This page details the unintended manipulation of Teslagrad's save game slots. This is only possible in Legacy (v1.3.1).
Video[]
Teslastuff Live - Save manipulation glitch
Save Duplication[]
When the Main Menu loads, there is a period of a few seconds where the selection cursor can freely move about. During this short period, it is possible to quickly load a saved game and then move the cursor to a different save slot. When the scene fades in after loading, pressing Enter will "load" the second save slot. If the second save slot is empty, gameplay continues as normal. Otherwise, the screen fades to black but gameplay remains active. In either case, the second save slot is now considered the active one, and any updates to the game state will be saved in that slot.
Item / Location Manipulation[]
The crucial detail of how Teslagrad saves the game is that when game state changes, only the updated part of the game state is saved to the file, not the entire game state as a whole. This means that a save slot can be manipulated to update only one of its aspects: its Scene Index, its collected Equipment, its collected Scrolls, or its list of defeated Bosses. This can be exploited to travel "back in time" to a previous checkpoint while retaining progression such as collected items or defeated bosses.
Time Saves[]
The application of save manipulation allows for the following skips:
- Back In Time: Boots to Well - Skip the climb back to the Well after collecting the Blink Boots.
- Back In Time: Orb Defeat to Scroll Vault - Skip the cutscene of being dragged by Oleg after defeating Guericke's Orb.