The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

This page details bugs of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

Fourth Day Glitch#

The fourth day glitch is probably the most well-known glitch in Majora's Mask. If you look through the telescope at the Astral Observatory on the Night of the Final Day, then exit the telescope right as the moon crashes, the game will roll over to the day after the Final Day without a moon crash.

The reason why this glitch occurs is quite simple. When the game detects that a rollover from the Night of the Final Day to the next day is about to occur, it sets the current day to 4, then sets up a cutscene fadeout that transitions to the moon crash cutscene after it completes. Setting the current day to 4 is a hack to deal with some visual issues that would occur otherwise, as the position of the moon as well as whether the Clock Tower is open or not depends on the time of day on the Final Day, and without this hack, those things would revert to their initial position during the fadeout.

Normally, Link is frozen and cannot interact with anything while a cutscene fadeout is happening. However, the telescope is coded as a special case in Link's actor, where pressing B will exit the telescope and return to the Astral Observatory by setting up a room transition. It is possible to press B after the current day has been set to 4 but before the cutscene fadeout finishes, which causes the code to overwrite the transition to the moon crash cutscene with its own, and thus effectively overrides the moon crash, instead ending up in a playable Fourth Day.

This glitch also works with the telescope in the Pirates' Fortress, which runs the same code. It was fixed in Majora's Mask 3D by checking if it's the fourth day, and disabling the B button to exit the telescope on that day.

Extra Owl Statue in Clock Town#

In West Clock Town, one can look down the path that leads to South Clock Town to see the side of the Clock Tower with the Owl Statue in front. If one heads there it will trigger the loading zone and load the actual South Clock Town map.

Believe it or not, this Owl Statue that you can see from West Clock Town is actually not the same Owl Statue that's present on the South Clock Town map (which explains why it's always in its "deactivated" state, even if you activated the Owl Statue in South Clock Town). It's a unique, fully functional Owl Statue that cannot be reached by any normal means within the game.

However, by using glitches (such as the "Bombchu Hover" glitch) one can bypass the loading zone on the way and reach this Owl Statue. It can then be activated with the sword (doesn't play a cutscene but still works) and it will stay activated because this Owl Statue has its own bit in the bitfield that the game uses to keep track of which Owl Statues have been activated.

However, as this Owl Statue wasn't actually meant to be ever used in normal gameplay, activating it has a few consequences...

Unusual respawn location ("Mayor's Warp")#

Normally, saving at an Owl Statue creates an Owl Save that returns you right back to where you saved your game, in front of the Owl Statue. This particular Owl Statue, however, doesn't have a respawn point set as it was never meant to be used; as such, saving at this Owl Statue and then reloading the file causes you to respawn at exit 0000, which is the Mayor's Residence.

For some odd reason, the game doesn't seem to be able to reset the "owl save" flag when loading such a file, and as such you will always respawn in the Mayor's Residence when playing the Song of Time until you turn off the console.

Also, for whatever odd reason, using this glitch with a particular combination of collected items causes the game to calculate a bad checksum, as such the save file won't be recognized and will appear blank on the file select subscreen, effectively erasing the game save.

Unusual warp point#

Normally, activating the Owl Statue does nothing to the warp subscreen that shows up when playing the Song of Soaring. This Owl Statue does not have a warp location set, so it will not appear on the subscreen at all.

However, the game behaves oddly when this Owl Statue is the only Owl Statue activated. Normally the game prevents you from reaching the warp subscreen if no Owl Statues are activated at all, however activating this particular Owl Statue is enough to enable the warp subscreen. Once you do this, you'll notice the warp subscreen is empty and the cursor is, by default, where Great Bay would be.

Trying to use the analog stick to move the cursor in this state will crash the game as the game tries to move the cursor to the next warp spot but there are none, so the only thing you can do is press A to warp. Interestingly, since the cursor on the map subscreen of the pause menu and the cursor on the warp subscreen use the same variable for storing their last location, moving the cursor on the map subscreen will make the cursor on the warp subscreen appear on that position instead, allowing you to warp to various locations in the game that don't always match the location the cursor actually points to. This is used by speedruns to quickly traverse the game world right from the beginning.

The location list is as follows:

Interestingly, if you select Stone Tower on the world map and then play the Song of Soaring, the cursor will be placed on the borders of the map and will show the name Stone Tower until it goes up to Zora Cape, but when pressing A the game asks you if you want to warp to Dungeon Entrance, if you say yes the game will softlock on Link's ocarina animation.

Deku Stick Texture Bug#

In-game, the Deku Stick model is rendered with a brown-black pattern. However, this is not the intended appearance, it's actually the result of a bug! The game tries to load a 16x16 texture for the Deku Stick model, but the texture itself is only 8x8, so the game ends up loading garbage data corresponding to the data stored after the Deku Stick texture.

While in Ocarina of Time this data was (part of) the texture for Link's hair, it's slightly more interesting in this game. It's unused leftover data for Link's model, originally used on the Equipment Subscreen for the preview shown when changing Link's equipment, rotating Link's limbs appropriately based on the equipment. Even though Majora's Mask does not have an Equipment Subscreen, the data is still there, and due to being conveniently positioned right after the actual Deku Stick texture it ends up being inadvertently used to "texture" the Deku Stick (which also explains why the Deku Stick looks different in Majora's Mask compared to Ocarina of Time).

Metallic Torch's Corrupted Texture#

To do: Find out what's actually causing it to happen. Taking a look at the Decomp may help: https://github.com/zeldaret/mm

In every version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the base of these metallic torches loads corrupted texture data. It changes when Link changes his form via masks, which suggests it's loading Link's texture data and not the texture it's supposed to, which should be identical to OoT's. This was fixed for the game's remaster for the Nintendo 3DS, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D.