Eggman has set up a mine and conveyor belt system to extract Little Planet's quartz crystals, for whatever reason. A pleasant little level that combines underground cavern and outdoor forest environments, where paths are often covered in moving conveyor belts, whose direction can be changed by touching nearby switches. A pretty quick stage with little to worry about, especially compared to either of its level neighbours.
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Quartz Quadrant always features a mixture of both internal and external visual backdrops. In the Present, you begin inside the rocky quartz mines whose background consists of purple stalactites and stalagmites on the floors and ceilings and lots of other little purple rocks in the middle, with a few glowing quartz crystals, all amongst a black background. Not that interesting, until you step outside into a nice forest area. Here, pointed, slightly abstract trees form the thick forest below a pleasant blue sky filled with small clouds. Underneath the forest are lots of pointed and even more abstract brown rocks, some cigar-shaped and pointing upwards with a spiral pattern, and lush blue waterfalls drop down in gaps between them. Reminds me of a sunny Sunday afternoon, for some reason. In the foreground, Eggman has placed man-made structures on presumably natural rock, which features green and turquoise patterns of a series of upside down triangle-like shapes, with the usual various intrusions and extrusions. Ground containing twisting tunnels relies more on a green mesh-based appearance and some mechanical things such as pipes and other assorted doo-hickeys are embedded all around the place. Surfaces of the paths are either wooden structures or long mechanical conveyor belts presumably intended to carry around the contents of the mines. Green quarts crystals can be found in various formations along the path including vertical chunks, large slanted crystals or even ones that look like Christmas trees. Large ones that glow from blue to purple line the very top and bottom of the level even further into the foreground. Even though the cavern is internal itself, you can get even more internal with the backgrounds of some large areas covered by a wall of tiny dark red circles, also with various vertical extrusions, and more machinery and metal pillars are peppered around it. This wall can appear shorter in other areas, reaching only a little way off the ground in uneven chunks.
In the Past, the caves are much more detailed. Bright green ooze is the order of the day here, as there are large pools of it across this spacious cavern, reaching all the way to the bottom of the level. Crystals emerge out of it while pointed rocky stalagmites reach up in a long line further into the background, with more ooze behind them. Stalactites as far as the eye can see hang from the ceiling, with a far background of pure black. The outside goes a bit more pre-historic with stumpy purple mountains in the distance and a pale purple sky with a few clouds. The forest is further away than in the Present and consists of lots of light coloured trees and a few tall leafless ones. In front of this is a large pale lake with lots of rather dead tree bark sticking out of it, and there's a bit more forestry at the bottom. The patterned ground is now green with lots of wood or brown cave rock around, laid out in various interesting patterns and visual structures. The internal walls that cover large areas are a green checkered pattern this time, made up of tiny squares and lots of intrusions and extrusions. With wooden logs, small parts of this wall reach up vertically from the ground in other areas, also with green diamond shapes on the uneven tops, and moss hangs from occasional ceilings. Various leafy vines curl around each other from floor to ceiling within narrow corridors, wrapping themselves in a strip around the wooden floor. At the beginning of Zone 1, they're also found with collections of odd, half-cut hollow green cylinders. The foreground is very decorated in general here.
The caves of the Good Future are completely different, and don't even resemble caves anymore. It's more like a futuristic city shrouded in complete darkness apart from multi-coloured lighting, illuminating a wide range of structures and buildings, and the floor and ceiling still contain the usual large quartz crystals, now static purple. Head outside and on the bottom of the background you'll find a large turquoise wall of machinery, organised mostly into tall pillars and domes, complete with purple lights in places. Above this are green bushes and plant-life amongst more metal domes and tall, mop-headed palm trees, and behind that, rocky purple mountains below a pale blue sky. For the foreground, the triangular patterns occur less frequently in light blue patches, but most of it is based on solid yellow blocks and panels with various other patterns and technical things, of course. The internal walls are made up of dark blue columns, featuring a pattern of small squares linked to each other by diagonal lines, and as usual, this also reaches up a little way off the ground in other areas. Thin yellow piping is present now and then, either popping out of the ground or creating a small network between floor and ceilings. Clear crystals with light blue outlines also offer up some additional decoration along the paths.
The caverns have been completely taken over by Eggman's machinery in the Bad Future, with all the crystals presumably having been extracted. Tall dark green towers and other deadly structures, all lit in various colours sit on the other side of what appears to be a floor of molten rock and magma. Rather frightening machinery hangs from the ceiling, with purple lights and bending pipes. Outside is a depressing scene. It's nothing but miles of dreary brown factories and lights, and the sky is ablaze, glowing from red to purple, and fiery yellow along the horizon. The foreground is designed much like the Good Future's, with large blocks of colour and panels rather than patterns, and this time the colour is a most unexciting olive green, and there are pipes, technical gubbins and yellow and black danger strips. Internal background walls are made up of curved pillars and vertical sections, all with holes indented into the dark green metallic surface, and small pipes create networks within corridors.
Quartz Quadrant, though consisting of rather horizontally long maps compared to the other levels, is quite quick and easy, and shouldn't provide much in the way of a challenge as far as the structure is concerned. It's like Palmtree Panic in that it moves at a pretty choppy pace, with long roads that carry on straight from left to right, with little turning back forced upon you. Multiple routes (usually three, but as many as four) are stacked up on top of each other in these linear directions, but they tend to be quite heavily broken up by gaps and platforms, as well as huge rooms that they all connect into, so it's quite hard to actually stay on one horizontal plane. Aside from the large open rooms, usually with an internal wall as their sole background and springs dotted around, areas are usually pretty enclosed, with low ceilings from the route directly above.
Moving conveyor belts occupy a good half of all of the surfaces of the pathways, and these feature a variety of slopes, curves and steps to deal with. It's not uncommon to have several sloping bumps in succession, plus much larger, taller slopes and then even very long stretches of perfectly straight ground, mostly on the far bottom floor of the stage, and usually containing several enemies and objects along the way. Particularly in Zone 2, some paths consist only of a series of small platforms in the air that are actually part of the structure rather than objects, and twisting tunnels and other forms of tube-based transportation are also common. Small but frequent structural changes tend to occur between the time zones, such as different shaped paths or tunnels, and while it's sometimes difficult to backtrack beyond a certain point, particularly where the large internal rooms are concerned, there's usually a way to do it, with a little skill.
No doubt the key feature of this level is the conveyor belts. They appear all over the place, across many of the paths and often travel over bumps and small slopes in the road, and can even appear on platforms. Like any conveyor belt worth its salt, it'll carry you along in one direction if you stand still, and you'll be a little faster when running toward that direction on it, but a little slower when running against it, and conveyor belts in the Futures appear to move at a slightly quicker pace. Nearby most significant patches of belts is a switch that will conveniently change the direction when you touch it. All the conveyor belts seem to travel in the same direction at the same time, and touching any switch will reverse this for all of them. It features an arrow pointing in the appropriate direction, and for each time zone, the directions are colour coded, both in the colour of the arrow and the colour of the thin conveyor belts themselves. In the Present, it's pale purple for right and yellow for left, and the Past has grey for right and red/orange for left. Both the Futures have purple as their left colour, but the Good Future has green for right, while the Bad Future uses white. Another conveyor belt formation very useful for time travelling is in thin vertical drops in the ground. The belts run along either walls of this and when the direction is set to right, you'll be forced down the drop, but when heading left, you'll be forced upwards, and you can remain directly above it in the air and fall back down to maintain a safe time travelling momentum. There are switches on either end to change it.
They're quite big on platforms over here in Quartz Quadrant too. Standard ones come in small, medium and large flavours regarding their length, and some can be found stationary, dropping only a little bit under your weight. Others move left/right or up/down across a certain distance and may have springs across their top surface, and some will begin to fall when you stand on them. Rarer ones will do the reverse and actually begin travelling upward, stopping at a particular place to deliver you to another ledge above. Don't worry, these won't crush you into the ceiling, no matter how close to it they get. As I mentioned in the above paragraph, also be careful of some of these platforms adorning a tricky conveyor belt along their top, whose direction can be altered by any switch, and these are also present on 180 or 360 degree swinging pendulum platforms. The trick is not to hold the opposing directional button but just press it at regular intervals, once you've got a firm footing in the middle.
Found in only one or two instances, you can also get four pairs of small circle platforms (the kind you would typically find composing log bridges linking two ledges, which incidentally, are also found in this level). In their pairs, these all orbit around one invisible point, next to a high ledge on the left and a low one on the right, and remaining on them is tricky, but with care, they can be used to travel horizontally and vertically between the ledges. Try and stay on whichever circle is the highest of the pair, and in the Futures, these circles have a straight surface at the top, and move much quicker. There may be a pit of spikes to watch out for nearby too.
Watch out for small hanging blocks of rock above the paths that are ready to drop and smash when you stroll underneath, and this danger also comes from small stalactites that simply fall right through the floor. Thin crumbling paths linking two ledges are a standard trap, and when you come to a thin wall in the corridor blocking your way, a simple jump into it will see it fall. There are glass transportation tubes that wind around in a coil in one part of the foreground, with anything from two to six coils in one go. You enter through a hole in the top that's usually invisible, and are rocketed out of the right side at the bottom. Although they can get your time travelling momentum going, most don't last long enough to see it through, so afterwards, you'd be taking your chances outside of it as you try and keep your top speed. Twisting, turning tunnels in the ground, ala Palmtree Panic, present a similar affair. In the Good and Bad Futures, there are groups of two or three strange, bouncing platforms along the bottom of the zones. In a horizontal line, they appear in unison out of the ground, rise up quite high and then go down through it again, while heading left. When the platform in front goes too far left it disappears and a new one appears at the starting point on the far right side, and they move continuously in this fashion. Fortunately, they cannot crush you into the floor.
Four ground-based enemies to dismantle in this level. Pink worm bots who resemble Caterkillers from Sonic 1 slowly wriggle their way back and forth across an area. The healthy ones have harmful spikes across their body, so they can only be attacked on the head, but the older varieties lack spikes, so they can be assaulted anywhere. Blue and yellow scorpion robots move across the ground, pausing to fire small projectiles in your general direction from their laser gun tails. The noticeably more dilapidated ones move more slowly and their gun is long gone. Blue spider robots are incapable of moving on a horizontal axis, but the new ones can jump pretty high. They turn to face away from you so that they can fire a tangling of sticky webbing at you which, funnily enough, also prevents you from moving either left or right until it disappears after a couple of seconds. You can still jump during this time however and you won't lose any rings from it directly - just time. The older models lack this ability and can't jump as high either. Finally, unusual yellow and pink snail robots trundle along rather slowly across an area, and should you intrude on their personal space, they'll stick out three spikes from their back, which only slot back down once you exit the premises. The older variety don't move any slower but they do lack the ability to defend themselves with these spikes. Quartz Quadrant features blue-stemmed flowers with yellow petals and light red stigma.
Each section of this page allows users to add their own notes to fill in any missing details or supply additional research etc.
View general notes for Quartz Quadrant (3)