A Link to the Past
Rupee Pulls
Rupee pulls are special sprites that can be pulled for 4 tiers of prizes based on certain conditions. Most of them are located on the overworld, with the only exception being the Mario painting in the east snitch's house in Kakariko Village.
In Any% NMG, the optimal rupee route gets two sets of rupee pulls (blue and red) to help acquire the rupees used to pay Kiki and access Palace of Darkness. This rupee route is around 6 seconds faster than the next best route involving the two 50 rupee chests in Sahasrahla's closet. The ideal spots for this are both trees on the overworld, which has led to the commonly used terms tree rupees or tree pulls.
How they work
For determining what to drop for the pulls, the game keeps counters for two events: Link being damaged and enemies defeated. Both start at 0 from power-on/reset, and when a rupee pull is activated, both counters will be reset to 0. Reference the table below to see how the counter states map to the different rupee values.
| Tier | Conditions | Prize |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 kills | Nothing |
| 1 | 1-3 kills | 4x green rupees |
| 2 | 4+ kills with damage taken | 4x blue rupees |
| 3 | 4+ kills with no damage taken | 4x red rupees |
Sources of damage include:
- Enemies
- Bombs
- Spike floors
- Spike blocks
Not counted as damage:
- Pits
The kill and damage counters are 8-bit, so they will wrap around back to 0 after 255. They are stored in work RAM and not cleared during save and quit, so they will persist across games in the same session. But as they are not in save memory, they will be clear after a console reset.
The player could in theory setup the counters, save and quit to file select, and then start a new run with the counters manipulated to some advantageous value. This technique is known as RAM preparation or RAM prep, and it's banned in nearly every leaderboard category for ALttP speedrunning.
Locations
Rupee pulls are sprites, and the game reconfigures sprites on the overworld as the player progresses through a mechanic called game state. It's recommended to have some familiarity with that article before trying to understand the following information.
Rain state
There are no rupee pulls available on the Light World overworld during the rain state, which is the community's term for the first two game states.
During the rain state on the Dark World, the sprites used will be ones from the Zelda-rescued Light World. This means that the rupee pulls that are normally present in the Light World after delivering Zelda to the Sanctuary will be present in the Dark World. This is even the case when the placements are nonsensical due to very different tilemap and sprite layouts. For example, the castle courtyard rupee pull is usable on the corresponding Pyramid of Power screen.
Zelda Light World
This refers to the Light World that you have after delivering Zelda to the Sanctuary, ending the rain state.
Agahnim Light World
This refers to the Light World that you have after defeating Agahnim1.
Dark World post rain state
After ending the rain state, these are the rupee pulls that will show up on the Dark World overworld.
Underworld
There's only a single rupee pull that exists on the underworld. Because it's on the underworld, it's unaffected by game state concerns and can be used at any time.
