Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

---

I’m quite surprised I’ve never seen any of this with these enemies before. I seem to remember going over them years ago, but for sure, nothing like this came up.

Smorks are a very rare enemy type in the game. They only spawn in 5-2, and even then, in only one room, over two spots. It’s actually fairly difficult to describe these guys in meaningful ways, cause there really isn’t much to say about them. They spawn when you cross their radius, homing in on your position. You then grab and throw them back at the background to hit targets. You leave, they stop coming.
Sometimes, a bit randomly, the portal that makes them spawn decides to disappear, despite you being in the radius. And it may take a while before it comes back up too. This quirk can make them a tad annoying to deal with sometimes.
This is what I always thought about them at least. Cool enemies, but with nothing special.



The footage is on JPN, but it seems to work the same on USA.

So, the big twist with these guys, is that in reality, we’re able to continuously make them spawn *even* outside of their spawning radius. To do that, we need to keep their portal open. So long as it is, Smorks will endlessly spawn.
And to have that happen, we simply need to meet one simple rule. Never have two Smorks simultaneously be alive before the game attempts to spawn another one. If both are alive, the portal will disappear.
Because you see, the spawning radius we are talking about is *only* responsible for spawning in the portal. The Smorks themselves rely on it.

Thus, with clever Smork use, you can keep the portal open, and make them come towards you wherever you want… well, some of the time. As it turns out, they decide where to go right before leaping. And they calculate where they should go relative to your plane, and your position within it. Most of the time, they’ll hit bullseye.
...But other times, especially in

tely unintended places… the trajectories are much more unpredictable. See 0:24 or 3:15.

More than being a stunt, the passage at 0:33 highlights the brand new movement capabilities granted by this knowledge. As it turns out, if the Smorks are flying fast enough, they will wander too far and despawn – I presume -. Thus, the portal will remain open.
But this clip also shows our closest attempt yet at returning back to the beginning of the room again. Doing this would allow us to respawn the giant armored Moo, and be able to verify if it drop its gems back. This endeavor has since become quite complex, I cannot go over the details here.
You can however notice how for a brief moment at 0:48, the Smorks stop coming. I went too far to the left… but as I returned back, so they did. While for some reason the portal may still be active, the Smorks are most likely instantly unloading upon spawning. Weird.

And at 1:25 and 2:05, we may have just uncovered never seen before sprites of these guys ! Like what the heck. How else would you see them ?



But the most noteworthy things by far with this knowledge, are 1:44 and 2:56.
For the first time ever, we are able to climb the disappearing platform stairs section without it being eclipse. We are also able to carry an enemy to the top, without grabbing one way ahead and wall-clipping back down.

In these two clips (both are imperfect), I show how to quickly get through the room and skip to the end. I believe the room at 1:44 can be reworked to better resemble the strategy of 2:56. Resulting in two possible time cycles in which you could perform this strategy (not exactly the same but).
The point with this, is that if we could find a way to meet this cycle directly upon entering the room, and finding a fast way of going through the stage that would lead to this cycle, we may achieve an even faster 5-2 than in this strategy : youtube.com/watch?v=kmjmbtylj_o
But it would need a lot of time and work to explore. One that I cannot provide. Plus I don't even know if these would be faster at all. But I would love to see a Smork revolution in this stage.

One thing of note : there is a bit of randomness with the way Smorks decide to move. When they spawn, they do a short animation before they can lunge. However, this animation can be skipped, and they will instantly lunge towards you after coming out of the portal.
I have no idea what causes this. it's not purely random, but I haven't grasped its rule. I know that doing different movement can change it somewhat. If you’re not aware of it, real-time or TAS, it can mess you up.
This change in spawning tempo can also bring an end to the endless respawning cycle of 2:25… but only if you sit far back there on the day cycle. During the eclipse ones, Smorks become cyan eclipses, and they all skip on this small animation completely. So there's less issues.

Probably a bit rushed, but I really wanted to get done with this one soon.
It, along with 5-2 as a whole, are extremely convoluted. I cannot do everything that I would want, but at least you have that.