Part 209: Glitch Exhibition, and...

Glitch Exhibition

Lobotomy Corporation is a fantastically broken mess of code, and today we're breaking the hell out of it.

Abnormality Storage Glitch

We'll start with probably the best known glitch in the game, Abnormality Storage. It's very easy to activate.



To activate it, we just play through the game like normal. I've opted to perform the glitch in Central.





We select two Abnormalities. This places them into the game's memory, so that the next time a department is expanded both Abnormalities are placed in that department.



Then, we return to the main menu while in the next story scene-any time is fine so long as we don't expand a department before returning to the main menu. The Abnormalities are still in storage at this point-even if we turn the game off and back on, the Abnormalities will stay in storage. It's written to the save file itself-I have a couple backup files sitting around on my computer with the Abnormality storage glitch primed from back when I was playing with the glitch.



Then, we start over from day 1. Unlike normal, we don't see an Abnormality selection screen with One Sin on it-this is because Abnormality selection screens are skipped whenever there's an Abnormality already in storage.




After the day 1 story, we're then asked to build out our first department: Control. This applies the two Abnormalities from storage to the Control Team, meaning…



We get two Abnormalities in Control! Using the Abnormality storage glitch it's possible to start with any Abnormality that we like-it can be triggered like this on any day. It's also able to be triggered by accident, most players who run into it for the first time do so either after being sent back by a story ending in the Architecture's endgame, or by returning to day 1 after picking an Abnormality during the Training/Safety, Welfare/Disciplinary, or Extraction/Records buildouts but not placing it by building one department out to 5. While single Abnormality storage doesn't cause any other noticeable errors besides starting with something unusual, storaging two Abnormalities back to day 1 like this can cause a cascade of other issues.



For starters, the buildout looks a little wonky. We've got two Abnormality cells, but the one for Backwards Clock doesn't have a hallway leading to it and cannot be worked. We can assign an Agent to work it, but they won't walk towards it and the work will never start.



Day 2 looks like this, as we still pick Abnormalities as normal. We can work Backwards Clock now, but not WellCheers.



Day 3, we can't work with YMBH now. Of note, we now pick our tool Abnormality on the third Abnormality pick of each grouping, instead of the last one. This does a strange thing to the Abnormality picks options for the day 3>4 and 8>9 Abnormality picks…



The pick after the tool Abnormality is chosen completely lacks any rules. It can be any Abnormality in the game, regardless of threat level, or even if it's banned from appearing.

In effect, the picks become Normal > Normal > Tool > Wildcard instead of the standard Normal > Normal > Normal > Tool.



This includes tools. Picking a tool for any of these wildcard slots will cause the picks to normalize, but there's a second problem. This is the fifth Abnormality in Control. Will this break something?



The Abnormality doesn't show up on the setup screen at all…



But it does appear here in the actual workday. It functions normally, and Agents can work it without issue. There are actually a number of these extra Abnormality locations peppered throughout the facility, though this one is the only one that can be seen without actively editing more Abnormalities into our facility than it should have.

All the Abnormality slots from here forward will be where they should be, so that's all there is to this glitch. It's very useful for when we want to start off with a nice strong Abnormality-and since One Sin is in the pool of selectable Abnormalities, there's nothing stopping us from just picking it up later.


Double Abnormality Selection Glitch

The next bug is specifically related to Architecture's Abnormality picks. Because both picks are wildcard picks, there's a certain oversight that has the possibility of happening naturally.



Step 1 is to clear any day that lets us select more Abnormalities for Architecture. Thankfully, I can use standard checkmate in the console commands to instantly clear the day without having to actually play through it again-this command instantly wins any Core Suppression.



Then, we select an Abnormality. This Abnormality is added to our storage, but because the coding for endgame is a little sloppy, it isn't removed from the available pool until after Abnormality selection ends.



This means it can show up a second time in a row, letting us select the same Abnormality twice.



This gives us two copies of the same Abnormality. Both of them act independently from each other, but share PE boxes as well as an information page and gear count.

This does mean that it is theoretically possible to have Queen of Hatred fight her own snake form. There is no unique dialogue for doing this.


Debug Weapons

There's also some dummied out equipment data in the game that we can access through the console commands. By using standard forge we can make the game give us one copy of any gear, and the debug gear is assigned to the numbers 177777 and 277777. The debug gear is a stick and a suit, and they are…





Completely busted.

As a means of testing them, I brought them into day 48 to use against Gebura.



They're exactly as ridiculous as you're thinking they are.

I did also learn something interesting about Gebura. Specifically, during her phase changes she doesn't take any damage until she's completely swapped over to her new weapons.



This is the best gif I have of the phenomenon. Obviously, this shouldn't ever come up in a real fight against her… but it's interesting to know!


One more thing…

During the thread, someone said that if I wasn't going to try and do a S-rank Day 49, I should at least talk about how I would try to go about it, so I'm going to do that here.

There aren't enough non-breaching Abnormalities to fill every slot in the game, so it's important to put the ones we can get where they count. Overall I'd say Central, Extraction, and Disciplinary really need to avoid having any breaching Abnormalities. From there, the further the department is from the Extraction department the more okay it is to have breachables-Records is fine, as is Control, and Training/Safety would usually be okay. Since Binah's Meltdowns don't spread to Architecture, we can put pretty much anything there without an issue. I'd also say that we want to avoid any WAW or higher Abnormalities which teleport around the facility, and that any TETH and most HEs are fine to be ignored regardless of if they breach or not.

Because it's possible to perfectly control the Abnormalities we get by just quitting to main screen if we don't like the selections we're given and then redoing the day, it's entirely possible (if time-consuming) to get exactly the Abnormalities we want even in an unmodded game-so if you're going to try S-ranking Day 49 there's little reason not to stack the deck as far in your favor as you can.

Unfortunately, I figured this when I was about halfway through the run to get footage for my glitch exhibition, so my final facility wound up looking something like this:





The suits we give our Agents don't matter for anything but damage mitigation for the Dawn/Noon, so I outfitted them with most of the good WAW/ALEPH gear. I outfitted everyone with melee weaponry in preparation for the day, focusing entirely on W or B damage weapons since Spore and Lamp are both melee weapons which give vulnerability to White/Black damage. The only exceptions to this were two Agents with Gold Rush, and one with Twilight-this rounded the number out to 33, the exact number of Agents I was hoping to field.

The main reason I'm not fielding a full facility today is because I want to reduce lag time when making large orders to the entire crew. The game gets very unwieldy when it's trying to make 55 Agents do something at once, particularly with all the effects of Day 49 going on around it.

As for the Agents themselves, rather than personally train a crew up to 130 base in all stats, I just made a bunch of random Agents from some of the Agent pool's leftovers-I put them to EX and left it at that, meaning their bases are between 110-125 in all their stats.

At this point, I figured that since I was already here, had brought in a bunch of decently high-level Agents, and had access to a plan I thought would work, I might as well give it a shot.

VIDEO: Day 49, redux







I didn't originally intend to actually do this, but consider it my thank you to you guys for making this thread such an awesome one.

That said, we've finally hit the end of all the content I have to show off. I feel like this is where some kind of epilogue or final thought should go, but… I did that back in the credits. Honestly, after the year and change I've been working on this thread, and you guys have been reading it… I think there's only one way to end things off.





See you next thread!