Engine Room

The Engine Room is a huge, cavernous area inside The Rusty Bucket of Rusty Bucket Bay. With its cams, cranks, wafer-thin platforms, and deadly fans, it is possibly the most hated room in the entire Banjo-Kazooie series.

The Engine Room is entered by Beak Barging the door on the bottom of the rear smokestack. Banjo drops down the smokestack to enter the room, where he must cross a great deal of rotating platforms and gears to access twelve Musical Notes, a Jiggy, a pair of Mumbo Tokens, an Extra Honeycomb Piece, and a pair of switches that, if both trigged with a Beak Buster, will shut off the ship's main propellers for 65 seconds, clearing the way to another Jiggy. The two switches also halt the rotating shafts in the room, making it easier to collect everything. If the player can't make it in time, Grunty will say "A simple task you were assured, but Grunty's engines start once more!"

If Banjo falls off of the platforms, he will fall into what looks like boiling oil, causing instant death. There is no way to avoid this once Banjo falls off. If you land on the pipes, you will still slide off. This is particularly frustrating because if you die you have to restart collecting notes from scratch (assuming you aim to get all 100 notes, and there are notes in this room as well) and it is notoriously easy to fall off and die. This is one of the main reasons why this room is so disliked.

Even before the Engine Room can be explored fully, Banjo and Kazooie must hop down into an adjacent room and hit a switch that causes the giant fans to slow down sporadically. Otherwise, they will spin too quickly to jump through. Even when they spin slower, you still run a great risk of falling off, because if your angle is off when jumping and if you get hit, the knock back may throw you off the platforms.

The Engine Room (as well as possibly the rest of Rusty Bucket Bay) is referenced in Banjoland in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, where a signpost states that its difficulty was far too hardcore for today's modern players.

Curiously, hacking into the game and filling the Engine Room with water will reveal that the room has underwater music. Its purpose is unknown, though it is possible the room was once meant to be enterable from underwater.