The Ultimate Guide to Sequence Breaks and Glitches in Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Mastering Ori and the Will of the Wisps requires more than just skill - it demands breaking the game's own rules. From vertical sentry jumps to risky loading-zone warps, the line between a record-breaking run and a corrupted save is razor-thin. This guide details the essential sequence breaks and glitches that define high-level play, explaining how to execute them and, more importantly, how to survive them.

Core Sequence Breaking Techniques You Need to Master

Alright, if you're looking to break Ori and the Will of the Wisps wide open, these are the five techniques that turn a casual playthrough into a speedrunner's playground. Each one's got its own quirks, frame-perfect timings, and potential to either save minutes or brick your save file - so listen up.

Sentry Jump: The Vertical Boost Glitch

Let's kick things off with the biggest vertical boost in the game. Sentry jump is a forced launch that happens when your up-attack collides with a sentry projectile on the exact frame it spawns, catapulting you roughly twice as high as a normal double-jump. You can pull this off with either Spirit Edge or Spirit Smash, and the timing changes depending on which you use and whether you're grounded or airborne.

For a grounded Sword Sentry Jump, hold Up, then slam both Sentry and Spirit Edge on the same frame - you'll get about 25.5 units of height. If you're off by a single frame, you'll still get most of the boost, just not the max. The aerial version is tighter: hold Up, press Sentry, then Spirit Edge exactly 3 frames later (that's 0.05 seconds at 60fps) for 18 units.

The Hammer versions are even stronger but trickier. On the ground, hold Up, press Spirit Smash, then Sentry 21 to 24 frames later (0.35-0.40s), with the sweet spot at 23 frames for roughly 27 units. In the air, it's Spirit Smash first, then Sentry 16-19 frames later, optimal at 18 frames for 12-13.5 units.

Here's where it gets wild: you can chain these indefinitely as long as you've got energy because bash resets all your jump flags. The loop is drop a sentry, bash it upward, double-jump into it, then up-attack on the 20-frame mark while you're still inside the bash radius for a second boost. This opens up early access to areas like Baur's Reach upper tree and lets you skip entire sections of Windswept Wastes.

Bash Invincibility Frames: Hazard Immunity

If sentry jumps give you height, bash i-frames give you a pocket of invincibility that laughs at projectiles and spore clouds. The game grants you 18 to 22 frames of immunity after you confirm a bash direction, which is just enough to phase through hazards that would normally shred you.

Speedrunners abuse this constantly:

• Mouldwood Depths dark-room skip: Chain bash off glowing flies to maintain i-frames through the entire 4-screen blackout, skipping the 40-second torch puzzle entirely.
• Windswept Wastes laser hallway: Continuously bash sand projectiles for non-stop immunity, ignoring the rotating beam maze and saving around 25 seconds.
• Damage boosting: Redirect an enemy projectile back into the same enemy to apply double damage and cancel their hit-reel, letting you one-cycle mini-bosses like Mora's spiderlings.

Bash also resets your double-jump and other movement abilities, so you can chain movement together for precise platforming. Just remember the whole game runs at a locked 60fps for speedruns - some tricks get easier at higher framerates, so you'll want V-Sync on if you're practicing seriously.

Water-Dash Storage: Underwater Speed Tech

Now for something that breaks the water physics wide open. Water-dash storage gives you a 6-frame window (0.1 seconds) where your SwimDashActive state persists after leaving water, letting you keep that stored speed for a brief moment.

The trick is pressing Dash on the absolute last frame before Ori's collision box clears the water surface. If you nail frames 1-3, you can angle-jump to ledges that are normally 1-2 cells out of reach. Hit frames 4-6 and you can bash off a projectile to convert leftover velocity into serious horizontal distance.

Miss frame 7 and the state flag auto-resets, you hear the water-splash SFX, and the break is gone until you dunk yourself again. This technique lets you reach Baur's Reach upper tree and Windswept Wastes early, cutting 4-6 minutes off an Any% run without needing Dash, Light Burst, or Burrow.

If you're on keyboard, grab the Ori WotW Training Tools mod from Steam Workshop - it color-codes the 6-frame grace period so you can see exactly when the flag is live. It's a lifesaver for learning this.

Loading-Zone Warp: Teleportation Glitch

⚠️ WARNING: This glitch can corrupt your UberState and brick your save. Duplicate your file before attempting.

This next one's the riskiest trick in the book. Loading-zone warp abuses a 4-frame window during a white transition - open your map and select a Spirit Well while the screen fades, and the warp flag gets written before the destination scene fully loads. The result? A white-screen hang or infinite void-fall on your next load.

Here's the reproduction: jump into a vertical one-way gate, open the map during the fade, click any Spirit Well, then force-close the game (Alt-F4 or home button) within 3 seconds. Relaunching might drop you into the void, which,

Early Game Sequence Breaks (Inkwater to Silent Woods)

If you're looking to blaze through the early game or just want to sequence break for fun, these skips will get you past the biggest roadblocks between Inkwater Marsh and Silent Woods.

Silent Woods Keystone Skip

So you want to get into Silent Woods without hunting down four keystones? You can absolutely yeet right over that door, and it's easier than you'd think. You'll need Bash and Glide at minimum, plus a Sentry to Up-slash with your Sword or Hammer.

Here's how it works: first, tuck yourself into that foliage patch just before the background tree ends - this gives you the vertical clearance you need. Pop a Sentry, launch yourself up with an Up-slash, then immediately Bash a lantern mid-air. From there you just Glide to the right trigger and you're in, skipping both the keystones and that unskippable cutscene.

The whole trick saves about eight seconds, but the real prize is grabbing the Spike shard and hitting the Ultrabash spirit well long before you meet Kwolok. And since you're staying within the map's intended geometry, this one even flies in the No-Out-of-Bounds speedrun category.

Feeding Grounds Gate Skip

The Feeding Grounds gate is another massive time sink, but you can bypass it completely using nothing but Bash and Sentry. You don't even need Light Burst, even though the game insists you do.

Here's the main method: get to the lantern above the gate with a Sentry Jump or Wall Jump, then drop a Sentry mid-air. Its explosion triggers the wind gate just like Light Burst would, and this saves you from the Shriek stealth chase entirely. We're talking a solid 3-4 minute save here.

If you accidentally trigger the stealth sequence anyway, there's a backup. Just die in the kill-plane, warp out at a Spirit Well, and Shriek will actually despawn from the area. The kill-plane disappears too, so you can stroll into Weeping Ridge through the normal post-chase exit.

Even simpler: before touching any trigger, use Burrow or aerial resets to bypass the bone trigger on the ground. This lets you move freely in the area and access Weeping Ridge without the chase ever starting.

Early Luma Pools Access (RISKY)

⚠️ READ THIS FIRST: This skip can permanently break your save. ⚠️

Seriously, don't try this on a main file. If you enter Luma Pools before visiting Silent Woods for the first time, the main quest item straight-up won't spawn, and the autosave will overwrite your backup saves. You'll be forced to restart the entire game.

That said, speedrunners on unpatched console versions - the 1.0 Switch cart or pre-patch builds - use this to shave a massive 5:30 off Any% by skipping Kwolok's Hollow entirely.

Here's what you need: the Triple Jump shard from Twillen's shop in Wellspring Glades, plus Spirit Smash for that extra vertical boost. You'll swim from Wellspring Upper Level to the Luma Pools antechamber, where a sand-spit crab sits on a wooden platform.

The launch itself is frame-perfect. You have to release Spirit Smash on the exact frame the crab's sand-spit spawns, then immediately hammer out a Triple Jump (B, B, B). Nail the timing and Ori rockets past the kill-wall into Luma Pools' main area.

Backup save instructions: Before you even think about attempting this, manually copy your save to a separate slot. The autosave will absolutely betray you if the glitch fails, so keep a clean backup you can retreat to.

Mid-Game Zone Skips (Mouldwood to Baur's Reach)

Baur's Reach Avalanche Clip

If you're sick of that avalanche chase, you can just... skip the whole thing. The Baur's Reach avalanche clip lets you burrow through the snow bank right at the start of the chase, which means you swim under the level geometry and access the area early while the game thinks you're still panicking.

You'll need Burrow from Windswept Wastes to even attempt this, and Bash is highly recommended for those tiny mid-burrow adjustments that make or break the clip. Here's the exact timing: hug the left wall of the first snow mound, hold DOWN to burrow, tap JUMP on the third wiggle frame, then release DOWN while holding LEFT to clip clean into the void. It sounds finicky because it absolutely is, but once you nail it, you're looking at roughly 18-21 seconds saved in real time and about 12 seconds on the in-game timer. That's the single biggest timesave in Baur's Reach, no contest.

Most Any% runners skip the early Vitality shard since it's wildly out of the way, but if you're running All-Cells or 100%, you can always backtrack after the avalanche ends without much fuss.

Mouldwood Depths Burrow Skip (Patched?)

Let's kill a rumor right now. You might've heard this skip died in a November 2025 patch, but that update literally does not exist. The final patch shipped in March 2021, and Moon Studios said the game is content-complete. So yes, the Mouldwood Depths burrow skip still works.

This skip lets you dive under the sand gate near the first dark lantern, bypassing the intended triple-jump/grapple/dash requirement that normally gates you from the Eye of the Forest wisp. Those stealth-patch rumors came from a Brazilian YouTuber who was playing on a modded copy with accidental keybind conflicts - so yeah, not exactly a reliable source.

If you can't get the skip to work, it's almost always input timing or framerate messing you up, not some secret update. It remains legal in Any% No Major Glitches categories, so you're totally fine to use it in runs.

Kwolok's Hollow Fence Clip (Patched)

This one's actually dead. The Kwolok's Hollow fence clip got patched in Patch 2 back in December 2020, which added an extra collision plane behind the fence and extended the gate trigger volume. You used to burrow straight through that wooden fence, skip the block puzzle and cutscene, and save a clean 12-15 seconds in any% routes.

On any build later than 4.0.0.30, this just doesn't work - Steam and Xbox Live will force that update the moment you connect. Any% runners have replaced it with the Spirit-Slam zip purchase from Opher, which is only about 2 seconds slower, so you're not losing much by playing on a modern version.

Late Game Optimizations and Endgame Skips

Alright, you've hit the back half of the game and you're probably looking for ways to shave seconds - or just avoid losing hours to bugs. Here's the stuff the game doesn't tell you about, and some of it can brick your progress if you're not careful.

Willow's End Elevator Clip

There's a nasty gauntlet in Willow's End where you're supposed to light lanterns while riding a vine elevator up. Speedrunners skip the whole thing with a frame-tight pause-buffer exploit, but the catch is it'll save you 18-22 seconds while also risking a full soft-lock.

Here's how it works: during the teleport animation, you slam the pause button and abuse the single integration step on unpause to ram Ori straight through the moving vine collider. The timing is brutal - miss it and you'll just bonk against the floor like normal. But if you clip too early, you break the 'vine released' flag, which means the weeping ridge door stays sealed forever and you're forced to reload an earlier save.

Moon Studios patched similar pause-buffer bugs in Luma Pools and Midnight Burrows, but they left this one untouched since it only bypasses optional traversal. If you're going for it, make a manual backup first. Seriously, don't trust autosave here.

Shriek Soft-Lock Prevention

The final boss fight looks imposing, but the real danger is the cutscene right before it. If you charge into Shriek's arena before the Kwolok death cutscene finishes, the AI can freeze and the battle music'll loop forever. You'll have to quit to menu and pray your last autosave wasn't inside the broken instance.

The root cause is a script-breaking flag: the 'Burrow tutorial watched' trigger gets skipped if you barrel ahead, which permanently locks out the Burrow move - even if you already grabbed the shard. Your controls will pretend you never learned it.

Prevention is simple but tedious:

• Turn off Auto Save on Quit before entering the Silent Woods.
• Make a manual backup save at the last Spirit Well before the chase sequence.
• Play offline so cloud sync doesn't grab a corrupted file.
• Whatever you do, don't touch the first Spirit Well that spawns after you escape Shriek's chase. That well is cursed.

To verify you're safe, watch Ori after the cutscene. If they automatically perform the Burrow dig animation and the shard icon glows, you're good. If not, reload that backup immediately.

Into the Burrows Four-Key Desync Workaround

Couch co-op in the 'Into the Burrows' quest has a brutal desync bug on the fourth keystone. The host's counter'll read 4/4 while the client stays stuck at 3/4, and the door script simply won't fire. Both players see the key vanish, but the game thinks only one of you grabbed it.

This bug is still live in patch 4.10.0.372, and the workaround is a pain: the host needs to enter the burrows alone, collect the first three keystones, then save-quit at the Spirit Well. Reload the save, invite Player 2, and collect the fourth key together. It's a hassle, but it's the only way to force the flags to sync.

If you're already soft-locked, you can't fix it from inside. Warp to another zone, fully close the game, then re-enter the burrows and redo all four keystones with both players present from the start. No shortcuts - you'll have to re-collect everything.

Optimal Boss Order for Speedruns

Boss order in Ori isn't just about following the story - it's the difference between an eight-hour adventure and a sub-nine-minute sprint. The devs laid out a clear path, but speedrunners treat that path like a suggestion, and the strategies they've found will change how you see every encounter.

Intended Boss/Chase Order (Normal Playthrough)

The game wants you to fight nine encounters total, and you don't get a say in the first one. Howl ambushes you on your first night in Inkwater Marsh, and you literally can't leave the area until he's down - think of him as the game's way of saying 'parry or perish.' After that, you'll bump into the Horn Beetle in Kwolok's Hollow, which is where you learn that Bash isn't just for platforming; it's for slapping projectiles back in faces.

Things get spicy in Mouldwood Depths, where you hit a double-header: first you chase Mora through escape rooms, then immediately face the Foul Presence in total darkness. You'll need the Flash ability from Luma Pools to light torches here, which means you're locked into this order unless you're breaking the game. Later, after returning all four wisps, Kwolok turns into a three-phase arena battle in Luma Pools, and beating him is your ticket to Windswept Wastes.

The final stretch brings Willow Stone, a stationary puzzle boss in Willow's End that summons exploding spirits, and then Shriek shows up twice - once mid-escape in Windswept Wastes, then again as the true final boss on the last platform. There's no skipping her; she's hard-coded into the ending. A clean playthrough where you actually fight everything will run you about 7.5 to 8 hours on Normal.

Any% No-Major-Glitches Speedrun Order

Now for the fun part. Any% runners don't care what the devs intended - they care about what's fastest, and they've sliced the intended route down by about 25% backtracking. The order looks like this: Howl still comes first, but he's dead in 6-7 seconds using grounded smash stun-lock. Then you corner-burrow past the Horn Beetle chase, which means you can skip the actual fight while still triggering the escape sequence.

Here's where it gets clever: runners use damage-boosting to reach Foul Presence early, before you're supposed to have Flash. They also clip into Luma Pools to fight Kwolok way ahead of schedule, then delay Mora until later when they can burst her down faster. The two Shriek encounters stay at the end because, again, you can't finish the game without them.

The real madness is the full-glitch Hand-to-Hand wrong-warp, which teleports you from the prologue straight into the final escape sequence. This skips 90% of the game, leaving only four bosses that load as scripted flags during the escape: Shriek #1, Mora, Kwolok, and Shriek #2. You don't even really fight them - you just trigger them in a cutscene while running for your life. The current world record for that category is 14.879 seconds. Yes, seconds.

All-Bosses Category Optimization

If you're a purist who wants to see every boss actually die, All-Bosses is your category. You still have to kill all nine encounters, but the order can be tweaked to minimize wasted time. The secret sauce is ability routing - buying only what you need, when you need it, and grabbing story abilities along the way.

Here's the exact purchase order that lets you fly through:

• Spirit Edge (you start with this)
• Double Jump (800 EXP, buy early)
• Burrow (free in Wellspring)
• Dash (1200 EXP)
• Water Breath (800 EXP)
• Spirit Smash (1200 EXP)
• Launch (from Baur's Reach)
• Blaze (800 EXP)
• Spirit Star (900 EXP)
• Flash (2100 EXP)

That's all you'll buy. You grab Torch and free Ku in Inkwater Marsh, buy Double Jump, then head straight to Wellspring to get Burrow and purchase Dash. Howl gets three-shot with grounded Smash, Mora falls to a Burrow clip that saves 40 seconds, and Kwolok dies in 28 seconds to a pair of Spirit Stars. The whole run targets sub-52 minutes, which is a far cry from the 14-second glitch fest but shows true mastery of every mechanic.

Time Savings Breakdown

The gap between casual and optimized is staggering, and it all comes down to which bosses you fight - and how.

Category	Time	What You're Actually Doing
Normal Playthrough	8-12 hours	Fighting everything in intended order, exploring at your pace
Fast Non-Glitched	~35-40 minutes	Any% No-OOB, using intended route but optimized movement
Any% World Record (No OOB)	24.5 minutes	Moka's run; glitches allowed but stays in-bounds
Any% Glitched	14.879 seconds	Hand-to-Hand wrong-warp; only four bosses load as flags
All-Bosses	<52 minutes	Every boss dies, but route and abilities are hyper-optimized

The real kicker is that boss order is only half the battle. The other half is knowing which abilities turn each fight into a delete button. Dash-Wallcling Climbs and Launch Hover Zips save seconds everywhere, but the massive time saves come from skipping backtracking entirely - whether that's through clever routing or just glitching past the whole map.

Speedrun Category Rules and Glitch Legality

Any% Category (All Glitches Allowed)

If you're trying to break the game completely, Any% is where you want to be. Everything's legal - out-of-bounds clips, menu glitches, even file manipulation on PC. The only real rules are that runs must be single-segment and timed in real-time, so you can't save-scum your way to a better time. The current world record sits at 7 minutes 45 seconds, and it leans on every busted trick imaginable. Loading-zone warps, memory-pressure teleports, clipping through walls - you name it, the top runs are using it to shave off seconds.

All Wisps Category (Partial Restrictions)

All Wisps is a weird middle ground. You still need to collect every intended item, which means the category follows a 'No Major Glitches' logic, but some sequence breaks are fair game. The Silent Woods skip gets a pass because you still grab the Wisp at the end of the sequence. The Luma Pools keystone skip, though? That's banned because it lets you bypass the wisp fragment boss entirely. File-quit corruption that deletes tree nodes is also off-limits, but normal sequence breaks that just get you to late areas early are totally fine.

No Major Glitches Category (Tech Only)

This is where the community's gentleman's agreement gets real fuzzy. Sentry jumps and bash i-frames are considered technical movement, not glitches, so they're allowed. But Void-Pass OOB and menu-storage item duplication are definitely banned. You're essentially allowed to be clever with the physics engine, but you can't break the game's logic. Because that line is so blurry, any suspicious movement requires a two-minute post-run explanation. There's also an Any% No Out of Bounds variant that restricts you to staying inside authored collision, though sentry-sword leaps and other minor physics exploits are still legal.

Risk Management and Save Protection

Uberstate Corruption Prevention

Here's the thing about Ori's save system: your entire run - health, skills, map data, every quest flag - gets serialized into one unencrypted plain-text file called saveFile0.uberstate buried in AppData. It's weirdly fragile, but Ori keeps three rotating local backups automatically (saveFile0_bkup0 through bkup2), and that first backup is usually your most recent failure-free state.

The bad news? Steam Cloud is not your friend here. If your main file gets corrupted, Steam will happily sync that broken mess to the cloud and overwrite your backups too unless you pause it immediately. So the moment something feels off, go into Steam Library > right-click Ori > Properties > Updates and uncheck 'Enable Steam Cloud Synchronization'. This stops the bleeding.

To restore a corrupted save, navigate to that AppData folder, sort by Date Modified, and open the newest backup file in Notepad to verify it looks like valid JSON (you'll see readable text, not gibberish). If it checks out, copy it to your desktop, rename it to saveFile0.uberstate, and drop it back in the folder to overwrite the corrupt file. Relaunch and you should be back in business.

Common Game-Breaking Bugs

Let's talk about the run-killers. The Seir invincibility bug is the worst one - it makes Seir unkillable during the final escape, and you can get trapped in a black screen loop after the cutscene. This one sucks, but there are workarounds.

First, add -refresh-shaders as a launch argument in Steam, run the game once, then remove the argument and relaunch. This forces shader recompilation and can fix the fade-to-black issue. If that doesn't work, cap your FPS to 60 with V-Sync enabled before the cutscene - high frame rates desync the animation triggers. Also, weirdly enough, disable Windows Spatial Audio (Settings > Sound > Spatial sound = Off) because Dolby Atmos seems to conflict with the fade event.

Inventory desyncs are another nightmare where the story progresses but your inventory slot stays empty, soft-locking doors that require the light. If this happens, load your broken save and wait 10-15 seconds doing nothing. Patch 5.14 added a silent repair routine that can restore missing core items if you give it a moment to breathe.

Safe vs. Risky Sequence Breaks

If you're thinking about sequence breaks, know that some are basically free while others will brick your save.

Low Risk tricks are safe to experiment with. The Feeding Grounds skip lets you access Weeping Ridge and Willow's End early just by walking there after getting Seir - no reloads, no menu glitches, just pure routing. The Luma Pools energy refill trick is also harmless: shatter an energy crystal, pause on the exact frame, reload, and you've got full energy with the lever reset.

Low-Medium Risk includes Baur's Reach early entry. A wavedash from Inkwater Marsh can clip you above the underwater tunnel to trigger the loading volume early - miss the input and you just splash back into the water, no harm done.

High Risk? Stay away from out-of-bounds launches and memory-shrine wrong-warps. These can hard-lock your game or leave you stuck inside walls with no escape except deleting your save. They're especially dangerous on newer patches, so don't mess with them unless you're speedrunning on a dedicated backup.

Whether you're aiming for a sub-25-minute Any% run or just want to skip a frustrating chase, understanding these techniques fundamentally changes the game. Remember to manage your risks, protect your saves, and always practice on a backup file. Now, go break something.