Crossing the Great Sea

Description

As sailing makes up the majority of your travel time in The Wind Waker before you can obtain the Ballad of Gales, it is vitally important to optimize your sailing in order to cross the over-world map as quickly as possible. Though both zombie hovering and superswim can be used to cross the Great Sea without the aid of the sail, and in some cases are necessary to accessing areas and equipment early, they are not always the most reliable, accurate, or in the case of zombie hovering, the most most timely, unless used in a TAS.

Sailing

Sailing is tedious and may seem at some points unbearable, especially when you must travel from one end of the map to another. However, sailing, without the assistance of the Ballad of Gales, can be optimized to speed up the rate at which you can travel from point A to point B. The most common method of doing this is sail pumping. To do this, you press the button your sail is on, immediately followed by the A button to put the sail away, and then pull out the sail again to continually repeat the process until you reach your desired destination. The reason why this is so much faster than sailing normally is because each time you pull out the sail you get a small burst of speed, presumably from the wind hitting the sail, which propels you forward faster than usual. By continuously pulling out the sail, you continuously obtain those small bursts of speed over the course of sailing.

Data Collected by Phazon

NOTE: These speeds, under "Value", have not been taken from memory addresses, but rather from time comparisons of frame-perfect inputs over a set distance of one quadrant. This means that these speeds are not the values read in the game itself, but are still relative to those values to a high degree of accuracy.

Superswim and Zombie Hover

As pointed out above, both zombie hover and superswim can be used to cross the over-world map to obtain items early without needing the sail. Though zombie hover is quite slow in doing this, superswim, on the other hand, is extremely fast. The only issue(s) with superswim is that it is incredibly hard to aim and you are limited by your air meter to the distance you can travel, without hitting dry land to refresh it. For this very reason, coupled with the fact that superswim requires bottled forest water (which takes 20 minutes to expire), superswim is hardly ever used out of a TAS. In a TAS, however, superswim can be done without forest water, and made extremely accurate to get to desired destinations MUCH faster than sailing, as well as obtaining the same items early the zombie hover would be used for in a non-TAS.

So why get the sail in a Low% or TAS?

Though the above information would draw most to think that the sail would be obsolete to get in a TAS, because it would only "slow you down" , or in a Low% as it would lower the item count, this is not the case. Because you need the sail in order to open Triforce Charts, whose shards are otherwise impossible to obtain, the sail cannot be skipped as the game would then become impossible to complete.