Quantum Ungulations (Outer Wilds)

King of Posters
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Let me know if I’m hinting too much, but I thought I’d drop a clue or two in spoilers to move you toward new challenges.

A small point of clarification regarding text that you’ve encountered: You found Nomai text referring to the south pole of the Quantum Moon. The text stated that you always land on the south pole. This text refers to an observation; it does not refer to instructions. The angle or location at which you approach the Quantum Moon will not affect where you land there.

Some thoughts about Brittle Hollow, specifically the Black Hole forge district: while it is entirely possible to turn your ship upside-down to land up there, it’s extremely fiddly because that’s not the intended method of reaching this area. Even if you get up there, though, the forge won’t be accessible unless you’ve done something elsewhere in the city first. First hint: it’s not the school district. Second hint: it’s not the Eye Shrine district, either.

If you want to make progress on Dark Bramble, I’d encourage you to find Esker’s signalscope log which is located on the Attlerock. If you’ve done that, and you don’t see why it’s relevant: the notes draw a connection between Dark Bramble and something happening on Timber Hearth. You need to find the connection. If it’s still not clear how to proceed, expand the additional spoiler below:

A critical technique for navigating Dark Bramble

There are two techniques, actually, but I’m only going to explain the first one, for now:

There’s only one source of harmonica music, but it’s coming from two locations. If you follow it to Timber Hearth, you get to a Dark Bramble seed that you cannot fit through. What happens if you follow the second source of harmonica music into Dark Bramble, though…?

Regarding the room full of spiky plants on the Ash Twin: like most challenges in Outer Wilds, it’s not about agility, it’s about timing. If that doesn’t give it away—wouldn’t it be easier to navigate if you had a surface you could stand on that was above all the cacti on the floor?

If you haven’t been inside the High Energy Lab yet, you definitely need to revisit the lowest level of the Sunless City. Again, I recommend you take the hole in the rocks next to the gravity cannon to get there, but it’s possible to arrive with enough time even if you take the long way from the escape pod.

Not sure whether you have the DLC, but that’s what the deep-space satellite signals are for. While it’s relevant to the overall story, it’s a completely separate bag of hammers; I wouldn’t pursue it while you’re in the middle of figuring out the main game.

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I read none of this (may return to it though if I feel stuck/need a new lead, thanks!) as I had a legit good, breakthrough day at this today! I remembered that I saw the dark bramble seed thing on the home planet and while I thought that was likely just to teach you about them when you come upon the related planet later, I decided to repeat myself from earlier and shoot my probe into it once more. I saw the second probe signal like 13-18km away, hopped into my ship and flew back to Dark Bramble which is where said signal was originating from. I flew quiet to avoid those fish and tried to see exactly where in there my probe landed. Took a couple warps, was scared for a sec when it seemed to be behind a giant fish but it turned out to be dead and Feldspar was camping in it! Talked to him, got some info, went further back into that area and found the note about using the jellyfish to get past the electric core in Giant’s Deep. Accidentally died by wandering into space, told the village guy about Feldspar to put him at ease. I called it a day there even though I only put maybe two and a half shortened cycles into it as I wanted to leave on a good note and with something to look forward to trying next time.

TBF I don’t grasp how what I did should have lead me to what I found as they seem rather disconnected, but it was still a decent idea and should have lead me to something so I’ll take it.

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So good news: I figured out how to go fully “under the sea” and I’m pretty sure that bit is fully finished now, although if I was supposed to draw what I saw later or something I may have to return or check a LP.

Less(?) good news: So you know the whole bulletin/rumor board with all those thing you can look at that let’s you know what you’ve figured out and where there may be more to find? I knew about the whole clicking on the card-shaped entries to get further details… but I did not know until just now that I could also click on the lines between entries to get further info. That may have been useful at various points.

Anyways tomorrow’s goal is return to dark bramble as my other plan for how to tackle it is back in play thanks to said rumor board: shoot my probe into the seed by the distress beacon inside there and follow that likely to the vessel. I tried that once before I think and fish were an issue, hopefully my luck this time will be better.

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Fantastic to see the progress you’re making!

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Well today’s session with the game sucked.

As noted the goal of the day was to get to the vessel in Dark Bramble as I was pretty sure that I had the way to find it figured out. I was also right in that the last time I tried that approach there was a lot of problems with fish as… there was a lot of problems with fish. Tried a few things, backing out to where you came from instead takes you all the way out of the planet but leaves the fishy right at that portal in an impossible to avoid kinda way rather than follow you out and hopefully out of the way. Could never get the ship by the multiple fishes guarding the other side of the vessel-adjacent portal so instead I climbed out and tried to drift past. This failed a couple times but eventually I seemed to be doing alright.

I want to take a moment here to describe how this cycle goes: Wake up, run to ship, put on suit, launch, find Dark Bramble and start autopilot, put on signalscope when I arrive to track down the distress beacon, go through a warp avoiding fish and then find beacon in second area while still managing speed and sound, from there follow lights to bramble seed, shoot probe into seed, again slowly make way to next portal that has probe signal that lands you right in front of fish, if you enter a touch too fast they are alerted the second you arrive/start cycle over. Get out of ship and drift past very slowly, if have to correct course at all within the first 20-30 second likely dead and get to restart.

I did all of that a bunch and finally, thankfully I drifted a good ways through, found another portal and the vessel was right there in front of me and… I looked around and floated all around it for minutes without ever finding the way inside. I slowly ran low on fuel and then oxygen and suffocated without even being able to interact with it for a single second. I died, went back to my rumor board and didn’t even get a single thing on that.

I am 90% sure I’m just gonna pull up a LP now and just watch this bit as I’ve got zero desire to do all of that yet again only to risk befalling that fate once more. Maybe it was dumb luck, I went left when I should have went right or a branch obscured my view at just the wrong moment or that thing that looked like it might be a half buried door right where the probe landed actually was one and something went sideways when I checked if I could open it but having to go through all of that just to get to a place likely low on fuel and oxygen and having to figure out everything that’s actually there under a potentially strict time limit assuming I can even find the dooris not something I’m looking forward to.

Also the rant I started with in this topic about if I make it through an annoying maze or obstacle course once you can give me a knowledge-based shortcut back so I don’t have to do it every time? THAT.

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That’s an understandable reaction. Recognizing that the damage is likely done, here’s what I’ve learned: when passing through a seed portal, there’s a specific moment when you leave the outer shell and enter the inner shell that the interior actually “loads”, and when that moment occurs, your speed and trajectory are set to default values. In other words, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going when you enter a Dark Bramble seed, so make sure you cut your engines before you reach the transition between areas.

When you follow the escape pod signal to the Nomai grave and fire your scout into the seed, the scout lands on the ship itself, and something you can see if you rotate three camera is more of those lights you followed to get to the grave. So, if you follow the scout signal to the red-light seed, cut your engines well before you enter and float past the three fish. Once you’ve gotten to the point that you can see the details of the fish eggs in the middle of the area, use light touches on the engines to enter the seed your scout signal is coming from. Honestly, you can get there just by rotating your ship to point at the seed. Unlike in space, your ship in Dark Bramble usually has slight continuous forward momentum, but I still wouldn’t try changing your angle until well past the fish. As you approach the ship, look for a gash in the hull right below the ship’s horizontal centerline—it’ll be the spot where those lights and the occasional Nomai skeleton are spilling into space. Once you enter the Vessel proper, follow the corridor to a room with text and objects you can scan and interact with. You won’t be able to solve the room on your first visit, but once you’ve done stuff there, the Vessel will appear in your computer, and you can mark it as a destination to skip the trip to the escape pod, at least.

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this thread is like a solid 50% blurred spoilertext so i don’t really know what is being discussed but i keep getting the sense from the bits i’ve read that there are a lot of potential pitfalls for players not understanding what the game is trying to tell them and potentially giving themselves a bad time

is there anything i should know before i start the game in earnest or is the risk of having a bad time by going in totally blind worth the possibility of figuring this stuff out for myself?

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imo no – this game is very good with no expectations. just put it down if you aren’t feeling it.

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i think it’s more that the game is slow and doesn’t provide much explicit direction (especially at the beginning), so if you’re not engrossed by the exploration part of it, you may feel like it’s a chore or you’re not making much progress.

i bounced around the game for like 10-15 hours just flying towards stuff that looked cool before i started actually trying to resolve threads or look at the ship log and i had a great time.

there’s one part that’s pretty annoying (and directly related to what username is posting about), but i found that to be the exception, not the rule.

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yeah i got what i wanted to out of this game going in blind. i’m very goal-oriented so i wanted to Figure Stuff Out and when i hit an annoying wall, i quit. and it was way better than knowing anything going in!!

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Had a beautiful experience going in blind, but then I’m the guy that Half-Life 2’s level design made feel like a genius. Developer intent glows pink for me

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I think I’ve stepped on just about every potential rake the game could throw at you and even I think the danger of being overspoiled coming in likely outweighs the benefits. I will say that if you find it annoying that one can’t… “reset” things in a timely enough way just look up what to do with that, any specific complains/questions are probably best served by posting heavily spoilered screeds here :slight_smile:

I went back to playing before @jsnlv posted some advice so I looked up a tip for the vessel entrance and while I got the impression that it would be near where the probe landed I noticed there was no mention of leaving the ship to drift past the fish, so deduced from that that I likely shouldn’t do that. On the… fourth or fifth attempt I finally managed to drift by, but on that one I didn’t launch the probe first and just went straight to the red portal so I accidentally went right next to a further in fish and had to redirect nearby; I actually got away but smashed the heck out of my ship but managed to pilot its damaged self into the correct portal where I fixed it. I then explored the vessel again without a harsh oxygen/fuel time limit which is good as it took another few minutes before I found the somewhat obscured path in. To give myself some credit the vessel is designed to be lit up by your ship’s headlights rather than your suit’s so without it a number of details are difficult to be seen. Anyways I got inside, looked around, saw that yes I should have written down those coordinates from the water planet and exited to go do just that.

That I did last night before I went to bed, today was like a rush of dumb luck and dumber ideas actually working out to my dramatic benefit. The quick hits:

-I landed on the moon! It turns out the overly complicated and hence stupid feeling idea I mentioned a week or so back of using the probe to keep it in sight was actually the right one. Then when wandering towards the north pole I went over the cloud line and got deposited in space but hey, landed on the moon!

-I found the bit of text in the sunless city that I apparently had been missing this whole time, ironically right after I found the quicker entrance someone mentioned before in response to my bitching. It seems to add nothing of note but hey, crossed off the to-do list.

-When flying off the planet the comet was in sight so I landed there again, found the frozen ship on it and actually recognized it this time as the one launched via the gravity cannon (I believe the note left next to it states this outright, but I think I first found this before I had a good idea of what said cannon was. Went back to planet, retrieved the ship, flew back to comet and…

-Happened to misstep onto the frozen cracks on said comet right as it flew closest to the sun, dropping me within! I assumed the now missing ship would crack the ice and let me in (maybe it still does or opens something else up), just almost died due to ghost energy but made it to the center on my first go. I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of the energy stuff they mentioned here is but at least I now know it.

-Go back to the moon at the start of the next cycle, screw around trying to figure it out and do get to the north pole this time, then the sixth location and get to talk to the alien fellow. I believe I managed to exhaust all the conversation bits right when the “cycle is ending” tune started to play so I tried to propel myself towards what maybe appeared to be the eye of the universe in the sky/clouds, figuring worst case I’d at least see where this distant sixth location is (could not see my ship anywhere). It didn’t work and I dropped right back onto the moon with dead alien lying nearby, jump into space just in time to watch the supernova.

-I found the stupid black hole forge controls I kept walking past, I see that they move that central thing up and down but I can’t quite figure out how that helps as my attempts to run and jump onto it have failed to work so far.

Still though that’s a lot of stuff that went right and it leaves that last bit and how I assume it ties into Ash Twin as the last definite things on my rumor board. I think after that would be the end game if this isn’t technically it which… means doing that annoying bit once more.

It will answer the one question I have had about the game though: I know multiple people who have put it down right at the very end with the vague explanation being “too hard/don’t want to actually do it”. I wonder if it is the bit I am already not looking forward to doing again or if there is something potentially much more annoying beyond it.

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Okay good news/bad news time.

Good news is that I think I am very close to being able to do whatever one needs to do to beat this game, I went back to the vessel and entered the coordinates, then noticed the floating warp drive. Grabbed it, inserted it, nothing seemed to activate it. Took it back to my ship and checked my rumor board, found the notes tying into ash twin and the black hole forge, choose the reset.

As a not the cycle before this I did visit Ash Twin and get to that spiky room while it still had a lot of sand so that I could take the tractor beam up which warped me to the sun station, which basically told me that it couldn’t blow up the sun but the comet might. I don’t recall anything there that’d help with my core.

The long and short of this is that I am down to a single question mark left on my board and of course it seems to be the one thing I desperately need to make any further progress: I gotta get to the center of Ash Twin as that is where they were sending their current warp core stuff. I checked out the black hole forge again couldn’t find anything that’d help, there was something on the wall that looked like the “when this point up you warp” dealie from the whole hole station but I stood on the warp pad thing right outside for a good 15 minutes and never warped so obviously that can’t start the process.

So that’s the bad news: I am likely fully 100% stuck. I’ve found all the various bits of writing that point at the place that almost certainly holds what I need but while it seems likely that there is a warp pad that will take me there I have found no real hints as to how or where, and while I do need to explore around on Ash Twin a good bit more I only figured out how the warp things there functioned last night that place involves a huge amount of waiting around while twiddling my thumbs. I’ll spend another cycle or two on it tomorrow to see if I can crack it but if not it sadly might be “go look up the answer” time as most everything else appears to be sorted out enough.

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This is probably the part that statistically the most people get stuck on if they bother to complete the game.

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yeah i largely lucked into that solution – i think they supposedly added some more explicit clues since i played but i have no idea what those are.

if i got stuck i would have looked it up too!

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I think I’ve had a couple other people insinuate the same thing to me today which… I mean I have seemed very capable of screwing up what the game would consider more obvious things, surely I am ready for it to be more obscure.

Also fun fact I forgot to mention before: I have never figured out the right way to get to the black hole forge. I go to the controls and raise it to the ceiling and just run back to my ship and fly it up there until it gets stuck to the “magnetic” floor at an angle where I can exit without falling directly into a black hole. TBF there is a non-zero percent chance that is the expected solution as I’ve felt that what I’ve considered to be dumb ideas have worked much more than what I’d have considered good ones… but it feels unlikely.

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Here is a question that may seem innocuous, yet is actually critically important:

How many “black hole core” warp platforms are in the various towers around Ash Twin’s circumference?

I count a total of just six such platforms. Why is this important? Two reasons: first, each black hole core warp platform has exactly one corresponding white hole core platform, and vice versa. Second, consider: how many towers are there on Ash Twin? Where does each tower go? This is a valuable clue.

If these questions haven’t provided a clear course of action to you, here’s a more specific nudge: there are white hole warp platforms on Timber Hearth’s surface, on the Statue Island on Giant’s Deep, and on Ember Twin by the High Energy Lab. You can get to all three of these locations easily, so these provide you no benefit. You’ve also already visited the Sun Station, so that’s a total of four warp platforms you can safely ignore. However, there’s a tower for Brittle Hollow, and the only white hole warp platform on Brittle Hollow’s surface connects to the White Hole Station. Could there be another warp platform on Brittle Hollow somewhere…?

There’s something else I’ve alluded to without specifically addressing so far in this post, and that’s the fact that there are five warp towers but six warp platforms. The Hourglass Twins are represented by a pair of connected towers, and each tower contains a warp platform. This is something they’ve tried to explain in the Black Hole Forge, but it didn’t make much sense to me at first: the Hourglass Twins count as a single astral body for the purposes of warp tower alignment. That means that regardless of which platform you stand on, these two warps activate whenever the barycenter of the Hourglass Twins passes overhead. That’s all well and good if you’re trying to go to Ember Twin, as that tower’s glass ceiling is intact, so the sand passes over the tower harmlessly. However, the other tower’s ceiling is missing, so can you still warp from that platform? If you want to try, you’ll need to ensure your feet are still on the platform during alignment. That means you’ll need to be under an overhang until the exact moment the tower of sand is perfectly vertical, and only then step onto the platform.

There’s one last thing in regards to the comet: I think they’re pretty explicit about this a little bit later, but the “energy readings” they were picking up from the spherical casing inside the comet refers to ghost matter. The comet brought ghost matter to your system, and as it approached the sun for the first time, the gravitational force was enough to cause the casing to rupture, blanketing the entire system in ghost matter and wiping out all the Nomai closer to the sun than the white hole. As they mentioned at the very beginning of the game, though, ghost matter disappears over time, it just takes a su-u-u-u-per long time to do so. It also doesn’t penetrate liquid water, so as an aquatic species, the proto-Hearthians survived.

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I sincerely love seeing all this spoiler text, I am not reading any of it cuz I still plan to play this game again but seeing all these hint blocks gives me a little thrill

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jason’s hints are great and i’m so excited to see username crack this last bit. i remember a poignant plot point in the writings on the solar station and that’s all

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why DID they release two games called Outer Wilds and Outer Worlds so close to each other?

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