ANIMAL WELL: Obtaining a “Secret” Item “Legitimately” (LATE-GAME SPOILERS)

So, you’ve beaten the game (and if that’s the only thing you’ve done you should probably stop reading). Obtained all the eggs, gotten the 2nd ending. Perhaps you’ve even gone down the rabbit hole and found all 16 bunnies, and uncovered the big secret(s) they point to, likely with the help of another guide. Maybe you think that’s the most the game has to offer you, all wrapped up in a pretty message & bow. But something in the game is still bothering you, something that’s way too obvious to not have a solution.

How the hell do you reach this room through the giant window?!

Surely there’s a solution, because this is so blatant. Clearly an unturned stone waiting to be uncovered. But you have no leads, and there seems to be no clear entry points at any of the neighboring rooms. Maybe you warp there? What could be inside? Perhaps it would be best to let other people figure it out instead, maybe it’ll be something cool. Though, as more time passes, people digging deep both in game and code, a certain answer is looking more and more likely, and it’s either unsatisfying, or really cool depending on who you are.

The short answer: It’s a tease. You’re not intended to reach there.

The long answer:

Inside this dark room is a small island in a perfectly boxed room, inhabited by a bunch of snails, and a fox. Its been dubbed “snail island” by some, as you’re able to see a snail from the window.

None of these elements can be interacted with, and at first blush, that’s all this room seems to offer. Nothing. And in a sense, that’s true. The main room here has nothing for you, there’s no point to visit it besides looking pretty and to finally mark it on your map… If you can actually reach it, that is. We still don’t know a “legitimate” way to this island, and considering what I’m about to discuss next, it’s unlikely there’s supposed to be.

Exploring this island under a little more scrutiny, there is actually something to be found here. But its in its own, equally inaccessible room, that can’t be reached from the main room. Here’s a full-bright map island to demonstrate.

Yes, that’s a chest. What could even be inside? Maybe a figure? What could be so secret about this?

Oh. Hm.

This island is more of a “cheaters island” than a snail island. Inaccessible, there to taunt the player, with an even more hidden item that tells you that you’re a cheater. Very clearly a developer troll, a bit of innocent fun, and now you have a mark in your inventory that says you cheated. Simple.

Oh yeah the ring also gives you the power to freely no-clip.

That’s some extreme irony at play here, a room you supposedly cannot access without no-clipping, that gives you an item that lets you no-clip. Brilliant. Both a troll, but potentially also a kind gesture to make cheater’s job easier once they obtain it. Maybe it’s part of a debug feature the creator left in as a laugh. Or, perhaps, they’re proposing a challenge. To see if players can still obtain something that by all means should be unobtainable. The in-game screenshots of me reaching the island and the chest, neither were obtained through the use of external tools or editing. This can be achieved entirely in-game, on console too.

NOTE: This guide will be explaining & utilizing a very precise blind warp exploit in order to reach the room. This will likely take some/many attempts to get a feel for it. I will also later explain issues that may result from flying around the map with no-clip. Good luck!

We will be using a precise wheel warp glitch in order to reach the room, a trick you may have seen in some speedruns but don’t quite understand how it works. It begins by disjointing your character from the wheel item, allowing you to move freely while the wheel moves around on its own, then selecting the wheel item again to warp to its position.

Start by going to the disc shrine, and save at the telephone in the room top-left of it for easy resets. Equip & deploy the wheel, return the disc, then take the disc back. This puts you in a glitched state where the game auto-selects the disc item, yet keeps the wheel out, with you no longer in the wheel. The wheel still follows your movement, however. It’s important not to select the wheel at any point of the setup, as you’ll warp to it when you do.

Get the wheel stuck in the right pool here, then warp to the fast-travel room using the animal flute. You’ll notice the wheel maintains its position in the room and joins you here. Go through the fish head portal and pull out the bubble wand.

You’ll appear to leave the wheel behind, but just like how it followed you to the fast-travel room, it now simply resides in the room to the right of here. In Animal Well, the game keeps loaded the rooms immediately adjacent to you, but as soon as you leave this screen via the top or bottom exit, the room the wheel is in will unload, losing collision, and the wheel will enter freefall. We will execute precise timing and positioning in order to warp to the wheel exactly when it reaches the room with the cheaters ring. Yes, you read that right. The wheel will drop down, loop from the bottom of the map, wrapping around to the exact position of the room with the chest, where our prize waits. I will try my best to explain a setup that worked for me, but bear in mind this trick will be very precise & fickle. Some setups may use the moth flight power to get in position, but I will detail a version that simply uses the bubble wand.

Stand in the top-left corner of this room near the room exit. Use some way to time yourself as soon as you exit, enabling the in-game stopwatch is perfect for this. Aim for a 10-second interval on the in-game timer, and ready a bubble in the seconds immediately prior to help jump out of the room when it’s go time.

When you jump into the next room, immediately go right, bubble to get some height from the fan, then hop up to around the place in the above image on the platform. Use the quick-swap feature to swap to the bouncing ball (or whatever item is immediately before wheel). Then wait. The timing here is exactly 10 seconds on the dot from when you entered the room, again use the speedrun timer to help time yourself. When 10 seconds hits, immediately press the quick-swap to the wheel, and the menu button at the same time, and you’ll warp wherever the wheel is while also opening the item menu. If you think you hit the room, swap off the wheel to another item before exiting the menu to disable the wheel & its large collision. Congrats if you got the chest!

Again, this will likely take many failed attempts and getting a feel for it! This is a hard trick, blind too. If you find yourself getting the timing right, but not the horizontal positioning, adjust as needed. On a failed attempt, simply quit to main menu and reload from the disc shrine.

To explain the execution here: The strange movement in this room is to help position the wheel. You may be disjointed from the wheel, but it’s still being influenced by your movement while in freefall. While the setup here isn’t a hard science yet, and using the fan likely isn’t necessary, it’s the sequence I’ve found to work best and most consistently for me. Note that the wheel follows your movement, not inputs, so you can’t just hold into the left wall for this.

Opening the menu at the immediate time of warp is to actually circumvent you “falling out” and returning from when you came after the warp. This is likely caused by the game thinking you’re colliding with water on the way through the warp, but opening the menu at the right time seems to avoid this check. If you’re encountering this issue while trying to preform a warp, this is why.

If you warped into the room with the cheaters ring, congratulations, you now have the power of no-clip legitimately* in the game! While not moving, press F on the keyboard, or click in right-stick on controller, to activate no-clip. Your animation will freeze, and you can freely zip around without restriction in any direction. You become intangible to damage, though can still interact with collisions like buttons or bunnies. There are several fun sights to be found across the map with your new powers. HOWEVER, depending on your concerns, take EXTREME CAUTION with what you do next. Safely navigate to a save point to save your ring before anything else, ideally without using the ring.

For navigating the map using no-clip, especially for the hotspots to look out for, here’s a useful map.[i.imgur.com]

• Red: “Extra” inaccessible “glitch” bunnies hidden behind walls. More on these in a bit.
• Pink: Buttons to open doors out of a few of the bunny rooms (!TAKE CAUTION!).
• Green: Extra inaccessible animals in walls.

The animals hidden in the walls here may be leftovers from earlier versions of the game, several even have dialogue (and an additional line if you use the flute near them). The creator has mentioned that the animals in this game used to have dialogue, but that was changed when they decided to go for a more realistic, moody atmosphere. These seem to be relics of that, left in as an easter egg. Go check them out yourself!

There are extra bunnies here too. You may have heard of these, people using warping/clipping glitches to find bunnies no one else has. Maybe you’re wondering if these are among the secret 4 bunnies to reach a total of 20, above the “initial” 16, or something of the like. Internally, there are actually 32 bunnies. 9 of these “bonus” bunnies can be found no-clipping on the map here, with the rest nowhere to be found. That sounds exciting, like there’s an entire other layer to uncover using them.

Don’t get too excited. In fact, the current running theory is that these bunnies are intentional fakes. Created and planted with the intent to thwart dataminers and cheaters. When you collect even a single one, you completely lock yourself out of being capable of preforming BDTP (the path to the rabbit temple where you unlock the moth transformation). Internally, you need 16 and strictly the 16 legitimate ones to actually access the temple, as the collected bunnies act as a sort of key on top of the directions you need to fly. All of these extra no-clip bunnies do in fact show up on the bunny island as normal, and on your save file, though they are visually copies of the normal bunnies. You’re free to collect them if you wish, but do so knowing that you can no longer go to the temple. If you accidentally collect one, which you can in the middle of no-clip, you can quit to main menu to revert to your previous save.

3 of the extra bunny rooms also have buttons that open the rooms to the normal map. But BE VERY CAREFUL. There is currently a (unintentional?) bug where if you press all 3, it corrupts your save file. It will still be playable, but many flags in the data will be reset, many items and buttons set to uncollected, alongside many other oddities. Back up your save if you decide to mess with this.

Otherwise, the map appears mostly safe to zip around and explore with no-clip. You can even poke your head through the tops of the bunny rooms to avoid them yet register it on your map, if you please.

One interesting oddity is that the bunny room right of the main well has a song to play on your flute. This song warps you to the center room with all the flame statues, which seems purposefully included for the aid of speedrunners and is in fact used in speedruns already. If you’re wondering of the “legitimate” origin of that song, this is it.

You can also access things like the deathless figure in the b.b. wand room using the ring, if you want to be a little cheater about it. You may have also noticed that all this trick requires to execute is the wheel, bubble, disc, and flute. Meaning, if you’re confident in pulling off this warp glitch to the ring semi-consistently, you can even use this to reach both speedrun clocks in a new run and get the timed figures that way too. The only true requirement for the 2nd ending is to get a manticore, even the initial one, and guide it to the flute spot left of the incubator. There are no other gates.

By playing the lynx’s song yourself on your flute, you can obtain the wheel early as well, though it’s one of the longest sequences to play in the game. You can even reach the lynx room early using a different kind of wrong warp glitch, using just the bubble wand and animal flute in the room right of the starting pod. There are other speedrun guides out there to help teach you this tech.

If you got this far, congratulations. Even more than the moth transformation, zipping around the map with actual no-clip is a liberating feeling. Have fun being the god of this Well!