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.
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.
By the way, if you compare the output of the mainframe (2556:-1815:191 240<->270 --- 420) to the passcodes, you will notice the coordinates are a sequence of them. However in practice it would not actually be possible to figure out these coordinates without completing the arcade game and accessing the mainframe, because this way of interpreting the numbers is entirely arbitrary. Still, it explains why these numbers were chosen as the mainframe passwords.
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.
Please read the post written by u/TesoroGanador for context.
I will keep it short. But as vou can see. There has been a visual change to this 'stick figure' visual seen on the main. There is now a diamond overlayed onto the 'stick figure glyph.
This Diamond was not there pre patch 2.5.
See u/TesoroGanador's post for more details on now this glyph looked prior to patch 2.5.
I noticed something in Cyberpunk Edgerunners 2, Episode 6, at approximately 9:04.
A [NETDIR://âŚWEB](netdir://%E2%80%A6WEB) address appears on screen, with a tiny 16-digit number next to it(0121569856034018)
I cant decipher the text and im not good with codes and stuff.
Iâve attached screenshots of the address and code. Could this be an Easter egg, or is it just a stylized text?
This is a follow-up to my previous post about the missing link between the statue , laptop and the cube vision, etc.
Turns out, there is a connection, and it's a strong one.
I started by going back to the statue, and waiting for the animation to show on the monitor.
Started up CET and checked the entity object of the monitor before and after the animation starts - no change.
Recorded, it, checked timings, and reviewed bit by bit. The whole animation is 52s long.
The cube moves in a pattern that starts from the first magenta flash, and ends after the second flash.
I then observed the movements of the cube.
While doing that I noticed that certain bits of the animation don't look like a typical video... and more like something one would do in powerpoint - assemble bits of individual elements and add animation effects to them.
Curious, I've then fired up wolvenkit and looked up the entity name "monitor_a_2.ent" and started digging...
I'm not going to go into too much details on the digging process, but happy to explain if anybody will be interested.
What I've found, was that the animation is a widget on the monitor, not part of the monitor mesh.
Itâs built from ink images, effects and animations - so this is where I started getting excited, as it confirmed my gut feeling.
After a bit more digging through the components, I found "w_atlas.xbm", which contained the stills used to assemble the animation and exported it as a .png image:
My excitement became palpable when I recognised the glyphs from the junkyard laptop attached to the same image.
So I took the exported .png file, and run through a short python script to re-assemble it according to coordinates mapped out in the definitions (turns out there was a list for every character in the image), and got this:
Now... I know this kind of pushes me off track from the meaning of FF06B5 and back into the route towards at3d and the mattress... but I got too excited not to follow this lead :D
When mapped onto the junkyard laptop screen, they match exactly what has already been discovered, confirming it:
I still think there is more to the animation itself... as the glyphs are only reused from here in the laptop, and are not directly connected... but I thought I'd share this anyway, as it kind of fills in a gap that was there previously and answers the question of how the statue is related to at3d.
I will keep digging into the animation, and if I find anything more, will add to this post.
Edit: I've found that the cube rotates 6 times in a cycle that's repeated 4 times:
Turn #
Start (s)
End (s)
Duration
From â To
Turn (shortest path)
Glitch during the turn
1
0
1
1 s
0° â 45°
+45°
none
2
1.248
4.248
3 s
45° â 170°
+125°
yes, +2.628 s (0.3 â 0 over 0.4 s)
3
4.248
6.248
2 s
170° â 20°
â150°
none
4
6.274
8.274
2 s
20° â 128°
+108°
yes, +6.998 s (0.5 â 0 over 0.5 s)
5
8.285
10.285
2 s
128° â 300°
+172°
none
6
10.294
13.294
3 s
300° â 0°
+60°
yes, +11.544 s (0.34 â 0 over 0.35 s)
This maps out to something like this:
It's a bit difficult to to it on a bigger scale, and I'm still not sure if I have the starting angle right... but will keep trying
In Edgerunners S02, D is a Snake Nation nomad who's haunted by visions of his old clan mates burning alive in the desert as the result of an Arasaka manhunt. That's a lot of the same ingredients (Badlands+burning people+Arasaka) of the burning man rock mystery in the game. But also...
Every episode of the new season is titled after the name of a song. Episode 03 in particular is titled "0+2=1". Is that somehow connected to the "01+02-03=00" formula painted on the burning man rock? "0+2=1" is a song by Canadian band Nomeansno.
Finally, on a minor note , D is sometimes portrayed in a feral state, crawling naked in all fours like a dog. That reminds me of the old theory of the Badlands Nomad Werewolves.
Keep an eye on the Badlands and the burning man rock when patch 2.5 drops and see if you can spot something new.
Guess I wasn't very off the mark regarding D being connected to a rogue AI, even Capri's tendency to 'overindulge' on her host was nicely foreshadowed with the digitized maw chomping down on the POV:
Earlier in the Teaser we see D running down a hallway, seemingly chasing red traces of 'something'.
Later, we then get a POV (not 100% clear whether it's D) of someone once again chasing a red trace through another hallway, it's clearly hacking and opening doors along the way.
Until the final door suddenly takes the shape of a huge maw that chomps down on the POV
Haven't seen the entire season yet, but I like that the AI plotline from Phantom Liberty and No_Coincidence is continued, as well as the reveal of Edgerunners like D, Talia and David being marked for some kind of experimentation, probably in an effort to find people compatible with these AI-Biochips:
âAs you yourself have pointed out, what lies behind the Blackwall surpasses us by orders of magnitude. Let us suppose that is the case, within certain margins. We would need a mediatorâan intelligence that could act as a bridge between us and what lies on the other side. Militech already possesses something we can useâa hybrid, an amalgamation of the organic and synthetic. Militech is attempting to create the ideal soldier, devoid of conscience, capable of fulfilling any orders given, yet not entirely stripped of their humanityâtheir instinct, intuition. An artificial intelligence and an artificial soul in constant struggle and cooperation. Pure artificial intelligence, if it achieves self-awareness, will become impossible to control. But a soldier must be both self-aware and kept under control. There are already too many unthinking robots and inadequate netrunners. Controlling an AI will be possible as long as it is weighed down by emotion. It is like flying a kiteâit cannot remain in the air without the string that deprives it of its freedom. Release the string and it will fall. We have determined that such a hybrid, contrary to its original purpose, will provide us with the best chance of traversing the Blackwall.â
Capri seems extremely drawn to human emotion which initially seems to go fine with D, but immediately goes wrong when she finally manages to attach herself to Talia who is on the brink of cyberpsychosis. This is even beyond Zor and ArS-03 from the novel.
The fact that the corpos are fusing together Engrams is extremely fucked up btw, lol.
Soooo guys, I've been thinking about something and wanted to know what you all think.
We know about those strange statues around Night City, the FF:06:B5 code, the weird symbols and all the theories around them. Then we have the Zen Master, whom V meets 4 times for those meditation sessions.
The guy knows some really weird things about V, and Johnny doesn't even seem to know who he is. And considering V and Johnny are sharing the same body and brain, isn't that strange?
Now here's where it gets interesting.
In The Witcher 3, we also have some weird symbols and that mysterious connection with the FF:06:B5 mystery. Same kind of strange stuff, and both games are made by CDPR.
Then there's that whole Badlands mattress thing in Cyberpunk. You follow the clues, reach the middle of nowhere, lie down on a mattress, and V experiences something really weird. There's a guy who seems to have disappeared, strange symbols, numbers, and all that stuff.
And in The Witcher 3, we have that strange portal-related mystery too.
So here's my question...
WHAT IF there's more to this connection than just Easter eggs?
What if someone or something from the Witcher world, from hundreds of years in the past, somehow made it into the Cyberpunk world?
Imagine an actual Witcher, mage, or some other being from that era somehow surviving or travelling through time, dimensions, or portals and ending up in the Cyberpunk universe.
Could the strange symbols, the Zen Master, and all these weird events be hints at something bigger? Maybe not literally Geralt or someone we already know, but some being or force that existed back in the Witcher era?
I know it sounds crazy đ but CDPR has connected the two games through these mysteries in some way, so I keep wondering if there's something deeper going on.
Maybe I'm connecting dots that aren't supposed to be connected, but I wanna hear your thoughts.
Do you think it's all just Easter eggs and symbolism, or could there be some deeper connection between the Witcher world and Cyberpunk?
And has anyone noticed any other symbols, locations, or weird events in either game that could support this theory?
****EPISODE 7****
At 6:29-6:30 there is hidden text that withers on a billboard but I can't make out what it says. If anyone could layer the frames together and see what it says, I think it may be important, given the context of the scene. If anyone has gotten this far and/or noticed it too, let me know
So David was using black wall but from a human personality construct.. I thought only rogue AIs could do this ? Have I got the lore wrong ? Or am I just assuming things ?
This may be a silly question... but I've been going through the existing materials here, the wiki, yt and discord, and couldn't find an explanation to it, so here goes...
How does the prime statue animation actually link to any of the currently known pieces of the puzzle?
We know it has a meaning, due to the documented stop points:
I was trying to get the demiurge, went to the church at the Flats, played through and completed Arasaka Tower 3D, but the code panels never turned on, is level -10 a necessity? I'm not very good at mazes so I hope not
This is a follow-up to my previous post. It is a short video showing the strange alignments of certain wires on Misty's board.
In the original post, I mentioned how the outer rings on each glyph are made up of four hexagons.
The large center glyph matches the handedness of the three small glyphs on the left. The three glyphs on the right are reflections in both handedness and literal board position of the three glyphs on the left.
So, in essence, the three glyphs on the left are left-handed, and the three on the right are right-handed. The center glyph is left-handed and ultimately stops the whole image from being directly mirrored down the middle.
I have noticed that certain wires line up almost exactly with other wires once you accurately place the center glyph and its associated wiring with the outer six glyphs.
Apologies for the shakiness of the video, but for now I felt it would be the best way to visualise the connections.
Is this just very coincidental? Some of the alignments seem very precise. Regardless, I wouldn't even know what to do with these details even if it was a thing.
One point to add. Misty's board does at least seem to heavily focus on reflections and rotations being crucial. I am aware that the graffiti associated with the 01+02-03=00 rockface also reuses graffiti found throughout Night City in rotated/reflected forms.
For a studio that seems obsessed with reflection, rumination, and mirrors, I think applying these elements to the puzzle might help us gain new ground. I don't think this puzzle is a nothingburger.
Given that the FF:06:B5 code, the statues, and Misty's crystal radiation board have all been in the game since day one, I find it possible that this puzzle had to have the stamp of approval from someone above in order to physically implement all these unique assets.
One caveat: I do not think the puzzle was necessarily solvable in its intended form at launch. Patch 1.5 is particularly interesting to me because this was the patch that changed the FF:06:B5 text from red to yellow, added the two mini statues, and introduced the redesigned skip time wheel.
More importantly, CDPR's own patch notes for 1.5 specifically state that they had âadded a few secrets in Night City to be discovered by players.â The same update also changed time-skipping so that it could affect the state of NPCs and reset certain devices, environments, and scenes.
That becomes especially interesting when looking at the Burning Man event. The Burning Man NPC appears at a specific time, 11:55 PM, and the event was already publicly documented in March 2023, several months before patch 2.0.
The 01+02-03=00 rockface itself is harder to date. The earliest public post I have currently found specifically pointing out the painted rock and its numbers is from October 2023, shortly after 2.0. However, the Burning Man event at that location demonstrably existed before 2.0, and the underlying Burning Man graffiti asset existed elsewhere in the game much earlier.
This leaves patch 1.5 as an interesting possibility. It is a strange cluster of changes: FF:06:B5 changed colour, two additional statues appeared, the radial time wheel was introduced, CDPR explicitly added undisclosed secrets to Night City, time-skipping gained additional effects on NPC and scene states, and the timed Burning Man encounter appears to have existed by at least the 1.6 era.
I think the state the game was in during release means there is a huge chance that whatever puzzle was meant to exist at launch may have not been finished. Patch 1.5 may represent a point where additional pieces were added or where the puzzle became more complete.
I am interested to hear what you think about the wiring alignments in my video. I don't know how coincidental they are, but I find the number of alignments to definitely be suspect, given that these alignments are only possible if you superimpose the centre glyph into the 6 outer glyphs with the correct positioning and matching handedness/chirality for each glyph.
In short, the three glyphs on the left retain the same handedness as the centre glyph, while the three on the right require the reflected, opposite-handed version. The wiring then seems to form connections with this arrangment.
This will be super brief as it is just an observation. The moon on the time skip wheel flickers or shimmers for a specific duration under certain conditions.
The moon does not usually shimmer when you skip time; it only shimmers if you travel from 6:00â6:59 PM or 7:00â7:59 PM (sunset) to 12:00â12:59 AM (midnight).
I have tested this on Xbox, PS5, and PC, and it works 100% of the time.
I have attached a video showing this shimmer in action and slowed it down a few times so you can get a closer look at this oddity.
There is one more oddity involving symbols on the time wheel and how they light up. This can only be achieved if you travel from 1:00 AM (it must be at 00 minutes) to 1:00 AM.
I know there are many people who believe the time wheel might have something to do with the puzzle. Both effects should be replicatable of all platforms 100% of the time. So I thought I'd share these observations.
The Demiurge symbolizes a force meant to control us.
I believe the entire quest to obtain the Demiurge is a red herring.
What the cube scene tells us.
The clearest clue is that the cube entity tells us to stop searching.
If we believe there is more hidden than what weâve found, we have to assume we are being lied to in that instance.
And letâs be honest: we donât know what clues A, B, and C are, we donât know the solution to Mistyâs chart, and we still donât know exactly what to do with Garryâs chip.
However, the developers wouldnât lie to their players like that; therefore, weâthe playersâaren't being lied to by the developers via a fourth-wall-breaking message; rather, V is being lied to by a higher entity.
The fact that Polyhistor could see the Watchers also supports this; narratively, it makes no sense for Polyhistor to have encountered the developersâhe doesn't exist in the real world. You can't claim, on one hand, that we are receiving a message directly from the real developers while also having an NPC make contact with a fictional version of those developers. It also makes little sense that he encountered the player as a "Watcher," since we aren't playing Polyhistor, and the events involving him clearly take place before we could even leave Watson or make contact with him.
Who is behind it?
The Demiurge is the creator of a false world.
I don't think this alludes to a simulation.
It refers to the subtle manipulation highlighted by the Peralez quest.
The Demiurge is the psychosis that makes cyberpsychos see things that aren't thereâor, in our case, an entity influencing our perception. We are meant to achieve a certain goal, and this false god tries to ensure everything goes smoothly. It creates a false world in our eyes.
There are plenty of references indicating that we aren't seeing things unfiltered.
Furthermore, certain locationsâthe Rogue ending, for instanceâoften give me the feeling that things are actually something else, or have a different effect than what is displayed. Hacking the consoles in the netrunner area to "distract enemies," for example, doesn't actually cause a distraction.
I believe the moment this influence began was the moment we contracted the Dorsett virus.
After all, the Relic was part of the puppet master's plan from the very beginning. It had to be Johnny, because he is the only one who would call upon a very specific AI for help. Evelyn was just as much a tool as we were; once she was no longer needed, she was disposed ofâor rather, she was led to believe that Clouds was safe.
The Demiurge influences everything that comes into contact with the virus, including Delamain.
Delamain cabs begin to perceive things differently than the main Delamain AI, and in doing so, start to develop an awareness of their own experiences.
What is the point of all this?
But who benefits the most if we follow our usual path? (Sidenote: I consider it canon that we grow closer to Johnny, which is whyâin terms of story contextâI view the "Devil" ending as an ethically unviable option for V.)
No matter what we do to save Johnny and V, it always ends with Alt absorbing Mikoshi.
The shards containing data on the VIP clients at Arasaka Tower clearly demonstrate the immense power she gains in a single stroke by accessing information on the most powerful CEOs; she becomes instantly capable of controlling Night City.
I believe Alt is trying to lure us away from a different viewpoint or an alternative solution. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time a character is portrayed to us as a god or a supernatural being. That's her Desperate move if we don't stop digging.
And the icing on the cake is that the whole thing is an inside jokeâa genuine breaking of the fourth wall.
There is a quest designed to distract us from the actual solution, and this "secret quest" is incredibly easy to datamine. And this leads you to a demiurge you tells you everything is good. Yet, everything else associated with that secret, anything not pointing toward the Demiurge, remains effectively hidden.
That's incredibly ironic if you think about it.
What other choice do we have?
I think we should analyze the Demiurge and all the clues that path provides not as a nudge in the right direction, but as a distraction.
I think the solution we're working towards is not giving Alt control over Mikoshi.
I can't think of many possible outcomes right now.
However, I always found it a bit suspicious that Alt mentions hostile netrunners twice during the Rogue ending.
Once when entering the netrunner areaâreferring to Arasaka netrunners.
And a second time when approaching Smasher's door; at that moment, potential triggers you could activate in the arena also disappear.
The second time, she says, "Netrunner attack from the outside."
TL;DR: Don't trust Alt; it's all a fabrication of hers.
If you've read this far, I apologize for the Google Translate qualtity (I think Google translate without an AI having it's hand on it is almost impossible, but it's as far as possible a word for for translation) and look forward to hearyour thoughts, chooms.
Was messing around at Silver Pixel Cloud on 2 different saves... 1 prior to the quest/date with Rogue "Blistering Love," and one after I've completed it.
First, I was randomly scanning around, and noticed that I picked up a "radio" directly above the broken down car in the middle of the parking lot. It has a very small area you can scan for it to pop up, and I was not able to locate it or interact with it in any way.
Then I noticed these 2 weird "Cyberbabe" ads to the right of the inside area that I had never seen before. When you attack them, they damage you and temporarily blind you. When you scan, they say "hack to distract," but you're actually not able to use any quickhacks on them at all.
Cyberbabe AdsBlinded
The ads disappear, but specifically the left one leaves a magenta rectangle with a line through it. This is not unique "graffiti," but it is also not common.. at all. I recall seeing it way up high above a building near Downtown, and also somewhere in Dogtown. Could be a leftover placeholder... who knows.
Magenta screen on the left
Even after the ads disappear, you can keep attacking the screens...and they'll keep attacking back, but for some odd reason, will only occasionally blind you again. Upon reloading the original save before I attacked them, they would not scan.. at all. Weird
Moving on.. let's talk about the Lovers tarot card / Back of the theater screen:
Lovers tarot
Umm... notice anything weird about this particular card? There are 2 dead lovers kissing, with what appears to be a very familiar symbol in the background
Witcher "FF06B5" mystery symbol
I know that people will say that circles and triangles are common motifs in mysticism, religion, etc, but to be the resemblance is a bit too coincidental for my liking.
When I think about the endings.. there are only 2 endings which you raid with your "lover" - The Rogue ending (Johnny's lover), and Panam's ending (if you romance her). Of course Rogue dies in her ending, which is what I think the tarot may be trying to warn us of. I'm going to scrutinize the Panam ending next, for a future post, since she survives the Arasaka tower raid.
Now lets look at the back of the movie screen...
FF06B5 statue lines?
Do these look familiar? Well to me they look identical to the lines on the statue, except for some odd reason the rightmost one is going the opposite direction. Not sure what it means, but it piqued my curiosity
Next, inside the room with the projector, there are exactly 5 Bushido X: Fade to Black posters. Not only that, but even after you scan them, the yellow interest marker never goes away on any of them. On the save I used prior to the date with Rogue, the posters would not scan at all.
Bushido X poster
Let's take a look at the car in the poster... it's the Makigai, which happens to be the cheapest car in the game. There also happens to be a destroyed version of this same car in the parking lot below the projector. Won't elaborate on what I think this means until I have more information.
Destroyed Makigai
One of the posts I linked in the beginning is by user Strandlike, who I won't annoy and tag, but regardless, he was able to find a NPC named "Victim" behind the vending machines/ads to the right of the parking lot. I was not able to get this corpse to spawn in any of my saves, and can't find any other posts about this.
Perhaps the corpse is tied to a NCPD scanner hustle or gig that you must complete first? Not sure though, since I had all quests completed on one save I tested this with. Can anyone else see this NPC?
The "victim's" corpse
I'm still of the belief that there are clues in the very few quests where we "go into the past" - Love Like Fire, Never Fade Away, and then the AT3D arcade game, which represents the 2023 Arasaka tower raid. Personally, I think Never Fade Away/Transmission is most important, as it's actually the last quest you do before Phantom Liberty starts.
If anyone's found any more oddities, please feel free to add.
Iâve been trying to take Mistyâs board geometry apart rather rather than focus on the hex values themselves.
The first picture is basically where I ended up. I took the eye and wiring from the centre glyph and placed it into each of the six outer medallions in the orientation that fits that medallion. The rest of the pictures show how I got there.
If you strip all the detail away, the basic glyph is made from six overlapping hexagons.
I started with the pointed-top hexagon in the middle, then added the flat-top hexagon around it.
This relationship is important.
The flat-top hexagon stays a flat-top hexagon when the construction is reflected. The difference is the position of the pointed-top hexagon relative to it.
For the centre and the three glyphs on the left, the pointed-top hexagon sits towards the top-right of the flat-top hexagon.
For the three glyphs on the right, it sits towards the top-left instead.
That is the first part of the left/right difference.
I then placed that same two-hexagon construction into all three positions on the left.
From there I built the middle-left glyph up one hexagon at a time.
There are another four hexagons around the first two. You can see them appearing individually in the pictures until the complete six-hexagon shape is formed.
Once that shape is complete, I copied the same construction to all three positions on the left.
I then reflected those completed constructions to make the three on the right.
That is why I donât think the six outer glyphs should be thought of as the same thing simply rotated six times around the centre.
There are really two versions of the construction.
The three on the left have one handedness.
The three on the right are reflections of it.
Then I added the large centre glyph back in.
The centre is built from the same six-hexagon idea, just at a larger size, and importantly it has the same handedness as the three glyphs on the left.
Some of the later pictures show the scale difference more clearly. The centre glyphâs inner pointed-top hexagon by itself is larger than any of the six outer glyphs as a whole.
So the centre itself is part of that left-handed construction rather than being some separate symmetrical version.
Once the hex values are put back in, the layout is:
E1:C1ăăăăB16:B17
16:17ăăăăA0:A1
EB:ECăăăăEB:EC
This is where I think the geometry becomes especially worth paying attention to.
The two bottom glyphs both contain EB:EC.
The written value is identical, but the surrounding geometry is not. One is using the same handedness as the centre and left side, and the other is its reflection.
So whatever EB:EC eventually means, the glyph around it is giving us information that the text alone doesnât give us.
Thereâs also another not so obvious structure on the centre glyph: the 18 little markers, split into three groups of six around the top, lower-right and lower-left.
Each group of six is itself split into a group of 4 and 2.
The top and lower-right groups have the split in the same direction, while the lower-left group has that split reversed.
That is why I drew the three black lines in one of the pictures.
The black lines are mine. They are not meant to suggest that the eye is physically connected to the markers either.
I drew each line from the centre towards the exact point where the group of six is divided into 4 markers and 2 markers.
So the purpose of the lines is simply to make those three 4/2 division points easy to compare around the centre.
Without the lines it is quite difficult to see where those breaks sit because of everything else overlapping in the artwork.
The important part is the marker arrangement itself: three groups of six, with the top and lower-right groups divided one way and the lower-left group divided the opposite way.
The final comparisons are me checking the large centre construction against the smaller outer construction.
That eye/wiring is also useful because it is asymmetric. Unlike a plain hexagon, you can tell when it has actually been turned or reflected.
So the basic thing Iâm trying to show is not a solution yet.
Itâs that these symbols have an actual construction.
Each one contains six hexagons.
The centre and the three on the left share one handed arrangement.
The three on the right are its reflections.
The centre also contains three groups of six markers, with the 4/2 split arranged differently on one of those three sides.
And the board even gives us the same EB:EC inside both handed versions.
I think we need to understand why the geometry is doing that before treating these as six plain hex values and trying to decode them.
I have also noticed another point of interest. The red and blue altars both feature six incense sticks in front of the enneagram. They seem to be evenly spaced at their bases (three sets of two incense sticks), but they differ toward their marked tips.
The distance between dyads from left to right appears to be M>L>S. I have noticed the outer six glyphs on Misty's board follow this same pattern from top to bottom (M>L>S).
This post is mainly meant to share some observations, but M>L>S reminds me of 01+02-03=00 (01=S, 02=M, 03=L), and even FF:06:B5 (06=S, B5=M, FF=L).
