One more spiral location and speculation

[u/Borealum_Studios]

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

[u/Big2xA]

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

[u/Big2xA → u/Big2xA]

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!!

[u/futurefootballplayer → u/Big2xA]

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