Stone Umbrella Shortcut

The Stone Umbrella Shortcut is a shortcut in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time discovered by Mike Damiani.

It is performed in the Shadow Temple. There's a room with two sets of periodically falling spikes. A nearby sign advises the player to use the Lens of Truth to find the "Stone Umbrella" (a big block of stone) to protect Link from the "rain" of spikes. Basically, you have to pull the block out of a fake portion of wall and push it all the way through the spikes. As it is taller than Link, you are protected from the spikes, which hit the block instead of you. At the far end is a small ledge which allows you to jump on top of the block, then cross the top of the spikes and collect a Small Key.

The shortcut is performed as follows. To the right of the first set of spikes is a small moving bladed wossname which appears in various places around the game. The idea is to use this to perform a damage boost and land on top of the spike panel, just at the instant it falls. This allows you to go on and collect the Small Key, but saves around thirty seconds plus of block pushing.

The difficulty lies in timing. Both the spikes and the blades are in constant motion, and you need to run at the blades from the side where the spikes are falling so that the damage boost, when it boosts you backwards, sends you back towards the spikes. Therefore, you run an enormous risk of either being too slow and not landing on the spikes before they are lifted upwards again, or being too fast, and being crushed by the spikes and losing energy.

Video

• Stone Umbrella Shortcut, performed by Mike Damiani during his 4 hour 57 minute world record run of OoT (424kiB)