ALTTPR Boss Shuffle: Which Bosses Can Land Where

Turn on boss shuffle in the A Link to the Past Randomizer and Trinexx can be waiting at the end of Eastern Palace. None of Eastern Palace's own rules change. Its boss room still wants a bow, a light source and the Big Key. Now it also wants the Fire Rod and the Ice Rod, because Trinexx brings that rule with him.

That is the whole setting in miniature: bosses move, their rules move with them, and each dungeon keeps its own locks. Our ALTTPR beginner guide gives boss shuffle one sentence. This guide covers how the three shuffle modes deal the bosses, which slots turn which bosses away, what each boss asks for in a normal sword seed, and how to find out who is behind the door before you open it.

The sources are the kinds our Inverted, Retro and Swordless guides used: the options page and update notes on alttpr.com, and the generator's source code on GitHub. Boss shuffle adds one more. The generator chooses the bosses itself, then hands its list to a separate program, Enemizer, which rewrites the ROM. The generator downloads a prebuilt Enemizer from a fork of the project, pinned in its composer.json. When this guide says "the logic", it means the No Glitches rules a seed is filled against, in the Open and Standard rule files.

What boss shuffle moves

Thirteen slots are in play. Ten are the dungeon bosses from Eastern Palace to Turtle Rock. The other three are the refights inside Ganon's Tower, which the spoiler log calls Ganons Tower Basement, Middle and Top. In the original game those three hold a second Armos Knights, Lanmolas and Moldorm.

Three fights never move. The options page leaves out both Agahnims and Ganon, and the code backs it up: it assigns the two Agahnim fights after the shuffle has finished, and every slot's placement check refuses Agahnim, his rematch and Ganon.

Two things stay with the dungeon rather than the boss:

• The prize. A dungeon's pendant or crystal is tied to clearing that dungeon, and the logic counts it as cleared when you can reach the boss room and beat whatever is in it.
• The dungeon's own requirements. Big Keys, small keys, light sources and the items the dungeon's rooms demand all stay where they were. There is a table of them further down.

Simple, Full and Random deal the bosses differently

The options page lists four values: None, Simple, Full and Random. Here is what each one puts in the deck.

Simple and Full shuffle a 13-card deck and deal it slot by slot. If a slot refuses the boss on top, that boss goes to the bottom of the deck and the next one is tried. The code fills the pickiest slots first: the top of Ganon's Tower, its middle, Tower of Hera and Skull Woods, then the other dungeons, with Ganon's Tower Basement last.

Random works differently. For each slot it draws from the full boss list until it hits a boss that slot accepts, so every allowed boss is equally likely. In a sword seed that is a 1-in-10 chance per boss in an unrestricted slot and 1 in 5 at Tower of Hera.

You may meet the setting without choosing it. The site's Daily Challenge rolls its own settings, and the weights in the generator's config give boss shuffle a 20% chance on any day: Random 10, Simple 5 and Full 5, out of 100. The Beginner preset leaves it off.

Four slots turn bosses away

Most slots take anything. Four do not.

Tower of Hera and the top of Ganon's Tower are the two Moldorm arenas, and Enemizer's own source bars the same five bosses from both. Both files carry a note on Lanmolas; the Tower of Hera one says Lanmolas is "still broken" there and "will spawn on top left after first cycle".

Swordless adds one more rule: Kholdstare stays in Ice Palace and is refused everywhere else, so a Swordless seed deals 12 slots, not 13. Inverted adds none. Its Tower of Hera, Skull Woods and Ganon's Tower rule files are built on the Standard ones, so the same bans apply.

The boss brings its rule with it

The generator keeps one rule per boss, and a dungeon only counts as cleared when that rule passes. Here are the ten shuffled bosses read for a sword seed. How each fight actually plays is in our boss guide; this table is only what the logic accepts.

Magic is counted in bars. Your meter is one bar, Half Magic makes it two, and each bottle adds one more refill of whatever your meter holds, on Normal item functionality. Two bars is Half Magic or one bottle; three is Half Magic and a bottle, or two bottles; four is Half Magic and a bottle, or three bottles. "A bow" means either Progressive Bow, plus the Rupee Quiver on Retro.

The Golden Bee route needs the Bug-Catching Net, a bottle, and either the Pegasus Boots or a sword with Quake. Our bottles guide covers where the bee lives.

Read down the Advanced column and the pattern is plain. Any sword satisfies seven of the ten. The other three each carry an item into whatever dungeon they land in:

• Trinexx wants the Fire Rod and the Ice Rod.
• Arrghus wants the Hookshot.
• Kholdstare wants a melt: the Fire Rod, or Bombos with a sword.

Moldorm takes only a sword or the Hammer. On Basic placement, seven of the ten add a second test on top, most often the Master Sword.

The dungeon keeps its own locks

Moving a boss changes one term in a dungeon's rule. The rest of the boss room's requirements belong to the dungeon. This is what each boss room asks for besides the boss, in the same No Glitches logic:

Getting into each dungeon is a separate rule, and that does not change either. Ice Palace still wants a melt at the door even when Kholdstare is somewhere else.

So a shuffle can add a requirement or take one away. Send Arrghus elsewhere and Swamp Palace still wants the Hookshot, because its own boss-room rule names it. Send Trinexx elsewhere and Turtle Rock no longer needs the Ice Rod: no dungeon or overworld rule in the Open and Standard files mentions the Ice Rod at all, so in a sword seed the only place it is required is wherever Trinexx ends up. On Random, that can be nowhere. Turtle Rock's own rules still name the Fire Rod, but only for the two Roller Room chests.

Ganon's Tower's refights guard seven chests

Ganon's Tower holds 27 item locations, and its three shuffled bosses gate seven of them.

The middle and top slots both have to pass for the Moldorm Chest. Since Trinexx is allowed in the Basement and Middle, a shuffled tower can ask for both rods before its Big Key Room or its upper floors. The top slot draws from the same five-boss list as Tower of Hera.

The compass tells you who is waiting

You do not have to walk in blind. The v31.0.10 update notes say boss icons now appear on the dungeon map to show the dungeon's boss, but only once you have that dungeon's compass. The base ROM patch's routine for it reads the first sprite in the dungeon's boss room and matches it against a list of boss IDs, so the icon shows whoever was shuffled in, not whoever lived there in 1991. In the original game the compass already marked where the boss was, as our small keys guide covers. The randomizer makes it say who.

That is worth acting on for the three item-carrying bosses. A Kholdstare icon in a dungeon you planned to clear means bringing the Fire Rod, or Bombos and a sword. If your seed comes with a spoiler log, its Bosses section names all 13 shuffled slots plus both Agahnim fights and Ganon.

Enemy shuffle, damage and health

Boss shuffle goes through Enemizer together with three other settings: enemy shuffle, enemy damage and enemy health. The options page describes what each one does; the code shows what they do to the logic.

Enemy shuffle. Shuffled randomizes enemies with some limits: rooms where you must kill everything never get enemies that need a specific weapon, tile rooms and bush enemies are left alone, and Thieves can be killed. Random also shuffles bush enemies and their spawn chance, scrambles tile-room patterns, and gives Thieves a 50% chance of being killable.

Enemy damage. Shuffled swaps damage between enemy types. The options page's example has Octoroks hitting for eight hearts and Ganon for one, and it says mail upgrades still reduce damage as expected. Random rolls the damage for each mail level separately, so a mail upgrade can make a hit worse.

Enemy health. This is the one that changes the logic. With any setting other than Default, bombs and the Cane of Byrna stop counting as ways to clear a room of enemies. That touches the five Mini Moldorm Cave checks, the Big Key Chest in Desert Palace and the Hyrule Castle checks that ask for a weapon. At the doors of Agahnim's Tower and Misery Mire, where the check expects more enemies and bombs never counted, the Cane of Byrna drops out too. What still counts is a sword, a bow, the Hammer, the Fire Rod or the Cane of Somaria. The v31.0.4 update notes added these checks.

The options page and the Enemizer source disagree on the ranges. The source is build 6.0.32, both in Zarby89's repository and in the fork the generator downloads its Enemizer from, and the two give the same ranges:

Bosses are spared either way. The health routine skips a list of sprites that covers every boss on the list above, plus both Agahnim fights and Ganon. The generator also leaves Enemizer's separate boss-health, boss-damage and boss-behaviour randomizers switched off, so boss shuffle moves the fights without changing their health.

The Daily Challenge weights keep all three rare: they give enemy shuffle a 10% chance, enemy damage 7% and enemy health 8%. Everything else we have written about the game is on the A Link to the Past coverage hub.

Quick Action Checklist

• Expect 13 shuffled slots (12 in Swordless). Both Agahnims and Ganon never move.
• Know your mode. Simple uses the original 13 bosses, Full uses all ten plus three random repeats, and Random can repeat or skip any boss.
• Learn the short list for Hera and the top of Ganon's Tower: Moldorm, Helmasaur King, Mothula, Kholdstare and Vitreous.
• Remember the two single bans. No Trinexx in Skull Woods, no Blind in Ganon's Tower Middle.
• Treat the rods, the Hookshot and Bombos as boss keys. Wherever they land, Trinexx needs both rods, Arrghus the Hookshot, and Kholdstare the Fire Rod or Bombos with a sword.
• Do not assume a dungeon got easier. Its own Big Key, keys, light source and items stay put. One exception is Turtle Rock, which stops needing the Ice Rod once Trinexx moves out.
• Grab compasses. A compass puts the shuffled boss's icon on that dungeon's map.
• Bring a real weapon on randomized enemy health. Bombs and the Cane of Byrna stop counting for kill rooms.