Here at Gaming Reinvented, we’ve seen some truly insane Breath of the Wild glitches over the years. There’s Memory Storage and Inventory Slot Transfer, which let you keep the Bow of Light and transfer items to a new game. There’s Wrong Warping, which lets you enter dungeons and Divine Beasts early, skipping huge parts of the game in the process…

And then there’s ARMS, a glitch that literally turns Link into Superman.

But as it turns out, there’s something far crazier waiting in the wings. Something in BotW that could potentially make all those things look like a joke.

Item Stack Underflow.

Yep, as shown by a new video we posted today, this glitch is insane even by BotW standards. You can create meals that sell for up to half a million rupees. Make weapons with attack power stats in the thousands. Heck, you can even do things like add unused items back into your inventory or close the game as if it was quit from the Home Menu.

It’s not quite arbitrary code execution levels of busted, but it’s damn close, and the nearest thing to such in a Switch game.

So what’s the setup? And why isn’t it being used in speedruns right now?

The Setup

Basically, there are a max of 420 item slots in BotW. If you reach this number across all tabs, then you’re unable to collect any more items.

This is tracked by a secondary inventory list called list2, which has a counter (mcount2) that tracks how about item slots are left to collect. This number goes down from 420, and if it reaches 0, you can’t get any more types of items/item slots.

IST lets you break this by making it so the counter doesn’t match up to the actual number of slots remaining, theoretically letting you go past 420 item slots.

Doing this breaks the game, and can be used to run code it’s not meant to.

So, in theory, breaking some slots with 420 items and collecting a new type of item should be enough to set up ISU, and do all these crazy things with some careful inventory manipulation.

In practice, it’s not that simple…

The Issue

Since the Switch uses a system called Address Space Layout Randomisation to randomise where things like functions are in memory whenever a game loads. So the chances of your ISU setup actually affecting the thing you need it to (rather than just crashing the game) are extremely low.

How low?

Well, the odds of success start at 262,051:1

Yeah. Apparently, those are worse odds than being killed by a meteorite.

More advanced setups just make the odds even worse. The Markiplier one (yes, it’s named after the YouTuber), which sets the value of firstItem to over 6 million…

Has odds of between 1/500,000 to 1/68,670,726,601

So, if you live in the UK, you are over 1,500 times more likely to win the lottery than succeed. Ouch.

And somehow it gets even more incredible. If you manage to set up a bunch of ISU gizmos and sequences, then you can theoretically do things like overwrite your entire inventory. One of these setups literally involves calling RandomBytes, and praying it works as expected.

The odds of that?

1/10^10^9

That is so incredibly low that if you spent just 1 hour per attempt, the heat death of the universe would likely have occurred 10^999,890 times before you even succeeded once. You could technically rewrite your save file in game without any third party tools this way, but you’d need to be lucky on a level that makes Phineas & Ferb or Gladstone Gander jealous to pull it off.

A Surprising Conclusion

Still, there is some hope here. Despite the incredibly low odds of success here, there are some people in the speedrunning community who believe we’ll actually find a consistent method to use this glitch at some point, at least where a TAS is concerned. In fact, they’re currently working on a specialised fork of the Suyu emulator specifically to make a more accurate testing tool that could allow them to manipulate ASLR and csrng in said TAS, and hence use ISU without modding the console.

So, despite my negativity in the video, there’s a chance we may actually see speedruns use that at some point, at least the tool assisted ones. And despite my jokes to the contrary, there is indeed a non-zero chance it might show up at GDQ or some other event in future too.

Still, that’s ISU for you. It’s an insane Breath of the Wild glitch with potential behind our wildest dreams, and probably the nearest thing to ACE that will ever appear in a Switch game, but the chances of it working are so low that it’ll almost certainly never be done in real time on unmodified hardware.

Regardless, what did you think? Is this possibly the craziest glitch in the history of the game? What do you think the chances of it actually being usable are?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below, on social media, or on our Discord server today!

Source:

The Impossible Reality Breaking Glitch That Obliterates Breath of the Wild (YouTube)