Blood moon
The Blood Moon is a game mechanic that ensures the world stays populated with enemies and weapons. Every time a blood moon occurs, enemies that have been defeated and overworld weapons that have been picked up by the player respawn.
Blood moons are also used to reset internal state when some subsystems are running out of memory or become unresponsive. Such blood moons are commonly referred to as "panic" or "emergency blood moons".
A common misconception is that blood moons help replenish system memory by resetting enemy kill flags. This is however total nonsense, because enemy kill flags are just GameData flags, and all GameData flags are loaded at bootup and stay in memory forever[1].
Scheduled Blood Moons
 | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. |
Panic Blood Moons
Panic Blood Moons occur when the game is running out of memory or when some tasks are taking too much time.
Panic conditions are checked every frame by GameScene, which also keeps track of the panic reason in an unsigned 32-bit integer so that memory issues can be reported to Nintendo via the telemetry system.
| Bit | Description |
|---|---|
| 0 | Resource system: at least one of the following is true:
|
| 1 | PhysicsMemSys: Havok main heap is running out of memory (less than 5% free) |
| 2 | PlacementMgr: Actor spawning heap is running out of memory (less than 5% free) |
| 3 | ResourceSystem/OverlayArena: ForResourceS heap is running out of memory |
| 4 | ResourceSystem/OverlayArena: ForResourceL heap is running out of memory |
| 5 | ResourceSystem/OverlayArena: Audio heap is running out of memory |
| 6 | ResourceSystem/TextureHandleMgr: Last TextureHandleMgr::calc execution took more than 60 seconds |
A panic moon causes enemies and other respawnable objects to respawn since it calls Demo011_0 just like the regular blood moon code. The demo contains a call to OffWaitRevival, which appears to be what actually resets the revival flags.
Inhibitors
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- ↑ Even without reverse engineering the code, everyone knows the game never loads Bootup.pack (which holds the GameData configuration) again after init so it cannot possibly be unloading flags. Not to mention that it'd be ridiculously inefficient to unload and reload flags all the time. And a quick look at the code shows that it's an absurd idea.