The Legend of Zelda / Good Bad Bugs

The Legend of Zelda is no stranger to amusing glitches, and nearly every game in the series has at least one.

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The Legend of Zelda

The game has a number of glitches that allow you to cross multiple tiles of water with the ladder, clip onto blocks (and then exit perpendicular to the angle you entered, allowing you to get through diamond staircases without clearing the enemies), scroll across screens, and even go through locked doors without a key. The last of these wasn't discovered until July of 2016, over 30 years after the game first came out in Japan. (Video intentionally set to a few minutes before the discovery.)
The entire second quest exists due to a programming error. The map data for the dungeons used only half of the intended memory on the ROM, but Shigeru Miyamoto decided that it played just fine and decided to use the extra space for an alternate layout.
The Japanese version allows you to collect infinite heart containers by going to Eastern Hyrule, where a heart container is out in the water on a broken dock and requires the bridge to reach. All you have to do is use the whistle so the tornado drags you across the heart container, and then travel back and repeat this for as many hearts as you like^note. All subsequent versions of the game corrected this glitch.

A Link to the Past

The "Death Mountain Descent" glitch allows Link to access areas in the Dark World that should be inaccessible until after you get the Moon Pearl, which counteracts that realm's Forced Transformation effect. Further glitches allow Link to actually take human form intermittently and complete certain dungeons (but unfortunately not all of them). You can use this glitch to complete the game without getting the Master Sword, and/or follow up with other illogical things like refining your regular sword into the upgraded Master Sword.
Using your flute at the "wrong" time can confuse the game into letting you swim on land or become the Green Flash. But this is nothing compared to what happens when you run away from your boomerang.
By emulating or taking your controller apart, interesting things happen when you walk up stairs facing downwards by pressing up and down at the same time. Interesting in that you go down a level instead of going up a level, letting you use room exits where there should be none, walking under the entire map of the game. If you enter the Triforce room while doing this, the ending plays. This is how the game is speedrun in three minutes.
There is another elaborate glitch that allows you to finish the game in just a few minutes: by saving & quitting while midair hopping off a certain ledge in Hyrule Castle, reloading and working your way to the same ledge without touching any guards, and then entering the next room to the left and walking up against the wall as another guard chases and hits you, Link will disappear into the wall and you can then walk him through the walls in a set pattern to bypass Ganon and go straight to the Triforce.
In dungeons, enemies cannot enter doorways, as if there is an invisible barrier where the wall would be if the door didn't exist. This means Link can stand in doorways and be perfectly safe from enemies, but can also swing his sword or throw projectiles at any enemies who happen to come within range or enter his line of sight. This is most useful for avoiding Flying Tiles, as you can grab a snack and cool your heels while they systematically and helplessly destroy themselves.
By attempting to use the Cane of Somaria when your magic meter is completely empty and then going into your inventory and switching to the Mushroom while the error sound is playing, you can use the Magic Powder without actually having it. This glitch has absolutely no purpose in the game as it was originally created, as the NPC that you trade the Mushroom to for the Powder is accessible long before you can get the Cane of Somaria, but it can see occasional play in randomizer runs.
Another glitch that serves no real purpose outside of a randomizer (in which the locations of the game's items are shuffled around at random) involves drinking a potion at a certain point in a hallway in the Dark Palace, preventing the screen from properly locking. Because the camera is misaligned, by walking against the right-hand wall of the next room, all of the Goriyas in the room, which try to mimic Link's movements, will walk to the left and wind up offscreen. Since there are no enemies on screen, the door to the next room will open as if the enemies had been defeated. Since Red Goriyas are only vulnerable to the bow, this allows you to sequence break this area if you wind up in the Dark Palace without a bow (though you'll still need it later in the dungeon).
While fighting Ganon, the number of bats he summons will almost overwhelm the graphics processor. You can push this over by throwing your boomerang, slowing down the action considerably and making the bats easier to dodge in a form of improvised Bullet Time.

Link's Awakening

The warp glitch allows many bizarre effects and Sequence Breaking glitches, similar to the Death Mountain glitch in ALttP. This glitch is so popular that many fans actually consider the colorized DX version to be inferior to the original solely because it fixes the glitch. The glitch can unfortunately cause consequences if the player is not careful, like being stuck permanently with a companion that refuses to let you enter dungeons (the ghost Marin glitch), though it has some humorous effects, such as Moblins being replaced with Grandma Ulrira.
Getting stuck in level architecture is the most common hazard, so waiting until you obtain Manbo's Mambo is a good idea if you plan to fool around extensively with the glitch. Saving and quitting is usually enough to fix the problem, but if you attempt to warp to the Face Shrine (the sixth one) or Eagle's Tower (the seventh) before unlocking their entrances and then save, there is no way to get out of them if you haven't yet learned the Mambo.
In some versions, warping over the edge of the map while holding everything except the level 2 sword causes you to receive a glitched object, which replaced the original sword. You have to save and quit to exit the room with the object, and loading up the game puts you in Marin's house. If you didn’t corrupt the save file, you might end up with a buggy, extremely powerful sword which can kill anything in one hit.
The doghouse glitch or doghouse world, which works in both the original and color DX version. It is very easy to enter—just defeat a set amount of enemies (not doing so results in Link warping to the desert or the swamp, depending on the version), walk down the side of BowWow's doghouse and push left—and is perhaps one of the strangest glitches in any game. It consists of every dungeon room in the game jumbled up in a seemingly random fashion. The graphics are glitched all to hell, Link's movement physics are completely changed (he can usually walk through almost anything), and treasure chests will contain anything from a random text box from the game to items from high level dungeons, which are completely usable. This glitch is almost endless in its useful capabilities.

Ocarina of Time

Early copies (predominantly those with a gold-colored cartridge) feature the "Swordless Link" glitch, which involves saving and quitting during the final battle right after Ganon knocks the Master Sword out of Link's hand. Doing so puts you back at the beginning of the final dungeon with no sword equipped. While this may sound lame, it's actually pretty cool — among other things, it lets you use items while on your horse, leading to some interesting and glitchy gameplay scenarios (including being able to use the dungeon-only warp spell Farore's Wind anywhere, and catapulting yourself out of the game world into the nothingness beyond). It's even possible to do this in later editions of the game, but you need to use yet another glitch which allows you to play almost any item as an ocarina to warp out of the boss's lair with your sword unequipped.
There's one involving the Gold Skulltulas. One particular Skulltula is in a small cavern. It's possible to kill this spider, use the boomerang to collect its token, then backflip onto the panel that warps you out of the cavern before the boomerang returns to you. This causes the token to be collected, but the Skulltula to return to life, allowing for infinite Skulltula tokens if used repeatedly.
Link's crouching stab when he's bunkered behind his shield (except for the Hylian shield as a child) normally does extremely pitiful damage in return for speed and safety, but due to a script oversight crouch stabs takes the damage of the last attack Link used. This oversight is succinctly called "Crouch stab storage" and is used with the stored damage from a jump slash to combine Link's fastest attack with his strongest attack while keeping him fairly safe behind his shield, trivializing any bit of combat. Almost ^* every boss in the game up to and including both forms of Ganondorf can be killed in a single vulnerability period with jump slash stored crouch stabs.
The infamous bottle bug that allows players to replace any item with a bottled fairy. While the fairy in the bottle thus created can't automatically resurrect Link like the fairies in normal bottles can, and the item replaced is gone forever, this can still be quite useful for an emergency life boost in the more difficult sections of the game.
Similarly, when you catch a bug in a bottle and release it, three will come out. You never need to release more than one at any time so you're free to release three, catch one, and let the other two do what you needed them to do repeatedly for infinite bugs. This tactic allows for some easy money farming and is invaluable in the Spider Houses of Majora's Mask.
Skipping all Young Link dungeons by glitching through the Door of Time and skipping all Adult Link dungeons by using the reverse bottle adventure bug. These and many more can be found here and make for some impressive speedruns.
Some players have found interesting effects by physically interfering with the connection between cartridge and console. If the player slowly lifts up one side of the cartridge while simultaneously running into anything destructible by bombs, Link might pass through the rock/wall/whatever. This allows the player to get into Goron City via the Lost Woods before getting the sword, thus giving complete (but useless) freedom. It can also be used to get past anyone who's blocking your path—like the Kokiri child who blocks your way out of the woods, Mido who stands between you and the Deku Tree, etc.—allowing you to get to Zelda and beyond without ever obtaining a sword.
One major glitch is the ability to "Seam Walk" by very carefully walking straight lines up the seams where two pieces of terrain meet at a gradual angle. The easiest place to do this is in the Gerudo horse archery arena, but its actual uses include standing next to Biggoron (and passing through him to climb to Death Mountain's peak) and "invading" the oddly water-filled Hyrule Castle. Oddly, this glitch was never fixed: notice that in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask the glitch is still possible, as Nintendo simply replaced most angled seams with vertical ones.
One of many glitches exploited in Speedruns is the "Super-slide", where you roll against something that causes damage and put up the shield at just the right moment, causing Link to slide backward indefinitely and at tremendous speed. Entering cutscenes this way has interesting effects. For instance, approaching the Forest Temple the first time as an adult, Link spends the whole cut scene hiding behind his shield, even while playing the ocarina, and mostly doesn't even show up onscreen since he's unable to walk where he's scripted to. Entering the Final Battle this way prevents Link from losing the Master Sword, with the side effect that it temporarily exists in two places simultaneously: stuck in the ground and in Link's hands!
You can easily win the second horse race against Ingo by following him closely, but then stopping just before the stable at the back of the ranch. Turning to the right and then turning back makes Ingo disappear, so you can take your time getting to finish line.
Dark Link might normally be an infamous example of That One Boss, but he goes down laughably easy if you face him with a Broken Giant's Knife. The reason is that the programmers never expected this and never gave him alternate programming, so he continues to block and defend against it as if it was the full Biggoron's Sword. Stabs and thrusts from the broken blade slip right past his shield and will kill him in seconds.
A minor one is the Redeads in the ruined Hyrule Castle Town. Normally Redeads are annoying Demonic Spiders that paralyze Link with a screech and lurch over to eat his brains, but the ones in the town aren't able to paralyze, letting Link run past what are effectively non-threats. It turns out that since their paralyze causes a camera zoom effect, it won't work in pre-rendered areas with a fixed camera position^note.
The game can only handle one timer at once, so if it would need to count multiple down, it has to pause one. Normally, the developers went out of their way to avoid having multiple timers at the same time. The only time it's possible is entering Death Mountain Crater without a Goron Tunic on during the Biggoron sidequest, in which case the only timer counting down is until heat exhaustion. Because warp songs technically set the quest timer to one second left and don't immediately fail you, this means you can technically teleport to Death Mountain Crater without the Goron Tunic on, run to the exit to Biggoron's cliff, and finish with just that one second left.
Messing around with item data can lead to a bug termed "ass chest," where Link warps behind the Gerudo running the Horseback Archery Range and does his chest-opening animation. Not only can this be used to get items and aid in hundred percent speedruns, it has the funny effect of looking like he's literally pulling items out of her ass.
- The Use Restricted Items glitch in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. Not only does it allow you to use certain items and weapons in buildings and other areas, but to use Farore's Wind anywhere, letting you use any spot in the game as a checkpoint. It then gets better when you realise that you can use it to escape the final battle without a sword, accessing all known effects of the original Swordless Link gitch, or that you can break the camera system and activate a free camera in areas like the market and Temple of Time.
Doing a jump-attack with a Deku Stick at a wall at just the right angle will glitch the breaking animation and only partially break it, resulting in a still swingable stick that will never break until you put it away or pull out another weapon or item. Since these sticks are the same strength as the Master Sword, you can utterly dominate powerful enemies as child Link using this trick.
The Goron Tunic protects against ambient heat and fiery surfaces, so it shouldn't help out against other dangers like spikes or poison, right? Nope; it's coded to protect against floor hazards and doesn't differentiate between fire-based and any other kind, so it's more useful than you might think in places like the Shadow Temple.
The Navi Dive. When Navi is talking to you, everything in the world is ignored and Link stands idly by and listens to Navi's advice. With a well-positioned jumpstrike it's possible to trigger Navi as you hit the water and sink to the bottom like a rock, with water physics only kicking in once you close the dialogue box. This can be used to escape Kokiri Forest as a child, and also allows you to complete Jabu-Jabu's Belly before the Dodongo's Cavern.
Normally you can't enter the Spirit Temple without either the Hover Boots or the Longshot. However, by running backward at the edge of the River of Sand and side-hopping just as you cross it to avoid voiding out, you'll run right over it. With this you can beat the Spirit Temple as early as having beaten the Fire Temple^note.

Majora's Mask

It's possible to wear the boss-only Fierce Deity's Mask virtually anywhere thanks to the glitch-filled Sakon's Hideout. Simply wear a mask during the second last section as Link, then when you swap to Kafei exchange that mask for the Fierce Deity's. The very first thing Link will do when you regain control of him will be to put on the mask he was "wearing" just moments before, and he will transform. Use that with a bug that lets you enter Sakon's Hideout on Day 1 and tell the Bomber Kid the password earlier on, and you can mess around anywhere you want for two full days with newfound superpowers. Just be careful not to talk to anyone whose lines varies based on which of the mask forms you're in — since the Fierce Deity is boss-only, those NPCs aren't programmed to properly react to it, causing the game to crash. This glitch also leads to some other weird glitches; if you talk to some characters, they will react as though Link were not wearing a mask at all. Some react to him as though he were transformed, but they don't make a form-specific remark.
You can keep looking through the telescope as the screen fades to black from running out of time. If you then press B to exit the telescope screen, the game does not end. All the time based events disappear and there is no timer. This is commonly referred to as the 4th Day Glitch.
The Blast Mask will normally create an explosion that damages you for half a heart when you use the attack button. Put up your shield and then use the attack button, and your shield will protect you from the explosion that's on your face. This is still present in Majora's Mask 3D and is referred to as though it were intentional by that version's strategy guide.
Using the Bomb Hover glitch, which allows you to effectively float over obstacles with well-timed bomb usage, allows you to warp to any Owl Statue before you've actually visited them^note. With this you're able to smash the sandbox wide open and gain access to a ton of items, heart pieces, and all the transformation masks without ever setting foot in a single dungeon.
Bomb hovering can also be used in fairy fountains to teleport, since all five fountains are actually in one area beside each other left to right in the order of Ikana, Great Bay, Snowhead, Woodfall, and Clock Town. For example, going into the Clock Town fairy fountain and Bomb Hovering over the left wall will land you in the Woodfall fairy fountain. Do it again and you're in the Snowhead fountain, and so forth. In other words, with a full bag of bombs and good timing, the fairy fountains basically become a Warp Zone that will take you to every major area in the game.
With the Goron mask, a bomb, and a well-timed ground-pound, you can use the explosion to catapult yourself over the fence blocking access to Great Bay and Ikana Valley, allowing you access to extra items or to do the dungeons out of order if you wish. The best use of this is to obtain the Hookshot early, as it is vastly helpful in beating the Snowhead dungeon.
In the 3DS version, standing on the edge of a platform and setting up a bomb behind you makes you jump a large distance forwards. This can be used to skip the green valve quest of the Great Bay Temple, and get the Song of Storms after the Night of the First Day, among other examples. This trick also exists in the N64 version, but isn't as powerful.

The Wind Waker

You can use items without depleting them if you pause at the same time you use the item and equip something else in its slot. The most popular use of this is to get endless portions of Grandma's soup; Link will down half a bottle and get the usual benefits, and if you perform the glitch with a full bottle of soup and equip another empty bottle in its place, you'll get a third portion of soup. This can be done using a few other items, such as getting multiple uses out of one Hyoi Pear. You can also use this to use items you're not supposed to use in certain areas, like bombs inside shops and houses and the like. An interesting thing to note about using bombs inside buildings is that this can be used to blow up the delivery boxes inside Dragon Roost Island. They appear nowhere else in the game and this glitch is the only way to destroy them.
A hilarious glitch with the Spectacle Island Cannon Game is to park your boat among where the targets will be. Shooting the boat has the same effect as hitting the targets but the boat doesn't explode, allowing you to zero in on it and just keep hitting it for an easy win. It's easily the most convenient way to farm rupees to pay for the odious Triforce Chart quest.
When you first pull out the sail you get a brief speed boost, allowing you to tap the button repeatedly to sail faster than normal.
By far the most useful glitch is superswimming, which allows you to completely and utterly demolish the game's attempts at Railroading you. It takes a bit of an awkward setup using a glitch called "Dry Storage"^note, but by performing that you can take the Wind Waker out, jump in a body of water, hold the Control Stick up to "charge" your swim, and then release it to send Link hurtling backwards with a distance depending on how long you "charged" it. You can use it to swim from island to island in mere seconds and go wherever you want and whenever you want the second you've acquired the Wind Waker.

Twilight Princess

A glitch allows the player to get the Master Sword very early in the game, which includes the possibility to change form freely, even in Twilight areas. Unfortunately, the bug also makes it impossible to enter the second dungeon.
You can get to the City in the Sky early by transforming into a wolf inside a crack under Kakariko Village to clip through it and warp the cannon to Lake Hylia. Since the game only checks for the last mirror shard, it allows you to skip a dungeon and a half. Unfortunately, the game will block all access to previous dungeons once you do the skip glitch, as the game discards all the old events because it thinks you already completed them.
The "Twilight Hack", a result of a particularly "meta" Good Bad Bug. Smashing the stack (that is, causing a buffer overflow) using a custom save file containing an overlong name for Epona that contains code that runs right after the save is loaded has allows people to use the game to boot the Wii into a root-level command prompt and install homebrew software on it. It's not really a bug in the strictest sense, since (especially after later firmware updates, due to hacking developments including — and focusing on — piracy) it can't be accessed without hacking, but its bizarrely beneficial repercussions make it worth mentioning here.
It only works in the second dungeon, and even then only in the places with magnet force pillars, but putting on the boots with the D-pad and then replacing them with any other item mid-air before you hit the magnetized surface allows you to move at normal speed on the ceiling. You can't use items or roll, and your hat becomes immune to gravity, but it makes ceiling walks much faster (and quieter).
The infinite-bombs-and-arrows glitch can be done by exploiting the connection between Iza's Rapid Ride and Plumm's Fruit Pop Flight Challenge up Zora's River. By playing the latter beforehand, and using the clawshots while swimming to clip through a wall, you can purposely fall out of bounds in Lake Hylia. What makes this glitch possible is the fact that when the game respawns you, it returns you to the place you last entered the area — in this case, at the end of Plumm's game, which can usually only be played while you're a wolf — however, because you died as human Link, you'll be respawned as human Link, in a situation that shouldn't be possible. After a few more deaths and respawns, you can get it so Wolf Link is playing Iza's game (another impossibility), but he isn't in the boat. This allows you to warp out, and when you turn human again, you'll still have the infinite bomb arrows assigned to your B button, as though you were still playing Iza's game. Having unlimited bombs and arrows makes the Cave of Ordeals a whole lot easier, among other uses.
Early American copies of the Wii version left in a debug feature where putting out the torches in the Cave of Ordeals opens the door on the floor below, allowing players to skip most of the fights.
In the Nintendo GameCube version of Twilight Princess, pressing the reset button on the console at just the right moment after Link falls into Lava in the Goron Mines (sometime during the fade to black) causes Link to respawn normally, except in Hyrule Field. He can then run around, and you might notice the title music playing. The title logo will eventually pop up, and pressing any button besides the control stick will cause the game to go into the file select screen. It's also possible in the Wii version, although the timing must be very precise and it's harder to pull off. Also sometimes Link can spawn on a Bridge of Eldin; in that instance the glitch needs to be used again. If done correctly, the area which is supposed to be the Hyrule Field rendered behind the title logo screen becomes fully explorable. This can lead to going outside the boundaries of the level, including going as far as the end of skybox, or seeing the blurry textures of places which are in the distance, like Hyrule Castle. Oh, yeah. Epona is a MUST when going outside the walkable area, so prepare to see some flying horses.
Pickup sliding. Link's Item Get! pose is missing the final frame of its animation, resulting in it not looping correctly and making him slide backwards very, very, very slowly. In this state, all of his collision is also disabled other than what's needed to keep him standing on the ground, allowing him to pass through any wall or door. You get an Item Get! screen the first time you pick up any given colour of Rupee except green, and due to a another bug, quitting the game causes it to forget that you've already picked up that colour before, resulting in you getting the screen every "first time" you pick up that colour after loading a save. Combine the two bugs, and you have the trick that defines the game's Minimalist Run.

Skyward Sword

The main glitch used in speedruns is nicknamed Back In Time, and it involves dying, selecting Continue and resetting the game immediately afterwards: if done correctly, Link will still be controllable while the game is otherwise in the title screen. Depending on where and how it's performed, you can use it to skip large parts of the game by forcing the game to trigger cutscenes when it shouldn't, instantly warp to another save statue in Skyloft for a major shortcut and end up in partially-loaded dungeon rooms with missing obstacles that you can bypass earlier than you're supposed to.

A Link Between Worlds

It's possible to skip the boss fight of Skull Woods. When it uses the rocket punch, use the Tornado Rod to fly up, clip into its body upon landing, and then quickly walk through the closed door to the outside. Done correctly, you'll end up in the area with the Skull Woods' Sage portrait. You'll still have to fight the boss if you want a Heart Container (it'll still be there when you return), but for speed runs and three-heart runs, that's little concern.
There's a trick to get Ravio's shop early. You must lure a crow near the entrance of the Death Mountain then get hit by it as you jump off the nearby ledge so that you land on the small elevated wall next to it. From there you can go through the cave and trigger the Death Mountain eruption cutscene on the other side, which in turn triggers the appearance of Ravio in your house. Here's the video. Not only is this trick useful in speedrun, but it has funny oddities: if you complete the Sanctuary the cutscene in which Link wakes up is glitched and there will be two Ravios and two Sheerows!

Breath of the Wild

The single-most useful and abuseable glitch in the entire game is whistle-sprinting, which allows you to sprint infinitely. All you have to do is hold down on the d-pad to whistle, then start tapping x as you run, and you can sprint clear across Hyrule without ever stopping for a rest. The advantage this gives you is utterly insane as it allows you to easily escape enemies that would normally run you down and force you to stand and fight, is much more flexible (albeit still slower) than riding a horse, and can even allow you some sequence-breaking opportunities as sprinting up a vertical surface can give you considerable height before you're forced to start climbing. Its one trade-off is enemies hear you doing it (the game thinks you're constantly whistling) which can attract a lot of attention, but since you can outrun them all you really need to worry about is the occasional arrow or Octorok's rock. The best part is Nintendo seems to be fine with this one as it remains unpatched even to this day, unlike some of the glitches mentioned below.
The Magnesis rune cannot be used to lift metal objects you are currently standing on. However, this can be circumvented if you put another metal object on top of that metal object. This works best with metal boxes being placed in mine carts, standing on the box, then lifting the cart into the air however high you want. Branli's gliding minigame on the Ridgeland Tower becomes trivial with this exploit.
Similarly, if you use Magnesis to push a metal weapon into an object, and walk Link into the object at the same time, Link will push the object aside as though he had infinite mass. This means giant doors, large rock spheres, and other such things can be casually pushed aside instead of puzzled open.
Warping from the Trial of the Sword to an incomplete Divine Beast could be used to activate a bug called 'World Reset'. This bug resets all treasure chests on the overworld (including those with gems, money, key items and Champion weapons), as well as lets players get as many seeds from the Korok as they want or farm infinite ancient parts by flipping over a dead Guardian. As you can guess, it completely breaks the game wide open. Pity Nintendo patched it out with an update.
There's a trick to get tons of free compendium pictures. Just finish the Sunshroom Sensing sidequest at the Tech Lab up until Symin is about to introduce the photo buying mechanic, then sell a bunch of the same item in a shop. Once you return, Symin will give you as many free compendium pictures as there were sold items at the shop. This lets you finish the materials section instantly, or even unlock pictures of weapons or bosses long before you encounter them.
Holding on to objects that have been hit while in Stasis at just the right way will send Link flying with them^note. In addition to looking cool, it's also useful for speedrunning the early parts of the game, before getting a horse.
If Link uses Stasis on one of the Guardian Stalkers that "play dead" by lying still on the ground, the Guardian will fall through the floor and vanish once Stasis runs out. It's a very efficient way of quickly dispatching a tough foe, especially in the early to mid game.
There's a strange quirk in the game's physics that causes certain airborne objects to speed up dramatically when Link uses his Bullet Time ability when they're in the air. A Cryonis pillar just happens to have a few frames where any items on it become airborne for a split second. Shoot at just the right time in midair, and you now have a functional refuse launcher. This in itself is pretty useless aside from being fun to watch, and blasting away empty chests that had crappy contents, as you can't do that to yourself. Normally. There's an advanced version of the bug that involves Ice element weapons, shield surfing, and any enemy that goes into ragdoll mode when stunned or killed, which includes any non-boss enemy other than Lynels, Yiga Clan goons, or Guardians. Freeze your target with an Ice attack, then shield-surf onto their heads from a high place, such as one of the encampment's nearby watchtowers. The enemy ragdolls upon you performing a Goomba Stomp on it and bringing it out of the "frozen" state, and this confuses the game and somehow shoots you into the sky like a cannon. If performed on the right angle on the enemy's back and a shield spin is performed at the same time, it sends you flying at Mach 5, fast enough that the game needs to take a breather to load the world, and fast enough to shoot you from the Great Plateau to Hyrule Castle.
The Infinite Jump Glitch (Moonjump). By bucking a wild horse when time expires on the Horse Archery minigame and fast-traveling afterward, the game will get confused and believe the player is always standing, and therefore able to jump indefinitely. This results in hilarious results, such as players hopping upwards repeatedly, ground gliding and so much more. One can even transfer this glitch through save files, so they can even have this active upon starting new games.
It's possible to spawn a square bomb right before a normal bomb explodes by exploiting aimed mode to enter into slow motion to set it up. By doing this with the right timing, the square bomb will hit Link, causing him to get launched into the air at ridiculous speed. This trick can also be done midair, allowing for more and more distance to be gained. This technique is known as Windbombing and it is used in many Breath of the Wild speedrunning categories.
- The speed of the blastoff, while pretty powerful on its own, can be further enhanced by pointing the camera in a direction that causes lag, which is called a Superlaunch. This is the variation predominantly used in speedruns, whereas regular Windbombs are more common in Multiplayer mod based Manhunt scenarios due to their better versatility.
By going into a shrine right when a Blood Moon is about to occur and waiting until it's past 12 AM in-universe, you prevent the Blood Moon from taking effect and delay it until the following night. And you can keep delaying it for as long as you want, which turns the normally obnoxious "Under a Red Moon" Shrine Quest into a mostly-free Spirit Orb, and allows you to cook a ton of Blood Moon-boosted meals until you're ready to let it happen. Another, albeit lesser benefit is that the monsters you kill stay dead, so you're free to explore their stomping grounds to your heart's content.
At certain positions in the game, it is possible to clip through walls by positioning yourself against them and activating the Sheikah Slate's spyglass feature. This is most notably used by speedrunners to skip the beginning cutscene.
Another clipping glitch involves jumping into slanted walls while starting a shield surf. When done correctly (only possible in 30 FPS), it corrupts Link's hitbox, allowing him to clip into walls with another shield surf jump.
Normally, obtaining the Master Sword involves an action sequence that drains your hearts for a brief moment, and thereby requires a certain amount of Heart Containers. However, by setting up a campfire next to the Master Sword, waiting to a point of time of your choice, and then looking into the sky as the transition fades out, it's possible to unload the trigger for that action sequence, allowing to pick up the Master Sword as a regular item.

Tears of the Kingdom

Negating Autobuild at the right timing in earlier patches of the game will leave the "ghost outline" of the Autobuild structure floating in the air. It is possibile to manipulate this structure and use it to fly around at high speeds. This has been called Autobuild Cancel Slide, or ABCs, by the speedrunning community, and is a common glitch used in any category that allows it. Because of this glitch, even Any% speedruns will still stop by to get Autobuild once it becomes available simply because the time it shaves off is worth the time spent making the detour to get it.

Good Bad Bugs / The Legend of Zelda

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