Malmo's Pungeon

Suddenly, it was possible to skip boss heart containers. Pinkus explained that we could prevent the "received item" ancilla from appearing by having no room for it. In his first demo, the heart deletion involved a Somaria block, Magical Boomerang, boots dust, wall hit, and sword sparkles.

Later, a much easier setup was achieved by placing a Somaria block in the center of the screen and then item dashing into the heart. The four Somaria beams plus the dash dust would leave no slot for the heart to spawn in, so the heart collection is skipped, and and Link's heart count never increments.

The Somaria dash could work anywhere in the Dark World, but what about the Light World? Pinkus found that only bombs, lamp, and bow were needed. He showed that Armos Knights and Lanmolas hearts could be deleted by firing arrows and then spamming lamp. Moldorm's room is different because we cannot press start to switch items. The clever workaround is that Link can place his last two bombs, auto-switching to lamp for lamp spam. Link needs to walk off the ledge and then return upstairs to collect the pendant.

Tojso explained that we can get a consistent heart delete setup by spamming lamp 3 times, firing 6 arrows, and then lamping twice. The lamp spam sets the ancilla search index high enough to get a known value of 4 on the 4th arrow, 3 on the 5th, and 2 on the 6th. A value of 2 is what is needed to prevent the heart from spawning.

Heart deletes would continue to be developed, but we now had initial methods to beat A Link to the Past with just the three hearts that Link starts with.

This was bad timing for MichaelK, who was TASing LowAD.

MichaelK__ (He/Him) — 06/19/2019 11:18 AM realizes he has to redo everything done so far in bootsless low% ad tas :RIPLink~2:

What else can we delete? kan mentioned that you could talk to Link's uncle and remain swordless. fsg found that you could free Link from receiving the Mirror from the Old Man, opening up routing possibilities in LowAD.

In early 2019, Yuzuhara discovered an almost entirely new class of glitches - ancilla glitches. The word ancilla is used for the stuff that Link creates - bombs, dash dust, splashing water, etc. Yuzu posted his discoveries with titles like keepExplosion, hoppingBomb, getintoEG, manipulateBombCoordinates, manipulateBoomerang, doubleSomariaBlock, and weirdSwordbeam. Below are examples dated Feb 9-10, 2019.

Yuzuhara explained that each glitch can be done once after reviving with a fairy or deathhole. But what is the connection between a fairy revive and ancilla? It took the A Link to the Past community a few months to take a closer look.

Pinkus started researching them and shared his findings on Jun 19, 2019. The "magic variable" is 03C4, known as the search index. A fairy revive sets this variable to 6, which allows ancillae normally constrained to slots 0-1 or 0-4 to be placed into slot 5. A bomb, for example, can be manipulated or duplicated if placed in this slot.

Yuzuhara's keepExplosion (a.k.a. Murderbomb, demonstrated above) involves misslotting a bomb and then extending its timer by using a sword beam, sword spin, or hookshot 5 slots under the bomb.

Later that day, Yuzuhara found that using the lamp 3 times can set 03C4 to very high values including 0x10, extending available slots to the point of going out of bounds. Pinkus saw that this could be used in combination with certain values of a nearby array to set up a condition in which the game could write to the wrong places. As a result, he was able to write "bomb stuff" all over the wrong memory.

The possibilities would be explored later, but there was something else found earlier that captured the community's attention:

Pinkus — 06/19/2019 8:47 AM

but uh oh (or maybe not), you can despawn hearts in darkworld after defeating a boss and grab the crystal hope that doesnt change glitched low%? lol

My zelda fanart in 2023:

Regardless of the ruling on Tree Warp, MichaelK would run with it.

MichaelK__ (He/Him) — 05/10/2019 2:18 PM i'd say we call this lowwwad and keep the old lowads 👀

It took Michael only two days to route and run Tree Warp Low% AD. On May 12, he posted an RTA viable method of Tree Warp as Bunny Link.

This method takes advantage of the fact that trees never go inactive, so the top tree fills three slots. Bunny Link can then lure the Moblin and Thief to the bottom tree. The only issue is that enemy RNG is not easy to control. Because of that, there is a risk failure, which may take the form of a game crash.

The dungeon order would remain unchanged from LowTAD. The difference is the item collection: Ether is collected with a Tree Warp immediately following Castle Tower. Fighter's Sword/Shield and Tempered Sword are skipped.

After re-climbing the tower, Michael encountered a surprise:

It turns out the route has a bonus boss fight – Agahnim 2 at Agahnim 1. Aga 2 appears because Tree Warp takes place in the Dark World. Since there is no world transition to return Link to the Light World, the Dark World version of the boss awaits at the top of the tower. After the re-fight, Ether drops as the dungeon prize. Unfortunately, Link is "softlocked" because there is no automatic transition out of the dungeon. However, thanks to the diagonal walls of the boss arena, we can clip out and then save & quit.

The full item list is:

master sword flippers glove bow hook fire rod ice rod ether lamp hammer somaria mirror

After completing Low% Mirror, Michael tackled Low% Tempered on Mar 26 in what would be the first and only known Bootless LowAD run. The epic length is due to incredibly convoluted routing combined with retries and rerouting. Michael improvised: “using Desert to exit Desert” was not in the route.

This run features previously described Low% Tempered routing – Swordless Superbunny hedge maze traversal, unlocking Desert from Thieves, and re-climbing Castle Tower for Ether. 

Additionally, this run’s glitches include:

West moat FAST (funny auto-swim thing) to clip into Escape

Mirror jump to save the Frog

Misplaced mirror portal to enter Ice Palace