Lamp

The lamp (also sometimes called the lantern) is a Y-item available early in the game. It has a passive effect where it activates a light cone around Link whenever he's in a darkened room. Actively using it spawns a flame that can light torches.

Location

The lamp has three different locations:

• The chest in Link's house
• The chest in the secret passage after the Uncle hallway
• The chest in Zelda's cell

The first of these that's opened by the player will give Link the lamp. After Link has the lamp, the other two chests will contain a blue rupee.

Description

In darkened rooms, having the lamp in your inventory will illuminate a cone shaped area around Link. If you don't have the lamp, the room appear be completely black. Most speedruns are forced to collect the lamp for progression through the throne room, for lighting toches, and/or for setting up glitches, so blindly navigating dark rooms rarely comes up in speedrun contexts.

Pressing Y with the lamp equipped will spend 4 MP and spawn a flame in front of Link that's capable of lighting torches. In the original SNES release of the game, the lamp flame is only capable of lighting torches. It has additional effects in the GBA release (can burn bushes and damage certain enemies).

Glitch applications

Setting search index

As part of the lamp flame's ancilla routine, some code for the magic powder is borrowed. This code writes a value to $03C2,X, where X is an offset defined by whatever ancilla slot the flame is in. This means that lamp flames that spawn in slot 2 are writing to $03C4, which is the same address as the ancilla search index.

The exact value written to the search index depends on what direction Link is facing when he uses the lamp:

Because three of these set a fairly high value (all but the right facing lamp), this is extremely useful for setting search index for ancilla misslotting glitches. Getting a lamp flame into slot 2 is straightforward and normally done by just rapidly using the lamp 3 times in a row. For magic preservation purposes, players can situationally opt to use other front slot ancillae to occupy slots 4 and 3, which will have the lamp flame spawn into slot 2 with only a single lamp use.

Lamp canceling

TODO

Bouncing somaria

TODO

Throne room interaction

In the game's opening sequence, you will reach the throne room in Hyrule Castle with Zelda. In the back of the room is an ornamental shelf that Zelda will help you push aside to reveal a secret passage to the Sewers.

If Link doesn't have the lamp in his inventory, Zelda won't help Link push the shelf, and the player will be unable to progress normally. In runs that don't use major glitches, this sets a hard requirement on getting the lamp prior to reaching this point in the run. For more glitched runs, the lamp is often theoretically skippable but usually this idea is counterproductive in practice. This is due to the lamp's high utility with navigating dark rooms and lighting torches combined with its sneakily powerful glitch applications. And because it's available right away in Link's house, it's very quick to grab in any route, even ones that don't immediately go and do Hyrule Castle.