Wallcrawling Intermediate Strategies

Here are some of the techniques and ideas I will discuss in the intermediate section.

.:Quick Links:.
:: Secret Rooms
:: Loading Secret Rooms
:: Door Jump Dump
:: Floating
:: Skywalking
:: Walking on Ceilings

Again, please don't attempt anything too difficult before you've learned the basics. If you haven't loaded RSA from SW 9, then don't continue!!!

.:Secret Rooms:.
We wallcrawlers have come to affectionately call certain rooms "secret rooms". These rooms are classified as having no visual graphics loaded, but you can still determine their boundaries by shooting at them. A secret room is essential to wallcrawling as you can't load a room unless it becomes secretized first. Basically, the game loads the room's boundaries and then fills the graphics into those boundaries. Get familiar with them because we toss the term "secretizing" and "secretized" a lot!

.:Loading Secret Rooms:.
Now that you know what a secret room is, you're going to want to load it. From on top of a door, get right between the room you currently have loaded (make sure it's the only room loaded) and the room you want to enter next. As long as nothing is in your way, l-lock your view and strafe and/or jump directly into the room you want to load. If all goes well, it will simply appear with no need to shoot the door. Practise this technique a lot. There are many places where jumping and/or strafing into the next room is impossible, so this technique will not work in all places. Thankfully, for most places you travel, this easy technique will work.

.:Door-Jump Dump:.
This is a trick commonly used to dump an old room during a wallcrawling endeavor. Position yourself between two loaded rooms, and strafe back and forth between them until your map changes. Whichever room your map says you're "in" will be the one that sticks around and won't dump after the door jump dump. So get the room you want on your map, and then lock your view downward. Make a careful space jump out from the door and allow yourself to fall just beside the door, then quickly space jump back onto the door. If you fall far enough, the previous room will dump and the room you're "in" will stick around. There are several rooms which have sticky and catchy walls or objects above your head which will prevent you from easily doing this technique, so practise it a lot and be aware to the fact that it won't always be easy!

.:Floating:.
Floating is the ever-aggravating process in which you use Secret Worlds to slowly push yourself upwards. When you're in a Secret World, you may notice that you'll slowly move upwards as long as you're standing still. Why? I have no idea. I believe it has something to do with the "defense mechanism" of the game. If you ever boost too fast into a wall or something, the game will push you out so you don't get permanently stuck.

Either way, you can use this to your advantage. Stand perfectly still and you can float up to any height of a room. Beware, though, if you try too move too much after floating upwards, you'll eventually start to fall back down to the room's standard unless you catch yourself on something solid. So when you want to move to a certain area and you're floating up to it, give yourself some extra height above the spot where you're aiming so you can allow for falling distance. Be careful when you want to float, as you can't float up underneath a room or even off to the side slightly, there is a designated "perimeter" around each room where you can begin to float. Just use the terrain of the level to discern whether you're floating upwards or whether you're quickly bobbing up and down (an indication that you can't float in that area).

.:Skywalking:.
You may have noticed that if you float up too high above any given room, you'll end up where no matter where you walk, you'll never fall down. Did you get lucky? No, you're skywalking! Every room has a given "ceiling" where whenever you're above it in a secret world state, you can walk around freely without fear of falling. This can be used for many things, most obviously to allow yourself to freely traverse a room and then drop down wherever you need to be.

From a skywalk, the only way to get back down is to morph into a ball. Be careful, you'll fall pretty darn faster after just a second or so, and once you get back down to the level of the room, you will no longer be able to just coast along in a skywalk. So whenever you need to get from one end of a room to another and you just can't seem to manually climb there, float all the way up above the entirety of the room and skywalk and drop over to where you need to be.

.:Walking on Ceilings:.
Once you have learnt to float up above a room and reach skywalking height, the next step in wallcrawling effectively, is to learn how to use the ceilings of rooms to your advantage. Ideally (i.e. whenever possible) you'll want to be above the room when moving in a SW state. This prevents the need for floating, which is a laborious task at best.

This is where making use of a room's ceiling is useful. After a Door Dump is performed, and depending on the height of the room you're in now, it should be possible to either Bomb Jump up the wall or in the case of most rooms, you can simply SJ onto the roof. Once on a roof however, you'll find that you might get "stuck" sometimes. If you find yourself becoming stuck, a series of L-Lock based SJ's should get you back onto a part of the roof that'll allow Samus to move freely. This type of area will mainly be signified by a "clunk" noise and Samus raising her gun as per normal.

Unlike the dangers present in climbing the sides of walls, going along the roof is relatively safe AND it's pretty fast when mastered. For example, in Ice Before Flaahgra, it's possible to get to Energy Core from SW17 in less than 60 seconds by jumping across the ceilings.

The fastest way across the roof of a room is when you "Bunny Hop" when jumping. That means moving ever so slightly left then right in an alternate pattern with single jumps. This seems to prevent any ceiling sticking problems (or at least most of them). Once mastered, this technique becomes invaluable for moving between SW rooms swiftly.

Once you've practised all of your intermediate techniques and hopefully mastered them, feel free to move onto some of the wallcrawling endeavors and the advanced techniques section!