Horizon: Zero Dawn - mount zipping
19This might be the most potent glitch in the game so far.
(Note 1: Beware of slight spoilers in the 2nd half of the video.
(Note 2: I've heard this trick may not work if you've patched your game.)
If you start a vault animation while riding a mount and quickly fast travel, you get a similar effect than when Override zipping: the game attempts to return Aloy and her mount back to where you started the jump. However, this happens at such a great speed that it carries some unforeseen side effects.
EDIT: just quick travelling during certain parts of your mount's melee attack will also cause a zip, which makes starting the glitch even easier.
Two of the most important effects are 1, you may end up out of bounds if the collision allows it. 2, the game seems to be rather lax about laws of physics if there is no collision near the mount, therefore allowing you stay suspended in air and ride wherever you like, as long as the zip took you either far enough above or below the map... Great!
You get the "height" for your zip from the destination you travel to. In other words, combinations where you either start from high and travel to somewhere low (or the other way around) are the best if you want to experience some air riding yourself. Not all possible combinations result in an OoB, though.
While riding above or below the map, you can still activate fast travel spots around the world as long as you're at a reasonable distance / height from them. And since you're able to bypass obstacles while air running, it's now an option in a speedrun to run under the map to activate several later quick travel spots early. (Although I don't know how handy that would be in practice.)
(Hitting auto-save spots is also an option, and Aloy does that from even further away than camp fires.)
You might also be able to access underground dungeons from out of bounds this way, but this is just theoretical so far. You can see the dungeons while riding under ground level, but some additional wall breaching tech might be required to actually get inside.
As for the individual clips on the video...
0:00 - the very first instance of underground mount riding I found. Start at Hunter's Gathering. Find the tower, then leap off the rock opposite to it. Fast travel to the campfire at SE. You end up out of bounds fairly consistently.
0:43 - here's the best setup I've found for going out of bounds in a hypothetical speedrun so far: get to the Northern Embrace Gate campfire. Walk towards the fire to get your mount to leap over it. Fast travel to Main Embrace Gate. This sends you OoB consistently.
However, Northern Embrace Gate is situated at a not particularly low altitude, resulting in a semi-high underground ride and you cannot visit several map parts like this. So while fast and it can be done early in the game, this particular OoB spot is probably not an optimal solution for moving around the map. Maybe a better solution emerges soon.
1:09 - right, the other side of the coin. Running above map. The setup on this clip is one of the most reliable ones I know so far. Unfortunately using the game's first camp fire for traveling results in a VERY high air ride, somewhere around 100 (in-game units... is it feet?)
To get a lower air ride, you'd want to use the camp fire to NE from the game's first camp fire instead, but the setup is different as well, and... mumble mumble... and in any case, even that air ride is too high to activate most camp fires in the upcoming maps, so the speedrun use would be rather limited.
1:57 - "I'm holding very tight
I'm riding in the midnight blue
I'm finding I can fly so high above with you"
Other Videos By AKheon
Other Statistics
Horizon Zero Dawn Statistics For AKheon
AKheon currently has 22,320 views spread across 24 videos for Horizon Zero Dawn. About an hours worth of Horizon Zero Dawn videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.95% of the total video content that AKheon has uploaded to YouTube.