Quickwarps

A quickwarp is a technique where warps between the Light and Dark Worlds can be made faster than normal by having the warp occur while the game's horizontal scroll is in specific positions. A quickwarp is 34 frames faster than a normal warp.

Technical details

The game's horizontal background (BG) scroll position is held at address $E2. A bug in the game's wave effect during the warp animation causes the animation to cut short when $E2 holds certain values. Specifically, the warp will be short when $E2 holds a value that is either 6 or 7 more than a multiple of 8. If you're watching the value in hexadecimal, this will correspond to the final digit being a 6/E or 7/F.

Given this theory, we can generate several practical observations:

• For every 8 pixels of horizontal BG scroll, there will be 2 consecutive positions that quickwarp the player.
• If the player is in a section of the screen where the background isn't scrolling horizontally (i.e. towards the left or right edges of a screen), a quickwarp won't be possible. This is because the value at $E2 will settle at 0 in these situations.
• The vertical scroll position has no effect.
• Because this depends on the horizontal BG scroll, using Link's position as a tell for whether or not you're on a quickwarp position is not always reliable. This is because Link's position relative to the background scroll is subject to change. An example of this can be seen by pressing Link into an NPC. The background will scroll some while Link's position remains still.
• Due to variances in horizontal BG scroll, how you load a screen can impact the quickwarp positions. A key example in the Any% NMG run is that the quickwarps on Death Mountain are different when loading the screen from the Old Man cave (during the Hera segment) than they are later in the run when loading the screen from fluting.

Applications

There are four ways the player warps between worlds:

1. Moving onto a portal tile.
2. Pressing Y to use the mirror while it's equipped.
3. Moving into a mirror portal.
4. Moving into the castle gate warp that appears after Agahnim1 is defeated

To know whether you're on a quickwarp position or not, you can use the quickwarp indicator in the practice hack. Category specific resources and tutorials will also usually go over quickwarp positions for the different warps throughout the run. Below are some general rules you can put into practice with a couple of the warp types.

Portal tiles

With portal tiles, you can frequently get a quickwarp just by walking into the portal from the left or right side. This is almost always worth doing, even if Link is approaching the portal from the opposite side that gives the quickwarp. Examples of this include:

• The portal north of Kakariko Village: walk into it from the left.
• The Lake Hylia portal coming from the whirlpool: walk into it from the left.
• The Death Mountain portal when the screen has been loaded from the underworld: walk into it from the right without superspeed. If you want to get it with superspeed, you'll have to approach the portal from below on a good horizontal position.

Some portal quickwarps are trickier and require the player to enter onto a central window that can't be automated in this way. Example of this include:

• The Desert portal: walk into it centered or one pixel to the right of center.
• The Death Mountain portal when loading the screen from a fluting to #1: walk into it centered or one pixel to the right of centered.

Because the Eastern portal is in a position where the horizontal scroll is locked, it's not possible to get a quickwarp while using it.

Using the mirror

With using the mirror, the player is in full control of where they're warping. There usually are setups for how to use the mirror to get quickwarps, especially in optimized categories, but there are few general rules.

One rule to stick to is that if you're emerging from the underworld and immediately want to mirror, pay attention to whether the position you're on is a quickwarp position. These situations give you a quickwarp automatically. Some examples include:

• When exiting the proboscis entrance to Skull Woods (i.e. after defeating Mothula), you're on a quickwarp position. Just don't touch the d-pad at all and use the mirror immediately.
• When exiting Ice Palace, you're automatically on a quickwarp spot.
• When exiting Misery Mire, you're automatically on a quickwarp spot.