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With a new glitch, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask speedrunners have finally overcome one of their greatest obstacles: the first three-day cycle.
The iconic title card for the Dawn of the First Day in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask has represented the bane of any percent runs for the game’s speedrunning community. Even with glitches that allow players to skip all four of the game’s major bosses and skip directly to the moon — the game’s final level — speedrunners still had to slog through the First Day Cycle every time.
No matter how quickly players complete tasks or how much the in-game mechanics are used to skip forward in time, speedrunners could only shave the First Day Cycle down to around 20 minutes. It remained that way for almost 13 years across all Majora’s Mask speedruns, whether glitchless, 100 percent or even tool-assisted. Players were forced to spend around 20 minutes on this seemingly insurmountable roadblock — until very recently.
Speedruns for both Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have accepted methods of glitching the game, and since the games were made using the same engine, they share many of these methods. Two used for any-percent runs are Stale Reference Manipulation (SRM) and Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Put simply, SRM and ACE are methods of corrupting the game’s code and exploiting that corruption to obtain items and objects that are otherwise inaccessible to the player at that point in the game.
Every item in the environment is represented with numbers inside of the game’s memory, such as X-coordinates, Y-coordinates, Z-coordinates and rotation. These items are also referred to as actors. The numbers tell the game where the actor is within the environment, whether the actor should despawn if the player leaves the area and many other important pieces of information SRM uses glitches to corrupt. Once the data is corrupted, ACE can occur, where the game looks for the code that it needs but find the corrupted data instead.
For Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, this sometimes means manipulating the XYZ coordinates of an actor to replace another code in the game’s memory. The only problem with using SRM and ACE in Majora’s Mask is that none of the previously established methods could be performed using Deku Link, and since Link is stuck in this form for the entirety of the First Day Cycle, it made the game’s long introduction impossible to skip and impervious to shortcuts.
However, that changed in November 2021, when glitch hunter and speedrunner Türkenheimer posted a video titled “SRM in 1st Cycle is possible.” After a couple of weeks and with the help of fellow speedrunner MrCheeze, Türkenheimer posted “Human in First Cycle,” showing a practical method to use this exploit in a Majora’s Mask speedrun.
First, the name of the save file must contain the characters Fpr (case sensitive), optimally at the end to save time later. Link must then catch one of the Clock Town Bombers, pop a balloon and blow a Deku bubble all on the same frame while the bubble is positioned in specific XY coordinates. When done correctly, the puff of smoke from the popped balloon will load into the same place in the game’s memory where the Deku bubble was. Now that this space in the memory is corrupted, the bubble’s XY values will overwrite the place in the game’s memory where the code for the puff of smoke disappearing was stored, triggering an instance of ACE.
Here is where the name of the save file comes back in. This corruption places the menu cursor in the game’s pause menu in a row it shouldn’t be. This allows the player to scroll through the game’s memory to the save file name. Fpr can then be set to specific values that represent items that can be equipped to the C-buttons (the little yellow arrows on the original Nintendo 64 controller). Fpr allows the player to equip the Fierce Diety’s Mask, the Goron Mask and the Hookshot to the C-buttons. To boil it down, the game’s code is corrupted by the actor (the deku bubble) and forced to retrieve code that was written in the save file name (Fpr).
With the Goron Mask, the speedrunner can proceed as Goron Link to West Clock Town and dance with the scarecrow to skip to the Dawn of the Second Day. From here, Link proceeds to the Woods of Mystery, where the layout changes for each day of the cycle. The layout on Day Two is the best option for performing the Moon Warp glitch, bringing the record for an unrestricted Majora’s Mask speedrun from roughly 24 minutes and 26 seconds to 18 minutes and 29 seconds. Six minutes is a huge leap in speedrunning terms, revolutionizing the art of speedrunning Majora’s Mask over 20 years after the game’s initial release — and it was all thanks to the seemingly useless snot bubble of Deku Link.
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