BEN% TAS in

Rerecords: 19,403
length: 23:44.03333 (85,442 inputframes)

The goal of BEN% is to get the elegy of emptiness statue underwater. This category begins from a race file meaning that I already have ocarina, deku mask, and 101 rupees in the bank. All clock town area cutscenes are cleared as well.

The biggest challenge to me in making this TAS was the routing and planning. The most difficult part of the routing was of course the in-game time management. The Curiosity Shop is not open until 10PM (or technically 9:59PM) which posed a major problem. Because of this, deciding which grotto to use became problematic. For a TAS, using the swamp gossips grotto would save a bomb shop trip, and allow me to skip part of the monkey's text in deku palace. The drawback to this is a lower bomb count and having to wait outside the curiosity shop for a short time. The benefits of the ocean gossips grotto include a better bomb count, and better in-game time. I ultimately chose ocean gossips, but I thought the in-game time benefit would be more significant than it was. I'm really not sure which grotto is actually faster for a TAS of this category, but I can't imagine it makes that much of a difference.

For the most part, I think this turned out quite well in the end and I am pleased with the result. There are some interesting time-savers I used in this as well that I'd like to mention.

- The jump in East Clock Town can be made without a jumpslash, it's just really precise.
- The grotto alternate exit was done in one less hover than it would be on console by backflipping onto a seam at the top of the grotto and sidehopping into the neighboring grotto.

- After catching bugs on the beach, I drop a bomb. This is because it is faster to force the bottle out of Link's hands than to wait for him to put it away, since it is impossible to play the ocarina while Link is putting away an item.

- In Clock Town, the business scrub cutscene will not play while Link is ESS shuffling, so I can take a tighter turn by HESSing past the flower.

- Not really a timesaver, but sidehopping off of stone tower and into the tunnel at the bottom is the same speed as a bomb recoil into the tunnel, so I save an explosive for later.

- There is no way to carry a HESS over the little mote in Ikana Castle, so I opt to convert it to a normal ESS instead of cancelling my momentum completely. Normal ESS like this is also still faster than backwalking and sidehopping.

- Spacing the bombs out more than normal for the hover in the well reduces lag, and seeing as I need to wait for tatl anyways, it really doesn't matter too much how long the hover takes

- Shooting a bomb with an arrow causes it to instantly explode, allowing for a faster deathwarp.

- Very precise bomb recoil for igos du ikana early. This allows me to curve the recoil towards my destination, and halt my momentum to prevent me from flying back too far. This also required the long jump on top of the sun block, there was literally no way to get up there and clip fast enough to shield the bomb without it. It still saved about a second over the jumpslash recoil.

- When you kill an enemy, there's this weird effect that happens where there is a white flash and you can't do any inputs for 4 frames. This also pushes back when tatl tries to talk to you by 4 frames. By killing both of Igos' minions on the same frame, I only get this effect once.

- For some weird reason, it's not possible to cancel the deku stick jumpslash animation by spinning the control stick. I can still cancel this animation by taking damage, so I let Igos hit me when I do my 3rd jumpslash.

- Igos has 14 health, so I do 3 deku stick jumpslashes (12) and finish him with a quickdraw sword jumpslash (2) so that I can cancel the recovery animation.