This is going to take a appalling amount of setup to explain. I recommend grabbing a nice snack and settling in, maybe bookmarking this for later, it’ll be a while.
First, an in-depth explanation of cloning, HOLPs, HOLP preservation, and limbo storage. Second, a rough description of how the plan works and what obstacles it’s dodging. Third, a detailed analysis of the Tick Tock Clock course as a whole, to see why it’s way harder than it initially looks to save 3 A-presses with the plan. Fourth, a more detailed analysis of the plan and its many steps and the glitches that go into it, and the extra crap that must be done to squeeze extra A-saves out of this. Fifth, a closer look at the key most-difficult piece of the whole puzzle.
Prerequisite Glitch Knowledge
To understand this, it requires understanding the physics of how Mario holds, throws, and drops items. There’s four key families of glitches which recur over and over in this plan. Specifically, they’re about how to clone items (including extremely unusual ones), how to remotely transport items to where you want, how to keep the game from noticing that you’re doing that, and how to store the items for a later time.
1: Cloning. If you manage to grab a bobomb the instant it explodes, you will be holding onto, not a bobomb, but an empty item slot. The game will search amongst nearby objects in the level to figure out what goes in the empty item slot, letting you replicate, hold, and throw normally impossible objects like coins, fire, explosions, and particle spawners. These items will have unusual properties when you throw them, such as being frozen in time, and only capable of interacting with you once. So, as an example, a thrown fire will never burn out, and you can only be burned by it once.
2: HOLPs. This requires a digression into how the game handles Mario holding and throwing objects. The game stores a coordinate called the HOLP (held object’s last position), the last spot the game saw Mario holding an item. When Mario grabs and yeets an item, it is yeeted not from Mario, but from the HOLP, which is the last place the game saw Mario holding something. Which is usually right in front of Mario, making everything look normal.
But there’s a curious thing. If you throw an item, the HOLP (last position of the held object) remains where you threw the item from! You can walk away and it won’t follow you. Now, the moment you pick up another item to do things with, the game will realize you’re holding an object and set the HOLP back in front of you where it should be, restoring normality.
But if, hypothetically, there was a way to have the game not realize that Mario was holding something... Then throwing the object would throw it from the HOLP, which is set at the last place the game realized Mario was holding an object, ie, far away. And this lets you remotely throw stuff to any place you’ve previously visited and thrown stuff at!
Specifically, there’s three key aspects of this. Throwing an item throws it from the HOLP (which is maybe far away from you). Dropping an item drops it at the HOLP coordinates but at Mario’s elevation (again, maybe far away from you). And it’s possible to set the HOLP in a different level entirely, go to a new level, and remotely throw something from the preset coordinates! This is called a preset HOLP. So, if I say “preset HOLP”, you know that means “set the coordinates in another stage, so you can start off your new stage strong by remotely throwing crap to the preset coordinates”
3: HOLP Preservation. Remember how I said that the HOLP was set at the last spot the game saw Mario holding an item? I meant “saw” extremely literally. It’s tied to rendering! This opens up 4 key glitches used in this plan to remotely transport items about the level without the game seeing you do it. From least useful to most useful, they are:
Invisible Object Cloning (IOC). You’re carrying an empty item slot around to clone things. Sadly, pesky visible objects load into the empty slot, making the game notice you’re holding something, and ruining the HOLP. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? But instead, you could start off by loading an invisible object into the empty item slot. Now, since you’re holding an invisible object, the game doesn’t see you holding anything! (because it’s invisible, silly) Just stroll on over to where you need to go for further cloning shenanigans, the HOLP is undisturbed.
Pause-Buffered Hitstun (PBH). When Mario gets hurt, he flashes, being invisible every other frame. When the game is paused, Mario is invisible the first frame you pause. So, if Mario gets hurt, and then keeps pausing 15 times a second while flashing in pain, Mario turns invisible. This lets Mario do things without the game seeing him do it, preserving the HOLP.
Instant Release (IR). Mario dive-grabs into an item and bonks instantly afterwards, dropping the item. As Mario has grabbed and dropped an item on the same frame, the game didn’t see him do it (Mario’s too fast), so the HOLP doesn’t update.
Blatant Camera Abuse (BCA). Mario walks off-camera. Now that Mario is offscreen, he can break the laws of physics with impunity, grabbing and throwing items as he pleases without the HOLP updating.
4: Limbo Storage. The game doesn’t like paying attention to things far away from Mario. So, if you remotely throw an item to a distant HOLP... the item won’t do anything, time won’t flow, the game isn’t paying attention to what happens there. But then, when you draw near, the game will go “oh shit, I totally forgot about this, one moment plz” and events will resume, and the item will be thrown from the HOLP as it should have been.
There’s a variant of this which is a key part of the strategy. If a bobomb is dropped out of bounds, then as soon as the game notices this (because you got close enough to it), it will go “oh fuck, this should not be out of bounds, where do I put this...” and place the bobomb directly in front of Mario. Just get close enough to an bobomb stored in out-of-bounds limbo, and wham, the bobomb suddently teleports right in your face.
The Plan (Rough)
Alright, part 2, explaining the plan and why it works, in rough detail. To understand why the plan is what it is, we must first look at the obstacles.
Tick Tock Clock is a very vertical stage, seemingly requiring many jumps. At one point, there’s a pole, which requires an A-button press to dismount. And getting off the elevator just before the pole, requires an A-button press to do. And getting to the elevator from the cage just before that requires a bobomb, which normally doesn’t exist this high up in the level unless you use the HOLP to import a bobomb. (just remotely throw the bobomb at the bottom of the level to the preset HOLP far above, climb high enough to activate the thrown bobomb out of limbo, and have the bobomb drop out of the heavens directly onto your face). Oh right, and getting to the cage in the first place requires another A-button press to go from a treadmill to the cog staircase leading to the cage.
That’s 3 A-presses and one preset HOLP seemingly required to make it past the pole on the normal route. One A-press to go from the treadmill up to the cage, use the preset HOLP to bring a bobomb to you in order to go from cage to elevator, use a second A-press to go from elevator to pole, and a third A-press to go from the pole to past-the-pole.
treadmill--(A)-->cage--(HOLP)-->elevator--(A)-->pole--(A)-->past pole
There’s mitigating factors, though. A-presses 1 and 2 can be saved by a Star Dance Clip (SDC). Basically, when Mario collects a star, he does a funny little dance, which boosts him up in height a bit. A star spawns when 100 coins are collected. So, you can just clone a coin to put it where you need, make that the 100th coin you collect, and then you hit the star that spawns right afterwards, doing a funny little dance and getting some extra height! Enough to save an A-press.
Problem. “getting 100 coins” is something you can only do once, so you can eliminate either A-press 1 or 2, pick one and only one.
treadmill--(SDC)-->cage--(HOLP)-->elevator--(A)-->pole--(A)-->past pole
Also you could use a preset HOLP (setting HOLP coordinates in another stage and then entering the clock so you can start off your plan by remotely throwing something where you want) to put something that hurts you at the top of the pole! Just climb the pole, and get knocked off the tip! But that means you can’t bring the bobomb up with you and you need to spend another A-press to get around that.
treadmill--(SDC)-->cage--(A)-->elevator--(A)-->pole--(HOLP)-->past pole
What does the standard 1 A-press route look like? Well, at the treadmill, you can build great speed, and jump once, leaping all the way past the pole in a single bound.
treadmill--(SDC)-->cage-------------------(A)------------------------->past pole
And yet, this new plan promises to get past the pole with no jumps! How is it possible? Well, roughly, the blueprint looks like
treadmill--(S)-->cage--(S)-->elevator--(SDC)-->pole--(HOLP)-->past pole
Where S is for Shenanigans.
Set the HOLP at the pole, remotely transport something up to the pole to forcibly knock you off it later, make your way up to the elevator using Shenanigans, set the HOLP at the elevator so you can transport the stuff you need for the Star Dance Clip, remotely transport that stuff up to the elevator, do Shenanigans again to get back to the elevator, do the Star Dance to get a bit of extra height and make it onto the pole platform, climb the pole, and get knocked off by the thingy you transported up there at the start. You are now past the pole in 0 A presses.
In more detail:
1: Set the HOLP (last spot the game saw Mario hold something) in a different level, with the coordinates set on top of the pole, and enter Tick Tock Clock.
2: Use the invisibility glitches I was talking about earlier to clone an explosion and remotely throw it to the top of the pole.
3: Quantum tunnel through a wall seam (ie, use floating point rounding errors to walk through walls) to set the HOLP out of bounds by the treadmill.
4: Go off-camera and drop a bobomb at the out-of-bounds HOLP, so now it will teleport right up in your face if you get anywhere nearby.
5: Problem, the “activation sphere” where the bobomb will teleport to you (it’s stored out of bounds and will now warp to you if you get close) is pretty big, so you’ve got less room to work with now. Use loads of random number manipulation to have a pendulum give you a lift all the way up to the cage, as that’s the only way to ascend that isn’t blocked by the activation sphere (waaaaay harder than it sounds)
6: Do a crazy maneuver where you dive off the cage into the edge of the activation sphere. The bobomb teleports to you, and in one frame, you grab and instantly release it while diving through the air. This sends the bobomb back to the out of bounds HOLP, but at a slightly higher elevation since dropping an object sets it to the HOLP coordinates, but Mario’s elevation. Mario falls out of the activation sphere in the very next frame, so the bobomb can’t go back to him again and remains in limbo.
7: Repeat steps 5 and 6 over and over again, to raise the limbo-stored bobomb higher and higher. Do step 5 one last time so you’re by the cage.
8: The bobomb you have stored out of bounds is high enough that you should just be able to walk over a little bit and pluck it out of thin air, like a rabbit from a hat! (you got too close and it’s in limbo so it teleports to you)
9: Use the bobomb to get to the elevator like usual, floating in the air. Now, you’re carrying an object, aren’t you? Discard the bobomb at the top of the elevator to set the HOLP there.
10: Drop down and use invisibility glitch shenanigans to clone a coin and some fire and remotely throw them to the top of the elevator. Everything’s set up for the Star Dance Clip now.
11: Repeat steps 3-9 to get back up to the elevator in the same way again. You did it once, you can do it again.
12: Remember the setup for this in step 10? Collect coin 100 while getting burned by fire (for extra vertical oomph) to Star Dance Clip off the elevator so you don’t have to jump.
13: Climb the pole and get knocked off it by the explosion you remotely set there in step 2.
Now you’re done!!
Well, actually, it’s more complicated than that, but this is a good understanding of it.
Integrated Stage Analysis (or, why this plan is lame without extra work)
Tick Tock Clock is kind of a weird stage because you can’t treat anything about it in isolation. There are three times you visit it and have to get past the pole, so that should save three A-presses, right? NO.
Here’s the deal. It takes an A-press to jump into Tick Tock Clock each time you want to enter the level anew. (bad)
There are three Tick Tock Clock stars where, right as you finish the level, you can do a glitch called Spawning Displacement to exit the level in such a way that you don’t need to jump back to get in the stage. The other three stars force you to exit in such a way that you need to jump to get back in.
Collecting some of the stars with minimum A-presses requires a preset HOLP. You have to be in another level to set this up, so anything like this must be scheduled for right after entering the clock. There are two stars like this.
So, it’s a bit of an interesting routing problem. You want to enter the stage a minimum number of times. The stars which require a preset HOLP have to be done right after entering. Some stars let you keep playing the stage afterwards. Others force you to leave the stage. So, an example plan for the 6 stages would go:
enter(A)->Get a Hand(HOLP)->Red Coins->Roll Into the Cage
enter(A)->Pit and Pendulum(A)->Timed Jumps on Moving Bars(A)
enter(A)->Stomp on the Thwomp(2xA, HOLP)
Get a Hand and Stomp on the Thwomp require a preset HOLP, so they must come right after entering. Get a Hand, Red Coins, and Pit&Pendulum are the three where you can reenter the level without having to jump to get back in. The other three force you to leave. There’s 3 entry A-presses, and 4 A-presses in the levels, for 7 total. This is the current state of the art.
The past-the-pole plan does save an A press, but it takes a preset HOLP to do so. So, we can shave off an A-press like so:
enter(A)->Get a Hand(HOLP)->Red Coins->Pit and Pendulum(A)->Roll Into the Cage
enter(A)->Timed Jumps on Moving Bars(HOLP)
enter(A)->Stomp on the Thwomp(2xA, HOLP)
3 entries, 3 A presses in-level, 6 in total.
But trying to clean up Pit and Pendulum as well runs into two big problems. The first big problem is that, if you look in detail at P&P, it’s one A-press to jump off the treadmill, and then the spawning displacement trick to reenter afterwards requires the A-button to be held down. Revenge of the half-A press. Now, the half-A-press can usually leech off the previous one, so you just need to press A once when doing things normally, and keep it held down for a bit. But the “past the pole 0x” trick requires that A not be held down. So, yeah, you got past the pole. But at some point A must go from being not-held-down, to held-down, in order to keep the “don’t need to worry about reentry” A-press saved. Bam, a new A press ruins your day.
Second problem: Let’s say the reentry problem wasn’t a thing, that you could do it in 0 A presses instead of 0.5. Well, then you have a problem of four stages requiring a preset HOLP (GaH, TJoMB, SotT, P&P), and you’ve only got three reentries from the outside to go around. Again, you either need to figure out how do one of the stages without a preset HOLP, or accept that you incur an extra A-press to enter the stage from having to do your work in four trips instead of three.
The planned solution to this is absolutely fucking brilliant. Just rethink fundamental assumptions. Who said we have to leave the stage in order to set the HOLP? If we could set one of the HOLPS from inside Tick Tock Clock, we wouldn’t need to leave the stage to set it up, and everything could be done in 3 trips instead of 4.
Sadly, Get a Hand has to come at the start of a session, even if its HOLP gets saved, because its 0.5x A press must leech off of a clock entry A press. Nope. Stomp on the Thwomp? Nope, that HOLP is waaaay too high up to set internally. What about the other two? Sadly, they’re the two pole HOLPs, and the whole point of the 0x pole plan is that you can’t get past the pole from below.
But... Wait a minute... once you do the 0x pole plan... you’re past the pole.
Ie, you’re high enough to SET THE HOLP AT THE POLE TO ENABLE ROUND TWO. This isn’t easy. You have to do a much fancier version of the past-the-pole plan to get it to work. Basically, when you go up to the elevator for the second time, you have to juggle two out-of-bounds bobombs up instead of one. This makes it so that when you get past the pole, there’s still one bobomb left over in limbo storage. Just walk over, and poof, it spontaneously manifests in Mario’s face. Throw it at the top of the pole, and you’ve internally set the HOLP.
So, if Pit-and-Pendulum reentry can be done 0x instead of 0.5x, and a fancier version of the 0x pole plan can be made that leaves you with one extra bobomb in limbo storage, you can do:
enter(A)->Get a Hand(HOLP)->Red Coins->Roll Into the Cage
enter(A)->Pit and Pendulum(HOLP)->Timed Jumps on Moving Bars(HOLP)
enter(A)->Stomp on the Thwomp(2xA, HOLP)
3 entries, 2 internal A presses, 5 total. Can we do better?
Well, there’s one last thing to take care of. Stomp on the Thwomp requires the HOLP to be set really high for the 2xA plan. It requires a HOLP at the pole for the 0xA past-pole plan. We can only set one. So this requires somehow figuring out how to complete everything past the pole in 1 A press, without the old HOLP that let us do that. But, since we’ve got a fancier version of the past-pole plan worked out now, there is an all-new option of warping in 1 free bobomb to do shenanigans with. For a final score of:
enter(A)->Get a Hand(HOLP)->Red Coins->Roll Into the Cage
enter(A)->Pit and Pendulum(HOLP)->Timed Jumps on Moving Bars(HOLP)
enter(A)->Stomp on the Thwomp(1xA, HOLP)
3 entries, 1 internal A press, 4 total.
So, yeah, I basically presented vanilla past-the-pole, but to use it to its full potential, we’re also going to need to solve Pit and Pendulum 0xA reentry, fancy past-the-pole (with an extra bobomb available afterwards), and Stomp on the Thwomp with no HOLP and 1 extra bobomb.
The Fancy Plan
Actually, the simple plan has most of this already. The question is just, what needs to be modified to do the stuff we need?
Step 11. It used to be “just copy earlier steps to get up”. But if we want a bobomb available past the pole, we need to store a second bobomb out of bounds too, adding more difficulty to it.
The extra part is: Set up 3 explosion clones. Do Step 3 again. Run into the explosions, hurting Mario, to do the Pause Buffered Hitstun trick (with invisibility) to clone an invisible bonk particle spawner, now you can ascend the wall with your invisible item, and wander down by the cubes. Go off-camera, clone a bobomb, and release it so it’s at the treadmill HOLP at Mario’s current elevation. You’re very short on space now, so use sick RNG manipulation skills to force the pendulum to give you a ride up to the clock hand (exceptionally improbable). Then, at the clock hand, have it rotate counterclockwise (also highly improbable!) to arrive near the pusher bar area. Then just repeat steps 4-9 (as the simple plan mandates) with less space available.
Woo yay we get past the pole from there, and then it’s time for the star-specific tricks! The plan forks into three directions for if you’re going for Timed Jumps on Moving Bars (B), Pit and Pendulum (P), or Stomp on the Thwomp (T).
Step 14B: Get the heave-ho to flip you up to the next level, do pendulum RNG manipulation, ride the pendulum up to the moving bars, do squish cancel tricks to climb the moving bars, and get the star. The completely standard and vanilla ending to Timed Jumps on Moving Bars.
Step 14P: Walk over, having the extra out-of-bounds bobomb stored in step 11 teleport to you. Grab it and throw it at the top of the pole to set the HOLP there for later use. Do even more pendulum RNG manipulation, to ride the pendulum over, and do a floating-point precise wall punch (instead of wall kick, which sends you further, but takes a half-A-press) to collect the Pit and Pendulum star, while bouncing off in a way that has its trajectory adjusted by the pendulum to barely land in the spot where you can do spawning displacement to save the customary entry A press. Unbelievably precise, but Pannenkoek did it.
Step 14T: Manipulate the nearby have-ho in the tiny region of spare space you still have (out of the bobomb activation sphere) to flip you up to the next level, and do a bunch of pendulum RNG manipulation.
Step 15T: Drop down to the pendulum, ride it over to the activation sphere of the bobomb, and have the bobomb return from limbo. Then, it... kinda gets stuck in the ceiling? So this lets you float in midair to a very special spot called the Pendulum Box Pedro Spot, that used to require using the HOLP to get into. You have to do it quite fast or else the bobomb explodes in your face. There’s a simplified version of this step that doesn’t require raising the second bobomb so much, which makes things a lot easier down below. Sadly, it relies on a glitch called the supersaturated bobomb, where the bobomb’s detonation timer overflows to the negatives so then it just doesn’t explode. This glitch takes 3 years for the overflow to happen. Everyone was horrified by taking 3 years to save an A press and wanted to go for faster, riskier methods.
Step 16T: Complete Stomp on the Thwomp in the ordinary customary way. Do lots of RNG manipulation, get the pendulum to push you into the Pedro Spot, build speed, launch out with the push of the A button, punch your way to the edge to conserve vertical speed, you automatically launch vertically with great speed up to the clock hand in the perfect spot, it goes counterclockwise (improbable), and you fall off it one more time with vertical speed conserved to launch up on top of the Thwomp and finish the level.
How’s the plan coming along? Well, almost all parts have actually been done in practice, on youtube! This includes the additional pieces to save extra A presses! The only missing parts are:
1: That step about riding the pendulum up from the walkway to the little island by the cage. The key part of the whole strategy.
2: I’m sketched out by the bobomb positioning needed for Stomp on the Thwomp 1x, it leaves very little room to maneuver and mandates doing the hardest version of pendulum riding (the hardest part of the whole strategy) to stay in the acceptable zone. There might be issues here.
3: Step 15T, about plucking the bobomb out of thin air near the pendulums, and using it to walk through the air to the Pendulum Box Pedro Spot, hasn’t been done. It’s been done with a hacked bobomb that’s had its fuse disabled (to simulate supersaturated bobomb), but doing it in practice with an actual bobomb with a fuse is still a missing piece. Probably doable.
Squish Cancel Ground-Pound Chaining, or: Welcome to RNG Hell.
The one big piece that’s missing is a piece done over and over again in the run. “Manipulate RNG to get the pendulum to lift you from the walkway to the island by the cage”. Basically, when Mario groundpounds, he rises up in the air a little bit. If he’s squished in this time, and the squish is canceled, he snaps out of the groundpound. A sufficiently quickly rotating pendulum is capable of doing this occasionally. So, it is theoretically possible to get an insanely good dice roll, and groundpound over and over, having it canceled each time, and gaining more and more height.
and then, at the tip of the Pendulum’s tangibility radius, but still too low for Mario to reach the ledge... The sheer vertical ledge is very very slightly not vertical, down at the level of floating point rounding errors. So it is conceivable that the lower half of Mario’s body is touching the “vertical” ledge, but the upper half isn’t, being a micrometer away (a literal micrometer, in this case). “lower half of Mario touching wall, upper half not touching” is the signal to the game to look for a ledge for Mario to grab. It’s a bit too high, but that’s ok, the game sends Mario up there anyways. And he’s up!
So, yeah, you’ve gotta chain like two dozen squish cancel ground pounds, one after another, with the probability dropping exponentially each time, and end up in a micrometer-precise spot to have a ledge grab glitch happen to send Mario up to the necessary spot.
This is, to put it extremely mildly, hard. Existing brute forcers have pulled this off from the clock hand, not the walkway. Doing that only requires about a dozen squish cancel ground pounds chained into a micrometer-precise spot. Much much easier, because fucking exponents.
Currently, a brute-forcer is being worked on for an alternate approach where the pendulum first shoves Mario into the ceiling (it is very hard to do this). But then Mario in the ceiling doesn’t fall down at all, so he can chillax out of bounds and take his time ascending, calling upon no great improbabilities to do so, until he gets to a good spot to do the squish cancel groundpound chain the rest of the way (Mario is high up then, so it’s quite feasible). This replaces “being on the bad side of exponentially decreasing odds” with “figure out how to get shoved into the ceiling, do that first”, which is clearly a much easier problem. And this is like, the one key missing piece to the whole strategy!
It should take about an hour or more of RNG manipulation initially, and then mere minutes each time the step must be repeated, but that’s pretty doable.
