#a-button-challenge

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The A-button Challenge: The Bully Battery Plan

So, I’ve been lurking on the A-Button Challenge discord (check previous post), and as a result, can speak fairly authoritatively about the currently extant plans to save one or more A-button presses, taking the number of A-presses to get all 120 stars in Super Mario 64 down from 19 to 14. These 5 planned saves can be neatly divided into two chunks. There’s the two “Bully Battery” saves, and the three “Past Pole 0x” saves. It is fair to describe both of these two plans as the most complex plans ever assembled in any TAS of any game, 3 years in the making for the Bully Battery one that I’ll be describing. If you’re curious, no, a 0xA 120-star run is definitely not happening. Maybe the A-press count could drop to, like, 10 eventually, if you apply a slightly unreasonable amount of optimism to the prospects of the 14 A-presses without plans. But A 0xA 70-star run (a standard completion of Super Mario 64, in 0 A presses) is only blocked by one single A-press left that hasn’t been saved yet. And it’s one of the five with plans. That one goddamn pole in Bowser in the Fire Sea (BitFS from now on)

So, I should mention that this one has sorta kinda has been saved. There’s an oscillating platform below the pole, and for the port of SM64 to the Wii, there’s a rounding error bug that wasn’t present on the original game, which means that the error in that platform position keeps accumulating. So, if you wait for three days, the platform eventually floats high enough to make it past the pole in 0 A presses. Problem 1: The Wii version of SM64 lacks a glitch present on the original Japanese version that lets you save 3 Japan-exclusive A presses, and so a solution that works on that version must be found. Problem 2: When watching a TAS of Super Mario 64 completed in 0 A presses, the gaming populace want to watch arcane wizard Mario push the game to its limits. They want to behold the adventures of a plumber capable of extraordinary feats of black magic glitchery, and perfected inhuman movement, but who skipped too many leg days so he won’t be jumping. They do not want to watch a “”“speed”””-run where there’s an hour and a half of Mario doing exactly that, and then 3 days of Mario lazing about waiting for rounding error to accumulate. This is because it would suck ass. So, a better way must be found, to get Mario further up in the level, past the pole. Said better way relies on three key pieces of information. Number 1: When Mario is on a tilting or rotating platform, the tilt or rotation is applied for one extra frame. If Mario is going stupidly fast so that on that extra frame Mario is very far away from the platform, then... applying the rotation matrix to a Mario very far away from the origin results in Mario moving a whole heck of a lot. Possibly up? That would get Mario past the pole. Number 2: BitFS has a tilty rotaty 3d platform that’s complicated enough that the developers rolled their own code for it. And as a result, they slightly fucked up their rotation matrix. Said platform almost always displaces Mario down instead of up, when he tries doing the aforementioned speedy rotation trick. Key word, almost. At certain extreme tilt ranges, the fucked up rotation matrix is capable of tilting a speedy Mario up, as desired. Number 3: BitFS has bullies. They are an enemy that bumps you. The game physics for this is very nearly an elastic collision simulator. But perfectly elastic collisions didn’t look aesthetically pleasing enough, so the programmers changed it a bit to make the impacts aesthetic. That change violates conservation of energy. And you know what that means! You can CHARGE UP UNLIMITED ENERGY. So, the basic plan is to charge up a large thermonuclear bomb worth of energy in the bully, use that to yeet Mario at 10% of lightspeed from the tilty platform, and then the small rotation matrix error is amplified by Mario being 1000 kilometers away in the next 1/30th of a second, giving Mario sufficient height. Then Mario just has to navigate through the Parallel Universe Grid at low-relativistic speed to land back in the main universe and kick Bowser’s ass. Princess Peach doesn’t appreciate how good she has it. Isn’t this just so much better than waiting around for 3 days? This is extremely far from easy, though. The strategy was beset by seemingly fatal problems from the start, and only Tyler Kehne had the ambition to see it through to viability. Problem 1: How do you trap a bully? You need to hold it in place, somehow, while still having the game register it as traveling at high speed, in order to accumulate energy. Problem 2: If you’ve got your bully trapped, then each time Mario hits it, only adds a constant amount of energy each impact, so to get a thermonuclear bomb’s worth of energy stored up, it’s going to take a unreasonable fuckload of time. Problem 3: The bully-trapping spot isn’t at the weird tilty platform. Once the bully is charged, you need to move it from the bully trap, to the tilty platform. It’s got relativistic speed, though, which is incompatible with “gently move the thing”. Problem 4: When the bully is going fast and hits Mario, Mario’s vast speed is entirely eliminated on the very next frame by bonking against thin air since he’s moving way too damn fast. You can’t get the energy out of the bully in a useable way. Problem 5: The platform can only displace you upwards at very extreme tilts that are hard to achieve in practice. Also, you can get around Problem 4 with a trick called squish canceling, but that requires you be under the platform. Every instant you’re off the platform, it’ll adjust back to normal, and this will very rapidly eliminate the rare sensitive upwards-displacement angle you need. So basically, going off the platform to get the speed from the bully, means that you unavoidably fuck up the platform angle. Problem 6: Charting a return route through parallel universes at low-relativistic speeds, traveling further than the diameter of the earth.... Is kinda hard. Especially because of your 1/30th of a second movement granularity, and angle granularity. And double-especially if you know what the deal is with parallel universe movement, and why it might be difficult to chart the proper return path when you’re traveling thousands of PU’s each frame, at weird diagonal angles. Solution time!  Problem 1... yeah, there’s bully traps. There are different sorts of traps for different speeds, I don’t really understand it that much. Gotta dig deep into bully physics there. But it’s definitely doable. Problem 2 and 4: The Slow Bully Battery (SBB) builds energy a constant amount each iteration. Mario repeatedly whacks a stationary bully. But there’s another thing, the Fast Bully Battery (FBB), where, basically... the high-speed bully hits Mario, and on the same frame Mario gets squished by a ceiling, canceling the bonk, and then the squish itself gets canceled the next frame after that, so Mario retains the energy, and if Mario can then hit the bully again without slowing down in the meantime, it transfers the energy back to the bully at a 2.5x or 3x speed multiplier! Doubling or tripling the speed every single iteration can get you up to relativistic speeds exponentially faster than adding constant energy each iteration.  It’s hard as shit to do, though. Problem 3: When a bully’s position on the next frame is out of bounds, it will reflect off out-of-bounds, changing direction, and gravity is not applied for that frame and the next. This means that when a bully is going fast enough that, on every frame or every other frame, it’s reflecting off of out-of-bounds, it’ll just... stay floating in air, gravity doesn’t apply. Also, there’s a very strong tendency for the bully movement to end up in semistable attractor states at these speeds, where it reflects off of parallel universes in a simple repeating pattern. This is called Hover Speed. Bully movement simplifies drastically at this stage, it’s quite easy to control, you don’t have to worry about gravity, you don’t have to worry about trapping, you can get it to where you want it to go, you can even do FBB iterations easily. It initiates at around Mach 7. Problem 5: This whole raft of shit is called the Final Speed Transfer problem. Or the FST for short. It’s the hardest part of the whole thing. I’ll be detailing the solution insanity later, but I can’t believe it’s been solved. Problem 6: Yeah, that’s a rough one. Get a computer to do it instead of doing it by hand? And so, roughly, the blueprint for the overall plan looks like this: Step 1: Get the bully to the appropriate location. Easy. (starting phase, <1 minute). Step 2: Trap it and start doing slow bully batteries to the appropriate speed needed. In the best case, it might be only a few minutes. In the worst possible case, it’ll be a full 24 hours. There’s a difficult sequence of steps to hit the bully with lots of speed to make this part go way faster, but noody’s figured out how to do it yet. (SBB phase, 1 minute best case, 24 hours worst case) Step 3: Do the first few fast bully battery iterations, doubling or tripling the speed each time, until hover speed is reached. Use bully traps, raising glitches, and overall cleverness here, to deal with the gigantic fucking headache of thousand-mph billiards with gravity and friction and slightly fucked up physics where you have to do extremely difficult glitches and never lose the ball. Expected to be an absolute nightmare and hard as shit. (Initial FBB phase, <5 minutes?) Step 4: Now that you’re at hover speed, you are afforded a much greater degree of bully control and further fast bully battery iterations are quite doable, doubling or tripling the speed each time to quickly raise the bully from mach 7 to relativistic speeds, and send it off to where it needs to be. (Hover Boosting Phase, <2 minutes) Step 5: Go on the platform and get the energy out of the bully while not fucking up the platform rotation angle in the process using UNFATHOMABLY COMPLICATED BULLSHIT WORKAROUNDS, then blast off to the Parallel Universes at 0.1 c. “The most complicated two seconds in any speedrun of any game”. (Final Speed Transfer, <10 seconds) Step 6: Return from the Mario multiverse at low-relativistic speeds. Get your computer to help you out on this one, this is not for humans. Apparently there’s a glitch called 1-frame crouchsliding that’s very handy here? I don’t understand it. (PU Return, ~1 second) So, how’s the team doing on this magnificent plan? Well... the problem needs to be worked in reverse. Bruteforcers must be coded for many steps in this process, and the overall problem needs a strategy of, like, finding initial conditions that get step N to work out, and making those initial conditions the optimization target that step N-1 is trying to hit, and working backwards. Not many people have the Mario knowledge and the coding knowledge at the same time. But it’s progressing slowly. So, here’s the deal with the steps, since we’re working backwards. Step 6, the PU return has had the brute-forcers coded up for it already, and it’s.. suprisingly doable! Lots of solutions, a nice rich solution space to work with, it’s basically solved. Step 5, the Final Speed Transfer... Tyler has solved it. I didn’t believe it. The explanation about how it works required, like, 15 steps, all in two seconds, and an appalling amount of glitches and subtle movement mechanics. Sadly, the solution required hitting three high-speed bullies instead of one (two of the impacts were to get across the platform in time before the tilt angle got fucked up). The plan was to find a firing solution where one high-speed bully would zip around the parallel universes in a chaotic pattern, doing relativistic ricochets off of the voids between them, to be in the main universe at the three exact right spots at the three exact right times with the three exact right velocity vectors. But as it turns out, this is an incredibly hard problem to solve, and they gave up after several months with nothing to show for it. But then, a breakthrough in the last two months! As it turns out, one of the bruteforcers revealed that there was a 1x6 cm sweetspot on the platform where Mario could stay on it at immense speeds to tilt the platform back into the right angle range, without rotation matrix fuckery declaring “oops, Mario is technically off the platform now, time to tilt it back to useless angles”. Everything works. And this means that two of the three bully collisions for the final speed transfer can be eliminated! They’re only there to get Mario across the platform fast enough, but if you can tilt the platform back to the right angle with  the sweetspot, you don’t have to worry about “gotta go fast to not screw up the angles too badly while I’m off doing other things”. And so, with one bully collision needed post-breakthrough, the problem shifts from “have the bully zip around the multiverse to be in these three spots at the right times with the right velocities” to “have the bully be in this spot at this time, with this velocity”. much more doable! So we can move on to Step 4, the Hover Boosting Phase! Step 4, the Hover Boosting Phase. There’s a proof-of-concept for a single FBB iteration, the movement scripting tools are being worked on, and this part will probably go smoothly. Step 3, the Initial FBB Phase. This is expected to be absolute bullshit. It’s the hardest part besides the Final Speed Transfer. Nobody has any idea how long it’ll take to do this, as this phase hasn’t been engaged with that much. I expect at least three separate instances of a seemingly-fatal problem with this stage being defeated by a brilliant solution pulled out of Tyler Kehne’s ass. Roughly, the problem is figuring out how to do Fast Bully Batteries at all when hover speed isn’t drastically simplifying the problem for you. The worst case scenario is that this stage is impossible, and it’ll take a full 24 hours of Slow Bully Battery to charge the bully up to mach 7, to proceed with the plan. However, since Fast Bully Battery doubles or triples speed each time, and Slow Bully Battery adds constant energy each time, the last few iterations of FBB save most of the time. If only the last instance of Fast Bully Battery gets solved, that cuts the Slow Bully Battery time from 24 hours down to 4 hours. Two FBB instances being solved mean 35 minutes on battery duty, and three and four drop the slow battery time to 6 and 1 minutes, respectively. Step 2, the SBB Phase. Going to take some scripting work to have it flow nicely into the rest of the plan, especially if thousands of iterations are required because Step 3 went poorly, but expected to not be too much of an issue if Step 3 doesn’t completely fail. And Step 1 should be trivial if all else is done. So, that’s where we’re at. PU Return is solved, the Final Speed Transfer has had a big simplifying breakthrough and we’re just waiting on the scripting and bruteforcer tools to whip up a demonstration, FBB iterations past hover speed are expected to be easy when we get there, the first few FBB iterations are expected to be hard as shit and take ??? time, and things should be easily solvable from there. Oh right, one last thing. Presenting the absolute insanity that is the Final Speed Transfer blueprint. The simplified version, post-breakthrough, which still qualifies as the most complex 2 seconds in TASing. Most of the following is floating-point precise (ie, micrometer-precise if translated to real-world terms) Mario runs in arcs on the platform to build up speed (to get off the platform fast when needed), and get the platform tilted appropriately. Mario does a few pause-buffered dive recovers to haul ass across the platform and get there a few frames faster. Also, since Mario is within 4 cm of the platform when he does this, the platform will go “ah, Mario is on me, time to tilt” and we need all the tilting we can get. Mario lands with the control stick in neutral to instantly stop in place, as Mario is going too fast now, and the instant deceleration saves another 1/15th of a second. Mario walks very slowly for 1/30th of a second, putting him in a sub-pixel-precise spot on the platform called the NUT Spot. (Nonstatic Unit Truncation). The C-up button is pressed, to decelerate Mario, which cancels into idling, which, due to rounding errors in the platform rotational displacement, cancels into freefall off the platform. Gravity then applies to Mario, and then Mario applies direction adjustment in midair, to land back on the platform in the NUT spot, so then the platform is like “oh, Mario is on me, time to keep tilting”. All this occurred in one frame. This entire sequence of events with the NUT spot occurs 5 more times in a row, so for 1/6th of a second, Mario is having gravity continually applied to him, while being in a limbo state of being on and off the platform for the purpose of good platform tilting. Now, with Mario’s stored gravitational acceleration, he can fall off the platform fast, saving  2/15ths of a second of falling, decreasing the amount that the tilting platform tilts back to normal. The relativistic bully impacts Mario, and being below a ceiling, he can do the squish cancel speed transfer. Now, Mario can’t really move unless his next intended position is in-bounds, (it is not, currently) so the platform, in the process of tilting back to normal since Mario is off it, ends up tilting so Mario now technically counts as being on it. Mario is now in the 1x6 cm sweetspot where rotation matrix stuff doesn’t screw him over, and can just hang out there for 4/15ths of a second, as the platform continues to tilt. Then the platform tilts too far, Mario counts as off it, and then it tilts back in such a way that guess what! Mario is back on the platform again. Another 4/15ths of a second goes by, this “Mario’s off the platform and back on it” glitch happens again, and now Mario’s got... almost an entire second before the platform tilts so Mario falls off it for good. This luxuriously high amount of time, a full second and a half, is easily enough so that the platform tilt requirements are finally met, and Mario adusts his angle slightly to zip off to the parallel universes and get a good height boost. Sadly, Mario is flying forward, a sure ticket to getting stuck in an alternate universe, or crashing the game. But there’s one last glitch. The 10k glitch, so named because past 10,000 speed (around mach 9, and we’re well past that), Mario can instantaneously reverse his speed direction in a single frame. Mario redirects his relativistic speed backwards in an instant, to navigate back to the main universe with 1-frame crouchsliding. Finally touching down past the pole, in 0 A presses, the last A press to be saved in a full-game run. THIS IS THE FUCKING SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF THE STRATEGY, IT USED TO BE EVEN WORSE HOW IN THE HELL IS A PLAN LIKE THIS CREATED IS TYLER KEHNE A MORTAL MAN Oh, one last thing! Bully Battery plans also have promise to save another A-press, the one in Lethal Lava Land. Because there’s a bully there, and that means INFINITE ENERGY. That plan is much simpler. Partially because nobody’s really working on it yet, so the plan is missing a lot of details. The optimism without a concrete plan is because everyone’s like “well, there’s a bully there, and a bunch of really janky geometry and platforms to interact with, and we only need sub-sonic bully speeds because Hyperspeed Lava Boosting is a thing (and it looks incredibly cool). Fuck it, we’ll probably be able to whip something up after we get BitFS taken care of” Damn this was long.  

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The A-Button Challenge: Past the Pole 0x Blueprint

Reposting the context, because the other post might get separated in reblogging with most people too lazy to click the link: I’ve been lurking on the A-Button Challenge discord, and as a result, can speak fairly authoritatively about the currently extant plans to save one or more A-button presses, taking the number of A-presses to get all 120 stars in Super Mario 64 down from 19 to 14. These 5 planned saves can be divided into two chunks. There’s the two “Bully Battery” saves (detailed in the other post), and the three “Past Pole 0x” saves (in this post). The Past-pole plan is to eliminate three of the four A-presses inside Tick Tock Clock (the treadmill jump ones) and has fully come together mostly within the past year. It is fair to describe both of these two plans as the most complex plans ever assembled in any TAS of any game, though the Past-pole plan is complex in different ways than the Bowser in the Fire Sea (BitFS) plan from the last post. The BitFS plan must be painstakingly assembled from the end backwards with a large assortment of bruteforcing tools and optimizers, while the past-pole plan has large chunks doable by a human TASer, with some very notable exceptions. The BitFS plan, if all goes well, takes ten minutes or less, while past-the-pole takes hours. The BitFS plan is relatively easy to understand in a handwavy way, with the true insanity showing up when you drill down into the final few seconds of the maneuver on a frame-by-frame level. The past-the-pole plan has more of its complexity spread out in the overall outline of “what are we doing and why”, with many more steps. The BitFS plan has the pivotal piece figured out, and large initial chunks missing, while the past-the-pole plan is almost completely assembled except for the pivotal piece. The BitFS plan relies on abusing bully physics and parallel universe travel, to charge up unlimited energy, blast off at relativistic speed into the multiverse, and return.  The past-pole plan relies on abusing Mario’s item-holding mechanics and the random number generator, to teleport objects about the level as needed while warping fate to pull off trillions-to-one improbabilities. A complete explanation past the break.

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.  

[tachvintlogic]