Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 4 (Patreon)

Welcome, everyone, to the fourth issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone! 

Today, we are going to take a look at an oversight in the coding of the hint system in Super Mario Odyssey that allows to get certain dog-related Power Moons faster.

Take a turn off the path, find a new addition to the cast! You know that any Supper needs a Broth!

That Doggone Moon

The cowboy hat-wearing dog from Super Mario Odyssey has been in the news on Nintendo-focused sites lately. Twitter user "CometMedal" has discovered that the dog's model was actually imported from Nintendogs + Cats on the Nintendo 3DS:

The Super Mario Odyssey dog is on the left, the Nintendogs+Cats one on the right. Whole the texture seems to be a higher-resolution version of the same source file (compare the small spots on top of the leg closest to the viewer, they are in identical positions), the polygon count seems to be increased. Presumably, it took the community this long to discover this due to the cowboy hat the Super Mario Odyssey dog usually wears making it appear more distinct.

The dog, outside of sometimes being present either inside the Odyssey or inside various Crazy Cap locations, is instrumental to obtaining five of the game's Power Moons. 

In the Seaside Kingdom, Metro Kingdom, Moon Kingdom, Mushroom Kingdom and Sand Kingdom, the dog can be found outdoors. If Mario approaches the dog, it will lead Mario to a specific location and dig in the ground, creating a glowing spot. When Mario Ground Pounds in that spot, some small reward like a few coins will pop out, and the dog will follow Mario from that moment on. The dog will only follow Mario on relatively flat ground and will not cross gaps or water, meaning that in some of the kingdoms the area traversible for it will be limited. In the Mushroom Kingdom, however, the dog can access most of the level's ground.

The way the Moons are obtained is by letting the dog follow Mario until Mario reaches another one of a set of specific locations. Then, the dog will slowly approach it, dig in the ground, and create another glowing spot. However, all of those spots except one do not contain anything of much value and are essentially a waste of the player's time, especially since the dog's walking and digging animation can take up to 5-10 seconds for each wrong spot. 

Thus, the challenge becomes a tedious task of combing the area with the dog, occasionally waiting for it to dig, and hoping that the Moon was in that spot. So, it becomes tempting to ask the Hint Toad for a hint to the Moon in question. After all, the hints almost always point out the exact location of the Moon on the map, so it would become a matter of only leading the dog to that point, right?

Unfortunately, not in this case. Here I have taken a screenshot of Mario standing in front of the hint to the correct Moon in the Seaside Kingdom. However, that is not the location where the dog needs to dig.

It is the location of the actual dog.

You see, the hint marker for the dog moons is dynamic. It moves around on the map with the dog's location, just like it does for the birds that fly around most kingdoms and need to be touched to release a Moon. However, unlike being useful as in the case of the birds, this hint is profoundly useless, as the point is not to see where the dog is, but rather where to lead the dog.

Here are two more pictures that show that the marker doesn't merely show the initial position of the dog, but actually moves with it. Here, Mario and the dog are both on the eastern edge of the area with the Odyssey.

Despite all this, there is a trick here. An oversight in the code actually results in the correct position being displayed on the map - but only as long as the actual dog is not present in the scene. What this means is that if Mario enters a side area - one of the challenge rooms, a Crazy Cap store, or the Odyssey - and then the map is opened while he is there, the marker will be pointing at the location of the digging spot for the Moon.

Here, Mario is inside the Odyssey. The marker in the reticle in the center of the screen is the correct marker (if you believe this may be one of the other markers, compare it to the previous screenshots of the map). This is in fact the location Mario needs to lead the dog.

Now, Mario is back in the main level and standing in that location. Now the marker is back to showing the dog, which is why it is slightly off from the previous image. Let's wait for the dog to dig...

The hint worked! We were able to go straight to the Moon location without needing to comb the area with the dog. This strategy works in all five dog Moon locations.

If you are wondering about other dynamic Moon hints while inside side areas, the bird Moons show on the point where the bird first spawns, i.e. the beginning of the loop it flies in. While this is potentially useful to know what point to approach if one can get there fast enough after leaving the side area, in practice, the birds move very quickly and very few side areas exist where exiting it puts Mario next to a bird's spawn location. The exception is the pipe on top of a house in Tostarena leading to a room with a Moon relying on the Switch controllers' rumble functionality. If Mario exits that pipe, the bird will fly past within a few seconds from the direction outside of town, so you may try this out next time you play!

This concludes today's dog facts. Until tomorrow!

Thank you very much for reading.