The Secret Behind the Desert Mole Playing Rough

That was a very interesting video.
Thank you for posting it.

Well I suppose that’s one way to address a serious glitch.

20 years later. Still new things discovered.

GREAT video. I Love it when we get super nerdy into how it works.

Quick off topic question: Anyone know if Swag Watch will ever come back? I want to get back into the Earthbound merch hunt, but it feels like a lot of “that side” of this site is either not working or just out of date.

which is sad, because this site was great for combining news and merch links and so on…

Wow! I really thought the moles were placed where they were as jokes. It’s super neat how they serve a hidden purpose! Kind of a funny work around.

Interesting video, but I am wondering something:
in the couple of solo playthroughs I did of Earthbound I noticed to álways get ambushed by a Mole Playing Rough at the very beginning of the Lilliput Steps cave, right above the small ledge/entrancepath the cave starts out on.
I wonder if this is also a 100%-spawn mole or not, since it didn’t get mentioned in the video and M.P.R.’s do spawn naturally inside the Lilliput Cave dungeon.
So my question is: is there also another 100% guaranteed M.P.R. at the beginning of Lilliput Steps, or am I just being paranoid?

Anonymous: That one is a 95% spawn. There’s an undocumented mode of my mapper for the randomizer at https://map.earthbound.app/?enemies that will display enemy spawns, if you go to that URL. Click the “Load Default EB File”, and you’ll see a bunch of red squares that are the spawn plates. Click one for details. It’s a little user-unfriendly as its meant as a debugging tool for randomizer development, but it’s handy to see at a glance without needing to download CoilSnake, the way people traditionally viewed these spawns.

I’ve played the game a couple dozen times and I’ve never encountered this enemy in Summers. Weird.

Also, my brain always gets scrambled when I see this little d00d and I hear “Role-Playing Muff” in my head. Would’ve been a very, very different enemy, the Role-Playing Muff.

What a fascinating video. The more I learn about the game’s inner workings, the more I realize how how quirky it really is on a gut level.