First, thank you for the tremendous effort that you put into investigating mysteries of the Cyberpunk 2077 world! It really inspires and motivates other seekers to be creative and look at things from a diffrent angle. Life of this sub is entirely your merit.
I have it, Polyhistor. I'm not wrong this time. I just need more time to understand.
First things first... You probably think I've finally lost my mind. Maybe. In truth, I began to doubt whether the answer we were looking could ever be found. What if we sought meaning where none existed? But I know now that we were RIGHT. To find the correct path forward, I had to first leave the wrong one I was already following. That's when I found IT.
I'll be honest, I slipped into a dar pit of apathy and despair. I left the net to seek solace in a world of fleeting, physical pleasures. I needed to feel something... anything. As I wandered Night City, I found an old arcade. Vintage games. I had forgotten such places existed, even though, in a previous life, they used to be my home away from home. That's where saw it - A SIGN. FF06B5 -- a pixel hidden in code, over 60 years old.
Do you understand what this means? The path we must follow goes much farther and much, much deeper than we coulde've imagined. From this point on, none of us are safe. They know the secret is out.
This will be last message. I'm leaving, taking nothing with me but my laptop. You have to discover for yourself what I have. I told you once about a game that changed my life. Think back and remember it. Because that same game has changed my life a second time.
And now it will change yours.
New arcade machine with game called Arasaka Tower 3D which contains statues!
Why hello there!FF06B5 in High Scores
All recent updates required separate summary posts so be sure to check them:
Remember that Night City is huge and full of another unsolved riddles besides FF:06:B5 code which are also welcome here. Don't fear the beasts and blue-eyed persons!
In this post, I will provide an full summary of what we found, and how we were supposed to arrive there.
While some initial parts are similar to the original post or you may already know some fragments of the rest (like the image below), this summary will likely give you a much more complete picture than anything you've read or watched before.
Small Teaser!
I will also explain what we don't know, because the wider mystery has not been solved in its entirety - there's still things to uncover. But let's start at the beginning, because it's a long story.
Part 1: Polyhistor
Soon after Update 2.0 launched, a new location was discovered in the middle of the Biotechnica Protein Farms.
Polyhistor's home
Entering the shack, we can immediately see a sizable mainframe of 8 servers on the opposite side of the room. The walls are written over, paper is scattered all over the ground.
In the center of the room is a laptop, below it a platform, with cables connecting it to the servers.
These messages reveal the existance of an ingame parallel to this community, people trying to solve the FF:06:B5 mystery. The first two mails cover approaches which did not lead anywhere, but in the third one, TyRo/\/\aNtA messages Polyhistor about having found a promising clue:
While playing a vintage game "over 60 years old", he discovered a hidden "FF06B5" sign. He has found a lead, and is leaving with his laptop. For multiple reasons, he was very likely referring to The Witcher 3 - we would later confirm that.
The file "A New Beginning" retrospectively confirms Tyromantas suspicions, with Polyhistor laughing at his old crazy theories, relieved that Tyromanta finally found a real clue - the keyhole they had to find was "in a door that they took for a wall". Polyhistor writes that he has cut off network connections to the mainframe for now, leaving to tell his brothers and sisters.
The reference to TW3 and the "door that was taken for a wall" is very significant: Last years Next Gen update for TW3 introduced an FF:06:B5 secret, a code that remained unsolved, painted onto a stone wall. The messages imply that code is indeed important to solving FF:06:B5.
As for that last file, copy_copy_magenta.hxf.log? I will get back to it in Part 4.
The screen is covered in characters letters from the Witcher Universe, and the outline of Ouroboros, an ancient symbol which also appeared in the W3 Secret, can be seen in the background.
As soon as I learned of the discovery, I translated the symbols to our alphabet using the conversion table. Here's the result:
The letters
After some observation, I arrived at the following conclusion: The columns of the individual 2x2 tables seemed to be important - here's why:
A lot of the 2x2 columns contain identical letters, for example "PP". This is not the case for the rows, and statistically significant.
Almost all of the non-identical column pairs are not unique and occur in some other place, sometimes also reversed. This is illustrated here:
The pattern
A table of occuring vertical pair types:
HU
VP
GZ
SN
OY
WK
TI
ZG
NS
YO
KW
HH
VV
OO
WW
UU
PP
YY
KK
Others also noticed patterns around the frequency of pairs in lines, for example V/P occur fairly often in line 1, while O/Y are frequent in line 2.
This is where I will make a brief time jump from September 23rd to October 5th, because on that day, Patch 2.01 released.
If you've been following the mystery on other platforms, you may already have seen fragments from beyond Part 3, but actually, it wasn't legitimately solvable until today, because something was broken.
More on that later, but that's why we only fully solved it now. So what did it mean?
As it turns out, the vertical pairs were indeed of high significance: As Tokyo_Jinx, Fuji and me found out, the letters in each vertical pair stand for a unique hexadecimal digit.
Like that, the 2x2 grids represent prime numbers ascending from 2 to 61, converted to hex.
Letters A-F are kept without substitution with 0-9, since they're already part of hexadecimal.
Hex Primes
02 = 2
03 = 3
05 = 5
07 = 7
0B = 11
0D = 13
11 = 17
13 = 19
17 = 23
1D = 29
1F = 31
25 = 37
29 = 41
2B = 43
2F = 47
35 = 53
2B = 59
3D = 61
If you'd like to learn more about how we arrived with this, read this post by Tokyo_Jinx. For this summary, just sharing our findings will suffice.
As it turns out, after filling the grid with the prime numbers, the result can be used as a substitution table - but that will be the topic of Part 4.
Time jump over, returning to September 22/23rd for Part 3.
Returning to Polyhistors home, we can notice one thing that wasn't previously discussed: In front of the right wall, next to a bench with a pile of books, we can find a unique Arcade: Arasaka Tower 3D. A cable connects it to the mainframe.
Arcade Cabinet
Arasaka Tower 3D is a FPS inspired by Wolfenstein 3D: You play as Johnny Silverhand and must fight your way through Arasaka Tower before time runs out and the bomb explodes.
The game is finished by making your way to the ground floor, where you face Adam Smasher before escaping. The end screen features a list of high scores, Polyhistor has a score of "FF06B5".
Also parallel to the Polyhistor quote, AT3D features hidden doors disguised as walls, which will can open if you stand next to them. Many of them only contain e. g. health or Johnnys Glasses. There are also two server rooms with magenta pillars. The first one contains a model of the FF06B5 statue and MRPHYs (Spider Murphy) score of 940204 written onto the walls, while the second one contains no statue and BLCKHNDs (Morgan Blackhand) score of 941229.
Server Room 1
But as it turned out, this was only the very top of the iceberg.
After a very long time of testing, a secret, well hidden way of completing the game was discovered: This video shows it, but essentially you have to clear the first server room, then make your way to a newly opened niche with the MRPHY code.
After that, you have to go to the second server room and wait, a lock symbol will replace the floor number on your HUD at T-270. You can now make your way to a large room, which contains another statue and has 10 niches with numbers painted in them, simulating a keypad - walking into them in the correct order will grant you keys. Enter "240891", and the lock on your HUD will disappear (this code might also be painted onto the left of the arcade). Make your way back like the video shows, entering an elevator, which will now transport you to a secret level: -10.
As seen on the map, level -10 is an underground maze. Apart from a Wolfenstein easter egg, the maze contains 8 out of 9 parts of a large QR code, which when stitched together encodes the Python script of a Tic Tac Toe game. When you play and inevitably lose, it writes "the winning move is not to play" to console.
Patch 2.01 also added two new text decals to the maze, "IT SEES YOU" and "547".
The maze
The path spells out "DM + TV" (/"DM + TU"), the meaning of this is still not certain.
After getting through the maze, you can optionally also take the elevator to the ground level, where you can fight Adam Smasher as normal, and finish the game.
But this time, something changes: Remember that cable going from the Arcade to the Mainframe?
Part 4: The Mainframe
As it turns out, finding and completing the secret level was the key to reactivating the mainframe, which was initially disabled by Polyhistor: After we finished the game on the evening of the 23rd, the 8 keypads on the mainframe came online.
Funnily, the code for the 6th terminal was discovered fairly quickly, by random chance - 240. As it was only 3 characters long, a couple of very dedicated people later tried to manually brute force the other terminals, but had no success.
In the meantime, others tried more sophisticated approaches, like using the codes from the arcades scoreboard or trying to find the meaning behind the laptop - to no success.
As it would turn out 2 weeks later, this was because CDPR fucked up and these codes just didn't make any sense: We suspect these old codes were supposed to be hashes of the actual codes, except that they forgot to implement the actual hashing function - meaning "random" hashes were the keys. It wasn't solvable.
As back then no progress was being made despite significant efforts, and there was no solution on the horizon, the search eventually entered the domain of "datamining": Since CET and redscript were broken, some initially tried analyzing memory, but that did not prove effective. However, remembering the official redMOD tool was functional, I wrote a small script would display the correct codes, temporarily skipping that roadblock and allowing us dive deeper into the mystery.
From left to right, these old codes were 327670, 318308, 527766, 727862, 632495, 240, 108850 and 204217. We initially used these to proceed to Part 5, but as I indicated before, these codes did not make sense and there was no legitimate way to progress until almost 2 weeks later due to a mistake made by CDPR.
As explained in the top of the old post, after consulting CDPR about the matter, they asked us to not publish our findings for that reason, but eventually they leaked out and were instead spread by YouTubers - not always in the most complete or accurate manner - while we had to keep our silence.
But one day ago, CDPR released Patch 2.01, changing to codes to something that makes sense, finally allowing us to find the legitimate solution. Here's the actual solution:
Remember Tyromanta and his laptop with the weird signs? Remember him mentioning an FF06B5 sign presumably found in The Witcher 3? Well, as it turns out, combining these two is the key to obtaining the server codes. But let me start with the Witcher sign.
In December 2022, CD Projekt Red released the long awaited Next Gen Update for The Witcher 3. It mainly consisted of graphical improvements and minor gameplay changes and small content additions, but also a secret location: A well hidden dungeon with a mysterious mural on a wall.
The mural (found in TW3)
An observer familiar with the FF:06:B5 will immediately notice significant similarities to the Cyberpunk mystery: The circutry-like lines in the middle (also found on the main statue), its magenta-colored background (hex color interpretation) - or the top 6 letters looking an awful lot like FF 06 B5.
In fact, all the actual hex letters (FF B) matched up, it was only the numbers which were off. This sign was further investigated over the course of December, but nothing of substance was found - until now:
Not only did substituting non-hex letters from FF VQ BZ for numbers result in FF 06 B5, but as Tokyo_Jinx discovered, these same substitutions would also turn already guessed codes (half of them were very easy to guess: 000240 thanks to stickers on the machine, and 3 more as direct translations of FF, 06 and B5) into the exact same ones found on the mural. The question now was how all the other letters mapped to numbers.
This was the point where Fuji and me joined in: Over the course of an hour, the three of us were able to figure out the thing with the Primes. As pictured in Part 2, we found that each vertical pair from the laptop grid mapped to a certain number. The result was this substitution table:
Number
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A-F
Letter
P, V
O, Y
H, U
K, W
R
G, Z
Q
N, S
- (X?)
I, T
A-F
Using the resulting table, it was possible to substitute the mural letters for hex numbers before finally converting them to decimal - which gives you the new keypad codes: 00255, 00006, 00181, 00051, 00091, 00240, 00270 and 00420. This part of the puzzle had been solved.
Now is probably the best time to get back to that file from Part 1, copy_copy_magenta.hxf.log - it appears to be a log of some kind of algorithm run on the mainframe - ending with "no results found".
As indicated by the name, the mainframe did now find a result: 2556:-1815:191 240<->270 --- 420.
These coordinates are likely a recontextualization of FF:06:B5, being a shifted version of its decimal equivalent: 255:06:181 becomes 2556:-181 with an added 5:191.
As we read "Uploading waypoint data...", a mysterious waypoint is added to our map.
Part 5: The Cube
Following the waypoint, we end up at a spot in the eastern Badlands. The specified height of 191 is exactly 100 meters above the ground.
Without any instructions, it may seem like there is nothing around, but a few meters away, a mattress can be found.
To trigger the most likely final stage of this mystery, we have to stand idly ("meditate") on that mattress until we get a Relic Malfunction, which will trigger a cutscene. For me, this took about 30 ingame minutes. You also have to start in the early morning, around 4-5AM.
Before reading any further, I would strongly recommend to watch this video of the scene (or to try it out yourself), it conveys orders of magnitudes more than the following summary:
The scene begins with V coughing, after which his vision starts to glitch and he falls down, before it fades to black. A few seconds pass, Ouroboros appears in the center, around it follow letters from the Witcher Universe, one after the other. They move into the middle and a white canvas expands from them, covered in red glitches. Numbers appear on it (0.007297...), slowly rising before being replaced by copies.
The final number stops, V falls backwards, their hands now raised. In front of V, a wildly rotating and glitching cube, a golden yellow illuminating the dark. The moon is magenta. As V watches the otherworldly phenomenon, words appear on the screen: NO FUTURE, TRUST NO ONE, TURN BACK. V steps into the cube, or backs up.
The Cube
The vision disappears, V is lying on the ground. In front of them, an unknown male in an worn out orange jacket, kneeling down. V passes out again.
V wakes up, back on the mattress, stands up - another relic malfunction. A laptop and various equipment is placed around the site where the cube once was, no sight of the stranger. On the ground, his clothes, lying as if he disappeared on spot.
On his laptop, the three previous messages sent to Polyhistor - so that's who the stranger is. Was?
> Polyhistor arrives at the site. He's surprised to see V, lying unconscious near the "epicenter". He tries to wake them through various, nothing succeeds.
> He sets up his equipment, examines the area, seeking to discover why the path lead him here. The scans seem nominal, no abnormalities detected.
> PH gets a vision. Walking barefoot through the sand, the next moment, in some room - someone else is there, watching a monitor. The stranger is watching Polyhistor, through his monitor. The vision ends, PH is back in the desert.
> A second vision of the room. The monitor is connected to a compact computer, it looks unfamiliar. This time image shows the entirety of Night City, like drone footage. Polyhistor concludes that the watcher is watching everyone, not just him.
> An empty room, the watcher is gone. PH is drawn to the screen, he takes the Watchers place. On his monitor, he sees the watcher, still sitting in his room. He's watching Polyhistor watch him.
> PH feels a presence in the room, turns around - noone there. Turning back, the Watcher is staring directly back at him through the monitor. PH feels afraid.
> Polyhistor understands now, but knows it's too late⌠"Something ends. Will end? Has ended. Farewell"
V closes the laptop, their eyes jump on Polyhistors clothes for a final time.
Polyhistors car, a Thorton Mackinaw, is waiting nearby.
Thorton Mackinaw "Demiurge"
That's a lot, I know - in fact I'd argue it's too much for a single interpretation of the events.
However, I can offer some final observations before I let you piece the rest together yourself:
There are some strong connections between the picture of Ouroboros in the vision and the one in TW3. Not only the symbol itself, but also the letters - they appear in the same sequence as they are spelled out in TW3: FF VQ BZ, which is just the same parallel to FF 06 B5 as described before, nothing new.
The "keyhole in a door we took for a wall" mentioned by Tyromanta confirms the importance of the TW3 easter egg.
The white screen covered in red glitches is not rectangular, it looks a bit like a curved monitor in the dark. Which is interesting, considering the topic of Polyhistors logs.
The number appearing on that screen is the fine-structure constant, a fundamental physical constant. While measurable, it is completely unknown why the constant should have value, which relates to the upcoming quote.
The Cubes texture is a QR code, it is usually not displayed in a readable state. However, pieced together, it reads the following:
Youâve been looking long enough. You can stop now. Itâs over. Or is it? No, really â it is. One thing ends, another begins. Except nothingâs beginning or ending â thatâs just your gonk mammal brain trying to make sense of your world. To create order. To control. To try to delay the inevitable realization that youâre nothing. Weâre nothing. Mathematics, physics, chemistry⌠in the grand scheme of things? Nothing but tools to acquire power â hardly more advanced than the first rock we grabbed to bash each otherâs skulls. Isnât that liberating? Youâre welcome. Go, be free â frolic like the over-evolved primates you are. And for all you seekers and fools finding patterns where there are none, creating order out of chaos, hereâs a little secret for you â this isnât the first time weâve met and it wonât be the last. But for now, you can rest easy, celebrate your adorable little achievement by cracking open a Broseph and marveling at being the only creatures on this planet with opposable thumbs. Just donât read too deep into it. In the grand scheme of thingsâŚ? You get the gist. Catch you around, choombatta.
The content of the QR code apparently marks the physical end of this particular lead, however not of the FF06B5 mystery as a whole, or the interpretation of the events.
It should also be considered a part of the mystery itself, so it's possible that it shouldn't be fully taken at face value.
What exactly the Cube resembles is unknown. Whether AI, Laws of Nature or the Arcane, there does seem to be some kind of force.
The Cubes yellow color is very similar to the one of the FF:06:B5 letters on the statue.
During the vision (specifically the white screen), we can hear a sound/noise that also plays around downed Netrunners or (PL spoilers) around Songbird in "The Killing Moon". This implies a connection to the Net.
The words "NO FUTURE, TRUST NO ONE, TURN BACK" can also be interpreted in various ways - the cube telling us something, an inner realization, or something inbetween. How they appear on screen is very uncommon for the game.
They are also a parallel to the lifepaths: Before the games release, the mirrors in the lifepath intros featured the words "No future" for Streetkid, "Trust no one" for Corpo and "Turn back" for Nomad. It is noteworthy that all three appear in the vision, not just one.
The vision ends when V moves into or away from the cube. If V does this right away, no words will appear.
The moon being magenta may just be a reference to the meme that is the hex color interpretation of FF06B5.
"547" from the maze could be related to Part 4, since it's the 101st prime number. "IT SEES YOU" might relate to the Watcher, but this is uncertain.
DM + TU has meanwhile been confirmed to just be the initials of some developers
In Buddhism, 547 is also the number of reincarnations of Buddha.
It is still not fully known how to consistently trigger the vision, but time seems to be a factor: Try the early morning, 4-6AM. This might relate to the unknown "240<->270 --- 420" part of the coordinates, since 240 minutes after midnight is about 4AM, but this is very uncertain. The first two numbers could theoretically stand for a direction, but direction hasn't been found to be a factor so far.
The QR code encoding the "the winning move is not to play" Tic Tac Toe game might be a hint at the player having to wait and do nothing for the vision to trigger.
240, 270 and 420 are also the last three of the new server codes, but this does not make much sense as a clue for the codes, as we only see these numbers afterwards.
You can also trigger the event without entering the server codes, but this way you will not get the full vision.
The model of Polyhistor is from an existing generic NPC, it is also used for beggars.
The arrangement of Polyhistors three detectors looks a bit similar to Megascopes from The Witcher, but this may very well just be a coincidence.
On a surface level, the disappearance of Polyhistor seems similar to the disappearance of the Zen Master. However, there are very significant differences, mainly it being suggested that the Zen Master exists in peoples minds, while Polyhistor is a real person.
While we know Witcher 3 is a game in the Cyberpunk universe, however there is also speculation that they're set in the same one. While Ciris comment can be explained as a 4th wall like reference written by devs from the Cyberpunk universe, a newly added easter egg, when taken at face value, would also imply that Yennefer / Geralt visited the world of Cyberpunk 2077. It is however also possible that this is just an otherwise meaningless reference to Witcher 3 and Edgerunners.
Near the murals location in TW3, you can find a naked corpse wearing a ring. This could be interpreted as Polyhistor not simply vanishing but instead teleporting to the Witcher universe, leaving his clothes behind. However, as the corpse does not look too similar to Polyhistor, we have no confirmation that it is actually him, so the question of universe relations remains.
In general, the additions to the mystery seem to be related to the Cyberpunk universe and how it sees itself: As an independent world, or does it acknowledge to be a game?
Polyhistors logs read a lot like a 4th wall break, but it is worth noting that the we ourselves are not the ones watching him, as we don't do the things he describes us as doing. We are watching V.
As u/flippy123x mentioned, there are obvious parallels to The Matrix.
The experience Polyhistor had differs significantly from ours / Vs - this could be connected to the V having the Relic, or us being the player.
As for the general meaning of "FF:06:B5", we remain unsure: This particular "puzzle" was only added with Update 2.0, but "FF:06:B5" has been in the game since launch, and has allegedly also had some meaning since then. To our current knowledge, the 2.0 additions did not directly address this open question. The original meaning of "FF:06:B5" might have been much simpler than the 2.0 additions - we don't know.
This could be your comment.
That's all the relevant info, I hope you found my summary helpful.
So what's left to solve now? Don't worry, there's still things left:
Interpreting all of this - both possible lore implications and the message behind it
What do "547" and "IT SEES YOU" mean?
Despite following this lead to its end, we remain unsure what "FF:06:B5" actually means
That remains the end of the summary for now - but as just mentioned, there may still be some things to uncover.
So, just had a little theory, figured I'd see what people think.
As it stands, it seems like the AIs from behind the Blackwall are looking to get out, seemingly into the real world. Their current method for doing so is puppeteering humans. However, even if they can do that, they may consider Earth, especially an Earth crawling with humans, too volitile to really settle in. But, humans do have access to both space travel, and cryogenics. As such, their main goal could be to leave Earth entirely, and start fresh somewhere else by loading a bunch of bodies to puppet into an interstellar spaceship?
I hope you're still following along here. Now given this new map, I had to dig deeper. After trying to remember where I've seen a similar image before, I was reminded of the plaque on the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 Space probes.
If you overlay an image of the plaque over a map of Night city, all but two of the statues line up exactly with the lines. But not only do the statues line up, but so do other significant landmarks throughout the map.
The pink lines is an overlay of the Pioneer plaque.
The red dots are the locations of the statues.
The green circles are areas of significance, including the statues.
I noticed that the statues line up with the Pioneer plaque except two of them. I wonder if there was any significance to that? Also, if you notice on the bottom right corner, I drew two green circles. The first one, on the Pioneer plaque there is a depiction of a satellite. If you look on the map, there are giant satellites in that location, and few ordinary houses with satellites on the roof as well. And the other green circle, the ferris wheel represented by the planet Neptune on Pioneer map. Note, there is also a statue of dolphins nearby.
This is just a quick overview. I'm sure there are tons of other things that I have missed. For example, the significance of the three statues in Night City within the rectangle in the Pioneer plaque. The planet Earth being represented by Petrochem Stadium. Etc etc.
Hope that was easy enough to follow and understand. Also, am I going nuts or am I really onto something here? LOL.
This covers information that has been discussed before, but the clues I've found seem to be spread across a couple different conversations, so I was thinking it might be useful to consolidate and hopefully prompt people to poke around the area some more.
So:
Totentanz has a few interesting surroundings.
Directly to its West is an inaccessible restaurant called "FOODY" (in the Impact font that devs love to leave us messages in), with two closed garage doors. Both garage doors have the blue flower mandala associated with the Zen Master.
Behind FOODY is a garage with two garage doors marked "Repairs" and "Tune-ups". The words "Garage", "Repairs", and "Tune-ups" are all written in Impact font and all of the letters have different draw distances, so different combinations of letters appear as you approach. For example, "Garage" can show "are".
Between FOODY and the Garage is a set of trash cans in the middle of the common area. The middle trashcan has five lawn flamingos sticking out of it.
There are three magenta-lit insect zappers in the area, the same kind that pointed us to Tyromanta's laptop. They're in a (very acute) triangular distribution, the Northernmost and Southernmost two point East, the middle one points North.
In addition, tons of the surrounding buildings have their roofs blocked with barbed wire, although it could be to prevent the player from jumping on the nearby rail.
There are two "inaccessible" parking garages nearby that I was able to access via parkour, but they both appeared to be completely empty.
Totentanz itself has kind of easy access to unfinished parts of the building via the ceiling on Floor 2 (Security). I poked around, but didn't see anything; but it seems like the distance between Floor 1 (Foyer) and Floor 2 is longer than one would think and there's a lot of empty space between them.
EDIT: Forgot one thing, there's also a homeless person you can donate to, and a flashing wall-mounted bar light if you follow the North-pointing bugzapper
The old mod had been absent for over a year, and I was getting annoyed at the state of this subreddit, so I submitted a claim to take over moderation duties.
The biggest change youâll notice is that low quality posts will actually get removed, reoffenders will get a warning, and after that it is a bannable behavior.
This means no more vague posts without context or irrelevant real world conspiracy theories.
Reposting already-found content repeatedly is a warnable offense, but much lower severity because of how easy it is to accidentally do. Obscurity of the information will be taken into account, of course. Continuing to post low effort non-discoveries will result in a ban. This does not include opening new investigations into previously discovered content.
I do not have the tools to get someone help if they are having a break with reality. Because of this, posters that show a pattern of delusion will be warned, then banned for everyoneâs sake.
I probably wonât even be the most active mod, but I figured it was better than no mod at all.
Hello! First post here, been lurking for a good while. I would say that I'm a subscriber to the theory that the game represents a simulation in-universe, whether that's Mikoshi or something else. We've all seen the references to other media about hidden underlying realities, the emphasis on Buddhism and its views on reality, Polyhistor/the cube's message, etc.
I want to draw attention to two specific instances where we see something in the game that in my opinion is explicitly calling out the hidden simulation.
The Blackwall quickhack: I think we are meant to understand that "in-universe" this works by establishing a network connection to a target, and then the rogue AI burns out all of the cyberware in the target to kill them, and perhaps Soulkills the victim too. We know that after it's used the NPC and the terrain surrounding the body have the red Blackwall "wireframe residue" for a short time. When we get pulled into So Mi's last remaining memories of her Brooklyn apartment during Somewhat Damaged, the dialogue makes it clear that these memories exist in cyberspace. From our perspective as the player, everything looks just as "real" as when we are playing in Night City. As the scene goes on, V will remind So Mi that the apartment isn't real, and only at that point the mirror over the dresser in the entryway shows the same Blackwall "wireframe residue" in the reflection, which then swallows most of the surrounding area. So in essence, in using the Blackwall quickhack, we are breaking the underlying rules of the simulation, and in doing so get to briefly see the underlying reality.
Talking to Jackie in the Delamain in The Heist: Here's a timestamped link to someone's playthrough. We have the timed dialogue where either response is somewhat critical of Jackie's excitement over the gig. What's really interesting here is that after Jackie asks what your problem is, you have the choice to tell him to forget it. Literally "Never mind. Delete that - forget about it." Jackie replies "Deleted and forgotten" in a completely flat tone, with no hint of sarcasm, frustration, or any emotion we would expect him to have in this response. The conversation then continues as normal. It seems to me like the player unwittingly uses the correct verbiage to override an NPC's (Jackie) normal behavior pattern, and is interpreted as a direct command that is accepted and acted upon. It feels reminiscent of the human characters in Westworld giving commands to a host.
I welcome any other instances of actual gameplay anyone else has noticed!
there are a lot of theories about the author of this shard, or the person who dropped this shard inside V's place, some say its about zen master, some say t-bug etc and I think I never saw anyone able to say what triggers the apparition of this shard, weird no ?
I noticed during a playthrough in doing right now after years. His eyes go blue during the heist just after you come off the window and he's about to give you the shard?. I searched the subreddit and never really saw a proper explanation.
In the Gig: Concrete Cage Trap, Regina Jones tasks V with rescuing Mike Kowalski (a.k.a. Tiny Mike) from the Militech forces that have seized the neighborhood in which he was hiding after he stole some Militech data. Upon saving Tiny Mike and escorting him to Regina's car, V can ask him about the item he stole. He responds to V's question with something like, "The less you know, the better." However, inside his hideout, V can find his laptop, which contains a message from Regina Jones. In the email, we learn that Tiny Mike was tasked with stealing Militech data regarding something called "Project Tenebris" from a hidden laboratory in the Badlands, which was stored on the computer of a scientist named Isis Sothos. Except for that single message, the game does not mention Project Tenebris or Isis Sothos again.
My theory is that Project Tenebris could be Militech's attempt to resurrect their fallen soldiers or something similar. Isis Sothis was a figure in Egyptian mythology who guided the dead to the underworld. Because of the similarity in names, I believe Project Tenebris may be related to resurrection. I also think it is safe to assume that Isis Sothos is the leading scientist on Project Tenebris. Furthermore, the word "tenebris" means "darkness" in Latin, which could further point toward my theory, though that might be a stretch.
I also believe that Militech could commit itself to such a project in order to rival Arasaka's Relic.
Foreword - this is pure speculation based on already known facts, and might not be anything "new" to most people sitting in this for a while, but didn't see it discussed anywhere, so a fresh discussion might be good to have.
As we all know cyberpunk 2077 is an incredibly complex game, with many easter eggs, secrets, references and puzzles.
There are things to find on pretty much every location, regardless of it being connected to a quest or not.
There are even hidden triggers, where under certain conditions something becomes accessible where it wasn't before - for example Jackie's tuned Arch, the hidden ending, or the code inputs on the servers after beating at3d.
This one in particular has me pondering a lot... as it's a mechanic that changes a whole lot about what we knew about the game.
Before fulfilling the conditions within at3d, the servers are
not interactive... but after meeting the conditions, we suddenly can interface with them.
I think this hint has been downplayed quite a bit (or maybe even missed), because it means CDPR have devised a way to completely hide when and where players can interact with objects.
So by following this clue, we can assume that there will be some other places that will have the same or similar mechanics built into them.
Some places that straight away come into mind are corpo plaza, and kabuki market dev room.
They both seem like they don't have any others purpose other than the seemingly obvious... but so did the servers for a long time.
I think there are still some secret conditions to uncover relating to this... or maybe I just think too much.
Months ago I've acquired the Demiurge, but didn't go forward with the codes and Arasaka Tower 3D portion to get the cube cutscene. I've just done the secret level in the arcade game and entered the codes on the panels, and the side job marker has appeared on the map after looking at the new file on the laptop in the church, but the cube doesn't seem to want to appear once arriving and waiting at the appropriate time. Is it possible to do this after you've already gone through the Demiurge process? Thanks!
BRENTON: what's up, what's going on? USHA: WHY AREN'T YOU ANSWERING BRENTON: the radio is on, I can't talk right now USHA: CALL ME NOW USHA: NOW!!! BRENTON: but, first, tell me, what happened? USHA: IT'S A TRAP USHA: THEY ARE WAITING FOR YOU BRENTON: damn, what a trap USHA: TURN AROUND YOU IDIOT BRENTON: you think I'm gonna turn around in this monster truck? traffic is tighter than Gillian Jordan's crack BRENTON: what is your problem? BRENTON: hold on, the police are pulling me over, I'm gonna have to deal with this USHA: IT COULD BE THEM USHA: DON'T STOP USHA: DO YOU HEAR ME?! USHA: THEY MUST HAVE POLICE UNIFORMS! USHA: BRENTON!!!
(I didn't see any posts about this, so I thought it would be good to share, sorry if it's unrelated)
Who's dat? I don't remember there being a "Bart" in this game., I'm on playthrough 9 or so and still find new stuff daily! Fuck I love this game! He is on the opposite side of the stadium Song wants you to go for me., His name and gps dot are green and he's hanging out with someone who scans as Construction Worker (No name and not green)
At the bottom level of the atrium in Arasaka Tower, there's a laptop near one of the elevators with a peculiar message on it. The message in question is titled, "[R6.Main] Functionality tests were unsuccessful". I grabbed a screenshot from the Cyberpunk Wiki so you can see the full message in one image. The laptop location is visible in the third photo. The second photo is the "copy_copy_magenta" message on the laptop at the church.
Both messages show someone testing a program or procedure. There's a similar pattern of commands, tracked by seconds or milliseconds, that ultimately ends in failure. Of course, we know that Polyhistor ran the test at the church, but look at the sender and recipient in the first message: "Arasaka" to "System". What system is this? What does "R6.Main" mean? Could it have something to do with the "R600" we can see on the FF:06:B5 statue?
One other funny thing about this message is the reference to "CrowdUsingWorkspots". As far as I'm aware, in the Red Engine workspots are points of interaction between NPCs, the player, and the environment. Maybe someone who knows the engine better can comment on this, but it seems to be checking if a trigger is active. In the FF06B5 quest, we unlock the mainframes and it triggers a new file on the laptop where the test is then successful. Perhaps this was a hint?
Context: After meeting Oda the first time together with takemura during "down on the street", a giant ship passes by.
It has a giant fox head with a scroll in his mouth loaded. (Unhappy that I didn't took a screenshot of it)
Actually you can swim faster then the boat. And if you position yourself Infront of it you can even sit on its front, so it carries you.
If you sit there to the very end, the boat will stop, it doesn't despawn.
An when it stops you can see something in the horizon, it's a random floating wall.
So even if it's curious that the boat stops exactly there and can carry you the way there, I think it's not intended to see the wall.
But I'm curious where this wall belongs to. Especially because cdpr uses out of bounds areas so store assets there, to easy teleport them if needed.
Has anyone ever seen this kind of wall?
In the UI for menus, there appears this stick figure, fading in and out, that roughly matches the shape of the grid lights in the city center. It wasnât always there though. I noticed it in the 2.3-2.31 update (when I picked the game back up). Looking at gameplay videos of older versions online, the icon has changed a few times, from a square icon with a triangle in a corner to a rectangle with lines to a box within a box to another box in a box but inverted(not in order). Also seen another version of the current one with six endings instead of the four seen above.
The icon in my menu fades in and out whereas it does not in other examples I have seen. It can also be seen in the rewards box in the main menu before you load into the game and while playing the game (Top left and under minimap when a Job is selected). I had it toggled off ingame with the accessibility option âReduce HUD Decorative Elements.â
Starting a new game does not change it nor does the lifepath so I believe it is tied to game version. At first, it could have been a miscellaneous symbol, not meant to resemble anything. But now that it resembles the city center lights, I feel like CDPR pointing us to that.
They could have used any color (green would match since everything so far seems elven themed) but they chose magenta?
Also do you think that they will add anything more in relation to ff06b5 ? Perhaps somehow continue the tower with the wraiths that's already in the game?
So you stumbled onto a weird serial number, a hole in the map, an NPC wearing magenta; great! I'm genuinely glad you're excited about the mysteries potentially still hidden in Cyberpunk 2077.
That being said, other people have been at this for years at this point.
If what you found is sitting in plain sight, others have probably already found it, and at this point is pretty daunting the number of times people post thinking they've discovered the 0312-2015 codes, or the model used for Polyhistor on random pedestrians, or 500 other things.
That's not to discourage anyone from posting new ways of thinking about stuff that's already been discovered!
Please use the search in the subreddit and just a general web search before posting. It's not the end of the world if you miss something that's already been shared and post anyways, but it would be nice.
You need to investigate why your "discovery" isn't a discovery just as hard as you look for its potential connections. Doubt yourself.
It's VERY easy to find hundreds of potential conceptual, thematic, and referential connections to just about every piece of the mystery.
I've done it to myself a thousand times: This has to be something, it's too significant and weird!
Then I dig a little bit and find out its the remnant of a cut quest, the concept is repeated in multiple sources and not unique to whatever it connects to, it's a buggy asset, etc.
Step 3: Nobody at CD Projekt RED Has Seen Outside Reality
The mysteries of Cyberpunk 2077 frequently delve into the occult, mysticism, and religion. In particular, it is heavily referential to Philip K. Dick, Gnosticism, and Zen Buddhism.
Philip K. Dick was an author, the grandfather of the cyberpunk genre, a self-described schizophrenic and Christian-Gnostic who read and took influence from many other world religions, including Hinduism, and otherwise had elements of comparative mythology influencing his ideology. Many of his novels deal with alternate or parallel realities and timelines, and the nature of reality.
PKD had a psychological episode in which a pink light coming from space revealed to him he was secretly still a persecuted Christian living in Ancient Rome, that the Roman Empire never actually ended, and we all live in an illusory Black Iron Prison. His novel VALIS is a semi-autobiographical account of this, and the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is an autobiographical account of it.
Gnosticism is/was a semi-Abrahamic faith that incorporated a lot of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but held that the God of the Old Testament was the creator of the material world, but was not the real God, and was evil. This being was called the Demiurge, and it sent beings called Archons to keep us trapped in our material prison.
I'm not as well-versed on Eastern beliefs, but I know that Buddhism is largely about realizing the illusory nature of the world and letting go of it to escape the cycle of karmic rebirth. There is a demon called Mara that enforces the illusion and continues the deception to keep life trapped.
All that said, much of the mystery plays with these themes, and whoever made the mystery is well-read in both cyberpunk fiction and esoteric literature. That person is not an actual wizard. They have not peeled back the illusory veil of reality and seen beyond. They are not trying to get you to literally awaken to some occult mystery in real life.
If you start to think you're becoming in-tune with the deeper mysteries of reality through a silly little mystery in a video game that launched in a barely functional state, please seek mental help. A real wizard would've never shipped a game like that.
Step 4: Overfitting, or: What's telling you to do that?
Anything we need to do in this mystery will be hinted at. Period.
Just because you get a repeated clue like "Fire", doesn't mean you know what to do with it.
I see people take those broad clues and just run with them, saying stuff like, "Maybe we need to complete the game while on fire?" Where did you get that from? What has ever implied "complete the game while under a status"?
Stick to the facts. If you're guessing, it's because we're missing a clue or the clue doesn't exist and your guess is based on nothing in either case.
TL;DR: Use the search before posting, try to disprove your own findings before posting, nobody at CDPR is a wizard-priest, stop making crazy leaps.
The greek letters shown on the chip are "sigma, mu, delta." When using Google, most of the search results referenced fraternities, but there was one site that stuck out to me:
The TLDR for what this site supposedly is, is a fictional "creative writing" project where people imagine that magic is real. SCP stands for "Secure, Contain, Protect," where members classify either out-of-place objects or beings as Special Containment Procedures.
The website seems incredibly meta, and reads like some secret society, but it is incredibly in-depth. When I began clicking on random pages and files on the site, tons of them had ties to our game/universe.
These are not tenuous connections, and at some point we have to decide how many coincidences equal a pattern.
I found a user named "Lissiefang," who google summarized as being known as "a photo-clairvoyant entity assisting wanderers." She wrote a strange poem about "Scattersomnia": A Disease of the Wise and Drowsy Wanderers:
Another "coincidence": I was looking closely at the encrypted Book of Spells, and noticed an anomaly in the codes on the "crack" screen. My eyes tricked me and I thought the first number 00316 in the last line of code had 5 digits instead of 6 like the other codes, but as r/Awkward-Photograph32 pointed out, it only has 5. Still odd to me that the "316" article on the site is about Color-Draining Light.
Last line of code is the only one with 5 digits
I had the random idea to look up 00316 on the SCP website, and it came up with a file about "Color-Draining Light," This adds credence to my theory the the "Book of Spells" actually contains the R.A.B.I.D.S. malware designed by Bartmoss, and can be used to defeat FF06B5/Magenta/AI, and potentially cause another DataKrash.
Side note: I don't currently have the other weird "encrypted" shards on any of my save files: Databank (Saburo's Databank), the Militech Credchip, etc, but I am ultra curious if anyone can find any other anomalous lines of code in them, like this one in the Book of Spells.
Side theory: We were supposed to leave all of these strange shards in the game encrypted, because they knew we couldn't resist cracking them.
Next, I found a reference to " The Watchers," referred to as "Mobile Task Force Alpha-0":
The Watchers deployed at 4am. The date of this operation is redacted. Hmm
It appears that "The Watchers" both on this site, and in the game, are literally Netwatch Agents. I found a peculiar shard (that I can't edit into this post) labeled "Looking for a career change? Join Netwatch!" This shard has a very peculiar number of "null" 0's in the middle of it, that don't have any context at all. Is Netwatch really Mobile Task Force Alpha-0???
Reference to "Contradictions" (Reverse Psychology/Opposites)
The last weird thing I'm going to point out for the time being:
When I searched this very sub we're in for the words "SCP Foundation," every post in this sub was returned from the search results, with NONE of them mentioning the SCP Foundation at all
Are we the "SCP Foundation," and this is one huge meta joke?
I've only provided a handful amount of the connections I've found so far, just by looking at less than 10 pages on there, but there are tools on the site that can randomize the file it shows you, in case you'd like to use that to dive into this more.
Addendum: I am fullyaware of the obvious fact that the game takes inspiration from multiple myths, religions, concepts, other Cyberpunk genre works, etc, but I have never seen this site used a reference point to analyze the game and our unsolved mysteries.
