PS4 Seth Solo Part 7: The Weird Stuff Edition, part 2

[ladyabaxa]

Part Six

In our last installment I took a quick look at encounter zones on Dezolis. I said there are two such zones. There are two, intended for use, but there is technically a third zone on Dezolis. We're going to have fun with that mess today. As we shall see calling it a singular zone might be a bit... premature.

Ok, let me stress something here. The ONLY sort of cheating I'm using for the following segment is the debug code. That's it. That's FFEC9E:06 in PAR code terms. I'm not using any other codes or something I'll show off later.

I also want to issue a warning that anyone thinking of trying to repeat this should use a well leveled character or party like I am. There's a reason a level 99 Seth is doing this!

Here's the Garuberk Tower. The blizzard is still going strong so the screenshot looks a little muddy but Seth is quite visible. (Yay bright yellow clothes!) I'm using the tower as an easily-recognized landmark on the northern border of the Dezolis map. The Musk Cat cave will work too, and is actually even closer to the boundary, but it's not as easy to recognize on sight. Now if Seth were to turn and walk north four steps he'd cross an invisible boundary in the game's code. It's something not possible without a walk-through-walls code or the debug menu but what that line is, is the edge of the Dezolis map... sort of.

The game will continue to lay out mountains and a chain of tiny 2x2 valleys if Seth keeps walking north. (That's what those white spots in the mountains on the map are.) If he triggers an encounter, however, he finds...

...that the game thinks it needs to pull monsters from Motavia's land encounters table.

He continues walking around unworried by the animals he keeps seeing until suddenly there's a distinctly human shape standing in front of him. Oh, uh, hi there Chaos Sorceror! You're not here to sabotage anything are you? No? you're just a run of the mill sorceror? Ok then.

As I wander around seeing what pops up I notice enemies from other locations in the game. I was surprised by how well Xanafalgue color palettes mesh with the Dezolis background. I could totally believe a creature like that roams in packs on the ice planet. Scratching my head I wonder if getting in and out of vehicles triggers shifts in the encounter table. Naturally of course I just had to try the Hydrofoil but since I didn't have the Hydrofoil with that Seth savestate I loaded up my endgame Seth and flew to Dezolis.

"I figured, this machine drives over water, right? The name is HYDROfoil. Ice is just frozen water. So I said to myself there's no better place to find it then on Dezolis. Let's take this baby out for a spin and get our money's worth."

"But the Hydrofoil was free!"

"EXACTLY."

It took awhile to work out some idea of what was happening since it turned out getting in and out of vehicles wasn't the culprit. I'm still not entirely sure but as best as I can tell some coordinates on Dezolis trigger a glitch in how the game locates what formation to call. I assume this is because the out-of-bounds part of Dezolis has some sort of default or incomplete configuration for enemy formations as I haven't been able to trigger the same behavior on Motavia.

(Just to clarify you can drive over any terrain with collision disabled via the debug menu. You just can't get into or leave a vehicle unless you're on terrain that is normally passable. The only exception to this is that if you are on standing on water you can use the Hydrofoil.)

I ran into some Edge critters early on but sadly never found any spot to reliably spawn more of them.

I also ran into a Leviathan and decided to go toe-to-toe in melee attacks for the heck of it. They're easily killed by Death Spell. It turns out a Leviathan has enough hit points that Seth eventually gets Maelstromed into needing a heal resulting in me using a sol dew.

There was a spot that would reliably barf up Bio-Plant formations. Blue Rappies also turned up.

Then an LW-Addmer spawned and I was scratching my head trying to remember if they're vehicle-only.

The very next encounter was a 4xForced Fly formation confirming that yes, the game was throwing vehicle formations at me while I was on foot. It's a good thing Raja wasn't around. Just the hint of that many Flame Bolts might give the poor guy a heart attack.

On a quick note, Leviathans are vehicle-only for Motavia. You won't encounter them by walking over the ocean with collision disabled. You have to be in the Hydrofoil... or glitch the game like this.

After much running around I finally encountered Infant Worms that could spawn Sand Worms. Most of the Infant Worms couldn't. (There are two versions of Infant Worm in the enemy stats table. One can spawn a Sand Worm when alone, the other cannot.)

As I encounter more reliable aberrant results I peek at the debug menu and jot down some coordinates. This is just a fraction of what's on Dezolis but the mountain range is huge and it's easy to get turned around. The areas are also tiny boxes, 2x2 or 4x4 tiles so finding them is time consuming. This is just a sample and not intended to be in any way a representative list of what's possible.

x: 01f0 y: 0bd0 and x: 0040 y: 0c00 - Vahal Fort bots
x: 01f0 y: 0c00 - sword cave phantoms
x: 0040 y: 0bd0 - Garuberk Tower formations
x: 0050 y: 0ba0 - musk cat cave formations
x: 0a50 y: 0a40 - yellow/blue rappies
x: 0ac0 y: 0a80 - Hewgilla

This glitching appears to be pretty safe. I crashed once when triggering an encounter and considering I was at this for several hours that's actually pretty damn good. (Trust me, PS IV will happily lock up if it runs into something unexpected during battle loading.) Other then the possibility of dying there were no long term effects from doing this.

Want to know where the out of bounds areas are? That's simple. Look at this map. Any place that is rendered as noise on it will trigger the encounter glitch. Most of them just call the most basic enemies on Motavia (which I'm assuming happen to occupy the first values and thus serve as defaults) but there is quite a lot of room for other shenanigans.

BONUS EDIT (from the FUTURE!)

That glitch is kind of depressing, isn't it? Well let's take a quick look at something that does work as intended and then subvert a failsafe because sending the game into an unwinnable state is sometimes fun!

First we need to go to Mile early in the game. In fact Seth pays a visit so early on the rancher is still talking about how awesome raising sandworms are so the sandworm job isn't available yet.

The rancher is on an auto-follow routine in order to block the player's access to the ranch part of Mile. Don't ask me why the developers didn't just make the entrance one tile wide to begin with and save themselves the trouble of doing this. I guess maybe someone just wanted an auto-follow routine and an excuse to use it? The rancher's kind of slow to follow anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could use frame-precise movements to get around him.

I don't need such tools when I have the debug code. Flip that on, turn on Block and walk Seth north.

Then turn Block off.

Which triggers an immediate attack by the Sand Worm. I said before that this was early in the game for Seth and the 75 hit points he has in the screenshot above should drive home just how early. There's no way to run from this particular Sand Worm so this fight is a hopeless battle. The worms the rancher are so proud of aren't the least bit friendly, are they?

Part Six | Index

Comments

[shining-armour.livejournal.com]

Interesting...

Is there anyway to run into boss enemies like Zio or Dark Force 1-3 in places you don't meet them like those unreachable Dezoris places? Also can Sandworms use their Earthquake attack in Dezoris? Just one more thing: is it possible to fight the Profound Darkness using a vechile like editing a savestate and making the party in a vechicle. I wonder if N-Sphere could work on it (N-Sphere never fails and it's an insta-kill), that would be so fun.
Also if you defeat the first two Profound Darkness like defeat their full HP what happens?

[ladyabaxa.livejournal.com]

As far as I know there is no way for a random encounter to spawn a boss.
Yes, Sandworms can use Earthquake on Dezolis.
I suppose it is possible. I did see a blog post about someone glitching the game to fight DF3 in the Hydrofoil but it wasn't in English and using Google translate was not very helpful. I have no idea if it was legit and have not heard of anyone reproducing it.
After looking up the hex values for N-Sphere on FreshFeeling's site I have to conclude it would not work. Its element type is 14 which all bosses are immune to. (source: http://www.wrftpb.com/psiv/txt/ps4-rides2.txt)
I've never tried to circumvent the form changes in the last battle. The game would probably just end the battle and proceed to the ending cutscene if that happened. For example I know there's a glitch in FF5 that makes it possible to skip the Neo Exdeath stage (although I'm coming up short for example links right now) and that's what happens there.

[shining-armour.livejournal.com]

Oh.

Out of all enemies in the game, what enemy is hardest to find?

[ladyabaxa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's a tough question. I don't have encounter rates from in the game so I can't use those. The most work I've put in to locate one monster would probably be the Depcens I tracked down in Hahn's report.

[shining-armour.livejournal.com]

Oh.

Is there anyway way possible to make Chaz's Megid look like The PD's Megid?

[ladyabaxa.livejournal.com]

Not without way more hacking/programming ability then I have.

[shining-armour.livejournal.com]

I see.

It's not the only time an enemy different graphic for the same technqiue. When an enemy uses Shift or Saner it shows wriggly lines rather than auras.