after beating outer Wilds I like many others scoured the internet for information about this game I mean it's kind of hard not to because by the time you've beat the game you've already developed this love for following your own curiosity naturally I Look to places like Reddit and YouTube for any sort of information about the game but after a while I randomly just thought to look for an outer Wilds Iceberg only to find that there wasn't one right then and there an idea was born I decided that I was going to make my very own outer Wilds Iceberg because I mean it only makes sense take one of the most information dense games and pair it with one of the most interesting ways of organizing information so I immediately got to work with making it and while it doesn't contain absolutely everything about the game it does have a lot of small details easy to miss story info a lot of behind the scenes stuff and of course crazy theories so if you are like me and beat outer Wilds but still crave more knowledge then this is is definitely the video for you a quick disclaimer before this video begins this will contain information for both the main game as well as the DLC Echoes of the eye but if you haven't played the DLC I have still put those topics at the end of each section so you can still watch the video because as the section gets to its end I will warn you hey I'm about to talk about Echoes of the eye then you can skip to the next section using the description or the progress bar below and with that out of the way let's finally get into the outer wild iceberg title screen drift simply refers to the fact that if you sit at the main title screen for too long you'll notice that the outer Wilds logo will slowly begin to drift apart kind of like gravity's having an effect on it I'm putting this first because this could technically be the very first cool bit of information you could ever learn about the game and a cool side note is that this is also set on a 22 minute long animation so after 22 minutes the letters will stop drifting due to the nature of how outer Wilds Works your character doesn't really have a name and you are simply supposed to be a stand-in for your character but outside of the game people need to refer to them as something so they've come up with two names either the hatchling or the protagonist so you know how the orbital probe Cannon shoots the probe in a random Direction every time you wake up yeah well it turns out that that's actually random well maybe not truly random but it's more random than you once thought because it can cause some pretty cool funnier injury interesting things to happen such as it hitting you or hitting your ship or just Landing somewhere that's kind of unusual one piece of the game that's very easy to access is also one that is very commonly missed which is the hide and seek game between these two children on Timber heart this teaches you the mechanics of the signal scope and if you're not talking to every single hearthian in the village it would be pretty easy to miss another thing that's kind of right in your face all game but is also pretty easy to miss is the fact that there's an eject button on your ship but you do have to manually press it to activate doing this will earn you an achievement if you can gain enough speed by leaving the system and hauling ass to Giant steep you can actually break through the current just by going fast enough doing so will also earn you an achievement the in-game reason for you having a map of the solar system is because of the deep space satellite and if you hit into it and therefore break it you can no longer access your map for the remainder of the loop doing so will also Grant you an achievement and that's the last achievement that's going to be on this whole list you may have noticed that when you're talking to other hearthians despite how they look they are never referred to as he or she their pronouns are always they or them the nomai on the other hand do refer to each other as he or she proving that they do have two different genders a very common connection that a lot of people make is that outer Wilds is sort of like Interstellar if it were turned into a game which I would say is the best compliment you could ever give Interstellar but in all seriousness there are a lot of similarities between the two like how they're both in the space sci-fi realm they both take place at times where the stakes are literally life or death for their respective homeworlds they both have black holes and wormholes and stuff and they both end in a hella trippy way but most of all I would say that they both put a huge emphasis on music to the point where people have swapped the two and they both kind of fit throughout the loop you'll see distant stars going supernova one by one and by the end of the loop the sky will have far fewer Stars proving the entropy is taking its course and the universe is truly dying the jellyfish most associated with giant steep are actually from the planet that is now dark Bramble but long ago when a bramble seed split the planet apart a piece containing a jellyfish landed on it therefore populating Giants deep the players told that the noma in the system died because of the ghost matter from the interloper but have you ever wondered why the harthians didn't go extinct as well well it's actually because there were an aquatic species at the time of the ghost matter explosion so most of them were underwater which negates its effects more on this later the player's first instance where they translate know my text will most likely be in the observatory and while it being there is very convenient for gameplay purposes there's also a very good story reason for why that no my text is in the observatory much like the real-life Rosetta Stone which helped Humanity crack the code for Egyptian hieroglyphics this Stone actually helped the hearthians translate the Nomi language which led to them developing the Nomi translator which is what you equip when going into space which is why you are so special staying around the topic of know my handwriting have you ever wondered why some know my messages look a little bit less legible than the others it's actually because these are written by know my children who just like human children have less developed fine motor skills and therefore their handwriting looks less legible but it could also be that these children don't have the know my writing staffs that people like solanum had because they're not old enough it's kind of like in real life where when you're young you'll learn how to write and then later on you'll learn how to type on a keyboard where all of your writing just looks the exact same and very neat contrary to popular belief there are actually other Nomi although they are living in distant galaxies or maybe even across the entire universe and this know my clan even though they went extinct I guess except for selenium they aren't the only ones the very obvious red glow that emanates from deep inside the dark Bramble is due to the red orbs that are actually anglerfish eggs this perfectly explains why the anglerfish are so hostile and territorial in this specific room have you ever been playing outer wilds and found yourself maybe stuck in an area or just wanting to kind of just skip this Loop and get to the next one without having to completely exit the game well there actually is an option for that although a lot of people miss it even though it's very easy to do after making your way to Giants deep and talking to gabro for the very first time you may have noticed that he's very relaxed and on the next Loop or on any subsequent Loop if you go and talk to him again you may realize there's another dialogue option where he teaches you how to meditate you will then immediately skip to the next Loop and from then on if you press pause you may notice there's another option where you can just skip to the next loop at any time we have now finally reached the topics for Echoes of the eye and if you have not played it again you can use the description or the timeline below to skip to the next section so it is pretty obvious but I figured I'd mention this just for the people who are curious about this information but aren't going to play Echoes of the eye but this DLC actually centers around a location called The Stranger that is a cloaked ring world that is still within the bounds of the outer Wilds that is also home to another ancient alien civilization after entering the stranger and uncovering the mysteries of the story and just playing the game naturally you eventually learn that while this ancient civilization is dead they actually live on in their own simulated reality that you can also access from inside the stranger so if you haven't played the DLC for a number of reasons then just use that as a kind of a reference for understanding what the things going forward actually mean although understand that just like the main game Echoes of the AI is very information dense so of course my simple explanation didn't cover absolutely everything while there are more than two entrances to get inside of the stranger there are two main ones the first of which you may have actually forgotten about because this is the one that you have to go all the way to the Deep range satellite to get to and then from outside the system you go to the stranger and get to your first entrance the second one which is the one that you'll basically use throughout the rest of your playthrough is the one from inside of the system when you mark it on your HUD via your shiplog and then go to the stranger and while that is pretty cool and shows the attention to detail because there would be two different entrances one from inside and one from outside it's also very useful when it comes to gameplay because if you think about it the very first time you enter the stranger is always going to be from the outside so it's a really cool way for the devs to give the player the exact information they want them to know their very first time they go into the stranger and now that we've talked about the first two entrances let's talk about the third one and what caused it inside of the room that is directly connected to the third entrance you can see a story of how the artifact that lets them connect to the simulation was constructed the first one didn't even work and you can kind of see it's very simple and looks just like a lantern the second one while simpler than the final product is a bit more complex and while it did work it worked a little bit too well and instead of the fire being contained inside of it the fire actually expanded therefore creating the third entrance and if you're curious enough you can take this artifact to any fire and if you use it it will kill you every single time the last iteration of the artifact added this lens to it which correctly contained the fire and allowed them to enter the simulation a lot of people argue that the ghost matter being inside of the stranger is actually a pretty big plot hole but what they're forgetting is that the stranger has been here for literally hundreds of thousands of years and like I said before there are holes in the ship and it would be very easy to assume that ghost matter got in through any one of those holes and if you think about it further almost all the times we see ghost matter it's in some weird crevice or hard to reach place so it's easy to assume that ghost matter kind of gets everywhere in the cinder Isle portion of the stranger you can actually find a secret cave below the island Tower if you enter that cave it will lead you directly to the very top of the tower where you'll find wires and antennas connecting all the different fireplaces throughout the stranger kind of showing that this simulation isn't just this mystical thing there are actually wires and electricity connecting all of them showing that there is some element of real world Science and Technology involved last but not least we have prisoner cutscene which to keep it short basically after you break all three seals and go and meet with the prisoner he tells you the story of his entire species just like the nomai they worship to the eye of the universe until one day they discovered what it actually did and despite what the universe was going through to stay alive they created a probe that blocked the signal emanating from the eye of the universe they then decided to live out the rest of their lives within the simulation until one day the prisoner had a vision of what the eye of the universe actually did and instead of fearing it he saw it as a beautiful thing he then exited the simulation and went to turn off the probe that blocked the eye of the universe's signal and that is when the nomai finally got the signal for the eye of the universe but shortly afterwards his people also exited the simulation and caught him to which they turned back on the probe and then imprisoned him in both the physical and simulated world after showing you all this in his weird memory staff thing you then turn it around and show him what you have learned and the cool part is depending on what you know and what you have unlocked in your shiplog that cutscene is entirely different as to not give you any spoilers after meeting with the prisoner and therefore beating Echoes of the eye if you go to beat the main game by just going to the eye of the universe and making it through the ancient Glade and go to collect all of your friends you'll find there's one extra puzzle and one extra friend that you need to collect who is the prisoner and if you keep going further and see the new life in this new universe that you created you can actually see there's one other new life form that was somehow created just by you meeting the prisoner foreign of outer Wilds you may have wondered what the anglerfish actually eat because at first glance there doesn't seem to be any smaller life forms inside of dark Bramble and it would be kind of strange if all they did was have a diet consisting of their own species equally strange and unrealistic would be them completely relying on other species to travel inside of dark Bramble so then they could eat so all of these may lead you to assume they just don't eat anything and you're not supposed to think too hard about it but outer Wilds is a game that has an answer for almost everything so of course they have one for this as well if you go inside dark Bramble and you just wait inside you can see small microorganisms floating across your screen this seemingly answers the question for how the anglerfish actually survive within the dark Bramble depending on your cause of death there are actually differences in the way you wake up so if your cause of death is suffocation you'll wake up desperately gasping for air or if you dine more relaxed way such as meditating with Gabriel's secret you'll wake up very relaxed and like nothing ever happened while the normal ending for outer Wilds has you taking the advanced warp core from the ash twin project and transporting it to the vessel where you warp to the eye of the universe there are actually many other alternate endings that have to do with the initial Act of taking out the advanced warp core from the ash twin project and therefore ending the loop the two easiest alternate endings to discover are the game over ending and the isolation ending the game over one simply has you taking out the advanced warp core and dying therefore ending the loop and the universe continues to Die the isolation ending has you simply taking out the advanced warp core and then traveling outside of the system so you're out of range of the Supernova but your resources do inevitably deplete and then you end up dying but those are not the only two alternate endings there are three more although these are more complex and they're actually worth your time the with a friend or not alone ending has you taking the advanced warp core from the ash twin project and transporting it to the quantum Moon 6 location where yeah the universe may be ending but at least you're not alone if you get a bit too curious while experimenting inside of the high energy lab you may discover that by using the black and white holes you can duplicate a scout this completely breaks causality and because the universe doesn't know what to do when one of its fundamental laws are broken it also breaks giving you yet another alternate ending if you are curious enough to wait inside of the ash twin project at the end of the loop you will see a black hole appear in place of the advanced warp core going inside of it will seemingly kill you but in the next Loop you may see your map shows you that you're in two places at once and if you go to your other location which is inside of the Ashton project you will literally find you from the past Loop and you can talk to yourself just like you're any other character and it's very surreal and this is the final alternate ending this next one kind of has to do with the last one but it doesn't really have to do about what happened more why it happened and the information that you actually learn by talking to yourself basically when you talk to yourself you get enough information to learn how the actual location of the ash twin project really works when the Supernova goes off the ash twin project takes all of that energy and creates a black hole then all the information from The Masks goes into that black hole and comes out of an opposing white hole 22 minutes earlier of course like all games outer Wilds has a speedrunning community with various categories but one of if not the most impressive to your average player is any percent shipless which you guessed it requires you to beat the game game as fast as possible without piloting your ship this is mainly done by propelling yourself using the Scout launcher and if you can believe it the world record is 9 minutes and 22 seconds I previously mentioned that throughout the loop you'll begin to see more and more stars go supernova and by the end there will be far fewer stars but you are not the only one to notice this chert another outer Wilds venturer who's on the North Pole of Ember twin also begins to notice that the stars are disappearing one by one at first he doesn't seem too concerned but as more and more start to go supernova and as the loop progresses he starts to notice that it's not just other stars and their star is starting to expand as well this causes him to have somewhat of a mental breakdown until the very end of the loop where he offers to just sit and watch the sun explode with you and it's then when you can choose to comfort him by telling him you're in a Time Loop and instead of calling you crazy he'll think of it as a comforting last thought one of the first things you'll ever do in outer Wilds is probably try to roast a marshmallow and while you may think that it's just kind of like a cool gimmick at the beginning of the game that you're not ever gonna really use they actually have some use to them and the devs didn't need to put it in but it's in the game if you roast a marshmallow and then eat it it will actually restore health so if you're ever far away from your ship but somehow close to a campfire you can do that to restore your health also on a side note and a really really cool attention to detail when the Supernova goes off and you're holding a marshmallow it actually catches on fire which that is so mind-blowing that someone actually took the time to code that and put it into the game before I said that the hearthians survived the ghost matter explosion because they were in aquatic species and while that is a good answer and very well known there's actually a way you can test it out yourself in in the game that is not well known at all if you go to this specific spot on gabbros island and wait for the island to be submerged you can see that the ghost matter that would have previously killed you above water does nothing while you're underwater again this is just a tiny detail that didn't really need to be put in the game it could have just been told to you but them showing it and actually being able to prove it yourself is a very cool detail one thing that may be kind of useful if it weren't so difficult to pull off is the fact that the know my ships are actually very hydrodynamic meaning that water friction doesn't really affect them as much as it would affect other things and this is actually provable because if you take the brittle Hollow gravity Cannon and know my ship and launch it to Giants deep you can actually pass through the current because the water doesn't really have as much of an effect on your speed as it would on your ship finally we have the topics pertaining to Echoes of the eye so if you haven't played that you can skip forward just like you did last time if you enter the simulation via the cinder Isles which takes you to the Starlet Cove and follow this exact path that's being shown on screen being careful to avoid the alarm you will eventually find burn to ruins upon further inspection you'll probably assume that this is not just some random house but it's actually the house of the infamous prisoner and this is actually confirmed if you find this fairly easy to miss portrait that gives you deeper insight into why the prisoner initially changed his mind about the eye of the universe while exploring the stranger and about five minutes to maybe a third of the way through the loop you'll notice these weird green things appear in the main window I guess of the stranger some people like myself assumed that this may just be some sort of like audio cue telling you how far you are into the loop because it's a little bit more difficult to look at the Sun so I assumed that having more audio cues to tell you how far along you were made a little bit more sense I also never ever really questioned why they were green but of course in typical outer Wilds fashion this doesn't just have to do with gameplay and the color isn't just randomly decided there's a really cool story reason for it being exactly how it is basically these green things are solar sails which is a real life thing and if you're unfamiliar it's basically using light which does emit a small amount of force to propel an object in space because space has no friction of course the force that light actually pushes on an object is very minute but given enough time and enough sunlight directed in just the right way you can actually Propel things fairly fast and if you remember in Echoes of the eye there's a very specific green material which somehow the inhabitants of the stranger have used to use light as a propellant in a very efficient and almost magical way so that all answers what it is basically a giant solar sail that uses the green material also seen on the rafts to propel the entire strange injured but it doesn't answer the why of it all why does it move and why did they come out at that specific time which if you either notice it yourself or go find the answer you'll realize that it's just because the Sun is going Supernova and the ship is realizing that so it pulls out the sales and moves you away from the Supernova this is why you always get that odd death animation when you're in the stranger because you're not dying by the Supernova you're outside of the system and it's just your memories being pushed back 22 minutes via the ash twin project you're not actually physically dying last but not least we have a very small detail that doesn't really affect Gameplay at all but it being there really enhances the experience of outer Wilds just because these small details add up to make the game what it is and this small detail in particular is the fact that if you stay inside of the vessel after going to the eye of the universe you can actually see the eye blocking probe that the inhabitants of the stranger sent out which is the reason why this game even exists to begin with because the no might only got that eye signal for a split second when the prisoner turned it off but when it was turned back on then the eye signal couldn't be located and therefore the gnome I had to find some other way to find the eye of the universe which was the ash twin project my God this game is so cool the broken down and buried harthian ship that's found abandoned on the attle rock surface is not just some random ship but it's actually the ship that you piloted in the outer wild Alpha which explains what's kind of low res a very odd fact that you most definitely wouldn't realize unless you were like a botanist or something is the fact that all nomai are actually named after different plants so for example solanum if you go and type that into Google you get results that show a purple star-shaped flower and yarrow would be a white flower that's kind of a cluster of flowers raymi or Rami is a leaf and thatch is like a root or a straw-like substance like a thatched roof similar to the nomai hearthians are not named after plants but different types of rocks and minerals for example feldspar is a quartz type Rock that's kind of salmon in color chert is a sedimentary rock that's black and tan and gabbro is an igneous rock that's kind of black and spot added past all these examples for both the Nomi and the hearthians I'm not sure if there's any connection between their plant or their Rock and their actual character or their personality within outer wild speed running there's one person that Reigns Supreme Above All Else and that is PT minkster he basically owns first place in every single category some of the time he just holds first place by maybe a few seconds but most of the time in a lot of categories that I didn't even know existed he holds first place by a huge margin to give some examples of his times in some of the more contested categories he has a 7 minute 54 second record in any percent normal which is basically just beating the game as fast as you can using any methods and he only holds that record by about five seconds second place is at 7 minutes and 59 seconds but you do have to remember that this is speed running and five seconds can be a pretty wide margin when you get times down this low he also holds the first place record for any percent Sleepless which has you beating the game without sleeping and he only holds this by about 4 seconds although this hasn't really been contested for a year or so for some of the categories that he holds a huge lead on or some of the strange ones we have any percent shipless like I mentioned before he holds 9 Minutes 22 seconds and he was the gameplay you saw before if you remember back then in that he's ahead of second place by about half a minute he is the only person and therefore first place in 100 percenting the base game plus DLC that he only did in an hour and six and a half minutes last but not least he has another world record that's on his YouTube called touch the fishy percent which he just dies by an angler fish in like a minute and 15 seconds when you activate a Nomi projection pool if you either look down or go and get mods to go into free cam to go to the location that you quote unquote teleport to you will see yourself made out of the strange gold liquid that is is used in both the southern Observatory as well as the probe tracking module this perfectly explains why these projection pools even exist because when you quote unquote teleport to a new location you can see the environment but if there were other people there they would see you allowing both of you to have a face-to-face conversation and the person who's projected could see around the room and maybe do some inspections or check up on their work everything is physics refers to the fact that everything in outer Wilds is actually built on a physics engine rather than it being on a rails or predetermined so the planets aren't just on a set path that they follow but are actually in orbit around the sun's very real gravity that actually affects them it also has some other interesting effects that you may not have realized like how when you're on Timber Hearth and the adult rock is directly above you you can actually jump slightly higher than if it were below you due to its slight gravitational pull upwards finally it's interesting to note that within this physics engine areas like the zero g cave and the ash twin project are not just areas where their gravity value has been turned down to zero but they're actually in the direct center of the planets so you're truly being pulled in every direction equally giving you that zero g Effect one thing a lot of people consider to be a minor plot hole is the ship log and how it keeps information past that initial first loop I mean it makes sense why you retain all the information you've learned because you're connected to a statue which is connected to the ash twin project but why does your ship retain information as well you may be rolling your eyes and saying that it's just for gameplay convenience and you shouldn't think too hard about it and while I would agree with you the devs actually have an explanation for it in game that a lot of people Miss if you talk to the hearthian that's at the entrance of the observatory right next to the Statue they will tell you that the ship actually actually uses a piece of another statue as a hard drive if you then go to your ship you may now notice the weird blue energy found in most know my technology flowing from your computer that presumably goes into a piece of the statue this is a brilliant way of explaining something that in all honesty doesn't really need to be explained because it's a video game and it would be really annoying if your shipblog didn't update but the fact that they went out of their way to create an explanation for something that most people would be happy to ignore is just it adds to the list of why these devs are amazing and deserve all the credit in the world kind of piggybacking off the last topic according to the developers rumor mode which is the organization of your shiplog where it's like a big web of information or whatever was actually not in the game until right before release originally the shiplog was just going to be the normal version where it shows all the planets and all the information you've learned on that specific Planet until eventually the devs decided to add a rumor mode which was basically just their own personal way that they arranged information found in the game and how it was all connected together personally this was the way that I like to use the shipblog so I'm really glad it made it in because it gives you a good feel for the different sections of the story and of the game but in the end you can see how they're all interconnected in its early days Outer Wilds was funded via donations on a crowdfunding website called fig which helps independent game devs get funding per the website anyone who donated got their name placed in four different parts of the game presumably depending on the amount donated the first of which is simply the credits where the list is hundreds of names long the second is on a piece of paper in the observatory that has a dozen or so names on it third is in the graveyard on Timber Hearth that has just a few people's names on it and lastly is the Fig backer satellite that unless you got lucky or looked up a guide is practically unfindable this one is a bit different than the last ones though because it's not just a few names it has videos and audio that plays as well that the donators were allowed to submit due to their generous contributions hidden deep within the foggy depths of dark Bramble is an otherwise normal Bramble seed but shoot your scouting to it and you'll see that what's inside looks like nothing else in outer wilds and that's because this is actually an Easter egg for another game called Elsinore that also has to do with the time Loop that was also released in 2019 just like outer Wilds it is now time for The Echoes of the eye ones so you know the drill I'll give you a few seconds although it's kind of cringe you haven't played Echoes of the eye but whatever this first topic is going to have all the Echoes of the Easter eggs because it felt a little bit like too much filler if they were each in their own separate category so I'm just gonna go through each of them one by one and if you want to go find them yourself if you can go look up a guide this first one is hidden behind a fake wall and it's simply just a portrait of some dude in a spacesuit and there's a bunch of lasers behind him I tried to look it up I still don't know what this is a reference to but it must be some reference to something or maybe just like an inside joke with the devs I don't know the second one is a simple seed found on top of a building that is a clear reference to a korok seed from breath of the wild and if you go into the weird simulation View and put down your Lantern you'll see it turns into a piece of poop the final note where the Easter egg is where you simply light this candle that's on a rock in the distance and you'll then see a comet appear in the sky and you'll also hear a cat purring afterwards if you set your artifact down and go back to it you'll see a cat sitting on that rock and it turns out that this is just a reference to one of the developers cats whose name is Comet one common misconception about the simulation is that it's always night time but this is actually untrue while the Alex are nocturnal their Homeworld did have a day night cycle The Stranger also has its own artificial lighting proving that the Elks do have some need for a daytime if they didn't then they wouldn't have included it in the stranger's design it then makes sense why this simulation would also probably have a day night cycle although we just get there at a bad time because of the loop so it's always night time like everything that uses the creative process outer Wilds has changed a lot compared to its earlier versions more specifically the Alpha version of the game which for this video I went through and played to take you through some of the more major changes I found the hearthians look way different and frankly scary the outer Wilds venturers don't have any real names and instead are called things like rocket scientist and moon Warden the nomai didn't really have a name and they were just kind of referred to as the aliens the alien statue is quantum and the memory animation didn't occur after getting the launch codes from The Observatory Timber Hearth feels and looks like it came straight out of Fallout game or a Roblox horror map take your pick brittle Hollow isn't blue the interloper is called The Nomad and is far less complex than the interloper because it's a lot smaller and doesn't have any ice or ghost matter Giant's deep isn't green and lacks the orbital probe Cannon and finally the dark Bramble is just a tangled mess of vines with fog in the middle that throughout the loop would get corrupted by the vessel that was inside and yes there are still anglerfish wild timing refers to the fact that it just is very convenient that the system seems to only come to life right when you start exploring it for example why isn't brittle Hollow just a black hole why does it only start to break apart as soon as we lift off and start exploring it ourselves also why does the sand start transferring on The Hourglass twins just after we wake up these things were sort of addressed with the know my writings where on brittle Hollow for example they talk about how the ground is unstable but it doesn't really feel like a real answer it kind of feels like a token effort at trying to explain that the world had always been that chaotic but other than that it really feels like they try to sort of tiptoe around the issue and not really talk about it too much the reason for that is because I one point in time they did actually try to address it and that was back in the alpha where there is some information sprinkled around that simply explains that the Supernova going off or the sun expanding is the general reason why all the planets are acting a bit strange although for The Hourglass twins specifically it's further explained that there's a 100 Year sand transfer where for a hundred years the Ashton will have the sand then for another hundred years the Ember twin will have all the sand and in between that they'll transfer it between each other so yeah you can kind of infer the reason why they decided to just not address it in the final version because both of those are fairly weak answers and I think outer Wilds Prides itself on having very strong and specific answers so not having them kind of just shines a light on the main issue and I think most players are just happy to ignore it and willing to accept that it's a good thing that they are there when all the interesting stuff is happening one of the biggest Unsolved Mysteries about outer Wild builds is where exactly the anglerfish skeleton that's on Ember twin originated from I mean there are instances of anglerfish exiting the dark Bramble like with the baby one in the observatory but the Ember twin one is a bit different because it's a fully adult one in an underground cave on one of the smallest planets that is the furthest away from the dark Bramble so how exactly did it get there well there's one major Theory and it mostly has to do with the fact that on Ember twin you can find fossils indicating that it may have had an ocean at one point in time this would mean that long ago even before the gnome I came to the system one lucky or unlucky anglerfish made its way to Ember twin there it survived on ocean life until eventually one day when it was swimming in a cave it just somehow died maybe it got too old maybe it ate something it didn't like something like that then thousands and thousands of years later when maybe the atmosphere was destroyed Droid and the oceans eventually evaporated all that were left were the remains in the cave a very very common misconception about the loop has to do with the Statue activating right when you walk past it a lot of people misunderstand this as some convenient event that the statue actually activated at that exact time when you were at that exact spot and you just got super super lucky and while I do understand why people think this it is actually completely wrong because the statues were actually designed to activate continuously after the probe found the eye of the universe so when you first start the game in that Loop that you first play which is not actually the first loop it's like the 9 millionth Loop you were just the first person to walk past it after it first gets activated when the probe found the eye in that quote-unquote first Loop so while it still is a bit convenient then nobody else is around it's not a case of you being at that exact act right spot at that exact right moment when the probe found the eye also you had technically been walking that exact same path millions of times so it was eventually bound to happen alright you know the drill if you've played that because of the eye you can stay everyone else isn't cool and they have to go to the lame lame area which is the next section next section is actually pretty cool it's not lame all right they're gone the creatures that appear in the new universe after befriending The Prisoner are actually the early designs for the Elks themselves in a podcast specifically about Echoes of the eye a couple of game devs over at Mobius digital talked a lot about how much the DLC evolved during production in terms of gameplay The Stranger was actually originally going to be what they called a coin Planet meaning that your experience would actually change depending on which side of the coin you're on there was also going to be a huge emphasis on the day night cycle where at night time it would be obviously a lot scarier than it would be at daytime and the whole twist would be that later on you learn that the whole day night cycle all depends on which side of the coin you're on which I'm not sure exactly how that would work with gameplay but that's just kind of how they described it and they said it was a little difficult to explain additionally to fortify the whole scary slash horror aspect of the DLC there was going to be a river monster that would live in the water that fills the void between the two sides making the raft basically a necessity for traveling around all of this would change when they eventually thought that it might be pretty cool for you to go into the same exact simulation as these ghost birds and then that's kind of how they evolved the whole day night cycle and after that a ringed world just made a lot more sense than a coin one we've talked a lot about how things have evolved with both outer Wilds as well as Echoes of the eye but one of if not the latest major change with both of them has to do with their initial plan for the eye of the universe see the devs always knew that they wanted to have some sort of cloaked planet and naturally it would be fitting that the eye of the universe would be given this privilege they thought that it might be pretty cool for you to assume that the eye was far away but in reality for it to be invisible and actually inside of the system would be a huge Revelation but as they kept developing the game and had thoughts of a possible DLC near the end of development they decided that the cloaked world would be a perfect fit for a hidden DLC location this change required them to go in and change a bunch of stuff but the most specific one that they pointed out was the know my writing below the small eye signal locator on the attle Rock currently the writing reads that the signal locator doesn't work because the eye signal is too faint and the locator is just too simple but what it was going to say is that the eye signal is too close so it can't pinpoint an exact location which I mean I liked how it turned out because we got a great game in DLC but imagine realizing that the eye is actually inside of the system that just that would have been nuts yeah the quantum black hole theory states that the eye of the universe is not some mystical unidentifiable object but is actually a Quantum black hole this makes a lot of sense when you think about how the other Quantum things in outer Wilds are simply objects with Quantum in front of them like Quantum Rock and Quantum Moon so what's to say that there's no such thing as a black hole that also has these Quantum Properties or I guess rather it was the first thing to have Quantum properties and gave it to everything else but the theory doesn't stop there it also suggests that the purple Mist around the eye of the universe is not just some random dust but it's actually conscious information from beings from around the universe all of it funneling into the eye later when you're in the ancient Glade and have collected all of your friends you can see this Mist forming into a ball above the campfire and this Mist contains all of the information that will be used for the life in the next Universe unlike the last topic this one has basically no basic this in reality and adds nothing to anything and it's only kind of worth mentioning because it's useful for the next topic which is a little bit more interesting I guess but this theory proposes that all games outside of the unreasonable and weird ones that won't fit and mostly including Space games all take place within the same universe and outer Wilds is simply just a last in the timeline ah no this is not a joke the fortnite theory which is Loosely connected to the previous topic states that because fortnite's storm mechanic is exactly 22 minutes long this obviously means that it is a direct result of the loop that is going on within the outer wild system and because it's theorized that fortnite itself is inside of a simulation the storm is just the simulation abstractly manifesting what's happening to the universe in the real world while the effects and weakness of ghost matter is understood there has never and will never be a clear explanation as to what ghost matter actually is or where it even came from and while you could assume that it is naturally occurring a more interesting theory is that ghost matter was designed by another species to be a weapon of mass destruction the theory goes that another species possibly one that lives primarily in water created ghost matter to be a sort of space nuke that would affect anyone who meant them harm but of course its main weakness would prevent it from being used against them eventually this species would become so Advanced that they would learn of the eye of the universe and even further down the line they would find out what it really did to prevent any other species from finding it as well and restarting a new universe they sent a natural looking comment full of ghost matter to that system that the eye orbited hoping that if anyone were there they would crack it open of course if this theory is true then their plane worked or at least it did until we found the eye isn't it weird that while outer while isn't supposed to be a scary game in a way it kind of is well obviously dark Bramble was designed to be terrifying but that's not what I mean I mean that almost every other planet has something about it that could make you just as scared as dark Bramble can the most obvious candidate is Giants deep that even from space will instill within you an unexpected dizziness as the gargantuan Planet fills your vision this is megalophobia the fear of large objects and while that initial Terror may go away once you pass through the thick atmosphere the violent whirling tornadoes or dark ocean may make you just as uncomfortable even if we move to another planet let's say Ember twin there's always the fear of being suffocated in the caves by the ever Rising sand this is claustrophobia the fear of being in confined spaces but even if we ditch the whole planet thing and go out into the middle of space where there's nothing you may still feel just as uneasy as the void surrounding you may cause astrophobia or the fear of endless space to set in it may be kind of paradoxical and a little bit weird to wrap your head around but canonically every single time the loop is stopped and you either die or reach the eye of the universe that is the Canon ending so if you started the game for the first time and got hit by the probe and died before connecting to the Statue that's Canon if you went and grabbed the advanced warp core made it to the vessel and then died while entering the coordinates that's Canon you're a speedrunner who slate just saw wake up and immediately launch themselves into space using only their Scout launcher and you eventually make it to the eye of the universe that is also Canon and that concludes the entirety of the outer wild Iceberg I hope that you enjoyed listening to it I know I enjoyed making it and before this video ends I just wanted to say a few things the first of which is that I know this isn't a regular Iceberg it's a little bit different it's not a super cursed or Theory based as other icebergs might be but this game has a lot of information and I want to fit as much of it as possible into one video and I figured an iceberg would just be a fun way to do that the second thing I want to say is a huge shout out to the lore explorer who is another YouTuber who does a lot of outer Wilds videos and there was a lot of information in this video that I would not have known if it weren't for him so I have a link in the description to his channel and go check him out he makes great videos other than that I hope you enjoyed the video and roll the outro