Cavern descent by Ghost
Posted September 25th 2025
Associated movies
- BCM586 - Heroic; Cavern descent by Ghost (7:35)
After rather belatedly discovering Spasmodic's short 2015 video 'The Bottom of the AotCR Pit - No Banshee' in which he took a Warthog ride to the bottom of the cavern by having it slowly slide down between two pipes, a truly sublime dynamic, I decided to try things with a Ghost. And after a few days of persevering, I finally succeeded, the story of which is covered in BCM586. Spasmodic subsequently related that he wasn't aware of it being done before, so it seems likely that this was actually a first. A nice bonus! Anyway, let me now give a description of the trick.
Desired sliding configuration
To take you to the bottom, the Ghost's speed needs to be sufficiently impeded by friction from the two pipes. That was how Spasmodic had got his Warthog down of course, but a Ghost has very different geometry, as well as being overall smaller, so it's not surprising that the Ghost struggles for enough grip, and doesn't lock into the pipes neatly and readily like the Warthog can.
As you'll see in my movie, there are various ways the Ghost can be configured relative to the pipes so it gets significantly impeded. But in light of my many hours of toil, I think there's only one configuration which is up to the job of getting you down, so let me focus on that.
Initially you want the Ghost to be in a quite steep nose-down attitude (see pic), with the nose contacting one pipe and the tail contacting the other, and with those contact points being on the same side of the pipes (so the Ghost is contacting mirror-image faces, in other words). You want that configuration to hold for a good long time. Sadly, you have no control, so can only watch and hope. Feel free to move the camera around if you like!
During this time the tail will slowly sink (relative to the nose), a phenomenon applicable to other configurations too, putting you on a path towards eventual ejection or runaway grip loss. I'd say that's virtually certain to happen when you're still quite a long way from the ground. As such, ejection will be fatal. If instead you remain aboard, you just have to hope for favourable dynamics as things become chaotic. The Ghost may still get slowed here and there, enough for you to reach the ground alive.
Obviously then, the longer the initially good configuration holds (or equivalently, the longer it takes the tail to sink), the better your chances.
Starting point
For getting into the pipes I initially used a diagonal approach (checkpointed of course, for which you can use a delayed tunnel checkpoint), but later switched to a starting point near the end of the lower pipe (see pic), hoping that I'd be able to get the desired sliding configuration more frequently. I hoped I'd have better control for that.
I think it did help, and at any rate it's how I eventually succeeded. So you may want to use a similar starting arrangement. Balancing the Ghost on the pipe is a bit tricky by the way (almost as if you're on a knife-edge), so you may want to do a bit of practice with that first!
Need some good fortune
However, it still took a great many tries. On the way down you have no control, which is quite frustrating. You can try to use skill to initiate a good slide, but thereafter it's in the hands of the gods. As such, succeeding is really a matter of playing the odds and keeping at it until you get sufficiently lucky with the dynamics. That's how I see it anyway. In my case, I only eventually succeeded because of some good fortune in how thing unfolded after the initially good sliding configuration was lost.
Note: for possible further useful information, read the written commentary for the movie.
Another possibility?
While working on the descent goal, and getting quite frustrated with it, I had an idea. If you speed the Ghost off the platform and get it caught in the opposite pipe pair, it might end up doing a slide down those pipes, potentially going all the way.
The virtue of this plan is that the jump would eat up a lot of height (potentially almost a quarter of the distance to the bottom), hence the actual sliding part would start a good way down. Because of that, I thought the plan might give better odds of success.
I put in considerable work attempting it, which included doing the jump from various angles and trying to get good pipe entry configurations, but the results were disappointing. Although the Ghost was getting caught sometimes, there seemed very little prospect of getting a well configured slide going. A couple of times the Ghost did end up scuffing its way down quite far, but that's about as good as it got. So I went back to doing things as normal, and happily succeeded.
I did some additional trying later when putting this article together, but again found little encouragement, and decided to move on. But I thought it worth mentioning here as a possibility. Who knows, if you made a few thousand tries, maybe you'd get lucky.