Submission #7050: FractalFusion's NES King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! in 30:59.69

General

Lag reduction

Cursor movement

Menuing tricks

• You can press two different buttons at the same time and both will be applied.
• Since the important icons on the main menu are near the bag icon, it is better to select these icons by pressing select and moving to them, rather than pressing B to select them. For the hand icon, it's 12 frames faster to select rather than press B three times. However you can't "charge up" the cursor with this method like you can by pressing B three times, but as far as I know, there is no instance where pressing B three times can make up for the 12-frame loss.
• The only time it's faster to press B to select an icon is when using the eye or talk icons. The eye icon is never used in this TAS, and the talk icon is used only once, to set up the witch genie bottle skip glitch.
• Some timers (that are necessary to wait through) tick down during menuing. So it is faster to do menuing and cursor manipulation during this time. There is one time where I use this to pre-select an item that I will use later, saving some time.

Area-specific

Serenia Route

• Getting the boot first, before going to the temple. This ended up saving a huge amount of time.
• Doing both the dog stick sequence and the haystack sequence right after seeing the Madame Mushka wagon (where you pay the gold coin). There are a few other candidates but this is the best time to do so.
• After leaving the dark forest, going left first to get the tambourine, harp and marionette doll, like in BZero's TAS. The alternative, going to town first to get the hammer, ends up several seconds slower when the routes converge.
• There are some places where it's faster to take extra screens. The two that I found are the screens before the Madame Mushka wagon (because of lag on the wagon screen, it is faster to go from below) and the screen to the left of the snake (it is faster to go down, right and up due to screen transitions).

Useful glitches

• Witch genie bottle skip: At the screen where the witch blocks you from entering the house, there is one very specific x-coordinate (135) that allows you to slip by the witch, without falling into the pit. Normally x-coordinate is an even number. However, by talking to the witch, this changes your x-coordinate to 105, making the glitch possible. You can get the emeralds, spinner and key this way.
  • However, the witch has to be gone in order to do the honeycomb and emeralds puzzle. So perform a save and restore and the game will think the witch has been defeated and erase her from existence. I choose to save and restore immediately after getting the heart from the tree door; the game puts you back where you entered the screen but saves all status flags, so this saves the walk back.

• Dink tambourine anywhere: In the labyrinth in Mordack's Castle, you can use the tambourine anywhere to summon Dink and get the hairpin on that screen, instead of where Dink normally is. This saves a huge amount of time (around 50 seconds, IIRC). Thanks to Dan_ for reporting this glitch.

Other glitches that weren't used

• It is possible to use the hammer to get a crystal, before defeating the yeti. However, the yeti disappears from existence shortly after and you cannot use the pie on it. The pie has to be used on the yeti to progress the story.
• On the harpy island, it is possible to pick up the fishhook without using the harp, and save and restore to get rid of the harpies, but you still can't move unless you actually use the harp.
• It is possible to enter Mordack's bedroom at the same time he appears to sleep. However this doesn't spawn the wand that you need to take.

RNG in Mordack's castle

• 0-95: nothing
• 96-165: blue monster
• 166-215: cat Manannan
• 216-255: quick Mordack

Comparison table