fun fact, the dachshund dog (the one who chases you on the little tunel), can actually hurt you while you fly with the ring, making him the most powerfull being in animal well.

My theory behind the extra bunnies is it was designed as a small extra layer of datamine protection from BDTP. If you pick up any of them, you cant do it. So you'd somehow have to know exactly which 16 bunnies are legit (or even know theres exactly 16 to collect). It was likely intended to make a small delay to anyone trying to datamine out BDTP to be too late to the community solving it first. If that was the goal, it worked. When we were at 14 bunnies, someone began using cheat engine to teleport and found these bunnies but could not do BDTP anymore and we couldn't use that info to help us. We then figured out all 16 bunnies legit, and despite those cheaters trying, they could not figure out BDTP using it.

You take the blue pill, the game ends, you exit to your steam library and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the Animal Well goes...

I swear babe it's not what it looks like, Animal Well told me to cheat on you so I could get a shiny ring!

Honestly, I think Billy put all this to fuck with us after we have already complete the sheer insanity of the main puzzles so that we can think there is just one more thing to do in the game

i remember in dunkeys video billy said that early on in development the animals talked but then he realised that animals dont talk, so its likely just the animals that didnt make it to the final game put in random spots

To me, the cheater’s ring previously having a normal name and being in the beta kind of implies that at one point it was meant to be normally obtainable, but then was later removed (probably replaced with the moth form, judging from how both are game-breaking upgrades related to flight) but the dev decided to rename it and leave it in at a place only cheaters and glitch exploiters could find

On a Reddit AMA, someone asked Billy if there was a legitimate way to reach "Snail Island" and Billy said "No comment." That could imply there is a way we haven't found. Or that there isn't a way and he does intend us to cheat and that there's something hidden in the corrupted save. The numbers of the health, firecrackers, eggs, etc all seem peculiar. I wonder if that spells out a flute code?

So if you didn't break one of the 'normal' walls earlier in the game, you could press all 3 pink buttons without any issue? It's the overflow of the 17th wall in a 16 wall array that corrupts the save?

I like the theory that the ring is a challenge from the dev to see if players can break into a spot that has no intended solution.

The sheep is actually reachable without Cheaters Ring. *Spoilers warning* In the Animal Well discord, someone found that there is actually another challenge similar to 'the floor is lava' challenge. You need to stand on top of the giant bunny temple and then plunge into a body of water

The cheater bunnies to me seem like a form of encryption to ensure the big bunny island directions could not be datamined. A red herring to obscure which bunnies are legitimately obtainable. However very interesting if there could be a 5th layer with the cheater ring...

13:48 Absolutely can't be a coincidence that there's 9 blocks in the background near this secret. I like to think that a lot of these could just be leftover ideas and assets of previous versions of the game, and he's intentionally left them in as homage and/or to just mess with us for discovering them. Fun seeing more stuff being discovered either way. I don't want this game to end

The fact that there is exactly one more wall than the array can handle really makes it seem like it's not an accident.

I remember The Binding of Isaac had this special puzzle that was meant to require several players working together to solve… and some guy solved it in a day by datamining. Billy probably added the fake bunnies to avoid that exact scenario.

I have another take, and I'm thinking this is genuinely a viable answer... possibly the "Cheaters Ring" is simply a troubleshooting and dev tool and there's a teleport point to it that only the dev knows. They may have dressed it up knowing that players will eventually find it anyway, so it adds another potential layer of speculation and mystery, but largely it was just there for functional reasons. The extra animals may have been additional tasks or puzzles that got scrapped along the way in dev work and they just left them in as fun bits to discover once you've unraveled the whole game. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if there WAS some extra thing around them, but knowing how devs work, they're constantly creating and abandoning ideas as the project takes shape. Sometimes it's easier to leave things alone so they don't break other things if they're removed. As far as the corruption goes? Yeah maybe to protect against dataminers but it's really hard to say. I mean, it could just be there to give another red herring to keep people obsessing ad infinitum thinking there's always one more mountain to climb. It's really tempting to latch on to all those juicy numbers at the end (matches, eggs, etc) and try to start spiraling into new ideas for things to try, but the game does have to end SOMEWHERE, right?

So, the 3 pink buttons causing corruption because the array is too small, what if you start a new game and *only* open those three walls by getting the cheater's ring as fast as possible, while avoiding doing anything else?

I have been trying to do a 'no Permanent items' run, (not even the map, fire crackers, or such), and with 1 potential exception, (the place that 'normally' requires bubble & disk), I THINK you might be able to get all the matches, & light all the candles; (keys & doors maybe to, but that's a whole other thing) The only Main Item I can use is The Disk, (since it is not permanent) & with ghost dog chasing me, which makes things difficult... (hesitant to pick up the mock-disk) I just unfortunately, lack the digital dexterity required to pull it off; that room near the chameleon with the 3 shadows... it is hypothetically possible to use the disk to make it to the candle there while avoiding the shadows AND ghost dog, but I just can't do it; crazy secrets sometimes require very unorthodox playstyles, & the fact that this 'no Permanent items' run can possibly achieve something like All Candles has gotten stuck in my head;

I subscribed for this. The animals being played songs to change their dialouge blew my mind. Why cant we get more games as complete as this one?

More animal well secrets discovered? Gotta leave school

Wait, hold on, doesn't that mean each of the 17 walls would cause a different corruption!? Could it be you can hit those three buttons safely if you can skip at least one wall?

i wonder if 8:43 would scare someone who never played elden ring

I'm still so obsessed about all that glass strewn throughout the game, seemingly random. It often doesn't feel like it "fits" into the scenery and is just there as a utility block or an obstacle. And the unreachable island blocked by glass solidifies that even more. So I was surprised when it was said there was no way to "break the glass" in the AMA. I still think there is something with this glass. I always speculated on phasing through that and I guess with the ring that's possible. I just wonder if there is anything to all that glass before. Even the Manticores breaking that specific kind of glass felt like a hint when I first played. I thought maybe we could either bring a manticore up into the well or get a similar laser ability but all that doesn't seem to be the case.

This game is mind blowing! Billy Basso made an all time classic literally by himself! Take notes gaming industry....

I like to think they are intentional (the bunnies. Not the animals) Also, are we sure the bunnies prevent the bunny temple? The code is based on the direction of bunny ears, what if the code is dynamic and changes with each bunny you collect. More bunnies = more ears = more code. Just my theory, I would test it if I knew how the original BDTP was found.

I've been making games for a while, I can't speak for Billy Basso, but a lot of secrets like this exist because instead of removing things it can sometimes be easier to "plaster over" them. E.g. instead of removing the buried city in WoW, you kind of just push it out of the world and build a new city on top. Similarly, If you had an array of removable walls and were moving these around the world as you were doing your level design, you might decide that instead of deleting leftover removable walls at the end and screwing up the ordering of the array, you might just move the walls you don't need somewhere that can't be accessed. The data corruption may have just be an unintentional side effect of moving the walls like this, and Billy left it in because it's kind of a neat coincidence that only happens when you cheat. Or they did it on purpose, which is genius. Other secrets exist because when you're testing your game you want to have quick and easy access to certain things. The cheat ring probably exists just as a quick in-game way of getting around the world, hence why it's been in the game since the start. Billy probably had an easy way of adding this item to their inventory with a keyboard shortcut and when it came time to ship the game they simply removed the shortcut instead of removing the ring (software developers are lazy like this and we love it). Other secrets exist because the dev made something and had to cut it but didn't want to waste the work they put in, so they'll move it somewhere you're not supposed to go and leave it in as an easter egg. The hidden animals might be something like that. In the end, most devs *WANT* you to find these cool details. It's sort of like a little hidden message that the dev is leaving for you. "Our little secret" if you will.

So I did this about a week ago, and when I played the flute for the sloth (i believe it was clockwise about 4 rotations starting from the 1 position) I was suddenly unable to take any action, the room started shaking, and my controller buzzed for ~2 seconds, similar to a secret door being opened. Since i couldn’t move I wasn’t able to tell what door was being opened and it was after I had already corrupted the data. I still haven’t figured out what happened. But I’m tempted to do a normal runthrough and try playing the flute in all the animal rooms and see if I can get it to happen again without corrupt data

13:17 you have no clue how much I thought about that specific wall you have no idea

This feels like a combination of factors... The buttons and animals feel like content that was planned but later abandoned. Though it is interesting that those buttons should be pink, unlike the other buttons. Rather than discard the unused content, they just buried it in game for people to find. The same goes for the fox. The out-of-bounds bunnies definitely feel like they were put there as a trap to prevent cheaters from getting first clears on the end game content, though. Especially if they are mixed in such that data miners have to know to skip them. That would very much be a "I don't mind you cheating, but not competitively" thing to do. The overflow triggered by those buttons is extremely easy to guard against from a programming perspective (simply by putting a watchdog method to protect against overruns), so most likely they, too, were converted from unused content to a countermeasure to prevent cheaters from clearing the game first. Can the manticore break the glass blocking the island?

I just realized the flower you come out of are the same shape as the fruit you eat

These games have rotted my brain to the point where I believe every fox is a Tunic reference. Extremely far-fetched, but has anyone tried the “musical language” angle yet?

I thought I was special for finding the Groveling Toad on my own. Then I see this.

I think this is totally intentional and Billy just created this layer to be sure not all secrets would be discovered really fast.

Well, in dunkey’s announcement video for the release of the game he has an interview with Billy where he says that he originally had the animals talking and telling you what to do but then he wanted to “make the game more realistic” so he ended up hiding the dialogue later because animals don’t talk. Maybe it’s worth going through that video

So happy when I saw this. I miss when all the animal well videos were popping up & people were figuring out secrets

I was waiting for this video! I didn’t even realize the dialogue changing or the fact that you get 20 hearts. Also didn’t imagine it could be a layer 5 but that’s exciting. Was awesome to see. Thanks for showing us in such detail for those who didn’t want to risk it ourselves. Was going to suggest collecting all the eggs again and of course you’re already doing it. Love to hear that. Excited for your figurine video once the collectors edition drops and also excited with any and all updates with the cheaters ring.

Would not be surprised that there is a 5th layer to this game. Couple theory’s I have are 1 the corruption is actually a code, it seems so oddly specific to get all of those numbers. Question now is what order is the code and where do we use it? The corrupted bunnies are possibly also hiding a new path way with their ears as well but yet again where and in what order.

I remember the sheep when I was traveling through the pipe but holy crop I’m startled that they are actual beings rather than backgrounds…

Everyone is talking about the implications of the secret animals and corrupted save, but is no one talking about what the cheater’s ring implies!?! DUDE, OUR BLOB HAS FINGERS.

Let’s just be grateful that Billy removed the dialogue from the main game. Can you imagine going up to every animal and they are like, “I like bananas”. 100% the right decision.

What happens if you flip that final button before you're at max walls so it is under the max and doesn't overwrite. What else should it unlock?

Fury, are you going to make a video about the two clocks and stuff that i assume is related to speedrunning? Also, is there any discover about the buried frog?

Hey, this is hardly related but umm, I found something by scanning the Animal Well title itself as a barcode. It's a little spooky, I had a hunch it would work...

Probably have to play the right songs for each animal.

just noticed something interesting, the save corruption button glitch reminds me of a glitch in super metroid you can do called the spacetime beam: with frame perfect timing you can equip the plasma beam and spazer beam at the same time (normally the game doesn't let you). using a certain combination of other beams and shooting it lets you fire off a beam that essentially resets all progress in the game including item pickups and door/room triggers but lets you keep all the items you currently have: for health upgrades it means you can get more health than you should have at maximum. the interesting part for me is that when you fire off the beam the game also similarly lags for a sec. May or may not be intentional but I think it's an interrsting connection: most likely though it's just a similar coding process happening like you described

Wait, is it possible that the reason why you can no longer reach the bunny temple, is that the game now checks for another combination of corrupted bunnies that leads to another place?

You know there's one thing that bugs me with this whole thing. Like getting into the snail island does require a genuine use of glitches, but past that point? You get a baked in item that allows you to noclip, which leads you to discover secret NPCs with a sense of direction, which then leads you to find secret bunnies with buttons in the same room? Getting to snail island might not be intended but past that, it is all designed, I agree wholeheartedly with what you said because this does feel like it is something! I wonder if getting all the normal bunnies after the corruption does anything, I suspect it wouldn't since you'd basically be re-filling the modified counters. I think we're looking at something that was a work in progress with that bug in mind. Anyway throwing thoughts at the wall won't change anything, I have yet to finish the third layer, so I can't test those assumptions rn lmao but maybe sometime

Has anything come about the “flowers” hint? Is it still being worked on or has it been determined to be a red herring?

this video blew my mind like 100 different times. cannot wait for the next update. godspeed, Fury.

guarantee the 12 keys 4 matches 17 eggs ect is a code to something billy probably realised that opening too many walls could corrupt the game, then took the info from that corruption and made it the password to something

I feel like it’s more just unused content turned into fun Easter eggs

I can't shake the feeling that this game is partially inspired by the 1985 "Alice in Wonderland" for the Commodore 64 (and its predecessor Below The Root). Many details big and small have parallels, and I've noticed a couple of comments scattered around the web that show I'm not the only one who's made this connection. (Plus "Animal Well" = "Rabbit Hole"!) In that game you collect a few little songs, and in some places you have to play the right song to the right character at the right time. These hidden animals who speak in short cryptic sentences, respond to being played music, and in one case explicitly ask for a lullaby REALLY remind me of Alice in Wonderland. I don't have the patience to delve into the world of frame-perfect warps and corrupted saves so I'm not going to do this myself, but I would love for someone to try playing them the tunes from that game. (At one point I did try playing the main title music from the Alice game, but nothing happened.) The lullaby in Alice in Wonderland is "Shut your beaks" and you sing it to some birds in a nest to get them to go to sleep so you can pass them.

It strikes me that there might not be any higher level to this, but the save-corrupting button is a deliberately created bug that is a canon ending. All of this is to mess with cheaters and dataminers

yes.

I think this game is just trying to play off that community ARG style mystery solving that Notia is known for. The mysteries in that game are insane.

There's no way, as soon as you pressed the third pink button i got an ad and was left very confused for like 2 seconds

THIS is the video I have been waiting for. I've gotten the skip down to a science and can usually do it in 3 trys at most, but often 1

Ya know cheaters ring actually makes sense when you think about how everyone thought we could break glass at some point. Why break it, why not go around it. I feel like animal well is only getting started.

Ayy Environmental Station Alpha making an appearance on the channel! Nice

I have everything done (thanks to this channel) and this is the video I was waiting for, it all seems very crazy to me about the exploits (I always thought we could go through the translucent walls)

Hype! Was waiting for this video

maybe playing a combination of the corruption numbers does something as they are all numbers playable by the flute and there is no number 9 key: 1,2 match:4 egg:1,7 bomb:2,8 health:1,6 example; 1,2/4/1,7/2,8/1,6

The door thing makes me think it was a error that came up in development and he thought it was funny, so he kept it in but made it impossible for normal players to do with a small margin for error (making it 3 buttons instead of 1)

Without any input from the creator i can only assume its a deliberate layer 5 for cheaters to make sure you couldn't get to the final BDTP. There was initially thought to be 16 bunnies you needed to collect for the end game since I believe that's all data miners could see on a map, only for a lot of those to be fake. The rest were hidden behind doing certain actions and appearing out of nowhere rather then sitting in a visible nook.

There's something else that I find quite weird about the cheated bunnies, which might be intentional or a bugged oversight. Either way, you are able to reach the Time Capsule without ever reaching the Bunny Temple by doing the BDTP code into two TC codes on a bricked save, which makes me wonder if there are more islands that still have yet to be found in the game's code or assets and require the cheated bunnies or save corruption. After this too however, you're also able to reach the Time Capsule several times over from the Time Capsule island itself by doing the TC code again with some small variations, such as going left from the start of the first capsule two extra times when doing the code again. Sometimes you even reach the Time Capsule within two rooms of each other.

If I had to make any guesses, an update will come on a date that we can predict based on ingame Easter Eggs, and the update may include another ending involving all of these things, locking out save files with the cheaters ring... Adding insult to injury for those who have corrupted their saves,

I like your voices for the animals. They remind me of Allan from Smiling friends, which feels appropriate for reasons I can't fully articulate.

I’m waiting for everyone to realise the colour lights are very intentional. Almost like pixels in an lcd screen. Also aren’t there’s statues of the hidden animals around the well in the backgrounds? I also notice nobody uses all the tools when they find a secret. Have you used ALL the tools?

Have people tried following the directions that getting all the bunnies gives? Or do the cheated bunnies not show up in the bunny statue area?

Has anything been made of the hidden lamps? The three above the top of the well/manticore zone entrance seem so peculiar.

On the topic of intended cheating, it’s worth mentioning a couple more things. In the source code there’s a few messages like the encryption key “good luck with this one” and “data miners win again”. Also there’s a check where if you externally edit your save file, it spawns a manticore to follow you everywhere. I dropped off from following the discord a couple weeks ago so those are the only ones I’m aware of.

I actually got wrong warped directly to one of the cheat bunnies while attempting this glitch lol

This makes me wonder if all the animals you find (and can coincidentally 'talk' to) are just cut content from the early versions where the animals would talk to you, as according to Mr. Basso, you'd originally be able to talk to the animals in the well before he cut most of the dialogue. Maybe the fox being Sprite 1 along with all the other animals in inaccessible locations are just animals you'd have encountered that he left in the game for those with the cheater's ring?

You're still one of my favorite KZfaqrs. I like the way you say things.

14:52 Sounds to me like you gotta unlock a specific 'last door' to corrupt the save file in an intended way lol

Thank you for these animal well videos

10:31 you have void stranger favorited!! That makes me so happy!!

has anyone talked about the fact that there is a 3 screen wide and 14 screen long void above and below the big bunny statue room? you cant access it without the cheaters ring but I only just discovered it today

Do the cheat bunnies ears point to somewhere? Also Is there something special to find with the ring outside of the well?

FINALLY, I WAITED FOR SO LONG

I think it's not there to make fun of dataminers, seeing how the recording in the time capsule congratulated even the people who cheated to get there. So probably one fo three things is true: either you are meant to cheat, there is a way to get to snail island no one has found yet, or (even though I think it's unlikely) there is some weird double standart thing where they say "good job cheaters" in one place but "boo cheaters" in another

Do you think there's a way to get the squirrel at the very start of the game? Does the corruption respawn it?

8:44 what the fuck is going on here? LMAO that scared the shit out of me

Does the game have any code that does would access a specific server on the internet? Or is there any binary that looks like completely random data? I'm wondering if there's a way to use the oob access in combination with something else to generate a key that's used to either poll a server or decrypt a blob to unlock one final secret.

is there a way to get to those buttons while opening one less wall?

is there really no use for the item we got by doing a nodeath runs? also speedrunning the game reward the player with different idole I think, what if we need everything on one save?

I'd bet that it goes deeper. Considering that we're pushing data around, there's probably some odd set of values to push over to cause some bizarre outcome.

He's too smart for the game to corrupt (accidentally) when exactly all the walls in the game open.

Hey, if there are many more inaccessible bunnies that would theoretically end up at the bunny island (if we could get there with them) what if you took their ear motions code and tried to figure out what order they would show up on the final island, from there there might be an extended set of directions that you need to go to get to something. Just a thought, though without being able to see their order on the final island it might take a fair bit of brute force to get their order right.

I accidentally discovered the ability to ride on the disk, I then proceeded to use it to access several secrets early.

13:21 actually blew my fucking socks.

Would love a video about all the figurines!

The weird tile background of that cheat bunny with the spikes makes me think of binary.

With all these secrets, easter eggs and map stuff accounted for, this game to me is like a mix of Fez, Tunic and Noita, even. Hell, throw some Outer Wilds in there. You can really see what inspired Billy, and I think he achieved his goal and created a worthy colleague to those titles.

Did anyone check if your save after corruption pre and or post 100% has any hidden messages in text or hexadecimal or any other system like that?

The pink buttons remind me a bit of the red/pink bits in Fez

bro every time I see a post about this game It's like my brain doesn't want to believe what I'm seeing. This level of depth and secretism is INSANE bro

not sure if anyone has thought about this but it looks and sounds like an intentional kill screen from the arcade days and if that's so, it fucking brilliant and perfect for the vibe this game captures. i get that kill screens were only obtained from being uber good at really hard arcade games and not cheating but what a cool throwback that would be!

Once I had the exact frame You did and it still kicked me back. Is this vid on the current patch? I've been "falling" next to a chest for hours already...

Time to figure out the block deletion power up