Uploaded March 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
In this video I show some behaviors of the unused Wind Arrow.
[Edit: this item is actually the Shadow Arrow, the documentation I used for this video was wrong]
During the development of OoT, 6 magical arrows were created, because the player was supposed to use the medallions to change what arrows the bow would shoot. Later on, the idea was scrapped and the arrows were reduced to 3, but the devs had already written part of the code for the 3 extra ones, which is still in the final game in the form of Action Parameters.
Action Parameters are numbers the game uses to know what action Link should perform when you use an item: for example, Master Sword and No Mask share the same value, which is why they act the same.
In the original game, the memory after the Action Parameters table is used for pointers and memory addresses: this is why exploiting BA to use items past 62 results in a cycle of a few Action Parameters repeating themselves (zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/item-chart)
In OoT3D instead, that memory is used to store some other values, which makes it so that 75% of the bytes are zeroed, but the remaining ones can have more variety than in OoT (pastebin.com/4ReepiRU).
One of these values just so happens to be the Action ID for one of the unused elemental arrows. The item is #176, and according to the documentation on wiki.cloudmodding.com/oot/Damage_Charts the arrow is the one that had to be used with the Wind Medallion (now Forest Medallion).
The easiest way to use item 176 is to do Poacher's Saw BA while having the Gold Skulltula icon, the Shard of Agony and Zora's Sapphire, and NOT having Gerudo Card, SoT, SoS or the other stones.
All of the unused arrows visually appear as Fire Arrows, but they don't consume magic. You still can't use them while other magic items are active, but you can do the opposite (use magic while the arrow is still visible): this doesn't crash the game as it would do in OoT.
Most enemies in the game react to the Wind Arrows, even though some of them don't receive damage (e.g. armos, spikes, bubbles). Baby Dodongos ignore them completely.
As with Light Arrows forcing killed enemies to drop a purple rupee, the unused arrows also force the drop to be a specific one: for Wind Arrows, this is a small Magic Jar. This doesn't apply to every single enemy, but the majority of them will use this forced drop even if they normally can't drop magic.
Some enemies have special weaknesses/special interactions with the Wind Arrow, which are shown in the video:
-Skulltulas receive 0 points of damage, but the normal ones still attach themselves to the arrow as they normally do, so you can push them around
-Bubbles are invulnerable to it, but the Green Bubble specifically manifests a very weird behavior if struck when its fire is off: it immediately starts falling downwards, ignoring any floor collision in its path
-Iron Knuckles receive 15 damage, but they can only get hit by arrows after they lose the armor. Armorless Knuckles have 10 HP, so you cannot one-shot them with any weapon other than a Wind Arrow (also, depleting 10 HP from the enemy's health could be the strongest attack Link can do in the game)
-Like Likes die in one hit, because they receive 15 damage. Something you may not know is that they also receive 15 damage from Light Arrows (and also from another unused arrow). These attacks and the one against Iron Knuckles are the only 4 in all of the damage charts to reach 15 points, which is the highest value the damage output can be (because it's stored in a single Hex digit, or nybble)
In this video I show some behaviors of the unused Wind Arrow.
[Edit: this item is actually the Shadow Arrow, the documentation I used for this video was wrong]
During the development of OoT, 6 magical arrows were created, because the player was supposed to use the medallions to change what arrows the bow would shoot. Later on, the idea was scrapped and the arrows were reduced to 3, but the devs had already written part of the code for the 3 extra ones, which is still in the final game in the form of Action Parameters.
Action Parameters are numbers the game uses to know what action Link should perform when you use an item: for example, Master Sword and No Mask share the same value, which is why they act the same.
In the original game, the memory after the Action Parameters table is used for pointers and memory addresses: this is why exploiting BA to use items past 62 results in a cycle of a few Action Parameters repeating themselves (zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/ba/item-chart)
In OoT3D instead, that memory is used to store some other values, which makes it so that 75% of the bytes are zeroed, but the remaining ones can have more variety than in OoT (pastebin.com/4ReepiRU).
One of these values just so happens to be the Action ID for one of the unused elemental arrows. The item is #176, and according to the documentation on wiki.cloudmodding.com/oot/Damage_Charts the arrow is the one that had to be used with the Wind Medallion (now Forest Medallion).
The easiest way to use item 176 is to do Poacher's Saw BA while having the Gold Skulltula icon, the Shard of Agony and Zora's Sapphire, and NOT having Gerudo Card, SoT, SoS or the other stones.
All of the unused arrows visually appear as Fire Arrows, but they don't consume magic. You still can't use them while other magic items are active, but you can do the opposite (use magic while the arrow is still visible): this doesn't crash the game as it would do in OoT.
Most enemies in the game react to the Wind Arrows, even though some of them don't receive damage (e.g. armos, spikes, bubbles). Baby Dodongos ignore them completely.
As with Light Arrows forcing killed enemies to drop a purple rupee, the unused arrows also force the drop to be a specific one: for Wind Arrows, this is a small Magic Jar. This doesn't apply to every single enemy, but the majority of them will use this forced drop even if they normally can't drop magic.
Some enemies have special weaknesses/special interactions with the Wind Arrow, which are shown in the video:
-Skulltulas receive 0 points of damage, but the normal ones still attach themselves to the arrow as they normally do, so you can push them around
-Bubbles are invulnerable to it, but the Green Bubble specifically manifests a very weird behavior if struck when its fire is off: it immediately starts falling downwards, ignoring any floor collision in its path
-Iron Knuckles receive 15 damage, but they can only get hit by arrows after they lose the armor. Armorless Knuckles have 10 HP, so you cannot one-shot them with any weapon other than a Wind Arrow (also, depleting 10 HP from the enemy's health could be the strongest attack Link can do in the game)
-Like Likes die in one hit, because they receive 15 damage. Something you may not know is that they also receive 15 damage from Light Arrows (and also from another unused arrow). These attacks and the one against Iron Knuckles are the only 4 in all of the damage charts to reach 15 points, which is the highest value the damage output can be (because it's stored in a single Hex digit, or nybble)
