Hitting a Block for 416 years crashes Paper Mario

What's up guys it's Stryder, and today we're going to talk about hitting a block. One of the cooler secrets in Paper Mario involves this yellow block north of Kolorado's camp in Dry Dry Desert. If you hit it once you will receive a Mushroom. Hit it 10 times and you'll receive a Super Shroom. Then if you're crazy enough to hit it 100 times, you'll get an Ultra Shroom. If you're like me, you might be curious about attaining even more items from this block. When playing the game casually, I remember think that if I hit it a thousand times, something might happen. Well, nothing happens at a thousand hits, but I had the right idea. The game has to use something to track how many times you've hit the block right? It turns out there's an unsigned four byte value stored in the memory at 014f1a48, which counts up each time the block is hit. Unsigned four byte values can store numbers between 0 and 4,294,967,295 inclusive in the decimal system. But what happens if we exceed the maximum possible number that can be stored? Let's say I hit the block 4,294,967,295 times and then decide to hit it once more. What ends up happening is the number is too large to handle so it overflows to 0, basically resetting the number. This means if you hit the block 4,294,967,297 times total, you will receive another Mushroom. Hammer it nine more times and you'll get another Super Shroom. Then you can hit it 90 more times after that to get yet another Ultra Shroom. So that's pretty cool, but you might be wondering how long it would take to do this. Well, we can hammer this block once every eight frames if we time our B inputs perfectly, and Paper Mario runs at 30 frames per second. Doing some simple math tells us we can hammer 3.75 times per second. If we divide 4,294,967,297 by 3.75, we can conclude that it would take 1,145,324,612 seconds to get the second Mushroom. To put that into perspective, that's 19,088,743 minutes, or better yet 318,145.726 hours, or even better, 13,256.0719 days. Simplifying this further tells us that if someone hammered this block frame perfectly without ever sleeping, it would take them about 36.3 years to get the second set of Mushrooms without hacking. You can tell we spawned another block in each position based on the opacity of the shadow beneath it. But let's get a little crazier. We've spawned six blocks now, but if we manage to spawn a total of thirty blocks by overflowing this value, it would overload the game and crash it. To find out how long that would take, it's not as simple as multiplying the number of seconds it took to get the first six to spawn by 10. This is because at around 9 block spawned the game's frame begins to drop, which will impact how long it will take us to spawn more blocks. Thanks to my friend Rain, I was able to use a Gecko code on console to test the game's frame rate each time a block was spawned. Now this is extremely tedious because the frame rates are not always integers. For example a frame rate that displays as 29 isn't exactly 29, it could be something like 29.03. This would not be to concerning when dealing with small numbers, but since we're talking about billions of seconds, it would give us a fairly large margin of error. Using a video program to go frame by frame, I was able to calculate the frame rates accurately. Here's a list of the frame rates at each respective number of spawned blocks. Using this data, we can calculate the number of hammers per second by dividing each frame rate by 8. We'll be using that information along with the number of times we'll need to hammer this block to calculate the number of seconds this would take. Just to clarify, the number in brackets is the decimal value of the memory address just to ensure we have the exact number of hits at each interval. After calculating the first 8,509,934,692 hammers at 30 frames per second, the next step is to divide each number of hits and gradually dropping frame rates by the respective number of hammers per second, which we calculated earlier. After this is done we will add the quotients together to get the number of seconds it would take to spawn blocks 9 through 30. Finally, we're going to add 2,290,649,251.2 and 10,862,127,354.279 together to get our official number of seconds; 13,152,776,605.479. This means it would take approximately 416.795 years to crash the game using this glitch. Again this assumes frame perfect hammers with no sleep the entire time. Keep in mind the lag was calculated using the Wii Virtual Console version which may be different from the original Nintendo 64. I'd like to give a special thanks to Bonecrusher for theorizing and verifying this glitch, and another special thanks to Rain for creating a Gecko code that allowed me to test this on a real console. If you enjoyed this video please leave a like, let me know what you thought of the glitch in the comments, and feel free to subscribe. Be sure to also check out my Twitter for updates, and I also sometimes livestream on my Twitch. Both of those links are in the description, and that's all for this video, so thank you guys for watching.