The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker speedrunners cook up an impressive solution to the game's Battleship-style mini-game

Those who speedrun The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in the 100% completion category hate one area of the game more than any other. In order to get 100% completion, players have to partake in the Sinking Ships mini-game, which is basically Wind Waker's version of Battleship. Believe it or not, this mini-game includes 604,000 possible layouts, meaning it can absolutely ruin a speedrunner's attempt due to its random nature. Well, it used to be able to screw things up, as a reverse-engineered solution has been released.

Speedrunners, hackers, and modders have all come together to solve this mini-game issue with a brand new tool that speedrunners can use while playing the game. This tool runs completely separately from Wind Waker, and requires speedrunners to put in some data in order to use it. The end result is a program that can generate where the likely hits and misses are on the Sinking Ships map.

To get a much more detailed explanation of this crazy tool, make sure to give the video above a watch. It's endlessly interesting, and shows just how far speedrunners are willing to go to bend a game to their will.