Chrono Trigger's Dream Devourer can be killed with an integer overflow
A wiki page detailing the Dream Devourer boss glitch spreads on Hacker News, prompting a swap of similar overflow exploits from other classic games.
What to know
- The Dream Devourer, Chrono Trigger's true final boss, can be defeated by exploiting an integer overflow in its stats rather than through normal combat.
- The Hacker News thread became a crowdsourced collection of similar integer-overflow glitches from other classic games, including Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Lufia 2, Transport Tycoon, and Realmz.
- Commenters offer competing informal theories about why such stat-overflow bugs occur, generally attributing them to caching and incremental stat updates rather than full recalculation.
The dispute Commenters disagree on whether such overflow bugs reflect an 'unnatural' coding oddity or an understandable, if sloppy, engineering shortcut. · positions read across 22 posts and comments
Similar integer-overflow exploits exist in many other classic games, and commenters enjoy comparing them.
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“The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.”
Ndymium · Hacker News ↗
The bug likely resulted from a caching/incremental-update mistake rather than a deliberate or mysterious design choice.
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“A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.”
LoganDark · Hacker News ↗
Chrono Trigger's sequel, Chrono Cross, is a disappointing follow-up that mistreated the original's story and characters.
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“Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior.”
falsaberN1 · Hacker News ↗
ronreiter Hacker News submitterLoganDark HN commenterseam_carver HN commenterSatvikBeri HN commenterNdymium HN commenterfalsaberN1 HN commenter
How it unfolded 6 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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6
Commenter recalls Transport Tycoon's money-overflow exploit
Ndymium describes how building a very long tunnel in Transport Tycoon overflowed the money counter, giving players effectively unlimited funds, a trick used widely by kids without understanding why it worked.
“The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.”
— Ndymium -
There were games being written in days where every byte was precious, and the indirection necessary for something like the decorator pattern was just infeasible. There was a lot of direct stat manipulation upon equip & unequip back in the day.Following that there was the era in which the only way to be competitive in the games space was to write…
2 more of the top 3 · 14 posts in this stretch
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If you still like video games and are a bit of a masochist you might try playing Noita sometime, a lot of the late game is basically built around this type of logic.For example there's a wizard-type enemy that temporarily debuffs your max health by 50%, and the effect can stack if you get hit more than once. But what happens if you pick up a…
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Reminded me of SNES Shadowrun, don't remember if my English skills were weak or what the cause of me misunderstanding it was but when you encountered the Jester in the game, you're supposed to shoot him until you get a chance for a conversation and saying his name completes that bossfight.However, I missed that this part was the key and after a…
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LoganDark theorizes how the Dream Devourer bug likely originated
A commenter speculates the bug stems from developers caching a stat value and updating it incrementally and imperatively rather than recalculating it from the inventory each time, causing it to underflow.
“A string of mistakes has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.”
— LoganDark -
Parallel rabbit holes if you like this stuff: - in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much - In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit - Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds - GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would've been expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. A string of mistakes has to happen…
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Similarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.
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Commenters swap similar integer-overflow exploits from other games
Multiple commenters recall analogous overflow bugs: a one-hit kill on the final boss of Fire Emblem: Three Houses' Azure route, and healing to defeat the 65,535-HP Egg Dragon in Lufia 2.
“If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256. This overflows to zero and you win.”
— seam_carver -
I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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In Fire Emblem 3 Houses, the final boss of the Azure route has 199 HP and is standing on a 60 HP heal tile.If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.This overflows to zero and you win.
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Commenter shares a BreezeWiki mirror of the fandom link
mitxela posts an alternative link to the wiki page via BreezeWiki, a tool that strips fandom.com pages of ads and clutter.
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Commenters debate Chrono Trigger's legacy versus its sequel
One early commenter uses the thread to criticize Chrono Cross as a poor sequel to Chrono Trigger, arguing it was 'spiteful' toward the original's characters and story.
“Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior.”
— falsaberN1 -
I don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks.Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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There's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.
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ronreiter submits Dream Devourer overflow wiki page to Hacker News
A Hacker News post links to the Chrono Trigger fandom wiki page describing how the Dream Devourer boss can be defeated by exploiting an integer overflow, quickly gaining traction on the site.
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first by HN Best, 4d ago · also HN Frontpage
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What people are saying 11 voices from 1 site · best of 22 · verbatim
- Is Chrono Trigger still worth playing today for someone who has never played an RPG?
- Today
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The classic Alone in the Dark I gives you "infinite" health points via integer (16-bit) underflow due to a bit of negligience. Once you get the poison, just drink it. And during the animation just drink it again. And again. And again...
- Sep 21
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In the soccer management game USM98, there was a textbox to input the numbers the wages you could offer to players and coaching staff. This was sensibly limited to positive integers in $native_currency. If I entered 99999999999999, I would get something close to £32,000 per week, suggesting they were using a signed 16-bit int.There was also a…
- Sep 20
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Kinda reminds me of Gandhi urban legend in Civilization, where his "peacefulness" was so low that if it got lower he became a war monger. I thought it was true until I looked it up for this comment. Still, funny stuff!
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Fandom and fextralife are the two “wiki” providers that do this. It’s best to exclude them both from all search results. Fextralife is even worse as it autoplays a twitch steam.
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I haven't thought about Realmz in a long-ass time. It had some really crazy tracks and was the only game I know of that used MOD instead of MIDI for its music.
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It's ad ridden sewer. The final straw was disabling comment visibility to only those who are logged in. I used that site a bunch for Kenshi and the comments were a trove of information. No more. I refuse to make an account on that visual nightmare.
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Fandom Wiki leaves 5 lines of readable text on my iPhone after about 3 seconds of loading.
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round(stat * 1.05); // rounded down round(stat / 1.05); // rounded down againthat would be my first guess.
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I recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago.Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS)(I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).
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A classic way of getting endless money in Transport Tycoon was to build a tunnel going from one edge of the map to another. The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.As kids we didn't know why this would happen, we just knew that it did and used it every game.
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A friend of mine and I played Secret of Mana until our money overflowed the bounds of an int (or whatever was backing it. It evidently caused save game corruption, and that was the end of our epic run.