You can get L2 Power Ring from the Advance Shop, thus getting it prior to D1. The Advance Shop has 1 Tier 3 ring for sale, and you can manipulate it to be the L2 Power Ring, a Tier 3 Ring.
How easy/hard is it to manipulate RNG? I feel (only from hearing the damage potential) you'd benefit more from the Whimsical ring, though I have no knowledge of how difficult it is to do so. Alternatively is it possible to corrupt your ring box much earlier in the game in order to get the Whimsical ring withouth having to spend any extra unnecessary time to get it the normal way? Or might doing so break the game in the long run due to the corrupted nature of the ring box? Granted the Double-Edged ring would make everything a lot more predictable with the fixed damage, yet also a lot more dangerous. Alternatively it could also work if you got the Power Ring L-2 (plus two sword damage, getting hurt makes you loose an additional 1/2 heart) instead (or together with any other rings, though getting the level 2 Ring box so you can bring two rings with you would probably be more time consuming than it's worth).
Aha, ok. Then what if you got either the Double-Edged or the Whimsical ring from the Yoll Graveyard directly after the first dungeon? Or are there not enough enemies to kill for the seed to appear until then? Alternatively if you buy one of the rings at the Advance Shop for 100 rupees and make sure it's the Whimsical one? Then you'd have a way to instantly kill most bosses from the start of the game. Or am I missing something something important with this idea? Apart from the obvious RNG struggle to get all those critical hits that is.
How does the ring box corruption work? Does it just give you a ring "at random" and equips it? Or does it convert an already existing ring into another? Or just appraise/equip an unidentified ring for you? I'm wondering since wouldn't it be better to get the Double-Edged Ring (sword does an extra eight damage, but you take one heart in damage with every hit) instead of the Red Ring (double the damage of the current sword)?
It should take less than a minute to get the red ring. It's still possible to get the positioning glitch without a time portal on the screen. It would be even faster if there were a way to get the glitched ring box with a time portal on-screen, but I haven't been able to do it. Is it not slightly faster to travel to level 7 with the glitch (ignoring the time needed to visit the tile)? Remember, you can scroll to the right side of the screen as well. Four screens up, two screens right, dive (cancelling the glitch), visit king zora. Also, it should be faster to visit the area from ambi's palace, rather than from out of bounds, since you'd get stuck in a wall.
Video I was messing around with the glitch, just to the left of the leftmost black tile. Twice, it booted me into gba mode... usually it did something else. Then once, my restore point disappeared, and I tried to exit, but the 3ds froze when I hit X to close the software. Then I couldn't boot it...
Okay... I would advise extreme caution doing this glitch on a 3ds. Somehow, I rendered oracle of ages permanently unplayable. I wiped the SD card and redownloaded it, and still, I couldn't boot it. Luckily I use a hacked 3ds with emunand, so I was able to roll back my system to a previous state. Someone doing this with an unmodified 3ds may not be able to fix it... Anyway, I noticed a potentially useful effect of the glitch in gambatte. It glitches link's position so that he is stuck on the left end of the screen... yet somehow he can scroll both left and right? Anyway, this lets him re-enter the map. I haven't gotten it to work on real hardware, though, only with gambatte. The way I did it, was I didn't move horizontally at all, and I moved up to the correct row of the map. I played the harp on the second tile from the bottom to go to the past. I activated the glitch, closed the map, then quickly opened it and did it again. Then link was stuck on the left side of the screen. I was able to glitch over to the eighth dungeon, and I cancelled the effect by playing the harp. Apparently, bizhawk uses gambatte's core. This could save time travelling to dungeons 7 and 8, though it doesn't seem to be consistent with real hardware. Edit: actually, this works on other emulators if you simply equip the ember or pegasus seeds with the seed shooter... it might work on a real cartridge, but I can only test with a flash cartridge at the moment, which may be more prone to crashing on bad memory writes.
I'm trying to get Vasu to not crash the game. Here's what I know about the ring box level. If you have visited the top-left area of symmetry city in the present, the results will be less interesting. So, that tile should be blacked out on your map screen. Assuming you've never visited there, and you've restored the tuni nut (which is probably necessary), there is one more factor which affects the ring box level - your shield level. Level 1 shield gives you the ring box level 10 (0x0a). Level 2 shield gives you ring box level 15 (0x0f). You don't need to have a shield, just check the shop to confirm the shield level. The level 10 ring box seems to crash in a consistent way. The level 15 ring box usually crashes the game, but in many different ways... one time, it actually let me go to the ring screen, though it was graphically glitchy. I can't figure out how to do it again. The level 11 ring box (0x0b) doesn't crash, but I don't think there's a way to get it with the glitch - only through memory editing. If I could talk to vasu without it crashing, I could probably manipulate the RAM past the ring list. I'm not entirely sure what it contains, though.
Alright so I noticed an odd side effect of selecting the tile while at 7a. the second start screen is glitched (as found before). the screen looks like it has been taken over by rings. also, If I select the last ring I have and hit right, which should bring me back to the first item, it instead goes to another ring. I can scroll through a huge list of random rings, most of which are the friendship ring. I can equip any of the rings and gain the effects of the ring. I have seen the pegasus ring, and the power ring LVL 3. I don't know what determines what rings are in the giant list, but will look into it on another file and see Edit: trying to access the ring list through Vasu crashes the game after this glitch