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Singular Flags

- 2.5 hearts out of 5

In many Zelda games, there are torches that you must light, or pegs that must be smashed, or buttons that must be pressed, or whatever. Generally, activating all of these devices in a room will cause something to happen: A chest to appear, or a door to open, or whatever. In Zelda Classic, you can achieve this effect with Singular Flags.

Singular Flags tell the engine not to activate the secrets on a screen until all of the trigger flags have been... well, triggered. This not only allows you to have multiple devices that can be triggered in any order, but they need not even be the same type. You could use both a hammer switch and a boomerang switch if you wanted to. But, for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll only use one type of switch: A hammer switch.

This is our example map. Draw yours to be similar on screen 00 (and don't forget to place Link's starting square!).

We're going to place a bunch of pegs, which are going to be hammer switches (i.e. smashed down with the hammer). Then, smashing them all will cause a cave to open up in the rock in the top-right corner. This will be done using both Hammer Flags and Singular Flags.

First, let's create the peg combos. In the default tileset, the tiles for the pegs are waaay down on page 36. Create one combo with the raised peg (to be smashed), and a second one with the smashed peg. Then, on the raised peg, set the inherent flag to 89 Hammer.

This means that any of this combo you place can be smashed with the hammer. However, this is not enough, as this will both trigger the secret by itself, and cause any other pegs to automatically lower without needing to be smashed! That's no good, but we'll take care of it in a minute.

Now, place a bunch of pegs so they're arranged like the following screenshot. The placement doesn't really matter, but I kind of like this arrangement for no real reason.

Next, we'll set up our secrets. On the middle rock tile, place a Secret 16 flag. This will be our cave. Then, on all of the pegs, place Singular Flags. When you're done, press the F key on your keyboard to preview the flag setup. With the inherent flags (the bottom number on a tile), your flags should look like this:

We're about halfway done now. The next thing we need to do is set up the Secret Combos. So, go to Data->Secret Combos, and set the flattened peg as the Hammer secret. Also, although you can't see it in my screenshot, Secret 16 (top-left) is set as the default cave combo (combo #4 in the default comboset).

When that's done, click ok. The last thing we need to do is set a few Screen Flags, so go to Data->Screen Data. You need to check off Permanent Enemies->Secret flag on Page 1, and All Triggers->16-31 on Page 2. They should look like this (with any other flags you might want to set):

Now, save the quest, and try it out! You may want to set Link to start with the hammer for testing (Quest-->Init Data, Hammer, check off Hammer), and ensure the Hammer in selectable on your sub screen (it should be, if you're using the default subscreen). If all went well, the cave should open up when you hammer all the pegs.

Download the example quest - singular.qst

File updated on July 31, 2007 - Upgrading to a newer quest format, which is smaller. Requires 2.5 Beta 500

ZCT Notes Version

1. Set the inherent flags for all triggers to the right flag (Burn for bushes, Hammer for pegs, etc.)
2. Place all your triggers (and set the Secret Combos!)
3. Place the "94 Singular" flag on all triggers
4. Enable the "Permanent Enemies-->Secret" and "All Triggers-->16-31" screen rule.
5. Set up any other secret flags (primarily Flags 16-31)