Where does Outer Wilds put its Pocket Dimensions?

I wonder if they could have loaded the nodes inside the sun instead?

Should've put it in the sun

I saw one of these black spheres when exploring the area around the eye of the universe

Hmmmmmmmmmm yes



I understood non of that

"the intention was for you to immediately go explore Dark Bramble"

Bro I put off Dark Bramble so much cause I was terrified 😭. I launched my scout into the seed on Timber Hearth early in the game and it took me 15 hours to go explore Dark Bramble

I mean, I'm not a game dev, so maybe I'm a dumbass, but maybe could've made the sun hollow and hid it there? It's not like you'll be able to go into the hollow part ever without doing bramble stuff?

I didn't ever notice that, I'm not sure how I didn't notice that either

Neat

You have amazing eye for detail my dude. And the questions that you ask are really high-quality. I'm a dev and I never thought about how the game is made while playing. I guess it's good from one angle because I can enjoy the sausage without caring how it's made but yeah this is amazing stuff.
This game is something else entirely.

Unfortunate to hear stories of players accidentally finding this sphere early on and getting frustrated over trying to investigate it. Hopefully devs make a patch at some point to camouflage the sphere so there's no risk of losing players because of it

Very interesting

How have i never seen anyone find the bramble sphere before

800 hours comes out to just about 2200 consecutive loops. Assuming no deaths!

There was an amusing part of Preach's Outer Wilds playthrough related to this. He played the game in a pretty early version, and he seemingly encountered a bug with the scout in the seed. When he opened his map, the map showed the scout at Dark Bramble's interior location, but the regular HUD showed it at the Dark Bramble planet.

Unfortunately he didn't spot the giant sphere in the sky, but he did notice a spherical object (where the map claimed the scout was) blocking out the background stars on the map down there, so he thought there was another black hole or something of the sort there (he grew a bit obsessed with black holes after somehow falling through the brittle hollow one at least 5 times per loop).
If anyone wants to go have a look, his playthrough is unlisted for some reason but you can find it among the playthrough playlists on the channel. It's on his highlights channel rather than VODs channel for whatever reason.

Echo's of the eye inspiration?

How the f*** did you spend 800 hours playing outer wilds?

Feels like a Dyson Sphere. Also, this game terrifies me so much that I have had to alt-f4 out a few times or have a heart attack.

Dude I remember seeing this dark circle and thinking it was a huge revelation Lmfao that answers the biggest question I had after beating the game

Funny how the ominous sphere kinda looks like the Stranger. I wonder if anyone's ever gone to it by accident after seeing the radio tower photos 😂

Whoa, that's really interesting. I had no idea it worked like that. I almost think I've seen the Bramble orb before but I was positioned weird and assumed it was the Quantum Moon or The Stranger

Trophied the base game, didn't notice!!

That really cool... kinda wonder though too, if noticing the bramble sphere lead to some inspiration for the DLC as well. 🤔

y'know, it's a little surprising that the devs didn't take whatever invisibility filter the Stranger has going on and slap it onto the DB marble. it would probably be noticeably taxing for something that the player is so unlikely to notice, but i'm pretty sure i've seen videos like this before EotE came out.

I wonder why they had to do that and not just have it be a separate world that doesn't exist within the same scene. Is it a Unity limitation?

If the pocket dimension is the size of the sun ... why didn't they put it inside the sun ?

Huh, I find it hard to imagine I didn't notice a massive black sphere in the sky every time I had a scout in the dark bramble

It occurs to me that the idea for the Stranger might originally have been a reference to the black sphere that contains Dark Bramble's level geometry.

What did you do in Outer Wilds for 800 hours?? Game + DLC took me 25 and I think I saw almost everything. Is most of your time spent analyzing the technical aspects?

Ive always wondered why they didnt just load in dark bramble areas inside the sun

I never thought it would be so poorly hidden, lol.

Then again, I never noticed. I guess it works for 99% of the players or so.

An interesting factoid is that in Outer Wilds, the player is the center of the coordinates system. As far as the coordinates system is concerned, its the solar system that moves around the player, not the other way around.

So yeah, teleporting the player to a very far away point could cause the entire solar system' physics simulation to become inaccurate.

I assume the reason why they made the player character the center of the coordinates system is for that same reason: they want the most accurate physics calculations to be the ones happening in the immediate vicinity of the player.

I didn't know the moon of Timber heart was the fragment of a exploded planet. The more you know...

What makes this game design great and so deeply memorable is also what makes it cruel. And it is the fact that it is an entirely experience based game. And you must cherish every moment, regardless of how puzzling or frustrating it might be, because it's an experience you can only have once.

You don't come out of exploring areas with leveled up traits or upgraded gear, you don't collect, grind, clean rooms or even defeat bosses. This game inverts the usual gameplay cycle. Progress is made through exploration and experience alone, so not only do you progress in order to experience, you must experience in order to progress.

And experience is something unique, and it is immensely difficult to craft an universe that can provide us with that, and yet it can only be had once.

So a game that has this unique take in gameplay and story telling is very, very rare. It takes a colossal amount of work to craft something that can only be experienced once. It is not very profitable, dare I say, and the reason we won't have another Outer Wilds very soon. And that is cruel. Very cruel.

What about the various surfaces of the Quantum Moon, or the dream world in Echoes of the Eye?

I found this early on and tried to get into it because it was the sixth location.

One thing to note about floating point error is that they actively have the solar system move around the player, not vice-versa. So whichever bodies are closest to the player will always be safest from floating point anomalies due to the player's coordinates being 0,0 at all times.
So in theory it's fine when the player is going through bramble to have it be far outside the solar system, but not so much when the probe is in it.

No such thing as playing too much Outer Wilds

No wonder when you send the probe into that seed and then look at your map, one of the duplicate signals points to that area.

I always wondered why upon flying too far, all my minimap started having a seizure! This video explains it!

After leaving my scout inside Dark Bramble's seed I left and went on to explore the radio tower, where I realised there is another hidden body in the solar system. I saw that dark circle then and I thought that was it lol, a hidden dark planet, not dissimilar to the quantum moon.

They should have just put it inside the sun

It's just a once-in-a-lifetime game, I reckon.

Game altered my brain chemistry, dude.

It's at that spot for when the sun explodes so that the explosion is at approximately the same distance as Dark Bramble, so you get killed, and get killed at the same time as if you were at Dark Bramble.


You need to travel pretty far outside the solar system for the floating point issue to become a problem, so they could have easily placed it much farther out away from sight.

This is really fascinating stuff. Even if it is just some dev infrastructure and has no actual significance to the world, I got the same cosmic horror pit in my stomach I get with a lot of this game when I flew into/near it. I think I have some kind of phobia I'm not totally sure the name of. XD

..How can you have 800 hours? There's not more than like 50 hours worth of content.

This is really cool! Thanks for covering it. It's always interesting to see the inner workings of games. So much goes on behind the scenes to create a game that you can lose yourself in

I find this kind of stuff amazing, it's just such an elegant way to conceal what otherwise look like a very complicated thing to do. It'd be a problem if you could realistically stumble upon it in a normal playthrough but honestly it's unlikely and even if you did you can't enter it and the black sphere will just feel like a curiosity of the universe, some mystery and that's cool too.

This is fascinating

coulda put the black sphere inside the sun no? but that would also require the sun to have special gravity and lighting exceptions for objects inside it.

How about The Quantum Moon?