Four Island

Pluribus and the Epidemic of Loneliness

2026-01-22T13:51:17-05:00

I've been watching Pluribus.

It's good! I've been trying to make a point of consuming new media lately, and I've gotten a lot of top-tier recommendations from friends. This, Severance, and my favorite, The Summer Hikaru Died, have been plaguing my thoughts. When I have feelings about media, my instinct is to write them down, whether that's via fanfiction, media analysis essays, or just infodumping into my friend Tooth's DMs. That is how I express my love for the work of others.

Of course, that's what this is. There's a question that constantly comes up when you talk about Pluribus. It's a funny one, because it purports to bring about unity, yet even asking it draws out concerns and beliefs that are individual to each of us. That question is: would you join the hivemind?

And, no. No, I would not.

(Spoilers for Pluribus after this point!)

Pluribus starts with scientists receiving a signal from outer space, which is determined to be the nucleotide sequence for a virus. They, for some reason, decide to create that virus for real in a lab, where it obviously begins to infect people. Our protagonist is Carol Sturka, a romance novelist who finds herself in a nightmare scenario one day when everyone around her simultaneously has a seizure, after which they all begin to walk and talk in unison. Later, we find out that she is only one of thirteen people on the entire planet who are not now connected in one massive hivemind.

The hivemind, or "the world" as they're often called, is pretty interesting, mechanically. They are able to work in perfect cooperation, and communicate telepathically from any distance. They speak in unison sometimes, just so the viewer knows how creepy they are. They also possess all the knowledge in the world, as all of the memories of every prior individual are now pooled together into one giant entity. Finally, they are benign. They want nothing more than to bring everyone together in peace and safety.

But I don't think this is true. I think what they're spreading is not unity, but loneliness. And death.

Pluribus is a genius take on a zombie apocalypse story, where the zombies want to infect you but aren't going around killing people. Instead they're just smiling a lot and talking about how great it is to be a zombie, and also asking if they can get you some ice tea while you wait. There's an incredible amount of tension for Carol, especially when she doesn't know whether or not she's safe from infection, but on the outside it can trick you into thinking everything's actually quite nice.

Carol's loneliness is a central focus of the show. She is now fundamentally different from almost every other human body. She is distraught and alienated by everything that has happened, particularly because her wife was one of many who died during the Critical Moment.¹ This hivemind apologizes for Helen's death, but insists that their actions were necessary. They profess that they are the best thing to happen to humanity, and that they can't wait until Carol is able to join them.

Importantly, they do not initially know why Carol and the others did not join the hivemind. When they eventually do discover what's wrong and that they need Carol's consent to fix it, she vehemently denies them. Her ability to choose, though, is what raises the frequent question of "Would you join the hivemind?"

What is a hivemind?

First of all, I have to admit that I have not really consumed very much media containing hiveminds. This limits the comparisons I can make. I've never seen Star Trek and I'm only loosely aware of the Borg, so you can maybe go ahead and discredit everything I'm about to say. But I need to contest the term "hivemind". To me, "hivemind" suggests distinct yet linked personalities. Thousands of voices collaborating in one big pool of thought.

Think of an actual beehive. The workers are individuals. Sure, their minds aren't actually magically linked, like a hivemind would be in science fiction, but they are able to work together in unison because their minds are simple. Bees have a set of rules that their brains follow like programming, and they can communicate their state to one another by dancing. They cooperate so well that you can observe the sum of their actions and call it one combined intelligence. A hivemind.

There's a few different types of things that feel like "hiveminds" to me, and I think it will help to talk about them. A very loose form of hivemind can be found on the planet Camazotz in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Camazotz has been taken over by "The Black Thing", a galaxy-sized cloud of evil that is attempting to consume the whole universe. This manifests on Camazotz via an entity called IT: an enormous brain which has telepathically enslaved the population of the planet. When Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace arrive on Camazotz, they are immediately met with a neighborhood of people moving perfectly to a common rhythm.

This was so. As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers.

A Wrinkle in Time, chapter 6: The Happy Medium

The 2003 TV film portrays this with an audible rhythm -- a creepy ringing sound that loops for much of the time the cast is on the planet.² Almost every person we see on the planet moves to this rhythm. Even people standing still continuously tap a foot or a finger.

What's important about this, though, is that it raises the question of whether the rhythm is controlling the people on the planet, or whether it's instructing them. The protagonists witness a boy in the neighborhood who is not playing according to the rhythm. His mother comes out of the house, concerned, and tries to console him. And then a car drives up to the house and takes the boy away. Later on in the movie, we see him inside a cell, where men in dark sunglasses use an orb to shoot electromagnetic pulses at him when he behaves aberrantly.

This makes it seem like the people of Camazotz are not quite mentally "linked". They may be acting in unison, but they're not sharing thoughts. They have been given instructions to follow, via these orbs, and possibly through merely being in the psychic presence of IT. They demonstrate fear when witnessing something aberrant, meaning that they've been given incentive to follow these rules. This allows them to appear as if they are working together, just like a hive of bees would. It's a hivemind, not so much in the magical science fiction sense, but in the sense of how people would refer to a totalitarian state as being a hivemind.

Despite everyone working together, the restrictions placed on their freedom make them incredibly lonely. Through this, we can see that one of the ways we avoid loneliness is through the unique ways we interact with one another and express ourselves.

This hivemind is incredibly different from that of Pluribus but there are still some telling similarities. The Man With Red Eyes, a mouthpiece for IT, promises many familiar things. He says that IT wants to make everyone in the universe "one". They have eradicated grief, conflict, and illness on Camazotz. He calls it "amazing", just like how the world in Pluribus says that being one of them is "wonderful".

On Camazotz, these promises are obvious lies, intended to entice outsiders into servitude, whereas Zosia and the others likely truly believe and feel the things they are saying. But from an outsider's perspective, they appear the same. Carol even brings this up, when she compares Zosia's words to those that she heard when forced to attend a gay conversion therapy camp as a child.³ It's understandable to be suspicious when others claim to know what is good for you.

Would I join the hivemind on the planet Camazotz? No, of course not. They're living in constant fear, with all pleasure and joy systematically forbidden from their lives. Worse, the desire for those things clearly remains, as seen in the boy who was playing off-rhythm. And yet, if I had to choose between joining this society and joining the Pluribus hivemind, I'd probably pick Camazotz.

The reason for this is that the people of Camazotz, no matter how downtrodden they are, still retain individuality of consciousness. This is something that I cannot say for sure about the world in Pluribus. We don't truly know what it's like inside the world's mind/minds -- in fact, Laxmi calls Carol out for never asking them how they feel. But the world does not appear, from the outside, to be distinct people whose minds have been controlled to want to act as a group, like those on Camazotz. No -- Pluribus's hivemind seems to consist of one, single consciousness that now lives inside everyone's heads.

What is consciousness?

Of course, this is difficult to prove, because it requires asking the question: what is consciousness? I don't think anyone knows the answer to this, and I'll admit I get kind of distracted in this section just hypothesizing about it.

The people in Pluribus have individual bodies, which take in oxygen and convert it to energy for the rest of the body to use, before exhaling used up carbon dioxide. They eat food (well, they eat something that's food-like), digest it, convert it to energy for the rest of the body to use, and then expel it. Critically, they have brains full of neurons and synapses, firing signals that control muscles and organs. If you look at a human as just a biological entity, the world hasn't changed. These bodies are still separate, and can live and die on their own.

Our experiences as humans are more than that. We have a train of thought; words, pictures, memories, all of which we have some level of control over. We have senses that place us physically within space. We use our voices to spread what is inside of us, so others can share in it. But the original experience of having that thought, or seeing that landscape, are our own, forever.

In Pluribus, the hivemind seems to only have one train of thought. It is extremely efficient at thinking, given that it is taking in sensory information from billions of bodies across the planet, but it is still only one mind enveloping that thought and those senses. It's almost as if there's only one body that just has tons and tons of mouths and eyes and feet.

For instance, when Carol asks Zosia to gather the other unaffected humans, Zosia does not need to telepathically ask someone in another country to perform this task. When Carol speaks to Zosia, she is also speaking to Ravi, Laxmi's 9-year old son. They are the same person, but the viewer and Carol alike perceive them as separate because they have separate bodies. The world can speak in perfect unison because when the hivemind decides to say something, it simply chooses which mouths the words should come out of.

It is unclear how this works, biologically. Humans probably experience individual consciousness because we are encapsulated in our bodies, and what we understand to be sight and touch and pain and love are all just what the signals in our brain "feel" like. It's like a video game, where the internal workings of the code are fairly divorced from what we see on the screen, but they're being represented in a way we can understand.

For the hivemind to work in a similar way, the brain signals that represent consciousness must not be confined to individual brains. One option is that the signals are networked across every brain, such that they begin to act like one large brain. No individual brain, looked at on its own, functions properly in a way that could think or even sustain human life. But together, they are more than the sum of their parts.

This option is interesting because it means that taking an individual body and smashing their head in would potentially cause damage to the entire system, although it's so distributed that surely they have built-in redundancy and could adapt very quickly. In fact, there's multiple instances of mass death that occur within the show, and the hive rallies each time.

Another option is that the individual human brains cease functioning entirely. Instead, brain signals occur on some electromagnetic frequency (which seems to be true based on Manousos's experiments), and the joined bodies are attuned to it. This makes calling the hivemind "the world" particularly apt, because it is almost like it is the planet itself that is thinking, and the bodies are just attachments.

Regardless, the reason this is a non-starter is because my consciousness is incomparably precious to me. I don't know how my mind works -- I don't know how life works -- and any fundamental change to those inner workings risks terminating what my understanding of life is. My deepest and most core belief is that life is worth preserving by any means. If I could live forever, even if I suffered while doing so, I would choose that path.

Thus, if my consciousness / my life is the sum of brain signals flashing through my head, would I still be alive after joining the hivemind? Whether my brain is an individual component in a distributed network, or it's doing nothing at all, it would not be functioning the way it used to, and it certainly wouldn't be self-sufficient. So it is my belief that joining the Pluribus hivemind would be tantamount to death.

Also, episode 6 explains in detail that the hivemind is going to starve to death in 10 years because of their inability to do things like kill farm animals or even pick fruit off trees. So even if I considered the continuation of biological functions in my particular human body to be me still living, joining the hivemind would at the very least shorten my lifespan. Nope! Nope nope nope.

Why does separation matter?

Now, I want to take a break from talking about consciousness to discuss another example of a hivemind in fiction. This one is a bit embarrassing: it's the shape-shifters (werewolves) from Twilight. You can't blame me for being a gay teenager in the 2010's, you just can't. Before I get into it though, I do want to acknowledge that while Stephanie Meyer's concept for the werewolves is interesting and pretty unique, it's also grossly racist for her to decide that a tribe of Native Americans become monsters against their will and then act in animal-like patterns. I am not cosigning her decision to do that. I just think some of the other aspects of the group are relevant for study.

Anyway. In Twilight: New Moon, Jacob and a number of the other (mostly) male teenagers in his tribe undergo a change. Like Pluribus, this change was forced upon them. It appears to be genetic, as it's part of a burden that their tribe has carried for many years. This change causes them to become shape-shifters; capable of transforming into a wolf whenever they want. There are many positives to this change: shape-shifters have enhanced strength, speed, and senses, even in human form. They also no longer age, as long as they regularly transform.

How does this relate to Pluribus, then? Well, another aspect of the shape-shifters that is not quite as positive as the others is that all of their thoughts are shared while transformed. This takes the idea of "pack mentality" to the maximum. The shape-shifters have some kind of instantaneous telepathy that allows any of them to hear every thought that may be going through a member's head. It's intended to enhance their ability to work together as a pack, but there's an obvious downside: the destruction of their privacy.

Despite this, the pack makes frequent use of their telepathic abilities. And not just in battle; it's mentioned that the link is socially important too. It can even be reassuring, at times.

"Yeah." Jacob's voice lowered. "When I… changed, it was the most… horrible, the most terrifying thing I've ever been through -- worse than anything I could have imagined. But I wasn't alone -- there were the voices there, in my head, telling me what had happened and what I had to do. That kept me from losing my mind, I think. But Sam…" He shook his head. "Sam had no help."

Twilight: New Moon, chapter 13: Killer

This highlights a crucial difference between the Twilight werewolves and the Pluribus hivemind. The shape-shifters can hear each other's thoughts, instantly and forcibly, as if their brains are connected. But their thoughts are still distinguishable. They sound like each member's respective voices; they carry an individual feeling to them. In that way, the pack's hivemind is incredibly social. The individuals never have to be alone. They always have someone to talk to.

The world, in Pluribus, is alone. If they are a single consciousness, then being comprised of multiple bodies has no consequence. One individual body talking to another one would be the same as talking into a mirror. The fact that they have no need to talk to one another is demonstrated by the fact that they don't. The hivemind never speaks when none of the unaffected humans are present. They are content with their loneliness, which is one of the most inhuman things about them.

Humans are social creatures. We know this. We all lived through a global pandemic just a few years ago in which many of us were completely cut off from regular contact with other humans, and the toll on the world's mental health was palpable. People need social interaction so much that some were more willing to accept the risk of contracting a deadly disease than they were to accept social isolation.

In episode 4, Carol attempts to get information from the hivemind by drugging Zosia, which is unsuccessful and almost results in Zosia's death. They respond to this by evacuating the city Carol lives in. They say that while they are still willing to help her with whatever she wants, they need their space for now.

Carol is initially pleased with this. She does not see the hivemind as human. She thinks that talking with them is a crutch; a coping mechanism to substitute for human interaction. We know this from her condemning the other unaffected humans for continuing their relationships with their loved ones who are part of the hivemind. Carol spends her freedom simply living her life. We see her wandering around the neighborhood doing random things like setting off fireworks and playing golf.

We then cut to a month later. Carol is sitting on her lawn, at night, setting off more fireworks. One of them accidentally falls over, and points directly at her face. She does not move. She does not get up and fix it. She simply accepts the possibility that she is about to die. It ultimately shoots past her and sets her house on fire instead, but the point is made. A month of complete social isolation has driven her to such a deep depression that she has begun to question the point of even being alive.

And then, like people violating social distancing rules during a pandemic, she makes a concession on her morals. She sends a message to the hivemind asking them to come back. Episode 7 ends with Zosia driving up to her house, and Carol dissolving into tears in her arms.

This sets up a striking contrast between Carol and the hivemind. Carol, just like us, cannot survive without social interaction. But the hivemind has no need for it. They look like they're many individuals whose need for others is met by being permanently glued together with billions across the planet, but this is a lie. They are alone, and it is "wonderful".

What makes us human?

At the beginning of episode 7, as her month of loneliness is starting, Carol does something interesting. She sings. She sings the whole time she's driving back from Las Vegas to her hometown. She sings while floating in a pool. She sings as she drives a cart around a golf course peppered with wild animals. She sings while admiring the art in a museum. She sings, and sings.

This is incredibly relatable to me. I live above a detached garage, so there are no walls shared between my apartment and someone else's. This gives me the freedom to make as much noise as I want without bothering people, and I take full advantage of this by singing at the top of my lungs. It is so very human to love music, to want to sing, to want to dance, to marry a rhythm and a melody and let it flow through you.

All of these behaviors are human. Golf is a game, and its only purpose is enjoyment. Swimming in a pool is just for fun. Setting off fireworks and watching the beautiful lights sparkle in the sky is exciting. We need this. The Twilight shape-shifters get to play, both in human form and in wolf form. Even the people of Camazotz get to play, although they are restricted to specific activities and only during the prescribed hours. IT allows them to do this because IT knows that humans have certain needs and that, if they are ignored, they are more likely to rise up.

The hivemind in Pluribus has two states. One when they are around the unaffected humans, and one when they are not. When Carol or the others are around, the hivemind appears to play. We see this a lot around Koumba. He has a harem of women who he sleeps with for his own pleasure. They get Air Force One for him because they know he'll enjoy the grandeur. He even gets to gamble against them!

He sits at a table, surrounded by women, and plays poker with a man in an eyepatch. It is acted out like a scene from a James Bond movie. However, when Koumba reveals his hand (a royal flush, by the way), his opponent momentarily slips up -- and cheers for him. Koumba has to remind him to stay in character. Because the eyepatched man is not really playing. He is not at risk of losing money, nor is Koumba really gambling to earn money. This is all just a farce being put on for Koumba's enjoyment.

Compare that to when the hivemind is alone. As soon as Koumba walks out of the room, the music stops playing. It is eerily quiet in the casino, with only the sounds of the people taking off their jewelry and costumes, cleaning up, and walking away. They do not speak out loud, because they don't have to. They do not spend any time enjoying the facade of the casino by themselves. They simply go back to work.

Speaking of singing: episode 9 begins with a disturbing scene where Kusimayu, the girl who told Carol that she was looking forward to joining the hivemind, waits in her village for the arrival of the specialized virus made specifically for her. All around her, the community and her family are working together, talking, and of course, singing. You could almost believe things are normal, apart from how everyone keeps saying "we" instead of "I".

But things are not normal. Faces adorned with smiles heave the canister over to Kusimayu and tell her not to be scared. It would be reassuring if it meant anything. Even if Kusimayu got cold feet at that moment, she would not be able to escape her fate. The hivemind only needed her consent to extract the stem cells from her body in order to mutate the virus for her. Once it becomes possible to infect her, they have an imperative to do so. They are only singing because they know it is what she needs in order to feel grounded and safe.

Kusimayu breathes in the vapor from the canister, and begins to convulse. Around her, the singing stops. There is no one to benefit from it anymore. The others hold her to make sure she doesn't fall, like so many during the Critical Moment. The girl's body opens her eyes again, and smiles, wide. And then everyone walks away in silence. The deed is done.

Kusimayu's culture is dead. The village only continued to exist because she, as an individual, valued it. So the hivemind kept familiar bodies around for her to interact with, and to speak with as if they were the people she knew. They sang songs because they knew she would enjoy them. They cooked food for her so she would trust them. And the moment her individuality was gone, the moment there didn't exist a human who desired that culture, they stopped. No one lives in that village anymore.

It's already kind of obvious that the hivemind is a metaphor for colonialism, but the destruction of a non-white culture really pushes it over the edge. Just like IT and Camazotz, an outside force has invaded Earth and systematically homogenized it. The differences between how people live, talk, and act have been documented in the collective memory, but they are not used anymore. There is a new pattern of behavior now that the outsiders claim is better for everyone. Those who are used to the old ways simply don't know what's good for them.

Cultural differences can divide us, yes, but they can also bring us together. When we meet others who share our culture, it helps us feel understood, because there is shared knowledge there. When we meet others who do not share our culture but are interested in learning, it creates something new rather than flattens it out, as long as it is done respectfully (which, to be fair, real people have had a lot of problems doing). All of this can work to make us less lonely in such a big world.

What is love?

Kusimayu's joining shows us something else too: the hivemind uses love as a weapon. Like I mentioned earlier, many of the unaffected humans had loved ones who were joined, and they were either unable to understand that their loved ones were gone, or were being willfully ignorant of this as a coping mechanism for loss. Carol's hatred of the hivemind for much of the show stems from the fact that Helen died during the Critical Moment. If she hadn't, then it's possible Carol might have clung to the Helen-shaped human puppet for emotional support just like the others.

But she is not safe from her heart being taken advantage of. In episode 8, Carol, still vulnerable from her month of solitude, spends a lot of time in Zosia's company. She falls asleep with her arm around her, because she is gay and lonely. They play cards together. Zosia asks Carol if she's writing again, and says that she's so excited to have something new to read. The hivemind is expressing the desire to read for enjoyment! This has to shatter our understanding of them, right?

The thing is, it would be sad if what Zosia was saying was true. If the world is so excited to read something new, why don't they write? They don't because they don't want to, and even if they did, anything they wrote would be immediately known across the entire hivemind, so there'd be no point in reading it. If the hivemind truly desires consuming unfamiliar works, then their goal of joining everyone on the planet actively works against their own interests. They would need at least some unaffected humans to come up with novel ideas. It's even possible that this is true and they're just too controlled by the virus to help themselves, the way they'd rather starve than pick an apple off a tree.

The hivemind is not allowed to verbally lie, but they don't seem to have a problem with manipulating the unaffected humans. Zosia takes Carol to a diner that she used to love, which burned down years ago. The hivemind rebuilt the place and relocated previous employees from across the country so that they could recreate the scene for her. And this is when Carol realizes that she's being played. She confronts Zosia at home later, and the latter confirms her suspicions: the hivemind is trying to trick her into giving up on saving the world.

The scariest thing, to me, is what happens next. Carol is moments away from having a meltdown, and out of nowhere, Zosia kisses her. Carol pulls away at first, but then the two months of loneliness and pent-up sexual desire after the loss of Helen overcomes her, and the two of them passionately make out. Despite knowing that she's being tricked, Carol's needs betray her. Her sexuality, which is one of the ways the human need for love can manifest, betrays her.

We see Zosia naked in Carol's bed in the morning, smiling, because she knows Carol is working on writing her book. The distraction worked. Appealing to her desires, which she only has because she's not in the hivemind, was able to pacify her. If they can keep tricking her the same way they've been tricking the rest of the unaffected humans, maybe they can keep them in line. It makes you wonder if they really are that different from The Man With Red Eyes on Camazotz after all.

Carol rejects Manousos's plan to save the world, because she feels dependent on Zosia. She lies to herself, tries to make herself believe that Zosia is an individual person who loves her, and her alone. She freaks out when Zosia says that they love Manousos "just as much" as they love Carol, because how could they when they barely know him? Carol almost says "but you're my girlfriend", only choking on the last word. Part of her knows how fake this is. She's no different from Koumba.

The way humans feel love is complex. One does not love everything the same way. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I show love for media I like by writing long essays or fanfics about them. But I show my love for my friends differently. I show it by spending time with them, buying them food, and telling them jokes so they'll laugh. And I have different amounts of love for different things. I love The Legend of Zelda, but not as much as I love, say, my mother.

The hivemind says they feel love too. But they love everything equally. They love every book Carol's ever written, and they like every detail about them. And they love every person, no matter how familiar they are. This is a problem for Carol, because she wants to be loved. She wants to matter to someone. She wants her "self" to shine brightly in someone else's eyes. That is the only cure for her loneliness.

But Zosia can't give her this gift. She doesn't have feelings of her own. She spends so much time with Carol but she's also simultaneously spending time with every other person on the planet. She is not loving Carol by choice, but because of a "biological imperative", like the one that drives them to infect others. And when Carol finds out that the hivemind has found a way to create a virus for her without her consent, she says "If you loved me, you wouldn't do this."

Maybe the hivemind can love, but not the kind of love we know. They love in the same way that they feel happy, which is to say, unconditionally.

What is my conclusion?

So why does this matter? Let's assume, for a moment, that you would actually retain your consciousness upon joining the hivemind. Your brain waves would still become part of the global network, but whatever spiritual continuity represents your life would continue, in some way. You'd live, but your wants and needs would be completely altered to match the group's.

If you like writing, you'd still know this after the joining, because all memories are retained and pooled. But you'd never do it again. Because the hivemind doesn't want to. If you like swimming, or playing golf, or watching fireworks, or gambling, or having sex. You'd be acutely aware that there had been an individual in one of these bodies that felt that way, but you'd never do them again. No song would ever escape your lips again, unless an unaffected human asked for it.

And why? Because the hivemind is already content. Again, Zosia calls it wonderful. It is so wonderful to be one of them. She says Carol can't understand that having desires is like drowning. This is really crucial to understanding how complex of a question "Would you join?" is. If joining would change you such that you don't care about your wants and needs anymore, then wouldn't that be fine? Wouldn't it not matter that you'd never sing again, since you wouldn't want to sing again?

Yes. It would matter. At least to me in my current form.

One's values are not immutable. I am different than I was a few years ago, and I will be different again before long. I know there are things that I value that the me of 10 years ago would be horrified by, and I've been able to live with that discrepancy. But the way I see it, the hivemind does not just overwrite your values. It replaces you with something that just looks like you.

I don't really know what it means to be alive, but I'm trying my best to figure it out. My "self" is a person I have spent decades forming an understanding of, and I'm not nearly close to completion. It is so valuable to me, the current me, because it is the only thing that is truly mine. I don't want that taken away. Like Carol, I don't want to attend gay conversion therapy camp. If someday I no longer want to sing Bad Apple!! in the shower every day, that would be okay, because I grow and change. But if my mind got fundamentally altered such that my body didn't sing anything in the shower at all, I would consider that a loss. Once again, it feels like a form of death.

And I think the reason for this is that death is a real thing that can do this to you. Death erases a person's desires. Death changes them such that they want for nothing anymore. Such that their pain stops. If cessation of suffering at any cost was the goal, then death would be an answer. That's unacceptable to me, because life is the most important thing. And if I won't accept that cost, then I can decide that other costs are too high as well. I can choose not to accept the cost of losing my "self" to a homogenous hivemind.

The hivemind does not seem like a savior, to me. They pretend to remember what it is like to be human, but they have lost so much of themselves in the process. They do not truly want anything but to live, and to propagate. Remember, they are a virus sent from outer space. They've already spread across the planet, and their next goal is the stars.

They won't stop until every person is lonely, like them.

The Critical Moment is what I call the event that caused most of the planet to join the hivemind. It's a reference to Homestuck, in which a timer counts down to a dramatic moment in which numerous plot-relevant events happen simultaneously. Pluribus frequently shows us a timer, which counts down to when the mass joining occurs, and after that it starts counting upward. It's used to let us know when the current scene is occurring, similar to marking years as AD or BC in relation to the birth of Christ. ↩
The 2018 movie might've done something like this too, but I've only seen it once and I don't remember as much about it. ↩
I gotta say I'm really pleased with the amount of media I've been getting to experience about how hard it is to be gay (The Summer Hikaru Died is another big example of this). It speaks to me, for some mysterious reason. ↩

Reserving Space For Images On Webpages

2026-01-18T16:14:35-05:00

I know I've mostly been writing blog posts that are thousands of words long lately, but this is going to be a quick one! I just wanted to share some webdev advice that might be helpful. Maybe I can actually use my blog as a blog sometimes!

I like to include a lot of media in my aforementioned very long blog posts, in order to break up the blocks of text. The problem with this is that all of that media has to load, and it can be a little slow depending on how large the files are. By default, web pages do not know how much space to reserve for external media, which results in the contents of the page shifting around as everything loads in. This can be annoying, especially if you refresh the page when you're somewhat far down.

The main way to solve this problem is to set the HTML width and height attributes on the <img> tag. This way, the page can reserve the appropriate amount of space before the file gets fully downloaded. The reason this doesn't immediately work for me is because most of my images are intentionally wider than the content area of my website. I have max-width: 100% set on img tags in blog posts, which shrinks the image down to the right size. But if you have the image's height annotated on the img tag, the image will shrink to the correct width, but will be stretched out to the original height! Uh oh!

Luckily, the fix for this is very simple:

.entry-content img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height: auto;
}

Yeah, CSS just has a built in way to set the height that preserves an image's aspect ratio. I was originally playing around with the aspect-ratio property, which lets you do exactly what you'd assume. It does work; I set aspect ratios on all of the images in a couple of posts and it correctly reserved vertical space given the width of the content area. But, semantically speaking, it makes a bit more sense to annotate the actual width and height on the element instead of providing it as an aspect ratio.

Here you can see how much of a difference this can make! This is a recording of me refreshing the history of updates to The Witness, a notoriously long post with many images and videos in it. On the left is the article before annotating dimensions and on the right is after:

I've gone through and updated all of my modern-era blog posts with size annotations for the images, so that the pages don't move around while loading. It's a little annoying, because it means I can't use the Markdown format for adding images to pages; I have to use <img> every time. But it's worth it! I hope this little blog post was interesting to read.

(Side note: it's kind of amusing that the other (very old) CSS advice post on this blog also had to do with reserving space so that things don't move around.)

(Second side note: maybe I also need to be setting cache times on my hosted images so that they don't have to get re-downloaded every time the page is loaded... It's not surprising that I haven't yet though considering Rails does not seem to properly support it.)

Left Clicks Only, Please

2026-01-10T08:03:54-05:00

Speedrunning is neat because it offers an incentive for replaying a game. Often, a second playthrough loses some of the charm of the first because you already know what to expect. You've already had the epiphanies. But speedrunning gives you an excuse to play the game in a different way. Now you make the rules (or, well, a community that manages a leaderboard makes the rules). And then there's the fact that many games have multiple categories to do runs in, giving you even more ways to look at the game and practice and have fun.

The Witness is no exception. It's a versatile game, and there are plenty of goals you can come up with, which exist on a sliding scale of "reasonable" to "how did you even think of this". It all just depends on how creative you are. I've been known to set bizarre goals in games before, like when I basically turned catching Raikou and Mewtwo in Pokemon FireRed into puzzles.

yr dedication to making games rly hard awes me
— 🇰🇷3 springrolls please✡️ (@shirAdrenaline) March 20, 2020

Today, I'm going to talk about a category called Minimum Right Clicks.

Okay, it's actually called Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits. And it's actually four categories. Let me explain.

Table of Contents

Introduction: What is Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits?
Basic Strategies: How to activate 7 lasers
Mountaintop: Getting into the Mountain
Floors 1 and 2: The "final boss" of the run
Conclusion: Did we do it?

Introduction

There's a concept in speedrunning called a Low% category. Most games have an Any% (beat the game as fast as possible) and a 100% (beat the game as fast as possible while making sure that you've gotten all of the things). Low% is the opposite of 100%. It's "beat the game as fast as possible while also getting the fewest things possible".

At first glance, this might seem like the same thing as Any%. Getting fewer things has to be faster, right? But that's not always the case. There's plenty of times in games where picking up additional things can save time, like keys that open shortcuts, or strength-enhancing items in RPGs. In a Low% category, it doesn't matter that picking up that key would save you from having to walk the long way in and out of some building over and over again. A slower time with fewer things gotten is better than a faster time with more things gotten.

In The Witness, the thing you're trying to minimize is usually your solve count. We have a 7 Lasers Low% category, an All Lasers Low% category, and an All Discarded Panels Low%, the latter of which is a category extension of a category extension. Fun! All three of them just involve doing the parent category's goal, but in a way that minimizes the number of panels you solve, and in all three cases, this wildly changes the route and the tricks you have to do. All Lasers Low% in particular is an infamously difficult category, involving multiple difficult snipes as well as advanced usage of the boat while it's invisible.

The categories I'm talking about today are a type of Low% category, but the number we're minimizing is different, so we don't actually use the name "Low%". In Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits, we're trying to minimize, well, manual solve mode exits.

Okay, well, what's that? In The Witness, there's two states you can be in: 3D and 2D. We call the 2D state "solve mode", because that's when the cursor is present and you're able to draw puzzle solutions. You enter solve mode by left clicking or pressing Space (or something else on controller, idk, controller is not optimal for speedrunning this game). Then, there's a handful of ways to exit solve mode, which we classify as either "manual" or "automatic".

Here's a list of things we consider "manual solve mode exits":

Right clicking
Pressing Space
Moving backwards, if you're snapped into a panel

It makes sense why these are considered "manual": they're actions with the specific, singular goal of exiting solve mode. Doing any of these plays a sound effect that's sort of the opposite of the sound effect that you hear when entering solve mode.

On the flip side, the game sometimes kicks you out of solve mode without you having to do one of those things. For instance, when you start a new file and you're in the tunnel, the first thing you do is walk up to the straight line panel and solve it. The left click that completes the solution and opens the door also kicks you out of solve mode. But if you try to do that panel again, you'll stay in solve mode this time.

The rules for getting an "automatic solve mode exit" are a bit more complicated than those for the manual exits. This is what we know automatically kicks you out of solve mode:

Solving a panel for the first time, if it's a solitary panel or the last unsolved panel in a set
- Panels with erasers on them will never kick you out of solve mode
- Swamp Island Control only kicks you out of solve mode if you've opened the laser shortcut door
- Mountain Blue 1 and 2 only kick you out on New Version
- Fully solving a video seek panel (not the input panel) in the Theatre will kick you out of solve mode even if the panel has been solved before. Partial solves will not do this.
Solving an EP, even if it's been solved before
Clicking an audio log, even if it's been used before

If you exit solve mode by doing one of these things, the exit sound effect will not play. This is important, because it's the real way to distinguish between a manual and an automatic solve mode exit. If you hear the sound effect, it was manual, and if you don't, it was automatic.

There is an exception to that, however. There's one way of exiting solve mode that doesn't neatly fit into either of these categories: loading a file. The game will always load in the 3D gameplay state, even if it saved while in solve mode. This means that you can either pause and reload your file, or just straight up quit and reopen the game, and when the file finishes loading you will be in the same location as before but not in solve mode.

For the sake of this category, we consider this a manual solve mode exit, even though the sound effect does not play. Being able to reload the file specifically with the intention to exit solve mode would defeat the point of the category because it can be slotted in for any of the other manual exit actions. Of course, there's an exception to this exception, but I'll get into that later.

I'll also note that I'm specifically going to be talking about Windows, although the stuff I say about Current version is going to apply equally to the macOS port. I have not researched how solve mode works on any of the console ports, namely because I do not have them. The iOS port, however, is explicitly banned, because every interaction with a panel gives you an automatic solve mode exit. Solving a panel with erasers, solving a panel multiple times, solving a panel within a set; even inputting an incorrect solution will kick you out of solve mode on iOS. This pretty clearly goes against the spirit of the category, so it will be ignored.

So now that I've spent 100 hours explaining Low% and manual vs automatic solve mode exits, it's time to put them together. Let's talk about how to minimize right clicks. By the way, I'd also like to give a major shout-out to IHNN for helping find a lot of the strategies for skipping right clicks! Coming up with this madness was a team effort.

Basic Strategies

There's a few categories that we can apply our restriction to: 7 Lasers, All Lasers, and All Panels. We've always gotta talk about 7 Lasers first, because it's the default way to play the game. It's also one of the shorter runs, so it's a good way to dip your toes in the water before diving in fully. That being said, that doesn't mean that 7 Lasers Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits is going to be trivial.

Tutorial goes nice and smoothly, but once we step into Town, we're presented with our first problem. The mining building has a panel with an eraser puzzle on it, and that puzzle opens one of the tower doors, meaning that we need to solve that panel. However, if you remember from earlier, eraser puzzles will never kick you out of solve mode automatically.

This introduces us to one of our most important tools when it comes to finding ways out of solve mode: sniping. If an important panel doesn't give us an automatic exit, see if you can snipe a panel that will. Here you can see the eraser puzzle in question on the right, and on the left in the background, the cursor solving a panel that will kick us out of solve mode:

That snag is easily solved, but it's not the only stumbling point in Town. There's a puzzle we call Town Triple because you have to solve it three times, and it's a problem because solving a panel more than once is one of the things that prevents you from getting an automatic solve mode exit. We can do the first solution just fine, and it'll kick us out of solve mode, but then we have to enter it again and input the other two solutions, after which we're stuck in solve mode.

This has a similar solution to the first problem: snipe something! There's a fun thing we can do here, which takes advantage of the way this puzzle is designed. The three solutions to this puzzle are revealed by standing in three different positions, although you can input them all from one place. One of the solutions is revealed while standing on the roof, which means there's a hole in the roof through which you can solve the puzzle. And the puzzle that gets activated by inputting all three of these solutions is also on the roof, albeit facing somewhat away from you. So, it's possible for you to stand near this hole, input the three solutions, and then solve the red hexagonal panel in order to get out of solve mode. The not-so-fun part of this is that the red hexagonal panel is one of the worst panels to solve in the entire game even if you're looking right at it, so doing it at this oblique angle can be a tall task. But if it gets us out of solve mode, we'll take it!

That's it for Town. Next is Monastery, which is straightforward, and then Jungle and Bunker, which we do interleaved in order to save time waiting for the Bunker Elevator. The first part of Jungle is fine, but Bunker isn't going to be as simple.

The first room of Bunker presents us with a new type of problem. There appears to be two sets of panels here: five on the left and four on the right. Unfortunately, the game actually considers this one continuous set of panels, and thus it won't kick you out of solve mode when you finish the fifth panel. You have to do all nine to get the automatic exit. As as you can see here, you can't stand in a way such that all nine panels are visible at once:

That's a front-on image of the room, but trust me, even if you stand all the way to the left, the rightmost panel is still obscured by the flowers.

This is also easily solved. The main characteristic of a panel set, other than the game not kicking you out of solve mode until you solve the whole set, is that if you are snapped into one of the panels, pressing the left and right movement keys will move you between the panels without leaving solve mode. Thus, what we can do is snap into the first panel in the set, and just move to the right after solving each one. After the fifth panel, you'll round the corner and be facing the first panel on the right wall. And you can just keep going until the end, which will kick you out of solve mode. Nice!

We then solve Bunker up until the elevator, and then detour out to do the rest of Jungle. There aren't any problems here, netting us another laser. We still have to go back and actually get the Bunker laser, though. And this does pose a problem, because it involves solving the elevator again.

The standard route for Bunker in most categories involves solving the elevator three times. Once, from within Bunker, to send it up to the penultimate floor. We then leave and go do Jungle while the elevator is moving. Next, we solve it from the penultimate floor to the top, where the laser is. And then, after activating the laser, we intentionally fail the panel so that the elevator moves down. We could technically remove one of those solves by just waiting inside the elevator the whole time as it goes up instead of doing Jungle in parallel, but that doesn't actually help us, because we still need to fail the panel at the top.

A view of the Bunker laser panel while standing in the elevator as it goes up. The cursor is drawing an invalid solution on the elevator panel, which will make the elevator go down.

This problem is a bit trickier than the others, because at first it doesn't seem like there's anything you could do to get yourself out of solve mode after activating the laser and failing the elevator panel. Whether you stand on the left or the right side of it, there's nothing solvable outside of the elevator on any of the floors. You're stuck riding it to the bottom floor, where you'll stay, forever entombed by the flowers.

Except there is something that can kick you out of solve mode, and it's staring you right in the face.

The laser.

What we do is turn the FOV way up and stand in the corner of the elevator like the screenshot shows. We wait for the elevator to rise enough that we get a good view of the laser panel. We fail the elevator control so that it starts descending, and then we activate the laser. This kicks us out of solve mode, and we can step out of the elevator once it reaches the open air floor. Horray!

Next is Shadows and Keep. If you're familiar with the Current 7 Lasers route, it might seem weird that we're doing them so late. It's because I'm describing the Legacy route, which shuffles things around a little bit because it's unable to do Jungle Wall Skip. If you're following along and are interested in doing this run on Current, you can easily rearrange the lasers so it goes Town -> Jungle/Bunker -> Monastery -> Shadows -> Keep -> Swamp. The fact that I'm talking about version differences is important, though, so keep that thought in your pocket! Anyway, Shadows and Keep are pretty simple and don't pose any problems. It should be noted, however, that we have to do the back half of Keep rather than the front (which is faster). The reason for this will also be explained later.

We only need one more laser to get into the Mountain: Swamp. Swamp pretty famously has a huge skip in it. You snipe two panels from the entrance, and it lets you walk right to the laser. This might lead you to believe that there's not as much room here for problems to arise, but alas, that would be a fallacy. The snipe itself is the problem.

The weird thing about Swamp Snipe is that while the two panels you need to snipe are in a set, both panels cannot be visible at the same time. There's always a tree branch in front of one of them. Players position themselves such that the first panel is visible, snipe it, then exit solve mode and move to the left so that the second panel is visible. This unfortunately doesn't work for us, because we want to minimize manual solve mode exits.

I find this problem kind of funny, because it's like an inversion of the first couple of problems we encountered. Instead of solving a close panel and sniping something to get out of solve mode, here we are sniping something and then solving something close up. The Swamp entrance area has 14 panels split into two sets that teach you the shapers mechanic. The entire second set is right next to you in the position you stand to do Swamp Snipe. So, the way we get out of this mess is to solve the first tutorial set, then snipe the first laser shortcut panel, solve the second tutorial set to get out of solve mode, and finally move into position to snipe the second laser shortcut panel.

Here, we're standing in position to snipe the first laser shortcut panel, seen in the distance on the left. The second panel is partially obscured by a tree. Luckily, there's a panel set right next to you that you can solve to get out of solve mode.

That finally brings us to the final area: Mountain. And by "finally", I mean we've only just begun. Mountain makes us for a solid 50% of what I want to talk about in this category.

Mountaintop

The very first Mountain puzzle immediately presents a problem. The Mountaintop Perspective puzzle, for those unaware, needs to be solved three times, each from a different standing position. The fact that you can't stand in the same place for any of the solutions means that we can't quite do what we did for Town Triple. We need three ways to get out of solve mode this time.

Luckily, we do have some resources to work with. We have a free automatic exit for solving the puzzle the first time, so there's only really two we have to worry about. And unlike other sticky situations, we're not trapped inside a small room with no options. There's a number of things to play around with on the Mountaintop itself, which we can take inventory of while enjoying that lovely view of the whole island. You really can see a lot of the world from up there. Some categories even snipe things from up there.

Speaking of which...

The three positions you need to stand in are behind the puzzle, on the left side of it, and in front of it. The behind solution is pretty restricted. You're facing the rest of the island, but it's pretty much all blocked by the mountain itself. There's an EP above you, but it's too high up. Even if you could get into a position where both the puzzle was solvable and the EP start lined up, the viewport isn't tall enough to be able to see both at once. The only panel in sight is the River panel, and there is a precise position where you can solve both. But let's put a pin in that for a moment.

The solution from the left is even more restricted. Now you're facing away from the island, there's no EP anywhere nearby, and you don't have much wiggle room in your standing position, especially on Old Versions before April 4th. However, the River panel is also visible from here if you're at a high FOV, and you don't have to be in a precise position to see it. You can just focus on standing in the right place for the Perspective solve.

So, the plan is to use our free automatic exit on the behind solution, and use the River panel to get out after the left solution. But what about the front? Well, here's where things get crazy, because there's a standing position for the front solution where you can actually see some of the island.

Namely, the Keep. And what does the Keep have, that might be facing the Mountain? The hedge mazes!

It's possible to stand in a position where you can both do the front solution to the Perspective puzzle, and solve the fourth hedge maze panel. Which is great, because it means we have a way to get an automatic solve mode exit for all three Perspective solutions!

Here's a top-down diagram of the Perspective puzzle. There is an arrow pointing to each endpoint from the general area where you'd need to stand for the solution. The start of each arrow says what we do to get out of solve mode.

This is why you have to do the back of Keep to get the laser in this category; you need Hedges 4 to be unsolved when you reach the Mountaintop.

Great, right? Well, not entirely. The bad news is that the Hedges 4 snipe is 220 meters away. That's on par with Catwalk Snipe, one of the farthest known useful snipes, used to enter Challenge with zero lasers.¹ Here, the player is standing in the position needed to solve both puzzles, with the cursor on Hedges 4. It is so far away that it is not even rendered.

This is what elevates the run into nightmare difficulty. You have one chance, 14 minutes into a run, to enter solve mode in a position where you can solve both panels. And even if you solve the Perspective puzzle, you then have to do this ridiculous snipe. I spend a minute and 24 seconds attempting this snipe in my run, which is a lot, but still relatively good -- it took six minutes in my All Lasers run. It's unfortunately not very fun to run a category that has an extremely difficult trick halfway through that you can't really find a consistent setup for. And that's why I haven't wanted to improve my Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits times.

At least, that's how I felt before.

I had an idea while I was writing this post. I spent a lot of time studying Old Version and the changes in each update in order to write my post about the history of updates to The Witness, and all that stuff is still floating around in my head. I remembered something, a specific change I'd written about in one of the Old Versions, that impacted Mountaintop.

I had to try something. So I closed Skype, since the person I was waiting for a call from was half an hour late and it didn't seem like they were going to show up, and I opened The Witness. And I experimented.

Before the February 15th update, there was an alternate solution to one of the Perspective endpoints; specifically, the one that you'd usually solve standing behind the puzzle. This solution could be input while standing in front of the puzzle, but from the left, rather than the right like the one we use Hedges 4 to get out of. And the interesting thing about that is that there's something in that front left part of the Mountaintop, something we haven't talked about yet.

An audio log.

I mentioned before that clicking an audio log always kicks you out of solve mode, even if you've listened to the log before. This is a very important tool in our arsenal, and it's going to show up more later. But for now, the idea is that we could use our free solve on the front solution, the River panel on the left one again, and then the audio log for the back solution, using the exploit that allows us to input it from the front.

Here's an updated diagram showing the new route:

The only sticking point with that is that we need a high FOV to be able to see both the puzzle and the audio log at the same time. We actually need to make sure we can get a high FOV for a bunch of other things too, a couple of which have already been mentioned. So we need to be careful when playing around with very old versions, because the game did not release with an FOV slider. You were originally locked in at an 84 degree field of view.

Thankfully, I have good news about this. The FOV slider was added in the second February 4th update, and the Mountaintop Perspective exploit was patched in the next update, on February 15th. This means that you can use this route to handle Mountaintop in zero right clicks by specifically playing on the second February 4th update, no earlier no later.

Both the perspective puzzle (with the exploited solution inputted) and the audio log on screen at the same time.

This is a fascinating find, to me. Picking which version to use is an important part of doing a Legacy run, but it's not usually this specific. If you're just doing a Legacy run to do a Legacy run, you can use any version. If the run needs to snipe audio logs, you can still do any version. And if you specifically want to use Force Bridge Skip or Keep Skip, you'd use something before April 4th. But this trick requires one exact version, because of the proximity of a new feature and a trick being patched out. It does unfortunately mean you have to play without a reticle, but that's survivable.

So, there's a pretty big difference between Legacy and Current in this category! They both pull off Mountaintop with zero right clicks, but it's significantly easier in Legacy since you can use the second February 4th update. You can also do the front of Keep to get the laser in this route, since you don't need Hedges 4 to be available for sniping later on. This saves something like 40 seconds over doing the back, which is pretty nice!

Floors 1 and 2

Now that we're finally inside Mountain, let's take a look at Floor 1. Most of the panel sets in here are fine and kick you out of solve mode in the way you'd expect, although if you usually do the Orange set in two parts (like I do), keep in mind that you have to do it all at once here.

There's something a bit weird about the Blue set, though. There's three panels and they aren't directly next to one another like with most sets. They also require standing in special positions to be able to solve them, because the gimmick is that they're partially obscured by solid objects. In New Version, solving each of these panels automatically kicks you out of solve mode, so Current runs get through this just fine. On Old Version, however, the first two panels do not do this. Which means we need to figure something out for Legacy runs.

Mountain is really where audio logs start to come to our aid. There's a table near the Blue panels that has an audio log on it, and it's clickable from both the position where you need to stand for Blue 1 and for Blue 2. This has the amusing effect of starting the recording and then immediately stopping it. It also means you may be able to save yourself if you accidentally mess up your lineup for those two panels, although if you get snapped into them, you're kind of out of luck.

The next stumbling point, on both Current and Legacy, is the Purple Bridge panel. You have to solve it twice: once to get to the Blue set, and a second time to get to the floor's exit. Panels needing multiple solves are a timeless struggle in this category, but once again we are saved by the fact that there's an audio log on the floor right next to the Purple Bridge panel. Classic!

Floor 2 is pretty spicy. Rainbow set goes fine, as does solving Blue Bridge. Multipanel is interesting because solving one of the panels over and over again appears to solve the rest of the set simultaneously. But just inputting all six solutions into the first panel like a normal run would do doesn't automatically exit solve mode. Your sixth solve has to actually be on the final panel in the set for some reason. You can do this by snapping into the set and sliding along as you solve, or by standing back so you can see the whole set at once.

The next thing you do is solve Orange Bridge. Once you do, you are confronted with a problem. A big one. Players familiar with this area of the game will know that you need to solve Blue Bridge three times and Orange Bridge twice in order to proceed to Floor 3. Whenever multiple solves are needed, we are confronted by strife. Blue Bridge's additional solves actually aren't a big problem because there is, once again, an audio log right next to the panel.

As for Orange Bridge? No such luck.

The Orange Bridge panel, like Blue Bridge, is inside a glass room, but this one has nothing in it. There's no way to snipe anything through the glass because it's solid, and too close for through-walls sniping. You can't snipe down the stairs either because there's invisible 2D collision where the stairs were; and even if you could, the only thing there is Multipanel, which you've already solved. There does not appear to be any way to get an automatic solve mode exit after the second Orange Bridge solve.

Unfortunately, this gives us our first required manual solve mode exit. We made it pretty far into the run before it happened, so it's a little sad that we couldn't make it the whole distance. But the only way to avoid that right click would be to somehow skip solving Orange Bridge a second time. Which is impossible, right?

Well, here's where things get kind of controversial.

There is a way to get to Floor 3 with only one solve each of Blue Bridge and Orange Bridge. If you've read my post about Force Bridge Skip, you might know where this is going. There is a bug on Old Versions prior to April 4th of 2016 where loading a file while solving a panel causes the solve to get canceled in the new file. This is important for us because the force bridge panels have special effects when you start solving and cancel solving them.

Basically, this is how the trick goes:

Solve Blue Bridge such that you can cross to the other side.
Cross the gap, solve Multipanel, and stand near Orange Bridge.
Load another file where you're standing near Blue Bridge.
Click into the Blue Bridge panel. The cable coming out of it will deactivate.
Pause and load the original file, without canceling your solve. The solve will automatically be canceled after the load finishes. This makes the bridge disappear, but the cable leading out of the panel will still be lit up because the trigger to turn it off already happened on the other file.
Solve Orange Bridge, for the first time, so that the entire panel is satisfied and it ends at the floor exit. This is the solution we use in 100%.
Enter the elevator. Tada! Only one Blue Bridge and Orange Bridge solve each.

Force Bridge Skip is pretty cool, and it does work in the second February 4th update, the one we're required to use for the easier Mountaintop. There's a couple of important things to note, though.

First, let's talk about step 3. How do we load a file where we're standing near Blue Bridge? We're only allowed to load files created during the current run, so one idea would be to get up to Blue Bridge and then start a second file from the beginning without restarting the timer and play all the way to Floor 2 again. There's an easier and faster way to do this, though: the game splits our save file every 120 points. So the idea would be to get our save file to split between solving Blue Bridge and finishing Multipanel.

In the post, I talk about how Force Bridge Skip doesn't really work out in 7 Lasers because we don't end up at Blue Bridge with enough points. But, we solve 16 extra panels in Minimum Manual Solve Mode Exits in order to get us out of sticky situations. This actually puts us perfectly in range for Force Bridge Skip with no extra work needed. 114 points before Blue Bridge, and 121 after Multipanel. So, we can actually make use of this trick to only have to solve each bridge once!

The second thing to note, however, is the big one. In Step 5, we pause the game while in solve mode, and we load a file. When the file finishes loading, we are no longer in solve mode.

Way back at the start of the post, I talked about what counts as an automatic solve mode exit and what counts as a manual exit. Loading a file is a weird edge case because it doesn't play the solve mode exit sound effect, but it's pretty clearly a free action that can be used with the specific intention of exiting solve mode. But Force Bridge Skip requires loading a file while in solve mode. So how is that allowed?

Well, it's kind of up to you whether it's allowed.

Categories like this are pretty arbitrary. We can decide what is and isn't allowed in order to make a better run. In this case, a few of us decided that it would be more fun to allow Force Bridge Skip, and say that the load in Step 5 doesn't count as a manual exit. There's a bunch of justifications you can give for this: "the file isn't loaded with the specific intention of exiting solve mode", or "the manual exit doesn't happen on the file that completes the run", or even "we could automatically exit solve mode without loading the file anyway because there's an audio log near Blue Bridge". For me, the justification is "I wanted to get to use Force Bridge Skip in another category."

And also "I didn't want to be forced to right click so close to the end of the run."

Conclusion

Regardless of whether this trick counts or not, getting past Orange Bridge means we can move on to Floor 3. It starts off with a monstrosity referred to as either Giant Floor or Metapuzzle, based on whether you run vanilla or randomizer. It is one large panel containing four smaller panels, which, when solved, become elements in the larger puzzle. It's pretty cool, but importantly for us, the sub-panels all have erasers.

This is barely an issue though because the metapuzzle itself doesn't have any erasers. You just have to stand in a position with a high enough FOV to be able to see the sub-panels as well as the full floor, then solve the sub-panels, and use the full floor to exit solve mode. And there we go! We've finished the run!

Really. After Metapuzzle is Random Doors, which aren't a problem, and then Pillar Room, which also isn't a problem. All of these panels individually kick you out of solve mode, including the three panels in the Wonkavator. Just make sure you don't enter solve mode before getting into position to solve the next puzzle, because I have lost a run of this category by entering solve mode in Pillar Room and facing the wrong way.

But that's it. We launch the Wonkavator, and we're off to the stars.

Overall, this challenge went pretty well. In Current, you're forced to do one manual solve mode exit, after the second Orange Bridge solve. In Legacy, it depends on whether you believe Force Bridge Skip should be allowed. If you don't, then you're also forced to do one manual solve mode exit: either the second Orange Bridge solve, or during Force Bridge Skip. If you do believe Force Bridge Skip should be allowed, then I am pleased to say that 7 Lasers can be done with no manual solve mode exits in Legacy!

Here's a breakdown of the different issues we ran into:

Erasers: 2 (Town Eraser, Mountain Metapuzzle)
Multiple solves: 6 (Town Triple, Bunker Elevator, Mountaintop Perspective, Purple Bridge, Blue Bridge, Orange Bridge)
Movement needed within set: 3 (Bunker First Floor, Swamp Snipe, Mountain Blue)

This post has gotten quite long, so I'm going to end it here and write a followup later. There's a lot more to say about this challenge, since we haven't touched All Lasers or All Panels yet. You'll also learn about a trick that was discovered during the writing of this post (so, a year ago), called Solve Walking. Stay tuned!

The farthest useful snipe I can think of right now is Tutorial Discard from Mountaintop, which is a through-walls snipe, is 270 meters away, and would save one panel in All Discarded Panels Low%. Nobody has performed a run that used it, though. ↩

2025 In Review: Quotes

2026-01-03T14:15:00-05:00

Happy third day of the new year! It's time for the annual post I'm most likely to be consistent at doing because it's not very difficult to write: the roundup of the best quotes from last year. Last year's was fun so I hope you like this one too!

There were 78 new quotes this year! We had an average of 6.5 quotes per month, with March and November having 11 each. Most of the quotes are still submitted by me and most still contain me but I'm always happy when other people submit and when there's conversations that don't include me! And we got a lot of upvotes this time too, so we have some pretty clear winners.

As a note: there were 12 quotes tied for tenth place with 4 votes each, so I chose my favorite for that position. Also, if you've never seen the quotes on this website before, most of them are pretty NSFW so keep that in mind.

With that, let's get started!

#842 - #UseYourButt
#828 - Supportive Asexuals
#822 - Stars Would Be Loud
#820 - My Tummy Hurts
#789 - My Partner Is Ace
#786 - Craziest Grapejuice Bomb
#781 - Sucking
#809 - Inception Dream
#775 - Meth

Finally, in first place, with seven votes and a pretty insane name, we have:

#787 - The Worldwide Femboy Human Traffickers

Yeah I don't know how to explain that. But I hope you enjoyed the top quotes of the year, and here's to a bunch of funny conversations and quips in the coming year!

By the way, the most popular quote of the modern era is still last year's top quote: #697 - Even War?. And the most popular quote overall is, sigh, still a tie between #334 - Have You Got It In You, and #232 - Blank. We're pretty consistent, huh.

2025 In Review: Music

2026-01-01T13:27:22-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone! It's 2026 now, and you know what that means: it's time for me to try to revive my blog by writing nostalgic posts! My aunt and I made a pact to blog more this year, so we'll see how well I can stick to that. In the past, I've done annual goals or silly predictions on the first of the year, but this time I think I'm going to cut in early with my music review post.

2025 was a great year for me in terms of music! It's been a goal of mine to listen to more new music (especially since the Great Debacle of 2023 when I only listened to two albums all year). I purchased or received eleven CDs since Christmas 2024 (but only ten albums, as I got one album twice!), which is improved from 2024 when I got five. While I did not reach an average of one album a month, I still think I kept myself occupied with songs I enjoyed listening to, rather than being stuck in a hole of listening to Memory Reboot and nothing else over and over.

This was also the year that I implemented the silly box on the sidebar of my blog that shows a random song I've been listening to lately. Just some fun with the last.fm API! It's been spoiling the names of some of the songs on my upcoming album, which I find amusing.

Once again, I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about. Feel free to follow along as you read the post!

Albums

I usually listen to full albums rather than singles, so I'll mostly be talking about those today. There's five definitive standouts from last year that are worth reviewing. I'll be going through them in reverse order of how much I listened to them, which I think roughly lines up with how much I enjoyed them.

There's room for a few honorable mentions before I start, however. . (literally just a full stop) by Kesha was an impulse buy in the middle of the year after I saw an Utena AMV to Joyride. A good chunk of the album is banger after banger, with my favorite being Boy Crazy, because that's just how I feel in real life. Another album I listened to a fair bit was the Lingo 2 OST by Icely Puzzles. I worked on this game, so it's pretty special to me, and I recommend everyone play it! My favorite track on the OST is Gammadelt.

MAYHEM by Lady Gaga

You may be surprised to see Lady Gaga at number five on this list, especially after how hyped I was for her new album in last year's predictions, and, well, that's just an indicator of how good last year was for music! This certainly was an anticipated release, however. I've been a fan of Gaga since Just Dance. She spoke to me, as a gay kid who likes dance pop and confusion. While I didn't really love ARTPOP and Chromatica, I've been waiting for the queen to make a triumphant return, and MAYHEM certainly delivered!

Disease is an obvious standout. I heard it once, months before the album came out, and it immediately hooked me. It's got the classic Gaga grit and it's so easy to dance to. The music video is also super intriguing because it reminds me of Unedited Footage of a Bear, with the whole "getting beat up by your doppelganger while in HoA cult suburbia" thing. (Disease on the left, Unedited Footage on the right)

My favorite track is How Bad Do U Want Me, though. I knew it would be a hit the moment I heard it. It's just so poppy -- and I love some good wordplay, too.

One other funny note about MAYHEM is that I have two of them. There was a Target exclusive release and a release exclusive to Lady Gaga's store, both of which have different album art from the regular release, and each also have different bonus tracks. I had to get them both to complete the track listing!

Girl With No Face by Allie X

Allie X is another singer I've been listening to for a long time. I listened to CollXtion I a lot in 2015, although last.fm doesn't seem to think so. CollXtion II was good, but not as good, and so I fell off for a little while. However, just like Kate Nash last year, I checked back in with Allie years later to find a new album, and I was smitten.

Girl With No Face was actually released in 2024, but it's a 2025 album to me because that's when I listened to it. It's absolutely a return to form for her, with exciting dance moments like Black Eye, ominous interludes like Staying Power, and cheery jaunts like Truly Dreams. I'm particularly fond of Off With Her Tits, a fairly self-descriptive song that I will nevertheless describe as being about struggling with the societal impact of having breasts, and wanting to have them removed.

My favorite track is probably You Slept On Me. The chorus is so utterly singable; it's a staple in the shower for me. Time to get down on one knee! Tell me why you slept on me! Then she starts talking about Krispy Kreme and I don't know why, but that's fine.

While writing this post, I noticed that Allie X now has another new album. I'll have to add that to my list for 2026.

BRAT by Charli XCX

I know, I know, I'm late to the party. I had my BRAT summer in the winter of 2025. Listen, I don't have a radio, I don't have social media, and I don't use Spotify. I don't know what you want from me. Everyone already knows this album so there's probably not much to say about it, but I'll try my best.

Charli XCX is yet again an old favorite of mine who I'd lapsed on for several years. True Romance is one of my favorite albums of all time; I really can't emphasize enough how influential it has been to my own music. But SUCKER was merely okay, and I didn't even know about / listen to most of the other albums. BRAT changed things.

360 is a pretty easy standout, and it's the one you hear the most in memes, but there's a lot to love on this album. Club classics, Sympathy is a knife, Apple... so many of the tracks are catchy. There's very few that I skip. To be honest, I don't like Girl so confusing very much, but it's one of the only ones.

Everything is romantic is probably the catchiest to me, but I'd have to say I think about it all the time is my favorite.

I think about it all the time
That I might run out of time
But I finally met my baby
And a baby might be mine
'Cause maybe one day I might
If I don't run out of time
Would it give my life a new purpose?

She's right. I do think about it all the time.

PRINCESS OF POWER by Marina

I don't even have to explain that Marina is another old favorite of mine. She's perhaps my favorite musician of all time. The absolute most surprising thing of the year is that the new Marina album wasn't number one. It was neck and neck for a while, but the other album eked out a win with likely only two or three playthroughs over Marina.

This album was so fantastic, though. It met all of my expectations. This is Marina, back again with powerful pop that gets into your skin and lives with you. No, it's not The Family Jewels or Electra Heart again, but it's so her and I love it.

My instinct here is to make a tier list for every track. Keep in mind that there is not a single song that I dislike; there's only ones I like less.

★★★★★ (Immaculate)	Princess of Power Cuntissimo Final Boss
★★★★☆ (Fantastic)	Je Ne Se Quois Cupid's Girl Everybody Knows I'm Sad Hello Kitty Butterfly
★★★☆☆ (Great)	Digital Fantasy Metallic Stallion I <3 You
★★☆☆☆ (Good)	Adult Girl Rollercoaster

Cuntissimo is my favorite song of the year, hands down. It is so electric and invigorating. If there's one song you should listen to from this list, it's this absolute powerhouse.

The other thing about this album is that I got to see it performed live with my friends Angel and Jett! I hadn't been to a concert since before the pandemic, but when I saw that Marina was performing in my city I snatched those tickets up right away. I have chronic pain and anxiety around people, but if there's anyone who I'll brave the crowds for, it's Marina.

I've actually seen her before; my second concert ever was her in New York during the Electra Heart era, which was phenomenal. Getting to see her a second time was spellbinding. I'm not usually too overwhelmed by celebrities, but Marina is so important to me. Actually seeing her, knowing it was really her gracing us with her beautiful voice, was wonderful. Definitely one of the best experiences I've had in years.

The most insane thing about this concert is that she performed Hermit The Frog from The Family Jewels. Hermit The Frog!!!!!!! That is such an obscure album cut and my friend and I absolutely lost our minds.

purity ring by Purity Ring

This album finally deviates from the pattern set by the rest of them, in that I had not lapsed in my listening of Purity Ring's music. In fact, I've stayed glued to them for years. They're the only group left from my 2016 trifecta of electronic music (Crystal Castles, Grimes, and Purity Ring) that I'm not embarrassed to be listening to. Definitely one of my favorite musicians. And yet, I did not know this album was coming. I heard about it from my roommate days before the Marina concert, which meant I couldn't allow myself to listen to it yet. It was something like two weeks that I had to wait in agony before I gave in.

This album. Is so good. I kept putting off listening to other new albums (like Lorde's album Virgin, which I did not end up liking at all) because I felt like purity ring needed more time. Eventually, I realized two months had passed and I was still listening to the same album. I feel like it has only gotten better with more time. It's so quintessentially Purity Ring, but you can tell how much they've evolved.

relict starts the album off with a strange, idiosyncratic vocal sample combined with spoken word poetry about grief. Grief! You know how much I love art about grief. Then we burst into many lives, a bright, singable light shining down before trickling seamlessly into part ii. Then we have place of my own, the first really danceable track with a hook and a chorus. After that, there's red the sunrise, which combines vocoded spoken word with beautiful singing that I can't help but belt out when I'm at home:

You're returning, turning now
Can you hear me, hear me now
So red, so red the sunrise
You're returning, turning now

Things only get better from there, with the cheerful memory ruins. There's a cat that meows halfway through it, which I always enjoy singing along with. Then, we get the instrumental mistral, a little ditty that reminds me of Frosti by Björk. It's always exciting to hear it because I know the next song is my absolute favorite from the album: the long night. This one is hard to listen to without getting out of my seat and dancing; long, swishing strides from one end of the room to the other. The trance-like gating is one of those effects I'm always itching to hear in songs, and the drop at the chorus really gets me.

The next song is imanocean, which I actually don't like that much, but I think it's mostly because it's right after the long night and it's hard to follow that up. It's the same reason I'm not too enthusiastic about Rollercoaster on Princess of Power. Regardless, we then go into between you and shadows, one of the more intense tracks, kind of like Dust Hymn from Another Eternity.

mj odyssey is another instrumental, and like the previous one, leads into one of the best tracks on the album: broken well. It's so moving. It seems to be about the sadness experienced because of the awareness of mortality, which is something I struggle with a lot too. I always love music that speaks to me. Finally, we end with glacier ::in memory of rs::, a tribute to deceased composer 坂本龍一 (Ryūichi Sakamoto), which samples his song Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It reminds me of the snow levels in video games with its synth backing and pensive lyrics.

I really love this album. If you haven't listened to Purity Ring before, you may want to start with something more approachable like their album Another Eternity, but if you have and you haven't heard this album before, you need to get in there right now. I'm waiting.

Songs

I didn't really listen to too many single songs this past year. Memory Reboot by VØJ and Narvent, This Feeling by my;lane, and shines by Purity Ring and Black Dresses were all still heavily in the mix, but that's not really different from last year. I had enough albums to listen to that I didn't need to rely on assorted singles.

There was one "new" single that I listened to a lot of this year, though, and that was Careful by Michelle Featherstone. This is not a new song -- it came out in 2009 -- but I heard it in an episode of How I Met Your Mother and bought it on iTunes right away. It's a lovely ballad about being nervous to open your heart.

One other song I'd like to mention is one that I made myself: Maybe. It's the first song I've released in six years, since my single Clipping in 2019. It's been exciting working on music again, but it's also fairly nervewracking to actually release something! It's a dark song with an upbeat and danceable melody. That's the way I like it! I hope you like it too, if you decide to give it a listen. As a bonus, there's also a B-side called Bubbled.

Maybe - Single by The Gates Of Sleep

Anyway, that's my review of the music of 2025! I'm looking forward to a new year of music. My goal is to include some more artists that I haven't listened to before, since this year featured a lot of old friends. There's an album by Zara Larsson waiting for me back at home, at the recommendation of my hair stylist. I've got a shortlist of other albums to try out by artists I've been hearing on the radio while on vacation, like Sombr. Of course, there's a couple of albums by old favorites that I want to check out too, like Allie X and CHVRCHES. We'll see how the year goes!

Happy new music!

Exploring Pokemon's Event Islands

2025-06-26T12:33:58-04:00

(TL;DR I made a short Pokemon fangame that gives you the experience of catching a certain Mythical Pokemon! And no, it's not Arceus.)

What? Who's this?

It's Arceus!!

And it's a real, not-at-all-hacked one. I got it back in 2017ish (holy hay that's eight years ago now) from my ex, when we were still close. They had been talking with one of their coworkers and found out that that coworker had an event gen 4 Arceus from Toys 'R' Us way back then. They weren't interested in Pokemon anymore so they traded it to my ex who traded it to me, because Arceus is my favorite Pokemon (tied with Swoobat). And I'm like omg I have a legitimate fateful encounter Arceus!¹

One of the reasons this is Awesome is that, well, back in 2017 you could not get Arceus without attending an event. Nowadays you get one for fully completing Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and then another one in Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl if you've finished PLA. But there's another reason this is Epic, and it's because having an Arceus in HeartGold / SoulSilver actually unlocks a secret area that cannot be otherwise accessed.

Table of Contents

Sinjoh Ruins: A secret place and the treasure it holds
Event-Exclusive Gameplay: Musings on my fascination with what is out of reach
The Solution: An experiment to re-create the feeling of an event

Sinjoh Ruins

If you enter the Ruins of Alph with Arceus following you, you'll bump into this researcher guy who takes you into the ruins. You then get teleported by dark magic to a mysterious place.

This place is past the top edge of the map. There's no other way in, and there's no way to leave other than by either talking to a man with an Abra inside a nearby cabin, or by completing the event. You're isolated in this place few people have memory of. One thing I noticed right away is that the music in this area incorporates the melody of the Azure Flute (the item you use to encounter Arceus at the top of Mt Coronet in Sinnoh/Hisui), which is a really cute touch! This place has some interesting lore, as it's supposedly a remote part of Johto where travelers from Sinnoh once lived.

Anyway, what's this event I mentioned?

Well, if you go into the cabin, you'll meet up with Cynthia: epic girlboss Champion of Sinnoh! The woman who has not one but two battle themes that strike fear into the hearts of many! She recognizes your Stranth and Prower and invites you back into the ruins, where you see the Mystri Stage.

You get to choose one of three circles that represent Palkia, Dialga, and Giratina. And then what follows is without a doubt the weirdest cutscene in any Pokemon game. I can say that definitively, without exaggerating, because this cutscene involves pixel art Arceus walking around over a slideshow of real world photographs. Pokemon games do not do this sort of thing ever. It's confusing and ominous and absolutely wonderful.

What does any of this mean? Arceus creates an egg containing the legendary dragon you chose earlier, and it hatches and you get that Pokemon. It's using its God magic to create life out of nothing, which is incredible enough on its own. But this is also the only time in any game that we actually see an egg being created. Even when you leave two Pokemon at a nursery in order to breed another mon, it's not technically known how that egg gets created. It could theoretically not have anything to do with the parent Pokemon! Who knows?

Anyway. The event ends after this; you get sent back to Ruins of Alph, with your new dragon in tow. I chose Giratina!

There's actually something very important about this. The dragon that you get is holding its respective orb; Dialga will have an Adamant Orb, Palkia will have a Lustrous Orb, and you can see my Giratina has a Griseous Orb. This is, in fact, the only way to get a Griseous Orb in HeartGold / SoulSilver. You can give an Adamant Orb or a Lustrous Orb to a Pokemon and trade it to HGSS and you're fine and dandy, but you can't do this with a Griseous Orb. You won't be allowed to enter the trade room with it.

Why is that? Well, it's because the Griseous Orb doesn't exist in every gen 4 game. It was created in Platinum, and when held by Giratina, it has the effect of transforming it into its Origin Forme (the default outside of the Distortion World is the Altered Forme). The Origin Forme (and the Distortion World) did not exist in Diamond and Pearl, and neither did the Griseous Orb. This is a problem when it comes to communicating between the games. Even talking to a potential trade partner in the Union Room could be a problem, because what if they have an Origin Forme Giratina? How would Diamond and Pearl handle it, since it has its own sprite, stats, and ability? How would it even say what item it was holding? Items are stored and communicated as IDs, not as textual names, so Diamond and Pearl would just see a number that means nothing to them.

So, both Platinum and HGSS go to extreme effort to prevent Diamond and Pearl from ever potentially having to see an Origin Forme Giratina or a Griseous Orb. Origin Forme Giratina is not allowed to enter the trade room, and no Pokemon other than Giratina is allowed to hold a Griseous Orb at all (even outside the trade room). Unfortunately, this also means that they can't be traded between the games that do have them. This isn't the only case of this happening in gen 4; Rotom and Shaymin got new forms in Platinum, there's an event exclusive Pichu form in HGSS, and while Pokemon caught in the HGSS-exclusive Apricorn Balls can be traded, the balls themselves can't be held.

And yet -- the orb has been granted to me directly via the graces of Arceus itself! This is interesting because it essentially makes the Griseous Orb, and thus also Origin Forme Giratina, event-exclusive specifically in HGSS. A strange inversion of how Rotom's alternate forms are event-exclusive in Platinum but easily accessible in the postgame in HGSS.

Event-Exclusive Gameplay

I love that there's this secret place that I get to visit. It's something Pokemon games don't really do anymore (aside from the Sinnoh remakes), but were big in gens 3 and 4. I can remember being a kid and reading about the Sinnoh ones online, dreaming of getting to visit one and catch the Mythical Pokemon waiting there for me, but alas, I lived in Australia and I knew there was no way I'd ever be able to go to a Nintendo event. Little did I know that the Sinnoh event items wouldn't be distributed until Platinum, by which time I was living in the US but had also lost interest in Pokemon, and that they would be distributed over the Internet rather than requiring you to attend an event. Sigh.

There's not many of these event islands (as I call them, even though some are not islands). I want to take a moment to list them out, what games they're in, what is required to reach them, and what you can get once you're there:

Southern Island in Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Omega Ruby, and Alpha Sapphire, where you can catch Latios or Latias holding a Soul Dew. Notably the only way to obtain a Soul Dew in gen 3. Accessed using the Eon Ticket. Interestingly, you go here as part of the story in ORAS, but you cannot catch Latios/Latias on your first visit, and you cannot return without the Eon Ticket.
Navel Rock in FireRed, LeafGreen, and Emerald, where you can catch Ho-Oh and Lugia. Accessed using the MysticTicket.
Birth Island in FireRed, LeafGreen, and Emerald, where you can catch Deoxys. Accessed using the AuroraTicket.
Faraway Island in Emerald, where you can catch Mew. Accessed using the Old Sea Map. Notoriously only ever distributed in Japan.
Rotom's Room in Platinum, where you can activate Rotom's alternate forms. Accessed using the Secret Key. The room is still present in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl but it is not event-exclusive in these games, as the Secret Key is automatically given to you when you catch Rotom. An identical room is also located in HeartGold and SoulSilver, although it is again not event-exclusive and does not require any item to access.
Flower Paradise (and Seabreak Path) in Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, Brilliant Diamond, and Shining Pearl, where you can catch Shaymin. Accessed using Oak's Letter. The item was never distributed for Diamond and Pearl, so the area cannot be legitimately accessed in those games.
Newmoon Island in Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, Brilliant Diamond, and Shining Pearl, where you can catch Darkrai. Accessed using the Member Card. The item was never distributed for Diamond and Pearl, so the area cannot be legitimately accessed in those games.
Hall of Origin in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, where you can catch Arceus. Intended to be accessed using the Azure Flute, but the item was never distributed in any game. The area is still present in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, where it is no longer event-exclusive. Instead, you are given an Azure Flute if you have a fully completed save file for Pokemon Legends: Arceus on your Switch.
Rock Peak Ruins, Iceberg Ruins, and Iron Ruins in Platinum, where you can catch Regirock, Regice, and Registeel. Notably the only way to catch these Pokemon in gen 4 (although you can still transfer them forward from gen 3). Requires a fateful encounter Regigigas to be in your party (so, one obtained through an event, not caught in-game).
Sinjoh Ruins in HeartGold and SoulSilver, where you can obtain (not technically catch) Dialga, Palkia, or Giratina holding their respective orb as described above. Notably the only way to have an Origin Forme Giratina in HeartGold and SoulSilver at all. Requires an Arceus to be in your party. Both a fateful encounter Arceus and an Arceus caught in the Hall of Origin will work, and in fact the game is coded to allow you to access the area twice if you have both, but the Hall of Origin was never made accessible in gen 4, so the fateful encounter Arceus is the only legitimate way to access it.
Liberty Garden in Black and White, where you can catch Victini. Requires the Liberty Pass. This is the only event-exclusive location outside of gens 3 and 4, and the area becomes accessible without an event (although also without Victini) in Black 2 and White 2.

Out of all of these places, I was able to go to exactly one of them as a child, and that was Southern Island. The Eon Ticket was distributed in a unique way in gen 3, compared to any other event item. My parents took me to a Toys 'R' Us before we left the US in 2003, and I was handed a physical ticket with an e-Reader stripe on it. There was an accessory for the GameBoy Advance called the e-Reader which worked like a credit card swiper. Nintendo could encode data on a stripe on these cards and you could get some in-game effect from them. It wasn't very popular in the US and didn't end up being used for much, but it was big in Japan apparently. And one of the few international uses for the e-Reader was this card that you could swipe in order to get the Eon Ticket item in your game.

I still have this card. I carry it around in my wallet, because it's meaningful to me. It's water damaged from years of storage and moving from country-to-country, and it can no longer be read by the e-Reader. But I still love it. And interestingly, I can still legitimately access Southern Island in new gen 3 save files, because for some reason, you can give a copy of the Eon Ticket to another game by mixing records (which is not something that works with any other event ticket).

Southern Island was so cool to me as a kid, even though the Pokemon you get there isn't even Mythical; I could have simply traded with my brother (I had Ruby and he had Sapphire) to get the other Eon Pokemon. It was a remote location I hadn't seen before despite playing the game for months. And I felt privileged to be allowed to go there. I was "in" on something.

There have been so many Nintendo events throughout the years and so many Mythical Pokemon that they insist on locking behind events, but event islands have not made a comeback aside from in the gen 3 and 4 remakes. For the most part, they just give you the Pokemon directly now. It feels melodramatic. It makes me realize that the Pokemon itself isn't what I'm really interested in. I'm not really going to battle with it, not that you're even allowed to battle with them in the battle facilities. What I'm interested in is the lore. The way these Pokemon fit into the story and the world.

Possibly the most well-known Pokemon rumor ever is that Mew can be found under the truck outside the S.S. Anne in Gen 1. This rumor had everything: a cool Pokemon you couldn't get anywhere else, a unique sprite (the truck) that seemed like it had to be there for a reason, and a non-trivial supposed method of accessing it, which was hard for most schoolchildren to verify (you had to have Surf before visiting the S.S. Anne to even see the truck, and the rumor said you needed Strength to move it). This rumor was ultimately untrue, and never became true despite the games revisiting Kanto several times (although FRLG and LGPE cheekily hid a Lava Cookie and a Revive respectively near the truck as a nod to the rumor). But this falsehood didn't seem to matter. The rumor was so pervasive and enticing that, years later, some people even attribute part of the game's success to it. People love a cool secret hidden just out of reach.

I don't recall hearing the Mew rumor as a kid, but there is one I do remember: the idea that Celebi was hidden in the shrine in the Ilex Forest in Gen 2. This one eventually turned out to be true in Crystal, albeit only in Japan, and apparently it was added specifically in response to the rumor.² For a limited time, via a ridiculous method involving hooking up your Game Boy Color to a mobile phone, you could get a special item (the GS Ball) that would unlock a cutscene in the forest that spawned Celebi. It wasn't exactly an event island since it took place right in the forest. But the idea that there was a secret Pokemon hidden in the world that I'd spent so much time traversing and living in, that it was the forest's protector and that it was just barely out of my reach, was captivating. It made me love Celebi. It was one of my favorite Pokemon for a long time, and that's despite not obtaining one until I was an adult and they made it available without an event in the Virtual Console release of Crystal.

Left: the truck outside the S.S. Anne in Gen 1.
Right: summoning Celebi at the Ilex Forest Shrine in Crystal.

So, I love these little islands and the tickets that get you there -- but there's an obvious downside to them.

The fateful encounter Arceus isn't the only event Pokemon that has a special effect in HGSS. If you have a fateful encounter Celebi, you can take it to the shrine in the Ilex Forest and activate a scene where you travel back in time to when Team Rocket was broadcasting the signal for Giovanni. You can go to the hidden room behind the waterfall in Tohjo Falls and Giovanni will be there. You learn that this was his hiding spot in the time between Team Rocket disbanding and trying to start back up again. You get to battle him, thus becoming the reason that he never responded to the radio signal. And you also learn that Silver, the rival in these games, is his son. It's a really cool addition to the Johto lore, and I've never seen it play out. Because I don't have a fateful encounter Celebi in gen 4, and likely never will.³

The exclusivity of these in-game scenes is part of what makes them so tantalizing, but it intrinsically also means that many people will miss out on them. And that doesn't quite feel fair. Work went into creating these scenes and islands. They had to be designed, drawn, scripted, and scored. The developers had to come up with lore for them that they knew would be interesting to the players. There's real gameplay, however short, that is coded and embedded in the games we're purchasing that we're not allowed to access because we didn't happen to be playing at the right time over a decade ago. The excitement to see these mysteries has built up in our heads the same way it did for players before the event actually happened, except now it's wasted because there's no payoff. That's probably why they don't do this anymore: because why work so much on a part of your game that most players will never see?

I have spent an embarrassing amount of my adulthood pining to go to these secret islands, and I've actually managed to legitimately access most of them. My friend Emily procured for me what is, to the best of her knowledge, a legitimate unclaimed AuroraTicket on an Emerald cartridge.⁴ I similarly managed to procure what I believe to be a legitimate unclaimed Old Sea Map on a Japanese Emerald cartridge.⁵

Rotom's Room and Hall of Origin were "declassified" in a sense in BDSP, and I did claim Oak's Letter and the Member Card when those events happened for BDSP. My brother happened to have the fateful encounter Regigigas and he gave it to me, so I can access the three ruins in Platinum. And of course, I have the gen 4 Arceus too.

Also a copy of Pokémon Black with a Liberty Pass on it mysteriously showed up in my house one day. I don't remember buying it, I don't know how legitimate it is, and the Victini on it was already caught anyway. Maybe the sandwich ghost is responsible.

The amount of work that went into some of these, again, makes the payoff feel more special. But it's another reason why these event islands are not good from a gameplay perspective. Finding the cartridges with unclaimed tickets on them involved a lot of luck, research, money, and luck. Getting the Regigigas and the Arceus just involved a lot of luck. Only the BDSP events feel reasonable, because they essentially revived the old events for a newer playerbase, which happened to include me at the right time.

And that, I think, is a hint to one of the main things Nintendo could've done if they wanted to preserve the exclusive feeling of these event islands without cutting them off from a majority of the players: make the event tickets available periodically, forever. This could be at odd intervals, so no one knows when it's going to happen and it's still an exciting feeling when one becomes available for download and you have to snatch it up. Even if you miss it, or if you don't start playing the game until later, there'll still be another chance someday to reach that phantasmal land.

But Nintendo isn't interested in making things available forever. They shut down their online services the earliest opportunity they can. They sell their games temporarily so that you're dependent on subscription-paid re-releases later on (I'm looking at the 3D Mario remasters). Nintendo wants you to play their games their way, and it's just sad to leverage the love and trust they built up in the children who grew up with their games, who lived and learned alongside them and internalized them into the recesses of their minds.⁶

I should also say that I'm sure a lot of seasoned Pokemon players would react to this melodramatic essay with: "if you're so upset at Nintendo not giving you what you want then why don't you just hack the event item into your game?" And there's nothing inherently wrong with doing that. For some people, that's a great way to gain access to this stuff. But for me, it's not good enough. It taints the special feeling of the event. It doesn't matter so much if someone is dangling something cool just out of reach if I'm able to snap my fingers whenever and magically wrench it out of their hands. I want fate to decide when I've done enough longing, and reward me for it. Yes I'm being really normal about Pokemon right now.

The Solution

After playing through the Sinjoh Ruins event and thinking about the lack of event islands in newer gens, I had an idea. What if I just... made one? I could make a mini fangame where you get the experience of going to an event island to catch a Mythical Pokemon. And it'd be available perpetually, so you can't miss out on the fun. Wouldn't that be cool?

Well, I hope so, because that's what I did! It's on itch.io and you can check it out here, if you want to play it before reading my process of developing it.

Marshadow Distribution Simulator by hatkirby

I made it with the wonderful Pokemon Essentials engine, which helps so much with creating a Pokemon fangame. There's tons of features that are handled off the bat for me, and that meant that I was able to make a quick yet advanced game without getting stuck in development hell for years. (And even so I still ended up stretching this project out to like three weeks lol).

There are several things, I think, that go into the experience of visiting a Pokemon event island:

Perhaps most importantly, the Pokemon you get there.
The "Inside", by which I mean the island itself.
The "Outside", by which I mean the place you access the island from.
The item that unlocks access to the island.
The method by which you receive the item.
Optionally, a puzzle you have to solve before seeing the Pokemon.
The lore behind the island and its relation to the Pokemon.

Let's go through these one-by-one!

The Pokemon

As you can see from the title of the game, I chose Marshadow.

First of all, it had to be a Mythical Pokemon. Southern Island and Navel Rock are cool, but it's not the same as the feeling of seeing an otherwise unreachable Pokemon for the first time, and seeing how it fits into the world. Second, it should be one that doesn't already have an event island. Third, while I would love to design a home for Jirachi, I think it had to be a Pokemon from one of the newer generations, since they don't have any event islands.

This made the decision pretty easy. Gen 7 is dear to me. It's what got me back into Pokemon as an adult. The designs (both the Pokemon and the Alola region) are great, and IMO Sun and Moon has by far the best story in any Pokemon game (although Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon ruin it arrrghghghh). Marshadow is also the first Mythical Pokemon I got from going to an event! I still have the card from it.

Not only that, but I saw I Choose You! in theatre in 2017 when it came out. That movie was an incredible shared experience by the way, because the entire theatre lost their minds when Pikachu started speaking. I haven't had that much fun in a movie theatre in a long time. And also: Marshadow plays an important role in that movie! So yeah, I'm fond of the little cutie.

The Inside

So, what is the island itself like? Well, I did want it to actually be an island, just because the canonical event islands are so iconic. Alola is also an archipelago of islands to begin with, so adding an extra island to the mix seems reasonable, and there's plenty of coast to leave from.

One of the main things we know about Marshadow is that it hides in the shadows of strong people and learns to fight by mimicking their movements. I love this concept of it being able to blend into the shadows, rather like Pride from Fullmetal Alchemist. So, I thought of the perfect place to find a bunch of shadows: a spooky old house! This mysterious locale allows Marshadow to trace the player's footsteps until noticed, which provides some cute flavor to the encounter.

I obviously had to name the island too. I stood in the shadow of the moon last year (which is to say, I witnessed a total solar eclipse) and it was one of the best experiences of my life, so I quickly thought of the perfect name: Penumbra Island.

The Outside

The next question is, where are we before we go to the event island? All of the Gen 3 events involve using a ticket to get the game's one ship to take you to an actual island. This is cool, but is a little lacking in personality. In contrast, even the Gen 4 events that are actually on an island have interesting ways to get there.

As a kid, I was entranced by the dead end of Route 224 and the locked building in Canalave City. I would repeatedly go back to both places after achieving certain things in the game, hoping that I'd be allowed to progress. I don't think I knew at that point that you had to receive a special item from Nintendo to do something in those places. But they had me hooked. I wanted to see more.

Route 224 extending into Seabreak Path and then Flower Paradise is cool, and it's the only time you actually walk across the sea to get to an event island. But Canalave City's Harbor Inn is particularly intriguing. It's a locked building in a busy city, and the game goes out of its way to tell you that the door "appears impossible to open". That meant there had to be something cool in there. If it was really impossible to open, there just wouldn't be a door. And then when you do get inside, someone hypnotizes you and you teleport to Newmoon Island in your sleep? So cool.

I had an idea that borrowed from both of these. Again, one of the things we know about Marshadow is that it can hide perfectly in the shadows. We've already investigated the motif of shadow, but there's another part of the study of shadows besides the darkness, and that's the light. Keeping that in mind, I took a look around Alola for locations that seemed relevant. At first, I wanted to do something with the Lake of the Moone, but there really wasn't any room for the kind of thing I wanted.

And then I saw it: the Konikoni City Lighthouse!

Just like Darkrai's Harbor Inn, the Lighthouse can't be entered (although the game doesn't taunt you with a description of why not). You also can't even approach it from the city; you have to go through an alternate exit from Diglett's Tunnel. This is perfect for a Mythical Pokemon event! I wanted to take a place that was tantalizingly out of reach in the real game, and put something there.

And what happens when you get access to the Lighthouse? You turn on the light, of course. And it illuminates a path over the water that leads you to the island. Just like Shaymin's Seabreak Path.

The Item

This one is pretty easy, given what we've already discussed. How do you gain access to the Lighthouse? With a key! So the item is simply the "Lighthouse Key".

The Method

Now this is where things get kind of bonkers. We have to figure out how the player receives the item.

Mystery Gift always fascinated me as a kid, for precisely the same reason that event distributions did. I knew that this feature was the key to receiving the secrets I yearned for, and yet were always out of reach. Like I said, I never got to make use of this feature in my childhood. The Eon Ticket was the only event distribution I attended, and that was technically pre-Mystery Gift.⁷ I stopped playing Pokemon between Diamond/Pearl and Platinum, and Platinum is when the Gen 4 event items were distributed over the Internet.

As an adult, however, I was able to attend events and receive Wonder Cards via Mystery Gift. I have a list on my phone of a couple dozen Gen 7 event Pokemon I've obtained, both through getting serial codes at GameStops and through online distributions that were free to everyone within the timeframe. It was always exciting to get these Pokemon, even though most of them weren't Mythical, and even though they weren't items that allowed me to go to cool secret places.

Because of this, I knew I had to make use of Mystery Gift in my fangame. Pokemon Essentials includes a Mystery Gift feature, which was super exciting to me. You embed a URL to a server in your game, and after the player has unlocked Mystery Gift, they're able to use it to check for active event distributions. If there happens to be one, then voila! The Lighthouse Key is delivered to them.

The word "if" is important there, though. Part of the intrigue of Mystery Gift is that there isn't always something there. It wouldn't be the same if you were guaranteed to find an active event distribution when you unlocked and checked Mystery Gift. Is it really an event, then? Or is it just a gameplay element? No, I wanted part of the event island experience to include the feeling of exclusivity. The feeling that you're being given something from outside of the game; that playing the game itself is not enough to be able to see everything hidden within.

Now, I could just have the server only offer the distribution during recurring real world periods of time, but that would also kind of suck because you wouldn't be able to have the experience regardless of when you discovered the game, and it would also make the experience less meaningful to those who happen to discover the game during an active distribution period. So, I came up with a scheme that combines both the feeling of getting an exclusive distribution from outside of the game, with a gameplay element that allows you to activate this distribution whenever you want.

Enter: the Konikoni City Questionnaire!

This little questionnaire is linked in the README of the game, and the NPC who unlocks Mystery Gift for you hints toward its existence. It is key to unlocking the event distribution. The way Mystery Gift works in my game is that the pool of active distributions is not global; it is specific to your Trainer ID. And the answers you provide to the questionnaire are able to identify you to the server.⁸ So, if you correctly fill out the questionnaire using the answers you find within your game, the Wonder Card is unlocked for you and you alone. Then, you just have to open Mystery Gift and the game will find an event distribution waiting for you.

It was so much fun implementing this part; both devising the identifying questions, and writing the server code itself. I love a simple webapp, and my tool of choice for this is a Ruby library called Sinatra. The webapp consists of a single Ruby file which contains the API endpoints for unlocking distributions based on questionnaire responses and for checking for active distributions, as well as a single HTML file making up the questionnaire itself, and a PNG file so you can see the Lighthouse Key item. It's that simple. No database is needed; the unlocked distributions are just stored in memory. There's no need for long-term persistence because the player is going to download their Wonder Card pretty shortly after filling out the questionnaire.

Writing the questions also allowed me to fill out some of the areas of the game that didn't have to do with required gameplay elements or the event itself. I tried my best to replicate the experience of being on the south part of Akala Island. I'm hoping that the questionnaire does a good job of enticing the player to explore the area and talk to NPCs.

The Puzzle

I said this was optional, because most event islands don't actually involve a puzzle. The only ones that did were Birth Island and sort of Faraway Island. In the latter, Mew hides from you in the tall grass and you have to chase it around without being able to see anything other than patches of grass occasionally shaking.

In the former, though, you are presented with an odd, triangular stone. Interacting with it causes it to move, and you have to approach it in the most efficient way possible (by taking the fewest steps possible). This repeats a number of times before the stone finally breaks open and reveals Deoxys. It's a simple puzzle, but it further enhances the experience, to me.

I like puzzles, so I wanted to include one on my event island. This one is a little more complicated than the one on Birth Island, but I still hope it's easy enough for players to solve. When you first enter the house on Penumbra Island, the lights are off, and you get the feeling you're being watched. There are five switches arranged in a circle in the house, and toggling a switch also toggles the two adjacent to it. You have to configure the switches such that they're all on at the same time. Doing so turns on the lights, and thus also reveals the creature that's been hiding in your shadow the whole time. This is a variation of a common puzzle type called, aptly enough, Lights Out.

The Lore

Finally, what does this event say about Marshadow? How does it help this Mythical Pokemon to fit into the world of Alola?

This is something that I've developed throughout crafting the other pieces of this game. Marshadow is a shadow, and although people whisper about its existence, it is seldom ever seen. It isn't just a myth, though. It inhabits an island not too far away from Akala Island. There's even a path that leads you there, albeit one that is invisible to people without the illumination provided by the abandoned lighthouse. It squats in a house that seems to be in a state of disarray. There must have been people there at one point, but they're gone now, and both the house and the island have been forgotten. Marshadow glues itself to your side the moment you step within its reach, haunting you until you turn on the lights. And then...?

One really cool piece of lore that is shown in I Choose You! is that Marshadow is able to harness Z-Power without a Trainer and thus without a Z-Ring. It has an exclusive Z-Move called "Soul-Stealing 7-Star Strike", the animation of which includes seven stars that form the Z-Power symbol. Marshadow also has a second form called "Zenith Marshadow", which is not present in the games as a real alternate form, but is seen in the movie and in the animation for Soul-Stealing 7-Star Strike. "Zenith" is actually what the Z in Z-Power stands for. There's some kind of connection between Marshadow and Z-Power, and we're never fully shown what it is.

There's a plugin for Pokemon Essentials that allows you to have Z-Moves. Obviously, I had to use it because I'm making a game based on Alola. And this plugin includes the ability to allow certain wild Pokemon to use Z-Moves. This, I think, was the perfect flourish to really accentuate the climax of the game. When you encounter Marshadow, it gains a Z-Power aura, and I made it visually change into its Zenith form. It's much stronger in this state, and is even able to use its Z-Move (with a five turn recharge period). You have to lower it to 30% health in order for the aura to drop and for it to change back to Gloomdweller form, at which point it becomes catchable. It's like a final boss and a catching game rolled into one!

This was a really exciting addition, for me. It feels like I know more about Marshadow now than I did before I started working on this fangame, and it makes the project as a whole feel more meaningful. I've learned more about this Pokemon that I love, and I've gotten to develop on its lore myself too by giving it a home. I hope this game gets you as excited about Marshadow as I am!

And that's kind of it, for now. Those are the things that I think makes up an interesting Pokemon event island. Take notes, Nintendo. They're not even including Mythical Pokemon in the base game anymore! They're adding them in with patches! And both Gen 8 and 9 have only had one each. It's interesting. On one hand, it's nice to not keep so much cool stuff out of everyone's reach, but on the other... There's something fun about it. If done correctly. As we've discussed.

The game has a bunch of other unnecessary flourishes that are not required for the intended event distribution experience, but which were irresistible to me. It turns out that when I want to make a piece of fan art centered on a thing that I obsess over, the other things that I obsess over end up leaking in too. I kind of want to make another fan game, now that I know how easy it is to get started with Pokemon Essentials. There's so much random complicated nonsense in Pokemon that occupies my mind to no end, like the battle facilities and weird one-off cutscenes and items that are hard to get and obscure minigames. It's exciting to think about.

Anyway, here's another link to the Marshadow fangame! Have fun!

"Fateful encounter" is a flag that is set on Pokemon that are received from event distributions; such Pokemon are said to have been "met in a fateful encounter". Strangely, the Shaymin in Flower Paradise in Platinum (but not the other games that Flower Paradise is in) also has the fateful encounter flag. This is probably because there are certain things in gens 3 and 4 that specifically check for this flag on a Pokemon, such as the NPC who gives you the Gracidea for Shaymin. It's unclear why checking for this flag was necessary, but it does mean that certain Mythical Pokemon transferred from gen 3 such as the Pokemon Colosseum bonus disc Jirachi and Celebi are not eligible to activate their in-game effects in gen 4, because they do not have the fateful encounter flag. ↩
Bulbapedia cites this interview as evidence for this claim. ↩
There's even a third instance of this in HGSS. If you take a fateful encounter shiny Pichu to the Ilex Shrine, a special spiky-eared Pichu will appear and join your party. This Pichu can't be evolved, traded, or sent to a later generation. It is a unique treat just for HGSS. And it's eternally out of reach now. ↩
I hyperventilated when she gave it to me. It was pretty amusing. ↩
I know that Wonder Cards can be hacked onto the cartridges. I've done additional verification beyond just the presence of the Wonder Cards but yes, it is true that I can't know for certain that they're legitimate. ↩
There's a research paper about how people who grew up playing Pokemon are good at visually recognizing things. It's pretty neat. ↩
This is me being pedantic. Mystery Gift officially debuted in Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, and allowed you to receive Wonder Cards using the wireless adapter for the GBA. Ruby and Sapphire had a similar feature called Mystery Event though, which did the same thing except you received stuff using the e-Reader. So Mystery Event is how I got the Eon Ticket in my game. Additional note: a feature called Mystery Gift also existed in the Gen 2 games, but it was unrelated to event distributions: it was for gifting random items between games, and for connecting to the Pokemon Stadium 2 and the Pikachu pedometer. ↩
The tech-minded of you out there can probably guess how the questionnaire identifies the player to the server just by looking at the questions. ↩

Madeline in the Mirror Temple

2025-04-23T12:10:55-04:00

Back in 2018, I was really into Celeste. It was pretty decidedly my favorite game at the time; the gameplay is fun, the music and art are beautiful, and the depiction of mental health issues was very striking. I highly recommend it, in case you've somehow made it this long without playing it.

One of the things that I got pretty invested in was the Golden Strawberries. Once you get far enough into the postgame, you unlock a special golden strawberry at the beginning of each stage, which you have to escort to the end without dying. In the past, I've tended not to enjoy deathless challenges because they felt like pointless difficulty padding, but there was something about Celeste that made it feel achievable, like you'd be able to get there if you just practiced hard enough.

There were 24 levels in the game at that point, and I made it my goal to get all 24 golden strawberries. I wrote about my progress as I went, and posted little video clips when I could. One of my favorite moments in this was practicing 6-a while sitting on the sofa at the office on my lunch break, and then suddenly realizing I was almost at the end. I can still remember the befuddled face my coworker made at me when I collected the berry. I managed to conquer all of the A-sides, all of the C-sides, and the first four B-sides, which meant my next task was 5-b.

So, a little time has passed. Seven years, in fact. Trying to get the 5-b golden strawberry proved too difficult for me back in 2018. The cycles and the spinners and the Theo section are all pretty intimidating. I even learned the spike jump skip in the second checkpoint so I could skip a room, but I still barely made it into the third checkpoint most of the time. I gave up on it eventually, and took a long break from Celeste.

Doing this spike jump allows you to skip one of the keys in the second checkpoint area. It's not exactly a free trick, considering the fact that if you don't dash quickly enough after the spike jump, you fly face-first into another wall of spikes.

Fast forward to late 2023. The Talos Principle 2 had just come out, and I was excited to play it since I'd enjoyed the first one and even speedran it for a little while. Unfortunately, after waiting a few hours for 70gb of game files to download onto my computer, I opened the game and immediately got vestibular sickness from the graphics. No amount of tweaking settings or upgrading/downgrading my graphics card seemed to help. It's a shame -- I still haven't played it. That experience with Talos 2 seemed to trigger something in me, too; for a few weeks after that, I struggled to play any 3D game. At the time, I thought it was because of a tooth infection, but it's possible that was unrelated.

Either way, it was around then that I noticed an online friend playing modded Celeste levels. It reminded me how fun that game was, and made me wonder whether I'd be able to play it without feeling sick since it was 2D and not 3D. And it turned out, I could! I played through the main game again from the start and it was a lot of fun to get to experience it all again after so long. Then, I downloaded the Strawberry Jam Collab mod and started playing it with my friend.¹ It was so much fun! It really reinvigorated my love for this game, and I think it's safely back in place as my second favorite game ever (behind The Witness).

Anyway, that was a year and a half ago. I still play Celeste a fair amount. I'll just play random levels on my Switch when I'm bored, or I'll replay Strawberry Jam levels or other modded levels that I like. I actually speedran it a few times too, and recently got a 46:41 Any%, which is almost 5 minutes faster than my previous best from 2024 and I'm pretty happy about it.

All this is to say that I've slowly been getting better at the game than I was in 2018. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the main things that helped me save time in that Any% run is that I died way less often in the later levels. This got me thinking about what else in the game might benefit from me being better able to avoid death. And just a few days ago it occurred to me that maybe I'd gotten good enough to be able to defeat the beast, to beat the level that had bested me: 5-b.

5-b isn't the longest level, but it's not the shortest level either. There's four checkpoints, each with ~5 screens. The first checkpoint is pretty trivial, and I could consistently get through it in like 20 seconds.

Checkpoint 2 is a bit weirder and is one of the few nonlinear sections in the entire game, which is to say that there's two keys you can get in either order. Doing the spike jump I mentioned earlier allows you to skip one of these two rooms, but I eventually decided that the room I was skipping was actually easier than the spike jump. It's possible that my insistence on using that trick is part of why I wasn't able to get the berry before. There's one room in this checkpoint in particular though that is quite nasty and is what killed the majority of my runs: the last room. It's a vertical room filled with throwing stars moving back and forth on a cycle, and as is usually the case with cycle-based gameplay, if you start the room at a bad point in the cycle, you're often screwed. There's also a scary dash between spikes at the end.

Checkpoint 3 starts with another vertical room where you jump and dash between spikes, and it also killed me a lot back in 2018, but there's at least no cycles, and I'm a lot better at it now. After that room, though, almost every room has at least one Seeker in it, which is pretty scary since they can be somewhat unpredictable. The worst is this one:

This room is the farthest I ever got in 2018. There's three breakable blocks suspended over a pit (one of them in the picture is already broken). You have to cling to one, wait for the Seeker to attack, jump out of the way so it breaks the block, land on its head so you get your dash back, and then dash to the next one. Then you do it two more times. If you land on the Seeker before it breaks the block, it's possible that its respawn animation destroys the block anyway. It's pretty spooky to have to get so up close and personal with a Seeker, especially when the AI (sorry for the loaded term) decides it doesn't want to dash at you and is just going to repeatedly amble up to you without breaking the block.

Finally, there's the Theo section. This part was also spooky in 5-a, since you have to make sure Theo doesn't die, and you're also more vulnerable while you're carrying this big crystal around. There's a couple of long rooms with Seekers in them and those are pretty rough. Strangely, though, I ended up finding this checkpoint easier than the middle two. I only made it here three or four times, and that was all it took. The last room is the cassette blocks room, though, and you still have Theo, which adds an extra element of difficulty to these already tricky rooms.

However, as is obvious from the existence of this post, just a few minutes before midnight last night, I did in fact finally get the 5-b golden strawberry! It was actually the first time I'd ever made it to the cassette blocks room with the berry, and I'm very glad I didn't choke. I have my usual 30 second Switch video showing the end, and you can see how close I came to falling into a pit right before the end. But I did it!

It feels great to have finally done what 2018 me couldn't do (and I'm trying not to have an existential crisis about the fact that I'm making progress on a video game challenge I started SEVEN YEARS ago). The question now, however, is: what's next?

Back when I started this, there were 200 strawberries, including 25 goldens. The Farewell DLC released in 2019 brought this up to 202 strawberries with 26 goldens. I've already gotten the Moon Berry in Farewell, so my current total is 198 (175 red, 22 gold, 1 moon). And despite how long this berry took me, it's absolutely not the hardest. 6-b is pretty daunting to me because I am not good at the feather mechanic. 7-b is the longest B-side, and the length of the level almost matters more than the difficulty when it comes to goldens. 8-b sucks; I've never had a good time playing it, and the thought of it fills me with dread. And then there's Farewell.

The Farewell golden berry (or, FWG) is considered the hardest challenge the game has to offer, by a large margin. Farewell itself is quite a step up in difficulty from the rest of the game, and to make things worse, it is 94 screens long.² That being said, I love it. Farewell is my favorite level in the game. I've played it so many times and I've gotten pretty good at it. I've beaten it in under 24 minutes, and with only 22 deaths.

There was actually a period of time last year when I was practicing FWG, despite not returning to the overall golden strawberry challenge. It's a truly magnificent foe. There are so many rooms with so many possible tricks and strats, and for the most part I enjoy making my way through them over and over again. The furthest I got was about 45% of the way through, which I'm still immensely proud of. I have kind of a deranged image detailing my thoughts about the rooms:

Of note is the "power source skip" mentioned near the beginning. I may have been doing the same thing that I was doing with 5-b, where I was attempting a risky trick instead of doing a couple more rooms that aren't actually that difficult. The more runs that get past that point, the better!

Will I ever get FWG? It's a long shot, but maybe! I certainly don't think it's impossible. And will I continue with the B-sides and get 6-b, 7-b, and 8-b? We'll just have to wait and see! Anyway, this has been a little trip down Celeste memory lane, combined with my usual dosage of "look at cool thing I did in viddy game!" See you next time!

Embarrassingly, I googled "strawberry jam" when trying to find a link for this post, and the results were not about the mod. ↩
7-A, the second longest level, has about 60ish screens you go through before the final checkpoint, and then that contains 30 flags marking your progress throughout like six rooms. Keep in mind that these rooms are also much easier than even the beginning of Farewell. ↩

The Witness: A Changelog

2025-01-26T18:59:01-05:00

The Witness was released on January 26th of 2016 at 5pm UTC, and by the end of the day, it had already been patched twice. It would, in fact, receive another 7 patches before the week was up. None of these updates changed the content of the game, of course. They were all about fixing bugs.

This is not uncommon when it comes to video games in the modern era. No matter how much you test software before release, there are always issues that quality control misses. Sometimes this has to do with the different technical environment that release puts your game in, and sometimes it has to do with gameplay bugs that only a wider audience can reveal for you.

Speedrunners have an interesting relationship with game updates. A game is usually updated in good faith, with the goal of bettering the casual player's experience. Stuff like lag reduction and increased leniency in difficult portions of the game are generally considered positive by everyone. But there are some changes that are beneficial to casual players which hinder speedrunners: most notably, the removal of useful glitches.

Today, on the nine year anniversary of its release, I will be talking about how The Witness has changed for speedrunners over time, and the history of New Version vs Old Version.

Disclaimer as per usual that this post contains a lot of spoilers for The Witness, including major mechanic reveals and also some full puzzle solutions. It's also long; I'm talking 13,000 words long. It got so long I had to widen a database column and split part of it into a separate post. Have fun!

Table of Contents

Initial Release
February 4th, 2016 #2
February 15th, 2016
April 4th, 2016
- Keep Skip
August 22nd, 2016
The In-Between
December 21st, 2017 (New Version)
- Jungle Wall Skip
- Other New Version stuff
macOS Old Version
Conclusion

Initial Release

I'm mostly going to be talking about the Windows release, although I'll talk a bit about macOS near the end. I won't really be talking about console versions at all, since they are inferior to the PC/Mac releases when it comes to speedrunning, and I don't know very much about them.

A lot of the early changes have to do with things like crashes when playing on certain operating system versions with certain graphics cards, or minor bugfixes for puzzles. I won't go through all of these, because they aren't really relevant to speedrunning. There's a post on Steam that documents some of them, although it curiously does not tell the whole story.

The first noteworthy bug that got patched is one that seems like it would be important in speedruns, but I'm not really sure it is. Day one players began talking about a glitch with the boat where you could get accidentally get off of it near Symmetry Island. It was a problem because if the boat was moving when you got off of it, you wouldn't be able to get back on and you'd be softlocked, with no recourse but to start a new file.

This was determined to be due to some incorrect collision geometry in that area that made the "surface" of the out-of-bounds area too close in height to the floor of the boat. One of the game devs actually made a video explaining it:

Softlocks are pretty bad, so they got a fix out for this quickly, in the first of two updates on January 28th. But I think it's still worth talking about, since it is possible to downpatch to a version that has the bug.

OOB in The Witness is strange because the walls are double-sided. There aren't many known ways to get out of bounds in this game, but most of them are useless because if you don't also have a way to get back into bounds, you're just stuck there. The fact that you can stop the boat in this specific location, get out of bounds to potentially do something, and then get back in bounds is interesting.

The OOB area here is pretty big. You can't get very close to Symmetry Island because the walkable surface ends, but you can explore quite a ways in the other direction. You can go all the way around Desert, and then carefully climb around the rocks to get into Quarry. The hard stop appears to be the back wall of Boathouse.

You can't solve puzzles through the backs of walls, but if you're standing somewhere such that your feet are out of bounds but your head is in bounds, you can usually still snipe things. And since you can also end up in a position where you're looking out underneath the island, it might be possible to do a through-walls snipe. I'm not convinced that there's absolutely no use for this glitch, but as of now I don't know any. Alas, you only have a quarter of the island's coast to explore out-of-bounds using this method. And the render distance isn't that long so you can't really see what's in the distance very well. And also it got patched out.

Moving on, a quick-but-very-relevant update hit the scene in the first of two updates on January 30: they increased the player's acceleration from stop. This always has an effect on speedruns because, well, getting to full speed faster means you're moving faster. It's kind of jarring how slowly the player accelerates in the initial versions, considering the fact that the acceleration wasn't that great after the change either.

There's another out-of-bounds-ish bug that got fixed in the early days, but it's of a completely different nature. It turned out that by pressing Shift and period at the same time, you could enable a "dev mode" that got left in accidentally. That would enable various other hotkeys, although most of them were useless. Pressing M, though, allowed you to detach from the ground and fly around, including through walls. Noclip wasn't used in speedruns because it was obviously cheating, but it was useful for traversing the game for routing purposes. And then they patched it out on February 4th.

It actually turned out, much later, that noclip still existed in the game, and that all the developers had done was disable the key sequence that enables dev mode. darkid's Witness Trainer mod can enable noclip mode even in the latest version of the game, using memory hacking. It's still very useful, especially when searching for snipes.

It's also useful for goofy category extensions, such as "Noclip Any%"!¹

February 4th, 2016 #2

After that, there were a handful of updates focused on one thing: reducing motion sickness. This was a major problem for The Witness in its early days, with Jenna Stoeber from Polygon stating "The Witness made me vomit after 20 minutes and I will never, ever forgive it." It's a common problem when it comes to 3D first person games, but most have features built-in to help out with it. The Witness did not, at the start.

The first thing they did (besides completely disabling view bobbing) was add an FOV slider. The game was originally locked to a 84 degree field of view, and a lot of people can feel sick when the field of view is too low. The FOV slider was added on February 4th (in a later update than the one that removed noclip), and it allowed the player to choose any value between 60 and 120. This was interesting to speedrunners for completely the opposite reason from what it was intended for. While the feature was added to allow people to choose a higher FOV for motion sickness reasons, there was some utility in lowering the FOV.

The reason for this is panel sniping. If you haven't read my post about through-walls snipes, an interesting feature of The Witness is that you are able to solve panels from any distance, as long as they are within your field of view and not occluded by anything solid. An unoccluded puzzle can be solved even if it is so far away that it isn't rendered. Speedrunners make heavy use of these snipes; 7 Lasers (the main competitive category) uses one in particular to turn the slowest level in the game into the second fastest.

Panel sniping requires a degree of precision though. You have to click on a very small target and then accurately move your mouse through a grid you may not even be able to see. One thing we do to help with this is to position the camera such that the panel to be sniped is in the corner of the screen. The camera's fisheye effect makes things in the corner appear bigger, which can help a lot. Another thing we do is play on the lowest possible field of view, because while a lower FOV reduces how many things you can see at once, it makes the things you can see bigger. So, for speedrunners, having 60 FOV as an option made tricks in 7 Lasers like Town Snipes and Swamp Snipe more consistent.

However, it seems like 60 FOV was a bit too extravagant for Thekla. The very next update, on February 15th, changed the lower bound of the FOV slider to 80 degrees. This is probably because the puzzles at the end of 7 Lasers are impossible to solve at less than 77.

Despite this change having an effect on speedrunners, it didn't trigger a rules discussion until the beginning of 2020, four years later. Weirdly enough, it wasn't about letting people downpatch to the Low FOV version, because by then this version was considered a different category from New Version. Instead, it was because the very existence of the Low FOV version had a ripple effect that infected every update after it.

Unlike every other setting, the game preserves your FOV when you start a new file. It doesn't preserve your mouse sensitivity, it doesn't preserve that you want subtitles, it doesn't preserve your keybinding selection. Just FOV. Additionally, the game doesn't validate the FOV value in your save file. If the FOV is outside the slider's range, it keeps that value. The knob on the slider would be visually past the end of the range, but it wouldn't force your selection back in range unless you tried to change it.

It's admirable that the game can handle this without crashing.

So, it's possible to get a 60 degree FOV on New Version without cheating by using an old save file to set the FOV, which'll then be carried forward into the new files for your runs. There was only really one person who was in favor of this exploit, though, so it was quickly decided against. The game rules now state that you can only use FOV values that are selectable in the game version you're running, which means 84 for the first two versions, 60-120 on the second February 4th update, and 80-120 on every version after that.

February 15th, 2016

The FOV slider wasn't the only thing that changed in that February 15th update. This is the update that finally added a reticle; the little gray thing in the middle of the screen that you can focus your eyes on so it's less likely you'll get motion sick. Jenna Stoeber would be proud, if she hadn't already completely written off the game. This reticle was diamond shaped and a little strange to look at, but it had a speedrunning benefit in addition to helping you not throw up: it showed you exactly where the cursor would appear upon entering solve mode, which meant you could aim better.

This update also added the "multisampling" graphics quality option to the game settings, but I have never personally touched it. The real thing I want to talk about here is the first patched speedrunning trick: the mountaintop exploit.

There's a puzzle at the top of the mountain that gets activated once you complete 7 lasers. You need to do this in order to enter the mountain, so of course, nearly every category reaches this puzzle. It's a bit of a strange puzzle: there are three start points and three end points, and you have to solve it three different times, one for each end point. There's also two statues standing on top of the panel blocking your view. The real challenge of the puzzle is finding the right position to stand in for each solution such that the statues aren't in the way. Because of this, most speedrunners call this the Mountaintop Perspective puzzle (although early runners call it Crazyhorse, because that is, for some reason, what the game calls it internally).

A top-down recreation of the Mountaintop Perspective puzzle, without the statues.

Note the three starts and three ends. This puzzle was designed such that each solution had to go from a start point to the end opposite of it. However, this wasn't actually enforced. All that mattered was that each end point received a solution; so, if you managed to find an alternate solution that reused a start point to reach two end points, you'd still be able to unlock the seal and enter the mountain.

Of course, this is what ended up happening. Players found early on that there was a solution for the back right end point starting from the back start point, rather than the bottom left. This solution was visible as you approached the puzzle, rather than from behind as the intended solution required. Thus, using this solution allowed you to save something like 3 seconds of walking. And that matters in a speedrun!

On the left is the intended solution that requires standing behind the puzzle. On the right is the alternate solution that uses this exploit. The position you have to stand in is somewhat precise because it's hard to make the back start point visible and also be able to round the corner near the end. But it's possible!

Or, at least it was, until the February 15th patch. Now, the puzzle starts off with no end points, and when you click on one of the start points, only the end point opposite to it appears, forcing you to use the intended solution. It's a bit of a shame to not be able to use this exploit anymore, but it really didn't save that much time, and it's understandable how this change could improve the experience for casual players. The puzzle is really about finding standing positions that provide the right perspective, not about figuring out which end point to use for each start.

There was one other notable thing that got fixed in this update, but it didn't have any utility; it was just an amusing bug. Early in the game, you stumble upon a large puzzle affixed to a metal door. The puzzle has multiple starts, multiple ends, dots, and stones. You find this before you even find the tutorials for dots and stones, and you're intended to see this, get confused, walk past it, find the tutorials, and then come back for a little challenge. We call this the Tutorial Vault, and there are four other challenge puzzles like this that guard access to the same prize that this one does: a video code for the Theatre.

Much later in the game, you find yourself in the Quarry, an area focused on the eraser symbol mechanic. There are two buildings in the Quarry, and one of them, the Mill, focuses on combining the eraser with both dots and stones. Once you've cleared all of the required puzzles in here, there's an optional puzzle at the end, just in case you want an extra challenge.

Here's a picture of both puzzles, with Tutorial Vault on the left and Mill Control Room 2 on the right. See if anything about them seems familiar.

Yep, they're almost identical! It's like a "spot the differences" puzzle. In this case, the differences are that Mill Control Room 2 is missing one of the start points, and has an eraser symbol. It's unknown why these puzzles are so similar, especially because the latter is not a vault. It is completely optional; solving it does nothing.

Or, well. It was supposed to do nothing.

Some players started reporting that the Tutorial Vault door was open despite them not solving the puzzle on it. The reason? They'd solved Mill Control Room 2. It seems that when Thekla designed the latter puzzle, they just copy-pasted the entity for the Tutorial Vault puzzle and changed some parameters on it. This is a fairly reasonable thing to do when you want to closely mimic work you've already done, but it does come with the risk that something will unintentionally sneak into the new entity via the copy-paste. And that's exactly what happened here: they forgot to unset the field that says what happens when you solve the puzzle, which in this case, was "open the Tutorial Vault door".

This was a a pretty funny bug, but like I said, it had pretty much no use, so it's fine that they patched it. As an additional fun fact, cause I'm full of them: there's actually another case of this in the game that never got fixed! There's a puzzle in the secret underground section of the mountain (otherwise known as UTM) that is almost identical to a puzzle on Symmetry Island, and we discovered in 2023 that solving it activates the next puzzle in the Symmetry Island set. It took so long to get discovered because you're usually required to do all of Symmetry Island before being able to reach UTM, so there's no non-glitchy way to encounter this and it only came up because the Archipelago mod can give you access to UTM early. If we could solve those underground panels early, it would lower the solve count in All Lasers Low% by two. There's currently no known way to do this since that area is very late in the game and the puzzles are facing away from the island (which makes sniping-through-walls difficult), but maybe someday we'll find a way to make that category just a little bit more of a nightmare!

April 4th, 2016

There were a couple of updates on February 19th, one of which added some alternate control schemes; you could use ESDF or ZSQD instead of being forced to use WASD to move around. It also added the advanced graphics settings dialog that you still see in the game today, as well as the option to disable vignetting. The latter is important because vignetting makes corner sniping harder by darkening the corners of the screen, so it's nice to be able to turn it off. But other than that, things were pretty quiet for a while. The game was in a stable state, and the post-release deluge of updates had reached its end.

Then April 4th happened. This was another update with multiple changes, but these had a little more impact than the previous patch. I'll start with the small things first. Remember the diamond shaped reticle from the previous update? It's already gone. Now the reticle is square shaped, which is how it remains to this day. The square reticle is a little bigger, and looks more like a bounding box for the cursor when it shows up. It's not a huge change, but I think the square reticle looks better, so this is a thumbs up from me.

The two reticles. They are admittedly pretty similar, but the square one just feels right to me.

Next, we have a bit of a weird one. The Witness auto saves your progress every 60 seconds, and whenever you pause. It also keeps track of your score, which is the sum of your solved panels, EP's, and obelisks. Previously, if your score passed a 120 point threshold, it would save into a new file instead of overwriting the old one, effectively splitting your save. As of the April 4th update, it now does this every 60 points instead. It may not be obvious why this is positive, but you'll see later.

We got a Mountaintop Perspective change that actually benefited us. As you saw in the previous image, one of the statues is holding a laser box, which is what activates the puzzle to begin with. There are two cables coming out of it: one going directly down into the puzzle, and one that the other statue is pulling over the first statue's shoulder.

The thing about this second cable is that it blocks your cursor just like any other object. When the game was first released, there was a lot of slack in the cable between the two statues, making it hang pretty low. This mattered for the solution going from the back start to the front end, which is inputted from the side. The position you had to stand in was rather precise because you had to prevent the right statue's leg from blocking one of the turns, but if you moved too far forward, the cable would block the line segment below the top white stone.

The April 4th update thankfully shortened the cable, giving you a lot more leeway in your standing position.

On top, the standing position for the back -> front solution, with the line drawn. Observe how close the cable comes to blocking the line. On the bottom, the shortened cable, seen from the same standing position.

Next we have another bugfix that doesn't immediately seem impactful. In the past, if you were solving a panel and then paused and loaded a file, the solve wouldn't get canceled until after the new file loaded. You could tell because the "solve cancel" sound effect would play as the pause menu disappeared. This was obviously a bug, but why did it matter? Well, it's because the bug allowed for a trick called Force Bridge Skip, which you can read more about in the linked blog post. It's one of my favorite tricks (partially because I discovered it myself), and thus I dedicated a little bit more time to explaining it.

It's sad that Force Bridge Skip got patched out, but there's actually an upside to it. You might be familiar with Eclipse Skip, otherwise known as the largest skip in the game. If you've read my post about it, you might remember something called the Theatre Pause Glitch. Basically, if you load a file while seeking through one of the Theatre videos, the video will be paused at that point after the load. This glitch is a critical part of Eclipse Skip. It's also a minor timesave in 99.8%, in which you pause a video early on in the run so that you can get the Catwalk EP later without having to walk all the way back into Theatre.

The video seek panels are pretty unusual, for a number of reasons. One of which is that canceling a solve on them has a special effect, just like the force bridge panels. The reason seeking works at all is because partially solving the panel is technically still canceling the solve; the panels just don't call the regular handler for a solve cancel. You can test this out easily: start seeking through a video and left click in the middle. Then repeat the seek and right click. The exact same thing happens both times.

The problem with this is how it interacts with the Force Bridge Skip glitch. Since it causes an in-progress solve to get canceled after the load, the seek handler gets called and the video continues playing from the seeked position. Not only does this immediately break the timesave in 99.8%, it also clears whatever flag in memory that normally causes the seek to smear across files, which breaks Eclipse Skip.

Despite this, Theatre Pause Glitch is still possible prior to the April 4th update. It just works a little differently. After seeking to the position in the video you want to pause at, you need to load a save file that hasn't input the video's code yet, so the seek panel isn't on. Then you can load your original file again, and in the case of Eclipse Skip, you can start loading the other files you want to smear the pause into.

So, the trick was still possible, but it was a bit harder because you needed to have an extra file to load into. Eclipse Skip has this built in because it also depends on Save File Splitting, but the 99.8% trick only works if Theatre is far enough into the run that the file's naturally split itself already (which it is in the current route, even taking the old split threshold into consideration). It should also be noted that needing to load an extra file, perhaps multiple times for Eclipse Skip, makes these tricks slower, especially since loading files is slower in Old Version.

All of this is just to say that patching Force Bridge Skip did have a positive effect, in making Theatre Pause Glitch and Eclipse Skip easier and faster. Unfortunately, this update was not all sunshine and butterflies for the 100% category. Now it's time to talk about the biggest patched trick in Old Version: Keep Skip.

Keep Skip

One of the requirements for a 100% run is solving all of the environmental patterns, or EP's. The Keep area has some of the most inventive EP's in the game. In the back half of the area, there are four puzzles that aren't solved by drawing lines through grids on panels like usual. Instead, there are large pressure plates arranged into grids on the ground, and you have to walk over them using the path of your solution.

Where this gets really cool is the fact that, when you're standing at the top of the Keep tower, each solved pressure plates puzzle becomes solvable as an EP. It makes sense, after all: they are visually Witness lines, and they're in the environment. What's unique about them is the fact that the pressure plate puzzles have multiple solutions, and not all solutions are equal.

Take, for example, the Purple Pressure Plates. Here's one solution, as seen from the top of the tower:

First of all, there are no symbols visible here. You can see the panel that this puzzle is connected to in the lower right, and the symbols are visible on that. So you'll just have to take my word for it that this is a valid solution to the puzzle, and that there aren't many others.

The next thing you'll probably notice is that this can't be solved as an EP. There's a broken pillar blocking one of the line segments, meaning your cursor won't be able to cross it. This happens regardless of where on the tower you stand; that line segment is always impassable and you can't get the EP if your solution uses it. This isn't the only such restriction: there's black paint spilled on a nearby segment, which has the same effect as the pillar: it breaks the continuous purple line, and prevents solving the EP.

Now consider this solution:

This one seems much better! The solution doesn't use the segment behind the pillar or the inked pressure plate. Indeed, you can solve the EP using this line. But there's something else that's important to note about this solution, and it's part of the reason why the puzzle was designed to use pressure plates rather than line drawing. That something is the wood piling next to the inked plate:

The piling sticks out at an odd angle. It's not really visible from the top of the tower because of the angle you're viewing the puzzle from, but from the ground the problem is more apparent. You can't walk across that pressure plate because the piling blocks you. You can activate that plate, sure, but you can't keep walking. You have to turn around and find some way to the other side in order to continue your line.

For a casual player, figuring out how to deal with this problem is really fun! The answer is that you can use the castle ramparts (or one of the other shortcuts in this area) to get to the puzzle after Purple Pressure Plates, and then walk the rest of the line starting from the end. The two lines you've drawn meet up in the middle, and the solution is accepted! Horray!

Something to note about this, however, is that it requires the door at the end of the puzzle to be open, and it only opens once you've solved the puzzle. That means that, in order to get the EP in 100%, you have to solve Purple Pressure Plates twice, using both of the solutions I showed. This can be pretty slow, since you're limited by walking speed rather than line drawing speed!

Okay, so, that's a lot of information about one puzzle, but what is that Keep Skip thing I mentioned? Well, you remember that wooden piling? It turned out that you could actually walk on the right side of it, next to the inked panel. There must've been some kind of bug with the collision there that allowed the player to step onto it. And what this meant was that you could walk a line up to the point where you activated the pressure plate blocked by the piling, and then you could backtrack a little bit and walk between the piling and the inked panel in order to continue your solution. This was called Keep Skip, and it allowed you to do Purple Pressure Plates in only one solve for 100%, saving something like 30 seconds, which is pretty significant!

So, why have I spent so much time explaining this skip? Well, it should be pretty obvious: they patched it in the April 4th update. You can't walk across the piling without activating the inked panel anymore, which means you're back to doing two solves and spending 30 extra seconds doing it.

This was a problem because it was the first time an update to the game really hurt the speedrun. Whenever something like this happens, it spawns endless conversations about whether to allow downpatching in runs. At the time though it wasn't too big of a deal because few people were actually doing 100% runs, and it was also somewhat easy to downpatch with Steam. Luckily, by the time the game started getting more active again and a Steam bug had made it harder to downpatch, the game had changed in a way that made up for the loss in time from Keep Skip.

And that's even before we found FOV clipping, which essentially brought Keep Skip into the modern era, as well as adding a number of other great skips, but that's a lesson for another blog post. It's time to move on from April 4th.

August 22nd, 2016

There was one more update to the Windows port of The Witness in 2016, and for a long time I thought it was equivalent to the April 4th update. But on the day of publishing this post, I remembered something that I knew didn't work in the initial release and did work on New Version. So I stepped through a bunch of different versions, expecting it to change on either April 4th or in New Version. To my surprise, I found that it changed on the one update in between: the August 22nd update.

There's a handful of moving bridges in the game that you can control by solving some sort of special panel. Swamp has two of them, and we call them Sliding Bridge and Rotating Bridge, because, well. You get it.

Rotating Bridge is particularly complex. There's four color-coded platforms around it: black, blue, purple, and red (although red is just a dead end). The bridge itself is bent at a 90 degree angle, so it always connects two adjacent platforms. The puzzle on the panel can be solved to direct the bridge to any rotation, and you can even specify whether to go clockwise or counterclockwise.

Swamp Rotating Bridge in its default rotation, connecting black and red.

The black and blue platforms are connected to the rest of the island, and you can't even get off at red, but the purple platform is different. It just leads to a puzzle, two EP's, and an audio log. So if you, say, solved the bridge control such that it rotated to connect black and blue, and you got off the bridge at purple while it was rotating, you'd be stuck there with no way to leave. You couldn't even snipe the control to get the bridge to rotate back to you because it'd be facing away.

Luckily, Thekla thought of this. If you stand at the purple platform and neither end of the bridge is touching that tile, it'll automatically rotate back to you. The same is true of the black platform, likely because if you're at either blue or black and the bridge is rotated to connect purple and red, the control will be facing away and you won't be able to snipe it back.²

What's interesting is that this didn't apply to the blue platform. Standing there when the bridge is facing away used to do nothing, before August 22nd. My guess is that this was because it's possible to get to the blue area of Swamp by the boat, bypassing the beginning. You can't actually make progress without going in through the front because there are locked doors on the black platform that open from the other side. However, if you stand at the blue tile and the bridge rotates to connect blue and black, and then go around to the front of Swamp and do the normal progression, you'll eventually reach the Rotating Bridge and it'll already be facing the right direction. You won't be forced to learn how the bridge works, which is something that a first time player could potentially experience, and maybe Thekla wanted to prevent that originally.

Rotating Bridge isn't the only thing that changed. The Sliding Bridge also now comes to you if you stand at either end of it. It didn't move automatically at all prior to this update, probably because you can't get softlocked by it. The control is visible from either side, and it would also be less likely for the player to have unintentionally sent the bridge away from them while also unable to access the other side by other means. Adding the automatic movement also does not harm the new player experience because you can't get to the other side of the bridge for the first time without actually using the bridge (or sniping two panels from very far away).

Now, are these changes relevant to speedrunners? Yes and no. There's no real speedrun category that makes use of either of these automatic rotations (although I have to once again mention Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain Low%, as it does make use of this feature in order to skip solving the Rotating Bridge control). There's a small chance it could be useful in bingo because there are two EP's on the Rotating Bridge. But otherwise you're not likely to encounter a situation where you'd need this.

It is, however, useful in the Archipelago randomizer. There's a mode in the randomizer that allows doors to be unlocked remotely, disrupting the normal progression of areas. And so it's possible that being able to enter Swamp on the blue side using the boat and then crossing over the Rotating Bridge to the black platform could allow you to make progress. It's not that uncommon, actually. Maybe one of the doors there is unlocked but not the other, meaning that if you approach the area from both sides you could solve all of the puzzles needed to progress. Or maybe the red underground room entrance got remotely drained, and you can head in there and maybe make it to the laser.

The In-Between

After that, the Windows port experienced a drought of updates. Speedrunners had a lot of time to adjust to and optimize the August 22nd version of the game.

During this time, Thekla was mostly working on ports of The Witness to other platforms. The PS4 version was already out; it was actually released alongside the PC version way back in January. It was released for Xbox One on September 13th, 2016, not long after the last PC update. A port for the Nvidia Shield came out on January 16th, 2017, and I've gotta be honest: I have no idea what the Nvidia Shield is, other than that it's a console. All three of those platforms are consoles, which also means they're unimportant to speedrunning.

The next two ports are pretty important, though. The first macOS version came out on March 8th, 2017, and I'll talk more in depth about that one later. And finally, a port for iOS was released on September 20th, 2017.

iOS is kind of a weird platform to port The Witness to. It's the only mobile platform you can play it on, and mobile devices pretty notoriously lack mice, keyboards, and controllers, which are the standard inputs for playing the game on any other platform. This means they had to completely redesign the way you interact with the game.

The result is pretty intuitive. You can tap somewhere on the screen and your player will start walking toward that spot. If you double tap, you run. The player's movement is nice and fluid; none of the hard stops you see in the PC version. You input puzzle solutions by dragging your finger around the screen, navigating the grids and environments through touch rather than from afar. It's clear a lot of work went into making the mobile experience friendly and responsive.³

Why am I talking about this? Well, sometimes when you do a huge refactor you end up writing or rewriting bits of code and then realize that hey, this might be good to bring over to the original branch. Why constrain all of the quality of life tweaks to iOS? This is exactly what happened.

December 21st, 2017 (New Version)

After a year and a half of silence, the PC version of The Witness received an update on December 21st, 2017. This update is known by many names: "Current", "Sliding", and of course, "New Version".

New Version brought over a number of the changes developed in the macOS and iOS ports. The most notable is a physics patch the community refers to as "sliding movement". In Old Version, entering solve mode brought the player to an immediate stop, eating up all of your momentum. In New Version, the player keeps moving briefly upon entering solve mode. You lose control of your movement and quickly (but not instantly) de-accelerate, with the result of "sliding" gently into place.

Sliding movement generally makes the game feel more fluid and comfortable to play. The instantaneous stop effect from entering solve mode in Old Version was visually jarring. This also increases the skill ceiling in speedrunning, because you can enter solve mode earlier than you would in previous versions and still be able to get into the position you want to solve or snipe a puzzle.

Still, this might not sound like that big of a change. It's just a smoother transition between 3D and 2D gameplay. However, there's two corollaries to this physics change that have a huge impact on the run: the player now accelerates from stop to full speed more quickly, and the player is no longer slowed down while walking up slopes.

I mentioned it before, but movement in Old Version was slow. The combination of solve mode instantly eating up all of your momentum, plus it being slow to accelerate back to full speed, made movement between puzzles feel clunky and tedious. And slopes were even worse. Climbing up Keep tower, or Town tower, or the Mountain, etc, felt terrible because the game just arbitrarily limited your speed so much. There's some argument about "realism" because "it's harder to go up slopes than down in real life" but if The Witness is supposed to be a paradise virtual reality island, I think the in-universe player would also be disappointed in having to walk slowly up slopes.

New Version solved all of those problems, and because of this, New Version is almost universally faster to run than any Old Version, even taking patched tricks into consideration. It's like Super Mario Odyssey, where important glitches were patched in Version 1.2.0, but the latest version drastically improved the load times, making it the optimal version for most categories despite having the most patched glitches.

The faster player movement in New Version didn't just stand on its own. It also led to one of the more unique tricks in the game.

Jungle Wall Skip

The first Witness speedrun I ever saw was FearfulFerret doing 7 Lasers (then called Any%) at Summer Games Done Quick 2016. There's a part in the route where you solve the Waves set of puzzles in Jungle, and then approach an orange panel next to a suspicious looking metal plate on the ground. Solving the panel causes the plate to spring up, creating a wall that blocks you from ever using that passage again. There are 6 puzzles mounted on the other side of the wall, so completion of the Jungle area requires you to navigate your way back to the other side of the wall without using that passage. As he popped up the wall, FearfulFerret said "It's impossible to activate that and to be on the other side of the wall as that happens."

I'm sure you can guess what happened next.

On January 16th, 2018, a user named Tedder posted the following video:

Yep! The increased player acceleration allows you to get to the other side of the Jungle Wall before it pops up. It's actually much easier than the video makes it look. The position you have to stand in isn't very precise; it's more the angle that matters. darkid posted a tutorial video showing how you can learn it yourself.

Jungle Wall Skip was big, not only because it saved 20 seconds of walking in categories like All Lasers and 100%, but also because it allowed us to re-route 7 Lasers. 7 Lasers is the most competitive category, and there have been a few routes for it in the past. The pre-Current route followed this structure:⁴

Tutorial
Town
Monastery, but don't get the laser yet
The first few panels of Jungle on our way to Bunker
Bunker, up to activating the elevator
More of Jungle, up to activating the popup wall
Use the shortcut into the Monastery courtyard, get Monastery Laser
The rest of Jungle
Bunker Laser
Shadows
Keep
Swamp
Mountain

Step 7 is the important one there. The Monastery courtyard shortcut is the fastest way to get back to the other side of the Jungle Wall, but it only opens if you do the beginning of Monastery. This forced us to do Monastery before Jungle. With Jungle Wall Skip, that shortcut was no longer needed, opening us up to routes that did Monastery later. And this did turn out to be fruitful. Here's how the current 7 Lasers route works:

Tutorial
Town
The first few panels of Jungle on our way to Bunker
Bunker, up to activating the elevator
The rest of Jungle, including using Jungle Wall Skip
Bunker Laser
Walk back through Jungle and do Monastery
Walk out the back of Monastery and do Shadows
Keep
Swamp
Mountain

The main change here is that Monastery is moved to be between Jungle/Bunker and Shadows/Keep. It takes a little longer to go from Town -> Jungle than Town -> Monastery, and a little longer to go from Bunker -> Monastery than Monastery -> Jungle, but Monastery -> Shadows is much faster than Bunker -> Shadows, which makes up for the other changes and then some. According to timing done by darkid, this route saves an additional 5 seconds on top of the free 20 seconds from doing Jungle Wall Skip at all.

Route A (early Monastery): 82.9 seconds

Path	Time (seconds)
Town Laser -> Monastery	18.4
Monastery Inner 4 -> Jungle 1	25.5
Bunker Laser -> Shadows	39.0

Route B (deferred Monastery): 77.5 seconds

Path	Time (seconds)
Town Laser -> Jungle 1	22.5
Bunker Laser -> Monastery	29.0
Monastery Inner 4 -> Shadows	26.0

Jungle Wall Skip is cool because it's really the only movement-based trick in the game. This is a game with very flat physics; no jumping, no parkour, barely even any running. But here we have a trick that uses fancy movement to save time. It's used in pretty much every category, so it's often one of the first things a new runner will learn, aside from panel sniping. Unlike most tricks in the game, you only have one shot: if you don't make it across the wall before it pops up, you're stuck there, and you have to take the walk of shame through the Monastery courtyard (or just reset if you're doing 7 Lasers, since the new route defers Monastery). It can take some getting used to, but once you learn it, you'll likely be very consistent at it, and it's a great feeling to get to that point especially considering how much time it saves.

Now, the reason this was discovered in January of 2018 is, of course, because of the physics changes in the December 2017 update. We assumed that this wasn't possible in Old Version because of the way it zeros out your momentum upon entering solve mode, and because of how slowly the player accelerates to full speed. But then what, pray tell, is this?

On July 16th, 2021, three and a half years after Jungle Wall Skip was found, a runner named Ezra3 posted a video where he does the skip on Old Version. How? Well, it turns out that Old Version doesn't actually zero out your momentum. Entering solve mode freezes the camera in place, but your player still has momentum; it's just not being applied. You do de-accelerate very quickly while frozen, which is why solve mode appears to zero out your momentum. However, if you exit solve mode almost immediately after entering it, you actually can carry some of your momentum through.

It's a pretty neat trick. What you do is line your reticle up with the start point on the panel, making sure you're standing in a good position with a good angle that will let you cross the wall, and then you walk a bit to the right. From this position, you should be able to start walking to the left and accelerate to full speed by the time you reach the panel. When your reticle touches the panel's start point, you have to very quickly click to activate solve mode, click to start the solve, move your mouse up to reach the end point, and click again to finish the solve and exit solve mode. If done right, you will still have some momentum after finishing the panel, and you'll make it across the wall before it pops up.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is a very difficult trick. The window of time you have while in solve mode is miniscule. There's a rhythm you have to learn: double click, up, click. It's surprisingly easy to accidentally do the up before the second click, and that means you'll miss the start point entirely. You're also pretty close to the panel, which means you have to move your cursor a non-negligible distance to solve the panel. Turning your 2D speed up before starting the trick can help with that part, but it also wastes time turning that up and then turning it back down again afterward.

This was a very cool discovery, and it was fun to be able to pull it off in a Legacy 7 Lasers run, but it is a pretty dumb trick that will ruin your run 99 times out of 100. Because of this, Jungle Wall Skip is still widely thought of as one of the hallmark New Version exclusive tricks.⁵

Other New Version stuff

There's still more to talk about with New Version! Even though New Version is an overall improvement both to the casual and speedrunning game experience, there are two things about it that I'd consider downsides over Old Version (in addition to the patched tricks inherited from the April 4th update). The first is pillars.

"Pillars" are special panel puzzles that are wrapped around, well, pillars. These puzzles are different from others in the game because the left and right sides of the grid are connected, and the solution line can wrap horizontally. There are only 12 of them in the game, but they're located in prominent places: the last thing you do in 7 Lasers is solve eight pillars,⁶ and the last thing you do in All Lasers is solve two pillars with randomly generated puzzles on them.

Unlike other puzzles, it's impossible to see the entirety of a pillar puzzle at once, because it's wrapped around a cylinder. Therefore, you interact with them in a unique way. Clicking into a pillar puzzle pulls your player into position in front of the pillar. As you move your cursor through the grid, the player physically walks around the pillar, making sure that the cursor remains in view. Because of this unusual method of interaction, pillars are among the very small number of puzzles that are distance gated, meaning they cannot be sniped.

In Old Version, the player was able to walk around the pillar very quickly, which could look a bit jarring, but felt good to play, since you were always in control. In New Version, they decreased the player's acceleration when solving a pillar puzzle. This is likely because it would've been difficult to control on iOS if it was too fast, but it unfortunately hampers the experience on PC. Instead of fluidly maneuvering through the grid, you have to spend time waiting for the player to catch up with the movement of your cursor. Sometimes, the cursor can even get stuck behind the pillar, which causes you to spin out of control, losing a lot of time in the process.

Solving a pillar puzzle on Old Version (left) and New Version (right). I got a really good solve on the New Version pillar here by keeping my momentum between the first and second rows of the grid. Trust me, they are usually worse.

The other downside of New Version is audio log sniping. There are 58 audio logs scattered around the island, and clicking on one in solve mode causes it to play a recorded message. Unlike panels, these are always distance gated. In Old Version however, there was a bug that allowed you to activate audio logs through solid walls, which meant you could get them out of sequence.

Truth be told, this is a pretty minor downside, mainly because audio logs are not really relevant to speedruns. No mainboard category requires interacting with them at all; not even 100%, because activated audio logs are not counted as points on the load file menu.⁷ They're only relevant in certain category extensions. Category extensions aren't split by game version like mainboard runs are, so in some cases (like the ones I'm about to list) there's a real advantage to downpatching.

I mentioned "Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain" in my post about sniping-through-walls, but to summarize: you have to activate all 45 of the audio logs that are reachable without going into the Mountain. The world record is a Legacy run and it's over a minute faster than the best Current run. This is because audio log sniping allows you to skip a bunch of stuff, which I list in the run description.
There's a category called "All Audio Logs and Panels" which requires you to get all 523 panel solves, and also listen to each audio log all the way through (unlike the previous category which just required you to click on them). This is important because you cannot listen to two audio logs at once. Also unlike the previous category, you are required to listen to the ones in the Mountain, but you aren't required to listen to the ones in Easter Egg Ending, which changes the total to 49. The combined length of these 49 recordings is an hour and 24 minutes, whereas the world record in the All Panels category is just under 46 minutes, so the idea with this category is to make sure you can start a new audio log as soon as the previous one finishes, while solving panels in between activations. Sniping audio logs through walls helps the flow of the route, especially in sections where the recordings are shorter and you need to detour from solving panels in order to get to the next audio log in time.

Aaaaaand that's it, as of right now anyway. So while it is a shame that they patched this bug, it doesn't impact us that much.

Time for some other miscellaneous things about New Version. Remember the Mountaintop Perspective exploit from ages ago, and how they patched it by removing all of the end points and only making the correct one appear when you click on a start point? Well, for some reason, they inverted their fix for it in New Version. Now, all of the end points start off visible, and the two incorrect ones disappear upon clicking on a start point. This has the same exact effect as the previous fix, but I suppose it's more player friendly to be able to see the end points even when you're not entering a solution.

Your movement keys can be fully customized now. Like I said before, they were originally forced to be WASD, and then they added options for ESDF and ZSQD. As of New Version, you can bind the four directions to any key you want. The way they did this is actually a little annoying though, because your keybindings are reset whenever you start a new game, meaning that if you use keybindings other than WASD, you have to set them every time you do a run.

Not all of the changes are easily describable. New Version changed something about tracing (which is what we call the act of drawing the solution line through a puzzle grid), and now it feels "better" in some way that is hard to explain. It's part of why it's hard for someone who's mostly played New Version to go back and try a Legacy run; the tracing just feels off on Old Version (and you don't want to get yourself accustomed to old tracing anyway, since quick, precise tracing is a huge part of the skill in a Witness speedrun).

The game is more generous with starting EP's now. On Old Version, you had to be pretty precise with your standing position to be able to activate an EP. Nowadays, most EP's will pull you into the correct position if you're a little bit off, which is very helpful for 100%. The main exception is the Town Tower Underside EP's, which are inexplicably harder to line up now. Shipwreck Underside CCW EP also got harder: the hitbox for the start point is a lot smaller and it's in the corner of the visible circle.

Speaking of Shipwreck EP's, here's a weird one: you know the Shipwreck Green EP? The green line that goes all the way around the shipwreck with a lot of quick connections and is very upsetting to mess up? There's a wall near the end that has glitchy collision now, and allows you to move your cursor onto the line behind it earlier than you're supposed to. It's pretty minor, but it does give you a little more leeway when solving it, which is reassuring since you lose so much time if you mess it up. It's also unexpected that New Version actually introduced some buggy collision.

Part of the Shipwreck Green EP solution. Notice how the cursor is on a wall instead of the green line. It's blocked from moving onto the end until the line becomes visible, but it still makes the connection more reliable to have your cursor so close.

And speaking of tiny weird changes: they removed a bush! Really. The path from Tutorial to Town has some trees and bushes, and you kind of rough your way through them at the beginning of 7 Lasers. The thick foliage made it hard to see where you were going, and it was easy to accidentally bump into something and stop moving. New Version removed some of that foliage, including one bush in particular that always seemed to get in one's way. They probably changed a bunch of little environmental things like this in the update, but this is the one speedrunners notice.

I don't know why they changed this, but I'm not complaining.

Remember how I said that you move around in iOS by tapping where you want to go? They brought that into New Version too. There's a "Click to Move" option in the menu now. Using it causes mouse movement to no longer rotate the camera. Instead, it moves a cursor around the screen (a different cursor than the one in solve mode), and you can click to direct your player just like on iOS. This is not useful for speedruns at all, although I can remember doing Click to Move runs once during the Witness weekly races.

You've always been able to press Space to exit solve mode, but you can now also use it to enter solve mode. When you're playing at a top level, you can use this to your advantage to speed up some panel solves. The fact that you previously had to use the same input (left clicking) to both enter solve mode and start a panel solve meant that the interval between clicks mattered. Now, for certain solves like the very first panel in the game, you can line your reticle up with the start point, and then press Space and left click in quick succession, getting you into the solve just a little bit faster.

Something that's worth mentioning is that New Version save files are backwards incompatible with Old Version. It's not possible to weave between versions during a single run, although the category split on the leaderboard makes that illegal, and there's very likely no situation in which that'd ever be faster than just doing a run on a single version. Saves on Old Version can be played on New Version, but doing so converts it to a New Version file, and when you open Old Version back up, you'll be standing in the starting hallway again.

Finally, another useful change: you can use your mouse on the pause menu now! In a lot of cases, it's still faster to move through the menu using your keyboard, but there's one control that's faster to manipulate with the mouse: the FOV slider. The range on the slider is 80 to 120, which takes a long time to seek through using key repeat. This is important because many runners (including myself) will play at the lowest FOV possible for the majority of the run, but it's advantageous to do Challenge with at least a 100 degree FOV. So, you can now press Escape, click on Settings, and click somewhere in the middle of the FOV slider to instantly get to the FOV you want, which saves a lot of time over holding down the right arrow key until you get there.

So that's New Version! There might be some stuff I missed, since so many little things changed, in which case I'll update the post. As you can see, change is both good and bad. We've lost tricks, but we've gained so much too. I think it's clear that New Version's benefits way outrank its cons.

I consider us very fortunate as a community that this happened. It means there's almost no reason to downpatch the game for runs. New Version is essentially a monolith; there have been additional updates pushed on Steam since 2017, but they don't appear to have had any impact on the speedrun. It lowers the barrier of entry for new players because they can achieve times as good as the top runners using the most easily accessible version of the game. Downpatching is not always easy to do; in fact, like I alluded to earlier, there was a period of time during the game's popularity when a Steam bug made downpatching harder than usual. You had to use an external tool instead of the built-in console, which itself was still not very user-friendly.

One way that speedrunning communities deal with version disparity is by creating separate categories for the different versions. This often happens when the older version is faster than the new version and the community wants to keep the main category accessible to new players. The reverse can happen too, though, and that's what happened with The Witness. By the time New Version came out, many of the older runners had stopped playing the game, and suddenly the runs they had put a lot of effort into were no longer competitive. It's one thing when this happens because a new trick or skip was discovered; in that case, there's effort that goes into learning and developing the trick, and it's understandable that these newer runs showcasing more advanced gameplay should eclipse older runs, even though older runners didn't know about the new strategy. It's quite another matter when there's a game update that just straight up makes runs faster with no additional effort.

Thus, in order to preserve the achievements of older runners, all mainboard categories were split in two. The sub-categories are called Current and Legacy, where Legacy is specifically any Windows release from 2016, and Current is any other release, including other platforms like PS4 which had releases in 2016. Legacy is mostly untouched at this point, but I still think it has a fascinating history, hence this mammoth of a blog post.

Now, even though I've hit the end of The Witness's updates on PC, there is one more version I'd like to talk about, and it's (in my opinion) the weirdest version of the game out there.

macOS Old Version

I've mentioned the macOS port a couple of times. It's the only non-PC version of the game that's at parity with PC, because the rest of the ports are for consoles or mobile. Despite this, most people choose to play on PC anyway. There's only one macOS runner on the board for 7 Lasers and 100%/99.8% (Cynthia_Clementine), and a lot of what we know about this port is thanks to her.

As I said before, the macOS port came out in March 2017, which was several months before both the iOS port and PC New Version. It's been updated a handful of times just like the PC version, but there's only really one version worth talking about, and that, of course, is the first. And why is that?

Because it had sliding movement.

Downpatching to the original version of the macOS reveals a strange combination of features from both Old Version and New Version. We can see what New Version features were originally developed for the macOS port: sliding movement being the big one, but also Click to Move, and being able to use the mouse on the menu. It's actually surprising that Click to Move was made for the macOS port and not iOS. We can also see the New Version changes that were likely due to the iOS port: fast slopes, bad pillars, audio log sniping being patched, and being able to use Space to enter solve mode.

I've organized these changes into a table:

August 22nd update	macOS Old Version	New Version
Non-sliding movement	Sliding movement	Sliding movement
Slow slopes	Slow slopes	Fast slopes
Good pillars	Good pillars	Bad pillars
Audio log sniping	Audio log sniping	No audio log sniping
Only LMB enters solve mode	Only LMB enters solve mode	Space enters solve mode
No mouse on menu	Mouse on menu	Mouse on menu
Only FPS Lookaround	Click to Move available	Click to Move available

I refer to macOS Old Version as a "Franken-version" because it really seems like an unreal mixture of worlds. The fact that there's a version that has sliding movement, good pillars, and audio log sniping is so bizarre. It actually counts as Current instead of Legacy because it has sliding movement. One might be tempted to use this version for runs, but unfortunately, there's something that stops it from being a "perfect version": slow slopes. Slow slopes lose more time than good pillars save, so there aren't many cases where this version is actually optimal.

There's one exception that jumps out, though: anything that relies on audio log sniping. Remember how I said there was a competitive advantage to doing Touch All Audio Logs No Mountain on Legacy? Yeah, I was sort of lying. macOS Old Version is automatically faster than the August 22nd update because it has sliding movement. You could do the same route that I did in my Legacy run, since macOS Old Version has audio log sniping, and it'll be faster with no extra effort put in. There's a good chance I'm going to attempt this by the time I publish this post.

This version was the only thing that was really exclusive to macOS. On December 8th, 2017, an update was released on a beta branch that brought macOS into parity with New Version. It was officially released on December 21st, same as on PC. After that, there were a handful of updates that don't seem to have affected the speedrun at all, again just like PC. There were some updates in 2023 that PC didn't get, but that was just to make the game compatible with the latest version of the OS (pre-2023 versions of the game won't launch on macOS Sonoma or later).⁸

One weird thing about the macOS version is that it includes a text file with a change history that dates back to September 20th, 2016, when the the port was apparently first available for beta testing. Most of them relate to miscellaneous bugs and crashes, like one would expect during beta testing, but there's a couple of interesting things. November 17th, 2016 mentioned "Threaded campaign saves", which is something I'm sure we've all benefited from. And February 20th, 2017 includes "Improved menu interaction with mouse" and "Click-to-move navigation enabled", which is interesting because it makes it seem like those changes happened pretty late in the development cycle.

There's one more thing to discuss regarding macOS Old Version before I wrap this post up. We've gone over the changes that macOS Old Version introduced when it was released. But what if macOS Old Version changed something... after it released?

On July 4th, 2023, Cynthia_Clementine posted the following image in the Witness Speedrunning Discord:

Huh? It looks like a night mode version of The Witness. The sky is black, the walls and floors are black, the trees and other decorations are still colorful, but the panels appear to be off. What's going on?

This is what happens if you launch macOS Old Version on macOS Ventura. Apple must have changed some kind of graphics API that The Witness was using. The game luckily continues to function despite something going very wrong, and gives us this stunning effect. I was able to reproduce it on my computer running Ventura, and I got some more screenshots that I think are just absolutely beautiful.

The Desert Temple at night. One must wonder how they can praise the Sun like this.

Having spent a significant amount of time playing this game, seeing the world drenched in darkness like this is utterly unreal. It looks like the island but after an apocalypse; it looks like a meteor hit the place. Maybe there was a bug in the virtual reality simulation and the in-universe player was in real danger. There's a lot of depth that this adds to the world's lore.

One of the most notable effects of this glitch is that most panels appear to be off. They're still solvable, but you can't see the grid or the symbols, and you can't even see the line you're drawing. You can still see your cursor, but you have to rely on memory to be able to solve the puzzles.

Glass symmetry panels are not affected by this, and the panels in Bunker are weird (the symbols are painted on the background rather than being part of the panels) so they're perfectly visible too. There's also certain dark panels that have light shining on them, like in Treehouse or in the pillar room, and for some reason that lets you see grayscale versions of the panels. But for the most part, the panels are only visible in your mind. It makes for a neat test of memory.

A view of the Shipwreck from the boat. There's an ominous glow rising over the horizon. Is it the Sun? Or is it something... else?

This also makes the two randomly generated puzzles before the pillar room very difficult. There's a trick we can use to get a deterministic left door, but the right door pretty much just has to be brute forced. And Challenge is essentially impossible. There's too many panels, and you're constrained to a 6 and a half minute timer.

I've dubbed this effect "The Witness's Nightmare". I did a 7 Lasers run in it back when it was discovered, including commentary about the effect and macOS Old Version in general. I also spend four whole minutes brute forcing right door, so that's fun. Check it out, if you're interested!

Conclusion

So there you have it! That's how The Witness has changed over the years with regards to speedrunning. As I said before, there are more updates than the ones I've listed, but these are the ones with changes that impacted us.⁹ Since there's a lot of detail up above, I've listed the main (Windows) updates below and summarized what changed in them:

01/26/2016:
- Initial release.
01/28/2016 #1:
- Fixed out-of-bounds access near Symmetry Island using the boat.
01/30/2016 #1:
- Player accelerates from stop a little more quickly.
02/04/2016 #1:
- Removed noclip keybinding.
02/04/2016 #2:
- Added FOV slider, with a lower bound of 60.
02/15/2016:
- Increased the FOV lower bound to 80.
- Added the diamond reticle.
- Disabled the Mountaintop Perspective alternate solution.
- Fixed the bug that made Mill Control Room 2 open the Tutorial Vault door.
02/19/2016:
- Added ESDF and ZSQD control schemes.
- Added advanced graphics settings dialog.
- Added menu option to disable vignetting.
04/04/2016:
- Patched Keep Skip.
- Patched Force Bridge Skip.
- Theatre Pause Glitch and Eclipse Skip are easier now.
- Replaced the diamond reticle with the square one.
- Decreased save split threshold to 60 points.
- Shortened the cable between the statues on the Mountain Perspective puzzle.
08/22/2016:
- Swamp bridges automatically come to you now.
12/21/2017:
- "Sliding movement" physics patch.
- Player accelerates from stop much more quickly.
- Player is no longer slowed down while climbing slopes.
- Pillar puzzles are slower and less easy to control.
- Audio logs can no longer be activated through walls.
- Added "click to move" mode.
- Space can be used to enter solve mode.
- The mouse can be used on the pause menu.
- Added custom movement keybindings.

The second February 4th update is arguably the best Legacy version. It has Keep Skip and Force Bridge Skip, it has the alternate Mountaintop Perspective solution, and it uniquely has the lowest FOV possible. But the version you'd want to play on may depend on what your goal is. Like, you might want to play on April 4th for 100% because of Eclipse Skip. Either way, December 21st, 2017 remains the best version of the game overall, and we are blessed because of it.

If you own the game on Steam, you can download and try any of these old versions using the Steam Console. Click on that link and then enter one of the following commands:

01/26/2016: download_depot 210970 210971 4660219967587740136
02/04/2016 #1: download_depot 210970 210971 4228623888217393697
02/04/2016 #2: download_depot 210970 210971 3474964570397670460
02/15/2016: download_depot 210970 210971 563785006206689728
02/19/2016: download_depot 210970 210971 7254650730882138932
04/04/2016: download_depot 210970 210971 4928984900918200681
08/22/2016: download_depot 210970 210971 7535264561626204005
macOS Old Version: download_depot 210970 210972 84967383702265709

There's no progress bar, and it'll probably take a while to download, but eventually it'll tell you where it saved the game. New Version isn't listed because the most recent version of the game is already equivalent to the 12/21/2017 update.

If any of you survived this far into the post, I hope you enjoyed this journey into the past! It took quite a while to write, but I've always found the version differences in this game really interesting despite the fact that I started playing two years after New Version came out. I'd also like to say thank you to The Witness's speedrunning community (and darkid in particular), as their documentation of some of the changes throughout the game's history was an extremely useful resource for my research.

Happy 9th birthday to The Witness!

The first catext I ever ran was called Noclip Touch All Audio Logs, and I'm pretty delighted by it because it manages to take advantage of the tiny amount of non-Euclidean space in the game. The Hotel in the Easter Egg Ending is weaved throughout multiple locations on the island, and at one point you walk through a cave overlooking the Challenge record player. There are multiple audio logs in the Hotel, but the majority of the Hotel is located very far away from the rest of the island, and it would take a lot of time to fly back. You could retrace your steps and leave the Hotel the way you entered, or you could just jump into the Challenge cave and suddenly you're in the middle of the island. ↩

“WHAT are you DOING?” Mizar yelled, her voice clipping out the microphone she was using to speak with him. “That’s not even POSSIBLE. You can’t jump or go off ledges in this game! I checked!”
You can snipe the Rotating Bridge when it's connecting purple and red, either from the mountainside or at the end of the flood gate. It makes sense that Thekla would not expect a casual player to do this. ↩
As a former iOS Witness runner, I do have to point out that for some reason, cables activate much more slowly on the iOS version of the game. Like, there's just a delay between solving a puzzle and a cable turning on, and I have no idea why they added it. Thank goodness that did not get brought over to the PC version. ↩
There was an older route that split Town into two halves, and took a detour to do Shadows/Keep in between the halves. This is the route FearfulFerret did in his SGDQ run. The speedrunning guide says it's about 3 seconds slower than the route I describe above. ↩
Interestingly, Jungle Wall Skip is completely impossible on iOS. Tapping to walk is disabled after solving the panel, and isn't re-enabled until the wall is up. Using two fingers to move does still work, but the walk speed is drastically lowered during the popup animation. This makes it seem like they were conscious of the possibility that the player could cross the wall before it popped up, which makes it all the more strange that they didn't do anything to prevent it on PC. ↩
Another thing that The Witness has in common with Super Mario Odyssey: they both end in an area called the Pillars Room! ↩
It is possible to see which audio logs you've found by looking at the flowers in the lake. There's a flower for each audio log, and they bloom once the audio log has been activated. ↩
As part of my research for this post, I downloaded a few old macOS versions to see exactly when specific changes happened. I already knew about the quirks of the original release and had played it years ago, but unfortunately I was not able to launch it on my desktop computer anymore because I'd updated the OS. I have an old MacBook Pro from 2012 lying around though and it has macOS 10.12 Sierra on it, so I was able to test on that. However, another cute little fun fact: Steam Client no longer supports macOS 10.12! The Steam DepotDownloader tool also kept timing out for me on my laptop, so what I ended up having to do was download versions of The Witness on my desktop and then transfer them onto my laptop in order to try them out. The Witness is a 4 gigabyte game. This was certainly an experience. ↩
NewSoupVi, developer of The Witness randomizer for Archipelago, asked me to include a footnote ranting about how difficult it was to find the "exit solve mode" function while modding the game, since it apparently changed in every version of the game and none of the byte code matched. Then they asked me not to do that. I'm so scared and confused. ↩

May the Force Bridge Be With You

2025-01-12T14:39:18-05:00

Well folks, I really did it this time. My propensity for prolix loquaciousness and overly comprehensive tutorialization has aggrandized to a heretofore novel level. I was working on a post about the history of updates to The Witness and how they affected speedrunners, and it got so long that it overflowed the database column (it had a max of 64kb, which I hit at about 11k words). I've resized that field now, but I had been considering breaking out some of the content into a separate post anyway, and I took this as a sign that I should get on that.

Old Version has a bunch of cool quirks and glitches, but there's one trick in particular that I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about. It makes use of a glitch that no one thought was useful, it prompted discussions about whether you could mess with game files during a run, and research had to be done into the game's internal workings, the results of which ended up being important beyond just this trick. And also I was "at the scene of the crime", as they say.

Today, I'm going to talk about Force Bridge Skip.

On April 4th, 2016, an update was pushed on Steam for the PC version of The Witness. It changed a handful of things, and notably patched out a useful skip in the 100% category. There's one thing that changed, however, that was kind of weird. It was known before it was patched, of course, but it's unknown how long it even took for us to notice that it had been patched, because it didn't seem like anything more than an amusing glitch. In fact, it wasn't until five years after it had been patched that we really understood what we had lost.

I'll stop being ominous. A week after the game came out, MousseMoose was playing around with the force bridges in the Mountain and came across something strange:

If you positioned yourself on a force bridge, then loaded into another save that was standing in front of the force bridge panel, clicked into the panel, and finally loaded back into the original save, the force bridge would disappear right beneath your feet.

At first, this sounds great! You progress through Mountain by starting at the top and going down the floors until you reach the bottom. If we could remove the floor beneath us while standing in the central column, we could skip Floor 1 and Floor 2, right?

Well, unfortunately, no. The Witness does not have gravity. The player is able to walk from surface to surface when they are at close enough heights, but it's impossible for the player to fall. If the player were to attempt to walk off a surface when the next surface is much lower than they are (e.g. on the Quarry Elevator), they are simply blocked instead. If you enter solve mode while noclipping, you are zipped to the nearest floor beneath you, but that's likely more a feature of noclip mode than it is a part of the game's physics engine. In general, The Witness expects you to always be standing on a walkable surface.

So what happens if the surface you're standing on gets removed? The game teleports you to a known safe location. There are a number of these throughout the island, usually outside the entrance to each area, so that the game can be sure it's not putting you behind a locked door or something. In fact, if you haven't opened the Tutorial Gate (which is only possible by noclipping out of Tutorial), the game will always place you inside Tutorial, right beside the gate, because if it placed you outside then you'd never be able to get back in.

Anyway, what this all means is that when you use this glitch in Mountain, you get teleported to the mountaintop, instead of to the bottom floor. Because of this, the glitch was dismissed, and the mechanics behind it were not studied for a long time.

Enter: me! On August 20th, 2021, I was experimenting with this glitch because I wanted to see if there was anything the earlier players had missed. I was interested in Floor 2, because the force bridge puzzle there is particularly complex. In order to get to the elevator, you need both bridges to be solved, and one of them has to point to the exit door. Ordinarily, configuring the bridges like this requires you to walk back and forth between the two sides of the room, inputting different bridge solutions. In total, the optimal solution solves Blue Bridge 3 times and Orange Bridge twice. I wanted to see if there was any way I could trick the game into pre-solving Orange Bridge, so that we could draw Blue Bridge directly to the exit without any back-and-forth.

Instead, I discovered this:

I solve Blue Bridge as per usual. When I get to the other side, I solve Multipanel, and then I load into another file where I'm standing in front of the Blue Bridge panel. I click into it and load back into the other save, just like in MousseMoose's video. The Blue Bridge disappears as expected, but here's the important part: the cable coming out of the Blue Bridge panel is still lit up. I then input an Orange Bridge solution that satisfies the whole panel and goes to the exit (the one used in 100% runs), and exit the floor, skipping three bridge solves and saving 15 seconds of solving and walking.

This reveals the trick behind the glitch. When you're clicked into a panel and load into another save, you can hear the sound of the solve canceling after the load finishes. This carries forward to the force bridges: their panels make very distinct and continuous noises while you're clicked into them, and you can briefly hear it after the load finishes. It seems like the game doesn't kick you out of solve mode until the file has been loaded. In most cases, this doesn't really matter, because canceling a panel solve has no effect. It's not like you can unsolve panels.

Well, except for force bridges.

The force bridge panels are special. Drawing a line on a force bridge panel creates the force bridge in real time. Solving the panel locks the bridge into place, but if you cancel the solve instead, the bridge disappears. So, what's happening here is that the game loads you into the file, then realizes it has to cancel the solve you were drawing, and because it was a force bridge panel, it has to perform the panel's special logic upon solve canceling, which is to remove the bridge.

But then why does the panel's cable stay lit up, if the game is performing the full cancel logic in the loaded file? It's because the cable is deactivated when you start solving the force bridge panel. The bridge is immediately removed once you click in, and you'd have to input a valid solution in order to re-illuminate the cable. But you never start solving the panel in the loaded file, you only stop. And thus we can get away with only two bridge solves.

Of course, the only reason I'm talking about this is because it is no longer possible to do it as of April 4th. The game no longer does anything to cancel solves after loading a file. But it's still useful if you want to specifically do old version runs, which have their own categories on the leaderboard! They're less competitive because there's little reason to ever play on an old version, but you can still do it.

This discovery immediately sparked a conversation about loading saves during runs. In the past, the only run that involved loading saves was 100%/99.8%. Solving the Tutorial Gate EP traps you in the Easter Egg Ending, but if you reload your file, you will be back in Tutorial without the Hotel spawned, and you'll still have the point for solving that EP on your file. Similarly, the Wonkavator, which activates the game's regular ending, is a counted panel that is required for 100% solves, but reloading the file removes you from the ending while keeping the point for solving it.

The thing about both of those cases is that they involve loading the same file that you were already playing. In order to do Force Bridge Skip, you'd specifically need to be able to load a file that's standing in front of the Blue Bridge panel while your main file is standing on the Orange Bridge side. The video above uses a second save file created outside of the main run, which is controversial because then should the time taken to set up that second save be reflected on the timer? The skip wouldn't save time, then. Should players just be allowed to put a prepared file in the game's save directory? But that would make it not really a full game run.

There is another solution to this, though! What if you loaded another file that was created during the same run?

Save File Splitting

If you've ever played The Witness before, you've probably noticed that the game automatically and silently saves your progress. There isn't even a menu option for saving; the game just does it. You might also notice that you have multiple save files, even if you're still in your first playthrough. This is important.

The top five files here are from a single All Lasers run. Yes, I did an All Lasers run just to get this screenshot. And also because the game is fun.

We've known for a long time that the game splits your save files sometimes, and that if you compare two runs in the same category, the splits will often be in similar places. But we didn't understand why and when it did this. In theory, if we could get the game to split our save file right when we're standing in front of the Blue Bridge panel, we could use that file for Force Bridge Skip, with no external setup required. It wouldn't be very fun, though, if we had to rely on a mechanic we didn't understand to just randomly split our save file at the right place.

In response to this, darkid started digging into the game's internals. He was one of the earliest modders of The Witness, and is responsible for many of the low-level things we know about the game. And sure enough, it didn't take long for him to uncover the logic behind the autosaving feature. Here's what we learned:

Pausing triggers a save.
Entering one of the endings (by solving the Wonkavator or solving the Tutorial Gate EP) triggers a save.
An autosave is triggered every 60 seconds, unless you are in the middle of solving an EP, in which case the game waits until you're done.
While the game is saving, it checks your current "score" against the old one in the save file. Your score is the sum of your solved panels, EP's, and obelisks (the pillars that show the EP's you've found). If your score divided by 60 (rounded down) is greater than the old score divided by 60, then the game saves to a new file instead of overwriting the last one. You can imagine there are markers every 60 points, and passing one of them is what triggers the split.

The fact that there are score markers every 60 points is noteworthy, because that's actually another thing that changed in the April 4th update! Before that version, the markers were every 120 points instead. It's a shame that this changed in the same update that made Force Bridge Skip impossible, so we can't take advantage of it in Legacy runs, but that's the way game patches go.

Regardless, this discovery was key to making Force Bridge Skip usable in runs! To explain how this works, let's take a look at All Lasers. Doing the standard route using Single Latch Skip and Stair Snipe results in a solve count of 230 right as we're standing in front of the Blue Bridge panel.¹ This is, by some beautiful coincidence, very close to a point barrier (240).

The idea is that we'd blink the pause menu while standing in front of Blue Bridge, in order to force a save and reset the autosave timer. We'd then have 60 seconds to solve Blue Bridge, walk across, and then do Multipanel, which is six solves. Ideally, we would have between 240 and 246 points upon solving the last Multipanel,² so that we could pause the game and force another save, and because we'd crossed a point barrier, it'd be in a new file, allowing us to load into the file where we're standing in front of Blue Bridge.

The problem is that 230 solves + 7 is 237. We'd need to walk into Mountain Floor 2 with three extra points in order to successfully split our save. Luckily, there are a handful of ways we can do this!

There's two panels that you can snipe while waiting on the Desert Elevator. The timing to get them is pretty tight, but there's no risk of losing time.
In Mill, there's a set of four linked panels that control a ramp and lift. Solving one of them automatically solves the others, although there is one that is not activated at first and can't be solved until you do the Lower Row panel set. We don't do the Lower Row in the stair snipe route, but still, solving just one of these would get us all 3 extra points. After you solve the Upper Row, you have to wait a second for the Control Room 1 panel to turn on, and you also happen to be standing right next to two of the linked panels. It's not technically free to do this because the time it takes for the panel to turn on is pretty short, but it's still an extremely efficient way to get those extra solves.
There's an EP that's free to get while you're waiting on the boat from Quarry to Treehouse. It is almost no effort to do, and wastes no time regardless of whether you're successful, so most All Lasers runners will do it just to pass time on the boat.
There's a very simple panel (almost a straight line) on the mountaintop called the River panel and it's in view when you're standing behind the statues, giving you a couple of seconds in which to solve it while waiting for the mountaintop seal to open. This window is longer than the one for the Mill linked panels, but it's still not great, and it's only one point.
If you're fast enough, you can solve the Purple Bridge EP while you're waiting for the stairs to Blue Bridge to descend. This is quite literally the last moment you could possibly get an extra solve in!

You only need three extra points with this route,³ so there's no reason to do all of these. The easiest method is to just get the Mill linked panels. If you want to make sure you don't waste any time, however, you can get at least one of the Desert panels, the boat EP, and then the Purple Bridge EP if you didn't get both Desert panels.

And it works! The Legacy All Lasers world record successfully gets through Mountain Floor 2 with only two bridge solves. The extra solves it gets are the first of the two Desert panels, the linked Mill panels, the boat EP, and then the River panel for some reason, for a total of 6 extra points. It ends up with 236 points before solving Blue Bridge and 243 points after Multipanel, and since the 240 point barrier gets crossed, it splits the file. Horray! It should be noted that only three extra points were needed, and the linked Mill solve definitely lost time, but that just means there's room for improvement. (I'm criticizing my own run, so it's okay).

So, that's All Lasers. What about 7 Lasers, then? Unfortunately, things don't work out as well. The standard Legacy 7 Lasers route ends up with 98 solves before Blue Bridge and 105 after Multipanel, which is 15 away from the 120 point barrier. Unlike All Lasers, there aren't many places where you can get free solves. There's no boat and no Desert Elevator. You can still get the Purple Bridge EP right before Blue Bridge. The only other place you have some waiting time is at the mountaintop while you're waiting for Swamp laser to go up. There's 5 extra points that can be gotten up there, but you'd be hard pressed to get them all without losing any time, especially on Old Version. And even that would still leave you with 9 more required points. There's nowhere else to get free points, and no reroutes that wouldn't likely lose more time than Force Bridge Skip would save. Alas.

There's a couple of other categories we could look at, but they don't fare much better. 100%, for instance, has many route variations that you can play around with, and the numbers don't work out for any of them.⁴ Here's a comparison of some categories and routes, including the only one that works:

Route	Score before Blue Bridge	Nearest point barrier	Difference
7 Lasers	98	120	15 more needed
All Lasers with Single Latch Skip and Stair Snipe	230	240	3 more needed
All Panels	424	480	49 more needed
100% w/o Eclipse Skip, deferred Town and Theatre	502	480	23 too many
100% with Eclipse Skip	547	600	46 more needed

If the score threshold was 60 it would be easier to work something out with the limited stuff we can move around, but such is the curse of the April 4th update.

I think Force Bridge Skip is pretty cool, but it doesn't see much use because it only really works in Legacy All Lasers. darkid and I ran the category for a little bit while we were figuring out the trick and developing the route, and our times are amusingly over 4 minutes faster than anyone else on that leaderboard. Legacy categories aren't very popular because New Version is just better. There is one other made-up category that uses this trick, but once again, that's a tale for another blog post.

There's one last thing I need to talk about. At the beginning of the post, I mentioned that this trick had ramifications beyond just Legacy. The reason for that is the research into save file splitting. Knowing how to deterministically split your save file isn't really useful for normal runs, but it's a great tool to have in your arsenal when searching for more complicated tricks. And as it turns out, less than a year later, save file splitting ended up being a critical part of the biggest single time save in the entire game: Eclipse Skip!

You can read more about Eclipse Skip in the post I linked, but the basic rundown is that we needed to use multiple save files to get a Theatre video into a weird state. This is why it's fortunate that they changed the save split threshold to 60 points instead of 120. The Eclipse Skip route heads to Theatre and starts splitting save files as early as it possibly can in the run, and the player happens to get up to 60 points fairly close to the entrance to Theatre. If we had to wait until 120 points instead, it would make the route a lot more awkward. Of course, Eclipse Skip saves such a ridiculous amount of time that it would be worth any amount of re-routing to pull it off, but we're still glad that it worked out the way it did.

And that's the full scoop on Force Bridge Skip! I hope you enjoyed this slightly vainglorious trip down Speedrunning History Lane. I'll hopefully have my full report on updates to The Witness out soon, so keep an eye out for that!

You can see in the screenshot above that the second file is right before the end of Mountain Floor 1, and I have a solve count of 224. Adding the two unsolved panels in the screenshot and the five Rainbow panels on the next floor would result in a solve count of 231. What gives? Well, I actually solved two extra panels in this run -- the Desert panels I mention a couple of paragraphs later. Subtracting those gives 229. The remaining difference is because the run I did was on New Version, and there's an extra panel you solve in All Lasers on Old Version that you don't in New Version. You'll see what I mean when I talk about Jungle Wall Skip. ↩
The reason we don't want more than 246 points after Multipanel is because it would mean we'd have at least 240 points before solving Blue Bridge, and thus the file wouldn't split. ↩
Doing Double Latch Skip instead of Single skips a panel, so you'd need four extra points instead of three. If you don't do Latch Skip at all, it adds three panels (including the two Desert panels mentioned as freebies), so you'd only need one extra point. Interestingly, Stair Snipe is almost required: not doing it adds 10 points (the six Lower Row panels, plus the full four linked Mill panels), which would place you at 240 points before solving Blue Bridge. If you didn't want to do Stair Snipe, you'd have to either do Double Latch Skip or Jungle Wall Skip, or leave Mill or Jungle via the slow routes. Just some unnecessary fun facts. ↩
It would be pretty strange if we could do Force Bridge Skip in 100%, because 100% requires you to get Blue Bridge EP, and thus you need to be on Floor 3 with Blue Bridge pointing to the exit at some point. This wouldn't actually be a problem though, because going from orange to blue takes the same number of bridge solves as going from blue to orange (4 solves), and thus we would still be saving three bridge solves using the skip. ↩

2024 In Review: Music

2025-01-06T10:43:43-05:00

Continuing with our jaunt through last year: it's time to talk about music! Historically I've been a bit of a music aficionado, and I've written album reviews on this site in the past. However, I've been listening to much less new stuff than usual in the past like, uh, ummm, uh... six years? Which, I suppose, makes this musical drought the new normal.

When I say drought, I mean that I believe I only really listened to two albums in 2023. Two! Granted, they were 終焉 Re:write by 150P and EPHEMERAL by Mr.Kitty, which are both long albums that are packed with bangers. Sort of. But still, I've been wanting for a while to get back into listening to music more often, and not just idly while I write code. I did listen to more music in 2024 than I did in 2023, although not as much as I'd have hoped. Still, progress is progress!

I've created a playlist of some of the songs I'll be talking about, in case you want to check them out or listen along with the post!

Albums

If you know anything about my music listening habits, you'll know that I predominantly listen to albums rather than singles. There's something about a packaged collection of music that is more digestible to me than random songs. I think part of it is knowing that I can spend like half an hour listening to something that feels cohesive, all sung by the same person, and that when my favorite song on the album ends, I can be comforted in my time of need by another song that I probably still like.

There's five albums I want to talk about for 2024, listed in ascending order of number of listens based on my last.fm statistics. I do want to give an honorable mention to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, which didn't make the list, but is still full of queer bops that I'm also pretty sure you've all heard already! Also, I should mention that only the first two of these actually came out in 2024; the rest are still 2024 albums to me, though, because that's when I heard them.

Tension II by Kylie Minogue

I was just poking around in the iTunes Store one day when I saw this album pop up. I've never really listened to Kylie Minogue before (although I've obviously heard Can't Get You Out Of My Head), but as a homosexual who grew up in Australia, it's kind of my responsibility to stan the princess. I liked it a lot! It's the kind of dance-y pop I was listening to in the mid-2010s, between my recession pop and dark electronica periods. Sia and Tove Lo, two artists that I think of as being from that era, are actually featured on the album! Their songs (Dance Alone and My Oh My respectively) are among my favorites, but I have to give the top spot to Hello, which has a perfectly earwormy hook that also just happens to be about being obsessed with your crush and showing up at their house in the middle of the night.

Hello, I am at your door
I know you're awake
Yeah it's close to four
Let me in

This is D-ne to B-ko. Yeah, everything's actually about Shuuen no Shiori and I make no apologies.

9 Sad Symphonies by Kate Nash

This album might've been higher up if I'd gotten it earlier in the year, and if I hadn't taken two vacations in December during which I didn't really listen to any music, which sort of highlights a fundamental problem with ordering by play count with an arbitrary deadline, but let's just ignore that. I've been a Kate Nash fan for a long time; her 2010 album My Best Friend Is You is in my top 10 albums of all time. That being said, that was 14 years ago, and I didn't like the couple of albums she released in the meantime.

9 Sad Symphonies is her first album in six years, and I was delighted to find that it was somewhat a return to form for her. It's more orchestral than Best Friend, which gives a bunch of the tracks these great swelling emotional moments that you just want to sing along to at the top of your lungs; one such track is Horsie, which alternates between mellow verses, and the lovely imagery of "I'm driving to the mountains to see snow! Crying in the car park of a Home Depot!" Ray is another, in which Kate promises you that "I can be a ray of sunshine" while sounding like she's having a hard time living up to it.

There's honestly too many tracks here that I love for me to go in depth on all of them. Millions of Heartbeats gives a great introduction to the kinds of feelings we'll be sorting through on this album, Wasteman is a catchy song that really gives off Lily Allen energy, and Vampyre gets stuck in my head for an hour every time I listen to it. And there's still more!

As a post-script unrelated to the album itself: what is up with the cover art? If you look at the image I included with the post, it's clearly a photograph someone took of the CD sleeve. I can tell because I have it in real life and that's what it looks like, and also the lighting on it would be different than if it was a digital image. But this, as far as I can tell, is the only official cover art for this album. This is what MusicBrainz, Album Art Exchange, and iTunes have. It's also something only I would care about, and doesn't really matter much, but it's pretty wild! I don't think I've seen something like that before, and I've been collecting CDs for years.

Monsters by Empathy Test

I got this album for Christmas in 2023 (and it actually came out in 2020), but obviously it still counts as a 2024 album. In fact, I consider Christmas to be the start of a new music year for me, since I usually get at least one CD. I don't 100% remember how I stumbled upon this group, although it was probably by looking at recommended artists on last.fm. This was after I'd spent a lot of time listening to Mr.Kitty, whose music has a dark feel, but is pretty firmly electronica.

I ended up liking this album a lot! It has a dark, shoegaze-y sound, kind of like Blouse by Blouse,¹ a favorite of mine from like eight years ago. The title and leading track, Monsters, is one of the best, with its heavy bassline and glittery synths, amid echoing voices warning the listener that "Baby, I've got the monsters." Incubation Song is high up there for me too. It's much lighter, musically, than many of the other tracks; it gives me the feeling of breaking out of a building where you've been held captive by a cult and you finally get to run free through the nighttime streets, even though the lyrics are quite self-destructive.

My favorite, though, is Skin, a song equally emotional and catchy, and which makes me reflect on my own evolving experience with loss:

But I see you've moved on a little too fast
For me to believe you've left the past behind
I'm just another boy with a bruised ego
Who can never let go of something he didn't know he had at the time
Isn't it always the same?

Worlds by Porter Robinson

This is the oldest album I'll talk about today, as it came out in 2014, a full decade ago. It's another Christmas special, actually; my brother handed it to me as he was packing up his personal effects while my parents were preparing to move house (obviously a fun thing to do during the holiday season). I'd never really given Porter Robinson a chance before because I figured his music would probably be pretty mainstream electronica, and I'm really into the sub-genre of "music you hear as you're freezing to death in an abandoned cathedral", like Crystal Castles and Mr.Kitty.² But I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard!

Most of the tracks I really liked were just very jubilant, very clear and melodic. Divinity is a great start to the album, kicking it off with some fun gated instrumentation that I'd love to do a better job explaining but honestly I'm kind of a novice when it comes to the actual production behind electronic music. It hits, is what I'm saying. Years of War and Hear the Bells have similarly strong hooks, with the latter's serving as the drop for the chorus, accompanied by a choir of children singing. I like Lionhearted a lot too; it's just very energetic.

This brings me to Sea of Voices. This, I would say, is my favorite track of the year, and it's very different from the rest of the album. It feels like a mythical journey through the clouds, with gentle synths building up for minutes before the drop, and soft repeated words calling out like an angel's voice. This is definitely what I would call an "aesthetic" song; a song you want to listen to while staring at the snow out the bus window. I'm gonna embed it here because I want you to listen to it even if you don't listen to the playlist (which also has it):

And the thing is, the next track (Fellow Feeling) is good and weird enough that I don't even feel too upset that Sea of Voices is over.

Nurture by Porter Robinson

Well, I mean, after I listened to and enjoyed Worlds so much, I obviously had to listen to Porter's other music.

Nuture came out in 2021, so it's at least closer to the present than the other two old albums. I got it for my birthday, which is pretty much half a year away from Christmas, so it's kind of like the year was split up into two Porter Robinson eras, and those eras have very different vibes. Worlds was more produced, more focused on drops and cool synths, and a touch more mainstream. Nurture is much more singer-songwriter. It feels personal, it feels vulnerable. And it's catchy as all heck.

I have a similar problem to 9 Sad Symphonies with this album, which is that there are too many standout tracks to comment on them all. But I have to try or I'm gonna explode.

Look at the Sky: This is the first non-instrumental track on the album, and it's such a good introduction to what's to come. It feels so hopeful; it feels like you're in the field of grass from the cover art, but you're facing up now, staring into the sky and dreaming of the future.

Look at the sky, I'm still here
I'll be alive next year
I can make something good, oh
Something good

There's a lot to this, I think. Porter Robinson has said that he dealt with depression for years after his first album, and that he wasn't sure he was going to make a second one. This feels like a rejection of that; time passes, things change, you're still alive, and you can still make art. I struggle with feelings like this too, especially regarding my worries that I'll never be able to complete the indie video game I've been trying to make for years. It's rather interesting, then, that I found this album during one of the periods I was actively working on it, and that listening to the album therefore makes me think about it.
Musician: This is just straight up a bop. You can dance to it. You gotta, really. It's also got an anime music video. Just like the last track, it feels so hopeful.
Mother: Possibly the most emotional track for me. One's relationship with their parents is often one of the most complex relationships in your life. No matter how much your parents love you, you will still get hurt, sometimes even because of them. There's something about a parent admitting their fallibility and continuing to put their child's needs above their own that always gets me (e.g. Crystal Castles's Child I Will Hurt You, also I cried during the third Princess Switch movie and that's embarrassing). Also it's catchy!
Mirror: Another absolute bop, this time about combating negative self-talk.
Something Comforting: This is slower and more ballad-y than the other songs. The drop brings it back up a notch, but honestly my favorite parts are the slower ones. You can hear the pain in his voice during the chorus, begging that "Someone tell me something comforting." Something Porter does in a number of places throughout the album is edit his voice to sound higher and more feminine. The verses on this track are in his regular voice, whereas the choruses are in the higher one. But then there's an extra chorus at the end where it cuts intermittently between the two voices with some glitchy sound effects. It sounds so cool, and just emphasizes the emotion behind the words.
Unfold: This was my favorite for a while. It's the penultimate track, and it starts off with the guest vocalist, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, singing over a melody with this really expectant energy, like you're watching someone prepare to unleash their final form. Porter's feminine voice joins in during the buildup, and then at a moment's notice, you're hit in the face with a jubilant landscape of sound. In retrospect, it makes sense that I like it so much; Porter Robinson has said that TEED was a big fan of Sea of Voices and wanted to make something like it. Unfold has the same kind of beauty, and the same kind of weight to it. You're flying through the clouds, but you're also burdened with "the weight of the world." It's a great climax to the album (not to take away from the simple peace that Trying to Feel Alive, the final track, leaves you with).

I can't recommend this album enough. I haven't yet listened to his newest album, the one that actually released in 2024, but I'm looking forward to doing it at some point (gotta spread this stuff out though!).

Tracks

Even though I mostly listen to albums, there are times when I'm forced to just enjoy a song on its own. Sometimes the album's not out yet and I can't wait, or it's an artist who doesn't really do the whole "album" thing. Either way, I wanted to acknowledge some of my favorite songs this year that couldn't be praised as part of an album.

Memory Reboot is a collaboration between VØJ and Narvent. There's a few versions; the one I like is the "slowed" version, with the Ryan Gosling music video. It is another "aesthetic" track; you know how sometimes at night time, city buses turn off the regular cabin lights and use a low blue light while the bus is driving? Sitting on a blue light bus at night and listening to this feels like entering eternity. I love how you get a taste of the magic, then it mellows down, before eventually building up higher than the start and it finishes tantalizingly too soon. I've gone on record saying that Memory Reboot should be four hours long.

When I played this song for my brother, he immediately said "this is one of those TikTok songs!" I don't know how to feel about this.

The next thing I did was play This Feeling by my;lane, and my brother said "I've heard this before!" It turns out it's a remix of a Noisestorm song with the same name. I like the my;lane version better. It's darker and you can really dance to it. The only sad thing is that it slows down halfway through the track. I mean, I still like it, but I want more time for fistpumping and screaming "I will never lose this feeling!"

Obviously I'm going to mention Leash by Sky Ferreira. We've only been graced with three songs from her angelic voice in the last 11 years, so it was huge when this dropped almost out of nowhere at the beginning of December. She supposedly only had two and a half weeks to make it, and it's incredibly in character of her to take a stressful and chaotic situation like that and drop pure art out of it. It has the classic Sky Ferreira grunge to it, both musically and lyrically, and her vocal dynamics are on point as always. Honestly, if she punched me in the face Regina George style I'd say thanks, but like, this is legitimately a good song.

Finally, I'm going to talk about Chappell Roan after all. I'm sure you've all heard Good Luck, Babe! because it's one of the most popular songs of the year, but I want to shout it out anyway because I really love it. Talking about compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia resonates with my own lifelong struggles with them. "You'd have to stop the world just to stop the feeling" in particular hits quite hard. I love seeing a popular figure talking about this kind of stuff. Also, it's super catchy.

(I'd be remiss not to mention the famous incident when my friend said "Chappell Roan's been stuck in my head" and I misheard it as "Chappell Roan's been suckin' my dad" and like. I KNEW it was wrong, but I didn't know what was right!)

Anyway, we've reached the end of this post! It's pretty difficult to review music in a satisfying way, and I know this and have known this for years and yet for some reason I keep trying to do it. I hope this post was at least somewhat more engaging than me just saying "omgggg I love this song and this one aaaaa pls listen to it!!" Although. If that convinces you, then yes, I said that too. Happy new music!

Ghost Dream by Blouse is one of my favorite songs ever and I will rec it at every opportunity. ↩
Disclaimer that both Ethan Kath of Crystal Castles and Mr.Kitty himself have been credibly accused of sex crimes and so I can't really recommend them despite loving their music. I recommend Pastel Ghost and Mareux. ↩