Eating Magic Mushrooms Makes You Fly…In “Serpent Isle”
It’s hard being an Avatar. The weight of the world is on your shoulders; you move from one potentially world-ending crisis to the next, occasionally coming home only to have your much-needed rest interrupted by burglaries or Time Lords rousing you from your slumber. Who among us wouldn’t at least be tempted to crack under the pressure?
And then one day, you’re wandering through a forest on a strange — yet strangely familiar — land, and you happen across some mushrooms. It’s late, you’re tired, and you’ve been battling reapers and goblins all day. Your nerves are shot, and your wits are at their very end; the last ounce of caring you had to give got left behind in Fawn because…
by the Virtues those people were rude, but nobody deserved to die like that. It’s almost a blessing that
Iolo isn’t around to complain about being hungry, although you know deep down that you’re going to have to address the fact that he’s been possessed by a Bane of Chaos at some point. Because of course you’ll have to; you’re the Avatar, and everything is always your problem to fix.
And you happen upon some mushrooms.
You’ve always ignored the mushrooms, everywhere you’ve encountered them. They’ve always just been part of the scenery to you, not something you’ve ever looked on as a thing to be trifled with. But it’s late — 1:30 AM! — and in a moment of weakness, you sneak a bit of the largest green-and-white mushroom in view.
And suddenly…your feet aren’t touching the ground anymore.
All narrative fun aside,
Marzo (yes, the developer of the
Keyring Mod for
Exult, and an active contributor to the
Exult codebase) was poking around in the
Exult usecode, wherein he discovered a number of unknown flags, including flag 36. Investigating in the in-game cheat menu,
Marzo was able to confirm that flag 36 is the flag for flight in
Serpent Isle. Which then led him to investigate what could trigger that flag.
Ultimately, he was able to discover that double-clicking certain mushroom shapes (e.g. shape 960, the large green-and-white mushroom pictured above) between midnight and 7:00 AM (in-game time, not your local system time) would occasionally cause the party member chosen to eat the mushroom to take flight. According to
Marzo, the odds are about 1 in 7 overall.
But the reason this easter egg has remained hidden for over 30 years is due not just to the low odds of actually having a character take flight, or to the fact that it has to be after midnight in the game. There’s also a third factor: the usecode that sets the flight flag will also only trigger after the Banes have been released. Additionally, not every mushroom you see in the game will work: the large green-and-white mushrooms will (but not the small ones), and the purple-and-white mushrooms should as well (again, just the large ones).
What’s more, this easter egg works in both
Exult and the original game; it may even allow you to walk across water. You can also change the height of the flying character(s) by making use of staircases or stacked crates.
Marzo has been discussing this over in the
Exult-specific channel on the UDIC Discord server; feel free to drop in there if you have any questions (or any difficulties reproducing the easter egg).
