I've been replaying the Devres episodes lately and came across a strange problem in Devres66 "Deluge" which is part of episode 5.

In this level you have to touch 3 gems spread across the upper parts of the level which activate 3 triggers by trigger zones. These 3 triggers in return unmask a series of blocks to make an underwater hidden trigger crate fall into 2 animated tiles that rapidly switch between a masked and unmasked tile (supposedly to brake that crate without buttstomping or explosion?).

However, that crate doesn't break during my recent gameplay, thus preventing further progress to the level altogether. Then naturally I tried running vanilla 1.24 but then the trigger zone that's underwater (on the right side of the level) doesn't activate at all! Cheating isn't an option either since jjfly doesn't work underwater.

I remember this level to be very straightforward, so what suddenly goes wrong now?

I made a quick check in TSF+ and sure enough everything worked correctly. Animated scenery isn't known for its 100% reliability when it comes to destroying crates, but when it fails, it should suffice to move away from the crate to let it deactivate, and then approach again.

I gave the level another go on TSF+ and found that by playing all the way through without loading from a savegame makes it work. After the first door I did load from a save again though, and the 2nd door got messed up again. In that case, even moving away to the far corner of the level won't suffice somehow. Even dying and replaying from the checkpoint didn't work. I know this level had a chance to crash on vanilla, but I still don't see why it would affect crates in masks.

So can savefiles (even in nonplus based levels) somehow be related to this?

And is anyone else unable to activate the underwater trigger zone on vanilla TSF?