Index Warp

Discovered by Indextic

Index warp is a trick which allows the player to warp to any regular owl statue in the game without having to activate the statue. The main requirement for performing the glitch is that the player has hit and activated the Hidden Owl Statue.

Other Owl Statues

It is also important that no other Owl Statues are activated. Having any Owl Statues activated other than the Hidden Owl will stop this glitch from working.

Performing the Glitch

After these two conditions are met, the glitch can be performed. Press START to bring up the pause screen and go to the map sub-screen. Once on the map, place the selecting cursor on the map area corresponding to the owl statue you wish to warp to from the table below:

Cursor ValueWorld Map LocationOwl Statue/Effect
0Great BayGreat Bay Coast
1Zora HallZora Cape
2Romani RanchSnowhead
3Deku PalaceMountain Village
4WoodfallClock Town
5Clock TownMilk Road
6SnowheadWoodfall
7Ikana GraveyardSouthern Swamp
8Ikana CanyonIkana Canyon
9Goron VillageStone Tower
10Stone TowerDungeon Entrance (Softlock)

Note that these map positions will need to be unlocked by going to that area on the map. So for example: in order to unlock the Romani Ranch spot on the map so that the player may Index Warp to Snowhead, the player needs to have visited Milk Road or Romani Ranch at least once in their playthrough. This will make it selectable on the map.

At this point, unpause and play the Song of Soaring. The Song of Soaring cursor will automatically be selecting the Owl Statue on the map from the table above. Pressing A and soaring to this point will allow you to soar to the statue normally, as if you had hit the owl.

Due to the Great Bay Owl Statue having the Cursor Value 0, it is the default position for Song of Soaring and therefore Song of Soaring will automatically take you to this Owl without having to select the world map.

It is worth noting, while the Song of Soaring menu is up, pressing any direction on the control stick will crash the game.

Explanation

Normally, when no Owl Statues have been hit, playing Song of Soaring yields a message explaining that you must hit an Owl Statue in order to soar anywhere. Hitting the Hidden Owl tells the game that there is at least one activated Owl Statue, and therefore it can bring up the Song of Soaring menu.

Hidden Owl's Soaring Menu

(Originally discovered by GlitchesAndStuff)

Normally, when playing Song of Soaring, the game places the cursor at the first activated Owl Statue it can find on the map. Since the Hidden Owl statue doesn't have it's own map index (as it can't be warped to and it isn't a regular owl statue) the Song of Soaring menu has no point to select. Instead, the menu just places the cursor at the default cursor position (Great Bay).

Changing the Soaring Cursor Position

(Discovered by Indextic)

This default cursor position is normally Great Bay but the cursor position value can be changed. Thanks to the fact that the Song of Soaring map menu and the Pause Screen map menu use the same byte for the cursor position, the Song of Soaring's default cursor position can be changed and manipulated by changing the cursor position on the Pause screen map and unpausing. This allows for all 10 owl statues to be accessed, as well as another out-of-index option which softlocks the game. Whenever you enter a new area, the world map/song of soaring cursor defaults back to zero (Great Bay Coast).

Increment or Decrement the cursor with Z and R

If you highlight a location on the map, then move the cursor onto the Z or R buttons, the cursor will be set to -1 and 11 respectively, which both correlate to Great Bay. It's possible to "move" the cursor higher and lower by closing the pause screen while Z or R is selected, play the Song of Soaring to open up the Song of Soaring Map, then open up the pause menu again. This causes the game to highlight a fake location, and you can move again to Z or R (whichever one you moved to first) to select a new location. Most of these values will softlock when you attempt to soar to them.

Text Overflow effect

Discovered by Fasch

Playing song of soaring with certain Index Warp values also causes the game to load glitchy destination text, which can be very long (thousands of bytes) and overwrite addresses beyond the normal text box contents. Most of the addresses you can write have purely visual effects, such as messing up the text box or HUD.

Opening the Debug Menu (original method, Soar Index 8057)

Discovered by Exodus and Fasch

This allows you get any inventory item, mask, boss remain, shields, equipment, song, stray fairies, gold skulltula tokens, and up to 9999 rupees.

Much faster method to open the Debug Menu (Soar Index 73)

Discovered by Exodus, Fasch, and MrCheeze
Last updated 06/19/2020 – Exodus