Pendant/crystal catching
You can save time by catching pendants and crystals in specific positions. For crystals, the way the screen is scrolled when grabbing the Heart Container matters too.
Pendants
Simply grab it while Link's head is below the shadow. This grabs the pendant faster for unknown reasons.
There's nothing more to grabbing pendants (releasing spin does not save lag frames as some might claim)
Crystals
As soon as you grab the Heart Container after killing a Dark World boss, the crystal will drop in the center of your screen (not necessarily center of the room - it depends on how the screen is scrolled). This means that if the room is scrolled upwards it will land on a higher position in the room than if it's scrolled downwards.
It is better to grab the Heart Container with the screen scrolled upwards if you can. For Trinexx you have the ability to choose how you want to grab it since it always drops in the middle of the room. Optimally you'd also kill Arrghus at the top of the screen, but most people are more comfortable killing him against the south wall. The difference between a high and a low Heart Container grab seems to be 5 frames overall.
Then we have two conflicting ideas:
- The lower Link is when catching the crystal, the faster it will be catched. Same as for pendants.
- The higher Link is relative to top of the screen (not necessarily top of the room - depends on how the screen is scrolled), the crystal's animation will travel a shorter distance after catching it (before the screen goes black).
As it turns out, it's better to optimize for 2. So what you want to do, in order of priority:
- You want screen to be scrolled as low as possible when catching a crystal. So walk downwards until the screen stops scrolling. This is the number one priority always.
- After you have reached the lowest scrolling position, the next priority is to put Link as high as possible without scrolling upwards. So make sure you don't walk more downwards than you need.
Most people use the crystal's shadow and Link's sprite (his face/hat) for cues that accomplishes this. See link below.
There's more than one pixel that achieves the fastest time. There seems to be 4 coordinates that will give you the fastest time.
See Michael's science on this, including images that demonstrates good visual cues for catching the crystal.
