The Glitch that allows Zelda Speedrunners to time travel

[Music] the date was february 4th 2007 only three months after the release of the legend of zelda twilight princess one speedrunner by the username masterlinkx was practicing their movement in the arbiter's grounds dungeon when they encountered a strange sequence of events during their practice they accidentally drowned in the dungeon's quicksand but rather than continue they instead brought up the wii menu and hit reset instead of going back to the game's title screen master link x saw link get up on the bridge of elden which is nowhere near the arbiter's grounds link's master sword had been replaced with the orton sword and all his other items were gone besides the orton sword and hylian shield eventually master link x died in this weird game state and when they respawned epona galloped into the field battle with king boblin that normally takes place way earlier in the game upon completion of the fight masterlink x was taken back to kakariko village only to find that the elden twilight which they had cleared hours ago had returned it was like their game had somehow time traveled into the past and wiped away their progress and with that sequence of events masterlink x had accidentally discovered one of the most notable glitches not just in twilight princess but multiple games in the zelda franchise a glitch now known as back in time when master link x reset their game in the arbiter's grounds they actually were sent back to the title screen but due to the specific frame they reset on during link's void out the game applied link's respawn animation to the title screen instead of letting the normal title screen cut scene begin once the respawn ended masterlink x could control link while on the title screen of course it doesn't seem like there'd be much use for this at first glance all link has is the orton sword hylian shield and the ability to call epona since these are the things he normally has during the title screen cutscene but there's no other save file progress so how is this useful in speed runs well back in time isn't limited to the arbiter's grounds while it was discovered there it can actually be performed anywhere that link can void out and respawn as luck would have it it's possible to reach the orton bridge only 40 seconds into the game which gives us a void we can use to perform back in time despite the fact that link doesn't have any items yet performing back in time will once again give him the orton sword hylian shield and ability to call a pona so in this case he went forward in time but we still refer to it as back in time since the original name stuck after performing back in time we can save and reload our file to spawn back at the orton spring and using our newly acquired orton sword we can save tallow right away to skip the first two days of orton village after hurting some annoying goats another benefit of back in time kicks in and allows us to obtain the iron boots from bose house significantly earlier than we should be able to this is due to our ability to call epona as the flag which allows us to do this also triggers bo's text sequence for the iron boots now the iron boots aren't particularly useful this early but getting them now skips a few minutes of backtracking that would have to happen later in the run following the iron boots runners will also save the game over a different file for later back in time comes back to save more time when runners reach the forest temple this dungeon requires players to save four monkeys before they can cross a broken bridge to obtain the gale boomerang but the value that's used to keep track of how many monkeys have been saved is shared by other events in the game mostly related to bosses which is why we call this value the boss flag one of the bosses that uses the boss flag is king bolan at the start of forest temple we can save our file and then jump attack into the out of bounds void to perform back in time again if we then jump off the bridge of eldon press a to transition to the file selection screen as link voids out and select the save file which was created after obtaining the iron boots we can warp into the king boblin fight and exploit the boss flag when skipping the cutscene before the king boblin fight the game will set the boss flag to a value of 39 this value will quickly tick down and eventually reach zero once the fight has properly reloaded however if we interrupt the ticking down by resetting the game before the fight reloads the value is going to freeze before it reaches zero we can then reload our forest temple file play through the short segment of forest temple before the broken bridge and as long as our boss flag value is at least four the game will spawn in a total of four monkeys and allow us to proceed to the gale boomerang room with all of these uses back in time saves about 10 minutes in the current twilight princess any percent route that's a significant amount of time saved but it doesn't seem like an amount that would make it one of the most important glitches in 3d zelda games and it isn't back in time became an important glitch due to a discovery that glitch hunter mzx rules made on november 27 2009 where they demonstrated that back in time also works in the legend of zelda the wind waker showing everyone that the glitch wasn't confined to a single game just as in twilight princess resetting the game on a specific frame right as link voids out will cause him to respawn on outset island with the title screen logo floating in shortly afterward this can be done over typical voids or by drowning in water unfortunately back in time in the wind waker has never panned out to be very useful unlike twilight princess link doesn't have any equipment or items when on the title screen and there isn't much you can do since you're just back at outset island which is the very beginning of the game despite it not being useful there are some interesting quirks to it that we can look through with a complicated back in time sequence it's possible to freeze link's action animations while he moves around which looks rather humorous it's also possible to transfer items from regular gameplay to back in time such as heart pieces small keys and rupees and perhaps one of the weirdest quirks is that in wind waker there's actually a second method that you can use to perform back in time in july of 2010 former speedrunner aruki figured out that if you die and reach the game over screen you can select continue and then reset your console to activate back in time contrary to the void out method the game over method won't place link back at outset island but will instead place him on the map of his respawn location after the game over meaning that it's possible to bring the title screen to other maps besides outset island but like before link still doesn't have any items so there's not much you can do on any map so we have back in time working in two games that both run on a similar engine and luckily for us nintendo decided to make use of that engine one more time skyward sword was released on november 20th 2011. when the speedrunning community got its hands on the game the first exploit everybody tried was back in time although back in time didn't seem to work unlike twilight princess and the wind waker voiding out in skyward sword doesn't cause a map reload the game simply covers the screen with a circle transition while it repositions link back to wherever he was last standing meaning that back in time would not be possible using this method a month later on december 28th skyward sword runner the only zero was practicing the sandship mini boss scurvo during their practice they would sometimes die which meant that they could try the fight again by continuing or their shield would break which they could only get back by resetting and reloading their file on one attempt they happened to both lose their shield and die immediately afterwards after they selected continue on the game over screen they remembered that to get their shield back they had to reset so that's what the only zero did [Music] link then respawned on the title screen since this is the game over method of back in time from the wind waker that i described two minutes ago it seems that nobody had tried the game over method up until this accidental discovery but now that back in time was known to work in skyward sword the community began figuring out what was possible within only 24 hours there were three major techniques discovered with back in time the first is known as back in time saving or bit saving for short [Music] because skyward sword's title screen takes place on skyloft there are some convenient bird statues that can be used for saving but if you're on the title screen and not on a gameplay file then what exactly are you saving the answer is just whichever file was last selected on the file selection by selecting a file and then saving out a bird statue you essentially teleport your file back to skyloft from wherever it was saved bit saving can be used to eliminate backtracking and also sequence break the beginning of the game as this particular state of the skyloft map has the goddess statue open earlier than normal it's also possible to create a corrupt file in back in time if you begin deleting a file and then save it during the deletion process the resulting file now has every saved value set to zero this includes link's health so if you load a corrupt file corrupt files are useful for dying quickly to activate back in time if dying on your current file would otherwise take too long and the most important find on that first day was a technique known as bit warping discovered by zelda glitch hunter glitches and stuff this technique is similar to a bit save except we perform the actions of saving and starting our file at the same time this results in the game loading our file on the map it was previously saved on but with the coordinates of the statue that we saved at during back in time essentially a bit warp allows us to teleport link to the coordinates of a skyloft statue on almost any map on its own bit warping immediately allowed for useful sequence breaks on six different maps with just these techniques skyward sword already had more uses for back in time than twilight princess or the wind waker the key difference is that in skyward sword the title screen transitions to the file selection menu without a map reload this allows us to stay in back in time while selecting files in skyward sword whereas the other two games will end back in time by loading a different map for their file selection menus the discoveries in skyward sword didn't stop after the first day though some community members began to notice that selecting files during back in time would sometimes cause weird things to happen such as random cutscenes beginning to play or objects on the map changing their state although it wasn't quite clear what was causing this to happen when it was first discovered so it became known as bit magic the community eventually realized that certain events in each game area would line up with triggering certain events on the skylocked map for example having the skyview temple open saving in the farron woods and then selecting that file in back in time would trigger the thunderhead opening cutscene similarly having this log pushed down in farron woods would open up the upper academy gates these interactions are due to these pairs of events each having the same relative scene flag value within their respective scenes in other words pushing down this log is scene flag 27 in farron woods and the upper academy gates being open is scene flag 27 on skyloft so when selecting your farron woods file during back in time skyloft reads that scene flag 27 is set and will open up the gates accordingly one very significant use of bit magic came in the form of early thunderhead on april 13th 2012 aruki figured out that by starting a file and then triggering the cutscene of the thunderhead opening up as the game faded out would cause the thunderhead to be open on that file this could be done way before normally opening up the thunderhead and thus it resulted in a 20 minute time save another key bit magic discovery came in 2015 where a group of various runners figured out that bonking into this tree in farron woods and then selecting that file in back in time would spawn in the life tree seedling item at skylock's pumpkin patch you could then dig up the seedling and start your file as you cleared the seedling text to put the seedling on your file and save another two and a half minutes after early life tree seedling things got quiet for a few years on the back end time front even with the 50 or so minutes that back in time saved in skyward sword as a whole the game's 80 speed run was still five hours long and much of the motivation for researching back in time had dried up over the past few years but as it later turned out there was still one more powerful technique waiting to be found on may 5th 2019 i was doing some back in time research for a video i planned on making to help my research i was making use of a newly released tool called the dolphin memory engine which easily allowed me to view memory changes happening in real time as i was playing the game during my research i noticed that when making scene flag changes in back in time those changes would always persist until i selected a different file so i thought hold on if these scene flag changes persist while the same file is selected then can i transfer them to the file by just starting it the answer was no as starting a file would revert the file's scene flags back to what they were supposed to be but i noticed that this would happen immediately after pressing start and not after the fade out transition occurred so my next question was can i try making a scene flag change during the fade out of starting a file the answer was yes if you start a file during back in time and then apply a scene flag change the scene flag you set will be applied to the map you're saved at instead of the skyloft map for instance if you start a file saved at eldon volcano and then push the gravestone that opens up the skyloft shed at night which is scene flag 47 you set scene flag 47 in elden volcano instead which corresponds to the earth temple door being open and skips collecting the five key pieces normally needed to get in this action of pushing scene flags from back in time onto a save file is sort of the opposite of bit magic which was loading in scene flag values from our save file into back in time 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 every area of the game to see how they lined up with the scene flags on skyloft and boy there were a lot meeting betrothed the demon lined up with the temple of time statue activation talking to professor allen in the academy lined up with opening the lenaerus silent realm giving betroth five gratitude crystals lined up with opening the elden silent realm collecting the loftwing prison gratitude crystal lined up with having found the sandship and so many more were discovered and the most important scene flag in the entire game scene flag 62 in the sealed grounds which opens up the door to hailey's realm and could save 75 minutes on its own lined up with nothing there is no interaction on skyloft that sets scene flag 62. skyloft just doesn't use it which means that we can't use reverse bitmagic on skyloft to open the door to hylia's realm but there's an important part to that last statement on skyloft [Music] on may 31st 2019 i figured out a relatively complicated file setup using the elden light pillar that allowed us to finally get the back in time state off of skyloft and into the farron region of the overworld once there we could access the farron woods and lake floria maps which meant that we could now perform reverse bit magic with their scene flags as well and in the farron woods scene flag 62 corresponds to opening the lake florian door [Music] and with that back in time and all its uses now saved over three hours in skyward sword over the course of the next year and a half skyward sword was continually whittled down thanks to other new discoveries and realizations involving back in time and reverse bit magic the current any percent record sits at around 1 hour and 22 minutes meaning that back in time currently saves around four and a half hours in skyward sword as a whole [Music] skyward sword is thus far the last 3d zelda game that has back in time the newer entries in the series don't have the same reset capabilities that made it possible in the older titles and so it seems that back in time may always be limited to these three games still back in time is a complicated and diverse glitch across the games where it works and even if we've come a long way with back in time we're likely to run into a few more surprises as we move forward in time to understand it further i'm gymnast86 with lowest percent and thank you for watching

Channel: Lowest Percent

Views: 1,156,476

Rating: 4.9608932 out of 5

Keywords: Zelda, glitch, back in time, bit, bit magic, reverse bit magic, twilight princess, windwaker, wind waker, loz, tloz, the legend of zelda, link, skyward sword, speedrun, speedrunning, speedruns, legend of zelda, zelda theory

Id: l6J0P2OCi5g

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ketriaava]

I'm so glad this new channel is a thing. Every video in it is amazing content.

[u/mzxrules]

ngl, i popped off when my name appeared in the video.

A funny thing about my discovery of BiT in Wind Waker was that a few days before I discovered BiT, someone found a minor sequence break in Forsaken Fortress that they decided to call Back in Time, even though it wasn't the same setup. I hated the name so much that one day I was just like fuck it, I'm finding the TP style BiT, so i get off IRC, turn my game on and hit it in about 30 minutes of attempts.

[u/MiT_Epona]

Good stuff

[u/666pool]

Ok now you’ve piqued my interest. Is there more content that explains how this glitch is used?

[u/confirmSuspicions]

Just when you thought Zelda Speedrunners had done it all