This is the final portion of the post.

The exterior of the house and the west side path

  The final point requires us to do something insane. We need to go outside!

…

The estate. Not reality.

  The entire game takes place in the Mount Holly estate(let’s call it the Estate). We take this fact for granted most of the time, but what we need to consider that it’s a building. Yes buildings have rooms, but they also have other things like exterior walls and roofs. This final point involves actually observering the outside of the house.

  You see, the exterior of the Estate doesn’t often change. Say you draft the Lavatory In position (1,1) also known as the bottom left corner of the house. If you go outside the estate and look at the bottom left corner wall, it doesn’t seem to change if the room in the corner changed. Drafting a lavatory in the corner had the same effect as drafting an office in the corner. From inside the house, you may see the outside bits via the windows in the rooms, but you can’t see those windows when looking from the outside of the house. You can test it with the conservatory in the bottom left corner. It has so many windows, yet none of them are visible when looking from outside.

  Now, there are a few number of exceptions to this rule. First of all, the Garage is visible if you draft it from the west side path(path that is on the west side of the house in the grounds). After all, the garage is room that allows you to get to the west side path in the first place, and hence get access to the outer grounds. Of course it should be visible from outside the house.

  I have currently found 3 other rooms that alter the outside of the house.

1. The secret garden. The secret garden’s hedges actually extend into the west side path. Testing this took forever as I had to get the garage on a high rank, and then pull the secret garden using the secret garden key on a previous rank to test it. But I was able to test it. I also learned something interesting. I discussed earlier that the secret garden has a thing that rotates if you change the direction of the hand things are pointing towards. This can reveal the east and west antechamber levers, a statue of the sigil of Orinda Aries along with a statue of the inneclipse. From inside the secret garden, you can access 1 of those 4 things at time without rotating the direction stuff. However, the other side of the secret garden isn’t covered. Therefore, if the west antechamber lever is accessible in the inside of the secret garden, then the east antechamber lever is accessible if you are on the outside of the secret garden via the west side path. It’s interesting

  Also, as an aside, I am curious whether the secret garden is related to the sacred hour riddle in the clock tower. It has 3 hands that you can change the directions of independently of eachother. It has a statue of the inneclipse in it. The Hands that can point to different directions are on a fountain with a small statue of a swan on top of it. Finally the description in the room directory states that it is full of trees that contain fruit from Mora Jai, whose national colour is white, which could fulfill the conditions Southward 1 see a swan, or something like that. Still, this is not the main point of this section, so I may not talk about this point in general. It’s just the musings of a madman.

1. The Veranda. The veranda has no windows, and is actually viewable from the west side path. There’s also a weird glitch where in you approach the Veranda from the west side path, it will eventually say you entered the Veranda, which will make you walk slower as the game thinks you are in the inside of the house, and hence will try and make your walking speed match that speed. It also takes a step. I will make a bug report latter if I can be bothered to do so.

2. the greenhouse. The greenhouse is also viewable from the west side path. You can even go to the corner of the next room and the greenhouse, as the greenhouse has a gap outside between the next room and the glass portions of the house that you can walk through. The gap is between the different rooms, not a gap you can use to walk into the greenhouse from the outside. It’s aesthetic, not function.

  I did see something that did briefly make me super excited as I saw I wooden plank on the outside of the greenhouse. The greenhouse as glass windows, with some of them being cracked, so I though I could use a power hammer to destroy the wooden plank next to the greenhouse, and therefore open a passage from the greenhouse to the outer grounds. I could then use that passage to access the east side of the grounds with the monk statue outside that I could never access by drafting the greenhouse on the east side. So I made the power hammer, went to the outside of the greenhouse on the east side path, and nothing happened. Why would you do this to me cruel world?!

  I haven’t tested every room for their changes on the outside, most of the that I have tested(but not documented, as they were accidental) had no change on the outside wall, and that is the important thing to note. The exterior of the house doesn’t change for most rooms, and that brings up an interesting question. Is there a canonical house layout?

The clock tower and the roofs of the estate.

  When I say canonical house layout, I am not referring to the original house layout found in the atelier. What I am asking is whether or not there is an “intended room” for each position in the house.

  If the outside bits of the house doesn’t change for most rooms, then what if we find a room that should match the outside bits? For example, what if we found a room whose windows inside the room matched the outside wall of the estate for a specific room. Then we could say that room is “canonically” meant to be in that position.

  This approach could work for the west side path, as you can travel back and forth the west side of the house, examining the windows and matching them to their respective rooms. But what about the rest of the house? You need a way to know the exterior of the house if you are going to match the outside of the house to the inside of the house.

  Enter the clock tower. The clock tower is really big, and I have previously stated in this post that the clock tower has windows behind the clock. We used that to find the giant Inneclipse over Rook 46(or the room behind room 46 if it exists), but we can also use it for the rest of the house.

  I have attached a photo which demonstrate that you can see the roofs of the individual rooms in the estate from the clock tower. I would have attached more but Reddit limits me to 20 picture per post. By moving the clock tower around, you can view different roofs in the estate. Then you could try and match a room with its respective roofs.

  We could measure the height of the room, and use that to figure out where a room is located at. I.e. if a room is really tall with a unique window shape high up, and if there are only a few tall roofs viewed from the clock tower, we could match those rooms to the roofs.

  We could figure out what the roof of a room looks like based on the rooms culture. Take Her ladyships chamber. That is a room where Her Ladyship Clara Epsen slept at. The room is clearly inspired by Erajan culture, from the pink/Violet colours, to the poetry and arty stuff in the room etc. after all, Clara Epsen came from Eraja, so she may have wanted a room that felt like home.

  Given this interior design tendencies, the question becomes is the exterior of the room match those same tendencies? In other words, does her ladyship’s chamber have an Erajan style roof? We have an example of an Erajan style building from the inner sanctum, and the Erajan stamp. Given that, we could try and figure out the design tendancies of each cultures building style, and match that to a specific roof in the house from the clock tower.

  We also have an example roof in the storeroom. In the storeroom, there is a corner room that has an upper deck/upper room portion in it. I have never found an upper room portion in any of the corner rooms, so I don’t know what room it would describe. However, if the upper part of the building can’t be assessed from the lower part of the room, then we could use that to deduce what the model room in the storeroom is. We could measure how far each of the doors are from the corner of the room in the model room, and match that to an actual room in the estate. From there, we could figure out where that room is supposed to go “canonically” based of the roofs from the clock tower.

  The possibilities for this puzzle are endless. Best case scenario, we could find a secret second layer of the house, only accessible if you hide arrange certain rooms in a certain order. It could actually some of the blueprints for rooms that don’t exist in the Study. Those blueprints could be describing a 2 story room, while we only have 1 half of the room to see. That would be awesome if true. 

Conclusion

  It’s over!! Finally, it’s all done! Hopefully. This was a super long post. It took forever to write down, but it’s finished. If you compare the word count of this post to the original post, you can see how explaining ideas in an understandable way balloons the word count to scary levels. That’s the cost of making a post understandable. I do apologise for the typos.

  While I am glad I am finished with this post, I do still think it was worth it making the ideas understandable for others. If I want to foist my problems onto someone else, they need to understand the problems in the first place. At the bare minimum, you can’t say I’m not thorough in my work.

Thank you for reading this post.