[Autumn]

Piercing Shinken (Wind enchant) seems to create dense tiles at random when it hits an enemy, usually in the 4 diagonal squares next to them.

How to replicate:

1) Face off against an enemy.
2) Use Piercing Shinken to push them back (Any range could trigger it)
3) Replicate until dense tiles are created.

[Neus]

Any details on the trigger? Is it only when an enemy is defeated by it, or if the knockback doesn't actually do anything?

[Autumn]

Hmm, Well as far as I know it happens when the target is alive, I haven't tested if the killing blow was landed, however if the knockback doesn't do anything, I don't think it'd trigger the dense tiles, its inconsistent on when it triggers, maybe it has something to do from the way you land the wind shinken itself, or if the target is knocked away at a certain angle.

[Kameron8]

I found a way to consistently generate dense tiles with a different set of abilities -- hopefully it lends some insight into why this ancient bug is happening. If somebody is boxed in by dense objects (people, Yokai, destructible rocks, etc), and they are forcibly pushed but cannot move anywhere, they will generate dense tiles in all corners around them.

This is illustrated here, where a single player is bashed while surrounded by 4 units:



The dense tiles persist past the battle, lingering in all tested battles on the same map (in this case, battles in the Shrine) until whenever the map is unloaded in the game. In our instance, it took between 2-10 minutes for the dense tiles to stop showing up in battles in the Shrine. This does not explain why some abilities seem to randomly generate them outside of this circumstance, like Piercing Shinken from the original post, but it's possible they're related.

So far, this has been reproduced with Impact Call pushing a boxed in monster, and the bash example above. Both result in identical spawn positions of the dense tiles, so I'm lead to believe any knockback suffices in this reproduction.

[Neus]

Nicely done, this should be corrected.