sure how to handle this when you open the UI map and simply crashes. Anyways, once you've had your fun, the only way
off of this beta map is to reset the game... which of course means facing the wrath of Resetti...
all for just trying to pay off your home debt. Interestingly, there are actually a whopping 50
beta maps left in the game files, but as of right now, we can only legitimately visit this first one without hacking. Maybe one day we'll get to visit the others legitimately, but I'm somewhat doubtful given that the way the game defaults to the first map. Regardless, it's definitely amusing how someone
came across such a huge glitch randomly and how someone could realistically have their game crash or just
be teleported to a weird glitchy map just by trying to pay off their home debt. Anyways, hopefully this video shed some more light on this topic. If you liked this video, my channel is actually focused on diving into the more technical, "computer sciency" details of Animal Crossing topics, just like this one! So some of my other videos may also interest you as well. Regardless, thank you for watching this video to the very end! Hopefully you found it entertaining or at least
somewhat interesting, and thanks again for watching! ♫
