Paper Airplane Corruption in Animal Crossing

[@Hunter-R.]

I'm admittedly more of a software person than a hardware person, so there a few technical inaccuracies throughout this video. The description includes corrections, as well as a technical explanation for why these airplanes duplicate. The general point of the hardware-related aspects in this video was to just provide some context on how this glitch can occur and not to be a wholistic explanation. Thank you!

[@Porygonal64]

2nd correction: Pokemon Sapphire does not have battery backed save data. The game only uses the battery for the Real Time Clock.

[@Hunter-R.]

@@Porygonal64 This is corrected in the description. I'll update this pinned comment to refer to this as well.

[@chonkydog6262]

You are wrong in this video, a byte isn't always made up of 8 bits on a lot of hardware, you are meaning to say octet

[@timohara7717]

Bruh these paper airplanes are like animal crossings evil biome

[@link_team3855]

​​@@chonkydog6262 this is the first i have heard of 8 bit != 1 byte

[@wgwebb]

If the paper airplanes never softlocked you, throwing them would be kind of fun.

[@WBonni23]

Why doesn’t this have any reply’s

[@Theknifejug]

If's and butts and all that

[@mugfat]

@@Theknifejugbutt means the human behind, i think you meant but

[@kgrfirdjy]

I would throw a fit.... and my gamecube as a kid. As an adult, I would be curious and want to see how it happened, as I love how glitches and devices like the Code Breaker can hack the game, possibly getting around that glitch.

[@link_team3855]

​@@mugfatbut butts are better than buts

[@user-bkey]

might be one of the funniest glitches ive ever seen imagine opening up your animal crossing one day and seeing that you got a deadly paper airplane infestation

[@Bidziilla]

I do a lot of reverse engineering on the animal crossing games too! :) Another fun fact about the paper airplane is that the reason your game softlocks is that the programmers never implemented animations for picking up or throwing the airplanes. It uses a blank dummy ID instead for the animation. The animation it calls doesnt have much associated with it since it was not even used. The lock is supposed to last until the player animation ends, but i assume the ID it calls doesn't have any data, the game hangs. Simply writing the idle animation into the player data will unlock the controls. You can swap the animation for the axe swing, and it looks cool and doesnt lock the game! I still have the code i made for this fix somewhere.

[@Hunter-R.]

That’s awesome! It’s interesting that picking up the plane doesn’t softlock even without a proper animation, but the act of throwing it does. Swapping the animation for the axe swing is pretty clever to make it appear like you’re throwing it. It’s really cool having a tight-knit community of modders and engineers looking at these games.

[@Bidziilla]

@@Hunter-R. I love finding other people who actually put the effort into these games to make the most out of it for ourselves. :) The code for the fix: 044e4f98 38800026 Also, correction, for picking it up it seems the game actually doesn't have any animation at all for it, doesn't even call anything. I'll definitely check the source code for more information, but I can only pull what information I can from it because it doesn't have anything that was left as comments by the devs lol

[@Daltonisntabot]

​@@Hunter-R. I know this was over a week ago, but, the reason it doesn't softlock, as Bidzilla said, is likely because it doesn't call an animation. It doesn't call an animation, so, the game doesn't try to play it and so you stay "Idle." When throwing the paper plane, it tries to call an animation that wasn't finished or no longer exists so it can't complete the animation, let's say "throw." Throw can't be completed so you can't get to the last frame and loop back to "Idle." You probably know this, but, just a bit more detail on animations and maybe for anyone who checks this reply section. (Also, algorithm.)

[@Bidziilla]

​@@DaltonisntabotThere's surprisingly quite a bit of detail regarding this in the games source code leak. I wouldn't be surprised if animations were made, but the game used a dummy animation ID anyway. I do not have the knowledge to physically add a new animation ID to the game with that data without recompiling the ROM.

[@asra-5180]

​@@Bidziilla any luck finding the code btw?

[@Vivi-xn9iz]

I can't wait to pay my debts at the same time as an event occurs while a cosmic ray flips the specific bit that makes paper airplanes spawn

[@neon_spotlight]

A single ray of cosmic radiation traveling into some poor kid's animal crossing save to flip a single bit and spread data corrupting paper airplanes throughout his town: We do a little trolling

[@vampyroteumint]

Better than hitting the kid and giving him cancer, I guess

[@renakunisaki]

A bit flip is assumed to have caused the infamous Tick Tock Clock Upwarp too. Mario warped a distance consistent with changing one bit of his position.

[@Hunter-R.]

Indeed! Although that being a bit flip occurrence is still unlikely. I'm a big fan of Super Mario 64 speedruns and technicalities as well -- pannenkoek2012 is one of my favorite content creators on this platform.

[@NintendoSunnyDee]

I've got an 8 year old comment on his video that keeps getting replies and it brings me back each time and reminds me how lobg it's been. I was doing taxes while watching that video, funny enough, but had to pause just to hear the rules because I wanted to try it myself! It didn't last lol

[@timohara7717]

​@@NintendoSunnyDeewow

[@whyareyoulookingatthislol]

the community consensus is not that the bitflip it's from a cosmic ray but that it's the result of a hardware malfunction / cartridge tilt. dota teabag had to keep the cartridge in a certain weird position for sm64 to start. i want to believe though

[@BierBart12]

It's still insane to me that ONE particle of cosmic radiation can do that kinda thing. Inside a house, going through many barriers. The universe is computer hostile

[@AlexTenThousand]

Note, Pokémon games on the GBA used a battery for the purpose of running an internal clock, not to save data - they use flash memory.

[@Hunter-R.]

Correct, I used the wrong graphic in this video. I’ll add a correction to the description!

[@RawrFizzy]

I never expected cosmic radiation to be a potential issue in Animal Crossing

[@kingnightmarevin]

One misdirected particle abd boom your town is now covered in mold like paper airplanes

[@Totally_Bonkers]

K.K. Slider telling you your town data is corrupted brings scary vibes, personally making me feel similar to anti-piracy or similar error screens

[@JoeLSNC]

Gen z don’t shit yourself or reference creepypasta when video game errors happen challenge (impossible)

[@daveslamjam]

@@JoeLSNCcrazy amount of assumptions you're making here. i think the comparison is quite apt, since there is a pretty famous anti-piracy screen with kk slider telling you that you have a pirated game.

[@JoeLSNC]

@@daveslamjam doesn't matter it's still not scary lol

[@daveslamjam]

@@JoeLSNC people find different things scary 🤷‍♀️ i personally find that some game glitches can be very frightening

[@JoeLSNC]

@@daveslamjamy'all are like that one episode of spongebob where him and patrick were scared as hell of the kiddy ride

[@TranscorpHR]

"Hey, Apple!" "What?" "Paper Airplane!" *reality falls apart*

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

Hamsters were introduced in New Leaf, and I haven't seen any videos saying that this paper aeroplane continues to appear in any other games, so you may have to rethink about what you commented.

[@TranscorpHR]

@@Most-sane-deltarune-fan i wasn't talking about the villager (which i locked in a metal institute) i was talking about like the annoying orange apple from annoying orange

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

@@TranscorpHR I see. But that's still no excuse to throw shade at a former villager of mine that I loved very much.

[@TranscorpHR]

@@Most-sane-deltarune-fan he looks deranged can you blame me

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

@@TranscorpHR SHE is a FEMALE hamster.

[@safebox36]

What I love about spontaneous bit-flipping is that, despite how rare it is and a lot of the cases are believed to be caused by single-event upsets. It's practically the universe going "fuck this bit in particular" because the cosmic particle interacted with that one component in a capacitor after somehow avoiding interacting with any other celestial body or atom on its way there... It's also been recorded ruining a Super Mario 64 speedrun and may have been responsible for a plane in clear weather believing there to be a storm and trying to correct itself.

[@discycat]

Can you give the video/documentation of it ruining the Mario run? It sounds really interesting

[@_pancakes1734]

@@discycat the mario 64 incident is actually a widely spread misconception. during a speedrun race, an upwarp occured in tick tock clock, which caused mario to gain a significant amount of height for no visible reason. because this glitch could potentially help with the a-button challenge, pannenkoek posted a bounty ($1000 iirc) for someone to find a way to repdroduce it. unfortunately, the glitch was all but certainly due to a bit flip. while it has been speculated that a cosmic ray might have been the cause, most people in the mario 64 community see this unlikely, because the speedrunner's cartridge & console weren't well cared for and had numerous other glitches due to poor connectivity. it's most likely that this is the true cause, though technically a cosmic ray could've been responsible.

[@qwertykeyboard5901]

DRAM uses capacitors, Flash memory uses transistors with "floating" gates that trap a charge.

[@Fennecbutt]

Yup, all of the information at the start just kind of reduces all types of memory to how dram functions. This dude should've done more research.

[@Fennecbutt]

Additionally he talks about electrolyte as if dram capacitors are electrolytic, they are not. There's so much misinformation in this video but it doesn't seem intentional, just terribly researched...

[@KiraSlith]

It's explained in this manner for simplicity's sake. It's the same reason we still mark power terminals backwards to the actual flow of electrons.

[@Lupen69]

"Yeah, the sun blasted my game and made this empty plot of grass into an unused paper airplane item that multiplied exponentially to the point of rendering my game unplayable" Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction

[@ducky_vt3982]

Underrated channel. I really wasnt expecting to hear any new information on this 20+ year old game but here we are.

[@asialsky]

A small correction: There are currently ZERO commercially available 2TB microSD cards. The most we have is 1.5TB, currently.

[@LilacMonarch]

Plenty of "2TB" cards exist though...don't fall for them, they're scams

[@ily8528]

I usually dont comment on videos, but as a computer science/cyber security major this is the BEST simple explanation of how data is stored. I dont even play animal crossing, but you just earned a sub!

[@JohnSmith-xv1tp]

As a software engineer, just be aware, the capacitors that RAM sticks have don't actually hold memory for years. They drain in a second to a minute after power loss depending on device. Solid state flash memory that actually does last for years is instead made of floating gate transistors. Besides that, I agree. The overall explanation on how memory works was good. Good luck with your major

[@JGHFunRun]

It's always the cosmic rays ...except for when it's actually something else

[@rompevuevitos222]

Cosmic rays are like the butterfly effect. Possible, but VERY unlikely to be the actual cause.

[@cashewmilkfan]

6:47 the capacitors inside of most memory chips don't have electrolyte. But their data retention does still suffer with temperature extremes.

[@Hunter-R.]

Yea I have a few corrections in the description, but I wish I would’ve made this video a lot clearer.

[@that1niceguy246]

Could it be that these paper planes spawning was a kind of test they used while creating the game for the balls that randomly spawned? Because they seem similar in that way but the paper planes would be easier since there are no animations (almost) also the duplicating almost seems like randomly testing what code can do and somehow ending up with that mechanic.

[@Hunter-R.]

It's apparent that the paper airplane was an item you were so supposed to obtain normally, but was scrapped for some reason and never finished. The leading theory as to why it's programmed to duplicate endlessly is that the airplane, for some reason, was used for testing flowers and weed spreading, since it works similarly by spreading to each adjacent spot. I don't think anybody knows for sure though...

[@halflynx]

My friend lost their town due to this stupid airplane. They were pissed that they lost a save they had 43 hours, and they broke their TV.

[@emilyjwatchesstuff]

imagine being brianmp16 who was in the process of becoming the first person ever to 100% the game (and was very nearly there) 😭 he managed it in the end but my heart sank at that bit

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

@@emilyjwatchesstuff At which bit?

[@lefthandedscout9923]

The same thing can happen in the GBA Pokémon games via Bad Eggs spawned by hacking the game and inputting values the game doesn't recognize for PC mons. They were also known for multiplying and spreading through your box tiles like an infection, and while they wouldn't crash your game, they did ruin saves by being impossible to get rid of, taking up box space and there's some stories of them overwriting Pokémon you had in the PC, deleting them forever, or corrupting saves. You do habw to wonder why these glitched or corrupted items spread, though - like, what part of the programming in either Animal Crossing or Pokémon has items that duplicate and spread themselves exponentially? Why do they do that if they weren't programmed specifically to do that?

[@prismavoid3764]

The explanation in the description is so nice, I've always been so curious why the airplane duplicates ever since I first learned about this. Also weirdly, this is the first time I've ever heard someone mention you can destroy the airplanes by dropping something else on top of them, neat!

[@LavenderRebellin]

Hopefully someone, someday will make a mod to the game that doesn't softlock your villager after throwing a paper airplane and makes it to where the paper airplanes don't duplicate because it definitely seems like a cool mechanic exclusive to this game much like the balls that show up randomly.

[@kingnightmarevin]

It's because of an animation being invalid, there is a code to fix it

[@midleno8364]

Much like the fucking what now? 🧐

[@rentworth]

@@midleno8364 harvey balls attack ◐◔

[@jan8265]

Someone just randomly explained bits to me in 3 minutes, while me being in to tech for decades and programming since a year, always assumed it to be a bit to complicated to think about.

[@Nesdude42]

You took a technical topic that would normally bore me to tears and made it entertaining. Great work.

[@0rphaneye]

Some day in the future, we're going to discover what truly happens when these paper airplanes go without limits, by simulating it on a supercomputer. Infinite paper planes with no lag.

[@haemorange]

i love this topic, it’s my roman empire

[@JimMilton-ej6zi]

It does suck that in most cases a bit flip will have no consequence at all, but despite that the game doesn't let you keep trying to play it regardless and instead takes all control away from you so it can force you to erase something you're heavily attached to. Or at the very least they could try to have a bit more space taken up to have extra saves in case a rollback is needed.

[@BlueKhaotix]

If this were to appear in your town, could you trap one by filling all adjacent spaces around it so it can't spread? And if this works, is it safe to keep in your town as a cool novelty?

[@xxkadieexx]

BrianMp16 did this in his 100% run and it worked!

[@Jiggy...]

Gamma rays strike again!

[@NaraMidnight]

It is criminal that you don't have more subs.

[@AnniChu]

I agree!!!

[@kinasakuraba]

Omg, I have that corrupted save KK error on my original memory card 😭 there's some weird kind of closure knowing exactly what happened. I was wondering if it was similar to the battery in a Pokemon game dying.

[@misoupfnf]

you're so underrated! one of my fav youtubers now

[@SlimyPennies]

this video made me actually existential like damn everything we have can just. fuck up. all our precious memories. idk how to explain it but it fills me with this immense dread... haha but otherwise i really enjoyed the video and the rest of your videos!!

[@sillypinkmoth]

i mean like human memory at its max only persists for 80 years on average

[@lazula]

This is why you keep backups of data, and the reason we have fault-resistant technology like ECC memory and RAID!

[@durdleduc8520]

most modern hardware & software are designed with bitflips as an understood concern; it takes very specific, very rare bitflips to actually corrupt anything nowadays. the majority of bitflips that ever happen are probably completely inconsequential (one pixel of an image having a slightly different hex color, for instance). there was once an election in Belgium that was miscounted due to a bitflip though.

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

@@durdleduc8520 "there was once an election in Belgium that was miscounted due to a bitflip though." Really?

[@ZachAttackIsBack]

If you get a bit flip, it's probably a sign that you've been playing too much Animal Crossing.

[@Most-sane-deltarune-fan]

You can NEVER play too much Animal Crossing! NEVER!!!

[@centxiv]

i've been playing too much ffxiv i had a stroke when you said "special cells"

[@FrostedGeulleisia]

as a sidenote, the message you've shown from Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire is actually incorrect: in those games (and by extension: Emerald) the battery only keeps track of the time, and amount of days passed, which is used for handling daily events and berry tree growth as well as initial RNG seeding. I don't remember if the original JP text was also incorrect or if this's just a localization error, but it's still something to think about. Only the first two generations (the ones on the GB(C)) actually use battery-backed saves, while FireRed and LeafGreen lack batteries entirely (however some of those carts have a history of the 1 Megabit flash chip failing, for which the game actually has a unique error message). I hope this clears up at least some confusion.

[@Hunter-R.]

Yep, I realized the mistake after recording! This is corrected in the description - though I know a lot of people likely won't see it there.

[@FrostedGeulleisia]

@@Hunter-R. ah, my bad still, imo you did a great job explaining the phenomenon in an easy to understand manner. Keep it up! Though now to think, why didn't they checksum dropped items? Since, when the game says the town data is corrupted, that basically means "whoops, the checksum is incorrect". But then, with just how many dropped items can be in a town.... yeah I can see why: it'd take forever to calculate the checksum, both when saving and loading. I would share my stories regarding bitflips but alas, I wasn't fortunate enough to experience any, even with how much I've used my OG 3DS or how I'd sometimes leave my launch model Switch with CFW running doing some grinding for me for ~72 hours straight at a time. I have however seen a switch - that was running for months straight, crash. It took the person managing it several more months to get the console back up and running, hosting the same den in Sword/Shield as it always does. In my friend group we joked about the "end of the world" as soon as that bot's stream came back because of how long it took. It's kind of sad, really. Modern computers are advanced enough that most bit flips will either be nullified (EEC in RAM comes to mind), cause a checksum failure, or crash the unit at best. At least we can mess around with that potential using tools like the Real-Time Corruptor.

[@FrostedGeulleisia]

Oh, right as I hit send I realized one more thing. I remember the case of someone on a Discord server I frequent, who brought up a weird occurrence with their Emerald cartridge: when facing down, the blinking arrow that indicates there's a warp in front of you, would show up at all times when facing that direction, even when there was no warp or even any collision on the tile you're facing. Turns out: this was caused by a bitflip in the ROM chip, which just so happened to cause an interesting and mostly harmless effect. On the topic of flash-based saves, though: one person I know possesses a cartridge of Platinum (I believe? could have been Diamond or Pearl though) where overwriting the save in any way would silently fail, causing the file to load back up at the same exact point. That I'd say is caused by the chip running out of write cycles, which I have personally experienced on one of my SD cards, so: this's something else to worry about with flash storage.

[@Hunter-R.]

@@FrostedGeulleisia Fascinating bits of information, thank you for sharing! I'm not too familiar with the Pokémon games outside of e-Reader homebrew, but there are instances of bit flips in a lot of other games as well so it's no surprise Pokémon is no different. I think one of the most famous bit flip theories is in regards to Mario 64, but they are still extremely rare. I have also personally never experienced a bit flip in Animal Crossing even with a vast amount of playtime.

[@KratosAurionPlays]

When in doubt blame cosmic rays.

[@rob5300]

Small correction: All data is still stored in binary in storage device (and in RAM/ROM). We just use hex for the human readable version of this data as its well suited for modern binary data.

[@afxgiu]

Came for the funny airplane, stayed for the amazing explanation on how computers work lol

[@theharbingerofconflation]

As a german I highly appreciate that you know about the Zuse Z1 and don't spew crap about Turing inventing the computer

[@durdleduc8520]

don't pit two bad bitches against each other

[@indignasmr7379]

I just discovered your channel and I'm fascinated by these videos! Something suuuper nitpicky, but at 1:32 I think it would have been neat if you had chosen to not use interpolation to zoom in. Seeing it become pixelated would have helped me intuit that you were showcasing each pixel to be stored. It's the little things (:

[@Hunter-R.]

This is actually not intentional interpolation, but was just me being lazy and not finding a high quality enough photo or changing my editor settings to show each individual pixel on a zoom in. I do agree with your feedback, though! I'm still pretty early on with editing and publishing videos, so I'll try to improve in the future.

[@indignasmr7379]

@@Hunter-R. I thoroughly enjoy videos about wringing the jank out of old games and explaining it. I'm looking forward to more from you.

[@wannacry6586]

SD cards are flash memory which works using floating gate transistors. The charge will dissipate over time which takes ~10 years after which the information will be lost

[@madgadgetss]

aw, it's such a cute little paper airplane, why would it do that.. 🥺

[@GunSpyEnthusiast]

what I learned: give my memory card sunglasses.

[@zacharymacaroni7649]

i'm in grad school right now studying these bit flips. specifically, how an attacker can cause them deliberately for fun and profit.

[@jayp.7197]

I was just watching BrianMp16 doing his 100% run of the game and he had an offhand comment about the sun causing this issue. I laughed a little, thinking he was doing a bit, but nope he was being serious. That is terrifying 😂

[@Erin-000]

Well now I want to know more about 1:23 how this special controller works if not with binary. How does it 'read' and 'change' the charge of the transistors? Great video by the way!

[@thinkingfubuki]

3:52 - "It looks like you'll have to erase your town data. That's, like, a total drag." Yeah, if the universe is corrupted and needs to be restarted, that is indeed a total drag

[@jewelthejaguar742]

I learned more from this than I did in my online AP computer science class

[@fluffalpenguin]

The cosmic ray thing is one of those things that sounds like it's way too cool to be real and definitely isn't the thing, but it is, genuinely, a real thing that actually happens in real life. It's exceedingly rare if you look at one bit. It's statistically impossible, if you look at one bit, really. Still kinda impossible on the scale of Gigabytes, but it's starting to be a thing that happens once in a while. On the scale of petabytes? Exabytes? It's happening constantly. There's some bit somewhere getting flipped by cosmic rays every second of every day, but most of those bit flips are either corrected because they were in something with error correction, irrelevant because they aren't being read by anything, bulldozed over by some kind of write before they ever get read, or in a (sub)system that nobody cares about so it breaks and nobody notices. Basically cosmic rays are extra cool because they really do the thing even though they sound WAY TOO COOL TO BE REAL

[@avasam06]

1:50 maybe using a RAM stick wasn't the best example for "Can hold data for years" haha (ik this was addressed in the description but I still find it funny when taking that still image out of context)

[@Hunter-R.]

Trust me everyday I want to remake this video due to the rushed inaccuracies… 😅

[@b.lightyear3455]

Hi, I stumbled across your channel earlier today and it's great. One question: Do you have any idea why they might be programmed to duplicate like that? It seems so bizarre that that would be deliberate functionality. I'm baffled.

[@Hunter-R.]

The leading theory is that the programmers, for some reason, used this paper airplane as a means to test natural flower/weed spreading. The duplication of the paper airplanes works similarly to how flowers spread where they duplicate to adjacent squares, so it's possible they reused this code here and allowed spreading every reload instead of over time with no cap. Thank you for the comment!

[@laserkiwi37]

​@@Hunter-R.imagine programming a test item and you find out you made a paper plane infestation that kills islands and is only caused by the console failing at something

[@ginomctony6773]

you also cant really give the nintendo devs any crap for this error happening cause i really doubt they were thinking people would still be using the console 15 years later, especially not the same one they first bought.

[@spritestudios_trademark]

Random thing but I love the way you say "paper air plane" I don't even think you say it different from normal I just like the word

[@orektez]

i ended up getting corrupted saves all the time on harvest moon a wonderful life and animal crossing when i used 3rd party memory cards

[@Totavier]

Same thing happened with me... Damn you Dreamgear memory cards!.

[@MatthewCenance]

I think the Pokémon Sapphire Version game on the right at 2:04 is a counterfeit... Also apparently most games on Nintendo 64 that don't only save to a Controller Pak, such as the shown Paper Mario Game Pak, used either an EEPROM or Flash RAM chip to save, which doesn't use batteries to save. It was surprising to first find that out. Game Boy Advance games also commonly use FRAM, EEPROM, or Flash RAM chips to save. None of those chips require power to save data. Only a few Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 64 games use SRAM, which do require batteries to save data.

[@Alex_192.]

At 1:21 the capacitors’ terminals(?) were both connected to earth.

[@bloxrocks5179]

and thats why self correcting error detection is important

[@izzy3550]

idk why, but i watch this at least once a month. i love the paper airplane

[@anthonyrodriguez6515]

Random thought, how about other controller inputs when softlocked? Maybe a second controller? Mario 64 technically uses 2 controllers if you count moving the camera in the end credits. If not, how about other controllers? The Gamecube had a fair amount of other controllers like the DK Bongos, the mic from Mario Party 6 or even the GBA cable, I don't know, just some random thoughts. Great content, keep it up!

[@itsnoteasybeinggreen7076]

Intro and Outro Song Credits: "K.K. Cruisin' " by Mesmonium

[@officialvatican]

i’ve been trying to figure out how computers work and store memory for years i’ve tried looking it up and i could never understand and my dad works in cybersecurity and he’s tried explaining it to me and i’ve never been able to grasp it yet somehow a random animal crossing glitch video is what made me finally understand

[@dundee6402]

In general video games are actually a great way to learn about programming and hardware learning since it's a very visual and playful medium.

[@fieratheproud]

Minor correction on the battery-based saves: Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald actually didn't do this. Gen 1 and 2 did, but the Hoenn games used the battery for keeping the in-game clock going. Source: my copy of Emerald has had it's battery depleted for several years now but my save file is still intact, and also that's what the games itself says whenever I boot it up again. As a side note, I don't think FireRed and LeafGreen had a battery in them. At the very least, there's no in-game clock.

[@HeroMakes]

just discovered your content, loving what i'm seeing so far! subbed!

[@trithedoge8205]

I’m a bit sad you didn’t mention how it happened to BrianMp16 during his 100% without glitches or nook codes but a phenomenal video nonetheless

[@Hunter-R.]

He was referenced slightly, but yea I wasn’t able to get in contact to ask permission to use his name then. He’s featured prominently in my turnip / stalk market video, though.

[@KingBowser9898]

I don't know if you know this, but BrianMp16 almost lost his save data because 1 bit flip.

[@omegahaxors9-11]

I get why throwing a paper plane would be an issue, but what unintended behavior would cause it to duplicate??

[@hatad321]

It's speculated that they used the airplanes to test weed and flower spreading, since they spread the exact same way.

[@PRT95]

When you mentioned how bit flips can occur, this was how a Super Mario 64 speedrun was set - some cosmic radiation had caused a bit flip during the runner's run, giving them the exact boost needed to warp Mario to the exact floor needed to complete the run, as he had jumped unusually high. The technique has yet to be replicated since then, as you'd need to be insanely lucky to have cosmic radiation hit the game again at the right time to pull it off, and based upon the odds... you're probably more likely to win your country's lottery jackpot. That's how rare it is. Likewise with the 2 documented cases of paper airplanes in vanilla gameplay of Animal Crossing GCN. Those two players/memory cards were hit with cosmic radiation, and the fact it's happened twice is uh... something. (I'M NOT COUNTING HACKING, THAT'S DIFFERENT) To reference Doofenshmirtz: "If I had a nickel for every time a player had paper airplanes spawn in their town without hacking, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird how it happened twice."

[@kurgans]

My gamecube for some reason corrupts everything on the memory card if I try to play Amazing Island and save anything on it. Probably related in some way to unintentional bit flips

[@extradipboneless]

I never grew up with Animal Crossing. I never played this game for more than 10 minutes. I can't stop watching these videos, they feel like sweets. 🤤

[@beardalaxy]

good thing is that, nowadays, if this ever happened to you then you could at least fix it.

[@pinkerino123]

how do we fix it bc now im paranoid pls lol

[@nintendosage77]

Back when PSO was online, and before Sega clamped down on it, hackers would often FSOD players, and vey easily corrupt their memory cards, along with everything stored on them. Those hackers loved tormenting other players, and Sega did a very poor job of policing it, despite paying them for the server to play PSO online. I lost my first Animal Crossing town to a hacker, as they corrupted by memory card. I have to believe that's what did it, because why else would the card get corrupted right after an FSOD? For those who don't know FSOD, it was "frozen screen of death" where they'd freeze your game, and very likely corrupting your memory card in the process, losing not only all your data from PSO, but anything else saved on that card, like villages from Animal Crossing.

[@Sonictheoofhog4]

Poorly taken care of GameCube = deadly paper airplanes that cause the world to end

[@foloan1209]

Curse of the Wright Brothers

[@Gameboy_1992]

This guy is the StryderX7 of Animal crossing

[@koopdawhoop.]

wasnt there at one point a random cosmic ray from the sun that flipped a bit in a SM64 cartridge and changed marios positionsl value

[@heartthepuppetqueen3027]

Ever since I saw this video, I now have occasional nightmares about the beta paper airplane because i haven't checked on my towns imin a long while. I better go see or I'll have the paper airplane corrupt my towns

[@pentagonyx]

oh my god the cosmic rays the mario 64 speedrun...

[@ButterFromDiscord]

This is why the companies buy error correcting ram

[@internetpeasent1374]

Do you think you could showcase all of KK’s corruption dialog? I’ve been searching everywhere and still can’t find a full video of it.

[@Hunter-R.]

By his corruption dialogue, you mean the dialogue K.K. says when your town data is corrupted? Is it unique every time? I’m not entirely sure.

[@internetpeasent1374]

@@Hunter-R. I mean the dialogue he says when the game detects corrupted town data.

[@doe9000]

the start reads like a poorly thought-out creepypasta

[@TrekDelta]

1:33 Never use image filtering ever again! Nearest Neighbour = GigaChad!

[@neighborhood_k]

Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars

[@palmtopturtle]

have there been any documented cases of this happening? like during a speedrun or something

[@Hunter-R.]

BrianMp16 had this occur to him while streaming every day to 100% the game. In other games, it’s theorized a Mario 64 speedrunner had a bit flip occur which caused Mario’s position to be offset vertically and save a bunch of time. There’s a lot of videos on the latter if you’re interested.

[@EllipticGeometry]

Flash/EEPROM (presumably used in these memory cards) has limited erase cycles. Could that be part of why speedrunners tend to run into this, aside from having greater cumulative chances stemming from extensive play time?

[@nerfspartanEBF25]

Will comment: The copy of Pokemon Sapphire you showed as an example of battery-backed saves is wrong. Pokemon games on the GBA used non-volatile flash memory. The battery is actually for the real-time clock that allows things like tides, berry growth, random events, and the like to work. You can verify this by opening a copy of FireRed or LeafGreen and noting the lack of a battery, yet they can still save, or by playing any Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald cartridge that has had the battery die. However, Red/Blue/Yellow and Gold/Silver/Crystal DO use battery-backed saves, though Gold/Silver/Crystal also use the battery for the real-time clock as well, so you're far more likely to find cartridges of G/S/C that are unable to save than you are of R/B/Y.

[@Hunter-R.]

Yea, I corrected this in the description and tried to point this out in the pinned comment, but I appreciate all the extra details!

[@Netfreak8]

so they're like a digital cancer?

[@jadethenidoran]

Can bit flips cause other items to appear on the ground? I'm guessing there's 15 other objects that might appear if another bit in a ground tile's contents is flipped. IDs 4000, 2000, 1000, 0800, 0400, 0200, 0100, 0080, 0040, 0020, 0010, 0008, 0004, 0002, and 0001 are the ones that could spawn from a single flipped bit on an empty tile, assuming items exist in all of those IDs.

[@KittyCatKayden]

Will dropping stuff on every paper airplane solve the bug and return everything to normal?

[@Hunter-R.]

Yep, dropping items on them and reloading the acre will delete them. But you have to do this before it duplicates too many times and crashes the game when you get near them.

[@fireswarmdragonp]

Actually pokemon on GBA does not use batteries for save data, only for clock data.

[@MeeBacon]

1:18 4 bits is a nibble

[@polocatfan]

I still don't get why bit flips don't count as a hardware modification. The hardware was LITERALLY modified. They ban runs for other things out of a runners fault, so why not this???

[@LilacMonarch]

If you wanna keep a few in your town without risking your save, you could just surround them in signposts right?

[@beatrice777]

ur vids r pretty good :)

[@novelezra]

Perfect creepypasta material

[@jamebo9390]

What would happen if instead the bit flipped to give some value other than 0x8000? i.e. 0x4000? Would the tiles be filled with some other sort of item them?

[@isanyonehome]

i wish the cosmic rays would bless my gamecube tf up🙏

[@JeraldTheBEAR]

I really liked this video. Good job on it

[@Hunter-R.]

Thank you so much! Means a lot.