Mokaygee | (Part 5) Pikmin 1 A-Button Challenge Day 7 @Mokaygee | Uploaded December 2017 | Updated October 2024, 7 hours ago.
Part 5! Booby-trap the A button! The goal of an ABC is to minimise the number of times you press A during the whole run.

I was gonna go to DS next but I'm still testing things. I guess it's nice to finish up FN beforehand. Skip around at the end for some advanced out of bounds shenanigans.

A presses:
Land in the area
Withdraw blues

Notable actions:
Collect parts without worrying about the fire.
Clip OOB and run OOB.
Push libra down, including some wacky libra-dropping mechanics. This is actually optimal, as it skips a pushing section.

This has nothing to do with the ABC but at the end, I clip OOB and explore what happens if you idle in the void. First, I show what happens if you lie down and enter the abyss, even standing up. It shows that there is a floor there. I call the section with floor below it "the abyss" and any section where there is no floor "the void". When you stand up, you upwarp to a common max height, then with some clever movement I fling myself at high speed away from the map, deep into the void.
If you wait long enough you can make olimar turn around and shake his fist, as if to say "I'm annoyed you aren't playing the game and wasting my time!" (to me it looks like something else ;) ). Normally you can't lay down while falling. It turns out if you fall for long enough you will enter the idle animation, and then lie down. This kills all your momentum, and you drop like a stone. Then, still falling, you can stand up again. Weirdly, this resets your whistle pointer height.
By the way, I found no way to walk on the floor of the abyss, only lie there. My theory is that when the libra falls into the abyss, it can reset, but when it falls into the void it does not reset the next day.

I'm proud of how well everything worked in this day.

This is a TAS, in this case meaning Tool Assisted Superplay. I use an emulator to use savestates and frame advance if needed. TASing pikmin optimally is difficult and time consuming. Sometimes I will choose to simply use savestates instead of optimal play, for the sake of getting the first run through of the challenge done faster. If there comes a point where I can only save an A press with optimal TASing, I will. I don't want this to take months if the result is only slightly cleaner.