A Link Between Worlds was created for the 3ds as a sequel in 2013 to the hit game A Link To The Past and as a way to test out the 3d graphics in a 2d Zelda game.

The main gimmick of the game is Link’s ability to merge into walls allowing puzzles to be solved in unique ways, or to merge through dimensional rifts that help Link free the seven sages to defeat the evil Yuga, and the evil Ganon, and the evil Yuga-Ganon.

The objective of this movie is to beat the game as fast as possible!

Emulator used: Bizhawk Version 2.10

In ALBW there are not really any MAJOR skips, just out of bounds clips and sequence breaks/boss skips. These glitches however, are very plentiful which makes for an interesting any% route.

The beginning has an empty file being deleted, which helped with stopping desyncs because it still started even if there was no file to delete, but it bleeds a bit of time for TAS timing. Luckily I made this TAS with RTA timing in mind, which starts the time at pressing the start button (WHAT). Also if you want it to sync by deleting a file, make sure the file you delete is named Link. For some reason that is the only thing that affects RNG before the run besides initial tick count.

Most of the beginning segment is a big cutscene (It’s a zelda game after all) so Link just mashed on the first frame that advanced text. You need to mash alternating between 12 and 14 frames to be optimal in a string of normal textboxes, 14 make the full text appear and then 12 frames later to skip to the next textbox.

Movement is very limited in ALBW, no options exist from the beginning to speed up horizontal movement so for now Link has to walk. Outside of the house, Gulley finally stops talking and lets Link use the weather vane, and forces a save at the vane. In order to unlock weather vanes for fast travel, you just need to interact so for future vanes, Link will NOT be saving because it loses time.

After a bit more walking and talking, Link arrives at the blacksmith. Here I learned that the circle pad is not aligned properly, I noticed that holding straight up on the pad made Llink slide left when walking at the house. I held slightly more and more right until he didn't slide anymore.

https://pasteboard.co/JnpV9AmiukVN.png

https://pasteboard.co/O1EJJBGiZwFS.png

The circle pad works with an X and a Y value as shown on the image on the top The number I found to make Link walk straight up is X=9-13, Y=127 (X is a range because I don’t actually know the exact value). The virtual circle pad works like the image on the on the bottom, slightly skewed counterclockwise.

Link gets the sword but he can’t use it yet because. The first trick in the run is ignoring the sword quest and instead going to death mountain, normally one would need the power glove after completing Eastern Palace to pick up the rock which would unlock after Eastern Palace, luckily using a damage boost from an enemy allows Link to jump over the rocks and enter the cave early. The damage boost works because the game is 3D, by jumping off the ledge Link can gain a bit of height before being hit by a crow that he lured over, the knockback from the crow launches him straight into the loading zone where he can start collecting money.

In the death mountain cave, Link taught me how RNG works in this game, although I didn’t fully understand it at this point so I couldn’t take full advantage of it. RNG is affected by a few things, the main one is the seed which is based off of the starting tick of the game, the second one that Link uses to turn rich is the location of Link when an enemy poofs away. After Link hits the final blow he can walk around and if he goes far enough the drops change, I imagine this game to be a giant grid and the square where Link is in affects RNG as well as the square where the enemy dies. Anyway to advance the RNG values you do pretty normal things such as break pots, or break enemies, and one other SECRET METHOD! That Link taught me later in the TAS.

Also in the cave Link takes a bit of damage from the moldorms and gets hit on the side so he doesn’t take the full knockback, outside of the cave a short cutscene plays that activates Ravio’s full shop. Because Link played the volcano cutscene before doing anything, it allows him to buy any item that he wants due to the nature of the progression in this game being pretty open. Next he walks to the weather vane while damage boosting to create a warp point for later. He dies soon after to teleport back to his home/Ravio’s shop to cut out walking. Ravio sells the first item for free if you cannot afford it, so Link chooses the fire rod which costs 100 rupees but thankfully Link is so poor that Ravio feels bad and gives it to him for free, next we buy the bow for 10 rupees which lets us beat the Eastern Palace.

After completing the sword quest Link can enter the Sanctuary, pushing one of the graves outside of Sanctuary gives a red rupee but Link opts to skip it to save a few seconds, inside the sanctuary Link chooses to skip 2 blue rupees to save about 1 second.

After buying the Tornado Rod and walking some more, Link does a trick known as an equip cancel. This trick works by swapping items before the full animation finishes in order to get control earlier, this allows Link to walk into the room transition as soon as the arrow appears, clearing his path of the octorok.

The first new trick of the run is in the fire rod section, by timing a damage boost from the fire while hopping, link can get across the gaps, this saves having to shoot some buttons with a bow and watch a cutscene and walk all the way around. The 3rd fire rod boost is used to get on a ledge to access 100 rupees and take a shortcut to Eastern Palace.

Eastern palace is pretty standard until the fairy room, runners usually do not go for this room because there are faster rupee options later on, however for the TAS route all of the other options would be slower. Up the stairs, Link presses a button to spawn the miniboss but by starting his sword spin the frame that the armos spawn, he can charge it during the cutscene. To pick up the rupees without losing time, Link performs a pivot slash. By slashing a few frames after a slash, it fully cancels into another slash. This is used to pick up the top left rupee at the beginning of the swing and pivot into a right facing slash, essentially slashing twice in the time of one. In the boss door room Link uses a technique known as tornado rod lifting, this is achieved by having his invulnerability run out while inside of a collision box during a tornado rod. The armos has a collision box because it turns into a statue which means that if Link is vulnerable, the collision pushes him away, making him end up on the roof. From here he drops into the boss loading zone.

Yuga is pretty basic, just requiring Link to hit him with a projectile and then doing enough damage. The forgotten sword does 4 damage, while the bow does 8 meaning it is more effective to use the bow as much as possible. Sadly Link runs out of stamina a bit into the fight so he has to use the sword for a few hits. The stamina meter is unlocked from one of the first Ravio shop cutscenes, but skipping them also skips the trigger to see this meter.

After defeating yuga, Link goes out of the left side of the arena. Normally RTA runners would go right and collect 100+ rupees but the merge back to the left side would lose a ton of time compared to balcony skip. By going to the left balcony and running off and quickly turning back Link can land on the lower platform and save a good bit of time. After going down a floor, Link has equipped the tornado rod earlier which allows him to skip a merge on the retracting platform, normally one would merge and unmerge, however merging and unmerging each freeze time for around half of a second which would delay the platform extending again. The tornado rod strategy doesn’t save one second like you might think, it saves only a few frames because the act of equipping the tornado rod also loses about one second. After returning to the entry room, Link goes to the right to get a silver rupee, this silver rupee is the fastest one available in the route.

After watching a cutscene, Link buys the hammer and bomb from Ravio. The hammer is only 20 rupees at this stage of the game because after eastern palace a few items that will help with the next dungeons are discounted so that Link doesn’t have to grind for rupees

Link then walks to the bridge to receive the bell from Irene, this enables fast traveling to weather vanes.

Link activates the weather vane in front of the witch hut and then merges across the water. Link continues to stay merged through the room transition in order to skip a short cutscene where the zora is in disbelief that Link can merge. Link bumps into the shady guy which lets him get the dash and smooth gem from kakariko.

Irene finally makes herself useful and brings Link to kakariko where he buys the smooth gem and enters the jailhouse to get another silver.

Originally I thought that this rupee would be one of the slowest to get, because in the RTA route (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1buYUIOwQr-xRUmzk40cZLNU3mR8vpYbDcc0zdjy1y1k/edit?tab=t.0) it takes 14-15 seconds. The other two options for a silver rupee are after yuga in eastern palace which takes 11-12 seconds, and one in Tower of Hera later which takes 9-10 seconds. You may be asking “Doesn’t the kakariko jail rupee take the longest to get?” To which I answer NO!!!!!! In the instance of the post-yuga rupee, performing balcony skip saves around 15-20 seconds from having to get the rupee and merge back to the left side. Skipping the rupee without performing balcony skip only saves around 11 seconds. The reason that the Hera silver is also not chosen over kakariko is because during the creation of the TAS, Skitten discovered a new hera route that looked cooler but it loses anywhere from 2-10 seconds (This is really confusing so I don’t know the exact timing) to the regular hera + hera silver. (More on this later).

Anyways, Link gets the pegasus boots from the shady guy which allows him to have an 8 directional dash, this dash takes a while to perform so it will be mainly used for long straightaways. The dash also automatically cancels after a room transition, so that is used to cut out the dash cancel/dash slide animation.

A quick bell warp to the death mountain vane, and Link is beginning a new chapter.

[ I’m getting bored of writing this to be honest and i actually want to publish the tas this year so from now on I am only going to mention the main tricks and not every bit of movement. ]

The first tas trick that Link discovered in this chapter is a short dash slide over a small gap in the cave, this trick is pretty precise and it saves around 1 second. You may also notice that Link starts the dash far away from the gap, this is because you need to wait a bit between the dash start and cancel, Link knows this so he also rubs against the railing of the stairs to delay the dash enough to where he can cancel it in time to float over the gap.

Link is very astute! He quickly made another discovery right outside of the Tower! When you are finally outside he learned that it is slower to stop your dash early and go in the left side of the door! This is because keeping your dash until you get moved up by the wall reduces the amount he needs to walk and replaces it with a dash. So even though he is covering more distance, he is covering it much quicker than he otherwise would.

This dungeon is VERY much different than the current RTA route so be prepared

On the first floor Link uses the IL method of getting up to the mole (salmon colored smiley bouncy thing). First he hits the mole with an equip cancel hammer and slashes the switch to make the wall go down, with this slash he also hits the mole that is still up which bounces him back onto the wall that is now lowered in order to cut out some walking. He then places the bomb that he equipped with the EC and equips the hammer again (the bomb placement is not equip-cancelable). He swings at the switch again to raise the wall and slash cancels into a spin slash. This spin slash allows him to reach the spinning spike which can bounce him off of the edge of the wall, this is important because if link hits a “bouncy” object that causes him to become airborne from falling off a ledge, he does a neat animation where he flies upward into the air before falling back down. He does this to make the game have more charm I guess. But while he is in the air in that animation he gets hit by the explosion of the bomb which boosts him to the raised floor which cuts out a section of walking and merging. He then simply hammers the moles and reaches floor 2 where everything is the same as RTA 🙂.

On the third floor Link travels upward to hit the switch as is normal, but he refuses to hit it again to lift himself up to get the key, this is a part of the new route because Link skips the key door. He throws his bomb from as far as possible to set up for a bomb rod. While using the tornado rod, Link gets enough height to be in the floor above him, but the floor above him will not load when he is in the TRod state. Using a bomb to damage him at the peak of his TRod will put him into the getting damaged state and cancel the TRod allowing him to load the floor above him. Link also clips into this specific spot so that he can be out of bounds when he lands on floor 4, if he is too far out there is no floor though, so he must be halfway inbounds. As soon as he lands he uses the TRod again but he is out of stamina so he must wait a while.

When he gets enough stamina to use the TRod twice in a row, he does. If he doesn’t use it fast enough the second time he will fall back down to floor 5. On floor 6 now, he again waits for stamina by spamming the use item button. He finally uses it again and waits again. While he waits this time he manipulates the beetle with his movement so that it goes close to him for when he tornado rods again. Taking damage cancels the TRod early which refunds the stamina so he can use it again without waiting, and the reason that he can transition up floors with the TRod during this part is because he is standing on top of the wall because he is out of bounds and can reach it now. Standing at that height means that he should be on the floor above because the floor of the floor above him is the same height as the ceiling he is standing on. He TRods again and then moves and TRods again and then TRods again and then he TRods again and then he TRods again and then he waits for full stamina to place a bomb to setup for a bomb rod while still clipped into the wall, he does the bomb rod and hits the mole while walking into an area with no floor so he does the hop animation to get some height which saves having to wait for a TRod. He goes and gets full health before hammering the mole because he is still waiting on stamina.

The moldorm boss fight is pretty simple, the bow does 2 damage and the sword does one. Link shoots him with the bow and repositions to shoot him again, he moves to manipulate again and uses his sword this time because it was faster than shooting him. This sword slash does not lose time even though it does less damage because moldorm dies on the same cycle even if you hit him with a sword once. This sword slash also makes Link not have to wait for stamina after he falls. Link then moves to the top of the arena and equip cancels his bow shot to hit the moldorm so that he has time to fall off of the arena before the worm dies. This is done to perform the pendant spawn skip, the pendant reward that the moldorm drops has a short cutscene that starts after waiting a few seconds and changing rooms/floors before it spawns skips having to spawn it in the cutscene. Link hammers the mole again and grabs the pendant and Hera is complete.

Link calls his ride to pick him up from work and travels back to Zora’s domain. Before he hops down the final ledge next to the water, he slashes behind himself to cancel a weird animation that he does after canceling a dash, this animation that he does prevents hopping down any cliff so he cancels it as quick as he can.

In the domain, Link places a bomb on the first frame that he can so that it explodes as early as possible, this is to perform a very strange bombrod that is called fish skip. By throwing the bomb on top of the pillar, the bomb is sent onto the ledge in front of it because of the way the geometry in this game is designed. In order to achieve a camera angle that is not directly above everything, the devs slanted all objects in the game to achieve a different camera angle that shows more about the objects and world. This is what the environment looks like from a different perspective:

https://external-preview.redd.it/2HWBaY0n_zJ4tYomlpA9Y6gg8HKu_a_3Z-QV-x-wcg0.png?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=bb8d1f6e17c2b2041d57352d36a822f9e0c1dfe5

Anyways, the tops of the pillars are slanted towards the ledge which allows the bomb to slide on the ledge, this isn't the important part though. In fact this part doesn’t even matter because the trick can be done with the bomb on the ground. But the pillar tops matter for the TRod because using the TRod lifts Link next to the pillar, the tornado rod locks his horizontal movement. So the bomb is used to cancel the TRod and allow him to move. Because of this, he bonks his head on the slant of the pillar and gets nudged just enough to land on the ledge above. This skip is done to skip the cutscene trigger at the top of the stairs, which plays a 30ish second cutscene of the Zora queen eating a fish.

Link rings up his day-one yet again and warps back to his house to make it to the House of Gales. A few dashes later and he is in the lake, swimming in this game is done by pressing B with the zora flippers and you can swim once every 30 frames which substantially increases your swim speed. Link needs 150 rupees by the end of this dungeon so he manipulates a blue from one of the pots.

The first skip of the dungeon comes in the room with the moving red blocks, Link falls off of the ledge and uses a TRod because when he is falling, he gets a few frames of leeway to use items. He uses this to land on top of one of the moving blocks and skip having to walk around a bunch in this room.

In the next room, Link pulls a bomb and throws it to a switch he scurries over to a button and steps on it to activate some wind. He TRods into the wind while the bomb triggers the switch activation cutscene so that link can be riding in the wind during the cutscene. On floor 2 he uses a precise TRod to get hit by the roller and cancel the TRod while having enough height to go over it. He grabs a key later in the room with a TRod which is unintended, normally you are supposed to do a puzzle to merge over to it but because the key would look weird if placed on the center of the beam due to the camera angle, the devs put the key a bit north so that it would look centered to the player.

Link grabs the BK and bonks his head on the ceiling to manipulate a bat to move into position for HoG skip skip skip, which is a trick that has been refined a few times but the current fastest version is using a bat to cancel the tornado rod which allows link to cross the room transition without doing the puzzle to turn the fan on.

He lands on the third floor and walks on the LEFT side of the hole in the floor due to TAS precision and can save a little bit of time. If he gets too close to the wind he will enter a wind push animation thing and lose a few seconds so runners go on the right side to avoid it. A dash cancel later and he is in the bossfight.

Link knows how to kill margomill, he uses a bomb and spinslash on the first frame that he can to kill the layer in two hits. But there is a problem, he can only use 3 bombs before running out of stamina, luckily the void is all around him and voiding out resets his stamina, problem solved.

By luring margomill close to the bottom of the arena for the final hit, Link can TRod on top of the boss and slash him from on top, the reason he does this is because the collision of margomill stays active for a few frames after the cutscene when link is actionable, Link uses the collision to get high enough to TRod on top a floor that conveniently slides under him. He lands on the railing because the railing is higher so he is actionable sooner, he exits the room which activates another pendant skip! How practical that the pieces fall into place like this. He enters back in the room and collects the pendant

Link flies over to Kakariko and goes into the lost woods with all three pendants, after playing a little game with some ghosts he collects the master sword and heals up to full.

The final Ravio shop is used to buy the items we haven't yet, both very important for tricks and movement coming up. The more important thing found in this shop though, is the Quick Equip ability. This lets link equip items from the touchscreen without pausing, opening this menu at all performs a Quick Equip Cancel or a QEC which is an equip cancel but all in real time so it saves around a second per QEC, it also can be used on items that you wouldn't normally, like a hammer into another hammer. This is because with equip canceling you would need to switch to a different item and then switch back to hammer which would be too slow to even consider, but now that you do not need to pause it is free timesave every time you use a Bow, Hammer, Ice Rod, and Fire Rod… Rad!

Link finally overcomes the biggest metaphorical and literal barrier in this whole route with a single slash of the master sword, inside the castle is the only part that was done with human input, while waiting Link decides to place some pins on the map. After talking in a scuffed cutscene with Zelda because we have not been in the castle yet, the upstairs door is open and we can enter the dungeon. On the third floor Link does his first trick of the dungeon, and it’s a TAS trick! Normally runners go on the right armos to do the TRod lift but with precise movement you can get up on the left side and be closer to the door (This trick probably took me the longest to get in the run so far, I spent a few hours doing it on the left but I could never get up so then I tried on the right and figured it out and then I went BACK over to the left and finally got it to work thankfully.) Walking over the room transition on the top of the wall slow enough makes Link fall down to the floor because the wall is not fully connected it seems. So Link uses this to fall directly into the door transition and walk up the stairs.

Floor 5 is home to one of the most overhyped tricks in gaming history, by luring trident holding guy to hit you and make you invincible, you can do a tornado rod on the stairs that clips you onto the railing, all while avoiding the bombs and making the trident guy avoid the bombs as well. Then you can TRod up onto the floor above and skip having to walk outside a little. To be honest I don’t think this trick saves time, it might lose less than a second but it looks pretty cool lol. On floor 6 Link cancels his dash cancel by running into the enemy as soon as he cancels his dash, just a minor optimization that you should keep your eyes peeled for, he does it a few times.

The Yuga rematch is pretty simple, manipulate him to take the shortest path when he is in his painting form, and then hit him. The final 2 hits are spin slashes to skip on final merge and kill the boss one cycle sooner.

Link peels back the curtain and discovers something he shouldn’t have… A crack in the wall… This crack appears to bring him into a different dimension, like HYrule got flipped upside down…I think it should be called LOrule…

Lorule is the dark world in this game and is segmented so that Link must travel into hyrule and discover new cracks in order to reach different parts of lorule, the enemies are harder and more frequent and there are 7 new dungeons that he must complete to unlock Lorule castle, these dungeons are a lot more broken though :).

Link warps back to the hot mountain and goes into lorule, he discovers it becomes the cold mountain, WHAT. The first fun trick of lorule is found at the bridge, by using a fire rod into the void, link can boost off of it onto the ropes of the bridge, usually runners do it on the top of the bridge because it is significantly easier because the wooden thingy stops you from getting knocked off of the bridge, but you need to walk around to the bottom anyway so doing it on the bottom to start saves a few seconds. By hookshotting across the gap Link can walk along the edge of the world and skip having to do one of the two multiple-minute long auto scrolling sections, sadly he doesn’t know how to skip the second one so he swallows his pride and enters the ice cave. There is nothing he needs to do in the ice cave so he ends up drawing a heart on the minimap and collecting some hearts to heal to full. At this point there is no need for rupees so he just stays poor forever now.

There is one trick to this room though, the moving platforms are all on a global cycle and merging pauses them for 1 second. In order to get the speed up the cycle, link merges as little as possible, skipping one

As he enters the dungeon, he QECs his fire rod to the side to melt the statue and make sure he doesn’t run into it. In the first room of the dungeon he QECs his fire rod to the side to melt the cube and make sure he doesn’t run into it.

Right at the start he falls down to B2 and starts riding the elevator, by moving to the right during the floor transition, Link can clip into the wall. Doing a dash straight up makes him land out of bounds on a floor below him and with a precise walk off he can go down to B2 which has a straight line to fall down which makes him end up in the boss arena, Link is supposed to drop down from the bottom of the arena but with this out of bounds movement he lands on the top half which stops the boss activation cutscene from triggering, Link can’t reach the dungeon item which is one of the seven paintings he needs though, he would have to kill the boss first. Luckily the boss can be hit and killed with 2 fire rod uses. This obviously wouldn’t be enough damage to actually kill it but during testing I found a way to spawn the boss without activating it, two fire rods would thaw it out and it would jump in the pit in the middle and kill itself…

Anyway this is enough for the platforms to fall down and create a bridge for Link. Hooray! Every painting he collects starts a cutscene with all of the sages he has saved so far, Link can get control early by pressing grab and he uses this to enter the portal to leave the dang cutscene.

Link walks and dashes and draws and flies and crosses dimensions to get to the next dungeon. Every Lorule dungeon has a dungeon puzzle before you enter, for ice ruins it was the big waiting room.

Dark Maze is the Dark palace dungeon puzzle, it starts with a long merge to avoid a cutscene trigger, runners don't do this even though it’s easy because on the way out of the dungeon there is another cutscene trigger that plays the same cutscene if it has not happened yet. I’ll talk about this when we get there but for now we skip the cutscene and save a good amount of time

Why am I even writing this? Who even cares, what am I doing? I'm not even explaining the tas tricks. I'm writing a fanfic of Link going through the game and finding all the tricks. What is the point of it all? At least this might be a nice guide for someone who only can read braille and they can’t see anything at all if someone translates this to braille. I don’t know anymore there are so many better resources for learning about this run but I’m not even having a bad time writing this tbh. Writing it from the perspective of someone documenting Link’s adventure definitely helps with passing time but also I feel like this deep of an explanation is not really important, I mean there might be like 4 people that read this total. Hopefully they like it, if they don’t at least I had a good time. I’m listening to music and I feel productive for some reason, I guess I am producing something I guess… Maybe this is what life is all about.

After unmerging, Link fires two sword beams at the mouth enemy, it’s important to be at full health because everything else kills the chompy if you hit him enough, sword beams only do 1 dmg. A hookshot is used to stun the enemy and line him up, by dashing into a wall inside of the enemy Link gets pushed onto the railing for some reason. I’m not sure if anyone knows why this happens but I'm assuming it's because stunned enemies can’t damage you but they still have collision, so by dashing into him you get some height and get pushed onto the railing.

This skips almost the entire dark maze, the only part that Link still needs to do is walk around some enemies with bright eyes and merge around the others

Link pulls a bomb and throws it from as far as he can, this leaves him in a predicament because he has an option to dodge the bomb by waiting for it to explode, but he believes in himself and takes the damage that leaves him at half of a heart, the bomb push also leaves him pretty high up.

The second room of the dungeon is where shit gets real. After hitting the switch to spawn the key, a lesser runner would place a bomb to blow up the floor to activate part of the boss, but Link chooses to wait on placing the bomb and he grabs the key with an unintended hookshot, placing his bomb after. This is to pull off a cutscene success skip but i’ll be honest i’ve been calling it a succession skip for the past few months (YIKES). It works by stopping a cutscene from activating by going through a room transition. After activating something like a switch hitting cutscene or blowing up a block like we did, the cutscene showing what it did will play around 2 frames after. Link walking through screen transition after the objective has been completed but before the cutscene activates completely stops the cutscene from ever happening but it still counts the objective as complete. By waiting a bit, Link can skip a cutscene that is a few seconds long

In the room after, Link chooses not to merge just to swag out a bit because the cycle was good.

On 2F link starts by shooting an arrow into a switch that spins the walls, Link is supposed to merge onto the wall and be flipped to the other side but he can sneak through if he is precise

Link pulls out a bomb and does another success skip, this one he doesn’t even pause for. He does another little walk around on the spinning wall which looks cooler this time. The next interesting room is a few floors down, this room appears to have no floor because you need to turn off the lights in order to see the “invisible” path.

The big boss room is one of my favorite parts of the whole TAS, runners hit the switch with the ice rod and then enter into the bomb bowling room, but Link doesn’t hit the switch yet. He does bomb bowling and leaves to perform a success skip on the big chest spawning cutscene. He then hits the switch with the ice rod outside of the room, and the reason he does this now is because he needed to open the door before he hit it. The door opening animation would take too long and another cutscene would play, so opening the door early allows you to skip a very long cutscene. You need to go in the bomb bowling room again anyways to collect the boss key chest, so doing these rooms and switches in this order makes you watch only 1 out of 3 cutscenes saving a ton of time.

Defeating the boss would be too slow to do with low health, so while Link slashes the boss he makes sure to have hearts drop from pots and heal up to tank the hits, making short work of the gemesaur.

After Link leaves the dungeon he does walks up some stairs and does a precise dash to go out of bounds in the maze, this out of bounds lets him skip the second cutscene trigger which is on the bridge, this movement with the out of bounds and the merging allows Link to save a few seconds compared to the other route.

Luckily right outside of the maze, Link uses a fire rod boost to go on the railing of the cliff, this saves a ton of time because he no longer needs to traverse through Hyrule to reach turtle rock.

After Link swims to the ladder he performs an animation storage glitch. By approaching a ledge that link would normally jump up to and doing a swim into it so that he is inactionable and can’t jump up, he saves the trigger needed to jump up the ledge. Swimming up to any wall will make Link perform the jump to exit the water, this is used on a ledge below the turtle rock entrance to skip the dungeon puzzle of saving the stranded turtle babies.

In the dungeon, Link doesn’t do anything special until he performs a special bomb rod, by taking damage in conjunction with a tornado rod under the grate platform, link can end up clipping above it and skip almost the entire dungeon

Grinexx the turtle, was a very difficult boss to plan. He has 3 attacks, 1 which he bites at Link and is vulnerable through the whole attack, and 2 where he retreats into his shell. Manipulating the boss pattern was honestly a pain but eventually I discovered the quickest kill that I could, Link slashes and freezes some lava which stuns him and using an ice rod also resets his pattern which gives favorable RNG. I just trial and errored this section with different attacks, items, movement etc. and this was the best pattern that I found.

Getting into the actual dungeon is changed heavily from RTA, a human would just walk in normally but many years ago it was found that you could do something called an ice rod clip to enter the dungeon a few seconds faster.

Ice rod clips work by using an ice rod over a water source and walking under the ice block, the ice in the sky turns into an iceberg with collision when it enters the water and it can push Link through walls in some cases.

The first room in the dungeon is also one of my favorites in the whole run, just because it was something that I discovered that felt like not many others would have found. This room makes use of two ice rod clips, the first one only works when link is facing directly to the side, otherwise the ice doesn’t become an iceberg, placing it in this spot and doing a QEC to walk under it in time allows link to clip inside of the railing and walk close to the wall to perform another ice rod clip that pushes link into the wall this time. For some reason clipping into this wall puts Link under the water and makes him able to walk. Runners normally would merge all the way around the room to the top right and then perform an ice rod clip through the wall to skip the dungeon puzzle of draining this room, but this version is 5 ish seconds faster 🙂!

In the first actual room in the dungeon where the music and title card come on, Link pulls the hookshot thing to fill up the room with water and he can do something to travel a bit faster across this water. By performing a frame perfect A press, Link can enter the grab animation which makes him unable to enter the water, this “jesus walk” as it is called can send Link at almost full speed across the water. Sadly Link loses a lot of momentum pretty fast so it is only useful for short gaps even though these can be chained infinitely, also the ledge in this room and most rooms for that matter is too high to reach using a jesus walk so Link still has to enter the water and jump back out to reach the other side.

In the next room, Link does a difficult ice rod clip from the top side of the wall to make his way around to the boss room. In between room transitions is a cutscene where Link is inactionable, so the fastest way to get out of the water is to save your B press until 1 frame before the room transition in order to maintain as much momentum as possible by swimming as close to the next room as you can. This honestly doesn’t look like much but it cuts out a few seconds of waiting from this section.

When Link hops up onto land, he instantly dashes straight into water and turns around to store the water exit animation, and then turns back around to use the animation to hop on to the hookshot switch where he can perform another trick called a hookshot hang. This is done by falling off of a hookshottable thing and turning around fully while still falling off and hookshotting during the few frame grace period that he gets when he leaves the ground. By doing it at a very precise position and time, the hookshot hang has minimum length which means Link has to wait a very short amount of time for the hookshot to spin the switch. This switch raises the water level across the entire dungeon floor which allows him to skip every dungeon puzzle. Also, in between the 2 short cutscenes that play because of this hookshot switch, there is one frame where Link is actionable where he uses that frame to angle as far left as he can and perform a swim just to save some swimming distance.

As he surfaces again, there is yet another ice rod clip that brings him out of bounds into the next room where he jumps up onto a wooden platform, still careful to stay out of bounds and then he TRods onto the top of the wall where he can move over the the boss room and fall down in between room transitions into a nice patch of water that is very small. Link then does a pixel perfect swim to land on the floor while staying out of bounds and then continues to walk along this edge which is extremely precise. Reaching the top middle of the room, Link has to shift his hitbox to collide with the stair trigger which is hidden inside of the wall, he does this by charging a spin slash.

This is the only dungeon in the game that can be completely done without entering it. Link is supposed to transition between Hyrule and Lorule a few times to solve the dungeon puzzle, but Link just needs to switch dimensions twice. While doing so, he finishes his art piece… It's a triforce! Wowee! That's neat.

Entering the big room, he heads over to the water where he performs an ice rod clip into a tornado rod to lift him up to the second floor, Link then walks down to do a fire rod boost to be fully out of bounds where he does pixel perfect dashes to maintain his dash (normally after small ledges link stops dashing). Finally Link dash cancels into the room with the painting and touches the painting, finishing the dungeon.

A good amount of the timesave from this dungeon is better enemy patterns and movement to avoid enemies. At the beginning, I was just assuming that the enemy patterns were set when I walked into the room and I had to deal with it. But Link showed me signs that things weren’t adding up… Leaving little breadcrumbs for me to eat… one mummy spawns a bit higher than usual… another mummy starts moving down instead of up… and then it hit me. Link has been teaching me that having the lamp equipped changes the RNG value, im not sure whether it’s based off of the flame pattern or the physics of the lamp but it definitely changes things. So in this dungeon Link uses this masterful technique to blaze through rooms with near perfect enemy spawns and patterns.

But all in all, Link does a pretty standard run through of this dungeon with only a few different tricks. The first is in the big room with the statues and the buttons, Link skips a merge by pressing a different button that leaves him with an extended beam that is closer to the corner which makes it simple to just TRod up and walk past the corner

As soon as Link enters the room on the right, he begins doing this room’s puzzle which is done by pressing all of the buttons with the statues, but he quickly gets to work on a trick after by pulling the statue down to the gate and timing the switch presses and statue push to make the statue fall on his head, clipping him through the floor. Link lands on the top of the wall of the room below him and navigates up one room where he throws a bomb at a switch to perform a partial success skip which saves a few seconds but he still has to wait through a sound effect which loses less than a second.

Link then goes up one more room and does a pixel perfect dash onto the grate half a floor down and one room to the right. He lands in bounds enough to stand on the grate and out of bounds enough to TRod up to the floor above him, the reason he can't just walk here is because this OoB floor is slightly above the room to the left’s OoB floor which means he can only walk from the right to left out of bounds and trying to walk left to right will cause him to void out. This is all done to enter the mini boss room early and skip all of the puzzles in the dungeon leading up to this, he can also collect the key without even fighting the mini boss. The movement after the key is to avoid the cutscene trigger of starting the fight

He rescues the thief girl and continues through the dungeon as normal, in the floor downstairs Link makes use of some jesus walks but that’s pretty much it for this part until he goes back up to B1. When Link is finally up the stairs he can cut off a merge in the big fan room by doing a dash cancel straight onto the switch. Link is back in the starting room, where he uses a TRod on the moving painting thing to get pushed on to the boss key chest platform so that he can skip using a merge.

Stalblind is where Link had some fun with a useless strategy, by hitting the boss precisely and moving around him he can pretty much stunlock the boss but it is equal to fighting the boss normally. When stalblind gets rid of his shield, Link is in a very strange spot that he is not supposed to be, he is inside of the boss hitbox and gets teleported to the opposite side of the boss. This is important because it makes the boss take a while to turn around and he cannot attack Link during this turn.

In the approach to the castle, Link pans the camera up with the d-pad during a dash which changes the hinox pattern and makes him not throw a bomb which saves only a little because Link does not have to reposition to dodge the bomb.

In the mini boss room on the first floor, Link manipulates as many hearts as he can without losing time because he needs sword beams to save stamina usage for a later room. As Link enters the bomb trial room on the 3rd floor, he pans the camera down to give more favorable enemy spawns, he then does every section with almost no frames of lenience. The switch is getting hit on almost the same frame that Link walks on top of the raisable walls, this is to reduce wait time. At the bottom of the room he flings a sword beam to the left and pans the camera to follow it so that it doesn’t despawn before hitting the switch.

The next section of this room was absolute hell. The hardest part by far of the TAS, it took me almost a full day of tweaking angles and positioning to pull it off. Link gets lifted up by the blue wall and pulls a bomb, he then throws the bomb directly onto the lowered red wall and uses another sword beam to hit the switch, lifting him up this time. But because he pulled the bomb so early in order to reduce time spent waiting, he will not have enough time to perform a spin slash that would hit the big rock above him and make him do a jump and get hit by the bomb to get boosted out of bounds, so he must do a single slash. The problem is, a single slash will not make him do the hop unless you are already falling off quite a bit, and the other problem is the slash will not hit the rock unless you are pretty close to it, and the problem with being close to the rock is that the bomb won't boost you far enough back to reach out of bounds. So Link has to do an incredibly precise walk off of the wall while slashing to get the hop and at the max height, get hit by the bomb which is placed high enough to boost him down and low enough to boost him enough to reach the wall. Eventually, after hours of attempts Link finally landed the frame perfect, pixel perfect walk off single slash trick, and lined it up with the pixel perfect and frame perfect bomb explosion, allowing him to walk straight into the boss walkup.

Yuganon is pretty straightforward thankfully, his first phase is completed by Link hitting him as much as he can, the attacks in this phase are all about equal so Link only manipulates Yuganon to not do the laser attack by using the bow for certain hits. The laser attack is an attack where Yuganon disappears for 8 seconds while making Link walk around to dodge lasers.

The second phase is a wizard tennis battle where Link just hits the ball as close as possible to Yuganon, pretty easy. In between tennis, Yuganon transforms into a painting and Link needs to shoot him in the butt each time with the bow of light. Each of these painting shots have different requirements to hit him. The first shot requires Link to merge and then shoot him in the front, and then unmerge and remerge behind him to hit him in the back, Link skips the first merge by getting hit while shooting which forces him out of the merge, but he cannot do it again because it deals 2 hearts of damage leaving Link at 1hp.

Link also has to deal with fire cannons that shoot purple fire butterflies that home, so he follows the floor pattern to dodge these for some entertainment (this took me longer than I’d like to admit so enjoy it).

The second tennis is pretty much the same as the first but for the merged shot, Link has a technique where he enters at a very precise distance away from Yuganon and shoots and instantly unmerges which causes Yuganon to turn the other way, allowing the arrow to hit his back. One more butterfly dodging session later and he is on the final tennis.

The final stage of tennis makes Link juggle two balls, this is a sticky situation. This part is very precise because if Linki hits the balls with the same slash they begin to sync up which means Yuganon will have immunity frames for the second ball and Link will have to restart the phase. So by carefully making sure that he hits them at the right time and separates them enough, Yuganon gets hit by both very quickly. Hooray!

The final painting is meant to be done by going close to Yuganon and firing the arrow the opposite way to trigger a cutscene where you can watch the arrow travel around the arena fully before striking an unsuspecting Yuganon. Link can speed this up by shooting it from almost the direct opposite of the arena and walking away from the arrow, this makes the game think that you were actually close to him when you shot the arrow so it starts the cutscene when the arrow is already hitting Yuganon. (Starting the walk away from the arrow one frame later does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Y9p-mztmM and one frame after that does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrRPdSY1dI4 which I just thought were funny interactions 🙂).

Finishing Yuganon off with a bow is the fastest method to kill him when Link is this far because Link needs to be at the top of the arena to start the ending cutscene. The ending cutscene might look fairly simple to a blind eye but it was discovered that after Link wakes up, walking to the right and then forward saves around 7 frames, I’m not sure why but who am I to complain about free frames. Link touching the triforce marks the end of the run. Thanks for reading this if you did, I hope you learned enough to be satisfied. If you didn’t read this, you saved a good amount of time, go use it on something important.

-Better Hera route - I went and looked at it again and I think the original hera route with the hera rupee is faster but I'm not really sure because the rupee stuff hurts my head.

-Less Equips red rupee fire rods - On the eastern palace fire rod boosts to hop the gap, it was discovered that you can do all of the boosts without an equip cancel, saving 4 ish seconds i think.

-Better Rupees - Self explanatory, better rupee rng because i didn't really understand the RNG until later in the run when rupees didn't matter as much.

-Better Lamp Pickup - This is a small one but opening the lamp chest as early as possible is optimal because you can use it earlier.

-Better Movement in the intro - My movement until sanctuary is pretty bad because I didn’t get the hang of it at the very start

-Dash in boulder cave pre hera - The cave right after the dash cancel across the small gap, you can dash right after the cancel so you don’t have to walk so far to get hit by the boulder.

-Hera landing on the mole postboss - After killing moldorm in hera, it was discovered that you can walk off of the boss onto the moles after killing it and then dash off of those directly into the void and respawn on the boss platform to save some stamina and to get back to the boss quicker.

-Dashes with less wall rubbing - A lot of my dashes are started as early as I can but sometimes it is optimal to walk before dashing so that you don’t rub into wall to slow you down, one example of this is the dash after Yuga 2 rubbing against walls and pillars and probably losing a few frames.

-Maybe skip first fire rod window cutscene in dp - In dark palace i think you can do a success skip on the first fire rod by walking out of the top room but im not sure how much time it would save if any

-Better boss RNG - If you really have a lot of time on your hands, you can restart the entire game for better boss patterns in grinexx, yuganon, and maybe gemesaur.

-Old desert maybe - There was an older desert route that was used for like a week, as soon as you get into Lorule and after swamp, walk to the bottom right and fire rod up one layer and then bomb boost up another layer. I don’t think this is faster but it is worth trying

-Better enemy patterns with lamp earlier - Use the lamp earlier in the run to manipulate earlier rooms instead of starting with skull woods like me.

-Skitten for helping with routing and trick discovery while I was tasing and to the whole community for finding and documenting niche tricks to perhaps find their place in this TAS.

I’m glad I did this TAS, I have a pretty deep understanding of the game which probably won't ever be useful for anything real, but cool nonetheless. Also I found some neat things and the community became active again around this time and some people learned some things from the TAS. It’s a cool feeling knowing that you found timesave in a game that you have never beaten. The farthest I’ve gotten is ToH maybe lol, i don't really remember. The reason I did this is because Skitten is my good friend and was the WR holder at the time and I was bored and interested in TASing, so shoutout to Skitten for inspiring me to do this even though I haven’t even gotten close to halfway through the game.

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO IT’S FINALLY OVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ☀️

CoolHandMike: Claiming for judging.

CoolHandMike: Replacing file with truncated version as well as changing the sync setting Use Temp Folder to True.

CoolHandMike: Well optimized and full of good strategies and OOB bugs I had a lot of fun watching this.

Accepting to Standard.

Excellent tas!

EZGames69: Processing...