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The First Room
On ZFRR, the Ascension First Room is the centrifuge room, the two-level hall at the bottom of the launch site where the players land at the start of every game. A giant centrifuge turns in the middle of the lower floor, next to the lunar lander pad the crew arrives on. A long staircase climbs to a curved balcony that runs above the centrifuge. The game treats the two floors as two areas joined from the start, and everything the players can reach without opening a door is the First Room.
Two doors lead out, one on each floor, and both cost 750 points: the lower one towards the laboratories and the power building, the upper one at the end of the balcony. Zombies come in through boarded windows, two of them on the lower floor, and drop from the balcony. Every game starts with the M1911, the knife and two frag grenades.
M14
500 points, on the lower floor, on the wall facing the lunar lander.
Olympia
500 points, upstairs on the balcony.
Those are the only two wall buys of the room. The power switch is on the top floor of the power building, behind the doors, so a First Room game is played without power from start to finish, and that decides almost everything else:
Quick Revive
The only perk in the room, on the far wall of the lower floor, right of the door towards the power. In solo it works without power, for 500 points, and the machine gives up after three lives. In co-op it needs the power and stays off.
The centrifuge
It needs no power and spins at random from round 1. It kills every zombie it touches, and hurts any player standing in its way.
No colour
The cosmodrome stays in black and white until the power is turned on, so the whole game is played in grey.
No Space Monkeys
Their rounds only start once the power is on and a player has bought a perk. A First Room game never sees them.
No lander, no Box
The lunar lander only flies with the power on, and the Mystery Box starts in the power room. Its spot in the corner of this room is only used after the Box has moved.
The records standing today, solo to four players, are shown next to this article, and the Ascension leaderboard lists every run with its video. Ascension is played under the Black Ops First Room rules kept on B2, with one rule of its own:
Doors closed
Opening doors is not allowed, and neither are out-of-bounds glitches. There is no minimum round.
No film tweaks
Changing the r_useFilmTweaks setting is not allowed on Ascension, because it gives a view of the map the game does not normally allow.
Reduced graphic content
Allowed on Ascension (B2 vote of April 2023, 62.5% for).
Black Ops settings
No fog removal, fixed backspeed in solo only, the host’s view required in co-op, full gameplay on video. Steam, Plutonium, BGamer and consoles are accepted, the Wii is not.
