The Gold Split Newsletter - Week #13

The Gold Split offers a free, weekly digest of news from the world of speedrunning and beyond.

This Story of the Week is all about the new Low% route in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and was featured in this week's issue. The full post includes more news, briefly, as well as this week's top times and a fun fact. Check it out HERE.

Story of the Week

Most of the time, new discoveries make a speedrun go faster and that makes sense. However, runners of the Low% category must feel a little bit anxious about them. The goal of Low% is to beat the game while completing the fewest objectives and acquiring the least number of items possible.

And in this reference frame, a new discovery could mean the obvious: saving time through a new trick or a route change. But it could also mean that another objective and/or item became redundant in order to beat the game and therefore needs to be eliminated. And only acquiring as few items as absolutely necessary is the ultimate requirement of Low%.

An infamous example of the lengths that Low% runners have to go to is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It was found that the idle animation while picking up an item is missing a frame. And that missing frame moves Link ever so slightly in one direction while ignoring collision with anything. By picking up a rupee in a certain spot close to a closed gate or door, Link will very slowly start moving into it over the course of the next few hours. This strategy is called a Rupee Slide and takes up over ten hours of the game’s current Low% route. These images were taken from Anorakkis' former record:

Left: Before the Rupee Slide | Right: After the Rupee Slide

After that introduction, these are the news: let’s say (hypothetically), that it was assumed that nine items were absolutely necessary to beat a game and that it couldn’t be done with fewer. This run would take roughly one hour, not too different from Any%. But now, a new discovery makes one of these items redundant. It is now possible to finish the game with eight items. Even if that run is infinitely more complicated and takes 13 hours to complete, it is now the new Low% standard and also the new record.

This is exactly what happened recently to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and so far Swiss speedrunner Aloakirby is the only person to complete a run with the new route. It took them just a little over 20 hours, but the run also includes a good seven hours of healthy sleep.

The item that is now no longer necessary is The Wind Waker, a conductor's baton giving Link various powers when conducting the right songs, not too dissimilar from the Ocarina of Time. But more importantly, it was also used to set up glitches and make other tricks more consistent. This is a full list of items acquired during Low% now, at the time of writing:

• Bombs
• Bomb Bag (30)
• Deku Leaf
• Magic Meter
• Master Sword
• Hero's Shield
• Fully Charged Master Sword
• Mirror Shield

This makes the entire run way more complicated, longer, and reliant on RNG. Due to a lack of space and… well… knowledge, I can’t go into full details, but here are a few of the resulting consequences that stand out. I’ll link the speedrun after explaining the three glitches and add a timestamp for each of them.

All Superswims have to be performed manually

Superswimming is the speedrunner’s preferred way to traverse the ocean. Simply put, it enables Link to swim backwards, and extremely fast. With The Wind Waker, players were able to perform a glitch called Dry Storage, making Superswims consistent and relatively easy to perform. But without this crucial item, they now have to set up each Superswim by using one of the following options, or a combination:

• Executing frame-perfect pause-buffering (pausing, unpausing, and immediately pausing again on the next frame) and changing Link’s direction on every pause
• Changing Link’s direction by 180° on every frame by flicking the joystick 30 times per second (the game runs at 30 frames per second)

Performed in the run at: 39:25

Speedrunner gymnast86 has a great video on the evolution of the Superswim, and there’s no better time to watch it than right now:

The run now includes a 1-hour long Zombie Hover

A Zombie Hover allows Link to theoretically gain infinite height and also some horizontal movement, while having no health. This sounds great on paper, but there’s two downsides:

1. Unless Link manages to land in a loading zone or increase their health, they will just die as soon as they touch land or water.
2. It is necessary to hit the B-button many times per second throughout the entire duration. The faster you can hit that button, the more height you gain. If you don’t hit it fast enough, you lose height.

Despite being able to pause and take breaks, doing this for over an hour is incredibly physically demanding, and nothing any doctor would recommend as a workout. To make matters worse, at the end of this particular Zombie Hover, a frame-perfect trick is required to achieve the desired result. Link needs to land in the water to be teleported to the upper entrance of Forest Haven, but also needs to pick up a heart on land just before. But if Link touches the land before falling in the water, they aren’t teleported.

The way this is achieved is insane, but so cool: at the apex of the Zombie Hover and above the desired location, Link starts to fall. At exactly the right moment during the fall, they pull a bomb out of their pack and hold it above their head, which now starts its fuse. If this was done correctly, the bomb explodes after they pick up the heart lying on the ground below, but before they touch the ground. The force from the explosion pushes them into the water, teleporting them to the entrance.

Performed in the run between: 1:11:10 - 2:20:00

Skipping Puppet Ganon is complete RNG

I won’t pretend to fully understand this, but it involves a complicated Zombie Hover and dropping bombs into a pot from above while being attacked by Puppet Ganon and Keese at the same time. This skip alone took Aloakirby more than eight hours of attempts during their run.

Done successfully in the run at: 9:26:00

This is a condensed version of the full run, shortened to two and a half hours:

But if you are actually curious about the entire run, you’ll find it on YouTube in two parts: Part 1 | Part 2

There is of course plenty of room for improvement. After all, the run still contains seven hours of sleeping and eight hours of attempts at skipping Puppet Ganon. An optimally performed run might only be three hours long. However, it’s very unlikely that many players will attempt to complete it using this route, considering how physically and mentally demanding it is.

Now, apparently it’s technically possible to beat the game with just seven items. But the glitches required to pull that off have been proven too inconsistent even for the most hardcore RTA runners out there. The tool-assisted speedrun even gets away with collecting only five items, and experience taught us that it’s only a matter of time until an RTA-viable route is found for seven and even less items, pushing the limits of Low% even further.

Thank you for reading! If you're curious about more of this week's news or would even consider subscribing to the newsletter, you'll find the full post over HERE.

Finding new stories to cover can be challenging. I encourage you to think about what happened recently in the communities you are a part of. If there are any stories, articles, glitches, events, or other topics I should be taking a look at, go ahead and submit them here or in the Gold Split Discord! 📨