The Strange Unloaded World of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild have a really robust map. But how does it work? And what if we broke this map to explore a world we could never really see before? Well we will be heading out of bounds to explore a low quality version of this game's map and tackling some other stuff too by using 2 players in the game to trip up the game's loading sequences.

Filmed and edited by SwankyBox.
Ultracam free cam by MaxLastBreath, with contributions by masagrator and KeatonTheBot.

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#zelda #tearsofthekingdom #zeldatearsofthekingdom

Music from Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild, and Dark Cloud 2

[echocolatowo]

Hello, TOTK dataminer/modder here, I spent hours investigating the various things that make Hyrule Bounds, including the air walls all around Hyrule, and the invisible floor below the Depths. All my research can be found at the link in answer (if it doesn't get deleted)

But basically, the depths floor is an actor called Exterminator. Exterminator is a ResidentActor, which means it is always loaded at any time in any world. Includes title screen, dungeons, main world, shrines... It's a giant box ranging from -5, 975 to 5, 975 in the X axis, -4, 975 to 4, 975 in the Z axis, and -3, 975 to -2, 975 in the Y axis. Its behavior is heavily copied from AirWalls that make part of Hyrule's giant invisiwalls, but it has a few differences: Pushing against its faces doesn't display "You can't go further." text, and its drifting force (see more about it in the linked doc above if you're curious, but basically AirWalls always try to push Link towards their nearest face from Link) is inferior to AirWall's, meaning if both clash the one from AirWall will win.

Exterminator, being an AirWall, has very low/no friction, which means that objects that start a movement on it will not stop from air friction. It's hard to clip inside Exterminator because being an AirWall, it will also push you towards its nearest face from Link, which in most cases is the top part. But there's also the physical Out of Bounds starting at Y = -3, 000 that despawns most objects in two to three frames.

Depending on the world you're in, Exterminator behaves differently:
- In MainField/MinusField (e.g. overworld + depths), it is a physical box that you can't enter by normal means. It also is using a random-like generated gloom map, that ends up being invisible because gloom needs the ground it's on to have a texture to display. When you render the ground, the gloom is visible (see the mod I made that renders all bounds of Hyrule, search for "Visible Hyrule Bounds" on GameBanana TotK).
- In CDungeon, e.g. Shrines, it acts as an automatic void out area, though it's still a physical box that Link can't enter.
- In LargeDungeon, e.g. the "unused" Dungeon worlds, it acts as a mix of the previous two, voiding you out and also being partially covered with Gloom.
- In NormalStage, e.g. both Title Screen and the Prologue worlds, Exterminator is... weird and freaky. It's very volatile / instable, making the player and other objects void out/despawn at seemingly random places and times. Some weird collisions too.


That's only a part of the research I did and if you're interested in the topic I really suggest taking a look inside the linked doc. Regardless, have a nice day!

[TheFuriousNightFury]

8:57 This right here FINALLY explained a mystery that has been plaguing me for AGES about how my horse mysteriously died while i was riding Dinraal for dragon parts. Holy moly He got barbecued by the fire effect despite being nowhere near the dragon. oh my gosh. WOW.

[GiygasGiegueII]

One time after I beat Ganon in BotW, i was spit out in the unloaded version of Hyrule castle. The sanctum roof was gone, and Ganob's cocoon was just suspending on nothing. It was trippy.

[Selunei]

2:54 Quick note: the singular of "vertices" is "vertex", not "vertice".

[realiteatimeforall]

This is why humans can't go faster than the speed of light. This reality can't load in quick enough if we go too fast.

[WindmageZyphos]

Floor below the depths sounds like it belongs on a Creepypasta iceberg.

[FloobusGoobus]

Bro finally remembered the account password 😭

[DebrisHauler]

For automatic level of detail generation, it is done by decimating vertices. Faces can be combined based on planar similarity. A dot product of their surface normal and neighboring faces' surface normals can determine if they are similar enough to be merged. The trickiest part of the algorithm is actually updating all the indices of vertices and their neighboring indices. But game devs use tools that already have that implemented well and automated. It is a similar operation to the decimate modifier inside blender 3d modeling software. And to get the billboard sprites at super low LODs, this is also automated by simply setting up the mesh in front of a camera and getting a single render.

[nlgames]

Be carefulll when talking about "multiplayer" regarding Nintendo games which originally DONT have that included.... We don't want another Pointcrow situation...

[sa]

In TOTK you can sometimes see polygons in the ground smoothly transform into smaller polygons as you get closer. BOTW doesn't seem to use that technique.

[lofiviberoom]

While I can not speak for this game specifically, as I'm not sure what engine they use if custom or based on Unity or something.

We do have Automatic LOD Calculations available to us in modern game engines including but not limited to Godot from my experience. It's designed for this exact case where manually creating the low poly models per asset would be cumbersome for so many assets.

To say they didn't put an intense level of detail into the games optimization, and configuration of these optimization tools despite being automated in nature is still nothing short of impressive 😊

[while_coyote]

The trees look like "imposters", which are slightly more than just a sprite. It's more like a set of sprites all taken from a different angle, and the one you see gets chosen based on your viewing angle.

[zeromontalvan]

btw, i used a glitch to fall throught the floor in the center if the caste, and i was suprised to find out that the astral observatory (where we fight calamity ganon) is still kind of there, with a rocky texture but the dome and cilinder are still there

[adrianmarion]

haven't watched this channel since i was a kid. nice to see that you're still around

[GamingReinvented]

Ah, low poly Hyrule exploration. Always neat to see.

But to answer your question about the Gloom floor, it's what dataminers have labelled the Exterminator. It technically exists in all maps, though on all maps except the MainField (shrines, unused dungeons, the prologue under Hyrule Castle, etc) it acts as a void out zone instead, stopping you from falling forever if you end up out of bounds. Below this, the game kinda breaks and does things like lock the camera and Link's movement, so it basically exists to stop him falling out the normal playfield like he could in the last game.

Interestingly, in some maps it actually has both functionalities; it acts like a Gloom floor and a void out trigger at the same time.

On another note, you can also get this low poly setup via glitches and in-game tricks too, no mods required. For example, escaping the Gerudo Town defence mission in TotK leaves you with a very similar (and very, very broken) map, since the game unloads basically everything so it can handle the swarm of enemies needed for that part of the game. This looks incredibly weird in towns, since it basically unloads everything except the collision. And I think you just fall straight through the Depths trigger too, since it unloads all the triggers and stuff in general.

Either way, interesting video for sure!

[InkLore-ph]

People complain all the time about the switch being an old console and especially about BOTW and TOTK chugging in some areas (looking at you lost woods) but no one notices just how much work had to be put in to make everything run as smoothly as it does. There probably isn’t a more optimized game for the switch than TOTK.

[subfloor]

I picked up SpongeBob Rehydrated for my daughter on the switch. The load times are just awful. It really make you appreciate what Nintendo can do with the Zelda and Mario games.

[LincolnScanlon]

For your information, you can use a hydro clip on any version to also make your way onto the depths floor, and it is completely frictionless, so you can infinity shield surf or build something with fans or rockets to NYOOOM under the map at lightspeed

[weebsquit]

I'm not quite sure how i did it, but in BotW on Wii U, I arrived to a low detailed Hyrule Castle. It didn't happen again afterwards.

[ZeranZeran]

Still thinking about that corn.
It was beautiful