Uploaded November 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago

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In my current draft of the All Brushes route, Moon Cave is delayed until after Oni Island by doing CC Skip. This allows us to get Mist Warp before this part of the story, saving some travel time.

Unfortunately, there are some caveats. The fastest way to get to Moon Cave is to Mist Warp to Kamiki, watch the Orochi arrow cutscene, then MW to Shinshu, which skips picking up Kushi and shortens the travel time. Because we never enter Kamiki from Shinshu, we never watch the cutscene which shows the full moon, which you're intended to watch before the Orochi arrow cutscene.

When you skip the full moon cutscene, you can still progress normally. However, if it turns night while you're in Shinshu after completing the Moon Cave, the full moon cutscene will play right afterwards, regardless of your position in Shinshu. This causes the day/night cycle to be stuck in eternal night. This is an issue because it prevents us from repeatedly cycle day/night in order to race Ida quickly to get the gimmick gear. Moreover, if we then bloom a sapling (namely, the Kamui sapling), the game will softlock. This is probably due to the blooming cutscene attempting to set the time to early day while the game is stuck in night.

In order to avoid this issue, we either need to race Ida without day/night cycles (something I still have to time), go out of our way to watch the full moon cutscene on the way to the Moon Cave (what this video is about), or race Ida earlier in the game.

Unfortunately, we can't have to defeat Spider Queen before we can race Ida the first time, defeat Orochi before we can race him the second time, and defeat Ninetales before we can race him the third time. This means that we basically have no good opportunities to race Ida earlier. even once.

It might end up being faster to do Moon Cave at the intended time after all...