Unused Farm Stage Found in Fighting Vipers

It seems Fighting Vipers held at least one more secret. Three days after publishing a patch to enable a previously unknown Pai-like costume for Honey and Backup Debugger screen, Saturn hobbyist hacker Bo Bayles posted on X about an unused stage hiding in the game.

“There’s an unused stage (index 09) that looks unfinished,” Bayles said today. “Its file name indicates that it’s a ‘farm’ stage.”

He published two screenshots of the farm stage showing ground that looks like a tilled field surrounded by a ring made of rope and grass stretching into the distance under a cloudy blue sky. But the sky has a disjointed tile problem and there are no other stage elements outside the ring like other Fighting Vipers stages have.

It’s possible that this stage was intended to be the Training Mode stage instead of the one that’s playable in the final game. “The training stage is index 09 — which is the farm stage — but there’s logic to overwrite it just before it starts,” Bayles said on the SHIRO! Discord server.

The training stage’s iconic music plays when the farm stage is forced to appear through hacking. Bayles found that out after hacking the farm stage to appear after the final stage of Arcade Mode, but finishing a match on it resulted in a crash rather than rolling credits.

In Versus Mode, index 09 is used for the “random” option rather than a specific stage. It may be possible to redirect that to the farm stage with a patch, but Bayles didn’t mention whether he’d publish a new version of his Fighting Vipers patch to make the farm playable.

The stage seemingly has been hiding under the noses of anyone who would have looked at the disc’s files — a file named FARMSTG.BIN is sitting there right after TRASTG.BIN, the training stage’s file. It follows a list of BIN files named after characters’ names with STG at the end, like GRASTG.BIN for Grace’s stage or RAXSTG.BIN for Raxel’s stage. Sadly, there are no more stage files on the disc after the farm’s.