Ocarina of Time Miscellaneous Glitches - Hidden Cave
Instructions
- As Child Link, go to Zora's Domain.
- Go to the top of the waterfall and pay to play the diving game.
- When the game starts, jump off the waterfall, swim over to the area of land in the water next to the cave, and climb on to it (see screenshot #1).
- Wait here, facing towards the cave, while the timer counts down.
- When the timer reaches 00:01, jump off the platform towards the cave.
Result
As you are in midair above the water time will run out, the failure message will come up, and Link will drop like a rock down through the water, landing on the bottom right next to the cave. Press A to get rid of the text, and quickly swim to your right and into the cave.
Note: Although it is described here as a "cave", it's really more of an alcove in the rock -- it's small, and it doesn't take you anywhere.
Explanation
Why Does Link Sink?
If a blocking message box (blocking meaning that it locks Link's movement) appears while Link is underwater, he simply floats idly. If the message box appears while Link is in midair (and if it locks his movement), he'll move into a standing pose (while in midair); when he lands, he remains in the same pose but turns to look up at whoever is talking to him. It seems that while the game will check whether he's on land or underwater when it first displays the message box, it doesn't even bother checking if he's in midair, instead preferring to assume that he's on land, and moving him into the standing pose that would be appropriate on land. Also, the game doesn't allow Link's state to change when a message box is on-screen (he can't take damage, and evidently, he also can't respond to water), deferring the changes until the message box is removed by the player.
URA Zelda Rumors
It has been widely speculated that this alcove is some sort of removed feature from the original Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time -- the original version, called URA Zelda, was never released. If, however, we make the (very generous) assumption that the Master Quest version of the game is in fact the real URA Zelda, then we can conclude that the alcove is just a random, uninteresting underwater hole.
Notes
To see it better I suggest you do one of the glitches to let you get under the ice as Adult Link so you can walk into it -- the underwater camera movement makes it quite hard to see the cave properly otherwise.
