Working on no signal offline today, to focus on the writing without the distraction of streaming and chatting.

I’ve been occasionally checking the chat log I’ve had with Tanuki about how the story should go, but I’ve never really compiled notes in one place that is easy to look up, so I suppose I should do that here now.

At the beginning of the game, you play as Spirit controlling the PGEIST. During this part of the game, you find hints and clues as to what is going on and, as a last-ditch attempt, you build a research vessel to send into the black hole.

To pass this part of the game, you need to find two key items:

• Bobby has been designing an experimental hull for a ship that can withstand the tidal forces of a black hole better than anything before it.
• Naoko is working on an equation for a new potential type of engine, which can potentially unlock FTL travel. However, she hid it after she showed it to Yuri who pointed out a few easy mistakes rudely. She then finishes a prototype design with the required materials.
  • When you go to Naoko’s room, there’s a key for a lockbox on her table, but you don’t know where the lockbox is.
  • In the dialog where Yuri is rude to Naoko, Yuri is so rude that Naoko starts crying. So, he chides her and tells her get over it by confiding in Neil to dry her tears and get back to work
  • In Neil’s computer, you find a dialog where Neil and Naoko are talking about what happened, and Naoko talks about how she thinks it’s important but doesn’t want Yuri to accidentally find out she’s still working on it — so Neil suggests she put the information in the lockbox.
  • The lockbox isn’t in Neil’s room, but you find a dialog where Spirit stumbles across it in one of the labs where Neil often works and asks Neil what it is. Spirit puts it back where it was.

You also need three pieces of information:

• Neil calculated a new trajectory during part of his research out of boredom. This trajectory optimizes for a fast way to send a vessel as close to the event horizon for as long as possible, heightening the chance that data could be transmitted out of the event horizon. He even gets the idea from Yuri’s Shark Spaghettification Project.
• While helping Neil with the trajectory, Nevaeh found that objects nearing lightspeed around the black hole were experiencing more time dilation than expected. After doing more tests, she uses this information to correct the use of thrust on the vessel to achieve the correct speeds.

However, it’s at this point when you try to send the research vessel into the black hole that the PGEIST breaks. You find yourself in first person mode in a station that is even more run down, and it’s behind the event horizon. This part of the game is short.

During this sequence, the player learns that Spirit has been building a larger version of the experimental vessel and has been rewiring the station in an attempt to overclock the prototype drive that Naoko made in an attempt to achieve FTL travel. All the player needs to do is finish rewiring the vessel to complete the game.