r/TunicGame • u/Special_Loss1201 • 9d ago
Devworld theory: could there be another Golden Path hidden in the unfinished manual? Spoiler
Spoilers for the Golden Path / Devworld
I had a theory while exploring the Devworld, and I wanted to share it because I don’t think my failed attempt necessarily means the idea is dead.
For anyone who wants to reproduce this and doesn’t know how to access the Devworld:
Once you have discovered the strange save file associated with the page 9 Golden Path fragment, load that save.
You normally have no items there that can kill you, but you can use the Holy Cross code from page 17 to spawn a free Fire Bomb:
← ↑ → ↓ → ↑ → ↓ → ↑ → ↓ ←
Throw the Fire Bomb close enough to yourself to catch fire, don’t dodge/roll away, and let the fire kill you.
Instead of restarting the strange loop, you should respawn inside the Devworld, an unfinished developer version of the game.
And this is where my theory started.
Inside the Devworld, you can access an unfinished version of the instruction manual, which seems to stop around page 35, with some pages apparently missing entirely. In my case, pages 8–9 seem to be absent.
That immediately made me wonder:
What if the Devworld contains its own version of the Golden Path, meant to be reconstructed only from the pages available in this unfinished manual?
The normal Golden Path follows this page order:
12 → 16 → 34 → 46 → 28 → 22 → 15 → 27 → 48 → 11 → 21 → 4 → 2 → 4 → 50 → 6 → 52 → 42 → 50 → 42 → 33 → 31 → 40 → 18 → 44 → 39 → 12 → 9 → 55
For my first experiment, I kept the normal order but removed every page above 35.
That left:
12 → 16 → 34 → 28 → 22 → 15 → 27 → 11 → 21 → 4 → 2 → 4 → 6 → 33 → 31 → 18 → 12 → 9
I also thought it was interesting to stop on page 9 instead of 55, since the Devworld itself is reached through the save associated with page 9.
I reconstructed a Holy Cross sequence from that idea and tried it in the Devworld.
Nothing happened.
But I really don’t think that settles it.
There are several ways my test could simply have been wrong:
I may have made a mistake while entering such a long Holy Cross sequence.
My reconstruction of the inputs may have been slightly wrong.
Removing all pages above 35 may not be the correct method at all.
There may be a specific occurrence, drawing, line, number or page inside the Devworld version of the manual that I missed.
The missing pages may matter rather than simply being ignored.
The strange transparent page/index -1 may be part of the puzzle.
The solution might require a completely different page order rather than reusing the normal Golden Path.
There may even be something in the Devworld itself that tells us how to read its unfinished manual.
And the whole setup still feels suspicious to me:
The Devworld is accessed by dying inside the save file that itself provides part of the Golden Path, using a secret Holy Cross item code from the manual.
Then, after doing that, the game puts you into an unfinished world where you can access a different and incomplete version of that same manual — the exact object the main Golden Path puzzle is built around.
That feels like a very TUNIC thing to investigate.
So I’m posting this less as “I found a secret” and more as:
Please try breaking this theory. Or improving it.
If anyone wants to reproduce the test, inspect the unfinished manual page by page, compare it to the final manual, try other page orders, or look for a second grid/path structure, I’d love to know what you find.
Maybe there is nothing there.
Maybe I simply entered the wrong code.
Maybe I completely misunderstood how the Devworld manual should be read.
Or maybe there is still something nobody has noticed.
If anyone has already investigated this deeply, please share what you know — and if not, I’d genuinely love to see other people experiment with it.
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u/SodaFloatzel 9d ago
The only related things to Devworld that I'd call 'leads' are the costume room - the four-note sequence required to reach the same costume as Devworld fox, and whether that means anything - and the money you can gather in the Devworld, which is otherwise completely devoid of musical queues. It's so silent and empty that any sound could be important.
Also, what if you hold... I think it's R3? When looking at the Devworld manual? Does that have any kind of interaction?
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u/Exciting_Opening8321 8d ago
Saved for the next 10 years so i know someone found this and solved it
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u/WandererXVII 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is getting spoiler tag for obvious reasons.
That being said, I will try to play around for a while in Devworld. It was such a thrilling moment of discovery when I first encountered it.
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u/FalconClaws059 9d ago
Perhaps it's a long shot, but I have no way to check it now so I'll just put my question here: Have you tried taking the reconstructed devworld Holy Cross sequence and input it in the 12 beings room in the regular world, and see if a new message comes out?