Elevator Manipulation

Elevator Manipulation is the process of manipulating Field Map RNG to predict and exploit a chain of specific "Hito" values on elevator button presses which will result in as little as a single encounter.

An elevator run starts on floor 6 and each jump can add as little as 7 and as many as 15 floors to your current position. Each floor has a specific battle formation assigned to it, or in the cases of floors 29, 38, 47, and 56, a short cutscene encountering Hito occurs instead of a battle. An ideal elevator run lands on floor 15, 17, or 19 for its first jump since those floors have the fastest formations, then chains together three manager encounters on floors 29, 38, and 47 before finishing on floor 59. Elevator manipulation aims to create that ideal elevator run consistently.

Pre-HQ List Manipulation

When performing elevator manipulation in a run, Stone should always be 33 as it is set there by the Squats minigame in Wall Market. All Pre-HQ manipulation strategies require Stone 33, and it is important to remember to keep a save file in front of the Squats minigame in order to set Stone to 33 any time you wish to practice Pre-HQ manipulation.

Waterfall Glows

The waterfall in front of Aeris' house is used twice: once going into the house to determine current List value, and again on the way out to set List to a desirable value. This method was developed by Brutalspeed.

Determining List

The waterfall calls RNG each time it glows to determine how long to wait before the next glow. There are three possible wait times. By observing the timing of the last 10 glows before entering Aeris' house, the value List stopped at when the house was entered can be determined. Using only 9 glows, the value of List can be mostly determined except for two List values, 72 and 247, which have the same 9-digit pattern.

The method of observing these glows most commonly involves recording your gameplay and playing it back at 25% speed while the cutscene in Aeris' house plays. While it plays back, use a stopwatch such as Windows' built-in Clock app to count the lap times of each glow. The three possible wait times at 25% speed are ~1.4 seconds, ~2.1 seconds, and ~2.8 seconds. Translating the latest lap times into 1s, 2s, and 3s with respect to those wait times produces your waterfall glow pattern. Entering this pattern into either Brutal's spreadsheet or Dash's document reveals your current List value.