Genshin Impact’s tornado bug is back

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-02-15 19:16 JST)

It looks like a humorous bug fans had previously dubbed the “tornado bug” is back in miHoYo’s open world RPG Genshin Impact.

Genshin Impact is a 3D open world RPG that gives players a high degree of freedom to climb, glide, and move around the map. For that reason, a number of odd bugs have been discovered in the game. One that received particular attention from Japanese Twitter users in 2020 was something called the tornado bug (related article in Japanese). The bug would cause Xiangling, a playable character in the game, to blast across the sky at high speeds while rotating like a tornado.

Originally, the bug involved a mid-air attack that’s supposed to drop the character towards the ground being used to move horizontally. Since the attack could be used to move horizontally, there was no ground to land on to end the move, which essentially let players continue to “fall” almost indefinitely across the sky.

The bug was fixed, but there have been reports on Twitter saying it has returned. On February 14, a Japanese YouTuber by the name of Sadistic S posted a clip of the bug occurring on Twitter. The tweet received a huge reaction having over 10,000 retweets as of this writing.

We can clearly see Xiangling spinning like a tornado while zooming across the sky in the video, but I (the author of the original article) couldn’t just go without trying it myself. Like in Sadistic S’s video, I prepared some housing tiles and blocks, and after some trial and error, managed to build my launchpad. It seems that climbing into the narrow opening and talking to an NPC on the tiles above causes the character to go sideways.

And after a number of repeated failures, Xiangling finally blasted off into the western sky.

Xiangling was quickly flying toward the edge of the map, but my launch angle was a little off and she crashed into the water. I then had to swim back to the island while being attended to by a worried Paimon. Xiangling seemed happy to have soared like a spinning rocket again after so long.

While I was able to successfully launch Xiangling multiple times, I couldn’t recreate the bug with other characters. Each character has a different physique and attack motions, so adjustments may be needed to launch them, and it might not be possible at all for some characters. And as far as I can tell, the bug hasn’t caused any lasting issues and the game didn’t crash while executing it.

Sadistic S introduces a number of bugs in Genshin Impact on their YouTube channel, so maybe we’ll see a video show up on there with more information regarding this tornado bug.