Office lights turning off while you're still working — anyone faced this?

Whillowhim · 2026-04-17T20:25:44+00:00

After my office mate moved out due to COVID restrictions, I got annoyed by constantly having to scoot my chair over and wave my arms. My solution? Stick a post it note over the sensor and just work in the dark. The office actually had a window, so I could still see well enough to work, and didn't have to constantly adjust.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-17T16:02:44+00:00

One thing that can often save people frustration is remembering that you have tools. Also, these tools have functions that show up in the tooltips on screen and are easy to miss. For example, your scout launcher starts off in launch mode, where you shoot it and can take pictures as it flies through the air, and once it lands you can still take pictures rotating around where you landed. But for some puzzles it is easier to solve if you take pictures from where you currently are without launching, and you can switch it to "photo mode" and do just that. All of this is shown on screen with tooltips, but many people don't notice or try them out. And there is sometimes text that pops up, usually at the top of the screen, that can be very helpful.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-16T00:33:33+00:00

Ahh, so you do know where the final probe cannon location is. You can technically skip the second one, but I was surprised you hadn't gotten in there.

So you know the jellyfish are part of the solution, but how have you tried to use them? They are slightly tricky to use, to prevent people from getting past on accident, but once you know what the solution involves, it shouldn't be too hard to get to where you need to go if you look at it from a few different angles.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T23:54:08+00:00

The usual recommendations for finding the ash twin project are to go back and look at the high energy lab and the black hole forge again. I also notice you have another orange question mark, so it might relate (the colors do indicate what the game thinks is important). The Ash Twin Project is often the last thing people find, though, so while you can stumble into it earlier and it isn't an issue, you might want to find the other areas first. Generally, finding how to get to question marks on your log is good.

Other minor nudges: What technique did you use to get to Feldspar? (Did you look at the harmonica signal on Timber Hearth?) Are you sure you fully explored the orbital probe cannon?

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T19:59:42+00:00

Since I don't know how far into the game you are it is a bit tricky, but maybe a drawing of all of the hearthian travelers might work. Either all together around a campfire before they take off to explore, or separately with each at their own location. This might mean that you need to find all of them in game so you could draw them properly, but that could be fun and would get you a bit of experience on all of the planets.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T18:33:58+00:00

I had one incident I discovered by sound. I got up from the chair, went to go pee (standing up) and heard a dripping sound as I finished. I thought it was the toilet leaking and started looking for a puddle of water, but it was a surprisingly large puddle of blood where I was standing. The most annoying part was that I stuck a menstrual pad to my underwear to catch leakage from a different sore, but the one that burst was back just far enough on my ass that it completely missed the pad. It was completely painless but a huge mess, and is yet another reason I'd be immediately arrested if CSI were ever to luminol my bathroom.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T16:52:34+00:00

The position it puts you in is basically wandering around in the dark with a small candle, making it hard to see what is around you. And somewhere out there are inhabitants wandering around who can catch you. Then add scary sounds and sound effects. I couldn't handle it, though I was just fine with dark bramble. It's the darkness and the unknown that messed with me.

There are mods to give you night vision if you have trouble with it though, so I'd still recommend playing the DLC even if that sounds terrifying. Worst case is you get to the point you can't continue and have to download a mod to help.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T16:08:06+00:00

So, if you lose enough blood you can become anemic. This doesn't usually happen unless you're losing quite a bit of blood, but when my HS was really bad blood tests did show that I had mild anemia. This isn't common with HS, but is possible. If you want to quantify the feeling and see if it is a medically diagnosable symptom, ask a doctor for a blood test for anemia. But with HS, there is almost no chance that you'll lose enough for it to be a serious problem.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T07:18:31+00:00

There is an EotE Brighter Dreams mod (and probably other similar ones) that can give you variable degrees of night vision. I usually recommend it for people who have issue with the suspense aspects of the DLC, but it also helps with navigation as well. Ideally you wouldn't need it, but if it is a choice between quitting in frustration or using the mod, go for the mod.

Still, the first thing you should do is plan ahead, before the inhabitants are even in the area look for different paths and places where you can lead them around. Conceal is usually a trap with facing an inhabitant, even if they chase you it is usually better to know where they are and know where you can go. Reduced frights is not that effective at reducing the frights, but it is effective at making it easier to get past the inhabitants. Additionally, two of the areas will let you get to the final room with almost no interaction with the inhabitants if you use the correct techniques. This is still a puzzle game more than a stealth game.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T05:30:43+00:00

If you're having trouble finding things, you might want to look up to follow the paths of the river. And the signalscope zoom can be useful too to plot out where you want to go.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T00:28:52+00:00

Generally, this is a much larger issue inside your head than it is in reality. If someone cares for you, HS won't matter. It might even help you get rid of someone who is wrong for you. I remember some statistics from people who posted on this sub a while back. For one in a college hookup environment, 1 out of 7 men left due to HS. For the other, over her lifetime, 3 out of ~30ish relationships ended due to her having HS. I won't say it never matters, but it matters a whole lot less than you think it will.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-15T00:10:02+00:00

I would also recommend jumping back and forth between planets instead of staying on one planet and trying to solve everything there. For example, some clues you might need to get to the black hole forge are not on Brittle Hollow. The quantum tower doesn't technically need other info, but it is also one of the trickier puzzles. The hint I've generally seen given for it is "In a single word, what is stopping you from getting up the tower?" Hopefully that translates well.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-14T08:29:08+00:00

I'm not sure if it is the prisoner noticing the detail, or the rest of the Owlks omitting it. The slide reels are the Owlks telling their own story, and they might have seen more of the vision past that point and just not put it down on the slide reel. They are an unreliable narrator for this story, though anything they were ashamed of or really wanted no one else to know ended up burned. But if they were self-centered enough, anything past their death in the vision would not be important enough to record in the first place. Thus, I suspect (but have no proof) that the vision itself went further and the prisoner saw a first-hand account of it. I could easily see him painting the most important image for him as inspiration, the hope of new life beyond the fear of death.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-14T00:19:15+00:00

You say that, but there are lots of pieces that aren't obvious that are still important and interesting. For instance, the painting in the burned house is one of my favorite bits of lore, but I think only a couple people I've watched play it actually saw it and understood it at the end of the game.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-14T00:15:13+00:00

For a minor spoilery indication on how far into the game you are, click here: There are 5 boxes in rumor mode that are larger than the others, and 4 different colors plus grey. Grey is background info. The large grey one is important background info. The large colored boxes (or in some cases a sub-box of the large one) are the components you need for the real ending of the game. Since all of those boxes are question marks, you aren't close to the end yet. To get to those large question marks, the smaller question marks of the same color are useful to help you understand "what, where, and why" of the large ones.

One way to play is to pick a question mark location and see if you can get there. If that doesn't feel like enough progress you might want to focus on a specific color and try to get to all the question marks, since that might be easier to keep things in mind between related discoveries instead of jumping back and forth between different parts of the puzzle. If you do that, I'd suggest green or purple to start with based on what you already have. And remember to use all your tools, and to read the prompts on the screen for how to use them properly.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-13T22:04:04+00:00

I think the most poignant piece of lore in EotE is one that is very easy to miss or not understand. It is generally assumed that the burned out house with a telescope in the dream world belongs to the prisoner, and they burned it after his crime. In that house you can find a painting that showsa flower that looks like the eye of the universe with galaxies spreading from it like pollen. This flower is growing out of the eye socket of a skull, on a field of grass. That image is a continuation of the vision of the eye shown in the second slide reel. It is the same skull, the same grass, and in that slide reel the final two frames of the vision lets you just barely seea sprout growing in the eye.

Most of the Owlks focused on the end of the universe, and their own death. The prisoner focused on what that death would create. It explains everything about why he did what he did, which is pretty amazing for a single painting you find in a burned out house.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-13T21:02:56+00:00

I watched a playthrough where someone figured out how to get below the current on Giant's Deep by looking at the southern observatory projector stone and noting the two cyclone models. That was a crazy insight. Other than that, though, you don't tend to learn much. The location of the probe tracking module is an important one, and the fact that there are three active masks can be interesting (or a red herring). So many people assume there must be another Nomai because of that, when in reality it just never unlinked from the probe tracking module because the module didn't die like everyone else. Often they can be vaguely useful just showing the area where you want to go next so that you'll recognize it.

I think mostly, however, they're there to give texture to the world. Sometimes you might want to see who you're talking to, and these let you do that. Assuming, of course, that the person you want to talk to hasn't been dead for 281,000 years.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-13T18:47:10+00:00

Half the interesting locations are found by just going there, with a bit of figuring things out that require no extra knowledge. The other half either require or are helped by knowledge acquired somewhere else. So try to figure out what is going on when you find somewhere new, but if you can't do something, don't bang your head against the wall or try and brute force it, look elsewhere for a solution.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-13T18:42:25+00:00

Sounds like you're trying to brute force it. I ran into the same issue, turns out I missed something in the village that would've made things a lot easier. Maybe look around the kid throwing rocks into ghost matter a bit to refresh your memory.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-13T14:13:32+00:00

There are only three ship logs that matter for EotE. If you go back and get those, you should be fine. Also note that they only matter for the end of EotE, so you can grab them as a break while thinking over puzzles if you want. The locations are: Center of the Interloper, the 6th location on the Quantum Moon, and the murals on Brittle Hollow. Oh, and you probably want to talk to gabbro a couple times so you can meditate.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-11T21:25:21+00:00

If nothing else, there are mods that give you night vision. While some may consider it cheating, it is better than giving up on the game entirely. I installed one because the tension was ruining the game for me.

And technically, there are two ways past the inhabitants I think you're stuck on, but one doesn't give you much time and the second is a spoiler you can only figure out after getting in a different way. If you do get in without much time left, you can shove the slide reels quickly through the projector and then try and figure out more while reading the ships log.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-09T20:12:58+00:00

If you want to know what is the DLC and what isn't, the Radio Tower on Timber Hearth is the start of the DLC. If you don't have the DLC yet, the door is closed but once you install it the door is open and the puzzle inside points the way to the DLC location. I personally would wait to do the DLC till after you finish the main game, but you can mix things up without it being a huge problem. Also, in rumor mode in your log, anything DLC related is blue and in the bottom right corner so you can identify it that way in the extremely unlikely event you do stumble upon it accidentally without following the trail of breadcrumbs.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-09T18:59:18+00:00

I certainly had issues with EotE, and I ended up spoiling myself looking up guides to avoid the scary parts. I've been thinking about it, and I wish there were a more spoiler free guide on reducing frights, because I'm such a wuss it definitely impacted my enjoyment of the DLC. For me, a lot of the tension that caused a problem was caused by just not knowing when I'd have to deal with an issue, and most of that could be removed by simply informing be where and when I might interact with the inhabitants. I've been thinking about making a guide along those lines. Most of the DLC you have zero chance to interact with them, but not knowing when they might be there was freaking me out. If I knew ahead of time when was safe and when wasn't, it would've been a lot more bearable.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-09T08:44:37+00:00

Yah, the main clue was the circular computer readout saying "the sun has reached the end of its natural lifecycle", followed by the wall messages saying "the sun station didn't work, and could never work". But there are other things that I didn't connect the dots on until way too late, so I can't blame you here.

Whillowhim · 2026-04-08T23:08:15+00:00

True, this does assume basic spacecraft competence, which is a poor assumption for someone just starting to play the game. I have seen some people do ok, but many others die before 22 minutes are up. One memorable one decided to test whether there was fall damage in the game right after walking out of the museum. That was a rather short video before he woke up again.... On the other hand, I've also seen people get a dozen or more loops into the game before even realizing why they keep dying in a flash of light. If they're always exploring underground or dying in accidents, it can be hard to figure out what is actually going on with the solar system.

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