Non existant registered rooms ... ??

[SaturnMeteor]

Ok so by now I'm trying to finish the room list on Switch on this game and so I helped my sister online to do so. On the process I recycled one room several times to add the new rooms in the list. Now it seems both my sister and me have a similar glitch of having a bunch of non existing active registered rooms in our room list on the isle of awakening.
If am not mistaking the active rooms appear highlighted in the list of the location we are at ? If so then there's definitly a big problem with that and we don't know how to fix this yet.
Any solution ? And can this cause problems to complete the room list if a bunch of rooms are counted as active while they definitly aren't there ?

[lilisaur]

If you mean "highlighted in the list" to be what is on the Recipes page, those would be rooms you have built at IOA at any time, not what is currently available. In truth, there are more than 100 room recipes, and you can't have them all concurrently.

There is no easy way to determine what rooms are currently available. The map will usually show an icon where a room is, but its not precise enough to be much use. You have to physically roam your island and manually count them, and if its different than the count displayed when paused, then you have a phantom room.

1. The Cell rooms aboard Shane's invasion ships count while they are present during the invasions. The last boat that remains at the Cerulean Steppe beach is fairly obvious, and isn't a phantom, but the two ships that appeared when he first attacks can indeed cause true phantoms - they don't even show room icons on the map - if the Cell room remains registered after you've returned from Skelkatraz. The only way to fix these is to either build a platform up from the seabed to where the cell room was, or coast with your windbreaker down through the same area. When the builder crosses into the phantom room's area, the game engine will see its no longer walled in and will deregister (with the accompanying sound.) You probably know where one boat is because you could see it from the Scarlet Sands beach. The other was on the shallow area southwest of the dock and you only see it for a brief moment as Brownbeard's boat pulls away from the dock. Either can be a real pain to correct and is one of the game's most aggravating bugs.

2. If you have curtains or a second door high in a room, you could have one room on top of another and you might not realize it without building a two (or higher) block platform to stand on. Rooms count the two lowest levels of the door and the level below that (which is typically the floor). Third row and above can count toward an entirely different room if you aren't careful. These are false phantoms because they are real rooms per the game engine but you might just not realize they are there. These are a little easier to correct but you may have to check a lot of different rooms across your island so they could be practically anywhere.

I've been told that if you destroy a large number of rooms too quickly, the count can also get messed up - I haven't seen this myself though. But these should operate like the Cell rooms about Shane's ships - talking a walk through the area where such rooms used to be 'should' rectify.

Also don't forget the Shabby Shack you, Lulu, and Malroth spent your first night in. That room still counts unless you've changed it.

On the other hand, maybe you never find it. On my main island, I've still got a phantom I've never been able to identify. It sucks a bit to be limited to 99 real rooms rather than 100 but its something I just eventually got used to.

[SaturnMeteor]

Hm, very intersting. Actually my niece pointed out we could see a number somewhere about the rooms. I didn't verify this. I'm going to do that now. Oh ok so it's the number you can see when you pause. What about the cursed room you build and destroy with a bomb ? Couldn't it be your phantom room ?

[lilisaur]

A Doomed Room (a room with a Wrecking Ball placed inside) should deregister normally if a wall is breached. Of course, a large enough room with the Wrekcing Ball centrally located might survive. It'll be a Doomed Room temporarily and then revert to whatever it was before after the bomb explodes.

I've been through the game enough times (six times now) and made Doomed Room probably in each of them without ever noticing it break the count.

Its possible though that the "Build a room somewhere down low" could cause it, if you covered up your hole without removing a door or doormat used to make the room, and put another room above it such that it doesn't stand out on the map. This is perhaps what I'd done to create my phantom room, but I've no intention of digging around under my island to seek it out.

[SaturnMeteor]

Lol yea, if the room is lost in the underground it might be hard to find it back if there's no clue of where it was. However I wonder was the phantom room that makes the count stuck at 99 present in each of your playthroughts ?

[lilisaur]

No. Only my main save (which had reached 99 rooms well before the latest version, 1.7.3)

On two others I got the cell room on Shane's ship to count, but I think I caused it by coasting down from the Green Gardens cliffs to his boat, and ran around the lower deck enough so that the room suddenly registered - it did not happen all on its own but I can't rule it out as possible. One of them the room icon remained when I returned from Skelkatraz, on the other it did not, but the room was counted in both until I coasted slowly with windbreaker through it, after which the room count matched my expected count. I also recorded room count before each major island expedition and after to see if it a phantom room suddenly appears after one of the islands - it does not. The only three rooms that can happen are with Shane's three boats, two before Skelkatraz and the one after Moonbrooke. At no other time is a room magically created for you on the island.

I am unsure of my other three playthroughs. I was not testing this bug in those so they may have the issue and I just never paid attention to it. I also only have the PS4 full game, so I can not be sure if there's some new flaw that occurs in the PC version (though the game engine pretty much works the same way regardless of PC, PS4 or Switch)