The Weirdest Glitch I've Ever Seen In Deltarune

Have you ever walked through a loading zone only to have the game crash and take all your save files with it?

Me either! Why did this happen? Is there a way to guard against it? And most importantly... who let me make a video while loaded up on prednisone?!

0:00 Opening Animation
0:05 Intro
0:30 Dogcheck?!
1:05 Let me tell you about Save Structures
1:54 Why this one is EXTRA weird
2:47 What about the Backup? 1_9?
3:33 What happened to the Room Number?!
4:13 Why *that* number? I don't even!
4:54 Can we prevent this?
5:10 What to do if your Deltarune Save gets corrupted
6:00 Limitations of Save Editors
6:44 Closing Remarks
7:27 CAT
7:54 What do you guys think?
8:11 Credits Music

#geoblocking4all

[HalfBreadChaos]

FAQ Time!

Q: Did you ever figure out what was up?
A: Oceanbagel of the Underminer discord made an break down of the mechanics at play here (after the video had dropped) so I'm just gonna paste it all here:

I'm watching it now and I do have an explanation for the room 412 thing. That room is not the legend on version 1.10, it's the dogcheck room. In chapter 1, your backup save is saved again upon reloading. This happens even if you load into the dogcheck room. So what happened was all the variables were initialized as they normally are before loading (which is mostly setting things to 0) and then the loading failed due to the corrupted save and then you're sent to the dogcheck room. Then the backup save is overwritten by all these initialized values plus the current room (the dogcheck room). So you would have needed to make a copy of the backup save file before reloading in order to use it.

As for the save file, you should be comparing bytes rather than characters, since the idea is that the game first fills the file up with null bytes up to the correct size. 41, 097 is within the range for number of bytes in a save file, which can vary based on the number of digits that happen to be in each flag. The difference that was unaccounted for in your calculations was that the line breaks are two bytes. So in your example, the number of bytes in the file would be 41, 460 (counting the characters and spaces for 1 byte each and the line breaks for 2 bytes each). If the save file were null bytes then you would expect to get one line with the last column being the file size in bytes plus one because of how notepad counts columns. And that does seem to be what it looks like.

Watching through the stream, it looks like their computer was really struggling with loads. The music not showing up indicates that the game wasn't able to load the music fast enough, and some of those room transitions were way slower than they should be. So I'd say it was either a performance issue or antivirus interfering with what the game wanted to do, and I think the save corruption itself happened during the save in card castle (the last save before the crash).
Also this is mostly unrelated but has to do with the autosaves being re-saved when you load. In version 1.09, there was an issue where you could load into the next room past where you saved, and since autosaves are re-saved, you can repeatedly advance through rooms by repeatedly dying. So speedrunners routed it out like this:



Q: @0:02 Is that....
A: Yep, that's Super Mario RPG sound effects.

Q: Wait did you *actually* go to the hospital over a CAT? How?!?
A: I'm deathly allergic to many many things, and one of them is cat saliva. This is not typically an issue because typically the cats just kinda... lay there and let me pet them. But this was my first time giving Lynx catnip, so I did not expect him to claw me up so badly.

Getting clawed when you're allergic to cat is functionally identical to being injected with cat allergens, and the more claws you get, the higher the dosage.

Oops!!

Q: Shouldn't you maybe not have cats then?
A: Going into an allergy induce shock is not at all limited to cats for me, it can happen when I'm grocery shopping, when someone eats a candy bar and I walk too close to the garbage can... Unless I spend my entire life hiding in my room away from all potential allergens, there's always going to be danger. For me this is part of life. As for cats, now that I know it's an issue I can just wear gloves when I try to brush them or use cat nip.

[StarshadowMelody]

"And when the patient woke up, his skeleton was missing, and the doctor was never heard from again!"

[shadow_shine]

Seeing you in a red shirt is cool. I love all the outfits you make. I also love how you use the wingdings hands.

[some_tiny_dragon]

My friend works with GMS2 a lot. I'm talking literally the only game making software he'll ever use, and we never had such glitch happening. I would guess that there was a write function that was cut off as the crash happened since saving files usually means to delete the old version and replace it. As for the crash, I have no idea. Game Maker just acts weird sometimes as I find it to be extremely finicky.

Though the possible bit flip from cosmic radiation is possible and not uncommon.

[miveldation]

in my eyes you are the top undertale/deltarune theorisete i know. thanks for your hard work

[Greatwolfpearl]

The editing on these videos are AMAZING. I cannot believe how cool it is to see.

This video is great, and please get better soon!

[iconofthicc]

It was actually Gaster, because everything slightly strange that happens in Undertale or Deltarune is because of Gaster, for some reason.

[Julian_Pepper]

The only detail I have to add is it looks to me like the game was in the process of editing the backup file as well when code execution stopped. The fact that some of the data changed though is what gets me, it wasn't just erasing lines, it was writing garbage data too (at least to where the room number is stored). I have no idea *what* exactly happened, it could be one of those once in a lifetime glitches that you can never replicate again, but the fact it's happened to multiple people suggests to me there's something they all have in common that we overlooked.

The reason I think that there must be a common element that is the root cause, is that Earthbound had a similar mystery that got solved a few years ago with the discovery of the Overworld Status Suppression flag (henceforth referred to as OSS) and how other elements interact with that flag. To make a long story short, sometimes the game over screen wouldn't appear on death, and no one could figure out why, this was dubbed the Game Over glitch. As it turned out, the reason is that the players got into a scripted battle with the OSS on and lost, and OSS being on interferes with the game over screen and doesn't let it start properly. Random battles prevented this by turning OSS off as soon as the fight starts, and several textboxes throughout the game also turn it off, but scripted battles don't turn it off. The one thing every example of the Game Over glitch had in common is that players had encountered an event that turned OSS on (ex. arriving in the Dusty Dunes Desert for the first time), and skipped everything after that event that could turn OSS off. They then entered a scripted battle, lost, and the Game Over glitch occurred.

[sandwich]

I've never had this to a deltarune or undertale save, but I've seen the million spaces happen _countless times_ at work with files going to and from different file structures
sometimes a file will copy and paste but when you open it, it's the spaces

I have no clue what causes it, or how to stop it, but it happens maybe once every couple weeks across about half a million computers?

[mxstrikk]

Wait a minute: you were hospitalized by a cat. Cats are heavily related to Element 6. Element 6 is related to Gaster. It would seem that Dr. Gaster has gotten his revenge on you!

[devlinmcguire]

Fun fact, before I get buried in comments.
Recently a guy named "Andrew Cunningham" got the community thinking about the narrator of Deltarune, and whether or not it's diegetic.
But one thing people who go over this tend to overlook is an obscure text box on the no mercy route in Ch-#1 where the narrator says something to the effect of *"Hathey will never forget you and what you did"* or something similar
But Susey then hears this and asks aloud "*In a good way?"*
Then the narrator answers her question saying *"In a bad way"*
While you could argue that this is just a joke, it is cannon, and if it isn't a only there for the joke, then it proves that the narrator absolutely is diegetic.
Because Susey can talk with whoever is doing the narration, it means that she is probably comfortable in knowing the person speaking...
Which also narrows down the narrator to Either Kris, or Ralsei, because they are the only non-Hathey(s) in the room.

Another thing that I brought up during Andrew's live stream of reading comments, was the fact the narrator doesn't follow Susey during cut scenes. He said on stream that he thinks that because we have the option of telling her to go right or left in ch-#1 is the narrator, but wasn't sure.
So I would like to clarify this, the options we choose aren't the narrator, both Noell and Susey hear our disembodied player-commands as Kris's voice, also he's the one who speaks after the Spamton fight and talks to Susey on the couch at his home.
The narrator however isn't heard by most characters, mainly only Kris and the rare exception like Susey during this joke.

So the Narrator, while it could be Kris as well, or like his internal thoughts talking or something, it could also be Ralsei, since they aren't narratively connected as of Chapter 2.

Just thought I'd get that out of the way, and I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter... :)

[KiieLuka]

Actually, something similar happened to me during early ch1 days that I have never seen reported anywhere else. In the are after the maze in chapter 1, earlier versions had no colision in certain parts of the floor, allowing for us to go too much out of bounds. I was once playing with this (I must have been hitting walk for some good 40 minutes) until my game suddenly just closed.
"No big deal" I thought, and started it again, but the game brought me to the first cutscene of the chapter as if I had never saved, which is weird since I was playing on the same save I completed the chapter a day before.
Unfortunately, I could never recreate it. I tried walking infinitely again out of bounds, but I either got bored after the first 15 minutes or when I actually got to the time I was before it never occured again, and now newer versions have the colision right.

[nicegoodstylish]

My favorite Undertale/Deltarune secrets are the ones [[WHERE THEY DELETE CRITICAL GAME FILES FOR $4.99]] [[FOR FREE!!]]

[Xesh]

sorry to hear about your cat-astrophe! fascinating video, it almost made me think there was a FUN value at play, with how rare it is...

[ZachATK]

i have a weird chapter 1 glitch experience from my brother.
apparently he was doing a no-save run and died, but then instead of ending up at the start, he ended up in the first puzzle room where the instructions are vandalized by Roulx, where there were also 2 Susies and no Ralsei.

[shadowsoftheinfinite]

We can make this even more cryptic by seeing how well we can connect this strange game malfunction to the actual lore of Deltarune :)

A sudden loss of control over Kris and the game...I can think of a fun fan comic idea with this. In the time that the Player is gone, Kris gains freedom to do what they'd like for the week Player was deactivated. However, they are just as shook and confused as we are as we are trying to make it work again, so they just continue to keep to themselves and ask themselves repeatedly if this is all a dream. A soulless Kris wandering around with a heavy sense of derealism...

...or Kris just fuckin' keels over and dies, either way. What a spooky game error!

[creditsunknown]

Oh boy! What a nice time traveling through the purple grass lands of card kingdom, I hope nothing unsettling and world destructive happens!

[GruffetTheSpider]

Very interesting glitch! I did some digging myself to try and find out what happened. but sadly couldn't find anything worth mentioning. There's no script that executes during that room transition which has anything to do with saving or overwriting save files, and neither does the transition object. My best guess is that Ephemera somehow managed to trigger the save point in front of the shop while the room was still loading, even though that seems impossible.. Yeah I got no clue. Toby sure knows how to make his code hard to read.

[cryotek]

I had a strange glitch during the lancer and susie fight where the souls somehow managed to escape the battle boxes borders allowing me to move around the soul freely. I remember catching some video evidence of it happening

[whim]

This glitch is so bizarre. I wonder if the reason it happens is the Game Maker tool the chapter 2 could be affected by a similar glitch. Nice video and documentation of this! Hope ya get better soon