Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Episode 3 of random text over unrelated footage of dragons perching
Just a small video on the dragon's "perch positions." Probably not super interesting on its own, but I felt it was worth documenting in case I come back to it.
For context, the dragon doesn't move at all while perched. It simply flies down to the top block at 0,0 until it's within 1m of the top center of it and stops. And won’t move from this "perch position" until it leaves again. It can still turn around to look at you, which moves the smaller green hitboxes around, but its main position stays exactly the same. Which, fwiw, is located at the bottom center of the big white hitbox, and is what I show on the graphs.
Now, this would leave a whole 2m diameter sphere of places where a dragon's "perch position" /could/ be. But since the dragon takes a pretty predictable path when landing, I figured a while back that there'd be some sort of pattern to them. Not to mention that they stop right at the target, which they all try to pass over anyway.
Regardless though that's pretty hard to prove/investigate without either a full dragon fight simulatinator3000 or a lot of patience, of which I had none. But after spending a week or so losing brain cells trying to recreate the whole dragon fight(did you know the dragon can use old targets from phases its not even in? Cuz i sure didn't!), I figured I'd test this out.
The results were fairly neat I suppose. Most of it isn't super surprising, but still fun and novel. The movement is almost identical to normal dragon movement, it mainly just gains angle momentum faster, so I suppose the two nice lines are to be expected. Plus they're mostly mirrored across all perch directions, since the end is (almost) one big circle. The positions are scarce towards the center of the sphere tho since the dragon is only moving like 0.25m/t, which is why they're hollow. It also gets the arch shape since once the dragon goes down below the target, it accelerates back up towards the target, essentially cutting them off below the target. This also causes them to bunch up near the bottom since every dragon that overshoots/gets an extra swoop ends up in that same area.
Something that did surprise me though were the weird bunches throughout the arches. I put this video off for a while just because I couldn't figure out why they exist, but idk maybe it'll be obvious to someone else with better experience. My best guess is just that somehow the different swoops form it, but I don't know why that would be the case or how to test that. Or what else to test so idk.
It also makes sense that certain seeds would have have some areas more common/scarce than others, since different seeds/terrain can have different height differences between perch node/target and the actual fountain/0,0 target. This can make it more common for the dragon to land during certain parts of a swoop, which determines which direction it'll be facing/approaching from. This height difference will also vaguely correspond to different areas on those arches too, cuz idk intuition? and dragon descends slower as it approaches its target ig?. Insta-perches are fun too since they're all approaching in basically the same way, at the same heights, even for multiple perch target heights.
Either way fun stuff i suppose. I mentioned yaw and tickle spots here a little bit because it's what got me interested in this initially. I made a video on a perched arrow insta-kill a while back(youtu.be/OaIesw4T7YE), but it seemed that getting close to the tickle spot was more difficult than I anticipated. So I thought maybe if there was a strong enough pattern to this it might be possible to predict where it was. Whether or not you can is kinda eh, but at least I got some fun facts out of it.
more speiciofioacially, the tickle spot is always 0.5m from the dragon position in the direction of the dragon's yaw(aka the center of the body hitbox). And since the dragon is usually flying towards its target, its yaw is usually facing towards the target as well. This leads to the tickle spots being much more condensed than the actual positions. Obviously if the dragon changes its yaw after perching that gets messed up, but I don't think current setups let it anyway. Yaw is also pretty fun because it lets you group the positions up by which way the dragon is facing, potentially letting you narrow down where the dragon position is even further. But again, probably not better than anything else
idk tht is all oki i hope ur world is spinning nicely today
also i didn’t proof-read/watch any of this so if something is wrong it’s actually my brain’a fault for not reading my mind
Episode 3 of random text over unrelated footage of dragons perching
Just a small video on the dragon's "perch positions." Probably not super interesting on its own, but I felt it was worth documenting in case I come back to it.
For context, the dragon doesn't move at all while perched. It simply flies down to the top block at 0,0 until it's within 1m of the top center of it and stops. And won’t move from this "perch position" until it leaves again. It can still turn around to look at you, which moves the smaller green hitboxes around, but its main position stays exactly the same. Which, fwiw, is located at the bottom center of the big white hitbox, and is what I show on the graphs.
Now, this would leave a whole 2m diameter sphere of places where a dragon's "perch position" /could/ be. But since the dragon takes a pretty predictable path when landing, I figured a while back that there'd be some sort of pattern to them. Not to mention that they stop right at the target, which they all try to pass over anyway.
Regardless though that's pretty hard to prove/investigate without either a full dragon fight simulatinator3000 or a lot of patience, of which I had none. But after spending a week or so losing brain cells trying to recreate the whole dragon fight(did you know the dragon can use old targets from phases its not even in? Cuz i sure didn't!), I figured I'd test this out.
The results were fairly neat I suppose. Most of it isn't super surprising, but still fun and novel. The movement is almost identical to normal dragon movement, it mainly just gains angle momentum faster, so I suppose the two nice lines are to be expected. Plus they're mostly mirrored across all perch directions, since the end is (almost) one big circle. The positions are scarce towards the center of the sphere tho since the dragon is only moving like 0.25m/t, which is why they're hollow. It also gets the arch shape since once the dragon goes down below the target, it accelerates back up towards the target, essentially cutting them off below the target. This also causes them to bunch up near the bottom since every dragon that overshoots/gets an extra swoop ends up in that same area.
Something that did surprise me though were the weird bunches throughout the arches. I put this video off for a while just because I couldn't figure out why they exist, but idk maybe it'll be obvious to someone else with better experience. My best guess is just that somehow the different swoops form it, but I don't know why that would be the case or how to test that. Or what else to test so idk.
It also makes sense that certain seeds would have have some areas more common/scarce than others, since different seeds/terrain can have different height differences between perch node/target and the actual fountain/0,0 target. This can make it more common for the dragon to land during certain parts of a swoop, which determines which direction it'll be facing/approaching from. This height difference will also vaguely correspond to different areas on those arches too, cuz idk intuition? and dragon descends slower as it approaches its target ig?. Insta-perches are fun too since they're all approaching in basically the same way, at the same heights, even for multiple perch target heights.
Either way fun stuff i suppose. I mentioned yaw and tickle spots here a little bit because it's what got me interested in this initially. I made a video on a perched arrow insta-kill a while back(youtu.be/OaIesw4T7YE), but it seemed that getting close to the tickle spot was more difficult than I anticipated. So I thought maybe if there was a strong enough pattern to this it might be possible to predict where it was. Whether or not you can is kinda eh, but at least I got some fun facts out of it.
more speiciofioacially, the tickle spot is always 0.5m from the dragon position in the direction of the dragon's yaw(aka the center of the body hitbox). And since the dragon is usually flying towards its target, its yaw is usually facing towards the target as well. This leads to the tickle spots being much more condensed than the actual positions. Obviously if the dragon changes its yaw after perching that gets messed up, but I don't think current setups let it anyway. Yaw is also pretty fun because it lets you group the positions up by which way the dragon is facing, potentially letting you narrow down where the dragon position is even further. But again, probably not better than anything else
idk tht is all oki i hope ur world is spinning nicely today
also i didn’t proof-read/watch any of this so if something is wrong it’s actually my brain’a fault for not reading my mind
