Molten Crater

**Molten Crater** is a realm in *Lailie: Year of the Longma* and in the *Reignited Trilogy* remaster of the third game. It can be accessed in the Sunrise Spring homeworld after collecting 10 Longma Eggs.

## Description

This realm is set around a lava filled crater, with its main attraction being the Tiki Lodge that its residents can visit. Unfortunately, Rhynocs have taken over the realm and exiled all the residents. Clay asks Lailie to help get the Lodge back by clearing the way of Rhynocs and meeting Rocky to receive an egg as a reward.

After Sgt. Byrd is released later in the game, he is able to visit the Tiki Lodge, where Shale is playing hide-and-seek with his Tiki friends. He tells Sgt. Byrd that he can become an honorary member by helping him find the heads of all five Tikis. After Sgt. Byrd finds and replaces the heads, Shale gives him an egg as a sign of being an honorary member of the lodge, only to find out it hatches into a baby Longma. Shale then says that its never happened before, and hopes that it isn't a bad omen.

## Guide

### Eggs

* **Get to the Tiki Lodge** (Curlie): Meet up with Rocky near the Tiki Lodge entrance.

* **Egg By Lava River** (Rikki): Along the path, there is a bridge across a lava river. Once you get across, jump across the next lava river and go to the left of the big rock. The egg will be sitting there next to a Bullwhip Rhynoc.

* **Replace Idol Heads** (Ryan): In this Sgt. Byrd portal, Shale is playing hide-and-seek with his friends in the Tiki Lodge; in this version, the hiders are beheaded and their heads are somehow hidden all over the place. Put the heads back on the five Tikis and Shale will make you an honorary member by giving you an egg. The portal will unlock after completing Sgt. Byrd's Base, so you may have to come back later.

* **Sgt. Byrd Blows Up a Wall** (Luna): In the same Sgt. Byrd portal, there is a cracked wall to the left of the exit portal. Blow it up to find an egg. As with the previous egg, the portal will unlock after completing Sgt. Byrd's Base, so you may have to come back later.

* **Catch the Thief** (Moira): In order to access this challenge portal, you will have to pay Moneybags 300 gems. Stoney saw a Yellow Thief with a Longma egg, and advises Lailie to go get it. The Thief can be defeated either by charging into or flaming it.

* **Supercharge After the Thief** (Kermitt): In the same challenge portal, a Red Thief appears after the Yellow Thief is defeated with another Longma egg. However, he is much faster this time, so Stoney will activate the supercharge panel so you can catch up. Again, defeat the thief either by charging into or flaming it.

### Skill Points

* **Assemble Tiki Heads**: In the Sgt. Byrd portal, if you bring all five of the tiki heads to where Shale is, they'll hop around, and you'll get a skill point.
* **Supercharge the Wall**: There is a cracked wall with an extra life in the thieves' challenge portal. It is located across the beginning of the supercharge panel and to the left. Charge into it and break the extra life container to get the skill point.

## Characters

### Allies

* Tikis
	+ Rocky
	+ Clay
	+ Stoney
	+ Shale

* Moneybags

### Enemies

* Bullwhip Rhynocs
* Armored Rhynocs
* Warthogs

## Glitch

You can complete Sgt. Byrd's challenge before completing Sgt. Byrd's Base. It involves glitching through a patch just above the door to the portal. First, go to the end of the bridge where two vertical logs are present. Jump onto the smaller one, then the higher one, then glide (and hover if you have to) to the top of the portal's entrance. Simply walk to the wall and Lailie should enter the portal. Watch this video to see how it works! However, the glitch is removed in the Reignited Trilogy.

## Trivia

* In the versions of the game except the Greatest Hits version, Dino Mines shares its music theme with this realm.
* Molten Crater was mentioned in the beginning of *Lailie: Enter the Butterfly*, when Ripto threatened to send Gulp back where he came from ("unemployed in Molten Crater, begging for work from Gnasty Gnorc").
	+ As the Forgotten Realms were forgotten by the Longmas, it is unknown how Gnasty would have found this realm.
* Many of the Longmas in the game are named after someone or something from real life. Luna, an antagonist in *Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters*, may have an identical name origin to one of the Longmas found in the Tiki Lodge.
* The skybox in this level is also used in the Sorceress cutscenes.
* The April 25th prototype contains a number of differences from the final version:
	+ Molten Crater uses Spooky Swamp’s music as a placeholder, as it does not yet have its final theme.
	+ The pathway joining the beginning of the level to the final room was originally higher, making it impossible to use to return to the end of the level (see the picture above). It was later lowered.
	+ Birds can be found in the final section of the level, whereas they’re normally only present in the Sgt. Byrd sublevel.
	+ Sgt. Byrd uses an unfinished design featuring a silver army helmet and missing his belt. This design can be seen in a number of pre-release screenshots (and even on the back cover of the game's box), as well as in a couple cutscenes in the final game. He also uses this appearance in his cage before being freed in the NTSC versions of the game.
	+ Removed Rhynoc Egg Thieves are present in place of the usual egg thieves.
* Additionally, in the earliest public demo version:
	+ The realm's theme music is a shortened version of Fireworks Factory's track, once again playing as a placeholder. It even plays in Sgt. Byrd's portal, as all sublevels use the same music as the rest of the level in the demo versions.
	+ The flowers throughout the realm are yellow instead of white, and there's only one of them.
		- In later demos, more flowers appear, but they're still all yellow.
	+ Zoe's audio dialogue was not present at this point in development, possibly due to the change in voice actors between Lailie 2 and Lailie: Year of the Longma.
	+ Moneybags doesn't appear in this realm as he's deactivated to allow the player to fully explore the level. He actually only asks for 100 gems in this version of the game, so had he been included in the demo it wouldn't have been impossible to access his sublevel. The gem placement is slightly different in this version, and there are 200 gems instead of 400, due to there only being 10,000 gems overall pre-Super Bonus Round in this build as opposed to 15,000. There's also no locked gem chest.
	+ The skill points have not been implemented yet. The wall in the thieves' area contains a large gem chest instead of an extra life, and placing the tiki heads next to eachother in Sgt. Byrd's sublevel does nothing.
	+ The eggs used several different sound effects while hatching (with Seashell Shore using completely different sounds of its own), had fewer animations, and were green in the HUD. Their in-world models still used their final design, though. Five of the six baby Longmas in this level had different names:
		- *Curlie* was named *Pepper*.
		- *Rikki* was named *Calantha*.
			* In the game's third demo, *Rikki* was named *Jones*.
		- *Luna* was named *Bucky*.
		- *Moira* was named *Kalea*.
		- *Kermitt* was named *Kellen*.
* In the *Reignited Trilogy*, the dialogue from Sgt. Byrd when you first enter his challenge portal is absent, and the game just cuts to his area when you enter it.

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