Horizon Zero Dawn/CFT
General
A Camp Fire Teleport (CFT) is a glitch in HZD where Aloy's respawn point is set to an incorrect position for Quick Saves and Manual Saves. The glitch requires using either Early Embrace Escape or Varl Skip in order to exit the Embrace early and enter a broken map state. While this map state is Active, the player can save at a campfire or fast travel location, and then reload the save ether by doing a restart from save (RFS) or loading a save from the 'Load' menu to get teleported to a separate, consistent location. It is uncertain who discovered CFTs, but some of the first to bring them up to the community were Charlatan_11235 and Marenelinea.
How To Activate
As previously mentioned, the player will need to exit the Embrace earlier than intended using either Embrace Escape or Varl Skip. This will give the player access to a map state adjacent to the one found in the nighttime Sawtooth fight in the "The Point of the Spear" Quest where campfires don't appear on your map. The player then needs to walk up to the desired campfire, and RFS at it to get teleported.
Mechanics
Overview
Upon leaving the Embrace before talking to Varl after the proving, the player can save and RFS at a campfire in order to get teleported. The position the player gets teleported to will always be consistent.
A CFT to Mother's Crown:
Cause
While it is not certain why this happens, it is theorized to have to do with the campfire within the Sawtooth arena in the "The Point of the Spear" main quest. This is because this campfire will teleport you to the center of the Sawtooth arena upon restarting from save at it, and the campfire itself won't show up on your map. The developers may have either intentionally or accidentally added a similar mechanic to all the other campfires. Testing with the help of Teleportation Mods back up this theory with having the ending locations from CFTs after escaping the Embrace early be the same as saving at campfire outside of the sawtooth arena during the nighttime section of the "The Point of the Spear" quest.
Map State Changes
While the location you will respawn at are consistent with your save location, certain actions will modify these locations to other static locations. Actions known to cause these changes are 'Discovering' the settlement Meridian and completing bandit camps. Both of these actions set the respawn location of all nearby save points to the campfire of the location (these campfires also have visible and selectable icons on the map unlike almost any other campfires outside of the Embrace). While it is unknown as to why these specific actions create new CFT respawn locations, it does help support the theory that of the possible respawn locations, you will respawn at the one closest to the location that you saved at.
Uses
CFTs are currently only used in Category Extensions, as no usage has yet been found in main game categories. Abs%, All Cauldrons and Dummy% all use CFTs in their routes.
Mapping
As CFTs are static in what locations you end up after reloading a save, several attempts have been made to create a full map of every starting location and where you will end up after saving but none are fully comprehensive because of the quantity of location and nuances of changing map states modifying ending locations.
The first published attempt to map CFTs was done by Lanthy in September of 2021 but does not account for certain map state updates such as entering Meridian.
AltinCloak has also made some attempt to map CFT extensively with a spreadsheet of coordinates but has yet to complete it.
