Transcript for:
The A Button Challenge in Super Mario 64

September 1994 Nintendo of Japan development of Super Mario 64 begins from the very beginning a major design decision was made while the transition to 3D did open up many exciting possibilities at the center of it all would be Mario's most basic and iconic ability his jump so that's what they did and they did it right in 1996 when Super Mario 64 came out it was an immediate success at the core of the tightest and most responsive controls ever seen in a 3D game was a wide range of unique abilities accessible at the Press of the a button single jumps double drums triple jumps triple jumps with sparkles side flips long jumps Wall Kicks backflips jump kicks jump Dives so naturally players thought what if we didn't use any of them foreign [Music] the late 90s early 2000s internet was a magical place like the kingdom far away in a fairy tale nearly all of it was either modernized or abandoned but every now and then you find an artifact of a simpler time preserved in Amber seemingly for generations to come one of these is Walton Dell's website where all sorts of Nintendo 64 tricks and findings were reported by waltendell himself or submitted by email some were glitches some were fun little challenges you could try and complete and some were downright stupid like imagining a face in the ground texture or telling you to track down all 12 Viking bombs until October 16 2000 when an anonymous visitor sent this long email blissfully unaware of the consequences that would unfold over the next two decades among many others there was something he called the a button challenge try to get every Star in bubble Battlefield while using a as little as possible even though the email was pretty clear about it for some reason waltendell was confused as to whether to count the Canon shots as a presses he figured that shooting the island in the sky which was submitted in 1A press was impossible if you counted cannon shots and so he decided not to count them in which case the star became trivial in zero presses but in the email the strategy for it was actually explained in detail simply run to this bridge and fall off doing a ground pound to break the Wing Cap box and get the Wing Cap afterwards use this cannon to shoot up and while flying ground pound the Starbucks breaking it and getting the star in a single a press to shoot the cannon interestingly the email mentions a guy named Miles and the star is listed on waltondale's website as Alex's challenge but who was that mysterious visitor well it turns out that it was the legendary Alex pennev one of the most prolific Nintendo 64 players of the time who set hundreds of World Records in Mario Kart 64 back in the game's first decade and is still active today in the Mario Kart community in 1999 a part of the community was using IRC to discuss shortcuts and strategies although Mario Kart 64 was the primary focus other games sometimes came up together with Miles buckram Jason walls and David Wan who also had his own website of N64 tricks and glitches pan-ev and friends came up with a number of challenges such as trying to get as many stars coinless capless and cannonless and of course the a button challenge Alex's email were surprisingly detailed for what actually ended up on waltondale's website many more a button challenges were submitted with strategies to solve them that were way ahead of their time for example in kulku Mountain the red Coin Star was already known to be possible in zero a presses this coin is particularly tricky and the strategy to get it found by Jason walls were surprisingly clever first touchdown airlift at the bottom to make it go up then quickly run to the warp to take it up and drop down to the coin just in time to dive and land on the chairlift or again in cool cool Mountain Wall Kicks Will Work the strategy here was to reach this spin drift then use a to jump on its head and hold the button never releasing it when spinning in the air Mario will twirl faster and fall slower when a is held using that slower fall technique it's possible to reach the star with only one a press it's unclear if it was before or after but the a button challenge was also submitted by a visitor named Nathan for the red Coin Star in stoneman's land here Dal said that it was easy Once you got to the Koopa shell but he couldn't find a way to reach the shell in the first place so he labeled the challenge impossible however in his email pen have detailed his strategy to reach the star twirl from the freezing Pawn with zero a presses so it's very likely that Nathan had done the same thing for the red Coin Star for reasons known only to himself waltendell never released any more of the numerous a button challenges that pennant included in his email for a whole year this appointment was the only documentation of the a button challenge available on the internet but that changed in 2001 when the very first web page dedicated that the challenge was created by gamefaq's user Chris holdfield also known as human tree he had a list of his own best scores for most stars in the first levels of the game for some of them Alex penave had already done better together they exchange strategies on icq for a short while but since the very beginning something had been lacking the a button challenge had always been considered on an individual star basis even the 100 Coin Star was tackled independently from other stars human tree was the first to break those rigid rules when he came up with this idea how many stars can you collect from a fresh file without touching the a button once he gave it his best using all the strategies known at the time the final result was 10 Stars unfortunately Bowser into Dark World required the a button to be completed so human tree was locked out of most of the castle also Big Boost Hound is only unlocked at 12 Stars so even that level was just barely out of the question so being limited to only four levels he collected big babam on the summit foot race with Kubota quick shoot into the wild blue every Star in kulukul Mountain except for Wall Kicks will work and the princess's secret slide in under 21 seconds of course no video of this feat remains today human trees page eventually went offline and no Archive of it can be found that piece of history is on the brink of being forever lost only existing in the memory of maybe a handful of people and then that was it After figuring out about 30 stars and getting 10 stars with zero a presses from a fresh file nobody extended the challenge to the whole game nobody asked the crucial question how many a presses does it take to beat Super Mario 64. for years that question laid dormant in the meantime though more resources for the game started to pop up in November of 2002 another regular GameFAQs user a high school student by the name of Curtis bright made a website that eventually became sm64.com which is still online to this day the site had a comprehensive list of every coin one of warp and other secret in the game it also had the world records for time challenges with videos which at the time was unheard of holding most of these world records were a couple of guys their names miles back rim and Alex bennev one day in 2003 pennev sent Bryant a message of her aim with the extension of the original cuckoo Mountain a button challenge to include the whole stage in a single League press this beaked bride's interest enough that he tried the same thing for Baba Battlefield 1's Fortress Jolly Roger Bay Big Moose Hound little lavaland and TaoTao Mountain as well the result was 45 different stars and 48 a presses he eventually created a page on his website for the a button challenge where he posted his scores at some point in late 2005. but he was alone for years the a button challenge was all but dead until this fateful day July 13 2007. on the game facts forums a user by the name of Kirby muncher created a new thread for the a button challenge Curtis bright was one of the first to participate in this thread and he mentioned that another player from Brazil had set up a record space of his own and that he had done even more stars his name was Thiago tujillo it turns out that Thiago had done a lot more stars in fact two months prior to the gamefax thread he'd already done 112 stars in 244a presses by this time Nintendo 64 emulation was getting quite popular and some people achieved stars and fewer a presses than ever before using save states for the hardest parts bright noted that he should make a world record list separating real-time scores from Tool assisted ones for fairness one of those tassers was Bob Mario 511 he came up with creative strategies to lower the a press doubt of many different stars but perhaps his most impressive achievement is posting videos of them that are still available 14 years later in fact he posted over a hundred of them at this time the few stars that were still missing were mostly tick tock clock and ring will ride as well as Bowser in the sky and the director's 100 Coin Star because they were deemed too daunting and couldn't be done in fewer than at least 10 a presses in the meantime Curtis bride had followed through he updated his website with the leaderboard divided between real-time and Tool assisted runs where people could submit their own scores with videos among those people were bright himself by Mario 511 and Thiago to hideo but also many unknown players like adam-112 silent Slayers Sonic Packer and Robert Z to name a few it's a shame none of those guys ever did anything else of significance the earliest date with an a press count for the whole game is on Curtis Bright's website on June 12 2008. all 120 stars were collected with a grand total of 217 a presses but there are two major caveats to this count first the good news every Star was counted in isolation and now the bad news every Star was counted in isolation because the 100 Coin Star doesn't kick Mario out of the stage when collected together with another star in the same stage they can combine for fewer a presses than when collected separately we can reasonably estimate that about 12 to 15 redundant a presses could be taken off the total however at the time a full 120 star count wasn't being considered and with incomplete data to analyze it's impossible to get a clear number without large leaps and drawing conclusions so we'll keep those redundant a presses in for the time being but this number doesn't account for the a presses needed to navigate the castle and enter every stage the secret aquarium hazy mace gave and the metal cap cores require one a press each to access rainbow ride Wing Mario Over the Rainbow the vanish cap course and Bowser in the sky all required too and finally tiny huge island and Tick Tock lock require one for every single stage entry for a total of 23 additional a presses which brings the earliest Full Count to 240. during the month of June 2008 another Tasker by the name of Alec Daniel managed to squeeze out another six a presses out of tick-tock clock which brought the total down to 234. his video went largely unnoticed like this Improvement on the 100 Coin Star getting one single comment from a clueless gamer with a submission-based leaderboard a gamefax thread bursting with activity the Advent of tool assisted runs and every single star finally having an a press count the a button challenge entered its golden age the quest to lower the total number of a presses to beat Super Mario 64 with all 120 Stars had officially begun immediately the progress that was made was nothing short of incredible [Music] thank you Curtis bright spage never really caught on it got submissions from about 30 different people over the next three years but no one actually improved any scores on there the game facts thread died out after a few months and 300 posts instead of lowering the count players simply assumed they had solved it it took three years for any Improvement to come but when it did it came from an unexpected source and it was glorious 20 stars in no a presses again stunted by Bowser in the Dark World blocking access to most of the castle this tool assisted run was made by a group of Japanese tassers in early 2011 and published to YouTube on March 5th when it made quite the splash 78 000 views in only six days articles were written about it unfortunately little is known about the development of the test since the only contributors that are still active today don't remember much about it but it did Inspire another Japanese dancer to find an improvement in Jolly roger-based Splendor in the sunken ship only two days later which allowed both that star and the next to be collected from a fresh file bringing the total to 22. and yet again that was it the challenge was largely forgotten for nearly two and a half years but this Dead period turned out to be very special it would be the last one on August 25th 2013 an unlikely figure reappeared remember this clueless gamer from five years ago this is pan and koek 2012. what he would achieve in the next few years is so revolutionary so absolutely incredible that it single-handedly elevated the a button challenge to Heights that no one could have possibly imagined foreign [Music] the year is 2013. here's every a press minimally required to collect all 120 stars in Super Mario 64. that's 208 of them some stages like most of the early ones are already pretty empty but the later stages especially the very vertical Tick Tock Clock are a total nightmare A revolution is about to happen in just two years from now nearly all of these will be gone [Music] 2012. originally starting out just watching videos about the game he started making his own Mark in 2010 by posting videos of getting all the coins available in every stage but for some of them he posted the maximum possible score of 255 way above the actual coin count he pulled that off using a complex technique that even he didn't fully understand at the time unfortunately the videos are pretty low quality they were done with some free trial of the screen capture software recording project 64. it could have been worse it could have been some hot garbage like we've seen before by 2013 he felt like he had figured out the maximum coin count for every stage so he moved on into a new Direction he began to investigate all sorts of glitches sharing his findings in a couple dozen videos until he felt like he had accumulated enough knowledge to tackle the a button Challenge on August 25th he began a long journey through every single star in the game one by one by posting an a button challenge video for each and every one of them among the very first ones he did were two Bob on Battlefield stars shoot to the island in the sky and find the eight red coins the main issue with those stars is needing to reach the floating island without using a and the strategy he came up with was absolutely groundbreaking while everyone else had been playing checkers pen and koik busted out the 4D chess this was the first stroke of the genius so legendary that it would later earn him his own Wikipedia page this is the art of cloning foreign it's only natural that peninkowic's first major technical breakthrough came through the use of a glitch that he spent years mastering with maximum coin scores before we delve into how this magic trick works we need to understand the cloning glitch and its underlying game mechanics buckle up because it's time for a game physics lesson [Music] okay A word of warning here this is going to be very long but I do not recommend skipping any of it cloning is to this day possibly the single most Capital technique of this Challenge and skipping its explanation could leave you pretty clueless for a sizable chunk of this history series so take out your textbooks and let's get started [Music] foreign has already covered this subject in scrupulous detail before in fact pretty much all the informational game mechanics that I will ever tell you comes directly from his past work look out in the bottom right corner of your screen for numbered notes pointing to additional information or clarifications you can find a list of all the notes in the video description as well as a glossary of the technical terms there will also sometimes be timestamps to earlier points in the video if you need a refresher on a given topic cloning is made possible thanks to Mario's ability to grab objects when Mario grabs an object what you see in his hands is actually a visual copy of the object he's holding the real object is made invisible and usually intangible until Mario releases it we'll call these the original object and the held object because the original object still exists and is still loaded but it simply cannot be interacted with we refer to it as being in limbo its animation data is still being updated but it's no longer being rendered meanwhile the held object is an illusion Cobble together from three different sources its position is tracked independently its rotation is copied over from Mario's rotation and its animation is copied from the original object what happens with the original object's position depends on what type of object it is some stay in place and some follow Mario around at or near his position an interesting case to look at is the bob-bomb its fuse is lit when Mario grabs it which causes it to start smoking because the held object is just a visual copy it's not capable of generating spoke particles the original object is kept close to where the visual copy is so that the smoke particle is coming out of the invisible ball bomb appear to be coming out of the Baba Mario is holding additionally ball bombs are an exception in that they stay tangible when held and that is the root cause of the bloated Bob bomb glitch for a few frames before it explodes a ball bomb dramatically increases in size if Mario grabs it at the right moment he can hold it in its bloated State Mario is then pushed back by the collision with the invisible bloated ball bomb and it will keep following him around so long as he's holding it but what happens if Mario grabs the bomb while it's exploding well this is where it gets fun but before we get there we need to understand how grabbing and releasing an object works when Mario grabs an object multiple things need to happen first the object is established as the target of the grab then Mario's State needs to be changed to holding an object and the object itself needs to change its state to being held which turns it invisible and intangible again most of the time for this whole process to function properly Mario and the original object need to be linked somehow otherwise Mario could never retrieve an object in limbo to achieve this the game uses a very simple system every object that is loaded is assigned the first available slot of 240 object slots while in reality object slots have addresses that look a bit like this for simplicity's sake let's instead give them a number which ranges from 1 to 240. when Mario grabs an object the object itself is put in limbo and Mario is given a reference number that links him back to it that references the held object or that visual copy of the original object the only information the held object needs to have is the number of the slot the original object belongs to so long as the object is being held it will stay loaded in limbo when Mario releases the health object by throwing or dropping it the game looks at the reference number and it brings back the associated original object from limbo but remember the original object's position in limbo doesn't reflect the position of the held object while Mario is carrying it around when the object is brought back its position needs to be updated to reflect the health object's last position and complete the illusion that position is tracked as a set of XYZ coordinates conveniently called the held object's last position or the hope for short while Mario is holding an object the hope is constantly updated to match the position of Mario's hands and as soon as Mario releases it the original object is instantly warped to the hope as the held object disappears there is one small but key detail to help create a seamless transition the original object isn't placed exactly at the Hope depending on Mario's animation when Mario is dropping an object to the ground the game aligns it with the hold horizontally but places it at Mario's vertical position which shuts it down on the ground most of the time this entire process is seamless and goes exactly according to plan but it's not airtight and the tiny cracks in it are just enough to let it clever and meticulous player caused a complete meltdown remember that when an object is being grabbed both Mario and the object change their state independently from each other and are linked together by the held object in the case of a diving grab or a water grab all of this happens at the same time but for a punching grab the signal to change States is established two frames before the actual State change this Gap can be abused if the original object unloads during those two frames there are multiple ways to cause that to happen the most common are to let a cork box sit still for 30 seconds and to grab it in the final two frames before it disappears or to grab a ball bomb as it's exploding anything that causes an object to unload within two frames of Mario grabbing it with the punch grab will work but it's also achievable by touching a loading zone a trigger that unloads part of a level and loads and other parts in its place unloaded objects can no longer be updated which means that the original object does not go into limbo however Mayo still receives a reference for it in the form of the held object but that held object is now linked to a vacant object slot or a slot that is ready to load any new object in it a vacant slot is marked as empty and its contents can no longer be modified as a result the health object looks invisible or frozen since it represents the final state of the original object before it unloaded when a new object is loaded in that slot the reference now points to a completely different object than what was originally intended while it appears like we've cloned the new object this is not true yet Mario is merely holding a reference to the new object and because that object is not in limbo it looks like there are two of them at once however when Mario throws what he's holding you can see that the copy disappears and the original object is Warped near Mario's position but what happens if the new object cannot be thrown like a Goomba each grabbable object has a script that takes care of its behavior when grabbed dropped in thrown if the new object is missing that script it will simply do nothing when thrown Its Behavior script will essentially be erased and it won't be able to function normally anymore so it will stay frozen in place this has a very important side effect when the object being cloned has a spawner spawners are put in place to handle the loading and unloading of a group of objects like a coin line a coin ring or a Goomba Trio for example when Mario moves far enough away from the broken Goomba it remains loaded yet its spawner doesn't get the memo and so it also keeps working just the same so the Goomba can be spawned again even though a broken copy of it already exists and it has successfully been cloned because the process of cloning involves erasing the behavior of the object being cloned It suffers from inherent limitations first the object being cloned needs to have a spawner otherwise it can only be transported that can still be useful though and in fact it is still referred to as cloning even if the object in question isn't actually duplicated but the most important limitation is that a clone cannot move or behave anything like the object it's supposed to be luckily the interactions that Mario can have with an object aren't handled directly by the behavior script so clones can be interacted with unfortunately the missing Behavior script is responsible for handling the interaction status of the object so after a single interaction it also malfunctions so while Mario can interact with a clone he can only do it once for example throwing a coin clone causes Mario to collect it with leaves it frozen in place and impossible to collect again throwing a Goomba clone causes Mario to immediately be knocked back by it after which it becomes Frozen and intangible essentially making the Clone utterly useless fortunately there is a workaround if Mario throws a Goomba clone while he's falling fast enough Mario will move out of the way as he releases the Clone and they will not Collide so Mario can come back and bounce on it once and only once so all pan and koik had to do is to clone a Goomba and throw it while falling then come back to bounce on it and reach the island right wrong there is one more major problem to release an object clone the object being clone has to be close enough to still be loaded unlike objects in limbo which are forced to Stay Loaded for as long as Mario's holding them cloned object aren't Bound by this rule so they unload when Mario goes outside a certain radius from their spawners while over here the Goomba Trio under the Allen can be loaded over there they no longer can this called for another trick from the bag remote release what seems like two hours ago I said that the health object's last position is constantly updated as Mario walks around holding something it turns out that there is a way to prevent it from being updated there are a few ways to do this but for now we're going to look at the hatted hand glitch the animation for putting on a hat has two stages during the first stage Mario is holding the Hat in his hand and in the second stage the hat is on his head when Mario picks up a hat the first stage is triggered Mario starts holding the hat and the animation plays now if Mario comes across a second hat to put on as soon as the first animation is over a second animation plays but the animation timer doesn't reset as a result the second animation is instantly interrupted and Mario ends up with his hat in his hand putting on two hats in quick succession can happen either by duplicating hats using a warp or by reusing a special cap box before the first one expires this glitch has important ramifications regarding the hope if Mario grabs an object while holding a hat the object will still be held like normal but Mario will look like he's holding his hat instead because the held object isn't being rendered the hope is not updated like it should this causes the hope to become disjointed from Mario because the position remains Frozen to wherever it was last updated for example if Mario releases a quirkbox here then performs the Hat in hand glitch and thrills of a bomb the bomb will be released where Mario released a cork box earlier because that's where the Hope still is this is known as remote release despite the complex setup in many drawbacks this is how Ben and koik managed to get onto the island in bubble Battlefield without using a first he grabbed an exploding bubble which gave him a reference to a vacant object slot then he carried it to this Gap where he released it to place the Hope in midair next he did The Hidden Hand glitch and used another bob-on to clone a Goomba from this Trio using remote release he transported that Goomba over to the Hulk where he could go and bounce on it just one Goomba wasn't enough he needed more to make a bridge to the island but here's the catch to place a Goomba further along the Hope needs to be further along which means Mario himself needs to be further along so he needs to bounce on this Goomba to place that Goomba but remember clones can only be interacted with once so once Mario bounces on the first Goomba to place the second Goomba the first Goomba becomes intangible so after placing the second Goomba Mario needs to come back and place a third Goomba next to the first one so he can bounce on these two this process becomes more tedious the longer the Gap is and exponentially so you see it's sort of like counting in binary except the ones or Goombas that you place and the zeros or gaps that need to be filled the length of the bridge is the amount of ones that you need in a row therefore for a bridge of length one you need a single Goomba for length 2 you need three Goombas length 3 7 Goombas length 4 15 Goombas and for a bridge of length n you need 2 to the power of n minus one this can rapidly become a problem because the game crashes from having to draw too many triangles if there are somewhere around 40 Goombas on screen that puts the upper bound of a Goomba Bridge's length at only five in this case Patton was able to get across using three Goomba bounces which means he had to play seven Goomba clones to cross the gap for the red coins this was sufficient but for this star he needed something extra to reach the star a Goomba to bounce on would be nice there are two options to get that to happen the first is to keep the same strategy set up the Hope under the star and remote release a Goomba clone from elsewhere and reap the benefits there is one major issue though because the Wing Cap box on the Allen doesn't allow for the hatted hand glitch to be possible the cloning has to be done off the island after the Hope was put on there first a Goomba Bridge is a single use infrastructure so two trips to the island require two separate Goomba Bridges the second option is to release the Clone directly at the location fortunately the top of the island is close enough to these Goombas that they can be loaded and therefore cloned while on the island unfortunately Mario can't release the Clone without instantly bumping into it and ruining its purpose because there's no way to release it by falling from above but Falling isn't the only method to prevent interacting with a clone that's being released What If instead Mario couldn't be knocked back by the Goomba because he was already being knocked back by something else a damaged knockback forces Mario to drop whatever he's holding and it also prevents him from interacting with the Goomba clone being released this way so it is the perfect idea on paper but one hurdle remains Mario still needed something to take damage from now if you remember 2 million years ago I mentioned that dropping an object has a slightly different effect than throwing it it places the object that they hold laterally but at Mario's height which because their hope is usually somewhere near Mario's hands effectively sets the object down on the ground in front of Mario if the hope is disjointed however the effect can be widely different remote dropping an object will place it that the point corresponding to the Hope's lateral position in Mario's vertical position which can be a completely new Point otherwise inaccessible if we go back to the babam example dropping the bob-bomb causes it to be placed up there going back to shoot to the island in the sky the stars at the location whose coordinates can easily be reached both laterally and vertically but not at the same time by releasing a cork box underneath the star's location performing the had in hand glitch and then honing a cannonball by dropping it here panonkoic was able to release the cannonball at the hope laterally but at Mario's height this left the Clone on the island despite Mario never needing to go there himself finally after cloning one last Goomba he was able to release the Clone by getting knocked back by The Cannonball this allowed him to place a Goomba clone without interacting with it and he could use the bounce to reach the star without pressing a a single time you may wonder why Patton didn't simply remote drop a Goomba onto the island instead of using a cannonball that's because there's no way to be at the correct height while still being close enough to a Goomba for it to be loaded the only Goombas close enough are clones and because a clone never unloads it also never reloads so it's impossible to clone the Clone also I glossed over how the Goombas and The Cannonball conveniently loaded into the specific object slot that Mario was holding the reason behind this could be an entire video on its own and in fact pan and koik made that video already but in short when multiple objects are load on the same frame such as a coinering a Goomba Trio or other groups of objects they unload in the reverse order that they were loaded in through meticulous planning and deep knowledge of object loading Behavior it's possible to manipulate Which object will be loaded into Mario's hands here patent was actually just winging it retrying over and over until he would get the result he wanted just like he had been doing for years but eventually with enough time and research he came to master the process of cloning [Music] this groundbreaking strategy was one of the first ever contributions that panicoic made to the a button challenge unfortunately as ridiculous as it was it actually wasn't an improvement unbeknownst to him two years prior the Japanese tester is already knew you could simply use a shell and a steep slope to gain super speed backwards and fly across the Gap to the island that way in fact most of pan and coax for his videos simply came to the same result as his predecessors nonetheless he did start finding new improvements as well the very first one was Wiggler's red coins in tiny huge island using an idea from fellow Tasker plush to use a slight kick bounds to reach this platform this brought the total count down to 207. by the way quick side note the count was said to be 228 in 2011 and down to 208 in 2013. like I mentioned before early a press counts were fuzzy to figure out precisely for all sorts of reasons and I purposely gave the most conservative estimate this 208 however is a pretty solid measure based on the full game oriented thinking that was implemented during this period and retroactively applied to the known scores at the time the main discrepancy comes from combining The Tick Tock Clock 100 coin star with stump on the Trump to save 14 a presses but there are multiple other small differences as well after Wiggler's red coins pan and quick Revisited an old strategy for the red coin star of rainbow ride the old 5A press strategy was to take the carpet ride to rise up high enough to access this platform in the Maze using one a-press then to navigate The Maze with the remaining four but pennant figured out that you could simply keep reusing the carpet to fall into the maze using only this jump every round trip with clever routing and platforming this news strategy brought the a press count down to only two after another dozen Stars with no new Improvement he struck again this time in wamp's Fortress chip-off forms block was a relatively simple star you can't get to the top floor of the Fortress with no apresses fairly easily but the fight itself required three ground pounds and one's back which automatically meant three a presses that is until panin had the idea of luring womb to the elevator and using the rotating platform to gain air time and ground pound the Minibots with no a presses unfortunately while in the previous strategy the star could be collected instantly after the final hit this slurring strategy meant that Patton would need to find a new way to collect the star without using a he couldn't find any and left it at 1A press improving it by two his next stop was total Mountain well not exactly first he did a quick trip to Tiny huge island to throw this chakia then made his way to TaoTao mountain and saved two a presses on scale the mountain he performed the head in hand glitch using the warp to duplicate his hat clone the Goomba and then threw it you can see the Goomba disappear but where did it go well it appeared right under the star and this is why he went to Tiny huge island first The Hope only ever gets initialized once when the game is booted up after that it only ever gets updated when Mario is holding an object and stays Frozen otherwise including between levels when Mario threw the chakia in tiny huge island The Hope was set at this position those same coordinates in tall tal Mountain correspond to the top of the mountain right below the star so with a remote release panen was able to place the Goomba up there from all the way down here there's one detail that I glossed over how did Mario reach this point up the mountain without jumping he didn't thanks to a new technique called frame walking Mario can run up steep slopes to a point but he keeps losing speed until it dips into the negatives at which point he slides down on his belly however when Mario's speed is low enough if the stick is neutral and then forwards again Mario will gain speed on the first frame even on the steep slope by quickly alternating between neutral and forwards it's possible to walk up steep slopes that way this claim saved one apress and the Goomba clone at the top saved another now there are three other stars in total Mountain that also required an a press to get past this point mystery of the monkey cage breathtaking view from bridge and the hundred coin star frame walking could get rid of that apress in all of them this discovery marked talta Mountain as the second stage that could be fully completed in zero a presses soon after pennin looked into various Stars mostly from the basement levels and he found some minor improvements to existing strategies along the way he first went to the metal cap course where a dive recovered from a crystal allowed him to get onto the switch in zero a presses then found a few clever strategies in shifting sandland he used tornadoes and fly guys to reach the red coins without needing to fly or jump and he bounced on the hand on the final hit in Standalone for pillars to reach the star he still had to jump once here to get out of the elevator platform and into the fight he then found a minor Improvement in Jolly Roger Bay by combining the 100 coins with the red Coin Star and by only using B to swim until he had to jump inside the cave for blue coins then back in shifting sand land he cloned the cork Box by using remote release to place it partly through the edge of another box and having it explode as it despawned causing it to give infinite coins this let him get the 100 Coin Star in zero a presses next he went over to bigboos Halt where one clever strategy allowed him to save a press is on four different Stars he manipulated these bookends to fly to a convenient spot then used a double bookend bounce to save one a press going to the top of the Mansion this was useful in both big Buu's balcony and eye to eye in the secret room additionally he was able to manipulate the big boot to help him reach the top of this box and then the star without any additional a presses bouncing on bookends also allowed him to reach this red coin without using a which obviously saved the napress for the red Coin Star but also that made the number of coins attainable in zero a presses go from 99 to 101 which meant the 100 Coin Star was now also possible in 0-way presses another similar method helped save an a press in hazy maze cave for the 100 Coin Star here swoopers were used to bounce up to get blue coins and to kill a sniff it and after all of these cute little developments pan and koik felt that it was time for another Revolution he switched from Project 64 to mupin this time the Revolution was not in the game itself but technological he finally got rid of his choppy free trial software captures and got a proper video encoding setup that is mupin 64 a direct Avi capture but perhaps the biggest Improvement was in passing capabilities project 64 only has save states so all of his videos up to this point were recorded mostly in real time interrupted with pauses to use save states mupin 64 offered frame Advance Ram watch and many other tools critical to making a good test he also started saving movie files of his input so that he could go back and improve them share them with his peers and archive them for historians to look at 8 years into the future the result was a crisp full 30 frames per second cinematic experience of the a button challenge for the second time in history after the Japanese tasks with this new high quality setup he felt emboldened to tackle the most daunting level in the game Tick Tock Clock he began by lowering get a hand to zero a presses by figuring out a way to get out the entire rotating platform section by ground pounding into a buttslide face first into the wall the bonking animation lets Mario stay on the steep slope of the rotating platform without sliding off just long enough that it has time to turn until it's no longer too steep to stand on Alex Daniel did have a similar strategy that used 1A press to get a little higher up at first but Patton's new method could do it in no way presses at all this new strategy did not only save a presses for get a hand of course it turned out to be useful for pretty much every Star in the level it saved the only a press left for the red Coin Star he got rolled into the cage from 4 down to three time jumps on moving bars from 11 down to 7 by also using a precise Heath hoe flip to save an apress and stomp on the thwomp from 15 down to 9 with more efficient platforming combined with all the other strategies on top of also combining it with with a hundred Coin Star for a good measure finally the pit in the pendulums was also improved from 6 down to four using the rotating red coin platforms and A better jump up to save another a press while he was devastating Tick-Tock clock panin also tackled Bowser in the sky the previous record of 13 a presses was relatively well done but pennant found three spots where it could be improved first this section were precise light kicks could let Mario get around these obstacles instead of over them second another precise dive recovery let him cross the gap between these platforms and finally a Goomba manipulation to bring it down to be bounced on Save the 30 press to bring this star down to 10. panonkowic's next stop was Dire dire docks there his first Improvement was massive he brought pole jumping for Red Coins a nightmare of a star for The ibutton Challenge from Tanny presses down to 3.5 wait what how does that make sense there's actually a simple explanation for it allow me to introduce the half a press [Music] water levels are a special kind of problem for the button challenge because you need to tap a constantly to swim if you don't press a then Mario's underwater movement options are extremely limited he can slowly sink down to the bottom or if he's close enough to the surface slowly rise up to it he can grab with B which moves him forward a little bit in this long animation or if he gets a hold of one he can grab a Koopa shell and move around faster for a short time but sometimes Mario can be swimming while holding an object a useful situation that we'll discover in a minute in that case bee swimming can't be used because Mario would throw that object instead of swimming there is one solution if a is held instead Mario will swim like this including while holding an object but since it does require a to be held that method uses one a press or does it if you were to do the star in isolation sure that would be true but in the context of a full game Run you could press a earlier for some other start that requires an a press and simply hold out that a press for as long as you need if you do that the two-way presses would combine into one single long a press that achieves multiple purposes at once so why is it called three and a half a presses the 0.5 notation serves as a middle ground to show The Duality of the situation when counting the Star by itself you round up the a press count to four and when taking other stars in consideration as part of a full game Run you would run it down to three because it would leech off of a previous star's a press three and a half a presses is better than four in full game runs but worse than three in isolation so it makes sense to fit it in the middle now that that's cleared up how did pen and actually improve that star by so much first he grabbed the Koopa shell from the bottom and carried it up to the surface if Mai was swimming with the shell and the timer expires or he touches dry land the shell will disappear this timer being quite short effectively makes shells useless in normal play but here's the clever part this only happens if Mario was swimming with the shell but he can also throw it when Mario throws the shell for a few frames he still holds on to it but he's no longer swimming with it so by throwing the shell and interrupting that throw by surfacing Mario bypasses destroying the shell and can keep it indefinitely so now he can carry it wherever he wants however the shell no longer functions like an underwater Koopa shell but rather like any held object to be able to go anywhere with it Mario needs a to be held to swim this is why this star requires an extra half a press but where does he need to go with that shell in that tunnel there's a loading zone a trigger that switches between the rooms when Mario crosses it the switch involves unloading the first room and loading the second all the objects in them included to save memory now what happens if Mario goes through the loading zone and unloads an object that he's currently holding like a Koopa shell cloning of course after unloading the Koopa shell Mario holds a vacant slot which can now contain newly loaded objects that aren't supposed to be held again with clever planning patent koic manipulated the pole to load into the slot that Mario was holding so that he would be able to carry it around and throw it somewhere note that the cosplays aren't handled by a spawner this is an instance of cloning that doesn't duplicate but merely transports the pole so panin had to be mindful of which pole he would transport to make sure he didn't get rid of a pole he would need to use afterwards after releasing the Clone he could climb it and reach the upper platform in a single a press from here it was mostly a matter of navigating around the poles without jumping sometimes requiring some sketchy diving and grabbing one more jump was required to get to the furthest pole and back in the water he went he needed another a-press in a second pole clone to reach the final red coin helped by the fact that these poles are actually longer than their visual model suggests all that was left was the star which unfortunately wasn't easy to reach either but thankfully just like any other object Stars can also be cloned remember that releasing an object clone physically moves that object to the new location clones aren't just broken copies of an object they are the actual object they only become a copy if a spoiler spawns the original object again so this started Mario is collecting is absolutely real he's able to collect it remotely without any additional a-presses for a total of three plus having to hold they at the beginning for the rest of dire dire docks the halfway pressed shell swimming strategy to clone a star was relevant for most stars aside from Manta Ray's reward which didn't require any apresses and the hundred Coin Star which for now pattern left alone also chest and the current did require a swimming as well not because of cloning but because of the whirlpool forcing Mario to swim at least a little bit more efficiently this brought down the total a press count by four because four stars that were previously listed as needing one aprest could now be completed simply by leeching off of a previously press instead but the half aprest was not going to be limited only to dire dire dogs it proved useful in Wing Mario Over the Rainbow as well holding a has more benefits like falling slower while twirling which remember was already known over a decade earlier but also holding a allows Mario to fall slower with the Wing Cap and to kick by tapping the B button kicking can help Mario get up steep slopes although frame walking obsoletes that one here however falling slower with the wing Gap allows Mario to reach the bottom platform to shoot out from the cannon because this star still requires two cannon shots the a press count was now 2.5 at this point aside from a few stray Stars the only levels left for panancoic to explore were Snowman's Land and wet dry World Snowman's Land was already nearly figured out before patent even touched it but wet dry World totaled 18a presses nearly half of which were for the red Coin Star alone so there was a lot of potential for improvement panin started with secrets in the shallows and Sky note that because entering levels is also an implicit part of the challenge you can't just enter a wet dry World any way you want the initial water level depends on the height at which Mario enters the painting So with no jumps the only available initial water level is the lowest one thankfully there's a warp to the Canon platform at the top of the stage and there are Heath hoes that can flip Mario up to higher levels Canon used a combination of those to get most of the secrets but the last one was a bit trickier the previous strategy was to use a Canon shot to reach it but instead he got a helping hand from chakia he manipulated the random number generated by the game or RNG value to be favorable so that chakia would throw Mario directly onto the wooded Bridge which led him access the final Secret in zero a presses he used the same strategy to save an apress in Express Elevator Hurry up and the 100 Coin Star top of the town was still problematic because despite being able to get all the way to Breaking the Box in zero a presses he had to jump to get the star the old strategy from 2008 was to use a cannon shot to go directly on top of the box and ground pound it which also took one a press but since activating the cannon took an additional lay press it was not counted at the time this new method was an indirect Improvement but the real problematic stars were quick raced through downtown and the red Coin Star those were sitting at five and eight a presses respectively before banan koik had a crack at them the solution he found for each of them is pretty complex so let's start with quick race through downtown when Mario throws chakia it will explode into five coins upon Landing this explosion happens based on turkey's state of being thrown here Mario throws Jackie and falls off the ledge at the same time which lets him catch up to it and intercept it while it's falling down chakia then grabs Mario in mid-air which changes its state from being thrown to holding Mario therefore when it lands on the ground it no longer wants to explode which effectively brings chukya down to this level from there panin abuses object Collision priority and uses chakya to push Mario inside of the block and throw chakia through the wall immediately after he gets caught by Chucky again and both of them fall down into the pipe below where Mario can retrieve chakya and carry it around in the water there are other ways to bring chakia here but this clever method uses no a presses to do so once Mario is holding chukya underwater he needs to swim he could do that simply by holding a but unfortunately that doesn't work after pressing B to grab an object so he actually needs to press the a button once but from there he has a hold of an object and the tunnel contains a loading zone that switches between the main area and the downtown part of wet dry world so he can clone the quick race through downtown star note that the cloning of a star can only be done if the star is already out there and collectible so the same can't be done for something like the red coins for instance but just like that he managed to get that star from 5 down to only one a press the red Coin Star was definitely the most challenging because it posed multiple problems at once to access most red coins Mario needs to break a box which he can only do out of the water however if the water level is low then he needs a lot of a presses to reach the higher platforms so he both needs the water level to be high so that he can navigate without using a but also to be low so that he can break the boxes the coins are in if he lowers the water to break a box he needs a way to raise it back up and the only Crystal that raises the water is way up there and accessible on the water when without jumping a bunch of times this web of restrictions is nearly impossible to navigate but if it's nearly impossible it's not impossible but there was a price to pay in his own words that star was a total pain to record and edit and you know what I believe him the strategy takes 14 hours to execute of course breaking down how all of it works would be too gigantic of a task so let's do it [Music] thank you if you pay close attention you can see that even when it's at a fixed height the water level Bobs up and down by a significant amount this is not purely visual the actual water level follows a sinusoidal function with an amplitude of 20 units and a period of 128 frames in other words the water has a median level and it deviates from that median by up to 20 units on a cycle that repeats every 4 seconds or so the downtown area's water level is independent from the main area when Mario goes from downtown to the main area the water level is preserved for when he comes back but here's the key thing the current water level is saved and then used as the median water level when Mario comes back therefore if Mario loads the downtown area and unloads it when the water is above the median when he comes back the new median will be here and the water level will rise and dip 20 units around that new line if you repeat this process you can raise the water level arbitrarily High 20 units at a time if you do the opposite and leave when it's below the median you can lower it the same way however this is easier said than done the loading zone is in the middle of an underwater tunnel which means Mario cannot simply stay here and swim in circles around the loading zone to raise or lower the water as he pleases he needs to get some air from time to time so the water in the main area needs to be at its lowest level to access this corner you can simply slide along this ledge carefully keeping Mario on with the precise angle and stick movement and now Mario has just barely enough time to lower the water level once before he has to rush back and get some air so this process is extremely tedious to get this part done without actually repeating all of this work over and over for days pan and koek figured out the way to make a sequence of inputs that would be loopable and repeated it for however many iterations he needed after lowering the water 26 times he could finally enter downtown by now the water was low enough that he could get some air inside the tunnel itself and he could go and break this first box but as you can see this great prevents him from lowering the water any more than that because it would block access to downtown if he did so Patton had to raise the water instead he does so for four hours in that time the water level is raised 398 times now the water level is far above the top of the stage at this point it's so high up that when Mario touches the low Crystal he has time to swim up to a higher platform before the water level catches up or at least he would if he had enough air unfortunately bee swimming is so slow that Mario would drown before he got there but thankfully Queens restore energy by grabbing a few coins along the way Patton was able to extend his underwater time just enough to make this genius route possible after this high anxiety swim up to the top Mario is now high up in zero a presses while the water is low which lets him break boxes and he has access to the high Crystal so he can raise the water back up and go back to the main area if needed he activates the high Crystal and Dives down to one of the boxes to break it just before the water catches up from there he only needs to get some air and he can go back and repeat this process again to break more boxes and that's what he does for another 4 hours he raises the water 366 times and repeats the same process however coins are limited so he has to become more and more creative with how he uses them to buy himself more underwater time the longer he has to go out of his way to get more coins the more coins he needs to get to offset that extra time this time he has just barely enough time to break this second box then he goes back and raises the water another 376 times uses of the last few yellow coins he has to his disposal and breaks one more box in one final trip he raises the water 154 times and then with almost no coins left to keep him alive collects all the red coins that he left behind specifically for this moment and he breaks off the last few boxes and gets the star all of that in zero a presses and only 14 hours even among all the clothing he had done this single star was probably the most intense strategy pan and koik had pulled off after this point it also saved an astonishing eight a presses in a single go making it to this day the largest single Improvement in the Challenger's history and he wasn't even done yet but he was almost done he took a look at the red coin stars in the first two Bowser stages and found some improvements in them in Bowser in the dark world he lured the Goomba down here so he could bounce on it and used frame walking to tilt the bridge 90 degrees and go up to Red Queen saving three a presses in total to bring it down to two in Bowser in the fire sea he was able to use a ball bomb to clone the star saving the two a presses normally required to get up to it and grab it in the final level he still had to go through Snowman's Land only two a presses remained and he was able to save one of them he got in the Deep Freeze from 1 to 0 a presses using Koopa shell hyperspeed this had already been used before by the Japanese dancers but I glossed over it until now here's how it works the way speed on slopes is handled is fairly simple when Mario is moving on the slope his speed is calculated in such a way that he moves the same distance along that slope than if he were in flat ground so with a speed of 30 on flat ground Mario will move 30 units forward but on a 30 degree slope Mario will move by 30 units of along the slope which translates to 15 units up in 26 units forward the way the game does this is that it factors Mario's speed by the cosine of the slope he's on to determine his lateral movement and then moves him up or down to match the new height of the floor this effective speed which is always equal to or lower than Mario's real speed is called the de facto speed now this method Works flawlessly when Mario is running parallel to the direction of the slope but if he's moving perpendicularly to it this speed reduction no longer makes sense nonetheless it is still applied no matter which direction Mario was moving in this is why he appears to slow down when going from flat ground to sloped ground despite keeping a similar speed and this is the mechanic that makes shell Hyper Speed possible when Milo tries to ride up a steep slope he'll rapidly lose speed and even slide back down the slope but if he's angled right something interesting can happen the backwards acceleration is the same so long as Mario is facing up the slope even if he barely is because the slope is so steep his de facto speed is a tiny fraction of his real speed so he basically stays in place despite his increasingly high speed so by facing ever so slightly up very steep slopes he can accumulate over 200 negative speed about 7 times more than regular walking speed all he needs to do next is to redirect that speed to propel himself with a star in zero a presses there were only a few Stars left rainbow ride 100 coins was moderately easy with the techniques pennant had developed after 1A pressed to reach the cruiser he was able to get a hold of an exploding Baba in Clone 51 coins to reach 100 without having to go around the whole course by the way a quick detail while there are other bob-ombs in Rainbow ride only the one on the cruiser is close enough to coins to clone them the ones at the bottom of the maze are too far away from any coins 100 coins was a little more complicated using the Shell method that he used to clone poles in a star he could clone coins but there is a more efficient method instead of cloning coins one by one he could clone an entire ring of coins like we've seen before rings of coins are handled by an intangible invisible object called the spawner on top of deciding when to load or unload a group of coins it also keeps track of which of its Queens have been collected so it can stay consistent when you load the coins in and out of memory however just like every other object quindring spawners can be cloned here's how the process works the cloning part works exactly the same but to clone an object you need to be holding a vacant slot for it to load into the problem with spawners is that they are loaded when you enter the level and they always stay loaded no matter how far Mario is from them there is however one exception if a level has multiple segments separated by a loading zone such as wet dry world or diode docks then it is possible to load and unload the spawner when a spawner is cloned it will simply look like an invisible object just like any other object not meant to be thrown once the Clone is released it will cease to function properly so it will also stop handling the loading and unloading of the coin ring if a coin spawner clone is released its Associated coin ring will no longer load when Mario goes near it but if the spawner clone is released while the coins are already loaded then they will no longer unload when Mario goes far away also when a coin from a coin ring is cloned because its behavior is broken and will be unable to send a signal to its spawn honor to indicate that it's been collected so the spawner will spawn it again when Mario goes near thus duplicating the coin this works exactly the same way if the spawner is the one being cloned the coins in a ring can be collected and it will send a signal to the spawner that they no longer should be loaded the next time the ring is loaded but the spawner will be unable to receive the message so when Mario reloads the area through the loading zone the reload and spawner will have no memory of the coins being collected and it will spawn them all over again this method can be used specifically in dire dire docks to duplicate whole range of coins at once instead of one at a time significantly speeding up the process this is what panin did he got 56 extra coins from 7 coin ring spawner clones and got the 100 Coin Star in 0.58 presses in tiny huge island pattern got make Wiggler's worm from 1 down to zero a presses by riding a shell up the mountain and clipping and using czechia around this time he also found an improvement in wet dry World in Express Elevator Hurry up he found that by raising the water level he was able to hold a and swim onto the elevator instead of jumping to it the timing for it is very tight but it is indeed possible this reduced the a press count from 1 to 0.5 because he needed a to be held and not pressed at this point patinkoic was nearing the end of his journey through every Star in the game he realized that he also needed to account for all the a presses necessary to navigate the castle between all the levels so he dedicated a video to all of them most of it is pretty trivial and like I discussed before the total comes up to 23 if you're being efficient he found one precise side flip to grab the ledge to Rainbow ride on one side and Wing Mario Over the Rainbow on the other which brought the total down to 21. he proved that the 5 Stars available inside the castle itself were all obtainable in zeroa presses and he completed his meticulous run through the complete a button challenge in wamp's Fortress by doing Fallen to the Caged Island the same way that Japanese dancers did it a few years prior finally after all of this work pan and koek with some help from plush managed to cut the 120 star a press count nearly in half from 208 to 116 but we lost track of time during this Epic Journey how many years have passed three years four years maybe even five years how about two months that's right this entire revolution of the Super Mario 64 a button challenge took two months from beginning to end and the best part he was only getting started from August 25th to October 26 2013 panancoic 2012 completely reinvented the a button Challenge almost entirely by himself his unprecedented dedication and endless creativity further enabled by a deep knowledge of the game and its infinite quirks allowed him to come up with ideas and strategies far more advanced at anything that had been done before such Stellar work was bound to be noticed and sure enough it was noticed by pretty much the entire speedrunning community at the time some people were interested in more than just watching from this point on panonkowic was no longer alone [Music] as soon as he completed his pass through every Star in the game pennant moved on to other challenges such as no buttons allowed and no joystick allowed where the only easy movement option is punching and jumping to slowly inch forward the a button challenge project cooled down a bit since there was little incentive to go back to it unless something new had been discovered he didn't revisit the challenge until late March 2014 when he found that enemy luring strategies which had been used to some extent before had more potential than he had given them credit for in hazy mace cave swoopers fly on a perfectly horizontal plane after their initial takeoff he used that to his Advantage by luring his Whooper all the way to the slope which raised it enough that he could bounce on it and reach the Sledge to amazing emergency exit cutting 1A press in the process the same could be done for navigating the toxic maze which is just the other alcohol to the right but that one was a bit more involved because there's no mole here he instead had to align three swoopers at three increasing Heights all set up by luring them to various slopes so he could reach the higher land Edge this posed a very interesting logistical issue panenku accused his buddy pen and paper to solve and illustrate the puzzle enemy luring could also be applied with booze while he did use a bookend bounce to reach this redcoin before the other redcoin in this room still required in a press but with clever manipulation pan and got booze to line up under it and bounced on them to reach the coin however because he needed kicks to get a bit of starting height which require a to be held he was only able to get big boost Hans red coins from 2 down to 1.5 a presses but remember because full game runs round down half a presses this was still good to lower the total a press count to 113. in the meantime patent quick also made a brand new glitch Discovery transport cloning [Music] objects that can move around like Goombas and Bob bombs have Collision detection amongst themselves we've already seen how this can lead to strange Behavior while holding a bob-bomb the function that handles the result of these collisions is the key to understand transport cloning two gumballs run into each other their respective positions cause their hitboxes to overlap so the game attempts to reposition them first it finds the relative distance between them then it finds the midpoint on this line and finally it moves each Goomba along the line from that point by their radius so their hitboxes end up tangential to each other in the more generic case of two objects with different radii the line is divided with the same ratio as the radii of the objects when the two objects are repositioned their hitboxes will always be tangential at that point along the line while such a scenario is technically possible by far the most common case involves two Goombas so they are placed at the exact halfway point between their original positions the transport cloning glitch happens when the Goomba clone is released while the original is currently colliding with another Goomba the key reason why it happens is that the Goomba is Warped to the Hope after the Collision is detected but before the Collision handling function is run when the function finds the relative distance between them them what should be a small distance ends up being arbitrarily large after that the game finds the midpoint and places each Goomba one radius away in each Direction so the result is that both Goombas are warped to the point halfway between their original positions and the hope another important detail is that this repositioning is only done along the horizontal plane the vertical position is completely unaffected so if the hope is at a different vertical position both Goombas will end up halfway to the Hope in the x and z coordinates but while the Goomba clone ends up at the hopes y coordinate the other Goomba remains as its original y position this glitch allowed for two major breakthroughs in cloning capabilities it was now possible albeit very restrictive and convoluted to release a clone at the location otherwise inaccessible without the situational Hidden Hand glitch although because Mario needs to be close enough to the Goomba Trio for them to be loaded in the first place there would be very few situations where transport cloning actually enabled new clone locations the most valuable benefit was the ability to release the Clone just far enough away from Mario that he doesn't immediately bump into it pattern quick figured that this new technique would prove useful in Bowser in the sky despite panin's hard work that stage was still sitting at 10 a presses first he found it luring a Goomba to the edge of this bridge barely allowed him to skip past that Gap without using a next he found the use for transport cloning he released a clone here while these two Goombas over there were running into each other this warped both Goombas halfway to Mario with the Clone partly in the ground because of Mario's lower position afterwards he used the fact that Goomba clones do still have collisions with other Goombas he guided a Goomba to push the Clone all the way to the other side where Mario could bounce on him after getting the final red coin saving an a-press pattern was not done in this level his next Endeavor was to save the apress needed to jump into the pipe to the Bowser fight the main issue here was that to bring a Goomba clone all the way to the pipe he would need to be able to get there while holding an object the closest Bob bomb to clone with is all the way down there and because holding an object severely hinders Mario's movement options that meant Bannon needed many more clones to cross small gaps that would otherwise be trivial so while he only needed a single Goomba clone at the pipe the many gaps along the way basically acted as one big deconstructed Goomba Bridge of length 7. at 127 Goombas that's way too much to make this a viable strategy and that's before even considering the fact that without the Hat in hand glitch and remote release there was no way he could release all of these clones without interacting with them it seemed impossible until he found something new as it turns out on any given frame Mario can only interact with a single object at a time if Mario is colliding with more than one Goomba at the same time whichever comes first in the processing order is the one that is handled and the other collisions will be ignored and here's the key part when the clone's interaction status is broken and it becomes intangible Mario still technically interacts with it when they Collide even if nothing happens the processing order of a group of clones is the same as the order they were generated in so if Mario releases a Goomba clone and bumps into it he can then come back and release a new clone inside of the first clone's hitbox because Mario is touching the first clone this is the interaction that is being handled but because that clone is now in a broken State nothing comes out of this interaction although he's also colliding with the second clone this Collision is ignored so he can come back and bounce on the part of the second clone's hitbox that doesn't overlap with the first clone and he has successfully released a usable clone without remote release nor transport cloning there are two caveats first this method does require one clone to use as a sacrifice to place another clone but one simpler tribute has been paid older broken clones that were productive can allow Mario to release newer clones at no additional cost second the interaction priority goes both ways Mario can't bounce on a Goomba if he's busy interacting with another Goomba he needs to release that second Goomba in such a way that there's a portion of its hitbox that's sticking out of the first Goomba's hitbox this tiny section becomes the second Goomba's effective hitbox so this new find was great to place clones at arbitrary locations but what about the problem of having to clone over a hundred Goombas when the game can only render about 48 once that one was solved thanks to transport cloning and clone pushing Goomba is needed for the fourth step of the bridge could be released remotely then pushed into position by other boombas this got the use of the second and third steps of the bridge by half finally the last step of the bridge was the Goomba next to the pipe and it could be bounced on without having to go and rebuild the rest of the Goomba Bridge again cutting the total number of clones in half once more hannon's complex plan balanced convenience and minimizing the number of clones used in total 61 Goomba clones ended up being used for this a press save plus two more for the final red coin this stretched the game to its very limit and he ran into many crashes while passing this stage but with the right camera angles to minimize the amount of goombas on screen at once it was indeed possible finally one last Improvement was made in Bowser in the sky but this time there was something different it was not made by panancoic but by someone new his name was ganner D Gennady started watching pennant's videos even before the a button Challenge and he had grown fascinated by them he messaged palan koik through the YouTube inbox system and after some back and forth they started bouncing ideas for improving the a button challenge one of those ideas gannady brought to the table was a very precise double jump kick to clear the first two Platforms in a single a press instead of two after a lot of testing helped by another guy by the name of Wiz doodle this apra save was proven possible bringing down Bowser in the sky from 10A presses down to 6 over the course of a few weeks around that same time another repress was saved this time in Jolly Roger Bay through the jet stream had always been fairly straightforward one a press to break the metal cap box and one a press to jump into the star with the medal cap but Patton found that the first one could be skipped thanks to an old technique that I haven't discussed yet pause buffering when Mario Dives with b as soon as he hits the ground he can do a dive recover either with b or a if he's on a steep enough slope he actually hits the ground on the very next frame after he Dives as soon as he does though he very quickly loses forward momentum so each frame spends lighting after a dive takes out a big chunk of speed in normal circumstances you could dive with B on one frame and press a to recover on the next but that's not a particularly alluring strategy here because both the dive and the dive recover have to be done with B there has to be at least one frame where B is released between them which causes Mario to lose part of his speed but while the game is paused the physics engine doesn't Advance yet controller inputs are still being read so by pausing the game while B is released Mario can dive on one frame pause and release B unpause and repress B and recover on the next frame this let him keep all of his forward speed which was just enough to make it onto the metal cap box and save an a-press in hazime's cave for Metal Head Mario Can Move canadi came up with another enemy lure this time with the scuttlebug to skip one of the gaps and save an apress meanwhile though patinkovic was working on something far more advanced he theorized something quite insane in Tick-Tock clock what if you could skip the final a press of time jumps on moving bars this would be incredibly challenging because while there are bob-bombs at the very bottom of the stage there is nothing useful to clone with them the star is encased in a solid cage with no features around it that could be used wait what you can simply dive recover into it oops well I guess that one slipped through the crack somehow the date is now may 2014. pennant's next Target is Bowser into fire C when getting the red coins Mario has to climb the pole twice because this coin forces him to fall back down the only way to get off the pole and onto the higher platform is to jump off of it or is it in the first round trip yes definitely there's no possible way around it but after getting up once the entire level is unlocked which contains Bob arms Patton carried an unloaded Bob bomb all the way back down here where he could clone one of the lower Goombas using transport cloning he was able to safely release a clone right next to the pole so that would allow him to drop off from the pole using Z and bounce to the platform right if only it were that simple when Mario drops off from a pole he has barely any horizontal momentum so little in fact that one Goomba bounce isn't even enough to cross this minuscule distance using more clones didn't help either because he couldn't even place them low enough for it to work he had to resort to something better setting Mario on Fire Burning Mario actually has a very useful component to it it makes him do a little hop forward this is actually enough to reach the platform from the pole the only problem is finding a way to burn Mario at the top of the pole luckily fire spitters are there to save the day these fire bars are made up of 15 individual Flames each taking up one object slot when the fire comes out all of these planes are loaded then unloaded as they stop burning if Mario's holding a vacant object slot when the Flames come out he can end up holding a flame clone to release it however patinkoi couldn't use transport cloning because nothing can push fire so he had to use the old knockback strategy by positioning a Goomba at the right spot finally he also had to place more Goomba clones so that he could Bounce from the elevator to this spot so that the flame would be placed high enough for this strategy to work after falling down to get the red coin he dismounted the pole by getting burned and he managed to get back up without any press this meant the only a press left in this level was the one one required to get off the pole the first time around the next day press to be saved wasn't tied to any star in particular it was the a press required to enter a cavern of the metal cap this one was simple but quite precise to pull off after getting Dory in the right spot Mario can reach the platform with a run-up and a diver cover ly the very next day Panic quick found another Improvement again in Castle movement this time it was pounding the pillars to lower the water and access the vanish cap course after catching mips panin carried it all the way to the pillars here he got off the pillar holding mips but ground pounded this instantly releases mips which in turn pushes Mario back onto the pillar rinse and repeat for the other pillar and two more a presses have been saved at the same time panin also found a way to get secret of the Haunted Books from two down to only one a press the a press to get to the second floor was still unavoidable but the second one to jump into the star wasn't here though it wasn't as simple as a diver cover instead he had to dive recover onto the railing which has a tiny slippery slope on top of it immediately after sliding off he Clips back in and ground pounds having just enough height to touch the star but how did he manage to clip back in like that well the answer is complicated not complicated enough to make a fascinating two-hour documentary about how of course it is so we're going to simplify things for the time being the railings cross section looks like this this is the inside wall the outside wall and the slippery slope on top now while hitboxes have multiple interesting properties they extend laterally by 50 units on each side of the wall in the case of a thin railing like this one the hitboxes can stick out of the other side like this also while hitboxes only extend vertically up to 30 units below the top of the wall because the inside wall extends higher than the outside one this section of inside wall hitbox sticks out and ends up pushing Mario back in from the other side this is the spot pattern quick hit to make this a press save work at the time he wasn't fully aware of all of these mechanics and simply referred to it as glitching to the other side of the railing another level that saw an improvement around this time is Rainbow ride the red Coin Star was already down to two a presses one for each of the two trips to the maze an obvious way to improve that would be to cut it down to a single trip to the maze that somehow gets all eight red coins in one go and that's what panin did he managed to do it by activating the elevator and taking it back up and with this precise dive recover but then he found something bigger the carpet dripped at the top of the maze was essential but the a press needed in it seemed fairly close to being skippable he figured that if he could have just one small bounce he could have the height needed to grab this ledge without any press and he solved it with the most advanced enemy luring strategy yet the lakituler he led lakitu far away while he was still low then deactivated it until the last moment deactivation Works differently than unloading does when Mario is too far away lakitu is no longer rendered and updated but it remains at the same position until Mario gets near it again because lakitu takes a while to rise up to Mario's height panen was able to get it to fly up into him just in time to get enough height to grab the ledge as it turns out the lackeytooler saved the final lay press in the red Coin Star but it also saved one of the 4A presses for a big house in the sky which also shares this Carpet Ride and just like that the total lay press count for all 120 Stars was now under 100. but there was no time for celebration there were more a presses to save in dire dire docks the convoluted red Coin Star went from 3.5 to 2.5 when Patton found that he could activate the boxer switch and drop from the Pokemon onto a box instead of jumping off this one was actually more precise than it looks again because Mario has almost zero horizontal momentum when he drops off from a pole following the theme of improving upon already complex stars panin then came up with an insane idea to improve the downtown stars of wet dry world this was perhaps the most creative and bizarre looking strategy yet thanks to its 14 hour water level manipulation epic the red Coin Star was already at zero a presses but quick race through downtown still required one a press to complete that is until patinkovic somehow thought of raising the water level so much for so long that it would reach a value too large for the game to handle the water level is stored as a 16-bit signed integer in other words it can only be a whole number from negative 32 000 to positive 32 000. if it goes beyond 32 767 the water level quite literally overflows so it wraps around to negative 32 000 essentially making the downtown area go from completely filled with water to completely dry instantly and now the genius part because the water level Bobs up and down if the median is right around the Overflow limit the water level can switch back and forth between its maximum and minimum values overflowing and underflowing every two seconds now that's a wet dry world the result looks very weird Mario swims for a bit then starts falling then becomes underwater again over and over and this double state is exactly what pen needed to bypass the need for an a press and quick race through downtown also although time is very much a secondary concern in this challenge this solution saved about 3 hours for the redcoin star after this string of improvements panancoy took a bit of a break until mid-june in the meantime though he worked on a project dear to him since his very beginning with this game a video on the 255 coin limit over the years panin had made dozens of videos about glitches in other Mario science but this one was special for the very first time the whole world could hear his voice hey guys it's me pan and koic 2012 bringing you Dutch pancakes since 2010. this video didn't bring anything new for the a button challenge specifically although it did show the length she was ready to go to just to get one extra coin in Tick Tock Clock the response from the community was so positive that he decided that from this point on glitch explanations and other science videos would become commentated but because a button Challenge videos were mostly demonstrations of his strategy he felt little incentive to provide additional commentary other than the video description and kept them in the same format as before when Patton came back to the Abundant challenge he found an aprest save to go to Bowser in the sky which always required two a presses to get up the steps After exiting either rainbow ride or Wing Mario Over the Rainbow it could be done in only one with a slight kick bounce and a dive grind double jump kick up three steps at once how does that skateboard trick sounding move work if you've played this game before you've probably encountered this situation this happens because ground movement and air movement are fundamentally different on the ground Mario is pretty much always moving in the direction that he's facing in the air Mario's movement is defined by his speed and facing angle as well but it is also influenced by the direction of the control stick if Mario was facing slightly away from a ledge but the control stick is held towards the platform he will move off of it while on the ground and back onto it once he's in the air this results in Mario oscillating between being on and off the platform it doesn't look like it here but Mario is facing ever so slightly away from the platform when he walks off he enters a free fall state in in free fall Mario can dive no matter his speed he Dives but the joystick is held towards the step so on the very next frame he moves back onto the step but now because he's facing away he slides back off the platform and into Free Fall Again each time Mario Dives and adds a flat 15 to his speed up to a maximum of 48 which is 50 more than running speed so with four consecutive Dives he gets his speed up to 48. then he enters free fall for a frame and lands again when Mario lands from a free fall he can immediately double jump because the vertical speed of a jump is influenced by the horizontal speed and because a double jump has a higher vertical speed than a single jump a 48 speed double jump kick gives him just enough height and distance to make it all the way up the stairs in a single a press next patinkoic looked at the hundred Coin Star in hazy maze cave it took 1A press to ground pound the switch for blue coins but with clever's Whooper bounces he could reach 100 different coins with only that one a press that is until he found a way to ground pound the switch without having to jump how could he do that again the answer was swoopers however using swoopers to ground pound the blue switch meant that he no longer could use them to reach to navigating the toxic maze all Cove because of that he missed out on too many coins to get 100 without an a-press but thankfully he could still combine it with the red Coin Star and get both of them for 1A press total instead of one for each next up was chip off one's block if you remember this star was left at 1A press last time because panicoy couldn't find a way to get Mario to the star without jumping well if he couldn't bring Mario to the star why not bring this star to Mario that's right he could do it via cloning now it's easy to say just clone the star but it's actually not that simple up until this point the only way Patton managed to clone the star was by carrying objects through loading zones but dire dire ducks and wet dry world are the only two levels in the game that have a loading zone the issue is that without the loading zone stars are always loaded no matter how far Mario is from them so they can't load into an object slot that he's currently holding but here because the star appears after the fight with King [ __ ] it could theoretically load into Mario's hands if he was holding the correct vacant object slot right at that moment as far as holding a vacant object slot goes Patton knew it was possible to get a hold of an unloaded cork Box by bringing it all the way up to the top and having King whomp break the Box while grabbing it at the right time there's a major problem with keep being that unloaded box though to end the fight Mario needs the ground pound King womp which is incompatible with holding an object it was time for new technology to step in this strategy was actually months in the making back in 2013 panenkook had discovered hands-free holding a state in which Mario is no longer in the action of holding an object but he still has a held object with him it can be triggered by a few specific actions like diving into a downward slope or bonking into a ceiling this is a volatile state with many restrictions in short Mario's trying to get rid of the object so he has to be kept constantly busy to keep him from dropping it this is usually done by jumping repeatedly but that's not an option here I'll leave figuring out why as an exercise for the viewer instead panin had to get creative first he triggers the hands-free holding glitch by bonking into the bottom of King womp which at this moment acts as a ceiling then he punches repeatedly to avoid dropping the unloaded box until he's in the right position to ground pound King [ __ ] while holding a specific vacant slot which the star loads into and this finally brought down chip off forms block to zero a presses around the same time panel quick also posted a video about trying to clone blue coins while he tried very hard to make it happen he just couldn't get it to work it doesn't really work I just get stuck in some sort of limbo world this goes to show that even though so many breakthroughs were made in that era a lot of the research still ended up in a dead end with nothing useful gained also Patton started posting some lower effort videos for testing ideas and documenting strategies over on a secondary Channel aptly named pattern chaos 2012. I'm sure that's not going to be confusing July 2014 it had been a good two weeks since womp's Fortress so it was time for more breakthroughs the ascent up the rotating redcoin Platforms in Tick Tock Clock which was done in zero a presses before was now found to be possible in zeroa presses but this time while holding an unloaded bob-omb palankovic found that by entering the clock on the random setting and by manipulating the RNG he was able to get all the way up these platforms safely while holding an unloaded object this led him clone a bob-omb up here the old strategy for Rolling to the cage was a side flip wall kick from down here to get up in two a presses but with a baba bomb in a single lay press Bannon was able to use the bloated bob-omb glitch to get up the cogs without using a again this strategy involves hands-free holding triggered here by being pushed off the platform while belly sliding and holding the Baba and a lot of ground pounding which during its animation temporarily disables Collision checks with floors and most of its tracks against walls this is usually fine when Mario isn't being pushed around during the ground pound but here it allows him to clip inside the cogs and pop up on top of them when the ground pound animation is over this route involves some seriously crazy movement because Mario can't hold on to the bloated Bob bomb for more than a few frames at once thanks to the ba bomb having four different bloated sizes he could grab it at slightly different intervals and have it be smaller if he wanted to position Mario and larger if he wanted a stronger push to cross large gaps this allowed him to get all the way to the star and save an a press but he still needed one more to jump into the star itself or did he five days after posting this video it was already outdated it turns out that the ba-bomb can still be useful even here in its most bloated state it displaces Mario by so much that it's possible to clip outside of the cage and with a ground pound onto this ramp from there he was able to clip back in but high enough to grab the star without jumping into it but this new find was bigger than that reaching this ramp had only been done in two a presses before therefore this new babam strategy saved and they press in three more Tick-Tock clock Stars the next new technical development was for Metalhead Mario Can Move three months prior a scuttlebug had been used to save an apress and bring it down to two while it was time for that little bug to put in more work and take out the rest of the apresses the first step was to make this Cuttlebug jump out of the pit but then Mario goes back out as Mario leaves the room the scuttlebug is deactivated but not unloaded again this means that it remains where it is but it's no longer being updated or drawn when Mario goes near it again it will reappear in exactly the same spot this will be useful later the main development that made this Improvement possible was found by plush it's similar to Shell Hyper Speed when pressing C up while facing slightly downwards on a steep slope Mario is trying to come to a stop but the downward slope accelerates him straight ahead instead again because the slope is so steep his de facto speed is a small fraction of his real speed now when Mario enters water he loses all of that speed a except he actually doesn't horizontal speed in Super Mario 64 is handled in two different ways the regular speed and the sliding speed the regular speed is a single value that is applied to Mario's current facing angle to move him it's used in most scenarios running jumping falling taking damage and many more the sliding speed is fundamentally different it's a vector with an X and A Z component the resulting Direction isn't necessarily Mario's facing angle as its name suggests the sliding speed is used while Mario is sliding no matter where or how even though only one type of speed is used at a time in most circumstances the unused speed is always updated to reflect the one that's being used when Mario is not sliding the sliding speed Vector is updated to reflect Mario's regular speed and angle and when he is sliding the regular speed is updated to reflect the amplitude of the sliding speed Vector but there are situations where the regular speed is updated while the sliding speed isn't as it turns out swimming is one of them while Mario is moving down the slope his sliding speed increases and his normal speed follows when he falls in the water his normal speed drops back to zero but his sliding speed doesn't update to match it so it stays high now he can go back on the slope and immediately start sliding which uses the sliding speed that speed is still high from the previous slide and it goes even higher panin repeats this until the sliding speed goes all the way up to 496 at this point Mario has so much speed that he can bypass the entire wall hitbox without even colliding with it that threshold is 400 speed in most cases now all he needs to do is wait for Dory to show up and use it to instantly start sliding out of the water as well as to gain some precious height and this is where the Scuttle Bug comes into play as soon as it's reactivated Mario goes butt sliding onto it with so much speed that one single bounce gets him all the way across of a star and that is how Metal Head Mario Can Move was dropped to zero a presses while all of this was happening another level was being worked on the Eternal Bowser in the sky it had been left at 6A presses back in April but Patton had been slowly chipping away at it with incremental improvements for six weeks from late June to August 3rd this is everything he accomplished in that period first one a press was saved using black magic what's going on here is actually not you in his first run through the challenge panin had already abused this mechanic to save an apress in a higher elevator perhaps without even realizing it but how does that work simply because this thing is stupid [Music] have you ever run into weird wonkiness on one of these elevators before have you ever bumped into nothingness or been squished out of nowhere here's why the axle rotates around its Center but its hitbox is incorrectly anchored at one of its tips instead and that's the reason behind all of this weird Behavior including both of these a press saving moves the second they press save came in the middle of the level this red coin always required an a press to grab but theoretically Mario could also collect it by falling from above unfortunately because getting off this bolt also requires an a-press it wasn't any better to do so but patankoic figured out that using Goomba clones it would be possible to Dismount the pole without using a because the cloning had to be done over here which is past the bull he did have to use a1s to Dismount it the first time but then he could clone Goombas drop down to the red coin and climb back up using the Goomba clones to Dismount the pole without using a again after some testing he quickly realized that because Mario's momentum is so low when dropping off from the pole his best course of action was to take damage instead he managed to do it by manipulating another Goomba to push the Clone under Mario to damage him while falling into position so that Mario could bounce on it during a damaged knockback that worked and so Bowser in the sky was down to only four a-presses two at the start one to get this red coin and one to get off the pole the first time around but that also wouldn't last thanks to a brand new development in Goomba engineering the Goomba ladder this is essentially like a Goomba Bridge except this time the bounces are mostly vertical Instead This let him bypass the pole entirely at the cost of many many clones long story short this process took him 46 Goomba clones one interesting detail to consider is how pannon managed to clone from this Balboa in the first place vacant object slot manipulation is something that I've avoided talking about in detail because while it is a crucial element of anything involving cloning one doesn't need to know all of its intricacies in detail to appreciate the incredible work that goes behind these cloning strategies here though I wanted to give a glimpse of the kind of effort that sometimes has to be made just to start cloning objects the main sources for all of these clones are this Bob almond that Goomba Trio on a flat surface like this it's extremely difficult to clone with a babang the only real option panukoi had was to hold it off the edge as it blew up grabbing it this way will give Mario the vacant object slot number nine because of all the smoke particles and the explosion happening at the same time now because a Goomba Trio is made up of three Goombas they will load into the first three vacant slots this is the problem to get a Goomba to show up in Mario's hands patent needs to lower that vacant object slot number from 9 to between 1 and 3 which means he has to load at least 9 temporary objects that would unload in a different order giving him a new vacant slot number the best he could do by kicking up dust was only up to 8 dust particles so he paired it with collecting the bobom's coin to add Sparkles to the object count so a temporary particle loaded into Mario's hands and then unloaded which lowered his vacant slot number enough that he was able to clone a Goomba from there but because the coin from above bomb is a one-time thing this method could not be reused so he used that first Goomba clone to get easier future cloning Bob arms immediately explode when they come in contact with other bob-ombs Goombas or other enemies with the Goomba clone just off the s like this when the Bob arm runs off the edge it falls on the Goomba and instantly explodes Mario is then able to grab an unnoted Bob bomb in vacant Slot 2 instead of 9. from there cloning more Goombas is easy alright that was pretty crazy but there was one more major problem Patton needed 46 clones to get past the pool here four more clones to get the red coin here two to get the final red coin and 61 more clones to bounce into the pipe the game was never going to handle this many Goomba clones at once the solution for that was twofold first the disjointed axle hitbox let him Skip One Step of the upper Goomba bridge and second he found that he could bring a bob onto the pipe and skip the last few steps of the Goomba bridge this brought down the total amount of goombas from 113 to 63. nonetheless because most of these Goombas were close together over there the additional clones Panda needed to get this red coin would invariably crash the game how he solved that seems absolutely insane because it is absolutely insane he got up the entire course without getting any red coins and entered the Bowser fight and then he purposely fell off to his death but why because this puts Mario back here at the very top of the stage when it resets the entire level so that all the Clones are now gone from there he was able to set up all the Clones again but this time because he started from above he only needed a few clones to get back up to pull once instead of using 46 to build a Goomba ladder to bypass it and that made all the difference to enable this crazy a press save to happen but wait there's more three days later pen and quick figured out a way to save the very last aprest past the beginning platforms he did it by carrying chukya all the way there in short the two main challenges were getting past this Gap and getting from holding chakya here to having it throw Mario into the coin without killing it in the process both of these were solved by dive grinding basically that gives Mario enough speed in a short enough time that he is time to catch up the chakia and get caught before it lands similarly to what he had done in wet dry world before and with that Improvement what was once a 13A press stage was now down to only two both at the very beginning foreign ideas dried up a bit College had started again and he stepped away from the a button challenge for a while but in the meantime someone posted a very bold claim on the castle movement a press's video I figured out how to go to hazy maze cave without pressing the a button once naturally pennon was skeptical what are the chances that some random Youtube commenter had genuinely found a way to improve upon one of the most basic a presses in the entire challenge after all he'd been getting dozens of these empty claims for well over a year now well obviously if I'm talking about it you already know the answer and patton quick would soon find out as well the probability is zero because this is no random Youtube commenter this is Tyler Guinea the great mind behind the discovery of parallel universes showing up out of the blue one day he annihilated every expectation and took the a button challenge to the next level [Music] while everybody was focused on a 120 Star air button challenge Tyler Kinney actually had a different Outlook his primary goal was to make it possible to beat the game in zero a presses no matter the star count now Super Mario 64 is very famous for its zero star speedrun but there's a bit of a problem with it most of the star door skips require speed generating techniques that make heavy use of the a button like backwards long jumping or Hyper Speed wall kicking a zero star or even a 16 star run would automatically incur at least a dozen a presses to skip the 50 and 70 star doors so the only reasonable method would be to find 70 different stars that could be collected in zero a presses and beat all three Bowser stages without the a button when he first looked at it Tyler found that the lowest possible count was 9A presses those included two a presses to beat Bowser in the Dark World a half a press for board browser sub entire dire docks as well as 5 other stars one in Bowser in the fire c one to reach Bowser in the sky two within Bowser in the sky and because only 6 25 stars were retainable in zero a presses three additional lay presses to get the required 70 Stars the halfway press is important here because in the event that the a presses to reach 70 stars and to beat Bowser in the dark world were all saved there would no longer be a prior a press to leech off from so from this starting point Tyler made it his mission to lower that a press count all the way down to zero his first discovery in that direction was a huge breakthrough because it allowed him to go to hazy maze cave in zero a presses unlocking a whole level that already had three stars at zero a presses because Pat and koik was busy with College finals Tyler took it upon himself to make a video about it The crucial development is the Star Dance clip which is made possible thanks to Mario's ability to grab onto ledges during most kinds of jumps or in free fall Mario can grab onto a ledge if he doesn't quite have enough height to land on this allows him to reach a floor up to 150 units higher than his own position up from 30 with a direct Landing a regular diver cover doesn't allow Mario to grab onto Ledges no matter how high because that specific action type prevents Mario from grabbing the ledge but when Mario collects a star this unique falling action type called the Starfall does allow him to grab a ledge normally during a ledge grab Mario is technically on top of the ledge while his visual model hangs off this is the key mechanic that makes Canon less possible in this case because the star Dan silver rides the let's grab animation Mario instantly pops up onto the higher ledge and starts dancing the Star Dance clip was revolutionary in that it allowed Mario to reach Elijah's high as about 280 units up from the 158 that a simple diver cover can achieve there was only one simple problem it required a star not only that but a star in a very specific location this was a major hurdle for two reasons first no stars are by default located somewhere that they can be useful to reach a higher ledge but most importantly in any one of the 15 main courses collecting a star will automatically exit the stage but there is one exception that conveniently sidesteps both of these key problems the 100 Coin Star this star appears precisely 245 units above where the 100th coin was collected so its location can be pretty much anywhere that a coin can be collected at but also other than some Castle secret stars this is the only type of star that keeps Mario in the level after collecting it therefore with clever manipulation their 100th coin could be collected just beneath a high ledge and the Starfall action could make Mario grab the Legend Save in a press and then because this is the 100 Coin Star he would be able to stay in the level afterwards this is the magic of the Star Dance clip Tyler immediately used it in Stand Tall on four pillars a Goomba knockback bounce into the star is just enough to pop Mario up on the the great which has a warp that takes him further up the pyramid this is now high enough to reach the mini boss fight without using a month later still on his own Tyler Caney discovered a massive new technique that he named a 207 diver cover a regular diver cover can get Mario on platforms up to 158 units higher but this special trick gets him up to 207 units higher this is made possible because of the wall and floor hitboxes if you remember I said before that while hitboxes extend up to 30 units below the top of the wall a diver cover gives Mario 128 units of height so in a platform that is up to 158 units higher Mario can die recover just above the wall hitbox and onto the platform if the platform is any higher the wall will prevent Mario from reaching the floor the floor hitbox however extends 78 units under the floor if Mario finds himself somewhere in this region he'll stop up onto the floor theoretically Mario could dive recover into the bottom of this region and snap up to the floor gaining up to but not including 207 units of height in practice though a platform is almost always surrounded by walls that prevent Mario from reaching this Zone but what if that wasn't always the case this is the key Discovery behind this new technique misalignments Super Mario 64 tracks Mario's position using 32-bit floating Point numbers so Mario's position on each axis can be virtually anything including 8 million numbers just between 1 and 2 alone the game physics calculation that checks the height of the floor Mario is on or above has a built-in shortcut instead of using the 32-bit floating Point number for Mario's position the programmers decided to convert it into a 16-bit integer this lost some Precision sure because any fraction would be rounded down to a whole number but because one unit is such a small distance a fraction of the unit would be completely insignificant well it turns out that it's not that insignificant when the wild Collision check does not make the same shortcut this leads to a very specific literal Corner case scenario where Mario can be on the floor but beyond its bounding walls at the same time this one by one unit square is beyond each of the wall hitboxes but if Mario ends up here his position will be rounded down for floor calculation putting him on the floor so for all practical purposes and the direction away from the origin floors extend one unit further than their Associated walls leaving a tiny exposed square at the outside corners this means that any platform which has a corner pointing away from the origin in both axes has a one by one misalignment that can be used to bypass the wall hitbox and step up onto the floor from 78 units below it instead of the usual 30. it seems rather small but there actually are numerous instances where that makes all the difference first these Platforms in Bowser in the sky where Tyler discovered the trick in the first place as it turns out all of these gaps that were just Out Of Reach with a regular dive recover were not reachable using misalignments all of them except the last one unfortunately but he was undeterred he was determined to make Bowser in the sky fully completable in zero a presses despite his already impressive track record of two major discoveries in a month nothing would truly showcase Tyler keaney's creativity and Mastery of the game like the chakia drop from all the way down here Mario is just on the edge of chakia's activation radius when Chuck guys deactivated it stops moving and isn't being rendered but it is still loaded but there's one crucial function that still works turning towards Mario check yeah has two main Behavior modes chasing and turning in Chase mode it charges forwards until Mario is behind it this is what the white line demarcates then it stops for about a second and a half and goes into turning mode in turning mode it turns until Mario is in the yellow cone then starts chasing again if Mario quickly goes from behind to in front of chakia he can already be in the yellow cone when chakia starts turning in that case it turns by about five and a half degrees or until it faces Mario directly before it starts chasing this is important because of the geometry of the platform chakia is on cekia has a built-in mechanism that prevents it from running off a ledge if its next intended position is more than 50 units above the floor that means it's about to fall off so it will stop on the edge of the platform this check is only is currently on the ground if it's already Airborne this no longer matters but how can chakia be airborne if it can't fall off in the first place because of slopes check it has a constant gravity of four units per frame squared the same as Mario On Any Given frame if after falling down by four units chakia is on or just below a floor it bounces if it's still in the floor then it's popped back up on the ground but if it isn't it becomes Airborne so if checkia moves onto a floor that is between 2.7 and 50 units lower than its current height it will become airborne and once it's Airborne the 50 unit limit no longer applies so it can now fall off from much higher there's one last potential hurdle chuckia can't just run around entire levels it has a point called its home and it can only Chase Mario up to a certain distance away from that home but thankfully the distance is strictly horizontal and by a stroke of pure luck it happens to be just big enough to allow this strategy to work every piece of the puzzle can now fall into place Mario performs a complex mating dance down at the bottom on the edge of czechia's activation radius he makes track your turn to face him here then moves back behind it to activate the stopping period in in that time he quickly goes back within the yellow cone to have chakia turn just a little more counterclockwise he repeats this until chuckya faces in this direction as much as possible then he activates Shakira by entering the radius and makes it run up against the edge and onto the sloped ground here at this point he can only activate czechia with diver covers and ground pounds once check your runs onto the slope it becomes airborne and can now fall off but it's headed in the wrong direction so Mario falls back out of the activation radius freezing chakia in mid-air then he moves back behind it to make it turn towards him and reactivates it so it now falls down towards him again he moves back behind it to make it stop before it falls off the course altogether and from there he's able to be grabbed and chucked on the upper platform and the final a press in Bowser in the sky had finally been saved it's impossible to overstate how unlikely this strategy really is every aspect of it just barely works this wall allows trachea to run up against it instead of getting stuck on the Edge at precisely the right angle to allow chakia to reach all the way to the slope while Mario is down below the slope is just steep enough to cause chakia to become airborne the perfect placement of the edge of the activation radius allows for activating and deactivating it on command and the perfect size of the area around its home allows it to move all the way to this point it's even crazier when you consider that Tyler was working with very rudimentary tools and little understanding of all the mechanics I just described the fact that this apra save is possible at all is nothing short of a miracle but the fact that it was discovered over seven years ago is indescribably unlikely you just can't make that story up foreign October and again on his own Tyler Caney found yet another groundbreaking trick to gain precious height and specific scenarios vertical speed conservation or VSC for short Mario's vertical speed is a variable that's almost entirely independent from its horizontal speed this is mostly a major hurdle for the a button challenge but it can sometimes be useful in certain circumstances when Mario lands on the ground his vertical speed isn't automatically set to zero it remains what it was at the last moment where Mario was in the air this means that if Mario was somehow able to land on the platform while he's moving up he could get off of it later and retain his upward speed potentially gaining more height than ever possible before there are two reasons why this can't work though first Mario can't really land on anything if he's moving up and second vertical speed is reset to zero as soon as Mario starts moving but what if I told you that Mario doesn't need to move to move the action of throwing a punch makes Mario ends forward a little bit but it doesn't require moving the control stick it also doesn't reset the vertical speed so if Mario lands with a non-zero vertical speed then punches repeatedly until he falls off the platform he's on he will conserve that speed but this doesn't fix the problem that Mario needs to fall onto something therefore have negative vertical speed in order to actually land on it while it turns out this isn't strictly true there are some cases where it's possible to move up onto a platform but they're relatively rare for example a platform that doesn't have any walls like a Magic Carpet can work also if the platform itself is moving it can move up onto Mario like an elevator so it is indeed possible to land on the platform with positive vertical speed and there are some very specific cases where this trick could actually come in handy at the end of October Pat and koik finally had enough time to come back to the challenge and he was immediately met with this revolutionary work he instantly recognized Tyler caney's potential and invited him on the ABC crew but he also saw the potential of these three new key discoveries the floodgates were officially open and improvements could start flowing again first came the big house in the sky where a dive recovered onto the Magic Carpet allowed patinkovic to conserve its vertical speed then by getting pushed off the carpet Mayu enters free fall but gains height like a diver cover being in free fall means that he can wedge grab allowing him to get onto these blocks without an a press sadly the last one is higher than the others and 1A press was therefore still required next up was Big Moose Hound where this apress was proving problematic for the four stars it required going up to the second floor again with VSC but this time done using the stairs raising onto Mario panin was able to cut the sabras out saving 4 at once the red Coin Star also required getting rid of that half a press for kicking onto who's in this room but panin was able to figure it out using a diver cover instead then in dire dire docks he found that these cork boxes can be climbed on using misalignments this allowed him to reach this High platform in zero a presses and without a poke loan which again revolutionized four different Stars board Bowser's sub was now down to zero a presses both through the jet stream and collector caps were also down to zero a presses because the special caps could now be obtained without jumping and finally ball jumping for red coins could get rid of the initial half a press and go down to a clean too in Bowser in the dark world three tassers Tyler panen and plush and two new techniques combined to save the remaining two apresses here Mario does a dive recover into the crystal which is made up of tiny walls in an interesting Arrangement by entering two wall hitboxes at once Mario gets pushed all the way to here because the floor slopes up this is enough to land immediately after the dive recover allowing him to preserve the vertical speed all the way to here with repeated punches the a press to enter the pipe was solved using a misalignment specifically this corner points outwards from the origin so Tyler Kinney was able to dive recover into the misalignment and save the final lay press in this stage now in Rainbow ride panonkoic found another multi-purpose a press save this time it was to reach the cruiser at the top of the stage he used vertical speed conservation combined with a very precise complex like it to lure to get it to fly up precisely into that corner the VSC was achieved by making this block start falling then dive recovering and Landing one frame later on this block Mario doesn't dip low enough to start being affected by the walls of that block making this maneuver possible then one punch gets him off the platform with vertical speed and the Liki to bounce gets him just high enough to grab this ledge this brought cruiser crossing the rainbow to zero a presses and somewhere over the rainbow down to one because of the cannon shot with the 120 star a press count down to 71 panenkoic and the ABC crew including three more people Kaze Emmanuel of room hacking Fame Ryan stroback and pedo Victor decided to make a prediction how low would the a press count be six months into the future on May 13 2015. everyone made guesses roughly around 60. Tyler keaney was the most optimistic of them all but 54 predicting that 17 a presses would be cut down before six months had passed needless to say every single one of these predictions would turn out way off base meanwhile Tyler keaney who was more focused on any percent tried to get rid of the apress to enter Bowser in the sky he found that on the rainbow right side of the room he was able to use misalignments to ascend some of the steps but two of them were being difficult this one and the final step the ramp on the top step complicated things a bit but using a ground pound and some slight grinding Tyler was able to make it up the first step's problem is that it doesn't line up right for a misalignment to exist Tyler could have used a slight kick Bounce from Rainbow Wright but because he was concerned with any percent where rainbow ride was not going to be entered he had to find another method he found the Glitchy ledge grab when Mario hits a wall a check is made to see if he can grab the ledge in short the game checks for a while hitbox at two points 30 units above Mario's position and 150 units above which is about the size of Mario's model if it finds a wall hitbox at this point but not the other it will try to find a ledge to grab onto by looking for a floor hitbox from 160 units to 100 units above Mario's position because floor hitboxes are 78 units high this means that Mario can theoretically grab a ledge up to 238 units above his position but if there is a ledge that high wouldn't there be a while below that ledge that the wild check would detect yes but not always here's why while hitboxes are 50 units wide perpendicularly to the wall but at the edge of the wall they don't necessarily extend perpendicularly they actually extend along their closest axis either X or Z so if a wall isn't aligned exactly along one of the axes its hitbox will have a slanted shape along its edges in this corner both walls extend along the x-axis creating this shape when Mario is in this Zone he's in the lowball hitbox but not the high one so the game detects a while 30 units above Mario but not 150 above him therefore the floor check is triggered now because Mario is colliding with the low wall the game uses the line perpendicular to that wall to check for a floor because of the lower walls orientation the perpendicular line is angled towards the higher floor so the floor check finds that one and Mario grabs the higher ledge if the wall is extended perpendicularly instead of along their closest axis this would not have been possible also there was finally only a single a press absolutely required to beat the game to jump off the pole in Bowser in the fire C in these frantic two weeks vertical speed conservation had proven to be a key asset to gain height by preserving positive vertical momentum but what about negative vertical momentum well yes negative vertical speed can be preserved but obviously in a challenge where height is brushes falling even faster than usual is crazy to even consider but the closest thing to Crazy is genius plush figured out that for Express Elevator Hurry up he could conserve negative vertical speed to fall down faster after activating the elevator making it possible to reach the platform using only bee swimming and cutting the halfway preset was left in the star plush was a relatively rare contributor but this time he came up with another a press save in the same month in Jolly Roger Bay through the jet streams a press to jump into the star could be skipped by positioning Mario in the center of the jet stream so that it would push Mario up into the star once the metal cap expired this seems obvious in hindsight but it's actually extremely precise so the point where it had been tried before and discarded the stream pushes Mario up but also outwards so he has to stand on the exact center give or take a tiny fraction of a unit in order to not miss the star plush was in a hot streak he struck again this time in dire dire docks he found that the underwater Shell's higher speed could be partially preserved with frame perfect to be swimming normally bee swimming has a speed cap of 7 units per frame but with this method it could hold a speed of 16 units per frame this is enough to do chests in the current without being sucked into the whirlpool so another half a press was taken out of the game the next Improvement came a whole month later at the very end of 2014. pattern koik not to be outdone was still busy concocting absurd routes that no one else could have even remotely considered and this time it was one of his best [Music] swinging in the breeze in zero a presses down from one the key new glitch in this route was hands-free teleport usually when Mario is holding an object he cannot use a warp but when he's holding an object hands-free he can the result is that the original object remains in limbo but the held object is discarded this means the original object cannot be retrieved from limbo and is stuck there forever but of course there is one exception the bombs after a hands-free teleport for the Baba Mario will no longer be holding anything which gives him back his wide range of actions but he'll still have the original babam hovering in front of him at all times invisible but still tangible he can recover that babam by grabbing it straight out of the limbo now what happens if that babam is also in a bloated State well because it's larger than usual it pushes Mario backwards again by a varying amount depending on the exact frame it was grabbed on and this is the reason behind the behavior that pan and koik exploits in this star let's go through the route first he goes up to the cruiser using VSC and the lucky to bounce like in the other stars once there he grabs a bloated Bob bomb hands-free by being pushed off the edge as he grabs it then he carefully navigates to the top of the red coin maze while preserving the hands-free state in order to reach the warp while hands-free holding a bloated he needs it to be bloated enough to give him a large push but after taking the warp the large push becomes a little cumbersome so he re-grabs the bomb and uses this thin ledge to get hands-free holding again but this time with a smaller bloated bomb back onto the maze he now has a babam that gives him a slight backwards push he makes his way to here where he lures the Fly Guy up and bounces onto it to twirl over to this platform then he pushes the Goomba up the slope using the hitbox of the invisible bloated Bob bomb in front of him but because the baban pushes Mario backwards he can't get enough forward momentum to climb the slippery slope but that's no problem for palancoic because this is what he does instead foreign from there he can push the Goomba all the way to the star get rid of the babam and use a damage knockback bounce to reach the star and save an a-press the year was now 2015. panicoic went back to pole jumping for Red Coins the new misalignment allowed him to reach the cat box and using the surrounding walls performed The Hidden Hand glitch this in turn allowed him to release a poll clone remotely by setting the Hope in another level beforehand namely wamp's Fortress with the preset hope he was able to release a book loan here in between these two poles and use it to navigate to and back from the red coin full clones are an exception to the one interaction rule Mario can actually reuse them as many times as he wants because the interaction with the pole does absolutely nothing to the pool's interaction status as opposed to enemies or coins this set him save an aprest but reintroduced a half a present during the level bringing the star down from 2 to 1.58 presses and saving 1A press overall shortly after he also Revisited big house in the sky which was left at 1A press for this blue box too high for VSC and not oriented properly for a misalignment of course that doesn't mean it was impervious to patent magic he figured out that an exploding could push Mario through the wall and because the carpet would be inside he would have ground to stand on while inside the box and because there are no inside walls he could get pushed back out easily on the other side but he was facing a pretty peculiar problem in short he wanted to bring a bob-on to this place while also having the carpet be active this makes things a little complicated because the carpet ride involves users of VSC and those involve a diver cover but diving with the Baba bomb in limbo automatically causes Mario to grab the babam instead this meant he needed to somehow bring a babam here but also be able to perform VSC on the box immediately before also because cloning Bob bombs involved reaching the cruiser he had to use lakitu to get there which prevents the other lack into bounce that's used in this route so now he has had to figure out a way to use two different ball bombs to clip inside those two different boxes on the same Carpet Ride the solution he came up with was quite involved first he went after the cruiser and cloned the Baba which he dropped to break the cork box below this simply frees up the space for later then he cloned another Bob bomb which he released in such a way that it would eventually fall down to the platform below but only after a bit of walking around finally he grabbed the third bubble and Bloated this time and carried it hands-free to the warp meanwhile the walking babam deactivates until Mario comes back now something interesting happens with babam's after a hands-free teleport when Mario does a hands-free teleport the Baba actually doesn't follow him it only does as soon as Mario enters its activation radius at which point it remembers it needs to hover invisibly in front of him so it snaps to his position in this case it happens that the warps are just a little bit further apart than the activation radius so when Mario warps the ba bomb stays on the red coin Maze and patton makes sure to stay out of its activation radius until he's ready to bring it back to Mario once that Baba is positioned he takes the carpet ride this time as he passes under the bomb on the bridge it reactivates and falls off below when he can retrieve it he uses that one to clip inside the box so the lakitu balance used to clear once he reaches this point he performs VSC just before entering this bob-bombs activation range he lets the wall push him off the platform since he can't punch twins forward and now he's ready to re-grab that bubon from limbo clip through the final box and save the last they press in the star after this madness you'd think Pat and koik would take a break from Rainbow ride for a bit well you'd be wrong he tried to apply the same bloated bob-bomb hands-free teleport strategy to tricky triangles but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't quite reach the star during that process though he needed to get the Fly Guy in a perfect location and in doing so he discovered a new technique Fly Guy manipulation this is a bit of a complex one so let me try and summarize it Fly Guy has three states flying around chasing Mario and going back to its home again like for all enemies fly guy's home is a point in space that it will always try to fly back to when it's Trace fire away if Fly Guy is currently far from its home then it will try to go back home unless Mario is low enough below it in which case it will chase Mario instead this state change only depends on the height difference regardless of lateral distance on top of that fly guy State can still be influenced even if Mario is outside of its activation radius although it won't move it's still able to change States rotate and gain vertical speed affecting how it's going to behave whenever Mario enters its radius again the space below Fly Guy can be subdivided in three zones high medium and low for it to start chasing Mario Mario needs to be in the low zone now there's a special case that happens if it starts chasing Mario and shortly after Mario is in the high Zone fly guy will then lunge at Mario instead and gain significant vertical speed if Mario activates fly guy again at that time it will lunge up and a head then return to a normal state sometimes Fly Guy can also start to spin in place while it's in lunge mode this Behavior randomly occurs based on RNG which can also be manipulated by strategically re-entering the low Zone and back to the high Zone it's possible to get flag eye to face any angle and lunge it that direction when it's activated again with all of this in mind it's theoretically possible to make Fly Guy go anywhere we want of course provided that at all times there's an accessible point to manipulate its state and another accessible point to activate and deactivate it at will in short flag eye manipulation is possible but it requires an amount of planning and effort only matched thus far by a handful of the most ludicrous strategies so with this new tool in hand palantcoic was able to use a better way to reach the tricky triangle star he got the Fly Guy to Lunge all the way to this platform where he could bounce on it and whirl directly to the star saving an apress but now there was an interesting question would it be possible to get Fly Guys so far and so high up that it could be used to go from their Cruiser to the platform where the somewhere over the rainbow star is was it even possible to reach the platform with a single twirl Tyler Caney and patankoic set off to answer that question it took three weeks of planning and testing and testing but they did it the resulting route is too complicated to break down step by step the luring itself is a masterpiece check out the notes for a link to a video showing how it was done given the rudimentary tools they had at their disposition it's impossible to overstate how astronomical the task to get Fly Guy across and up the entire level was while also juggling lakitu for that balance to reach the cruiser and now after all of this work they had Fly Guy at the very top top of the Cruiser's Mast it was time for the final two defaults [Music] and with this incredibly tight twirl one of the unlikeliest apresses to ever be saved was now gone [Music] but Fly Guy manipulation wasn't limited to only rainbow ride it turns out that Snowman's Land also has a fly guy and that level still had one pesky a press left and snowman's big head using shell Hyper Speed panin was able to ascend steep slopes all the way up to the ice bridge and from there a carefully manipulated Fly Guy lunged into him sending him flying up to the star Snowman's Land was now fully done in zero a presses meanwhile Tyler Canyon plush were hard at work to pull off another creative strategy in the volcano of lethal lavaland lava boosting can be used to gain a great amount of height at once at the cost of three sectors of health so while it is a very useful tool it can only be used twice otherwise it would kill Mario however there's one way to get around this limitation refilling Mario's Health Midway spinning Hearts heal Mario when he runs through them the faster he runs through a heart the faster it will spin which in turn refills Mario's Health faster and for a longer time so this is what they came up with first they get some height to do a like it bounce into the lava waterfall in order to reach the High Bridge with two lava boosts there's nothing funky going on here Mario bouncing on lava with this light kick is purely intended Behavior then they go over to the spinning heart and dive into it touching it with roughly 48 speed that causes the heart to spin faster and longer than usual giving Mario a lot of Health back they use that to get back up to the bridge with higher Health than before pick up coins to fill Mario's Health up and use another lava bounce to reach this higher platform but they'll need better to get to the star so they slight kick bounce back to the lava waterfall picking up the last two coins and they now have just enough health for two more lava bounces that give Mario barely enough height and distance to cross the Gap to the highest platform in the volcano that brought hot footed into the volcano to zero a presses an elevator tour in the volcano from 2 down to one a press during that time patinkoic was working on vanish cap under the moat while the other special cap switches had features allowing to get on top of them without jumping the blue switch was problematic because there was nothing to work with on top of that even new discoveries didn't seem to help there was no star to work with no nearby ledge to use VSC and while the switch did have a misalignment it was 247 units above the ground too high for a 207 unit misalignment diver cover but Patton still wanted to test it and in doing that he found that the base of the switch also has a misalignment of the same spot so by diving into that misalignment he could get up 72 units then dive recover and Ascender remaining 175 units using the second misalignment all special cap courses were now done in zero a presses including the a presses needed to reach them March 2015 the a press count is already down to 57 with two months to go until the predictions deadline at this rate it still looks like Tyler bikini might get close with his guess of 54 and that's when things took a wild turn Tyler was looking for a way to reach the piranha plant's platform from the tiny Allen painting you see the problem with tiny huge island is that entering the huge painting takes an a press and entering the tiny painting leaves you stranded in the starting area figuring out a way to get out of there would indirectly save an apress in the castle even if the star itself was already possible in zero epresses he found a way to get across both gaps using tiny Goombas first this one to bounce onto the middle platform and then that one can fall off from above and a precise dive recover could hit it and bounce Mario to the piranha plants from there the pipe could be entered using a misalignment on its outer corner and the rest of the star was trivial panon Court got to work and after four hours of Goomba manipulation he managed to pull it off one of the castle lay presses have been saved but the story doesn't end here as it turns out from this platform the rest of the island is painfully close to be fully accessible there's only this Gap separating Mario from saving the a press on every single tiny huge island stage entry which would be massive unfortunately no misalignments can be exploited and VSC can't be used because the level of geometry doesn't allow for it there was one trick left in the bag of new discoveries the Star Dance clip theoretically it would be possible to get up if a star was positioned perfectly in that Gap but how would you get a hundred Coin Star here of all places with only access to a tiny fraction of the island you can't of course unless your patent koek and Tyler Caney back in 2010 panen had already figured out the way to get infinite coins in tiny huge island and that method involves the piranha plants if they're hit on the last possible frame as they shrink back into the ground piranha plants can give coins again this process can be repeated infinitely many times however once he did get to 99 coins penins still needed a way to get his 100th coin precisely in that corner thankfully when the plant dies the coins spring out in a direction and speed fully determined by the RNG value by manipulating that to be exactly what he wanted pennant could get the coin to fly out directly to that corner but this was extremely precise as it turns out of the 65 000 possible RNG values only 17 of them could provide sufficient speed and the correct angle to make this possible on top of that to milk all the extra distance he possibly could panin also abused object tangibility mechanics objects like Quirk boxes elevator platforms rotating platforms seesaws and many others are only tangible if Mario is close enough to them that distance is surprisingly short as soon as Mario walks away just a bit other objects like coins or enemies will fall through these platforms if you pay close attention you can actually see the queens start falling through between each box that's pattern using this mechanic so that the coin will would fall just enough to be pushed forward by the outer wall of this cork box then he enters that cork Box's tangibility radius just in time for it to catch the coin in the end that was just enough to get the coin in the right spot before it disappeared from there patent could do the Star Dance clip using the 100 point star and he was now on the mainland in zero a presses from the tiny painting and that saved five a presses once for every Star in tiny huge island except for the first one on the very same day panin also found a way to get up from this point of tick tock clock to this point in only one a press instead of two he did it by using a bob-omb to clone coins all the way up to 99 then performing his usual Shenanigans to reach this point with a Bob at hand he collects the coin right here spawning the 100 Coin Star then uses VSC in a Star Dance clip to get all the way up onto the ledge from there 1A press is required to jump off the pole so an a press was saved in three different Tick-Tock clock stars for a total of eight a presses in a single day in the meantime patent cook was also very committed to saving the a press for top of the town but no matter how hard he tried no matter from what angle he looked at it he always hit a wall he tried so many different strategies in fact that he came up with a list of 10 different actions if even one single action from that list could be done in zero a presses the star would be solved here they are enter the painting at the high water level return from downtown on the low water level hold Chucky has a light object on its platform get Chucky onto the plank get past the wall hitbox on the Star platform with less than 50 speed have at least two airframes while diving onto the spinning platform at high speed have one more unit of room on the Star platform bring your Flame or a flame clone onto the Star platform get one more unit higher than a diver cover on the Star platform and finally be able to remotely open the star block pattern quick was so close yet so far and that's when plush discovered that it is possible to hold chakia as a light object on its platform every object that can be carried around can be either light or heavy when Mario carries a light object he can walk around fairly quickly with the best animation in the entire game if the object is heavy though Mario's movement is extremely limited also the game always expects you to grab heavy objects with a punch grab you can't dive grab chakia and you would never be expected to grab it in water either so those two grab actions always default to the light object holding State regardless of the weight of the actual object but as it turns out you can in fact grab chakia in water after that Mario will be walking around as if he was holding a bob-omb or a box unfortunately for this star that wasn't quite useful enough the key new discovery was that it is possible to dive grab chakia but only if it's done a couple of frames after punching this can be achieved by standing right on the edge of a platform shortly after punching Mario starts falling and Dives on the same frame that allows him to grab chakia and land back on the platform at the same time because he used the dive grab action Mario defaults to holding a light object and he can carry Chucky around with much more freedom Bannon used this to get chakia up onto the plank and from there he could carry it over to the spinning platform where he could get thrown into the star another easy a press save in the books you know it's been a whole three days since pennant quick last blew everybody's mind with a comically absurd cryptic sequence that somehow comes together into an absolute Masterpiece how about we go for a ride in womp's Fortress the only apras left in that stage is into the top of the Fortress but first a quick stop in bubble Battlefield to place the Hope in a convenient location this is a pretty high point so a few Goomba clones are needed to do the trick now in womb's Fortress panin first uses the metal cap to perform the Hat in hand glitch then collect some coins the hundred Coin Star will come in handy here he also throws a box but wait where does it go ah there it is and there it goes again whoa there it is after dropping it at the top of the slope he finds it over there as you may have guessed by now the hope that was set in bubble Battlefield translates to a point High Above This Arrow platform now he uses that box to collect 100 coin right next to the tower but he needs one more piece of the puzzle he goes back down and gets the other cork box on the stage he plays catch with schroding Xbox once more and brings the box to the top as well and now don't blink foreign so what just happened as Mario threw the box it warped to the Hope panancoy placed it at this exact position so that the box would land on the elevator platform at this precise angle Mario quickly gets into position with a pause buffer dive recovery before the Box falls on top of him and pushes him off the platform he enters free falling ground pounds meanwhile the boxes bounce trajectory perfectly follows him pushing him forward for the entire duration of the ground pound this allows him to touch the hundred Coin Star much higher than would otherwise be possible and from there a Simple Start dance clip gets him up the rest of the way onto the Sledge and the rest of the star is Trivial this brought womp's Fortress to zero a presses and the total lay press count down to 45 completely eclipsing every single prediction made by the ABC crew with two months to spare but the next two months did not end up as fruitful as January and March were most members of the ABC crew were busy with college and other responsibilities nonetheless a major advancement was made this time they got outside help from a speedrunner Japanese Runner honey was practicing Bowser in the sky when he ran into this glitch by a complete accident you can see the Baba disappear but if you pay close attention you can see that it reappears way off in the distance what could have possibly happened soon enough Tyler keaney plush and painted koik were on the case they eventually managed to recreate and understand what happened and that's when they realized they had a shiny new tool to break the game with instant release the way this works is actually very simple it has to do with the fact that the held object's last position only updates if the held object needs to be visually updated with instant release Mario Bonks into a wall on the same frame that he grabs the object banking automatically drops the object Mario's holding so before the held object has any time to be drawn in Mario's hands it's already gone because the object is being dropped it's released at Mario's vertical position but at the hope laterally this is what's being observed in Honey's clip The Hope was somewhere on this line and the Bob bomb was released at Mario's height now this had important ramifications for the a button challenge because it was now possible to remote drop an object without the Hat in hand glitch and without the massive restrictions of Transport cloning the only restriction this time was there had to be a way to grab the object and bonk into a wall at the same time this new technique immediately found the use and Tick Tock Clock by setting up the whole bin wet dry World beforehand panin is able to use instant release to warp a bob-omb out of bounds far enough away that Mario is out of its activation radius then he uses the other bob-omb to clone coins and gets all the way to 97 then he places a flying clone under the ledge of course as he releases it he instantly gets burned which uses up the Clone but all he has to do is clone a new flame and release it next to the first one just like he had done with Goombas before and this second clone would be usable after that he collects these coins making sure to clone one of them to collect it right under the ledge spawning the 100 Coin Star exactly where he wants it to be and now everything is in place for the magic to unfold a dive recover into a flame bounce into a Star Dance clip gets him all the way up to the ledge from there dye recovers give him up the cogs where the Baba magically appears this is because as soon as Mario enters the babam's radius it's reactivated but because it was dropped out of bounds the game puts it at Mario's position as a failsafe and now he gets across in the cage and uses VSC to reach the star finally lowering roll into the cage to zero a presses a feat that seemed absolutely impossible not even two years before and patent koik was not even done in Tick Tock Clock the red Coin Star is sitting at zero a presses for a while now could obviously no longer be improved but that didn't stop panin from trying anyway and that's when he came up with something truly incredible negative a presses okay not really but this is the next best thing Tick Tock lock always takes one a press to enter Because the clock face is so high up but what if there was a way to collect the star in such a way that once Mario returns to the castle he's somehow able to re-enter the stage without the required a press it seems impossible because changing Maps like that resets almost every variable and strips control away from the player until the celebration is over but there's one glitch that can still affect Mario despite all that spawning displacement when Mario is standing on a moving platform that suddenly disappears the platform will displace him for one additional frame despite no longer existing when the platform unloads because of Mario exiting the level via the pause menu collecting a star or even dying this extra frame of displacement is applied to Mario as he spawns in the castle now for a regular moving platform this effect is barely noticeable but for a rotating platform displacement is applied as a rotation from the platform's center as such objects are moved proportionally to their distance to the center and that is precisely why this glitch can be useful here's what planet could did he cloned the red Coin Star using one of the ba bombs and collected it while standing on the moving spinner the level unloads with the spinner rotating clockwise and Mario is still standing on it now when the castle loads it occupies the same coordinate system as Tick Tock lock but in a completely different way the position of the spinner in Tick-Tock clock ends up far enough away from where Mario has spawned that the rotational displacement is greatly magnified as a result Mario has moved down significantly enough that he ends up landing on the clock instead of in front of it one of the six a presses to enter Tick-Tock clock had been saved there's just one tiny caveat this glitch was fixed immediately after release which means that it is only present in the Japanese version of the game and every subsequent release including North American and pal this glitch has been patched therefore this apra save came with an asterisk it had to be done on the Japanese Nintendo 64 version of the game this is as valid a version as any other so there was no inherent problem with it but it's just something to keep in mind another unfortunate detail is that while this looked extremely promising at first it actually couldn't be used for any other Tick-Tock clock star because since they're all already present from stage load they can't be cloned collecting a star on a moving platform especially with conditions as precise as they need to be to save the re-entry a press was simply not possible for any other star May 2015 babam Battlefield had been mostly solved for over four years now ever since the 20 star 08 press tasks there was just one single lay press left but it was a tough one Mario Wings said the sky with its coins high up in the air always looked like one of those stars that would never be done in zero a presses it's impossible for Mario to start flying without a triple jump or a cannon shot both of which require an apress and wild shell hyperspeed could be used to reach the first three coins getting these two without flying was Unthinkable there was the outside possibility of using Goomba clones to reach the coins but because of the exponential nature of Goomba bridges that was quickly ruled out as impossible without a major breakthrough and a major breakthrough is exactly what happened just one week after spawning displacement panenkovic shocked the world when he put to use the latest advancements in Goomba engineering the Goomba cluster and Goomba Oasis I mentioned before that when Mario throws an object to help create a seamless transition during Mario's throwing animation the object is Warped at the hope but not to its exact position to be more precise the object is Warped 32 units ahead of the hole in whichever direction Mario is facing this means that if two objects are thrown remotely to the same hope while Mario is facing different angles the two objects will end up at slightly different positions Goombas with partially overlapping hitboxes can be interacted with one by one with the right positioning this is called the Goomba cluster in the past a Goomba Bridge had to be built by placing the hope for every Goomba causing the amount of goombas in a bridge to increase exponentially with its length with this new key development multiple Goombas could be released at the same hope but at slightly different angles allowing the Hulk to be reused therefore the bridge could be built by placing the Hope only once for every step of the bridge any given step of the bridge only required one Goomba clone for Every Step Beyond it causing the amount of goombas in the bridge to only increase quadratically with its length so a Bridge of length 8 that would have required 255 Goombas in the past only required 36 now but 36 Goombas is still a high enough number that you can't build two of those bridges without crashing the game so both coins had to be collected in one go just reaching the general area where the fourth and fifth coins were located wasn't enough there needed to be something there to help Mario stay in the air long enough to maneuver between the two coins this is where the Goomba Oasis came to save the day the idea is actually fairly simple transport cloning moves the object to the halfway point between its original position and the hope laterally but to the Hope's y-coordinate when the original object is a Goomba its original position isn't always the same like most enemies Goombas have a radius around their home in which they can run around freely therefore even if the hope is fixed two Goomba Clones released via transport cloning can end up in different locations in other words for any given hope in a Goomba's home Circle transport loaning can move that Goomba to a circle half the size of the original and halfway between the Goomba's home and the hope laterally at the Hope's height more specifically transport cloning could allow any amount of goombas to be placed anywhere inside of this circle using one single hole this is a Goomba Oasis here's exactly what panin did first he needed to place the Hope here at just about the fifth coin's height so that the resulting transport cloning Zone would cover the space around the fourth and fifth coins he did so by using 28 Goombas to build a Goomba Bridge of Bank 7 using Goomba clusters once the Hope was set in the correct spot he could pause exit and re-enter the level to get rid of all of these Goomba clones after collecting the first three coins with shell hyperspeed he could start cloning Goombas again he built a Goomba Oasis in this Zone by transport cloning seven Goombas from this Trio at various positions those would help guide Mario between the two highest coins if you look closely you'll notice that because of Transport cloning's limitations the Goombas are all at the exact same height which is the Hope's y-coordinate then he built a Goomba Bridge of length 8 to reach this point from the top of the mountain using 36 Goombas once everything was in place he could finally pull off this masterpiece to reiterate this a press save was made possible by the ability of the Goomba cluster and the Goomba Oasis to reuse one hope to place multiple Goomba clones which greatly lowers the amount of clones needed to move the hope and build complex Goomba structures meanwhile a tasker by the name of kaiman showed something interesting to the ABC crew entire dire docks if you end up holding a Whirlpool clone and release it Mario will spiral around it and die but if you release it right next to the loading zone and Mario crosses the plane as he's spiraling the whirlpool unloads and is replaced with another object Mario will then spin around this new object however because most of the time this new object is very far away the rotation quickly flings Mario out of bounds killing him instantly on paper given an object far out of Bounds at just the right place it would be possible for Mario to spin into the pole that leads to this boxed red coin but in reality such a scenario simply wasn't possible and so the idea as promising as it was was shelved for about a couple of days command had one clip that Tyler keaney and panonkoic couldn't make sense of where Mario ended up spinning wildly around the first area of the level what didn't make sense was that Mario seemingly warped across the entire map before he started spinning but then pattern realized what was happening the glitch isn't that Mario warps across the map is that he doesn't when he should this is no translation loading levels are always contained within the square between negative and positive 8192 in both directions dire dire dogs is bigger than that this is why it's cut up into two rooms with a loading zone in between the rooms occupy the same space in the coordinate system so the end of the tunnel in the first room doesn't line up with the same point in the second room when Mario crosses the loading trigger in the loaded area switches from one to the other he needs to be translated to the same location in the new room the offset happens to be 8192 units or half the size of the map this translation happens every time Mario crosses the loading trigger and it results in a seamless experience now if Mario is spinning around a Whirlpool clone he can end up crossing the loading zone in an unconventional way the whirlpool spins Mario towards out of bounds but he crosses the loading zone so he ends up in bounds in the new room the game tries to translate him to match the new coordinate system but doing so would Place him out of bounds unlike the rotation from the whirlpool which can send mayorada back accounts to loading zone translation can't put him out of bounds so he chooses not to move him at all this is how he ends up in the middle of the first room out of nowhere once he understood the implications of this discovery panicoy got to work and used it to save the a press to reach the final red coin he ended up finding a set of conditions that worked perfectly first he plays The Hope in the second room in the point that corresponds to just outside of the tunnel in the first room then he remote released a Whirlpool clone using the Hat in hand glitch when Mario gets caught in it he starts spinning towards out of bounds as he crosses the loading zone the translation Fail-Safe is triggered and so he ends up in the middle of this room now he would keep spinning around the whirlpool but it unloaded and was replaced by this cork box therefore he now spins around this box on an arc that conveniently happens to pass right on the corner of this platform fortunately Mario touching the floor interrupts the spin otherwise he would keep spinning to his eventual death from there he can reach the final red coin with no additional a-press note that for Mario to be able to swim with the shell in Clone stuff the a button needs to be held throughout so the star went from 1.5 to 0.5 apres is despite being well established in the ear button challenge the half a press notation never failed to confuse new viewers at the same time in Jolly Roger Bay pandan and Tyler were working on a way to pound the blue coin box without an a press for the 100 Coin Star they knew that a Goomba bounce would do the trick but these Goombas homes were too far from the box running into the Goombas could give a bit of extra distance but not enough to make it possible until Tyler found a clever abuse of the Goomba's mechanics called the Goomba Chase extension a Goomba chasing after Mario will quit chasing him if it moves too far from its home if Mario moves too far from its home or if Mario moves too far from the Goomba itself the Goomba chases Mario by setting its Target angle towards him however if the Goomba walks into a ledge a steep slope a wall or another Goomba it recalculates its current Target angle which means it's no longer targeting Mario after that it turns until it faces the new Target angle then stops chasing after carefully manipulating Goombas Patton was able to get a Goomba to chase Mario then run into the Rock then into the wall then into the other Goomba so before it has time to face its Target angle it runs into a new obstacle that causes it to recalculate its Target angle and extend its Chase finally it runs close enough to the box that Mario can bounce on it and save an a-press July 2015 the addition of Tyler Kinney to the ABC crew had ushered the a button challenge into a new golden era the introduction of vertical speed conservation misalignments and Star Dance Clips revolutionized a challenge like only pan and cook had done before in the past year and a half the a press count had been lowered by an incredible 80 percent from 208 to 40. while panikoic and Tyler were showing no signs of stopping each additional lay press was becoming harder and harder to save options were starting to dry out but Tyler Caney hadn't even made his most legendary contribution yet it was time for Mario to enter parallel universes foreign on July 11th Tyler Kinney was looking for ways to get even more speed than the 500 from repeatedly sliding on this slope he found this corner where the open gate created the ceiling barrier because he's walking uphill on a slippery slope Mario accelerates backwards but he's right up against the ceiling unlike walls ceilings don't push Mario sideways out of their hitbox if Mario is in the air and moves forward into a ceiling that will result in a bunk as a quick aside ceiling hitboxes technically extend infinitely upwards unless there's a floor above them the annoyance commonly referred to as invisible walls is actually caused by exposed ceilings that don't have a floor directly above them usually due to imperfect geometry when Mario is on the ground and about to enter a ceiling hitbox or out of bounds he simply doesn't move at all he still conserves his speed but he looks like he's pushing up against something and he stays in place this is what Tyler uses to accumulate hundreds of speed the underside of the gate is a ceiling that prevents Mario from moving into it once Mario has enough speed to complete bypass the ceiling he breaks out of this spot and zooms across the room into the water instead of the 500 speed the plush achieved using the Middle Island Mario now has 1700 speed but then Tyler found that Mario could turn around to have his back facing out of bounds the ceiling had a limit but out of bounds is infinite immediately this discovery was used to improve watch for Rolling rocks this star had always had the problem of requiring Mario to reach one of the highest points in the entire level despite the ABC crew's best efforts the intended wall kick strategy was still optimal so it had been sitting at two a presses since the dawn of time but this was about to change with so much stored speed Mario could simply do this foreign how does that work well again it's surprisingly Simple Mario exits water on dory's slippery back reactivating the stored sliding speed then he enters free fall and lands on the path as he lands he instantly jumps I've mentioned this before but this is now critically relevant the vertical speed of Mario's jump is a function of his horizontal speed the faster he goes the higher he jumps with 1500 speed one jump gives him enough vertical speed to sort the upper limit of the stage but if he has so much speed how come he jumps straight up because he Dives like I said before a dive increases Mario's speed by 15 up to a maximum of 48 while this 48 is a hard cap if Mario is moving at 33 speed or higher and he Dives regardless of how fast he was going his speed will be set to exactly 48. even though Mario jumps and dies on the same frame the initial vertical speed of his jump is calculated before the hard cap of 48th is applied to his horizontal speed so he inherits this astronomical vertical speed while stopping his horizontal momentum before he smashes against the edge of the map from there Mayu can slowly navigate above the level and fall into the star bringing down this relic of the past to one single a press with this new tool in hand His Image cave looks much more solvable than before the stage was down to three a presses in watch for Rolling rocks amazing emergency exit and the red Coin Star in order to make this newly found high speed in the cavern useful though there needed to be a way to bring the speed up the level without jumping the answer was simple just take the elevator but there was one problem when Mario has this much speed his next intended position is out of bounds so he can't move Mario ends up staying in place while the elevator moves through him until plush and Sonic Packer had something to say about it when Mario is about to go out of bounds only his horizontal displacement is canceled not his vertical Movement by kicking repeatedly Mario moves up and can stay on the elevator at the cost of a bit of speed in a half a press this allows Mario to go nearly anywhere in the level with a very high horizontal speed plus figured out a route that would carry Mario all the way up to amazing emergency exit but he ran out of speed a little too quickly and couldn't clip through the final door panonkowic took over and optimized it just enough to make it possible and bring the star down to 0.5 a presses meanwhile the red Coin Star could get the same treatment but Panna needed a tiny bit of height to get past this Gap and navigate to the Red Queen's room it was time to ask his old friend the scuttlebug for help up until now every enemy's home has always been a fixed point this is true for chakia Fly Guy Goombas Bob arms and scuttlebugs alike but there's an exception if a scuttlebug runs into Mario its home will move to its current position effectively redefining the Zone it can move in this can happen infinitely many times which means this Cuttlebug can move arbitrarily far provided that Mario has enough Health to take a beating fortunately there's a spinning heart right here unfortunately these Kettle bugs can't travel across the entire level at will they can't go through doors so they are actually confined to their room here though it wasn't necessary because Patton only needed the scuttlebug to move close to the door then he gathered some speed took the elevator up and bounced on the scuttlebug to cross the Gap and complete his trip to the red coin room another star brought to 0.5 of a presses the only star remaining was watch for Rolling rocks getting it down to one a press with Hyper Speed had been relatively simple but the task of bringing it to 0.5 was something else entirely although this platform could be reached like we saw earlier it could only be ledge grabbed which kills Mario's momentum it also wasn't high enough the watch for Rolling rocks platform is significantly higher padded coik wasn't deterred he still had a few ideas to make it work including Tyler Kinney's discovery of infinite speed with hyper speed walking it would require a lot more time and effort though and so that star remained at 1A press for the time being while it couldn't quite be used for watch for Rolling rocks infinite speed in hazy maze cave turned out to have an unexpected application it was used to solve one of the very few remaining trivial a presses of the entire Challenge and what is perhaps the starkest contrast between the complexity of the 1A press and the zero a press strategy entering the secret Aquarium buckle up because this is a big one first of all how can speed in one level have any effect on the castle interior again the key ingredient is sliding speed conservation swimming is a situation where sliding speed and horizontal speed no longer line up but it's not the only one during a stage transition like a death a pause exit or entering a pipe the horizontal speed is reset to zero but the sliding speed isn't in almost every case though the sliding speed is set to zero immediately after the transition so it makes no difference but in the case of a pause exit it's possible for Mario to crouch on the very first frame after the transition when Mario is crouching he automatically starts sliding if he has any momentum so by crouching immediately after a pause exit with stored sliding speed Mario can conserve that sliding speed through the stage transition however exiting a stage with storage sliding speed is not as simple as it looks Mario normally needs to be considered idle for the exit level option to be available in the first place if Mario is Idle then he is by definition not not moving it is nonetheless possible in a few specific cases where either the sliding speed isn't being updated such as when Mario is in water or holding onto a pole or it hasn't had time to update like on the first frame of a latch grab Landing from a twirl and a few others fortunately hazy maze cave has to Lake so Mario is able to accumulate some speed then conserve it into the castle lobby with the pause exit while he's in the water but how much speed does he need well the answer is complicated you see the goal is to reach the ledge of the secret Aquarium entrance without any vertical momentum to help to do that Mario needs to be moving from a high enough platform but as it turns out this Ledges the highest platform in the entire area the only place is high enough to be of any use are the one apocal of across the room the I'll go through the princess's secret slide and the hallway leading to Bowser in the Dark World between these the hallway to Bowser in the dark world is by far the easiest to reach and everything else is too low to attempt a ledge grab from Mario would need a very large amount of speed to travel pretty much instantly between those 4 points but it is technically possible the problem now is reaching this point with that amount of speed the only possible way of ascending up to the Bowser in a dark World hallway is to go up the central stairs of the lobby but with this much speed Mario can't get up the stairs he either gets stuck in place as he's trying to move out of bounds or he Zips through and into the hallway to the Courtyard once his speed is low enough to climb the stairs it can't be brought back up to do the ledge grab this Sprout looked impossible so Tyler Kinney and pen and quick had to think outside the box actually not outside the box outside the universe [Music] if you remember a misalignment is a one by one unit Square on the corner of a platform that exists because the floor detection function converts Mario's position from a 32-bit floating Point number by rounding it down to a 16-bit integer the limitations of 16-bit integers actually go both ways both in precision and in scale we've seen this with the water level overflow in wet dry world if you add one to an integer's maximum value of 32 767 the variable wraps around to its lowest possible value negative 32 768 and vice versa what happened with the water level can also happen with Mario's position but remember this conversion is only made specifically for the floor detection Mario's actual position always remains a floating Point number which can well exceed 32 000 up to basically Infinity if Mario's position exceeds the integer limit when it comes to detecting if Mario has a floor under him his position will be truncated to a number within the integer limit essentially his real position and the floor detection position become disjointed if the truncated integer position happens to line up with the floor no matter how far Mario's actual position is the floor detection function will say that yes Mario is standing on the floor but instead of thinking about it in terms of Mario having two different positions simultaneously it's easier to think of it as there being infinite copies of the entire map's floors 65 000 units away in every direction it doesn't matter that there isn't an actual copy of the floor out there so long as the game believes there's a floor Mario will be able to stand there functionally there's no difference these so-called infinite copies of the map are named parallel universes or pus for short because only the floor detection has this bug parallel universes have no objects no water no walls no textures only floors and ceilings the typical Map size is roughly 16 000 units so only about 1 16 of the total space is filled everything else is considered out of bounds and inaccessible the only way to reach a parallel universe is to have so much speed that Mario travels this distance instantaneously in a single frame once Mario reaches a parallel universe he must preserve this speed because if he loses it there's no way to get it back and return to the main map but in fact just having 65 000 speed is not enough to go to a parallel universe this is because of a quirk of Super Mario 64's physics when Mayo is trying to move his movement is subdivided in four steps called quarter steps for any given frame the game will check at each quarter step of the way for any obstacles whilst pushed Mario to the edge of their hitbox and allow him to keep moving but ceilings and out of bounds prevent Mario from moving altogether so if Mario only has enough speed to reach the first parallel universe the game will actually check one quarter of the way through and only finds out of bound so he will not be moved for Mario to be able to travel to a pu he needs each quarter step to be on a valid floor therefore he needs four times the speed or 262 000 and will travel through four pus in a single frame this is called one qpu now if Mario has a speed that is an exact multiple of 65 536 his floor detection position which we'll call his relative position stays exactly the same panenko called this the sinking speed as in this speed where his position syncs up with the pus by deviating slightly from the sinking speed Mario can travel relatively forwards and backwards by turning ever so slightly he can move relatively sideways but even the tiniest angle changes end up greatly magnified over pu distances this is the key to solving the movement to the Bowser in the Dark World hallway if Mario achieves PU speed he can have a relative speed that allows him to move slowly up the Lobby's staircase then wait for his speed to go down until it drops low enough to travel in the main map from the hallway across the ledge but the reality is a bit more complicated than that for two reasons first when Mario is moving with pu speed he's traveling absurd distances he needs to somehow be able to navigate these parallel universes in such a way that he's LED back to the main map at the end this problem can be solved with the right amount of planning which as it turns out is a [ __ ] ton of planning but the second more concerning problem is the staircase well actually the problem is that this is not a staircase because of the properties of all hitboxes this staircase is too steep to be a series of individual steps it would end up as a worse version of the staircase to the basement which already has some odd behavior due to the steps being too close to each other Instead This is a slope and like All Slopes it changes Mario's de facto speed as a quick refresher the de facto speed is the actual distance that bio travels which is a factor of the horizontal component of the slope he is currently on the steeper the slope the lower the de facto speed now when Mario steps on the slope with bu speed his lower de facto speed will cause him to attempt to move a shorter distance which no longer syncs up with the Pu and leaves him stuck in place in other words the sinking speed is not a fixed number it depends on the steepness of the slope that Mario is standing on the steeper the slope the higher the sinking speed needed to keep the de facto speed constant this specific slope has a sinking speed of 381 thousand so now Mario needs 262 000 speed to move on to the staircase then 381 000 speed to move up the staircase and back down to 262 000 to travel to the Bowser hallway once Mario leaves the hyper speed walking spot he can no longer gain any more speed again we've run into a deal breaker the solution simply build up more speed remember hyperspeed walking allows Mario to speed up slowly but infinitely so this is what pen and quick did he doubled up the initial speed to 524 000 so that Mario could travel 2 qpus per frame instead after conserving that speed into the castle Lobby he could reach the staircase then lower his speed down to 381 thousand go up the slope lower his speed again to 262 000 and move over to the Bowser hallway finally with the right speed he could snap back to reality right at the secret aquarium ledge and turn an incredibly simple a-press into an insane 25 hour marathon Yes you heard me right 25 hours doesn't matter though they saved an apress they saved the air press right right unfortunately this strategy which was obviously done on an emulator was not possible in the real Nintendo 64. when Mario travels to a parallel universe the camera tries to follow him which crashes the console every time unless you use the option to hold R to fix the camera in place in which case it is possible to navigate to a pu without crashing however you can't fix the camera in the castle interior so even that couldn't save them unlike everything that had been done thus far this strategy could not be replicated on a physical Nintendo 64. but what about Wii Virtual Console it is an official release and it is an emulator as it turns out VVC does not crash when the camera moves to a bu so this amazing a press save could technically live on so long as the challenge was to be done on the Weaver troll console release of the game not on Nintendo 64 but there's one little detail I told you to keep in mind spawning displacement used to save a re-entry a press in Tick-Tock clock is a Japanese exclusive glitch which does that mean the optimal lay button challenge was now limited to the Japanese VC release of the game surprisingly no in 1997 Nintendo released an updated Japanese version of the game with Rumble pack Support called the shindo version where backwards long jumping was famously patched and Mario's voice ruined this version also had all of the North American and pal version fixes including spawning displacement the Japanese VC release is the shindo version since no VC release can do spawning displacement switching to VC to save an a press lost a Tick-Tock lock re-entry a press save ultimately resulting in no improvement therefore despite this technically constituting an apra save it did not end up lowering the apres count in the meantime pattern code's YouTube channel was starting to Garner a lot of attention his most popular content wasn't the a button challenge but unrelated usually commentated videos about interesting discoveries like collecting The fabled Impossible coin or exploring the secrets of the Mystery Goomba he began to cement his place in the YouTube sphere as an expert Super Mario 64 scientist but nothing he had published before got as much press and public attention than the tick tock [ __ ] upward The Story Goes Like This kaiman had stumbled upon an old twitch video from 2013 of a speedrunner named DOTA teabag who saw Mario inexplicably warp significantly upwards in Tick Tock lock this was potentially groundbreaking because an upwork of this magnitude that seemingly didn't require the a button could reshape the future of the a button challenge particularly in Tick-Tock clock of all places the potential was so huge that panin decided to put a 1 000 Bounty for whoever could replicate the glitch in an emulator and provide an input file that could be analyzed to make sense of this anomaly money speaks and so thousands of people for the most part completely inexperienced haphazardly smashed their face against the wall hoping for the golden ticket to the top of the clock there was little information to go by other than a somewhat mediocre quality video but with such a revolution right around the corner the collective motivation to crack the mystery was enormous countless news articles were written about it even as recently as 2021 Derek Mohler from veritasium covered the subject in a video with over 17 million views But as time went on with no one managing to get anywhere close to replicating it the ABC crew realized that there had to be another explanation years after the fact the commonly accepted explanation is a hardware malfunction causing a bit flip at Mario's vertical position flipping a specific bit in the position in similar conditions achieves just about the same exact result that was observed back then the popular explanation is a cosmic ray but the exact cause behind the bitflip is impossible to know for sure as promising as it initially looked this discovery ended up shelved as a one-off hardware issue that could not be used in speedruns or the a button challenge nonetheless there was still one Tick-Tock clock discovery that ended up crucial for the challenge the Petro spot originally found in cool cool Mountain by Pedro Victor in November 2014 a Pedro spot is a point where a floor and a ceiling meet in a very specific way when Mario lands onto a petrol spot he would snap up to the floor but that point is inside the ceiling hitbox which prevents him from moving the landing action happens before the collision with the ceiling so Mario doesn't Bonk on it but since Mario is prevented from moving he stays suspended in mid-air from this odd double State he can both jump and ground pound but also he can build up forward speed without moving similarly to hyper speed walking this is limited by the geometry around him at high enough speeds he ends up breaking out of the spot with no ability to turn or otherwise redirect Mario's speed petrol spots are a bit Limited in what they can achieve but when Tyler canney found a petrol spot here in Tick Tock Clock he realized it had excellent potential to bring stomp on the thwam's 7A presses down Mario couldn't get in position by himself he needed the bob-omb to push him into place the clock also had to be on the still setting which meant that the Spinners typically used to travel up the clock with the Baba in zero a presses could not be used instead four a presses were required to jump up an instant release was used to place the Baba Mata bounds to be reactivated near the cogs at first glance that seems terrible but what comes next more than makes up for it Mario uses the babam to push himself into the petrol spot once he builds up over 800 speed he's ready to do a jump dive again with so much speed he jumps extremely high but the dive caps his forward speed at 48 instantly that's enough to get all the way up to the top of the clock where one final lay press gets him the star and brings stumbled that one from 7 down to 6A presses in response to the ever increasing interest for his commentated videos patentcook decided that a button challenge improvements should have accompanying explanations with voice commentary so he made one for stump of the thwomp he carefully broke down every element of the strategy for casual viewers to understand the Hope instant release the outer bounds failsafe the federal spot and the high-speed jump dive it was received with high praise and excitement by his growing fan base in June 2015 panenkoic was exploring Scatterbug transportation and trying to get a scuttlebug to go through a door his attempts proved mildly successful he was able to get one scuttlebug to clip through a door but then it was stuck next to the door and would deactivate as soon as Mario stepped away while playing around with this pattern found that he could get the Shuttle Bug to jump up repeatedly by running in and out of its activation Zone he had discovered scuttlebug racing the way this works is similar to The Mechanics I've used for the chakia drop and Fly Guy manipulation in levels with multiple rooms the inside of a room is only loaded when Mario is in it or when he's standing close to a door leading to it therefore a scuttlebug in one room gets deactivated as soon as Mario steps away from the door outside of that room this was used before in Metal Head Mario Can Move similarly to the Fly Guy and checkia a scuttlebug also has a limited range of actions when it's deactivated although it won't move it can still turn in lunge at Mario if he enters the radius around its home once the scuttlebug is reactivated it will perform that lunge if Mario deactivates the scuttlebug in the middle of the launch it will stay in midair then another lunge can be triggered and the scuttlebug can jump again when reactivated this process can be repeated indefinitely and the scuttlebug can jump up arbitrarily high this development seems relatively insignificant it's anything but that the final piece of the puzzle was in place the last hazy mace gave apres was ready to be taken off watch for Rolling rocks in 0.5 a presses was possible the entire route is a culmination of every discovery made in the past year first scuttlebug Transportation was used to move this kettlebug below the platform where the star is then scuttlebug raising was used to make it jump up the exact position of the scuttlebug's home is crucial here the cylinder around its home partially intersects with the area near the door where the scuttlebug is activated Mario can enter the radius without activating the Shuttle Bug which triggers a delayed lunge then as Mario steps out of the home cylinder the scuttlebug turns back towards its home when Mario reactivates the scuttlebug it lunges past its home when the process is repeated the scuttlebug now turns the other way to jump back towards its home as it jumps back and forth the result isn't moving straight up over time once the Scatterbug is in the correct position patent quick moves on to the next part of the plan he goes to the lake and builds up speed with hyper speed walking making sure to redirect it out of bounds he builds up speed for 12 hours until he has 479 000 using the properties of de facto speed he is able to navigate up the path to the elevator using floor triangles with decreasing steepnesses so that the sinking speed gradually comes down over time remember objects aren't present in parallel universes so Mario needs to return to the main map to board the elevator this was made Complicated by qpu alignment in short while Mario has enough speed to travel 4pus in one frame he doesn't necessarily complete all four quarter steps of his movement action Mario only moves up to the last valid quarter step in a frame if a quarter step leads him out of bounds because the slope changed or because he's not quite at the sinking speed he can end up moving by a fraction of his total speed doing so misaligns him with regular full-frame movements and he has to do another other partial movement to get back to the main map the Pu navigation had to be painstakingly planned out so that everything would line up in the end just like last time Mario uses repeated kicks to activate and to stay on the elevator once he reaches the height of the next elevator Mario quickly travels to a pu and back to effectively warp across the map this second elevator takes him up to the highest point he can reach Panic quick sets up his position in parallel universes in preparation for the final move and then he returns to the main map on the scuttlebug that he previously positioned so that he can bounce on it this actually still isn't enough to reach the platform so he places himself in a unit precise spot and ground pounds into a misalignment at the corner of the platform and this is watch for Rolling rocks in 0.5 a presses the final lay press in hazy maze cave gone as soon as patent quick pieced everything together for the Cypress save he knew it had incredible potential for a detailed explanation with commentary and visuals however College was taking up his time and so despite figuring out all the steps to do the star in October he didn't actually work on the project until the holidays when Christmas came he realized that while planning and passing such a complex star already was a time consuming and energy draining process creating this Behemoth of a video explanation turned out to be even more taxing but the project had already been shelved for two months so with college starting again in two weeks he decided to press on he pressed on he had to get it done he worked tirelessly day in day out but in the end he pressed himself too hard panikoic was in a terrible mental space he was struggling through issues in his personal life and working on this video was not an escape it was a Purgatory in the end what should have been a passion project turned out to be the canalization of his own mental suffering he completed the entire task in the accompanying video in about 140 hours over two short weeks he should have been immensely proud of his work he didn't feel Pride he didn't feel accomplished he felt nothing pennant was used to his videos going viral but nothing could prepare him for what would become of watch for Rolling rocks as it went viral it instantly exposed the a button challenge to hundreds of thousands of people for the first time in their lives these viewers first impression of the a button challenge was this the incredibly thorough 24-minute piece was approachable yet utterly unbelievable it was so many levels beyond what anything these people had ever seen that they couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all scuttlebug Transportation half a presses building speed for 12 hours parallel universes qpu alignment every single concept of the video seemed like made up nonsense in some over-the-top absurdist humor yet all of it was real watch for Rolling rocks in 0.58 presses rapidly became not just a meme but a family of memes that played on the chasm between casual gameplay and top level speed runs or tool assisted runs the ABC crew members were not just Geniuses there were the gods of Super Mario 64. to this day the video has over 4 million views and the memes that stemmed from it made their way into unexpectedly far reaches of the internet meanwhile pananco expand the winter semester mentally recovering from his breakdown during the holidays part of that recovery process was establishing that the pressure he was putting on himself to always improve the production value of his channel was destructive he realized that this mindset would ultimately lead him into a spiral of ever increasing workloads until nothing would ever get done again with the unprecedented success of the latest ABC video public pressure on him to keep creating similar content was mounting memes about half a presses in scuttlebug jamborees repaired it in every comment section of not just his videos but pretty much every Super Mario 64 video out there pananquick was being reminded of the video and its nightmarish production cycle at just about every corner his mental scars were still fresh so he knew there was no way he would make anything that the scale of watch for Rolling rocks until he would actually feel ready to undertake the project it's widely believed that the memes were the reason pananco equipped making commentated videos but they actually were a tiny factor in the equation the main reason behind it is quite simply that he doesn't enjoy making voice commentary and making such videos represented too much tedious work unless they were exceptionally worth it so after releasing that video he decided to switch his mindset a button Challenge videos would go on his secondary Channel which he renamed uncommentated pattern and where he felt zero pressure to make high effort content the first step was to release a bunch of ABC improvements he had been holding on to since the discovery of scuttlebug raising in October until he could get around to making commentated explanations so on January 13 2016 he dumped five improvements at once then went relatively inactive in the Abundant challenge for the better part of the year instead focusing on glitch documentation and explanation videos on his secondary Channel every improvement from panin's backlog stemmed from the discovery of scuttlebug raising it helped eliminate the halfway press left and the two other hazy maze cave stars that used hyper speed in elevators first amazing emergency exit solved by raising a scuttlebug for half an hour until it would jump into the right spot for Mario to bounce across at the star and second the red Coin Star he could manipulate it from the first room but only if the scuttlebug was in the perfect position to get it in the perfect spot he had to go down in the red Queen's room to go back to the first room he needed to cross this Gap in no a presses thankfully two Scuttle bugs could be transported over and Mario could bounce on them both or go back to the Red coin's Room from there just one hour of scuttlebug raising was sufficient to have the scuttlebug follow Mario to Dismount the pole saving another half a press the other applications of scuttlebug grazing were in Big Boost haunt and they were a bit more involved here 1A press was left to grab the star in the Merry-Go-Round and one was required to reach the top floor of the match for both big Buu's balcony and eye to eye in the secret room let's start with Big Boo's Merry-Go-Round panan got his cattle bug into a specific spot against the side of the mansion with scuttlebug Transportation then by alternating between going near the scuttlebug to get it to turn around and activating it by standing by the front door panin was able to raise the scuttlebug how much does he raise it do you ask well only about 10 times sorry 10 hours after 10 hours the scuttlebug is so high up that it has entered a vertical parallel universe vertical parallel universes or vpus for short function slightly differently than regular pus do here is the vertical position that overflows rather than the horizontal position the result is different for Mario than it is for enemies so let's look at what happens specifically to the scuttlebug when it reaches a vpu when the position initially overflows the scuttlebug's floor detection doesn't find any floor under itself so Its Behavior becomes a bit more erratic instead of turning towards Mario it spins in place Place pennant can still keep raising it just fine despite that limitation once it gets even higher it reaches the Mansion relatively in the vpu but floors and ceilings are not solid so it can keep racing through and above the virtual map once it's high enough pattern reactivates the Scatterbug and it jumps down again because floors and ceilings are not solid in vpus the scuttlebug goes through the level and into the basement where it collides with the wall contrarily the regular pus vpus do have solid walls and they have a peculiar property when this Cuttlebug collides with the wall it gets snapped to the Wall's height in the main map to summarize the Scatterbug is raised for 10 hours until it enters a vertical parallel universe so it can fall through the floor and reach a position relative to the merry-go-round in the basement then it collides with a wall that snaps it back to the main map at the same time Mario leaves this cuttlebug's activation range so it stops moving there when Mario enters the Merry-Go-Round The scuttlebug Remains deactivated because it's hard-coded to belong to the outside of the Mansion no matter where it actually is despite being deactivated and invisible the scuttlebug is still tangible so Mario can bounce on it and reach the star the other application of scuttlebug raising was to reach the highest floor of Dimension the idea is quite similar but instead three different Scuttle bugs are moved to roughly the same location and simultaneously raised for 13 hours into a vpu after reactivating them pattern precisely guides them into the room leading to the top floor where they collide with a wall that snaps them back to the main map after a little bit of additional manipulation he's able to stagger them in a staircase leading to the upper ledge again because the Scuttle bugs belong to the exterior when he goes near them they're invisible and stuck in me there but they are still tangible instead of a side flip and two bookend bounces patentco accuses one bookend to get up on this step then the other bookend and the three carefully positioned scuttlebugs to reach the top floor and save the two final lay presses in Big Boost haunt during 2016 despite the relative inactivity of the ABC crew thanks to the universal Acclaim of watch for Rolling rocks the a button challenge saw a large influx of fans eager to contribute to new strategy developments the crew grew larger and larger but so much work had already been done that it would take a long time for newcomers to start making any meaningful progress or maybe all it took was just to look at the star with a fresh pair of eyes I've left the best Improvement for last Wing Mario Over the Rainbow this star was famously used by Pat and koik as an example to demonstrate the half a press notation two a presses were very clearly needed to shoot the cannon twice in order to get all the red coins but in order to reach the first cannon a halfway press was also required so that Mario would fall down slower to the Canon platform until Super Mario 64 expert sm-64 expert found this yep that's it instead of just running up if you do a dive recover before the slight geek you have just enough speed to make it without the slower fall near the end of 2016 what used to be just a small group of friends calling themselves the ABC crew is now a full-blown Community millions of people had heard of the a button challenge panel cook was a superstar tens of thousands were following developments closely celebrating each new upload even if it was all on a secondary Channel by then but soon enough the wave of newcomers realized something their task at hand was Monumental the apress count was now at 32 exactly half of those were for Tick-Tock clock alone and the other half for the rest of the entire game this was the dawn of the modern era an era defined by the seemingly hopeless uphill battle of solving Tick-Tock clock foreign was still in a period of relative inactivity despite some developments being made in 2016 nothing was released until November when he put out a pair of improvements that had been discovered months prior the first one was in Jolly Roger Bay the sidewall of the ship is actually not always a wall this is because the status of floor wall or ceiling is not an inherent property of a given triangle it depends on its orientation a triangle that is facing generally upwards is a floor one that is facing downwards is a ceiling and any triangle facing sideways is a wall but as it turns out for a triangle to be treated as a wall it needs to be nearly perfectly vertical as soon as it tilts just a little bit it becomes a floor or a ceiling as the ships waist to one side this wall temporarily becomes a floor for just long enough that Mario can frame walk up it was refreshing for the ABC crew to stumble upon a relatively simply press save little did they know that this would be the final one the other development came in Tick Tock Clock while in the past the ABC had done its fair share of RNG manipulation when dealing with chakia Goombas and moving coins these baby steps paled in comparison to the most advanced form of RNG abuse yet pendulum manipulation on the random setting the clock's moving Parts rely heavily on the RNG value to determine their pattern the pendulum is one of them however Its Behavior is pretty Bare Bones at the end of each swing it calls the RNG function two-thirds of the time it swings slowly one third of the time it swings faster the pendulum accelerates until its angle goes beyond zero at which point it slows down at the same speed ending up at roughly the same angle on the other side no matter if it swings fast or slow this fact doesn't change the pendulum always has the same somewhat narrow range of motion until something strange happens because the pendulum accelerates until its angle goes beyond zero if it somehow passes directly at the 0 it will accelerate on that frame and start slowing down on the next however when it comes back the other way if it passes at zero again it would also keep accelerating for one more frame effectively if the pendulum is on either side it will experience a force pulling towards the center but if it's exactly in the center it will experience a force in the same direction as its movement resulting in a net increase in total energy the pendulum's range of motion therefore keeps increasing for each swing passing through zero now two questions remain how does the pendulum suddenly start passing through angle zero and how can it keep passing through angle 0 repeatedly well those are really just the same question how can we manipulate the pendulum to do exactly what we want when the pendulum chooses a fast or slow swing the option it chooses slightly changes where it will cross the middle point and therefore where it will stop on the other side if the acceleration was a fixed value like on the slow fast and still settings the pendulum would always swing between the same two plates in fact whatever the random pendulum chooses the same speed twice in a row it returns precisely to the same point after two swings but if it chooses a different speed on every swing the slight variation in where it crosses the Middle Point causes the pendulum to never quite return to the same position every time similarly the point where the pendulum crosses the center slightly oscillates around the middle all that's left is to keep alternating speeds until the pendulum happens to line up exactly at angle 0. it takes 291 swings to get there once it gets there what you want is the opposite now you want the pendulum to keep Crossing angle 0 on every swing so the pendulum has to choose the same speed on every swing to keep gaining momentum the actual manipulation part is pretty simple if only a bit tedious the RNG function is a complex operation that basically takes a number from 0 to 65 535 and spits out the new seemingly unrelated number it iterates upon itself which means means that the output from one call becomes the input for the next call a given input always yields the same output for example 2044 always yields 129 which always returns 15937 and so on therefore the RNG function is a closed loop once an output is the same as a previous input the loop is closed and the values cycle in the same exact order the full loop starts at 0 and contains 65 114 numbers every time the function is called the value Advance is one step through the loop this can happen multiple times in a single frame depending on how many objects are calling RNG at any given time thankfully there's one simple way for Mario to call RNG on demand kicking up dust to determine their exact position dust clouds call the RNG function therefore by choosing to generate dust Mario has direct control over the RNG to a certain degree because the pendulum only caused a function at the end of each swing there is plenty of time in between Queen to manipulate RNG to a desired value this is what pandan quick does once up on this platform he kicks up dust to get the pendulum to cycle through the 291 swings until it crosses angle 0 and starts gaining momentum now that pendulum manipulation is in full swing the pendulum's range of motion keeps increasing until it swings through the ceiling and onto the next floor then Mario rides that swinging pendulum up and brings down time jumps on moving bars from 4 down to three a presses unfortunately pendulum manipulation ended up only being useful in this spot since other pendulums couldn't provide any meaningful help from swinging outside of their usual range in June 2016 a Tasser by the name of Zimbabwe posted a comment on patented Quick's video about the pit and the pendulums in two apresses she said can this be done on the random setting it's possible to do a kick off the wall while grabbing the star and fall all the way down to the red coin platforms I think this could save an apress that comment got lost in the sea of empty claims panin was subject to all the time he couldn't replicate what this comment was talking about so he dismissed the idea just like the hundreds of other empty claims that came before and since it took until November for plush to look into the matter but when he did he found out that Zimbabwe was absolutely right she had found a way to save one more a press using a trick called Kick recoil momentum thanks to a convenient pendulum Mario is able to kick the wall and pick up the star simultaneously normally picking up a star zeros out Mario's horizontal speed but kicking the wall gives him a lot of backwards momentum he then falls down with the star with that momentum which is just barely enough to reach the lowest spinner and end this stage on their rotating platform spawning displacement does the rest of the work and a second Tick-Tock clock re-entry a press was saved this also broke the tie between the Japanese Nintendo 64 version and the VC version returning the original release to the spot of single best version for the a button challenge 2017 was a transitional year even though the community was bubbling with activity the actual challenge itself had its most quiet years since 2012. instead people were busy learning more about the game and developing new tools specifically danbu and pan and cook along with a few occasional other contributors created the Super Mario 64 technical runtime Observer and object processor Stroop Stroop is basically Ram watch on steroids it runs alongside the emulator and keeps track of every useful piece of memory it also has the ability to hack in arbitrary values in every way of visualizing data Under the Sun it took years of shaping up to make troops such a robust and versatile tool but the result is worth the investment from this point onwards the Super Mario 64 tassing Community as a whole benefited from the incredible work of danbu panenkoic and everyone else who worked on Stroop so by the end of the year the ABC Community was fully ready to tackle the remaining 28a presses I say 28 depresses because 2017 did have one single Improvement by either Sons on stomp on the thwomp the Pedro spot 6A press method had to use an extra jump at the end because the angle Mario was coming at was not good enough to reach the star directly either son simply found a better position in angle for the petrol spot that did allow for a direct jump to the star and that was the Improvement of the year but while 2017 was dry for the ABC it also saw an unlikely Resurgence the return of real-time runs ever since Bob Mario's flamboyant entrance in 2007 the interest for real-time ABC had fallen drastically in favor of tool assisted super plays the ABC was seen more as a puzzle than a test of skill that changed when bat boot took on the task of beating the game with 70 stars in a single segment in his few a presses as possible this had never been attempted before the only thing that came close was Chris oldfield's 10 stars in no way presses 16 years earlier which was only marginally beaten by a Japanese Runner Altair with 12 stars in 2011. so much had improved since then but on the other hand so many techniques were incredibly precise and could never be replicated with human hands in a controller misalignments that require lining up with a one by one unit Square cloning which requires tons of object slot manipulation and precision RNG and enemy manipulation and any kind of hyperspeed technique which were all this addedly off limits the task was Monumental but bad boot was up to it on September 24 2017 he sat down and gave it his best he pressed on for over five hours as always time was very much a secondary concern when bat boot defeated the final Bowser and collected the Giant star his total lay breast count read 46. he made a few mistakes along the way he used 38 plan day presses and Aid to retry sections where he fell but overall this was a surprisingly good first attempt and a very high bar for others to clear a month later bad boot gave it another solid shot this time he had refined his strategy a little bit he got his planned a press count down to 34 before the run and it went even better than last time he made zero mistakes in the entire run he did choose to add 1A press first kill the mountain instead of having to resort to the cloning strategy with the preset hope in tiny huge island for his own sake so after a bit less than 5 hours this time bad boot had beaten Super Mario 64 with 70 stars and only 35 a presses This Record was incredibly good although it obviously didn't include the most advanced task only solutions it still made the use of cloning to start ends clip frame walking and plenty of crazy tricks the Run was so good that it stood as the 70 star record for years meanwhile other players were interested in the individual star approach the starting point was nearly 10 years old and well over 2008 presses the strategies had evolved beyond recognition in that time with all this modern knowledge at hand Runners Billy War Lord snack the real Zion ivan-178 and a few others including patent quick himself started chipping away at the count they crossed a 200 Mark in November 2019. 2020 saw the most activity with a total dropping from 180 in March to 116 in November finally the 100 barrier was broken on July 27 2021 and the most recent improvement from as recently as December 12 2022 brought the abras count to 78. in the process some truly incredible achievements were done like the pit and the pendulums in only three a-presses using super precise platforming to climb up the clock and to grab the star somehow this is not even the most impressive part of the run to get off this bowl Billy War sent a bob through a preset Hope High up in the air so it would reactivate and fall on top of him knocking him off the pole another impressive feat was pulling off The hyper-speed Walking and jump dive in real time to get watch for Rolling rocks and amazing emergency exit in 1A press each done by Billy war and ivan178 and perhaps even crazier is Big Boo's Merry-Go-Round and zero a presses something that even tatters only managed in 2015 using 10 hours of scuttlebug raising it was done in real time in August 2021 by Billy War using just a couple minutes of scuttlebug raising and running into the scuttlebug with a crazy box taking damage while holding a crazy box acts like instant release it transports the box to the hole laterally but at Mario's height using the Hat in hand glitch prevents the crazy bugs from rendering and updating the Hope by setting the hope at the right location beforehand Billy War sent the crazy box above the Merry-Go-Round where it deactivated after spawning the star he reactivated the crazy box and managed to grab it before it would fall to the ground and break he then bounced into the star which completed the zero a press run sometimes the real-time ABC crew got very creative and found much simpler Solutions in what Pat and koik had done years before in the Deep Freeze was solved by bad boot when to replace the Tass only shell hyperspeed strategy he simply learned a Spindrift and bounced on it as far as full game runs go the real-time ABC needed a bit of extra motivation so pan and cook announced a bounty in October 2020 for people to beat bat boots 35. pennan was giving out 50 per a press saved over the standing world record until the end of 2020. in the next couple of months three players scrambled to get their Ray press count Lower first came brqm on November 7th he fired up a run with a route that would ideally get him 26 A presses after a few minor mistakes along the way he ended up in Bowser in the sky 9 hours into the run with 24 a presses if he closed it out perfectly he could Edge out the record by three but he couldn't handle the pressure all it took was one bad fall sadly one fall turned into many and frustration took over he finished the run with 55. the next day Billy War strung from his work on individual Stars also set out to beat the record his run went exceedingly well he entered Bowser in the sky after only 11 he presses he didn't choke in the most stressful part of the Run he closed it out in just 21 total a presses actually not quite after failing the Star Dance clip to enter hizime's cave he had to reset to retry it causing his a press counter to lose eighth a presses his real total was actually 29. still he had beaten the record by sexypresses and achieved pretty much exactly what he had set out to do at the end of November a new Runner by the name of purple Juice Box entered the field after a nine hour long effort he managed to beat the record by another three a-presses again the a press counter is wrong because of a reset this time due to technical difficulties in December purple Juice Box continued to refine his strategies until the very end of the month mean meanwhile brqm was back with the Vengeance on December 27th he did a run with an incredibly demanding 17 a press route he lost six along the way but he was in Bowser in the sky on a 23A press base but disaster is struck again and the record slipped from his hands once more brqm finished his run with 2080 presses just shy of the record with less than 48 hours to go on December 30th purple juice box was ready to take on another run this time with a 21A press route he executed it near flawlessly purple Juice Box beat Super Mario 64 in four and a half hours using 22A presses one single extra apress was used at the start of Bowser in the sky and that is where the record stands today the 120 star category was deemed a bit too daunting by the real-time ABC Runners it took until October 2021 for Billy War to take on the challenge he put together a route that would ideally get 163 a presses he ended up scoring 53 over that finishing out with 216. this record still stands finally another category held the attention of real-time Runners Max stars in zeroa presses since Crystal Fields 10 in 2001 in altera's 12 in 2011 so much had changed technically up to 25 stars were now possible without buzzer in the Dark World which was still Tass only players battled in 2020 to get as close as possible to the maximum a battle that was ultimately won by Zion on January 12 2021 when he got all 25 possible stars and put this category to rest or so he thought on February 16 2022 Ivan 178 completed Bowser in the Dark World with red coins in zero a presses in real time yes that star with the VSC yes that star with the misalignment yes that star with the frame walking up the Seesaw platform a month and a half later he would get 34 stars in zero a presses thanks to the extra stars in the basement to this day Ivan 178 is still the only player to complete Bowser in the Dark World in zero a presses in real time and he has sole control over this record as a result and this is where the real-time a button challenge is today after being dormant for 10 years a small community formed around it and its members are still lowering the apress count on a regular basis March 2018 the first Improvement of the Year came in Jolly Roger Bay and was the result of slow incremental progress over many years by pan and koik Tyler Katie and Maria Nicole first Mario frame walks up the pole to quickly gain a lot of sliding speed then he gains a little bit more on the bottom of the pole using a new technique called Hyper Speed punching normally if Mario is moving fast enough pressing B will make him dive but Mario can still punch at high speeds by using a slight control stick tilt on the frame he punches instead of a Full Tilt during the punching action Mario experiences a lower friction than usual if he's standing on a steep enough slope the downwards acceleration can overpower this unusually low friction causing him to gain speed thanks to Sliding speed conservation he can reactivate that speed to quickly slide up the pole Tyler Kinney had the idea of using another punch to lose less speed while sliding up the extra speed at the top of the pole combined with the precise dive proved to be just enough to reach the plan form and save the a press then two months went by without any improvements time and effort were being poured into complex a press saves but nothing came to fruition for a while until the Fateful night of May 26 2018 when an unsuspecting speedrunner by the name of Andrew after practicing movement in Bowser in the fire sea decided to go to bed while leaving his console on overnight the next morning he found something strange the platforms had risen from the lava significantly over the next week a Matt Dash ensued as the community tried to understand and replicate this everyone fired up their game and impatiently waited for something to happen in Bowser in the fire sea Andrew was playing on Wii Virtual Console which was immediately suspected as being relevant it quickly became apparent that the suspicions were correct whatever caused the platforms to rise from the lava seemed to be unique to the Wii VC release this made testing more inconvenient because emulators could not replicate the issue within just a few hours bad boot had pinpointed the cause of the glitch the Nintendo 64 console and emulators when performing a specific operation on float numbers round the result towards the nearest float number whereas VVC truncates the float effectively rounding the result towards zero because the platforms are at a negative y value as they bob up and down their height ever so slightly drifts upwards the problem is for them to rise up enough to become useful for the a button challenge that rounding error needs to happen roughly 8 million times this takes about three days of real time multiple excited community members such as Emilia Barry wanted 59 and switch Palace Corner began live streaming on Twitch as they left their Wii on for days watching the platforms rise up like grass growing despite both Technical and skill issues leading to multiple failures one thing became very clear this new glitch worked the rest of the stage was a bit different now that the other syncing platforms also drifting towards zero had sunken completely through the floor leaving a very inhospitable fire sea but Patton had no issue navigating that thanks to the safe Zone on the edges the very last a press in 70 star was finally solved Super Mario 64 was beatable without using the a button the solution to get off the pole in Bowser in the fire C was to bypass the pole entirely after just a couple of days danbu made a modified version of mupin 64 that replicated the rounding error found in weavc so panicoic was able to make a proper task to get the red coins he simply entered the Bowser fight to reset the platforms back to normal then use the regular strategy found in 2014. of course this a press save came with a massive caveat again it was exclusive to we the achievement of solving the a button challenge completely for 70 star felt a little Hollow because it was abusing a glitch only present in an inaccurate emulated re-release this also brought weevc back on par with Japanese Nintendo 64 for 120 Stars since there were now two different apras saves unique to E's version that canceled out but the tie wouldn't last very long just three weeks later with help from Bad boot to figure things out and from Pat and cook to string everything together Tyler akini unveiled the most Off the Wall insane ABC achievement yet entering the secret aquarium in zero a presses without parallel universes [Music] before we begin I want to mention that this next section is heavily based on the excellent video on bat boots Channel about this a press save the known strategy to enter the secret aquarium had one simple problem to get from here to there Mario needs more speed than he can possibly have and still be able to get from here to here with pu speed not being an option there had to be another solution that solution was the Glitchy ledge grab no not that glitchy ledge grab the other kind if you remember to determine if Mario should grab a ledge the game checks for a wall at two points 30 units and 150 units above Mario's position on their staircase leading to Bowser in the sky there are two ledges next to each other the game checked for a while at the lower ledge then checked for a floor of the higher ledge this type of glitchy let's grab is a bit different the while below the ledge of the secret aquarium is ever so slightly tilted between the points at 30 and 150 units the wall tilts away from Mario by one quarter of a unit so there's a gap of the same size Where the wild check finds a wall at 30 units but not at 150 units which triggers the floor check for let's grab like we've seen before this check can find the floor all the way up to 238 units above Mario's position allowing Mario to grab the ledge from a lower height but how much lower well enough to make coming in from this location viable and that was all they needed to solve the puzzle well not quite there was just one simple problem sure Mario could get from here to there with a lower speed than before but there's no way to accurately guide Mario directly to the right spot below the ledge with such high speed the angle required is simply unattainable with that amount of speed thankfully sitting right there is the perfect way to redirect Mario to an arbitrary angle a text box text boxes preserve Mario's speed but once that text is cleared he can turn to face any angle instantly redirecting that speed to the new angle this along with precise speed and positioning in front of the door does allow Mario to grab the ledge but there was one simple problem this text box is only here if Mario doesn't have enough stars to open the door therefore Mario must have zero Stars it turns out this simple problem is a major issue because it rules out hyper speed walking in hazy maze cave the method to enter hazy maze cave requires getting a star from mips which also only shows up if Mario already has 15 Stars if Mario can't enter hazime's cave he can't carry infinite speed into the castle Lobby what other level could be used well not many with zero Stars only Bob and Battlefield is accessible there's also a way to reach vanish cap under the mode but that one turns out not to be very helpful within babam Battlefield shell hyperspeed immediately comes to mind but there's just one simple problem the shell isn't available until after getting stars 1 and 2 in the level so it can't be used instead sea up sliding saves a day as a refresher when sea up is pressed on a downward slope Mario slides to a stop but the slope overpowers the friction from sliding resulting in a net acceleration this is enough for Mario to gain over 200 speed from there Tyler Caney was able to bounce Mario to a tree in pause exit which conserves Mario's sliding speed however 230 speed is nowhere near the 900 or so required for secret aquarium instead it's used to send Mario to Bowser in the dark world without the required 8 Stars the first key can be obtained and the basement is now unlocked in the basement two more levels are accessible lethal lavalant and shifting sand land let's turn our attention towards the latter in here shell hyperspeed could generate a few hundred speed but again it's not enough this time Hyper Speed punching saves the day in this corner of shifting sand land the visual geometry doesn't match the actual level geometry everything in this zone is out of bounds when Mario stands here in punches he accelerates forwards but stays in place because he's attempting to move out of bounds so long has he punches frame perfectly he can build up infinite speed in this corner however there's one simple problem as soon as Mario stops punching he immediately and instantly loses all but 32 speed thankfully by pressing Z at the right time Mario starts sliding instead which does conserve his speed for one frame at least after one frame Mario's sliding speed is capped to a hundred but sliding also turns Mario slightly with the right angle this can turn Mario towards a valid position in bounds after one frame Mario ends up in the corner of the level which happens to have a lower floor than the hyper speed punching spot so Mario enters free fall and gets to keep his high speed and now he gets to face several problems first of all with 45 000 speeds Mario is going way too fast the target speed here is on the order of 2000 secondly he's also headed face first towards out of bounds while in the air so he's about to Bonk last but not least even if he could get out of this spot Mario needs a way to conserve his sliding speed into the castle Lobby through a pause exit solving all three problems was a stroke of pure genius from Tyler Caney and batboot the first problem was solved with a Koopa shell clone a shell clone functions like a normal shell except that the Clone stays in place and Mario rides an invisible shell it can also be reused in fact it's used three different times in this level the shell was used here for an important property if Z is pressed while Mario is riding a shell he starts Crouch sliding again there's one small problem this doesn't work if Mario is Airborne but thankfully on the first frame where Mario's on the shell the game doesn't check for that condition and Mario can press Z the crowd slide despite being in the air so with one extra frame of sliding another trick could be used to bring the speed down to a workable value the 10K glitch when the control stick is pulled back while Mario is sliding a multiplier is applied to his speed to slow him down the multiplier is meant to slow Mario down slightly more drastically the faster he's moving so it follows this formula more specifically for every 10 000 speeds Mario has the multiplier goes down by one so if Mario has a speed in the tens of thousands are higher this formula can yield very interesting results here by tilting the joystick ever so slightly backwards it's used to instantly bring Mario speed from 45 000 down to only two thousand but there is you guessed it one simple problem for Mario to land on the Kupa shell he needs to fall down on it although he's in free fall he hasn't started falling down yet but if he spans one more frame in the air he will Bonk instead Mario needs something to fall without bunking enter the fire clone when Mario is burning in the air and moving towards out of bounds he keeps his speed but Falls straight down from there he can land on the shell clone Crouch to start sliding pull the control stick back to activate the 10K glitch and bring his speed down to 2000 but then what he still has no way of conserving that speed through a pause exit and by the way he still had it face first into out of bounds this is where the final piece of this puzzle comes in a fly guy with this lower speed Mario Can Move for one quarter step before bunking on the frame that he bunks his speed doesn't get killed immediately only on the next frame does it get set to negative 16. however the bunk is canceled by landing on the Fly Guy before the speed is capped so Mario speed ends up being conserved and he starts twirling after that he can wait until the perfect moment to land and pause exit on the first frame to conserve his speed into the castle lobby but there was one simple problem how do you get all this stuff in the corner like that the short answer is cloning and Fly Guy manipulation now for the long answer the Fly Guy is nothing we haven't seen before the annoying ones are the fire clone and the Koopa shell the shell can be found in this block which would be easy to reach with a tornado but it only shows up after getting star 3 so on zero stars there is no tornado here instead the only method to get the shell is to open the box remotely and clone the shell this can be done with a preset Hope from another level namely Bob on Battlefield it just so happens that the perfect location for this is on the floating island so they get their hope there Mario needs to clone a Goomba and use the bloated Bob on glitch no big deal so far after placing the Hope Mario can then fall onto the slippery slope get 200 speed and clip into Bowser in the Dark World with the preset hope now an issue when Mario fights Bowser for the key he needs to grab Bowser which automatically updates the Hulk there's no such thing as had in hand here an instant release while seemingly promising at first glance doesn't actually work in this case but remember the Hope updates when the game needs to draw the object Mario is holding if we can't make Bowser invisible what if we made Mario invisible it turns out that we can using pause buffered hitstun after taking damage Mario is Invincible for 30 frames or until he's no longer colliding with a source of damage this blinking during those invincibility frames is determined by the global timer a timer that simply goes up by one on every frame from power on if this timer is even Mario will be visible and if it's odd Mario will be invisible the global timer doesn't stop when the game is paused so it is possible to only unpause the game while the global timer is odd causing Mario to remain invisible during the invincibility frames in that short time he can grab and release objects without updating the hope this is pause buffered hitstun after all this worked Mario enters shifting's hand land with the Hope intact again the Hat in hand glitch is unavailable because the Wing Cap requires 10 stars and klepto is too busy carrying a star around to steal Mario's hat so pause buffered headstone has to be used to perform their remote releases first a baba is thrown to the Hulk where it deactivates then another ba bomb is used for cloning when Mario gets near the haiba bomb it falls down and breaks a box spawning the Koopa shell which Mario clones he walks all the way to to this spot to release it and uses it to get around faster then this Fly Guy is manipulated while the other Fly Guy is lured into Spitting Fire for Mario to clone pause buffered hitstand had to be used extensively here Mario stays inside of the Pokey to extend his invincibility period until he can walk up the slope when the Fly Guy spits fire Mario clones it and drops it at the hope laterally but at Mario's height which places the fire clone just above the Koopa shell clone then pananquick finishes the Fly Guy manipulation and everything is now in place Mario crouches which turns him he gets burned so not to Bonk lands on the shell to start sliding again and the stick is pulled slightly backwards to trigger the 10K glitch and instantly bring Mario's speed to 2000. he bongs but cancels that bunk before his speed is capped sending him into a twirl at 2300 speed foreign now that Mario is in the lobby with 2000 speed here comes the easy part just kidding it's actually the hard part first one thing to keep in mind is that high speed movement is very limited Mario can only turn by up to one Thirty second of a turn or about 11 degrees in a single frame this severely hinders movement options unlike when traveling at pu speed where most of the possible positions would be out of bounds anyway Mario doesn't have the liberty of choosing which angle he wants to move in next he sort of always has to hug the walls the other major limitation is floor hitboxes which only extend 78 units below the floors this means that in any single quarter step Mario can only ever move up to 78 units upwards that's why he can't just go up the central staircase normally for the final glitchy let's grab to work Mario needs about 920 speed but to get up the central staircase he can have at most about 500 speed instead he will need to come at it sideways from as high as possible the lobby movement against solved by Tyler Caney can be subdivided into five main sections entering the Jolly Roger Bay room landing on this pillar reaching the 8th star door reaching the one star door and finally grabbing the secret aquarium ledge let's go through them one by one the first part is reaching the Jolly Roger Bay room which is quite a bit higher first Mario's stored speed sends him into the worm's Fortress room where he has to carefully turn around and navigate back to the main lobby after reaching this staircase Mario needs to zigzag up to gain height and small enough increments the geometry of this area just barely allows it to work if the stairs had one more step or if Mario needed slightly more speed going up this Turkish would have been impossible once in the Jolly Roger Bay room Mario is now at the highest point he can be before heading towards the central staircase however he can't go directly to the staircase because at this angle he would shoot past it and into the bobbin Battlefield room instead he has to aim at the pillar next to the staircase the pillar is 77 units higher than the floor Mario is currently on so he has a grand total of one and a half frames to reach it this is why despite only needing 900 speed at the end Mario needs to have 1700 speed at this point in order to reach the pillar Tyler aimed Mario towards the railing on this Frame Mario's next intended position after one quarter step is right here less than one unit inside of it the railing is 51 units wide so there's a one unit Gap where only the outside wall affects Mario allowing him to get pushed by it he gets pushed into the pillars while hitbox but the wall check is over so he doesn't get affected by it right away then because Mario is inside the floor hitbox he gets pushed up to it and lands this sequence works because the game treats Collision checks in the order of walls first floor second and ceilings last Tyler Dives here and does a dive recovery on the pillar for a very specific reason when Mario lands from that dive recovered he can instantly turn by turning in this direction he now tries to move into a ceiling which leaves him stuck in Place allowing him to let his speed come down to 1100 for the next section but during the dive recovery he needs something to keep him in place that thing is the other railing Mario's first quarter step leads him in the railing which has two overlapping opposite wall hitboxes that cancel each other out so after this double wall push Mario's position is inside of a ceiling which not only prevents him from moving there but also negates his vertical speed if he did get vertical speed from the diver cover Mario would have caught the top of the railing and fallen off once Mario speed drops down to 1100 he's ready to head to the 8 star door he spends one frame on the staircase which lowers his de facto speed just enough to avoid falling off then he manages to turn towards the star door and Trigger the text as far left as possible this is important for the next section after closing the text Mario can now redirect his speed in any direction because he's on the left side of the door he has a near direct line to the one star door which he reaches in three frames he needs to trigger that text with a very precise speed and position so he weighs some speed out and then Clips inside of the princess's secret slide room to realign himself then Tyler makes use of a neat high speed trick to redirect Mario towards the door if Mario is pushing up against a wall and see up is pressed Mario will instantly face directly at the wall with high negative speed this causes him to shoot away from the wall perpendicularly no matter his prior facing angle this leads him into the door's text box again after closing it out Mario can redirect his speed this time towards the secret Aquarium entrance all that's left is to perfectly aim at the quarter unit Gap and do a glitchy ledge grab and there it was entering the secret aquarium in zero a presses compatible with the Nintendo 64 console after this enormous achievement the ibutton challenge Community could sit back and relax for a while nothing really happened alright that's enough what if we saved two a presses this time this new development was a joint effort by bad boot Sydney and Tyler Caney it makes use of a trick discovered in February by bad Boot and Sydney Hyper Speed grinding it requires a specific spot where a bit of steep floor is next to a gap in the floor and the wall Mario runs off the Steep floor making him Airborne on the next frame the wall pushes him back and the stick is held back towards the floor so he lands this cycle is repeated for as long as needed because of the landing frame Mario's speed is normally kept in check by friction and he can't accelerate beyond the normal speed cap of 32 but if the floor is steep enough Mario has no friction when Landing so he can build up speed to a certain degree because of limitations with geometry this method can be used to build up to roughly 400 speed at best despite that it could still prove useful so long as there existed a spot that filled all the requirements in tick tock clock this is where Sydney came in and found the edge of this treadmill here it works slightly differently Mario's getting a push from from two wall hitboxes at once which combine to send him back on the treadmill where he lands after gathering enough speed Mario can do a hyper speed jump dive and reach the next level in a single a press instead of two finally Tyler Kinney executed the strategy to save the a press and pan and cook as always strung everything together he published The Pit in the pendulums in one a press and time jumps on moving bars from 3 down to 2A presses stomp on the thwob the only other star higher than this still used a petrol spot strategy so no other a press could be saved with this new trick as soon as Hyper Speed grinding was proven possible though an alternate strategy for time jumps on moving bars was Revisited over the years many alternate methods were found that completed stars in the same amount of a presses but with wildly different routes sometimes faster sometimes not one of these was for time jumps on moving bars instead of using a bob-bomb to reach the roll into the Cage star and then two a presses to get up to the times bars one could instead use three a presses to reach the timed bars and repurpose the bow bomb to clip into the final cage instead of jumping to it a way to get up the cogs without the Baba was theorized but never actually accomplished because both amounted to 4A presses in total or three with panzilla manipulation but with the discovery of Hyper Speed grinding suddenly where the original route saved one a press the alternate route saved too so the alternate method became the main one but first they had to actually get up these cogs not just think about it the problem doesn't actually lie within the cogs themselves but with this platform which is slightly too high to just dive recovered to given that it's not oriented properly for a misalignment to exist but with enough conserved vertical speed it would be possible to grab the ledge they just needed to land on the Cog with positive vertical speed and get pushed off at the right time to reactivate that speed piece of cake on the random setting Cog spin back and forth like this as they rotate their wall hitboxes move around as well creating openings on the corners from time to time more specifically there's a misalignment on the corner found in this region of the Cog because this section points away from the origin this is both a blessing and a curse it's a blessing because a misalignment makes it possible for Mario to land on the Cog with positive vertical speed it's a curse because this spot seemed just Out Of Reach it wasn't just that Mario needed to land there he needed to get there with enough vertical speed to grab the ledge afterwards using mathematical models and calculations there rock project in Sydney ended up finding that yes this strategy was indeed just barely possible the cog's wall on the previous frame could be used to help Mario get increased distance to reach the misalignment using their guidance panenkovic was able to pass it and the route was complete the rest stayed relatively unchanged Until the End Hyper Speed rounding to get up here in 1A press then pendulum manipulation to save another but then the Baba they repurposed falls down from way above and Mario grabs it bloated to clip into the cage The Hope was placed in Bowser in the sky beforehand and the bob-bomb was released at the Hope using pause buffered hits done just two weeks after being brought to two a presses time jumps on moving bars was already down to just one two months later on September 26 2018 stamp on earthworm underwent a revolution when a new petrol spot was found here well actually the petrol spot itself was already known to exist but no one knew how to get Mario lodged in there like that until ds-273 found a way to knock Mario into the petrol spot without an apres using pendulum manipulation in a bob-bomb the old 5A press route the one with 4A presses at the start and one hyperspeed jump dive went flying out of the window instead it was replaced with this the beginning is basically the same as the pit and the pendulums in one a press only the hope is in a slightly different position then two different RNG manipulations are done at the same time pendulum manipulation and the rotating clock hand at the top of the stage pendulum manipulation is used to make the pendulum and the spin here this is actually nearly a full rotation so when it swings back it swings upwards to return to angle zero this lodges Mario in the ceiling and reactivates the bob-bomb which falls on top of him and knocks him onto the pendulum's Box this allows Mario to turn towards a suitable angle for what comes next when the pendulum swings back around the shaft pushes Mario off the pendulum box and into the petrol spot once Mario is in the petrol spot he builds up to over 600 speed and jumps out of the spot instantly landing on the floor above to preserve his vertical speed he instantly pushes C up to enter first person otherwise The Landing would instantly bring his speed to zero then he punches repeatedly until he leaves this platform where the conserved speed sends him flying upwards he lands directly on the clock hand this is why RNG was manipulated before after getting on the hand into a presses all that was needed was to wait for it to make three quarters of a turn and jump on earthworm to get the star in three this saved two a presses at once for the second time in a couple of months after completing this run panenkoy and crew were not satisfied the petrol spot could on paper give enough vertical speed to Mario to reach all the way up to the star the problem though was how disjointed the petrol spot was from the thwomp while Mario could jump all the way up to the star he couldn't cross the horizontal distance in that time since having to resort to VSC to get past this platform killed all of his forward momentum the solution they found was double VSC the route is mostly the same up to this point this time Mario builds up almost 700 speed which gives him a little bit more vertical momentum once he shoots off this platform he lands on the clock Hand by having it turned under him pressing C up on the frame Mario lands preserves his vertical speed on top of stopping him on a dime then the hand rotates towards the thwomp and Mario releases the remaining vertical speed to land on it and save yet another a-press the highest star in the toughest stage for the iban challenge was down to only two a presses but hold on clock hands are supposed to move clock that's quite literally the definition of clockwise how does the hand turn backwards like that the answer is RNG manipulation and a lot of it the problem though is that once Mario enters the petrol spot there's no longer a way to manipulate RNG so before getting into the petrol spot patent coexpent an extra 9 Minutes manipulating the hand so it would turn counterclockwise by a third of a turn despite being on the random setting the clock hands still favor moving clockwise if you let the clock run without interference long enough though the clock hand will eventually turn by this much counterclockwise the only problem is it typically takes on the order of weeks that's not ideal so panicoic wrote the program that simulated the clock on a random setting and used it to calculate the way to affect the RNG so that 12 minutes later the clock hand would move exactly the way he wanted his script found dozens of solutions and penins simply picked one of the more convenient ones 2018 turned into 20 2019 the community was as active and dedicated as ever to find April saves but they were getting exponentially harder to come by even Tick Tock Clock which was still responsible for 17A presses not that long ago had seriously dried up and was down to only eight it was time to think outside the box What If instead of trying to remove a presses from the total they started adding them back this is get a hand up from 0 to 0.58 presses if you've been following you might know where this is going first adding a half a press in Tick Tock Clock doesn't hurt it's assumed that the star would come after entering the level for the first time an action that still incurred in a press second the halfway press is useful here because it allows Mario to kick which in turn lets him fall down with backwards momentum this sets things up for spawning displacement there is one major issue though the previous spawning displacement was achieved on the pit and the pendulums which is directly above and very much above get a hand despite that Mario has barely enough speed to land on the lowest of the Spinners if Mario were to kick the wall and get this star he'd be way short of the Spinners this one was solved by ds273 the problem with kick recoil momentum is that the speed Mario inherits is a fixed negative 48 but the ABC crew figured out that while it's true that Mario's speed can't be changed speed isn't the only way to move Mario he can also get pushed by walls if Mario finds himself inside of a ball hitbox because the hitbox is 50 units wide on each side he can theoretically get pushed by double that or 100 units perpendicularly to that wall now because the ABC experts were trying to push Mario in the same direction as his movement that proved to be a bit tricky because Mario would need to enter the wall from behind for this to work but thanks to pendulum manipulation it was possible to have the wall itself move into Mario instead unfortunately even that while push ended up being too weak to move Mario enough to reach the Spinners by a factor of 10. that idea was not gonna work it was tough enough to get Mario to get pushed by a wall in the right direction once let alone 10 times until the s273 had a new idea the pendulum is made up of many tiny triangles to give the illusion of a round shape as it turns out in this specific spot many different triangles converge into a single point theoretically if Mario ended up exactly on that point he could technically be inside of all of these triangles while hitboxes at once like we've seen before when Mario is in multiple wall hitboxes at the same time he receives a combined push from all of them so if Mario ended up inside of all of these walls he could get a wall push from each of these triangles and how many triangles is that 10 triangles the path forward was clear the goal was to get Mario in this point in the Starfall action with kick recoil momentum then he would get a massive push from 10 walls at once and move just barely far enough to start then's clip onto the spinner now the question was how do you get Mario in there well the answer was not easy unlike floors wall collisions do use floating Point numbers so the point where these 10 triangles converge is one single floating Point number or 0.000025 units wide also for all 10 triangles to be walls at the same time the pendulum needs to be at a very specific angle so extensive manipulation was also required the point itself was also a little bit too high Mario somehow needed to kick the ball from slightly higher than this platform that wasn't enough to discourage ds273 here's the route that he came up with and that pan and coex successfully tasked afterwards first there needs to be a carefully preset hope tautau Mountain can be used to do just that next pennant uses instant release to send two bar bombs of their whole laterally but at slightly different heights this is so they can be reactivated later in very specific positions then after climbing up to the turning hand panin manipulates the pendulum for 18 minutes until it starts making full rotations he reactivates the first Bob on which he wants to grab since he has to hold a to kick later on he can't just grab it normally so he has to use the ledge to dive grab it instead he grabs it slightly bloated which gives Mario a weak backwards push then he reactivates the second bob-on so that it snaps to Mario's position and explodes pushing him through the wall he normally wouldn't be able to stand in there but here he can for two reasons first objects like Bob arms can push Mario into positions that he normally wouldn't be able to reach by himself like inside ceilings or out of bounds we've seen this twice before in stomp on the thwomp second this area is not out of bounds because there's a floor directly below it's inside of a c feeling which traps Mario in mid-air but doesn't immediately kill him like out of bounds would The Swinging pendulum passes by and Mario can walk on it whichever so slightly moves him upwards to the correct vertical position for the float precise wall push then he keeps moving inside of the ceiling thanks to the Bob I'm pushing him around until he gets to a fraction of a unit behind the wall the perfect spot for the final part the inputs in RNG to get to this point required brute forcing to reach the exact values needed now all panin can do is wait when the pendulum is about to turn into the exact angle that yields the float precise 10 triangle overlap Mario kicks and starts moving backwards he enters the wall hitbox and gets clipped back in bounds his kick collides with the wall on the same frame that he touches the star then he inherits negative 48 speed and the Pendulum turns into him he enters the float precise point where 10 Wall hitboxes go inside in a single frame he gets pushed 1 000 units backwards which happens to be just barely enough to Star Dance clip at the very bottom of the spinner finally one small bit of RNG manipulation before this whole ordeal ensured that this precise moment the spinner would start spinning clockwise and provide spawning displacement to save the re-entry a press all 120 stars were now obtainable in 19a presses the ABC crew had done it the whole game was under 20. the a button challenge had completed its 22-year transition from a fun little distraction in the corner of an RC chat to the most convoluted and well-researched video game puzzle of all time as complex and difficult the new apress saves had become it was worth the effort with the community as large as ever filled with talented experts working together tirelessly the sky was the limit but despite so many technical advancements no discovery that came after this ever directly helped the apress count remained Frozen at 19. months became years ultimately still sitting at seven a presses by itself Tick-Tock clock had one in 2022 the a press count is still 19. [Music] thank you the date is July 6 2022 the ABC Community finally unveils not one not two but three ape press saves at the same time all of them in Tick Tock Clock of the hundreds of apresses once needed to collect all the stars only 16 remain [Music] though it seemed that the ABC had been dormant for a while the new developments in Tick-Tock clock actually had been in the making for years in fact ever since 2016 there was one leading idea to lower stump on earthworm to only one a press at its Inception it could save up to 8 a presses on three different Stars it was a very simple idea with just one small problem houseball about the scale of the universe the idea involved the old petrol spot strategy that method was stunted by having to enter the level while the clock is still which made reaching the petrol spots so much more inconvenient than what a moving clock could provide so what if instead the Pedro spot could be used while the clock was in the random setting theoretically through the magic of RNG manipulation the Cog could stay in place for long enough that Mario could build up all the speed he needed to jump straight up to the thwomp at the top of the clock but here's the small problem to stay still for so long assuming purely random conditions the Cog needed to roll a 1-7 chance 1200 times simply finding a solution that worked would take longer than the heat death of the universe there were a few redeeming elements that made the actual odds slightly better either songs made a detailed analysis of the probabilities with the more optimistic Outlook and found that the odds were much better than patent code's initial calculation specifically he found that once Mario has enough speed the Cog can turn turned by some tiny amount without breaking the federal spot but regardless of how you spin it the improbability of the strategy outscaled the number of possibilities that could be tested by dozens of orders of magnitude so while the random Cog petrol spot idea was alluring in its Simplicity it was impossibly intimidating in its execution it remained in limbo for over six years waiting for something to be found that would make it computable but that never happened instead it was its competing idea a much more complex one on the surface that prevailed in July 2022 and saved three a presses at once to get some context on the discoveries that led to the improvements we need to step all the way back to March of 2018. Tyler Kinney and batboot were brainstorming strategies to get past the pole in Bowser in the fire sea on Console during their research they found a promising and peculiar trick that stems from a very obscure interaction squish cancel when a ceiling and a floor are close together Mario can't quite fit in that spot this is the mechanic that makes petrol spots what they are however if at least one of them is dynamic in other words if it belongs to an object Mario will get squished instead now if at least one of the surfaces involved in the squish happens to be very slanted by more than 60 degrees as Mario is getting squished he also gets pushed off by 10 units if that push happens to be enough to take him off the floor he's on then he suddenly finds himself squished by nothing in midair to prevent that on the next quarter step his action state is set to idle instead finally on the next frame Mario can either do an action like a jump from that state or he simply enters Free Fall the reason this was so promising is that squish cancel happens to preserve Mario's horizontal speed while it resets his action back to Idol but there's also an unexpectedly useful side effect it also zeros out Mario's vertical speed ultimately the goal was to use this in combination with high-speed collisions with bullies but there were missing pieces of the puzzle and despite all their best efforts for years and years this idea could never be fully realized a few months later in August 2018 a tasker by the name of super watermelon 64 was playing around in Jolly Roger Bay when he encountered a very odd glitch Mario could dive twice for seemingly no reason this turned out to be The Accidental discovery of remote squish cancel if you remember ceilings extend up infinitely until there's a floor above them sometimes due to imperfect geometry or rounding errors a ceiling that's supposed to have a floor above it has a tiny sliver that doesn't this exposed ceiling stretches infinitely upward and causes what's commonly called an invisible wall if the exposed ceiling happens to have a floor immediately under it and one of them is part of an object then all the requirements are met to squish Mario even though he's far higher than the game would expect him to be when Mario is squished he instantly down warps to the floor below him but if there's a steep slope in Mario gets pushed out his action is set to idle instead from that point he can jump or enter free fall again while preserving his speed because all of this happens way above the place that would actually squish Mario this is known as remote squish cancel immediately bad boot found that under perfect conditions the pendulums and Tick-Tock clock could fulfill the requirements to enable Mario to perform a remote squish console at the time nothing concrete was found to have it directly saved in a press but it was one more tool in the Box the other trick that was found during that time though was much more evidently groundbreaking on May 1st 2021 ds273 published a discovery of behind camera anywhere behind camera anywhere are BCA for short is a surprisingly simple trick at any given time the camera has a focus point now you think that Focus point should be Mario but as it turns out that would look a bit odd and annoying instead the camera is looking at a constantly evolving Point that's roughly this much ahead of where Mario's looking now if you lock the camera in place the focus point will still behave as normal if Mario goes really close to the camera the focus point in front of him can end up on the other side the camera always looks at the focus Point therefore Mario can end up behind the camera so long as he's looking in the right direction to save on resources anything that isn't in the current field of view of the camera isn't being rendered because it wouldn't be on screen anyway that's true even if Mario himself if he's far enough behind the camera then he no longer gets rendered and you know what that means if Mario isn't being rendered then whatever he's holding also isn't being rendered so the Hope does not get updated that's right behind camera anywhere is yet another whole press reservation method adding to the Hat in hand glitch instant release and pause buffered hits then of course it comes with its own set of challenges Mario needs to grab and release an object all while keeping himself behind and his Focus point in front of the static camera that's a pretty restrictive situation that effectively prevents moving around with the object and also limits Mario's facing angle during the trick nonetheless behind camera anywhere would prove extremely useful to streamline a lot of existing cloning strategies and it even found its way into real-time ABC but most importantly BCA enabled new possibilities for crazy routes in Tick-Tock clock combined with remote squish cancel and a few thousand hours of working out this discovery led to the 3A press saves in Tick-Tock clock 14 months later the idea boils down to solving one problem getting past this section of the level in no a presses the Stars depict under pendulums time jumps on moving bars and stomp on a thwomp I'll rely on clearing this section the existing method bypassed the whole thing in one a press with Hyper Speed grinding to go from one to none though a completely different strategy was needed it can be broken down into three steps First Crossing this gap which has been solved for years using a bloated ball bomb second getting up to here which can be done with a diver cover into a fire clone in a Star Dance clip and finally dismounting the pole which can be solved with another conveniently placed fire clone and that's it with just these three steps the whole section is cleared in no a presses actually not quite it's easy to look at each individual problem within a level and find the solution that misses the bigger picture this is one of those the Star Dance clip looks like a great solution but it actually isn't it's all because this Gap already uses a star dense clip you can only spawn 100 Coin Star at once but here you would somehow need two one of them has to go this is where ds273 came up with an absolutely crazy plan that could in theory get rid of this Star Dance clip but it was a bit of a lunatic idea that had no business actually being possible until a newcomer sjmhrp jumped into the problem ahead first she created various programs to search for the one perfect alignment of stars that allowed DS's insane plan to work this task was astronomical but after a thousand hours of work over eight months and after over ten thousand computational hours to search through billions of permutations of conditions she found the solution sit down buckle up and put your helmet on let's get it out of the way right off the bat Mario rides a pendulum into the ceiling he gets squished and burned then repeatedly ground pounds to gain height all the way up until he grabs the ledge at the top finally he pulls a babam out of his pocket and uses it to cross the Gap that's it that's how it's done and now we need to spend 20 minutes understanding why [Music] foreign the first step of this ordeal is to manipulate the pendulum it needs to reach a very specific state so a total of 61 minutes of manipulation is required to do so after this much manipulation it's now spinning so fast that it does 50 full rotations per swing but it's not just the speed that's important it's also the exact angles that the pendulum will be taking at various times a couple dozen frames apart next Mario rides the pendulum up into the ceiling normally he should get squished but there is a 10 unit Gap where Mario is stuck in the ceiling without being squished so long as Mario keeps walking he stays stuck in that ceiling if he stops walking he falls down so after a few minutes of waiting for the pendulum to reach the correct State Mario falls back down and gets carried up into the ceiling this happens because collisions are processed in the order of walls floors and ceilings Mario snaps up to the pendulum before the ceiling has anything to say about it also Mario doesn't take damage because he goes from being lightly squished straight to being fully inside of the ceiling in a single frame now Mario shouldn't be able to move around in here but the pendulum provides a floor for him to stand on but to be able to reach the higher section Mario needs a fire Bounce from a fire clone for now we'll skip explaining why Mario Clips inside the pendulum and how The Clone got there we'll get back to that later after more precise mid-air walking and waiting the conditions are finally perfect for the magic trick Mario turns until he phases out he ever so slightly enters the back of the wall hitbox clipping him back out then he ground pounds as the pendulum rotates it enters a position where because of imperfect geometry and exposed ceilings squishes Mario canceling the round pound and resetting his vertical speed back to zero on the same frame he's pushed out of the exposed ceiling on the next frame he enters free fall from there he can move into the next spot that will have an exposed ceiling and ground pound again to gain height in total this trick is repeated seven times this is why the pendulum manipulation was so crucial the pendulum needs to create seven squish cancel spots at regular intervals of about 7 to 10 frames with no exposed ceilings in between Mario can only move by a tiny amount between each round pound so all seven squish cancel spots need to be very close to each other at the start the pendulum needs to stay below Mario otherwise he'd Bonk into it and finally because the pendulum is only tangible if Mario is close enough to it as Mario goes higher the the angle range to pendulum can take gets smaller and smaller when Mario is at the very top he's too far from the pendulum to do any more squish cancels but he's still too low to grab the ledge thankfully ds-273 had one last trick up his sleeve a glitchy ledge grab this wall is made up of two sections that seamlessly combine to create one surface but as it turns out due to some floating Point rounding nonsense each section has an ever so slightly different normal Vector as a result there is a float precise position where Mario's 30 unit check finds the lower wall with the 150 unit check does not find a higher wall and he grabs the lens from way below this glitchy lens grab was found on November 14 2020 and it was the last piece of the puzzle ds273 needed to devise his master plan once on this spot Mario could use a ball bomb to cross the Gap a Star Dance clip to get up the elevator and a fire clone to Dismount the pole but hold on how do you get all this stuff here in the first place we need to rewind a bit the last one is the simplest this fire clone is placed at the beginning of the stage using a preset Hope from TaoTao mountain and behind camera anywhere but despite being the simplest it's not that simple because Mario needs one of these babon for cloning yet the object he's cloning is all the way up here he needs to find a way to carry an object for an extended time without updating the hope at any step of the process first Mario makes both Bob bombs explode one frame apart just as he grabs it the other bow bomb is unloaded this causes the babon spawner to load into Mario's hands like we've seen before a spawner is an invisible object because it's invisible it doesn't need to be rendered which in turn doesn't update the Hope Mario then carries that invisible object up until it also unloads and can be replaced at the exact moment when it's replaced with a newly loaded fire object Mario is now behind the camera so again the hope is not updated Mario throws the fire clone to the Hope where it sits waiting to burn Mario off the pole later on the Clones on the elevator are more interesting but we'll get to those later I did promise that I would explain how these fire clones got here there are three of them one has to be used as a sacrifice to prevent Mario from activating the useful fire clones too early the Clones were placed by setting the Hope under this spot then using BCA to drop them at the hope laterally but at Mario's height the range of usable Heights for the fire clones was pretty restricted which made the whole strategy harder to pull off and now we take a look at how the Baba magically appears in this spot it uses a known trick the out of bounds Fail-Safe mechanism but in the new way in the past the bob-bomb was placed using a preset hole from another level that happened to be out of bounds in tick tock clock but here the preset hope is already in use and there can only be one there needs to be a way to place a baba amount of bounds from within the level of course Mario normally can't go out of bounds on the rare occasion that he does find himself out of bounds he dies immediately needless to say this proved to be quite a challenge for ds273 to solve this solution he came up with is nothing sort of amazing here's how the Hope can be set out of bounds just below this treadmill 31 units below to be exact there's a wall overlap when Mario Dives with the Baba onto the edge the moving treadmill moves Mario off which does two things first Mario enters a hands-free holding State and second his vertical speed of negative 24 is conserved after one frame of falling Mario's speed is now negative 28. on the second frame's first quarter step Mario moves down by a quarter of that speed or 7 units he precisely enters a wall overlap and gets moved outside of the level but wait that's out of bounds how can Mario be out of bounds without instantly dying well he actually isn't even outside of the walls of the level Mario isn't immediately out of bounds as it turns out the floor at the very bottom of the clock extends a little bit outside the walls Mario is only treated us out of bounds if there's no floor under him so technically he is still in bounds after falling for a bit Mario Dives which he can do while hands-free holding he hits the actual out of bounds in bunks which releases the bomb and knocks him back into the level meanwhile The Hope which while Mario's diving is in front of his position ends up out of bounds now a bomb needs to be released there with some remote release method either pause buffered headstone behind camera anywhere or instant release this turns out to be more challenging than it seems because of the 4000 unit activation radius for the Fail-Safe to trigger Mario needs to enter the bobom's activation radius which is this sphere but the hope is too low for that radius to intersect this ledge so the Baba needs to be released at the hole laterally at about this height instead however at the moment when the ba bomb is released Mario needs to be outside of this Zone otherwise the Fail-Safe would be triggered immediately and the bubon would snap to Mario's position this creates a bit of a problem considering the bob-ons are right here but what if they weren't prior to setting this hope Mario clones one of the ba-bombs by reloading it from above the Spinners he uses that bomb to clip through through the wall on the moving bar again despite being outside the walls the moving bar provides a floor for Mario to stand on he releases the babang here setting the Hope in this weird semi-auto-bound spot then he clones another Bubba making sure to avoid updating the Hope using BCA he throws it out of bounds something weird happens the babam goes to the hope but gets stuck in a weird mid-air oscillation this Sparks a few questions why does it do that because it's out of bounds when a babam tries to move out of bounds its movement is reversed which normally should send it back towards the map but when that new position is also out of bounds it runs into the same issue on the next frame the net result is the bob-bomb oscillates between two out of bounds positions reversing its movement on every frame but why is it out of bounds if it's just above the moving bar because just like any other object with Collision moving bars are only tangible if Mario is close to them because he's not there's no floor here and the babam is indeed out of bounds but if it's out of bounds why doesn't it snap to Mario because the Fail-Safe only triggers when Mario drops of a bomb when he throws a bob it goes to the Hope regardless of if it's inbounds or not so Mario throws the Baba Mata bounds where it remains until he goes right next to the moving bar to make it tangible during that time he sets up the out of bounds hope using the treadmill for the next part when he goes back to the moving bar the babam falls on it and clips back in bounds just as it's about to explode Mario Dives and performs instant release on the bloated Bob bomb this sends it to the hope laterally but at Mario's height far enough away that it deactivates until Mario enters its radius but also the radius happens to intersect this ledge we finally got the bob-omb where it needs to be this however creates a new problem remember Mario cannot enter the bob-bomb's activation radius until the exact moment when he's ready to use it the radius intersects the destination sure but it also passes right through the Section where Mario rides the pendulum into the ceiling to avoid reactivating the bob-omb early Mario actually needs to clip inside the pendulum as he's going up thankfully there happens to be a tiny one unit wide sliver of floor inside the pendulum for Mario to stand on he gets squished by the pendulum and finds himself on that one unit slice of ground he gets burned while narrowly avoiding the walls in the baobom's activation radius and he reaches the top of the pendulum with one sector of Health remaining at last after the whole squish canceled ground pound chain sequence Mario can enter the radius and snap the Bobble next to him one more detail because the bow bomb is bloated at its maximum size when it stops to Mario's position it pushes Mario out through the wall and inside the cage but also because the bob-bomb is so big it touches the Cage's wall hitboxes both the outside wall and the inside wall the outside wall doesn't push it any further out but the inside wall pushes it all the way inside the cage so it Clips in alongside Mario finally Mario can grab it and use it to cross the Gap towards the elevator and that's when we finally get to these two clones how did they get here remember they can't use their own preset hole because there can only be one the solution is very simple you take all of the steps needed to reach the spot the entire thing and you do it twice the first time after crossing the Gap with the babam you use that babam to place the Hope here then you go back down and use BCA to release a coin in a fire clone finally you do all of this again and get back up this time with all the right tools to climb the rest of the way after all of this work Mario gets past the pole in zero a presses if only it were that simple remember the poll isn't the end here several challenges remain first of all because there are three instances of spawning displacement to re-enter the clock the level can only be entered with a preset hope a total of three times get a hand needs a preset hope which leaves only two uses of a preset hope for three stars that need it the second problem is that the Petro spot VSC strategy for the end of stump on the thwomp required a different preset hope to send a bubbaum high above Mario the third problem is that time jumps on moving bars also required its own preset hope for the bob-bomb clip at the end how could all of these extra Bob arms and preset hopes ever be reconciled well the third one was actually solved in September of 2018 by ds273 it turns out the overuse of preset hopes with limited opportunities to enter Tick-Tock clock from anywhere in the castle was spotted as a potential issue back then as well in an effort to cut preset hopes out the s273 figured out time zones on moving bars without the babam at the end the solution he came up with was the first use of Squish cancel in the ABC it made use of both pendulums for the ending instead of just one the far one was used to get some height and dive to this moving bar and the second was used to squish can solar dive recovery to allow Mario to enter free fall from a diver cover Mario can't grab onto Ledges but from Free Fall he can this lets him grab this pledge and reach the star in no a presses with Noba bomb and therefore no preset hope now for the other two problems luckily both of them can be solved the same way unluckily that way adds to the solution to get past the pole one extra thick layer of Madness remember the bloated used across the Gap is one of the tuba bombs found at the very bottom of the stage the solution to the two problems is to bring the other babam past the pole the general idea of the route stays roughly the same until it's time to make the final Ascent that's when even more steps are needed to bring not just one but two bob-bums up first there are a few explosion clones that need to be set up for what's coming up explosion clones function like you would expect when Mario collides with them they knock him back and damage him then they become intangible just like most other clones Mario places one explosion clone over there using BCA and three more right here the first clone is a sacrifice so that the other two can be used later with that done the hope is set up out of bounds on the moving bar and the first ball bomb is thrown there using BCA where it will be held in play safely much to our convenience next the hope is moved out of bounds using the clip below the treadmill this hole will be used to move both Bob arms up the clock now Mario wants to grab the second babang here however there's no other babang whose spawner can be conveniently used to bypass updating the hope this is where the explosion clones come into play they allow the use of pause buffered headstone until a new invisible object is able to be loaded into Mario's hands a star particle spawner this takes a while which is why two active clones were needed the first one to knock Mario back and the second one to extend his invincibility frames long enough to load the star particle spawner that spawner quickly unloads so now Mario is holding a vacant slot therefore he needs to be careful not to generate too much dust particles in other temporary objects that could load into his hands and update the Hope nonetheless he climbs up the Spinners and reaches these cubes he loads the bob-omb and drops it at the hope with BCA just outside of the activation radius this however is an awkward position it's too low to be useful for the rest of the climb and too high to be worked with and dropped higher up so it needs to be lowered first to do that Mario goes down to this walkway and enters the activation radius snapping the Bob onto him then he does a breakdance kick to get the babam to explode and does instant release on it while it's bloated at its maximum size this sends the bob-on back to the hole but this time a bit lower and a bit bigger the next step is to climb up to the moving hand but without reactivating the ba bomb to do that Mario can simply ride the wild pendulum up to the hand this climb just barely works Mario is less than one unit from clipping through the pendulum because it's rising too fast from there the other explosion clone comes in handy to set up another pause buffer it hits done Mario enters the bobom's activation radius grabs the bloated bomb and gets pushed off the hand where he drops it back to the hopes tail bloated but much higher this time then it's back to the first ba bomb again it's dropped to the Hope bloated as well using instant release the tuba bombs end up very close together the first one slightly lower and the second one slightly higher after the squish cancel ground pound chain it's time to reactivate one bomb the two radii are very close together and as it turns out because it's higher the second bobom's radius is the one that Mario enters first therefore that's the one that gets reactivated and the other one is kept in place for now this proves to be quite the problem though because the range of motion is extremely limited this time when the babam snaps to Mario it pushes him not completely Inside the Cage because that would load the other ba bomb instead it pushes him between the two walls where their combined push cancels out while in there Mario has two frames where he's able to move out of the way until he exits the outside wall hitbox and he completes the clip into the cage at this point he's within one single unit of activating the other babam finally he is able to grab the bloated bob-omb and do the rest of the sequence after getting past a pole he can retrieve the first Bob on by entering its activation radius we're almost done from here the bomb has two separate purposes in the pit in the pendulums it's used to replace the whole at the top of the pole before collecting the stars without after re-entering the clock another star that gets past a pole can be done right away the last detail to consider for that star is that because it's now down to zero a presses Mario can't kick the wall to recoil into the star instead of spawning displacement so a punch is used instead the principle is the same but the execution proved to be a lot more difficult and precise in order to receive the recoil speed and touch the star on the same frame a very specific sequence of events needs to happen first Mario punches from on top of the pendulum shaft then he snaps down to the Head this is possible because when Mario is on the round he can move from a higher floor to a lower floor by up to a hundred units at once on the next frame Mario is on a float precise scene between two walls so he gets pushed by both this sends him next to the star and his sponge connects with the wall finally he receives recoil and touches the star one frame later and he falls with backwards momentum this specific set of conditions turned out to be nearly impossible after making and running a brute forcer to figure out a configuration that worked patent quick found nothing his closest attempt was just two units short of touching the star but after brainstorming new options with ds273 he finally found one single solution that required to dive roll from the other pendulum to punch the wall with enough speed note that the hand also needs to be in this precise spot to stop Mario from doing a Star Dance clip on this platform instead which would ruin the spawning displacement for example at one the bob-omb is used along with a slightly more complex pendulum manipulation to send Mario to the petrol spot this was the combined work of ds273 in pan and cook first Mario goes up to the platform above the pendulums where he manipulates both of them at once then he falls on top of the first pendulum reactivating the bob-omb it pushes Mario into his spot just a little bit inside the ceiling like we've seen before Mario walks in mid-air stuck in the ceiling and he's moved around by the babam pushing him back once he gets into the petrol spot the rest of the strategy is very much like the last stump on its womp Improvement he gathers nearly 700 speed then uses a double VSC to reach all the way to the thwomp and collect a star in a single a-press and this is how Tick-Tock clock went from 70 presses down to only four three of which are to enter the stage but this wouldn't hold for very long a new face in the community was concocting unusual plans he had been around for a few years even contributing to the latest depressed saves but nothing on the scale of what he was about to achieve the complexity level was about to get from the stratosphere to outer space thanks to one man his name was marbler [Music] on August 21st Patton quick and marbler completed their project of the past couple of months together they saved the final lay press of lethal lavaland they got elevator tour in the volcano in zero a presses bringing the total count to 15. first of all why is this star problematic well because of the final boss of the a button challenge a poll there is no way to get off this bowl without falling down or jumping while it is possible to reach the other star in a volcano in no a presses the two platforms are too far apart and a long jump is required to cross that Gap instead Mario will gain height another way using a familiar method in a completely new context let's reminisce the mechanics of spawning displacement the reason it works is because Mario's displacement by a moving platform is based on its state at the end of the previous frame effectively causing platforms to move Mario for one extra frame after they should if that displacement is rotational when the new map loads and the platform gets replaced with the new object because Mario is very far from that new object the rotation is applied over a much longer distance and Mario is moved significantly here the concept is exactly the same except that instead of a map transition creating a large gap Mario himself moves really far away in a single frame then when the displacement is applied the rotation is very small but the radius is so large that Mario is moved upwards substantially enough in fact to end up above the Star platform in a parallel universe that is because for Mario to get displaced so much he needs to have pu speed and move into a pu now the question becomes how can Mario be on a rotating platform on one frame and in a pu on the next this is where things get complicated to get our answer let's break down the 26 hour test step by step Mario Begins by pushing a bully into the lava and running into it this interrupts a death animation of the bully which leaves it stuck below the floor since there's no more floor under this the bully is out of bounds just like the Bob bomb in Tick Tock walk it gets stuck alternating between two positions as a side note for visual Clarity the bully will often be represented in a superposition just keep in mind this isn't actually the case the bully is merely alternating between the two this state is particularly interesting because it keeps the bully speed Frozen even though the bully itself is out of bounds its hitbox sticks out of the level just enough that Mario can still collide with it if Mario runs into the bully perpendicularly to its movement he transfers some of his momentum to the bully adding a tiny bit to its speed this is called slow bully battery after doing this a few times and by a few I mean 31 000 over 21 hours the bully now has 4 000 speed we can do something with that but first we need to wait a few minutes in Super Mario 64 one full turn is 2 to the 16 or 65 536 angle units so when the bully is trying to move out of bounds and its movement is reversed the game adds exactly half of that 32 767. wait 67 yep as it turns out the angle added is 1 200th of the degree shy of half a turn this discrepancy is obviously completely meaningless unless you're the ABC Community while the bully is alternating between two positions the angle at which it moves slowly drifts over time so slowly in fact that it takes over 36 minutes to do a full rotation coincidentally it's also exactly the time it takes for the displacement angle to exceed the 32-bit integer limit and overflow causing a game Crash but there is an additional quirk that makes this even more interesting when calculating the displacement the game truncates the angle to the nearest multiple of 16 using what's called hexadecimal angle units therefore in practice as the angle drifts the actual displacement only changes once every 16 frames because 16 frames is an even number the angle change always happens while the boole is in one of its two possible positions as a result this position acts as a pivot around which the other position rotates extremely slowly choosing one position to act as the pivot is fairly simple after colliding with Mario if the bully's angle is even its current position will be the pivot if it's odd the pivot will be the opposite this means that while panicoic was building up the bully speed every single one of the 31 000 collisions had to result in an even angle using these pivots and a lot of patience you can get the bully to move into any convenient location you want marbler uses this to get the Boolean to a nice spot for the next part but first he needs Mario to be in a bit of a better shape to climb the volcano up to the spinning heart he gets some coins for a lava boost then gets this bully stuck in the corner and uses a dive roll knockback to clear this ledge this method will be used a few times to refill Mario's help throughout the Run when the bully has rotated around the pivot enough Mario runs into it so this position becomes the new pivot this causes the other position to start moving the process is repeated a couple of times to move the bully around which takes about an hour now Mario activates the elevator and rides it until it falls into the lava and on this Frame the first of many magic tricks the bully appears because the elevator is partly under the lava this creates a floor for the bully to move on to so instead of turning around the bully does move to the elevator on the next frame it moves onto the rock on the other side of the stage now the bully is back in bounds but it's going so fast that its next position is out of bounds again this reverses its direction and freezes its speed on the next frame the same thing happens and the bully reverses back to its previous position the result is therefore exactly the same as before even though the bully is now in bounds regardless of the bully's current position so long as its next Position will be out of bounds it will behave this way 10 minutes of pivoting later the bully is now in a perfect position for the next part you know slow bully battery seems to imply the existence of a fast bully battery what does that look like well don't blink the bully now has over 6 000 speed what happened this time Mario isn't bullying the bully the bully is bullying Mario the Collision angles are reversed the bully is mostly perpendicular and Mario is parallel to the Collision tangent in this scenario the bully actually transfers three times its momentum to Mario this isn't a bug it's an intentional feature to give bullies a bit more punch to their attack normally this wouldn't be an issue because Mario's knockback speed is capped at 32 but as you may have guessed this isn't a normal scenario this is the original textbook use case for Squish cancel the edge of the elevator has an exposed ceiling because of a rounding error and it's a dynamic surface Mario enters the bully's hitbox to get knocked back on the next frame first the elevator displaces Mario into the exposed slanted ceiling squishing him then the bully Collision moves Mario out and gives him triple the bully's momentum or just shy of 10 000 speed before the game processes the knockback speed cap the squish push now disjointed because of the bully Collision moves Mario here where he ends the frame since he left the ceiling and the elevator the squish cancel is complete Mario still has his high speed but he's no longer being knocked back he is now idle therefore the speed is preserved on the next frame the elevator moves back under Mario so instead of entering Free Fall Mario is still on the ground at the same time Mario moves for one single quarter step to the other end of the stage because he's still on the ground he can snap down to a floor up to 100 units lower 82 units in this case this is important because when Mario tries to move out of bounds his speed is only conserved if he's on the ground if he's in the air the speed is immediately set to zero meanwhile the bully after this Collision does lose a significant amount of its speed but it still has 1100 this is low enough to actually move inside the level over the next few frames it bounces around skipping over Mario and bouncing back on out of bounds until Mario hits it again that transfers Mario's new speed back to the bully the important element of this interaction is the momentum being tripled when the bully knocks Mario away this breaks the usual conservation of energy just before the Collision the bully had 2500 speed a third of it was lost during the two frames the bully spent moving in bounds earlier after Mario transfers his speed back the bully now has 6600. the only caveat of this trick is that it's impossibly precise the elevator needs to send Mario into a unit precise exposed ceiling and the bully needs to somehow collide with Mario again soon after in other words marbler was trying to hit a P with a pull shot where the balls are moving at escape velocity nonetheless fast bully batteries can be chained together allowing Mario and the bully to exchange exponentially large speeds to each other after the first one though things do get a bit simpler first the bully collides with Mario at 6000 speed this leaves Mario with 20 000 speed conserved using squish cancel and the bully with 4000 speed and an odd angle therefore the pivot is far out of bounds and the bully slowly rotates back into Mario Mario transfers all of his speed again leaving the bully with 15 000 speed this process is done a total of six times roughly tripling the speeds involved each time however because the Collision angles need to be somewhat precise and their positions extremely precise this turned out to be a very complex logistical problem after one fast bully battery the bully often needs to rotate to a completely different angle for the next one sometimes the bully itself needs to be moved using alternating pivots to set up a viable position for Squish cancel marbler had to figure out a way to move the bully around at pu speeds but never letting it cross a valid position in a parallel universe doing that would lose the bully into the void forever he carefully planned out a series of speeds and rotations that would never cross a pu throughout the entire process at pu speeds when the pivot is tens of thousands of units away what used to be an imperceptible rotation is now pretty obvious this actually becomes a problem at even higher speeds moving the bully using a pivot becomes impractical because the inbound's position moves too fast for Mario to keep up with it and you can't simply wait out a full rotation when that would crash the game the last three fast bully batteries all need to be done without moving the bully also the second to last one has to be done within 5 frames or Mario would get squished by another exposed ceiling which was another nightmare for marbler to solve in this three-hour ordeal the bully comes dangerously close to a pu more times than we can count and ultimately runs into Mario at 847 000 speed this gives Mario 3.4 million speed and now Mario is ready to take an elevator ride out of this world but this is actually a bit more complex for the elevator to keep affecting Mario for a frame Mario needs to actually be on it not only does Mario need to go to appeal in a single frame he needs to trick the elevator into thinking he hasn't moved at all how does he do that simple by moving to a point in a pu that corresponds to the elevator in the main map except it wasn't simple it actually was a total nightmare with a million workarounds that barely work for all these reasons that you can pause to read if you want finally after Mario moves from the elevator in the main map to the same elevator but in a pu on the next frame the elevator still thinks Mario is standing on it and rotates ever so slightly this rotational displacement when magnified over a distance of 52 parallel universes sends Mario almost 4 000 units upwards well above the Star platform the conditions for this are quite precise considering Mario needs to stay in bounds the maximum vertical displacement achievable when the elevator is in this state is quite small which is why panin and marbler had to settle for an insane distance to magnify it over this causes the horizontal displacement to be problematic there was no way to have the elevator move Mario up far enough without also flinging him far out of bounds they solved this problem by making the elevator move Mario an entire pu over now Mario is a bit too high about 500 units above the Star platform to correct that after a bit of speed adjustment pan and quick had to make Mario fall down quite a bit that fall takes 20 frames and moves Mario by 975 parallel universes and now all that's left is to navigate back in bounds pan and quick moves 624 pus in the x-axis and 96 on the z-axis and finally 352pus X and 44 puz back to the main map collecting this star is Trivial reaching the star was not let's back up a bit on the timeline to April 19 2022 Tick Tock clock's Triple A press save was being heavily worked on and was looking more and more likely by the day on that night ds273 and marbler were in a voice chat the subject of stomp on the thwomp soon being down to a singlely press came up what about saving that last a press marbler and ds273 were laughing at even suggesting such a thing first of all that jump is probably the single a press that gets the most work done it skips going up these boxes these treadmills and of course the thwomp itself they had no Star Dance clip left no preset hope no pendulums and one Bob from all the way at the bottom of the clock needless to say it was never going to happen and they had a good laugh about it the next day marblers set out to demonstrate how infeasible this idea was by going through each step and showing precisely why it couldn't be done he came to the conclusion that in total there were eight problematic points two here two here three here and finally getting on top of the twomp most of these could theoretically be solved with a Star Dance clip but proving that is useless you can't just spawn 700 coin stars but then marbler looked closer at each failure point and the closer he looked the more answers he found first the pole platform which uses the only available Star Dance clip this in itself is a problem because it means the method to get past the pole with its use of a star and a fire clone is a one-time use for a zero aprest strategy to have any kind of a chance of being possible there would need to be a way to climb up and down the pole to set up hopes for cloning it was time for Mario to do away with non-renewable height sources this is the Crux of the issue with the amount of obstacles in the the way up the clock the problem becomes very similar to what Bowser and the sky used to be a very long deconstructed Goomba Bridge except this time it was Bob bombs coins and fire clones and this time instead of casually walking around Bowser in the sky every single step involved repeating the madness-inducing nonsense to get past the pole in no a presses every single time the elevator platform could theoretically be reached From Below using a diver cover a fire bounce and a misalignment unfortunately despite this while having an open corner it's not pointing away from the origin therefore no misalignment exists but if instead a bloated Bob bomb could snap to Mario's position and push him into that corner it could possibly push him completely through the wall hitboxes and into the floor Beyond this diagonal is 141 units a maximum sized bloated bob-omb pushes Mario by 149 units on paper this could actually work in practice well that's another story where would that ba bomb that magically snaps to Mario's position even come from the 4000 unit sphere would need to intersect this minuscule spot in a way that Mario can enter it here without touching it at any earlier time but also what bob-omb would that even be currently the only two bow bombs are already in use well it turns out both of these questions can be answered at once using pause button preferred hits done when Mario grabs a babam it's always placed 100 units in front of Mario regardless of where the hope is this allows Mario to do a bob-on Glide despite the Hope still being disjointed this comes within one frame of failing but it does get Mario across without updating the hope then the ba-bomb is released back to the Hope which remember is out of bounds across the clock by some absolute Miracle with a very slight modification to its exact position the same hope used across this Gap and to retrieve the babam past the pole can also perfectly intersect this open Corner this lets Maru reuse the same to get pushed completely past the wall hitboxes and into the floor hitbox bypassing the use of stardance clip this groundbreaking discovery had two huge implications first the Star Dance clip was freed up to be used somewhere else higher up in the clock but crucially there was now nothing preventing Mario from making multiple trips up and down the pole well almost nothing there were just five little hurdles to get over first Mario also needs a repeatable way of getting off the pole thankfully after the first rip up he can lure this Heath ho to get stuck in just the right spot to have its fling Mario from the pole directly onto the elevator above how convenient now for the second problem the setup to clip this corner was extremely precise and required to fire clone but remember fire clones can only be interacted with Once each trip up the pole adds one more fire clone and they all need to be in different positions for Mario to be able to touch them individually contrarily the Goombas which can be as close to each other as possible fire clones need to be at least 37 units away from each other to be usable the elevator can only take up a limited set of positions so the possible Heights more you could achieve were also Limited in the same way all things considered a maximum of 21 trips up the pole were theoretically possible with this method the third issue is between the hope and the squish Council ground pound chain remember the old position was just barely far enough away to allow for the strategy to be possible in the first place sadly this new required Hope was incompatible it prompted sjmhrp to revisit this quiz cancel ground pound chain and find a completely new method and the one she found found was not only compatible with the new hope it was also a lot simpler to set up and repeat the fourth headache was between the hope and the instant release at the moving bar the New Hope was also incompatible with this part since it barely overlapped with the entire moving bar this one was fixed with a clever use of BCA right at the edge of the activation radius finally the thing with fire clones is that while they can give Mario additional height they do so at the cost of his health as of now getting all the way up to the pole cost Mario 11 Health sectors way above the maximum survivable damage of seven while theoretically coin clones could be used along the way to refill some of that missing Health they would need at least four per trip which would be unbelievably annoying to set up but sjmhrp's Improvement to the squishcastle ground pound chain also took down the damage Mario takes from 6 to 2 meaning that Mario could live through this climb without a single coin for extra health now the babam used past the pole in stomp on Advanced 1A press strategy could be repurposed for other things higher up in the clock however at its current height the 4000 unit radius ends up short so the bubble needs to be moved up while staying out of bounds but here's a problem Mario needs to enter the activation radius to stop the bobblem to him then he needs to be out of the 4000 unit cylinder to release the bob-on back to the hope at this new height how can he go all the way from here to there certainly not with behind camera anywhere but maybe with boss buffered hits done but even pbh ends up way too short enter the hitstan highway this series of explosion clones creates a path for Mario to extend his hitstand timer all the way across the clock and exit the activation radius before releasing the ball bomb without ever updating the Hope another problem solved and now a new problem is created to get from the elevator to time jumps and moving bars usually a heave ho flip bypass the whole thing but if it has to be stuck here Mario needs a new way to get from here to there thankfully a simple misalignment on the corner of this platform gets the job done except it doesn't because that would reactivate the bob-on we've just moved instead another fire clone has to be used for multiple trips a string of fire clones the next failure point was these cubes which were decidedly too far apart to ascend however there is an alternative to navigating those reaching the top of this gauge and Diving across unfortunately that's not easy either but it is possible with fire bounces oh in a second chain of Squish Castle ground pounds on this pendulum that comes within a single unit of reactivating the babam early no big deal the Final Ground pound is actually pretty significant while Mario is in the ascending part of the ground pound quarter step collisions are not calculated which is how he can clip through platforms sometimes regardless another Collision check is also made at the start of the frame but there's a key difference in the hitbox shape used for those checks instead of of using the air movement hitboxes it uses the ground movement hitbox which is narrower at the top because it's narrower it happens to miss Mario on this frame on the next frame because the moving bar is springing out fast enough the hitbox skips over Mario entirely as Mario starts to fall back down he meets the side of the moving bar which pushes him out but because that would push him into a ceiling the movement is canceled and Mario stays put after collisions with walls are handled collisions with floors are next on the list so Mario lands on top of the moving bar to get up on this walkway though there was no misalignment it wasn't anywhere near the babam activation radius there was nothing to work with this is where the Star Dance clip would have to be used which means everything further up can only be accessed once so better make it count and make it count marbler did the first treadmill step can be approached in two different ways the first is somehow getting 324 units of height to reach a misalignment which can only be done with the start clip the second is to reach it from the walkway instead which is just a little bit too far away to be possible but what about this Bob bomb that we placed Out of Bounds at around the height of the pole you guessed it its activation radius just so happens to now be perfectly placed to snap the bob-omb back to Mario right here which pushes him into the one unit misalignment and snaps him up to the treadmill then Mario does a quick turn when the stick is held in a direction different than the one Mario is looking in he slowly turns until he matches that new angle but if instead Mario is walking and comes to a complete stop he can then turn in any direction instantly so this is what happens Mario lands with the stick at a neutral position which stops his momentum then he walks at the minimum stick range for one frame comes to a stop and instantly turns around this allows him to turn around in only four frames instead of up to 16 which in turn lets him grab the Bob on before it falls out of his grasp now for the final treadmill which again is simply too high to have have any chance of getting up marbler had to think outside the box where he found one sliver of Hope The Spinners the height difference from here to there is just barely within reason but could this Gap be cleared well of course it can with the babam Glide the problem though is that the bottom is so bloated that Mario ends up completely overshooting it the spinner is also still a bit too high to reach without the extra help from stored vertical speed so instead marbler Waits out the fuse timer then re-grabs the bob-bomb as it's about to explode when it's slightly less bloated this turned out to be a bit of a tricky maneuver first Mario gets pushed off the treadmill so he Dives back on on the next frame he does a dive recovery which has to be pause buffered because it's another B press on two consecutive frames because the end of the treadmill is so steep after one quarter step Mario immediately lands again which stores a vertical speed of 26. on the next frame he does a standing punch which also has to be pause buffered because it's yet another press this establishes the bottom as the target of a grab but because it's a standing punch Mario doesn't quite grab the bobbin yet at the same time he gets pushed back off the treadmill by the now expanding ball bomb which reactivates his conserved 26 vertical speed on the next frame Mario does a pause buffer dive the fourth B press on consecutive frames this makes him grab the babam instantly because it's already to Target of a grab and also makes him land on the treadmill again this time with 22 vertical speed at this point the problem pushes Mario back off the treadmill where he enters Free Fall while hands-free holding his stored vertical speed carries him up and a ground pound covers the wrist but it's just not quite enough to land Square on the spinner that's a handful of units too far to reach because the sidewall of the spinner prevents landing on the corner at least it would except there's a sliver of floor one unit wide sticking out of the wall hitbox which allows Mario to land safely on the spinner staying on the spinner is also a bit tricky but it is is doable thanks to the Bob arms still pushing Mario back and keeping him on the steep slope long enough after this section the rest is a piece of cake until the thwop here the ba-bomb is used to get a fire clone by the thwomp using BCA thankfully there's another fire spitter right at the top of the clock so no need to go all the way down for it besides remember there's no turning back after using the stardance clip but the real problem here is that the flame clone needs to be higher than the highest point where Mario can set the Hope or release a clone this was solved by ds273 and marbler using a wild combination of object slot manipulation magic and the jagged diagonal of the treadmills floor to get in a hands-free holding state that still wasn't enough because while they could get Mario a bit higher up with a ground pound he couldn't release an object and therefore placed a hole until after he landed that is until ds273 had the idea of using BCA not just to release the Clone but to set the Hope Itself by forcing Mario to go off camera during the ground Pound The Hope stops updating at this point so it remains up there and finally the last magic trick a die every cover via C into a ground pound squish cancel fire bounce to reach a misalignment on the corner of the thwomp this is not like a regular misalignment instead it exists because the wall is ever so slightly slanted sideways creating a one unit Gap in its corner at certain Heights now repeatedly Burning Mario to clear gaps takes its toll on the poor plumber thankfully there are two spinning hearts in tick tock clock but despite all the best efforts to minimize the burning damage Mario comes within 1 16 of a sector of health of dying on top of that four coin clones are used to refill some health setting all of this up requires multiple trips up and down the clock to place all of these clothes how many exactly 5 trips to set up enough fire clones at this elevator for the rest of the route two trips to set up the explosion clones for the bottom Glide under pause buffered headston two trips to set up the explosion clones for the hitstand highway two trips for the flame clones to get off this elevator two trips for the flame clones needed to get up on this cage and coin clones to refill Mario's Health one trip for the flame and coin clones on top of the cage one trip to set up a coin and a fire clone for the Star Dance clip one more trip to set up a flame clone here because the way the bob-bomb is sent to the outer bounds hope for the last time prevents Mario from manipulating the heave hoe into throwing him directly on the elevator it's possible to get on the elevator with at least 128 units of height excluding 128 a diver cover gives Mario precisely 128 units of Hyatt so it's not enough hence the use of one more fire clone and finally a 17th trip up the clock where Mario sets up two bob-bombs out of bounds he climbs up with with the squish canceled ground pound chain he stops one Bob to his position and crosses the Gap under pause buffered headstone to avoid updating the Hulk he climbs up to the pole by snapping that same ba-bomb to him again and clipping into the floor of the pole platform he snaps the other Bob bomb to him and uses a pause buffered headstone highway to carry it across the map without updating the out of bounds hope he gets flung next to the elevator and Flame bounces onto it he hits another fire clone to cross this Gap he rides this pendulum up does a final squish cancel ground pound chain up through the cage flame bounces up to the top he Star Dance Clips to this walkway snaps the ball bomb to him one last time to get on the treadmill then Glides into a misalignment on the spinner he carries that ball bomb all the way to the top where using hands-free holding in PCA he sets up the hope for one last little bit of cloning finally he completes the star with VSC a ground pound squish canceled or fire bounce and a misalignment to get on top of the thwomp at last tick tock clock is a press free tick tock clock is conquered at least on paper every piece of the puzzle has been figured out and proven possible but an apres save is only truly proven when there's a proper task that pieces it all together in one fluid motion this unbelievably complex task is as always given to patented quick 2012. this time though he isn't doing it all alone sjmhrp and marbler join him as well sjmhrp specialty was the 17 squish Castle ground pound chains on the lower pendulum pan and quick dealt with everything in the lower part of the clock which came out to be most of the work marbler took care of the upper section taking over after sjmhrp and handing back the task to pen and quick whenever Mario had to go back down to set up more clones very little of the testing process could be automated aside from pendulum manipulation and a couple of repeated processes nearly all of this six hour task was painstakingly created frame by frame which took in a ballpark of 180 hours and over 160 000 re-records the team ran into an issue with the preset hope that threatened nearly the entire first half of the work but they managed to miraculously Salvage it the theory crafting of the route was done in parallel to the work on the three a press saves from July work on the task began soon after lethal lava land was finished in mid-september it was finally completed on October 27th and published two weeks later on November 13 2022 as of today there are 14 apresses left in Super Mario 64. so what are those 14a presses and how could we save them first let's look at the famous a presses to enter tick tock clock with three spawning displacement strategies allowing for a re-entry without using a tick tock lock now needs to be entered three times from the floor the prospect of adding more spawning displacement is quite Grim it just does not seem possible but even if it was tiktok clock already requires three different preset hopes that can't be set within the stage itself each entry that requires an a press sets the hope somewhere else before entering the stage so adding another spawning displacement would disrupt this fine balance so what other options are there well in this room of the castle not that many the level entrance is pretty high up so there's no hope to ever get up directly from the floor to the clock in no way presses that's not even close the only possible Avenue would be to reach it from the path to Bowser in the sky unfortunately to have any chance of that Mario would need at least about 90 speed with nothing useful to work with that's well beyond the maximum speed attainable for now these three a-presses are looking pretty solid similarly also in this room is a pair of twin a presses one to go to Rainbow ride and one to go to wingmar Over the Rainbow again the Outlook is Bleak 90 speed would suffice but it's still nowhere near feasible the next I press left is in Jolly Roger Bay to collect the star Treasure of the ocean cave this a press as trivial as it is has been a total nightmare to try and save for over a decade the star is 24 units too high to be collected with a diver cover the chests look like the obvious solution but they're simple objects with a hitbox and no actual geometry Mario can't stand or bounce on them the star is at one of the highest points in the room so It's tricky to approach it otherwise it was found that given enough speed Mario could in theory collect the star unfortunately this method requires about 260 speed whereas the maximum speed that has been proven possible to gain in the level is only about 180 using these pillars multiple ideas to build up more speed were examined but none of them were successful the floating ship doesn't have the right surface for sea up sliding nor the right conditions for Hyper Speed punching this rock has a lot of potential but the conditions aren't perfectly right to allow for hyper speed of some kind research is still ongoing to try and find new ways to build up speed or to try and lower the 260 requirement no significant progress has been made in years princess's secret slide is in a similar boat but much worse while the star you get for finishing the slide under 21 seconds is low enough for a dive recovery the star Inside the Box isn't the Box itself can be broken with a diver cover but then the star is 31 units too high there's very little hope because the geometry of the room is so Barren that there simply isn't anything to work with if the star had been closer to the back of the room then it would have been reachable with VSC in a ground pound other than that there are a few pipe dreams like spawning displacement and a title screen demo but none of that is remotely close to work in fact the demo in princess's secret slide never presses any buttons so it couldn't even break the Box even if it had the chance next up is Tiny huge island here the one star with remaining a presses is wigglers red coins this in fact is one of the two stars left in the game that requires two a-presses to get the first one to clear this Gap and the second one to get on these pillars I'm repeating myself here but again this this room just doesn't have much to work with isolated platforms with large High disparities no way to clone anything and just this one fires bitter however there is the floor above here you can find wiggler running around and some coins it's not much better but it's something and as it turns out it is possible to use wiggler to set up Hyper Speed unfortunately no way has ever been found to clip down into the red Queen's room so that high speed is useless crazier strategies were also looked at having wiggler itself come down seems impossible and not even helpful a Star Dance clip could be good if not for the only available coins being in unhelpful locations the need for a flame clone which is impossible and for the 100 Coin Star already being required to reach the mainland in the first place using sliding speed conservation to carry Hyper Speed into the red Queen's room seemed quite promising but unlike a pause exit this map transition doesn't preserve sliding speed ultimately The Surge turned up fruitless the second star with two remaining a presses is Wing Mario Over the Rainbow and here we've got the most solid a press in the entire game you can't fly without an a press Mario can start flying in only three ways with a triple jump a cannon shot or in this one specific exception if he starts the level already flying due to the nature of this level collecting all the red coins without flying is unimaginable so if the 14 a press is left this is by far the one that's the most absolutely sure to never be saved with that in mind though there have been some ideas thrown around to at least reduce the star to a single Cannon shot instead of two the problem here is pretty simple from the start of the stage you need to go to the bottom of the level to talk to the pink ball bomb and activate the Cannons the lowest Cannon is too low in too weak to shoot Mario all the way up to the top of the stage so one shot from the high Cannon is also required for a total of two a presses note that entering the level takes 1A press by itself so you can't open the Cannons and re-enter the stage the only way would be by dying but there's no way to take damage without an a press from this spot even assuming you could re-enter the stage with the Cannons already open only the lowest Cannon is accessible without an a press anyway there's one more glimmer of hope when Mario is flying against the edge of the map he's actually able to build up speed unfortunately the speed at which Mario accelerates with this method is much too slow and the Wing Cap has a limited timer on top of that the timer can't be refreshed because Mario can't break boxes while flying unless he's flying very slowly therefore there is no way to build up meaningful speed because you'd constantly need to give up all that speed to refresh your flying timer another level with two a presses is shifting sand land here though it's just one a press but repeated on two different stars to get out of the elevator for inside the ancient pyramid and pyramid puzzle the elevator is particularly annoying because its walls are just seven units too high for a diver cover to clear them there is also the option of climbing the entire pyramid which sounds terrible but surprisingly doesn't look too bad after a precise knockback bounce to warp past this pole and a Star Dance clip to get up to here things are looking up but then all hope is lost when Mario faces another pole with no warp available no helpful knockback source and no way to clone anything this a press seems unavoidable specifically for inside the ancient pyramid things look even worse a second they press is needed to reach the star although a stardance clip has been shown to work of course you can only have one star dance clip at once the poly press also serves to get on top of this grindel and clear the next ledge without that jump this little step just barely too high for a diver cover would have to be cleared using an amp clip these amps are unique instead of going in a circle they chase Mario this corner is just barely close enough to make an amp appear with the clever lure it shocks Mario and he grabs the ledge Just Like a Star Dance clip theoretically an m-clip could also get Mario up to the star but it doesn't work in short the amp might not go that high up and it won't stay this far from its home long enough for a double amp clip but regardless the problem is the pole without a way to get past the pole nothing matters there is however one remote possibility involving iroks if an IROC is about to pound the ground but it starts its movement while already touching the ground it can shoot upwards into Infinity this idea has some potential but outside of hacking its position the IROC has never been made to enter this state even if it did though it rises so fast that Mario would clip through it instead of being carried up last but not least this is perhaps the most infamous a press of them all the pole in Bowser in the fire Sea from the very beginning Tyler kenney's primary focus was to make a 70 star run in zero aprests as a reality for over 7 years this 1A press has been the only barrier between him and his goal even worse it is a actually possible to get past the pole but only on the Wii Virtual Console but the fact that it's an emulated re-release and its incompatibility with the Japanese N64 exclusive glitches have always tarnished a zero-way press full game Run in the minds of Tyler Kinney and the ABC Community a blueprint to make it possible on Nintendo 64 has been in the works for years and years but several hurdles Remain the idea is actually similar to the lethal level and strategy it consists of supplying thousands of speed to one or more bullies then using squish cancel and the rotational displacement of one of these platforms to send Mario up as he travels to a parallel universe when he comes back he's now past a pole the setup is a bit more complex than in Lethal lava land here's a rundown of how it works I'll give you time to read it it boils down to this problem the platform rotates because of Mario's weight on it as such the rotational displacement applied to Mario is almost always going to be negative getting a positive displacement from this platform requires a sudden burst of speed that isn't possible to achieve with normal movement the only currently known way to do it would need three different bullies all hovering at ludicrous speeds and pinpoint precise positions only there's a single bully down here so this cannot work this theoretical solution was created after years of work by Tyler keaney he did it by hacking the speed and position of each bully and its purpose is to serve as a demonstration that the idea of a pu speed switch cancel upwork in Bowser in the fire C can work on paper given the right conditions this wishful thinking would take him massive leap towards reality if it was shown to be possible using only one hyperspeed bully and in fact that's exactly what happened just a week ago when Spud Y2K showed off a route using the 10K glitch that would theoretically require a single bully but despite the creation of multiple different brute forcers to try and find favorable conditions there's still a lot of work to be done to bring this idea to reality this is the brick wall the a ABC Community needs to break through the actual bully batteries thought to be relatively trivial in comparison to this massive problem although it could take significantly longer than the mere 26 hours of lethal lava land there are also four half a presses remaining in the run one for watch for Rolling rocks to use elevators with pu speed two entire dire dogs to swim with the shell for cloning and one for get a hand to kick the wall to set up spawning displacement with so many other a presses left it seems very unlikely that we'll ever run into a situation where these half a presses become a problem for the 120 star run here's my own judgment of How likely each a press is to ever be saved it's entirely subjective and while I believe the gist of it is generally agreed on the exact ordering is pure speculation of all these a presses they're most likely to be saved is definitely Bowser in the fire sea a long way behind would be Jolly Roger Bay then shifting sand land and the second Canon of wing Mario Over the Rainbow even less likely would be one of the two a presses in tiny huge island followed by all of the stage entries with a slight favor towards tiktok clock at Rock Bottom you can find saving both apresses in tiny huge island the princess's secret slide box and finally the first cannon in Wing Mario Over the Rainbow the final perfectly optimized day press count might very well be 13. if we're slightly more optimistic maybe 10 or 11. if we're widely optimistic it could get down to about a handful I see no possible scenario where the entire game could ever get down to zero but regardless of the final Frontier of the ABC there will always be the endless secondary challenge of making the run faster and more efficient over the years countless improvements have been made that cut dozens of hours from the total run time a full 70 star run in zeroa presses has been in the works for years but it's stuck waiting for Bowser and the fire C to be solved on Nintendo 64. meanwhile the estimated time for a 120 star run in 14a presses is now 58 hours and 47 minutes over two-thirds of that can be attributed to elevator tour in the volcano in Tick-Tock clock combined over 22 years the a button challenge has become the most fascinating video game Endeavor of all time in 2000 when Alex peniff posed this challenge to a handful of friends in IRC he couldn't even begin to imagine what would become of it neither would Kurt is bright who tried to turn it into a new form of competition on his website his vision and Forward Thinking to allow tool-assisted speedruns to compete on his board paved the way for the Revolutionary work of Bob Martin 511 who set the Baseline for years to come at the same time Thiago tsuhilo attacked the real-time version of The Challenge almost all on his own an achievement that to this day is still underrated but by all means this amazing adventure would have never happened without the Nile legendary pan and koic 2012. his incredible work on the ibadan challenge inspired multiple Generations coming in waves over the next nine years first came plush gannady and Sonic Packer who supplemented panin's work with novel ideas then Tyler Caney whose fresh Outlook brought three major trick discoveries that shaved off dozens of a presses and bad boot who not only made key discoveries but also rekindled the real-time ABC in recent years marbler took the complexity level to a new Galaxy helped by the involvement of talented and dedicated problem solvers like ever Sange ds273 and sjmhrb the team has evolved so much but at its core the infallible pan and cook Remains the captain of the mission his commitment to the journey and his undying resilience continue to amaze hundreds of thousands of people to this day the Legacy left by panenkoic and the a button challenge cannot be overstated it inspired so many other game communities to do the same just to name a few pretty much all of the Mario games the 2D Mario games would seem boring at a glance but they're actually full of surprises Super Mario World is especially interesting considering that all 96 exits can be done in only 24 aorb presses more recently the new Super Mario Brothers Wii jumpless challenge done by a deal is getting a lot of attention Super Mario Sunshine in both Galaxy games have to waste hundreds of apresses in menus but they are quite optimized in terms of actual gameplay most 3D Sonic games also have an a button challenge in fact Shadow the Hedgehog was beaten entirely in zero a presses by ring Rush the Donkey Kong 64 ABC which is also led by ring Rush is absolutely full of clever Solutions and Goofy tricks it's sister games Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie both have a button challenges of their own as well the Super Mario 64 ABC also inspired a myriad of more or less Loosely related challenges such as the B and Z button challenges the no buttons Challenge and the no joystick challenge even in other games I conquer enough time in Majora's Mask any percent low pauses or all dungeons no doors beating Sonic 3 without pressing right and half of sieve Gaming's YouTube channel the list is absolutely endless so this is it this is the current state of the button challenge 14 a presses remain dozens of blueprints exist to try and save them one of them is being actively worked on and is thought to be possible only one after all these years the community has finally hit a wall with all its dead ends the current outlook for the future of the a button challenge does look a bit Grim but the community around it keeps growing over the years the entire Super Mario 64 code was fully decompiled countless simulators were written to investigate billions and billions of possibilities there's still work ahead of us there might always be Mount Everest wasn't designed to be climbable mountains don't care if anyone manages to reach the top or not Super Mario 64 was never designed to be beaten with zero a presses the game doesn't care if it's possible we do and until we reach the top we will keep climbing [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]