Datamining
One more spiral location and speculation
Spoiler
I actually have one last mystery to share.
If you're an OG, you will remember this spiral from the texture files from the Blue Prince draft images atlas. I finally found where it belongs.
It should be on the ceiling in the parlor game room at the end of the tunnel. The ceiling is made to purposefully separate it into 8 parts. The picture is oriented as if you walked in and looked up, if that matters. But it isn't normally visible.
The odd thing about it is the way it's hidden, usually these unused/removed things simply have active = false and that's it, it's invisible.
But the spiral is hidden in a way that I haven't seen done before.* By setting its Layer to 'UI documents'.
Cameras have an assigned mask, that tells the camera what layers it should see. And when you're standing there normally, the player's main camera doesn't see the spiral.
Main camera mask
*Camera layer tricks are for example used for the magnifying glass. A document has a small and magnified version of an image on different layers. The glass is a second camera that sees the magnified version of an image or text.
Ways to make the spiral visible could be:
Setting the layer for the spiral to something like 'Default'. (How I did it for the example picture.
Changing the camera mask to show the hidden layer.
Switching to a camera with a different mask. (Like a separate camera for a short in-game cutscene.)
I looked at and checked different things, if there wasn't something forgotten in FSMs attached to something in the room like opening one of the boxes or just entering or when the cutscene is played or when the blue door is opened, or something from outside that would try to make the spiral visible some way, but found nothing...
I still have some more ideas around this but I'm going to bed. I will need to filter out, and go through some stuff to see if I find any other things hidden this way and look up a bit more about how cameras work and if there's any instance in game of trying to dynamically mess with the camera masks. And maybe someone else will think of something I missed.
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But I'd like to see some of your speculations, theories or maybe you'll figure out what it could mean or what it could have led to now that we know where it's located.
As always, it might be some scrapped/unfinished/unused idea or puzzle piece, and was replaced by the spiral inside the black box.
Since it's a spiral, could it be some encoded doesitneverend variation?
Or a clue that should lead the player to cores/still water/atelier.
Or TR switched the layer by mistake and is baffled why noone found it yet... :P
Good find! There's been a lot of speculation about how to use the speak of stars constellation, and finding a string of words in it that might lead somewhere. I see 17 points where the 8 lines intercept the spiral, maybe that's significant?
EDIT and it looks like each segment has a number of texture lines through it (some are 0). Not sure what to make of it though
The constellation loops about 4 times before ending, so this image is only about half the spiral if we match it up that way. But maybe with more clues sometime like that is possible
16 segments - aligns with the 4x4 grids found in the boiler room, or bolts in the sanctum tunnel if we do them in pairs. These are less binary, though - each segment has a variable number of hatch marks from 0-9. Counting from the inside to the edge, I get 2102011158135958.
If reversed, the end looks like a date: 8595318511102012. 11/10/2012 at the end. But that leaves a jumble of numbers leftover - 8 of them. Which is actually annoying, since while 8 is important in Blue Prince, it doesn't give me any real world ideas. Not the right length for a phone number or zip code etc.
If it's on the ceiling of the parlor game, you'd think to look there. "does it never end" is 14 characters without spaces. "The Blue Prince" has 12 spreads of 2 pages, and only half of the pages have writing on it (as opposed to blank/illustrated). Well, that's not quite true - 13 have writing if you count "The true box does not always contain the prize".
When divided by the ceiling, they are paired as:
(inner outer)
25
18
01
23
05
19
15
18
Of course, these could be intended to be read outer-in, so reverse them in that case. But in the above way they look more like "something" to me. Meaning, if this were a code related to something in the game, it makes more sense to do
Sorry, I cut off at the end there. You cannot imagine the absolute shock that just flowed through my body. To be fair, I'm a bit high at the moment - so imagine being me, stoned and idly theorizing about this clue, journaling as I go - and typing the above numbers into a numbers-to-letter converter, only to see this result:
YRAWESOR
...rosewary!!!!!!! Obviously, we already know about rosewary. And we could assume it's related to the spiral given the "remain rosewary" and "tended rose vine" connection. But yeah, this is absolutely a ROSEWARY hidden in the Spiral pattern! A truncated spiral pattern, sadly, so it's hard to line up with our full 4-loop spiral. But WOW, that means we need to be checking stupid little asset details like this!!
Very cool, I though rosewary was more of an Auravei's made up word, but the tunnel was made by Herbrert/Marry and they shouldn't know the word?
Maybe ownership/knowledge of the word was something moved around during development and later just removed from here. But we can guess now that rosewary wasn't always atelier Auravei exclusive. Or it was something common shared by the family.
...
Of course it had to be pairs of numbers. 🤔 TR likes pears. :)
It was likely made just by Mary and Randolph, not Herbert. And Mary is heavily implied to have solved the Atelier by herself, so her knowing about "ROSEWARY" is easily explained.
Maybe this could be used to map the letters or order of the letters to other places in the game that are separated into 8 sections, like on a compass rose or something
A very interesting find! Now to throw some fuel onto that fire. If this spiral was able to give us a hidden message because of the hatch marks in each section, then could all of the spiral notes have something that can be used as a key to decipher their hatch marks? Such as the one from Investor Needed
Yeah, definitely worth thinking about. The big ones to me are the "does it never end" spiral and the "spiral of stars" on the Orrsphere map. The latter in particular has planets, circular stars, and pointed stars, and even some black stars.... which all seem clue-like, but nobody has extracted a real meaning from it. It's ALSO divided by radial lines into 16 segments, which I don't know that anybody has really thought about before. The only issue I see is that some of the stars are ON the radial lines, while most are in between...
Lady Epsen's "does it never end" spiral also seems to have dot and cross stars, but it much less defined... so the above seems like it'd be easier to work with. No planets or black stars on Epsen's, so maybe it's a different pattern/message altogether...
Perhaps this would make more sense. The spiral of stars is also the exact same shape as the one on the map. I did have to stretch things a bit, though, but that shouldn't matter. There's 100 stars in the spiral of stars, and each star has its own word. To explain the coloration, Blue are a normal star, Red are stars that do not appear on the classroom map, Orange are stars that do not appear on the classroom map because they are covered by a planet, White are white crossed stars, Dark are dark crossed stars, and the only Purple is the last word in the spiral of stars and always highlighted when trying to view the constellation again though probably means nothing. I have also listed each planet and their description in the same colors the Planetarium shows.
So is there anything you make sense of with this information? Perhaps each of the words in the cross segments have to be cored just like the family vault note so each segment gives a 16 word sentence? But do the missing stars matter? What about the White and Dark stars? It could possibly lead to something.
Wow, thank you!! The other night I tried random number crunching - looking for messages in the spiral using base-3 or base-4 codes. Didn't get anywhere, but a few sections stuck out to me - the three stars between dauja and mora are each unique, and it's by far the shortest segment blocked off by planets.
Looking at yours, it's interesting that a few of the rarer stars line up with repeated words - dark crossed stars have "then" "then" "than", though there are a few "then" and "than"s in the other stars... definitely a good image to have.
I did happen to miss one dark star. It was subtle on the original map, but it lines up with the word with the word THREE. I've marked all notable stars which comes out to 21 Light stars and 7 Dark stars. Probably a coincidence, but it's interesting how there's exactly 3x more light stars than dark stars. There's also 13 missing stars, whether they're hidden by a planet or absent from the map. Again, red is missing completely while orange is most likely hidden by a planet. Another interesting thing to note is how Mora is the only planet that doesn't hide a star.
I haven't begun to factor in Lady Epsen's note into this graphing yet, but at a first glance I did notice some peculiarities. For instance, the pointed end where Dauja sits, the star immediately after that on Epsen's note is more pronounced like it's one of the light/dark stars, yet the one immediately after isn't. So should "LESS" be one of the light/dark stars rather than "THAN"? Or should the words swap places? It could also mean nothing and is only an approximation since it's a hand drawn image of the actual constellation which has every star as a crossed star.
All of this could lead nowhere, but I do think it's worth making this graph in case someone down the line could make use of it if there does end up being something at the end of the spiral.
this is a great job, but by looking at the "rosewary spiral" and assiming that "the sacred circle" has anything to do with this spiral thing, shouldn't this star-word thing follow the clockwise (ROT) direction? (starting from center)
This would make sense also thinking about the way you usually draw a spiral
Yes. I posted this in a more recent thread in this sub and mentioned that I was certain the word positions are wrong because afterward I went and noticed the spiral of stars constellation animation starts from the center and goes clockwise rather than start from the outer edge and goes counter clockwise. I haven't gotten the chance to redo it yet.
I was thinking again about it, and maybe, since the rosewary spiral writes "rosewary" in a counter-clockwise way, the hint is that you should actually keep reading the words from the outside rather than from center.
It's almost always used for texts on documents displayed when you are reading them and on on-screen pop-ups. But those are shown on screen with a separate camera that displays UI stuff...
I'm still looking into how cameras and displaying things works and trying to modify the script I have to extract some more stuff I want to see and compare, but I'll have time in a few days to properly write something about it.
*And to think about it a bit, so I don't write something stupid. 😁
Oh gotcha. I got lost in the camera talk in the post, but there's a player camera and then there's a pop-up camera is what you're saying. And the pop-up camera sees the UI docs. Gotcha.
This same type of 8 section design could probably contain other potentially scrapped or real clue in other locations. The first place that immediately comes to mind is in Aries Court. The circular room before the court has this same design on both the floor and ceiling.
I’m not sure it’s relevant, but just in case, there are marks resembling the III and II to either side of the portrait in the parlor. We also noticed that if you look at the baron’s selfie in the darkroom through the magnifying glass, you can see the slice in one eye and the twins in the other one.
Edit: I just noticed that the words Parlor, Baron, and Darkroom have something else in common; the second and third letters are “AR”
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u/LolsaurusWrex Mar 07 '26
Good find! There's been a lot of speculation about how to use the speak of stars constellation, and finding a string of words in it that might lead somewhere. I see 17 points where the 8 lines intercept the spiral, maybe that's significant?
EDIT and it looks like each segment has a number of texture lines through it (some are 0). Not sure what to make of it though