Paper Airplane Corruption in Animal Crossing 

I'm admittedly more of a software person than a hardware person, so there a few technical inaccuracies throughout this video. The description includes corrections, as well as a technical explanation for why these airplanes duplicate. The general point of the hardware-related aspects in this video was to just provide some context on how this glitch can occur and not to be a wholistic explanation. Thank you!

If the paper airplanes never softlocked you, throwing them would be kind of fun.

A bit flip is assumed to have caused the infamous Tick Tock Clock Upwarp too. Mario warped a distance consistent with changing one bit of his position.

might be one of the funniest glitches ive ever seen imagine opening up your animal crossing one day and seeing that you got a deadly paper airplane infestation

A single ray of cosmic radiation traveling into some poor kid's animal crossing save to flip a single bit and spread data corrupting paper airplanes throughout his town: We do a little trolling

I never expected cosmic radiation to be a potential issue in Animal Crossing

I do a lot of reverse engineering on the animal crossing games too! :) Another fun fact about the paper airplane is that the reason your game softlocks is that the programmers never implemented animations for picking up or throwing the airplanes. It uses a blank dummy ID instead for the animation. The animation it calls doesnt have much associated with it since it was not even used. The lock is supposed to last until the player animation ends, but i assume the ID it calls doesn't have any data, the game hangs. Simply writing the idle animation into the player data will unlock the controls. You can swap the animation for the axe swing, and it looks cool and doesnt lock the game! I still have the code i made for this fix somewhere.

I can't wait to pay my debts at the same time as an event occurs while a cosmic ray flips the specific bit that makes paper airplanes spawn

Note, Pokémon games on the GBA used a battery for the purpose of running an internal clock, not to save data - they use flash memory.

K.K. Slider telling you your town data is corrupted brings scary vibes, personally making me feel similar to anti-piracy or similar error screens

What I love about spontaneous bit-flipping is that, despite how rare it is and a lot of the cases are believed to be caused by single-event upsets. It's practically the universe going "fuck this bit in particular" because the cosmic particle interacted with that one component in a capacitor after somehow avoiding interacting with any other celestial body or atom on its way there... It's also been recorded ruining a Super Mario 64 speedrun and may have been responsible for a plane in clear weather believing there to be a storm and trying to correct itself.

"Hey, Apple!" "What?" "Paper Airplane!" *reality falls apart*

That is some true creepypasta material right there. All it needs is for the airplanes to start talking to you.

DRAM uses capacitors, Flash memory uses transistors with "floating" gates that trap a charge.

This reminds me of the DUMMY item, which started showing up when I'd been playing my game for a couple of years, and with quite a bit of time-travel here and there. And it was never referred to with an article, either. Not "a DUMMY" or "the DUMMY." Just DUMMY, like artwork is. All-caps, too. This was without any cheating device, too, outside of the aforementioned time travel. Villagers just started offering me DUMMY in trades and such. It's shaped like a white triangle and has some Japanese characters on it. I don't recall it having any detrimental effects, other than being useless.

The same thing can happen in the GBA Pokémon games via Bad Eggs spawned by hacking the game and inputting values the game doesn't recognize for PC mons. They were also known for multiplying and spreading through your box tiles like an infection, and while they wouldn't crash your game, they did ruin saves by being impossible to get rid of, taking up box space and there's some stories of them overwriting Pokémon you had in the PC, deleting them forever, or corrupting saves. You do habw to wonder why these glitched or corrupted items spread, though - like, what part of the programming in either Animal Crossing or Pokémon has items that duplicate and spread themselves exponentially? Why do they do that if they weren't programmed specifically to do that?

Gamma rays strike again!

A small correction: There are currently ZERO commercially available 2TB microSD cards. The most we have is 1.5TB, currently.

My friend lost their town due to this stupid airplane. They were pissed that they lost a save they had 43 hours, and they broke their TV.

i love this topic, it’s my roman empire

I usually dont comment on videos, but as a computer science/cyber security major this is the BEST simple explanation of how data is stored. I dont even play animal crossing, but you just earned a sub!

Could it be that these paper planes spawning was a kind of test they used while creating the game for the balls that randomly spawned? Because they seem similar in that way but the paper planes would be easier since there are no animations (almost) also the duplicating almost seems like randomly testing what code can do and somehow ending up with that mechanic.

It's always the cosmic rays ...except for when it's actually something else

If this were to appear in your town, could you trap one by filling all adjacent spaces around it so it can't spread? And if this works, is it safe to keep in your town as a cool novelty?

Underrated channel. I really wasnt expecting to hear any new information on this 20+ year old game but here we are.

The explanation in the description is so nice, I've always been so curious why the airplane duplicates ever since I first learned about this. Also weirdly, this is the first time I've ever heard someone mention you can destroy the airplanes by dropping something else on top of them, neat!

"Yeah, the sun blasted my game and made this empty plot of grass into an unused paper airplane item that multiplied exponentially to the point of rendering my game unplayable" Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction

Some day in the future, we're going to discover what truly happens when these paper airplanes go without limits, by simulating it on a supercomputer. Infinite paper planes with no lag.

6:47 the capacitors inside of most memory chips don't have electrolyte. But their data retention does still suffer with temperature extremes.

If you get a bit flip, it's probably a sign that you've been playing too much Animal Crossing.

Hopefully someone, someday will make a mod to the game that doesn't softlock your villager after throwing a paper airplane and makes it to where the paper airplanes don't duplicate because it definitely seems like a cool mechanic exclusive to this game much like the balls that show up randomly.

this video made me actually existential like damn everything we have can just. fuck up. all our precious memories. idk how to explain it but it fills me with this immense dread... haha but otherwise i really enjoyed the video and the rest of your videos!!

Someone just randomly explained bits to me in 3 minutes, while me being in to tech for decades and programming since a year, always assumed it to be a bit to complicated to think about.

You took a technical topic that would normally bore me to tears and made it entertaining. Great work.

It is criminal that you don't have more subs.

as a sidenote, the message you've shown from Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire is actually incorrect: in those games (and by extension: Emerald) the battery only keeps track of the time, and amount of days passed, which is used for handling daily events and berry tree growth as well as initial RNG seeding. I don't remember if the original JP text was also incorrect or if this's just a localization error, but it's still something to think about. Only the first two generations (the ones on the GB(C)) actually use battery-backed saves, while FireRed and LeafGreen lack batteries entirely (however some of those carts have a history of the 1 Megabit flash chip failing, for which the game actually has a unique error message). I hope this clears up at least some confusion.

SD cards are flash memory which works using floating gate transistors. The charge will dissipate over time which takes ~10 years after which the information will be lost

Small correction: All data is still stored in binary in storage device (and in RAM/ROM). We just use hex for the human readable version of this data as its well suited for modern binary data.

It does suck that in most cases a bit flip will have no consequence at all, but despite that the game doesn't let you keep trying to play it regardless and instead takes all control away from you so it can force you to erase something you're heavily attached to. Or at the very least they could try to have a bit more space taken up to have extra saves in case a rollback is needed.

Came for the funny airplane, stayed for the amazing explanation on how computers work lol

you're so underrated! one of my fav youtubers now

Omg, I have that corrupted save KK error on my original memory card 😭 there's some weird kind of closure knowing exactly what happened. I was wondering if it was similar to the battery in a Pokemon game dying.

1:50 maybe using a RAM stick wasn't the best example for "Can hold data for years" haha (ik this was addressed in the description but I still find it funny when taking that still image out of context)

As a german I highly appreciate that you know about the Zuse Z1 and don't spew crap about Turing inventing the computer

aw, it's such a cute little paper airplane, why would it do that.. 🥺

When in doubt blame cosmic rays.

what I learned: give my memory card sunglasses.

I just discovered your channel and I'm fascinated by these videos! Something suuuper nitpicky, but at 1:32 I think it would have been neat if you had chosen to not use interpolation to zoom in. Seeing it become pixelated would have helped me intuit that you were showcasing each pixel to be stored. It's the little things (:

Hi, I stumbled across your channel earlier today and it's great. One question: Do you have any idea why they might be programmed to duplicate like that? It seems so bizarre that that would be deliberate functionality. I'm baffled.

you also cant really give the nintendo devs any crap for this error happening cause i really doubt they were thinking people would still be using the console 15 years later, especially not the same one they first bought.

Well now I want to know more about 1:23 how this special controller works if not with binary. How does it 'read' and 'change' the charge of the transistors? Great video by the way!

I learned more from this than I did in my online AP computer science class

I was just watching BrianMp16 doing his 100% run of the game and he had an offhand comment about the sun causing this issue. I laughed a little, thinking he was doing a bit, but nope he was being serious. That is terrifying 😂

i ended up getting corrupted saves all the time on harvest moon a wonderful life and animal crossing when i used 3rd party memory cards

just discovered your content, loving what i'm seeing so far! subbed!

i'm in grad school right now studying these bit flips. specifically, how an attacker can cause them deliberately for fun and profit.

My gamecube for some reason corrupts everything on the memory card if I try to play Amazing Island and save anything on it. Probably related in some way to unintentional bit flips

The cosmic ray thing is one of those things that sounds like it's way too cool to be real and definitely isn't the thing, but it is, genuinely, a real thing that actually happens in real life. It's exceedingly rare if you look at one bit. It's statistically impossible, if you look at one bit, really. Still kinda impossible on the scale of Gigabytes, but it's starting to be a thing that happens once in a while. On the scale of petabytes? Exabytes? It's happening constantly. There's some bit somewhere getting flipped by cosmic rays every second of every day, but most of those bit flips are either corrected because they were in something with error correction, irrelevant because they aren't being read by anything, bulldozed over by some kind of write before they ever get read, or in a (sub)system that nobody cares about so it breaks and nobody notices. Basically cosmic rays are extra cool because they really do the thing even though they sound WAY TOO COOL TO BE REAL

Intro and Outro Song Credits: "K.K. Cruisin' " by Mesmonium

I really liked this video. Good job on it

i've been playing too much ffxiv i had a stroke when you said "special cells"

Imagine all the rumors of weird game occurrences is just cosmic rays

I’m a bit sad you didn’t mention how it happened to BrianMp16 during his 100% without glitches or nook codes but a phenomenal video nonetheless

ur vids r pretty good :)

At 1:21 the capacitors’ terminals(?) were both connected to earth.

have there been any documented cases of this happening? like during a speedrun or something

Minor correction on the battery-based saves: Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald actually didn't do this. Gen 1 and 2 did, but the Hoenn games used the battery for keeping the in-game clock going. Source: my copy of Emerald has had it's battery depleted for several years now but my save file is still intact, and also that's what the games itself says whenever I boot it up again. As a side note, I don't think FireRed and LeafGreen had a battery in them. At the very least, there's no in-game clock.

I think the Pokémon Sapphire Version game on the right at 2:04 is a counterfeit... Also apparently most games on Nintendo 64 that don't only save to a Controller Pak, such as the shown Paper Mario Game Pak, used either an EEPROM or Flash RAM chip to save, which doesn't use batteries to save. It was surprising to first find that out. Game Boy Advance games also commonly use FRAM, EEPROM, or Flash RAM chips to save. None of those chips require power to save data. Only a few Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 64 games use SRAM, which do require batteries to save data.

When you mentioned how bit flips can occur, this was how a Super Mario 64 speedrun was set - some cosmic radiation had caused a bit flip during the runner's run, giving them the exact boost needed to warp Mario to the exact floor needed to complete the run, as he had jumped unusually high. The technique has yet to be replicated since then, as you'd need to be insanely lucky to have cosmic radiation hit the game again at the right time to pull it off, and based upon the odds... you're probably more likely to win your country's lottery jackpot. That's how rare it is. Likewise with the 2 documented cases of paper airplanes in vanilla gameplay of Animal Crossing GCN. Those two players/memory cards were hit with cosmic radiation, and the fact it's happened twice is uh... something. (I'M NOT COUNTING HACKING, THAT'S DIFFERENT) To reference Doofenshmirtz: "If I had a nickel for every time a player had paper airplanes spawn in their town without hacking, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird how it happened twice."

I get why throwing a paper plane would be an issue, but what unintended behavior would cause it to duplicate??

and thats why self correcting error detection is important

Do you think you could showcase all of KK’s corruption dialog? I’ve been searching everywhere and still can’t find a full video of it.

I don't know if you know this, but BrianMp16 almost lost his save data because 1 bit flip.

As an amateur compsci.. person - the reason why this happens and not anywhere else, like on PCs or smartphones is - well, that it does, it's just that memory management systems feature redundancies and even some higher end, industrial systems utilize what is called ECC memory, which is designed to correct for bit flips when they occur - such memory is usually mandatory for use in things like satellites, airliners and spacecraft. Video game consoles aren't built, at least they weren't until the 6th gen with the Xbox 360 and the sort, to handle memory more authoritatively - When you turn on a PS2, Gamecube or Dreamcast, the BIOS initializes, and much like your PC's operating system, the game engine is executed and initializes, operating much like its' own OS while the BIOS goes dormant outside of certain low level features, being responsible for memory management, is usually delegated to the game's engine - however, space was at a premium in those days, same with performance, so including memory management subsystems outside of the bare basics was seen as overkill and potentially detrimental to the end user - if it made the game stable during normal operation, that's all the dev teams cared about. Nowadays, especially with the latest game consoles, games are run within virtual machines, and the underlying OS of the game console works more in the same way as a conventional OS does outside of 'userland', a term for the user-relevant components of the OS - OSes that do this, are called Hypervisors, and virtual machines for the uninformed can be considered like emulators, but the same hardware as the machine that's running it. Doing it this way allows for more stricter control over the program and sandboxing it makes issues caused between hardware or firmware revisions less likely, reducing the chances of data corruption. But how does it do this? On cheaper, consumer-grade hardware, the PC will often run validation checks built into code that make sure the program is running properly - if for example, a bit flip changes something vital inside of Windows, the Kernel's (Essentially the heart of the OS) memory management will try to resolve the issue. If for whatever reason it cannot, and continuing in this state is dangerous, it will bring up a BSOD, and log the issue for review. This can happen with failing power supplies, dying RAM or CPUs, or even external factors due to fluctuating power sources, usually for those in second and third-world countries, where power to the home is more 'dirty' than what you'd expect in places like the US, Canada and the sort, and power delivery isn't at a constant, steady amperage/voltage, and, of course, there are things like Solar Flares and other astrological phenomena that if powerful enough to penetrate the natural EM shielding of our planet, can cause all sorts of havoc against non-ECC powered systems, given they're not severe enough to, y'know, plunge us into the dark ages.

I never grew up with Animal Crossing. I never played this game for more than 10 minutes. I can't stop watching these videos, they feel like sweets. 🤤

Real unmatched power of the sun moment

What would happen if instead the bit flipped to give some value other than 0x8000? i.e. 0x4000? Would the tiles be filled with some other sort of item them?

good thing is that, nowadays, if this ever happened to you then you could at least fix it.

If you wanna keep a few in your town without risking your save, you could just surround them in signposts right?

the start reads like a poorly thought-out creepypasta

Back when PSO was online, and before Sega clamped down on it, hackers would often FSOD players, and vey easily corrupt their memory cards, along with everything stored on them. Those hackers loved tormenting other players, and Sega did a very poor job of policing it, despite paying them for the server to play PSO online. I lost my first Animal Crossing town to a hacker, as they corrupted by memory card. I have to believe that's what did it, because why else would the card get corrupted right after an FSOD? For those who don't know FSOD, it was "frozen screen of death" where they'd freeze your game, and very likely corrupting your memory card in the process, losing not only all your data from PSO, but anything else saved on that card, like villages from Animal Crossing.

If you encounter a paper airplane in your game, what should you do? Is your game permanently ruined or can you exit to get rid of it before it multiplies?

This guy is the StryderX7 of Animal crossing

wasnt there at one point a random cosmic ray from the sun that flipped a bit in a SM64 cartridge and changed marios positionsl value

Perfect creepypasta material

Can bit flips cause other items to appear on the ground? I'm guessing there's 15 other objects that might appear if another bit in a ground tile's contents is flipped. IDs 4000, 2000, 1000, 0800, 0400, 0200, 0100, 0080, 0040, 0020, 0010, 0008, 0004, 0002, and 0001 are the ones that could spawn from a single flipped bit on an empty tile, assuming items exist in all of those IDs.

Curse of the Wright Brothers

interesting glitch! i'd love to see more on this topic

At 2:48 2TB micro SD cards don't exist yet at the time of this recording. The highest micro SD cards that currently exist are 1.5 TB

nice i never knew that !

1:33 Never use image filtering ever again! Nearest Neighbour = GigaChad!

This is why the companies buy error correcting ram

(Volatile) RAM and capacitor images used during talk about long term, persistent storage.

How do the 1s and 0s translate into what we see on the screen? I’ll never understand this lol

holy hell chonny jash

Will dropping stuff on every paper airplane solve the bug and return everything to normal?

What happens if you pick up every plane when there aré only a few, and then save and restart the game?

Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars

Flash/EEPROM (presumably used in these memory cards) has limited erase cycles. Could that be part of why speedrunners tend to run into this, aside from having greater cumulative chances stemming from extensive play time?

I still don't get why bit flips don't count as a hardware modification. The hardware was LITERALLY modified. They ban runs for other things out of a runners fault, so why not this???