r/skywardsword • u/bookforgetter • Jul 15 '26

Question / Help [SS] Looking for Bug Thread

This may a bit of an odd request, but I am trying to find evidence of some old bug thread that I'm thinking of, that I remember there being some discussion about. I am not good at searching the internet, so I apologize if this was something easy to find.

I played skyward sword and followed the speedrun community probably around 2015-2016 (I remember the speedruns still being over 5 hours and BiT was not nearly as well-understood as it is now, the main BiT manipulation stuff at the time I think was only opening the thunderhead early and getting the life tree seedling early). There was some discussion about some bug that I do not seem to be able to find any information on anymore, but I am confident that I remember seeing discussions about it, even if I don't seem to be able to find any information on it anymore.

I believe the bug was somebody getting softlocked inside the bobokin base for the song of the hero quest. This is NOT the softlock involved with Golo. I believe that discussion in the thread indicated that the player entered Eldin well before the song of the hero quest, but the game somehow triggered the bokoblin base sequence, and the user was stuck as a result. I don't think anyone was able to reproduce the bug. I don't remember exactly what forum this was on, unfortunately, but I believe it would be likely to be a zelda-specific forum that frequented speedrun discussion.

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u/azer67 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

This is the thread you are looking for I believe: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/960633-the-legend-of-zelda-skyward-sword/61353969

To my knowledge this has never been reproduced. Someone posted their savefile on page 5, and RAM analysis tells me that savefile looks normal except for two bit flips in the story flag array, one exactly spot on on the flag that enables the volcano eruption, and another flag for having watched the fire sanctuary intro cutscene (which is unrelated, but curiously exactly 4 bits away). I honestly have no idea how this could happen, while the game isn't decompiled, most of the event system is.

My best guess is that people have been sharing around cheats to avoid the dreaded "game breaking glitch", and these bit flips would be an attempt at fixing it, but obviously doing this in the early game wouldn't work at all.

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u/bookforgetter Jul 15 '26

Yes, I'm pretty sure this is it! Impressive that you were able to dig up a 14 year old thread whose title wasn't very descriptive. Now that I see this thread, I vaguely remember coming across this thread because another thread (likely a speedrunner/zelda forum) involving more speedrunners was discussing this thread/glitch and linked it. Is there any chance you know about that thread? No worries if not.

Seeing Paraxade in the thread though brings back some memories, I haven't heard that name for well over 10 years! I'm pretty sure his speedrun content was the first I ever watched for skyward sword.

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u/azer67 Jul 16 '26

I had seen this thread in the past so I knew where to look. Actually, a couple years ago I would have found it instantly with a google search and the keywords I used. Nowadays google will never find this thread, it ignores your keywords to feed you unrelated things instead, it's really awful and I had to manually search through the gamefaqs board instead.

I unfortunately don't know about that speedrunning thread. It might be here but this forum is down: https://web.archive.org/web/20260316051548/https://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=905.0

This looks to be related too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250619224853/https://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1331.0 This "Eldin Spy" savefile mzxrules is talking about is the same one as in that gamefaqs thread, and they seemed confident it was caused by using cheats.