The Secret Aquarium

The Secret Aquarium is one of the secret courses in Super Mario 64. It is located in the same room as the Jolly Roger Bay painting and is accessible from a small hole in the wall.

A Press Counts[]

It takes no A presses to complete The Secret Aquarium.

Entering The Secret Aquarium (0x)[]

Main Article: Entering The Secret Aquarium

With a complicated plan spanning three courses (Bob-omb Battlefield (BoB), Bowser in the Dark World (BitDW), Shifting Sand Land (SSL)) and the castle area, Mario builds up enough speed and conserves it to be used in the castle, speed being preserved by Sliding Speed Conservation. The purpose of the hyper speed is to utilize a glitchy ledge grab onto the entrance of without pressing A. In order for the backward speed movement to work, Mario must not have collected any single star beforehand, adding the difficulty severely.

The first course (BoB) has two purposes - to set up the HOLP needed for SSL and build up speed for BitDW 0-star entry. The speed is generated by C^ trick and conserved by a tree grab. Mario then enters BitDW by clipping through the star door.

Beating the second course (BitDW) is required to unlock SSL. Mario defeats Bowser with Pause-buffered Hitstun (PBH) to avoid HOLP changes.

The third course has only one primary purpose - to exit the course with more than 2000 speed. There are four steps to this procedure: Shell Clone, Fire Clone, Shy Guy Manipulation and Hyper Speed Punching (HSP), and Exit Course.

The Shell clone has a special property that it can be used multiple times. Mario first makes a shell clone using a remotely thrown Bob-omb (with PBH, appears at HOLP, delayed activation) and a fake Bob-omb (to make it turn into a shell clone). The shell clone is then moved to the corner of the course, while setting the HOLP for the fire clone later.
Next, Mario uses Shy Guy Manipulation to allow a far-away Shy Guy to perpetually shoot fire and clone one of its fires with another clone, this time using a 45-second long PBH to sustain invisibility, walk to a high enough point, and then remotely throw it into the same far corner.
Then, while riding a shell, Mario performs Shy Guy manipulation to transport a different Shy Guy to the far corner, using height differences of the edge quicksand.
After the setup, Mario begins Hyper Speed Punching for 40 minutes until he reaches 45000 speed.
Finally, Mario crouch-slides to redirect his angle towards the in-bound part of the course, begins burning due to the fire clone (cancelling crouching capping the speed), falls down in a burned state (cancelling any bonks killing the speed), lands on a shell clone but immediately cancelling it with Z press (to activate 10k glitch, which adjusts his speed to 2300), and moves forward one quarterframe to bonk at the out-of-bounds region. Before the bonk kills any speed, Mario prematurely ends the bonk by landing on the Shy Guy to enter a twirling state, allowing him to adjust his angle and speed and then exit the course on first-frame landing.

The speed is conserved for the castle movement, with Mario gradually ascending onto higher and higher platforms, until Mario's height is high enough to trigger the PSS 1-door text to redirect his angle onto the glitchy ledge grab of Secret Aquarium.