The Great Salt Lake

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

A long walk east, a station at the end of a bridge, and then a dry lakebed with an enormous skeleton lying across it.

You do not come back here. Every source that mentions it says so. Take everything.

On the way

Sweep the bridge and the station with the hidden-item ability equipped. Guides disagree wildly about whether there is anything at either — one reports a draw point at the far end of the bridge that nobody else has, another reports two different ones at the station, and a third says the station has nothing at all. It costs two minutes and if any of them are right, you only get one chance.

The skeleton

There are two hidden draw points on and around the big skeleton, and they hold two of the strongest spells available to you at this point.

Eight guides agree on which spells they are. Eight guides give seven different locations. Some say before the vertebrae bridge, some say after, one says inside the skull.

So do the obvious thing: walk the whole skeleton with the hidden-item ability on, slowly. They are close together.

And as always with a draw point that matters — put your highest-Magic character in the lead before you take it. That decides how much you walk away with, and here there is no second helping.

What lives here

Three enemies, and all three take extra damage from Holy. Two of them come in pairs.

The two halves of that pair look identical and are not. The game stores them as separate records with completely different mug and draw tables, so mug both of them rather than assuming one stands for the other. No guide separates them.

Fair warning if you are keeping your levels down: the big one pays 100 experience and the small ones 40 apiece, which is a lot for a short walk. There is nothing here you need to farm.

The boss

At the far end there is a fight, and it has a trick to it.

The thing you are fighting is undead. That means healing hurts it — a Phoenix Down or a strong potion thrown at it can end the fight on the spot. Seven separate guides say so. One says the opposite, and that same site’s own boss page contradicts its own walkthrough, so believe the seven.

But before you do that: draw from it first. It carries a healing spell, a status cure and a dispel, and from party level 30 a fourth. The healing spell is whichever tier matches your level, so a low-level party gets the weakest one — that is in the game’s files, not a guess. It is also worth 40 AP, which is the joint highest single fight in the guide so far — and it pays no experience at all, so there is no levelling cost to taking your time.

Mug it too. It takes half damage from physical attacks, so if you are hitting it with swords and wondering why it is taking so long, that is why.

Game Notes

An enemy that dies to a Potion.

FFVIII does the undead thing that the whole series does — healing magic damages the dead, Phoenix Downs kill them outright — and it is a lovely bit of design because it is the only place in the game where the correct move looks like a mistake. You open the item menu in a boss fight and use a healing item on the enemy.

What I like is that the game never explains it here. There is no tutorial, no NPC who mentions it, no hint. The game assumes you either know how these games work or you will find out by accident, and either way it never draws attention to it.

The interesting consequence is what happens when a guide writes this down. Several of them list “Cure” alongside Fire and Holy in a weaknesses column — which puts a property of the creature’s type into a table of elemental percentages. They are describing the effect correctly and filing it in the wrong drawer.

We can say that with confidence because the two things sit in different bytes. It is the third time this project has found a published “weakness” that turned out to be a flag rather than a number, and the pattern is now clear enough to expect: whenever a guide lists a weakness that is not one of the eight elements, it is probably reading a behaviour off a flag somewhere else.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 12 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

The headline: the undead property is a flag, not an element

Seven sources tell you a Phoenix Down or a strong curative can end the Abadon fight outright. One source says the opposite — that it is immune to Phoenix Downs — and that same publisher’s own boss page says curatives may kill it instantly. An internal contradiction inside one site.

The seven are right, and the data says why.

Each enemy record carries an elemental table — eight bytes, one per element — and a separate flags byte that has nothing to do with it. The undead property lives in the flags byte, at bit 0.

We verified the decode by checking which enemies have that bit set. It is set on the Abadon fought here, on the undead boss from the D-District Prison, and on the roaming undead enemy that drains HP. It is set on nothing else in the surrounding material. Three for three against the game’s three best-known undead is a good enough test to publish.

So the healing-item kill is real, and it is not a weakness. Two sources list “Cure” in the same column as Fire and Holy, which puts a property of the creature’s type into a table of elemental percentages. They describe the behaviour correctly and file it in the wrong place.

This is the third time this project has found a published “weakness” that was actually a flag: Granaldo’s supposed Earth immunity was the flying flag, the Gravity immunities turned out to be their own byte, and now this.

And the elemental table itself settles a 4-to-1 split

Four sources publish exactly that. One source publishes Holy at 200% and Fire at normal damage, alongside every other element. The four are right; the one is wrong about Fire.

Correction: there are two Abadons

The game stores two separate enemy records under this name, and they are not variants of each other:

Every figure published under this name belongs to one of these two. This is the fifth name collision the datamine has found, after two BGH251F2, two Fujin, two Raijin, and the four Seifers.

Note the second record has no loot tables whatsoever and pays nothing — the shape of an encounter the designers did not expect you to profit from, which is the same reward-table reading that settled several FFVII pages.

Abadon’s curve

510 at level 1, 5,010 at level 10, 10,010 at level 20, 17,010 at level 34. Settled.

Four sources publish the 510-to-17,010 range. One guide’s prose gives the floor as 5,010 — ten times higher — while its own table publishes mid-level values that match everyone else. 5,010 is this enemy’s HP at level 10, which is almost certainly where the prose figure came from: somebody wrote down what they saw and it became the bottom of the range.

That is the level-scaling failure in miniature, and it is the fourth time this guide has found it in a published range rather than in a single figure.

Zero EXP and 40 AP. The AP figure is agreed by four sources and confirmed. No source publishes a non-zero EXP figure — one prints a dash — which is consistent with the finding that every boss encounter in the game pays zero experience, though no source states it.

It takes half damage from physical attacks, per two sources.

The loot

Mug and drop are settled and undisputed: four sources each. Mug is a Power Wrist in every slot, drop is ten Flare Stone in every slot, and both are the same in all three level bands. Nothing here changes with level, which is unusual enough to say.

The draw list was the opposite — five published versions:

The lists are now readable and they settle it:

The healing spell does tier up. The three sources that say so are right; the one that fixes it at the base tier throughout is wrong. Esuna and Dispel are the two constants all five agreed on, and the fourth entry that arrives at level 30 is Flare.

Correction: no Guardian Force is drawable here

One outlier claims a Guardian Force is drawable from this fight. Draw ids of 64 and above are Guardian Forces and this record does not carry one in any of its three lists. The outlier is wrong, and the ten other sources that say nothing about a GF are right by omission.

The card

One database lists a boss card for this enemy and gives a refinement output. No other source mentions a card here at all.

What the data can say: this record does not carry the always-obtains-card pattern that the game’s seven guaranteed boss cards share. So if a card exists it is a roll, not a certainty. The bytes give us the shape and not the name, so this stays flagged.

The roaming enemies

Four sources give the same three. One guide instead lists six entirely different enemies and then separately notes the agreed three are “in the lake itself” — which reads as a continental world-map encounter list bolted onto an area list.

All three are weak to Holy, which is worth knowing as a set rather than one at a time. One playthrough log reports 1,000 EXP per fight, which does not match any of these figures and is presumably a formation total at a high party level.

Correction: the pair is two enemies, not one

Every source lists the pair as a single row, and on stats they are entitled to: the two records match on the HP curve, the EXP, the AP and the elemental table. They share nothing in any loot table.

So which half of the pair you mug decides what you walk away with, and above level 30 one of them hands over an accessory where the other hands over a stone. Mug both.

This is the same failure the Propagators produce on the Ragnarok: records that are identical in every field a player can observe, differing only in the tables observation cannot reach.

And Lefty replaces its whole draw list at 30

Nearly every enemy in the game steps its draw list up a tier at a band boundary — Fire, Fira, Firaga. Lefty does not. It carries Blind and Drain below 20, adds Slow at 20, and at level 30 discards all three and carries Bio, Demi, Quake and Regen instead. Not one spell survives, and not one of the four is a tier-up of anything it replaced.

Six enemies in the entire game behave this way, and this is one of them. If you want Blind or Drain out of this area, take them before the party reaches 30 — there is no coming back for them.

The larger of the three mugs a Lightweight at every band: one below 20, two from 20, and six to eight from 30.

Draw points — researched, and badly

Two hidden points on the skeleton. Eight sources agree on both spells and give seven placements each.

For the Meteor point, four put it before crossing the vertebrae bridge and two put it after. One requires the hidden-item ability explicitly; three call it hidden without saying so. One wiki alone states it never refills — which, in an area nobody revisits, changes nothing in practice but is the only replenishment claim anyone makes here.

For the Thundaga point, seven put it past or above the skeleton and one puts it inside the skeleton’s mouth. No source says anything about replenishment.

The approach is also contested. One wiki reports a Curaga point at the Galbadian end of the Horizon Bridge; a dedicated draw-point FAQ lists none on the bridge at all. At Seaside Station, one source reports a Tornado point, one reports a Cure point, and one states there is nothing of interest there whatsoever — three sources, three incompatible answers, and everyone else silent.

Lead with your highest-Magic character before taking anything here.

Correction: “nothing is missable” in an area nobody can revisit

Every source that addresses the question says the area cannot be returned to. One wiki calls it an unrevisitable location outright; a location database notes the station is gone by the final disc.

Against that: one guide flags nothing here as missable, another says “none explicitly mentioned”, and two dedicated missables pages list nothing at this location at all.

Both halves are published and they cannot both be useful to a reader. An unrevisitable area containing two draw points and a one-time boss loot table is missable content by definition. The missables pages are not wrong about any individual item — they are applying a definition of “missable” that only counts named unique items, and a draw point charge does not qualify under it.

We count it. Take everything on the way through.

Game Notes

This page is mostly about a byte.

The elemental table is eight bytes and it tells you how much damage each element does. The flags byte is one byte and it tells you what kind of thing the creature is. They are next to each other in the file and they mean completely different things, and from inside a playthrough there is absolutely no way to tell which one you are observing.

You throw a Phoenix Down, the enemy dies, and you write down “weak to Cure”. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to write. It is also, in the game’s own terms, a category error — you have put a type property in an elemental table, and the next person who reads your table will look for a Cure column that does not exist.

Three times now. The flying flag that looked like Earth immunity. The Gravity byte that looked like an elemental resistance. The undead bit that looked like a weakness to healing.

Each time the community observed the behaviour correctly and inferred the wrong mechanism, and each time the wrong mechanism generated a downstream error — because if you think it is an elemental weakness you will expect Holy-element gear to interact with it, and it will not.

There is a general lesson in there about the difference between knowing that and knowing why, and this guide keeps running into it from different directions. The community’s observations are nearly always right. The models they build to hold those observations are the thing that breaks.