faq  and bug info

Q: What does Stasis Suit do and how do I activate it?
A: It is activated by waiting in a crouching position for a short time (technically 105 frames). I’m hoping some players will notice it activate when they crouch to farm bugs. While it is active, enemies and some environmental effects pause until it is disengaged, which happens when you fire a beam/missile or lay a bomb, or when you run out of missiles which are drained over time.

Q: What’s the deal with Piezo Suit?
A: It triggers every time Samus takes at least 90 contact damage, resetting the accumulated count each time it triggers. Note that heat and lava damage do not count towards the total.

Q: Boss X is very difficult! Why is it so hard?
A: Each boss was designed so that a player of intermediate skill, plus some experience battling the boss, could beat it with 3 e-tanks, 15 missiles, 10 super missiles and 10 power bombs, and nothing else unless an item is found in that particular boss room. If you struggle with a boss, either look for more health, more ammo, or more major items that might make the fight easier. For example, Phantoon is much easier when you have Space Jump. 

Q: This path is very difficult! How do you expect me to go that way?
A: In general, if you are having an unpleasant time, try going somewhere else instead. It is an open world, so you never have to commit to anything. If you are dying a lot, it’s your choice whether to explore somewhere else and get more items or to continue struggling and gain more practice with the obstacle. Do what is fun for you.

Q: What’s the deal with the rumbling that happens sometimes after a boss is killed?
A: After you defeat 3 bosses, a rumble effect triggers and the planet ceases to rotate, locking in whatever weather effects are currently active. After your 6th boss, there is another rumbling, and the planet rotates again, but faster. 

Q: Just how fast is the planet rotating?
A: Each quartern lasts 27,000 frames. In real time this is about 7.5 minutes. So a whole rotation is about 30 minutes. When the planet speeds up near the end of the game, it rotates twice as fast.

Q: How many items in total?
A: There are 60 items: 8 e-tanks, 1 “reserve”, 20 missiles, 8 supers, 8 pbs, and the rest are the standard major items save for X-ray. 

Q: I notice that the items needed to access bosses are different depending on the time of day. That’s very frustrating. Why did you design the hack this way?
A: Ultimately the time of day changes must be meaningful in some way, in particular meaningful to the routing, as the main goal of the hack is to offer a dynamic routing experience with high replay appeal. If bosses could still be accessed with the same items at any time, there would be very little suspense in reaching the boss / critical room within some time limit. Because the items you need are time dependent, your optimal path and boss kill order also depend on your speed, so you may play the hack multiple times and be forced to improvise differently each time. If you find it difficult to remember what item you needed at a particular place and time, I recommend taking notes. 8 x 4 = 32 different states preceding bosses are not easy to remember and there is no shame in writing things down. Some compromise was made with some states not hard-requiring any item, but being much easier with one. I wanted to do this with some states but not the majority of them, otherwise high-skill players would lose the suspense of time-dependent routing.

Q: The overall room design feels rather tight and claustrophobic. Why is that?
A: There are two things going on here. One is due to the way the time event states update when you pass through doors. Because you must go through a door to load a change in event states, it’s best for the player to be moving through doors more often than usual, otherwise there would be awkward instances of spending several minutes in a single room without the weather or time indicator changing. The other reason is due to my own inexperience combined with risk aversion because this was created for a contest. As this was my first hack, I was not sure how room data was being stored and how much space I had to work with (to be honest, I still don’t have a complete understanding). I was genuinely concerned I would run out of space because so many of my rooms have 4 event states. Therefore I decided to restrict myself to mostly rectangular room shapes with very few wasted tiles offscreen. Ironically, I believe one of the ways rom space is most restricted is by enemy data, and I was not stingy in packing rooms with enemies. If I were to build this hack from scratch, with the knowledge I have now and outside the pressure of a contest, I would still design rooms on the small side to trigger plenty of door transitions, but I’d make more oddly shaped rooms like Terminator from vanilla.

Q: Why did you change the name of this hack?
A: Unfortunately for me, I did not realize that the revolution of a planet specifically refers to its rotation around a sun, not its own rotation about its axis. It’s pretty cringe to make this mistake but I forgive myself and I’m sure familiar people in the community understand I was tying to avoid using the name Super Metroid Rotation, which belongs to a popular hack. 

Q: What inspired you to make this hack?
A: I believe the inspiration came from having a turbulent sleep schedule where I’d wake up early some mornings to exercise and in the same week stay up very late on the weekends. The idea initially came to me one early morning looking at the sunrise on the horizon. Of course I was already thinking about the prompt from the oatsngoats contest, which was “uninhabitable planet”, and I knew I could make something for a planet that has a super fast day cycle.
But then there’s the question of why did I find this appealing enough to commit to. The joke answer is that I wanted to find a way to put fog everywhere, hell runs everywhere, suitless water everywhere, and spikes everywhere, all at once. The real answer is that I love complex systems where optimal solutions are difficult to discover. There was also a curiosity about the idea - is it any good? I didn’t just want to make a hack, I wanted to know if this idea had potential, and I could not know unless I made it.

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If you notice a bug I would love to know so I can fix it if it is serious. Here’s a list of bugs I already know about and have no motivation to fix:

Unresolved bugs:
Power bombing near bomb blocks sometimes behaves strangely, doesn’t destroy every block and also temporarily allows Samus to pass through them, which can result in softlocks when ammunition is depleted. I don’t know what causes this, and I noticed it happens even when I don’t apply my ASM to my project. Be a little extra careful when you have a single power bomb left.

It is possible to get jammed inside a solid block when Piezo Suit grants a stored shinespark. This only happened to me a single time, so it must be very rare, but it’s possible when you get hit while in a 1 tile high tunnel. It’s rare enough that you should play fearlessly as if it never happens, but it is known.

Overdrive (Reserve Tank) can still be turned from auto to manual. This does not stop it from draining over time and granting fast charged shots. Not removing it from the pause screen was pure laziness. I considered allowing pausing consumption of the tank while in Manual mode but that was far too powerful.

I swear sometimes I’ve had low health but the low energy beep was not triggered.

Vortex Jump’s message box fills up the screen completely for some reason I’m not terribly concerned with. It very likely is specific to Draygon’s room.

In rare cases Wave Beam’s ability to destroy spikes can bug out if you are rapidly switching between firing the beam and missiles.

If Stasis Suit is triggered, then Samus enters a new room that has a gate (blue gate, green gate, etc) in it, the barrier part of the gate will remain invisible but still solid until time is unfrozen.

The hit that triggers Piezo Suit to store a Shinespark skips actually dealing the damage to Samus. This was originally unintended, but I prefer to keep it this way to encourage masochistic speed strategies.

Sometimes weird stuff will get drawn near the upper right corner of the HUD. I haven’t looked into what causes this. I think I’ve noticed it happen in Super Metroid Impossible as well.

Sometimes if you have Vortex (Space) Jump equipped and keep jumping in the air, you will stop triggering the Space Jump sound. Screw Attack seems to sound fine, however.

There’s some dirty graphics effects right after the final boss. I’d like to figure out how to prevent this for future hacks but it’s not critical enough for me to delay uploading this hack another day.


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Thanks for playing!

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