Maybe if I coat the Ghost with glue first, it'll grip the pipes better?

(7:35) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. Recently I saw Spasmodic's 2015 video 'The Bottom of the AotCR Pit - No Banshee', in which he took a Warthog to the bottom of the cavern by getting it wedged between two pipes and letting gravity do the rest. I'll be tackling that shortly, but I fancied trying things with a Ghost first (didn't know if had been done before). Did I make it down? Here's the story!

Released September 10th 2025, gameplay recorded September 4th-6th 2025.

00:02 (Setting up and early tries) After getting a delayed tunnel checkpoint at what I thought might be a good run-off spot, I started trying to get down. The Ghost needs to be slowed by friction from the pipes, but it's not easy to initiate any good grip at all. And as one of these clips exemplifies, you can easily get ejected!

My run-off spot was different than Spasmodic's for his Warthog. Prior to all this, I'd spent a few minutes doing a quick bit of testing, to gauge whether a Ghost descent might be a possibility. From this sort of spot I'd managed to get a bit of friction going, if only briefly, which indeed suggested some potential. That's when I decided to go for it and start recording. Incidentally, my Ghost was from the two-Wraith area prior to the cavern. I sniped the pilot out of it.

01:31 (Progress) This partial descent, obtained after maybe around 40 minutes of trying, was the first one where things looked really promising. The configuration sadly decays, and things go south once the Ghost goes horizontal, but it was very encouraging.

02:01 (No control when falling) After a while I concluded that on the way down, I had no control at all, so I was just a passenger relying on fate. Bit frustrating not being able to take corrective action!

02:19 (Tail sink problem) It also became clear to me that even when the Ghost's nose was pointing down, which seemed the best thing, the tail tended to sink (relative to the nose), leading either to ejection or grip loss. Both very bad things! It seemed to be the key problem in getting down. I just had to hope the tail wouldn't sink too fast.

02:51 (Not far off) On this try, which was after more than an hour's worth of toil (broken into sessions), I move the Ghost to the left slightly, before my run-off, and subsequently the Ghost gets into an excellent configuration, in nose-down attitude with the nose contacting one pillar and tail contacting the other, and with the two contact side being 'opposite' (so the Ghost isn't going diagonally across). This is the configuration I came to realise is what I wanted, to be able to get down.

I eventually die due to tail sink, but I wasn't far off reaching the bottom. It was another bit of encouragement, and in later play I sometimes used that same initial left shift, though I didn't know whether it really helped me get a good configuration.

03:44 (Camera play) Once I was convinced that I had no control over the falling Ghost, I started playing around with the camera somewhat, to get different views. I knew that would make for more engaging movie footage, for one thing. One nice aspect of this clip is that you get a close-up of MC's head turning, which makes it look as if he's monitoring the situation.

04:12 (Bridge run-off) Among the variations I tried in terms of my run-off (just in case it might help), I sometimes tried starting from the bridge. On this occasion the Ghost momentarily looks like it's got into a good configuration between the pipes. But the tail quickly comes down, which doesn't bode well. I haven't included it here, but the grip held for another 15 seconds of slow falling in a near-horizontal attitude, before disaster struck.

04:26 (Dizzying work) Just to end this day 1 phase of the movie in an amusing way, here's a clip where things get rather spinny, caused by my left Ghost wing clipping the higher pipe when making the jump. Clipping either pipe at the start was quite a hazard, leading to many a quick failure.

04:43 (Day 2 - new strategy) Eventually I had the idea of getting a checkpoint on the lower pipe, in a position where I'd be ready to ease down into a hopefully grippy configuration. I suspected that this would give me a higher success rate of initiating grip, bearing in mind how random the outcome of the jump from the platform was, and it could thereby speed me towards eventual success.

So, using a copy of my basic save (I didn't want to lose the original), I modified things using a new delayed tunnel checkpoint as shown. A grenade gave me a good amount of time to get the Ghost positioned in what I hoped would be a fairly optimal position. Incidentally, landing the Ghost on the pipe isn't as easy as it looks, as the Ghost can very easily fall off. But I'd had a bit of practice first.

You may be thinking, why not get the Ghost on the pipe before going off to fetch a checkpoint? The trouble there is, when you reboard the Ghost it can very easily fall off, due to the instability there. After experiencing that a few times, I opted to avoid having to board the Ghost when it was on the pipe.

05:12 (Still hard) It was actually rather hard and fiddly to get the Ghost into a grippy configuration, but I ultimately felt that my chances were better here. On this particular occasion I don't ease down as gently as I would've liked, and the Ghost soon ends up in a terminal situation, with the tail repeatedly bumping on one of the pipes as the speed builds. That's a dynamic you'll quite often see if you try this business, so I wanted to include an example in the movie.

05:36 (Falling montage) This 36-second montage section shows various snippets of the Ghost falling, representing a great many descent attempts with this new set-up. In total I did over three hours of trying with it, spread across multiple sessions.

06:13 (Day 3 success) Day 3 arrived. After two days of only rarely getting close to the bottom, I was starting to wonder if I'd be able to get the glorious footage I needed to agreeably complete the movie I'd already started roughly shaping. It seemed possible that I might have to settle for a 'work in progress' sort of movie instead. However, having got close a few times, I figured I just needed to keep at it, and there was probably a decent chance I'd get lucky before too long. So I resumed my trying, mostly using my second set-up - and was duly rewarded as seen here!

When the tail suddenly slips down about 18 seconds into the fall, I'm expecting to die shortly. But very unusually, the Ghost gets jiggled back to more of a nose-down attitude. Things get quite dodgy after that, but somehow I'm not ejected, and I get a gift when the Ghost briefly passes between the pipes (very unusual), causing what I think was some critical slowing. The Ghost barely hangs on after that, and a fatal ejection looks a distinct possibility. But I stay aboard, and a final tail-strike lands the Ghost in a nosedive. I'm ejected on impact, but I've made it! It was fortunate that the Ghost didn't rotate any more from that tail-strike, else it might've landed upside down and killed me. That really would've been annoying!

As well as the satisfaction of having done it at last, it was a big relief to know that I'd now be able to have the movie I wanted. And I was already looking forward to getting to work on that.

Closing remarks In all, achieving that success took over nine hours of trying (yep, it really was that bad), with around two thirds of that being with my first set-up. I'd saved footage for around 120 tries, so there was quite a lot to go through to decide what to include in the movie.

In regard to that, I've gone for a fairly chronological 'story' structure. To clarify a detail there, the clips are in chronological order except for (1) the first reboarding clip (slightly brought forward), and (2) the 'falling montage' (though all those clips were from when using my second set-up on day 2).

I currently don't know whether my Ghost descent was a first or not, but that wasn't why I was doing it anyway. I was just enjoying the personal challenge.

Note: in due course I'll put together an article on this trick, for my level 5 fun section. It's possible also that I'll end up doing a tutorial movie giving more direct advice, particularly if I come up with a way of improving the set-up or something, making things easier.

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