Forum:Distant Tundra discoveries

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Now that I've figured out how Miiverse works, I can post some helpful images I get from Pikmin 3! To start, I did some exploring in the Distant Tundra and found three things.

1. One of the Pyroclasmic Slooches inside the cave with the Bloominous Stemples gave me a drop of ultra-spicy spray when I defeated it. I wonder if other "non-solid" enemies like this will drop ultra-spicy; I've got to say, I wasn't expecting it.
2. While discovering Yellow Pikmin, you can move the radar to find Alph just standing by the Drake. If you "un-pause" while in radar mode, he'll just idle about in his tiny circle of fog of war; you can hear him and the snow and everything. It's not that strange, but I didn't expect you to be able to see it.
3. I found these odd shapes in the cave where Brittany discovers Yellow Pikmin. Here's a picture:

In the top right corner, Brittany's cursor is pointing to them. Those are the only 3 examples I've seen in the game of strange colorless shapes like this. You can see them by either getting Brittany up out of bounds or (the method I used here) facing the geyser as you use it and then turning the camera around 180 degrees as she flies through the air. You only see them briefly; they appear to be very far in the distance. Could we be looking at pre-loaded bits of another part of the Distant Tundra? It's hard to say... I'll see if I can get a closer look. Scruffy (talk) 18:23, 2 September 2015 (EDT)

Update

I have concluded that the cave in the Distant Tundra in which Yellow Pikmin are found has no rendered walls or ceilings, unlike other caves in Pikmin 3. I've proven it by getting Alph and Brittany out of bounds, and throwing Alph over the two roots that form a barrier above the snowy spot where Brittany first lands. I walked around with Alph on the other side of the barrier; obviously some invisible walls prevented me going to far, but I saw some cool stuff anyway. The floor is not rendered pretty early on since the designers figured it would easily fade into the black background. So you can see snow particles underneath the ground from where Brittany lands, and you can see the light-emitting object just outside the brick wall broken by the iron ball. The most interesting part, though, were these two pictures (I'm sorry I couldn't get more; these were taken seconds before the day ended since I'm no good at out-of-bounds stuff).

The lens flare is definitely from outside sunlight, meaning the game thinks that the sun can be seen in the cave in that position and renders the flare. The strange light... I'm not sure. It also sort of behaved like some sort of glare, but I can't tell what that glare is supposed to come from. By the way, both these pictures faced the general direction of the landing site.

But yes, that cave has no walls or ceilings, and what we see in the game is the stark, pitch-black world background, put through a slight filter. In camera mode you can see it without the filter, as just black. This means that the strange distant objects I photographed before are bits of other areas in the Distant Tundra. After collecting the Dodge Whistle, Anti-Electrifier, and defeating the Vehemoth Phosbat (using all of the Electrodes), one of those shapes had disappeared, leaving only the two shapes that are close to each other. So they are connected to the game sequence somehow. Scruffy (talk) 20:06, 2 September 2015 (EDT)