Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics

You press the crouch button, take two running steps down the east hallway, and launch into a long jump — and for a brief, absurd moment, Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics becomes a completely different game. Mario slides across the linoleum in full SM64 physics, cap flapping, momentum carrying him almost the full length of the corridor before he touches down again. Then Baldi rounds the corner with his ruler, and reality snaps back hard. This mod, submitted by KoopTheKoopa on GameBanana, uses the libsm64 library to embed the actual movement engine from Super Mario 64 directly into Baldi’s Basics Classic. The schoolhouse stays exactly as it was. The math problems are still there. So are all the characters. Only your body belongs to a different world entirely.

What libsm64 Actually Does in Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics

libsm64 is an open-source library that extracts the movement and physics simulation from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project and makes it importable as a standalone module. When KoopTheKoopa integrated it into Baldi’s Basics Classic, the result is not a costume swap or an animation replacement — Mario’s movement is genuinely governed by SM64’s own code. That means the same analog-style acceleration that speedrunners have studied for decades now runs inside a Windows application originally built in Unity, navigating corridors that were never designed with BLJs in mind.

The full moveset transfers over. You can walk, run, triple jump, backflip, wall kick off surfaces, ground pound, and dive. The long jump — initiated by crouching while running and then jumping — is the one move that transforms how the schoolhouse feels. Hallways that normally take several seconds to traverse at the standard player walk speed become short sprints when you chain long jumps. Players who spend time with the game quickly discover that reaching the later notebooks before Baldi’s aggression scales up becomes genuinely easier once you treat the corridors as a movement playground rather than a stealth environment.

One detail only players who spend real time with the mod notice: the ground pound on carpet tiles produces the same thud and visual squish animation it would in SM64, but the schoolhouse audio layer continues playing over it, so you get the impact sound layered under Baldi’s distant slapping ruler noise at the same moment. It is a small collision of two completely incompatible worlds, and it happens constantly.

Items, Characters, and the Principal of the Thing

Everything that exists in Baldi’s Basics Classic still exists in Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics. The BSODA can be fired to knock Baldi back. The Alarm Clock still summons every character to a single location. WD-NoSquee silences the door squeaks that Baldi hears from across the school. Baldi’s Least Favorite Tape slows him down when he picks it up. The 25 Cents coin feeds the vending machines. Safety Scissors cut Playtime’s jump rope. All of these items interact with the game exactly as they do in Classic, which matters because Mario’s speed advantage over Baldi is significant enough that experienced players sometimes question whether the game has lost its threat entirely.

It has not. The Principal of the Thing remains the most immediately dangerous character once you understand Mario’s moveset. The Principal enforces the no-running rule, and the running detection in this mod triggers on Mario’s faster movement states — meaning that every time you break into a sprint or chain jumps through a hallway within the Principal’s line of sight, you get sent to detention. Detention removes you from play for a fixed duration while Baldi continues approaching. Players who come from SM64 speedrunning backgrounds and treat the schoolhouse like a course to blast through usually discover the Principal problem within the first two minutes.

Arts and Crafters remains the most unpredictable character in any session. Once he has absorbed enough notebooks, he teleports you back toward Baldi with no warning — and being teleported mid-long-jump produces some of the strangest moments the mod can generate. First Prize charges in straight lines with enough force to corner you, and Mario’s movement does not include a reliable dodge roll, so the standard avoidance strategy of letting him pass still applies.

What Beginners Get Wrong in Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics

The single most common mistake is trying to speed-run the notebook collection using long jumps everywhere, ignoring the Principal entirely. Players familiar with SM64’s open worlds treat corridors as linear stages to blast through at max speed. The schoolhouse does not work that way. Detention eats time, and the time lost in a single Principal of the Thing encounter can negate the speed advantage Mario’s moveset provides over two or three notebook runs.

The second mistake is neglecting math answers. Baldi becomes faster each time you answer a problem incorrectly. In Baldi’s Basics Classic the third problem in each notebook is intentionally unsolvable — it generates a random string of symbols with no valid answer. Submitting a wrong answer there is unavoidable, but submitting wrong answers on the first two solvable problems compounds Baldi’s speed in ways that make even long-jump movement feel insufficient once enough notebooks are collected. Platformer players who are not used to the math loop sometimes hammer through answers without reading them, burning multiple incorrect submissions early.

• Prioritise silent movement near the Principal’s patrol route. Walk rather than run in faculty-adjacent corridors where the Principal appears most frequently.
• Use the long jump for open stretches of hallway, not for classroom-to-classroom transitions. The doorframe collisions can cut jumps short and leave you in an awkward position.
• Keep WD-NoSquee for doors near where Baldi was last heard. Door noise is how Baldi tracks you when he cannot see you, and Mario’s speed means you will be opening doors quickly.
• Save the Alarm Clock for genuine emergencies. Summoning all characters at once when you are already cornered does not help — use it when you need to clear a path, not escape one.

The Honest Limitation of Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics

The community largely agrees on what this mod is: a genuinely impressive technical demonstration that is more fun to watch and to experiment with than it is a redesigned or balanced game. Baldi’s speed in Classic was calibrated around a player who cannot long jump. Mario’s top movement speed is high enough that, on most runs after the first couple of notebooks, Baldi poses little real threat unless you are actively making the Principal encounter mistake described above. Completionists and players who want the tension of the base game intact will find it reduced. The novelty of launching a triple jump off the cafeteria wall never fully wears off, but it is novelty first and a game design achievement second.

Speedrunners in the Baldi community who visited this mod mostly treated it as a sandbox rather than a category — there is no established competition around clearing Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics as a timed run, partly because the outcome is not in serious doubt for anyone comfortable with the SM64 moveset.

Can the Principal catch you if you long jump past him?

Yes. Running detection in Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics applies to Mario’s sprinting and jumping states, not only his walk speed. If the Principal of the Thing is in the same hallway and has line of sight when you launch a long jump, he will send you to detention regardless of how fast you were moving. The detection appears to check movement speed against the normal walk threshold, so slower walk-speed inputs avoid it, but any full-run or jump state triggers it the same way a normal sprint would in Classic.

Does the long jump let you skip notebooks or bypass Baldi?

The long jump does not skip any notebook collection logic — you still need to walk up to each notebook and interact with it, which requires stopping and answering the math problem. What it does do is reduce travel time between notebooks significantly, which helps before Arts and Crafters can teleport you. Baldi can be outpaced reliably once you have two or three notebooks collected and his speed has only incremented a couple of times, but Arts and Crafters remains the harder character to avoid because his teleport ignores movement speed entirely.

What SM64 moves actually work and which ones are broken?

The long jump, triple jump, backflip, wall kick, ground pound, and dive all function in Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics. The BLJ — backwards long jump, the famous speedrunning trick that exploits speed accumulation on stairs — does not produce useful results in the flat-floor schoolhouse environment because there are no downward slopes to build the velocity overflow on. Some players have tested it near doorframe transitions and reported inconsistent behavior, but nothing approaches the speed exploit it represents in SM64 proper.

Super Mario 64 in Baldi’s Basics earns its reputation as one of the most technically unexpected crossovers the Baldi modding community has produced. Watching Mario execute a perfect triple jump down the hallway past Gotta Sweep, grab a notebook, answer two math problems, and then ground pound his way toward the exit while Baldi slaps his ruler somewhere behind the lockers is an experience that exists nowhere else. The moveset works. The characters work. The tension between SM64’s open-world momentum and the schoolhouse’s claustrophobic design is the whole point — and it lands exactly as strangely as it should.