So, for anybody who doesn't know, there was a weird new trick discovered in Wind Waker last week (technically Ace had it happen to him back in January but he assumed it happened because of cheats, however I had it happen on console with no cheats). What this glitch does is set a flag that removes/unloads ALL the song stones in both Earth temple and Wind temple. What's weird about this glitch is that if you perform it, it will not apply to just the file you perform it on, rather it will apply to ALL files that you currently have, or then make. So if you were to start a new game after activating this flag, that new file would not have any song stones blocking the entrances to Earth and Wind temple which means you can easily enter them early. However, if the console is reset, and the game reloaded, the glitch disappears. When this happens, all song stones that have not been broken in game yet will appear back in their proper places.
Activating this flag requires a
seemingly precise set of actions. This is a video showing my general route of how I set the flag to make the song stones disappear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdLq4ETq1pMOther people have been able to activate the flag with slight variations on this general route through Wind temple. The only steps that we currently know of that are absolutely essential are: getting chest storage, and opening the door to the room with the final song stone in Wind temple (the A press). Once you open the door, the flag becomes set and all song stones are gone.
Even though it's possible to enter Earth temple and Wind temple early now, Medli and Makar do not appear in either of their respective temples because that has a separate flag which is dropping them into the loading zone of their respective dungeon (yes that is
actually the flag). We messed around in Earth temple a little bit and realized that it is possible to complete the Earth temple without Medli! However, the same cannot be said for Wind temple as Makar is absolutely essential in the third and fourth rooms of the dungeon (planting trees). Also no, fake Makar does not exist unless Makar has already been in the dungeon. Currently this is the only thing stopping us from completely skipping Earth temple (as the only reason for completing Earth temple is to make Makar appear in the waterfall cave).
I encourage anybody interested to mess around with this. If we could find a way to do it in Earth Temple then we could end up skipping the cutscene going into wind temple which could save a little bit of time. Then this trick would be useful for RTA runs.
