TL;DR
- A Reddit user named addis_the_scroll posted a video showing a tree-catapult traversal trick in Crimson Desert
- The trick uses the Swift Flight skill — unlocked by upgrading the Flight ability to level 2 — to launch and glide across the open world at high speed
- Swift Flight drains stamina quickly, so investing in stamina upgrades is essential to pull it off consistently
- The community reacted with a mix of admiration and debate — some love the creativity, others feel the momentum loss when spreading wings makes it feel clunky
- Crimson Desert launched March 19, 2026 and sold over 2 million copies in under 24 hours, despite landing with mixed Steam reviews
- Pearl Abyss has already deployed patches and confirmed a controls overhaul is coming in response to widespread player feedback
Crimson Desert has only been out for a few days, and players are already finding ways to break it open in the best possible way. One Reddit user discovered that the open world of Pywel isn’t just a backdrop — it’s practically a playground full of physics toys, if you know where to look.
Shortly after launch, a user named addis_the_scroll posted a video to the Crimson Desert subreddit demonstrating something nobody else seemed to have tried yet: bending a tree and using it as a makeshift catapult. The clip shows their character pulling the tree back, getting flung skyward, and then soaring over a wide stretch of the open world before landing cleanly on a path and continuing on foot. The whole thing is absurdly smooth, and it works.
How the Trick Actually Works
The key mechanic behind the launch isn’t just the tree — it’s Swift Flight, the level 2 upgrade to Crimson Desert’s base Flight skill. The base Flight ability, unlocked during the “Woman in White” main story quest, essentially functions as a slow parachute that bleeds your stamina. Upgrading it to level 2 grants Swift Flight, which reduces drag and lets you accelerate through the air at genuinely meaningful distances.
The trade-off is stamina. Swift Flight burns through it faster than regular gliding, which means pulling off the tree catapult trick consistently requires a solid stamina foundation. Players who’ve been dumping their Abyss Artifacts into stamina upgrades — ideally pushing it to level four or higher early — will have a much easier time covering ground this way without plummeting mid-glide.
For those looking to push aerial traversal even further, pairing Swift Flight with the Axiom Force grapple’s Aerial Maneuver upgrade turns Pywel into something almost Tarzan-like: chain a grapple, launch off a surface, glide the distance, repeat.
What the Community Is Saying
The post sparked a lively back-and-forth in the comments. Plenty of players jumped in with admiration for finding such an unconventional way to get around, and several shared their own similar environmental discoveries. The general vibe is that Crimson Desert rewards the kind of player who pokes at everything just to see what happens.
That said, not everyone was impressed with how the mechanic feels in practice. A handful of commenters pointed out that the moment you spread your wings after a launch, the momentum noticeably drops — and for some, that’s a symptom of a broader issue with how the game’s movement systems interact. It’s a fair criticism, and it ties into the larger conversation around the game’s controls that’s been dominating discourse since day one.
A Blockbuster Launch With Rough Edges
Crimson Desert made a massive commercial splash when it dropped globally on March 19. Pearl Abyss announced that the game had sold over 2 million copies in under 24 hours — an enormous number for a brand-new IP. On Steam alone, it peaked at nearly 240,000 concurrent players on launch day, with strong numbers assumed across PS5 and Xbox Series X/S as well.
The reception from players and critics, however, has been more complicated. Steam reviews initially landed at “Mixed,” with the most common complaints centering on the game’s convoluted control scheme, an overly restrictive inventory system, and performance hiccups on PS5 — including map-related crashes. The Metacritic score settling at 77 was enough to knock Pearl Abyss’s stock price down roughly 30% in the aftermath, which tells you how high investor expectations had been set.
Pearl Abyss hasn’t been sitting quietly through all of this. A day one patch rolled out shortly after launch covering stability and balance fixes, including adjustments to early-game encounters. More recently, the studio posted a direct acknowledgment of the control issues, stating it is “currently preparing a patch to address” the discomfort players have experienced — and specifically called out keyboard and mouse players as having received an unsatisfactory experience at launch.
A World Still Being Figured Out
None of the friction has stopped players from exploring. If anything, discovering tricks like the tree catapult is exactly the kind of organic community moment that keeps interest alive between patches. Crimson Desert is a standalone action-RPG set in a medieval fantasy continent, and despite evolving from its original conception as a prequel to Black Desert Online, it’s carved out its own identity with a deep skill system, large-scale boss fights, horseback combat, and a world dense with activities from fishing and crafting to hunting and faction conflict.
For those still finding their footing in the game, it’s worth knowing the basics of how to cook the best healing food in Crimson Desert and how to unlock the Ranch and Farm — two systems that become increasingly useful as encounters get tougher. And if you’re keeping tabs on other big gaming announcements this week, Minecraft Dungeons 2 just got officially confirmed with a fall 2026 release window.
Pearl Abyss has always maintained that diverse missions and environmental interactions were built to push players toward creative problem-solving — it’s just that nobody quite expected “bend a tree and fly across the map” to be one of those solutions. As more players work their way deeper into Pywel, you can expect the list of unconventional discoveries to keep growing.
