The Hidden Holy Mountain Map

[raw kelp]

This documentation focuses on the 61-eye mapping of the Magick Disc to Holy Mountains, which produces a seemingly coherent (and very challenging) "hard mode" run.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zvwOEEfPqCvLjeTpD-nHVku2WFoZYg25OPoa8ifIZuM/edit?tab=t.0

I've left some new notes in the documentation compared to the original work, but no strong theory yet on what may be needed to turn this into an actionable run (if anything, I suspect a ruleset would be coming from some other possible puzzle, such as the wall messages).

[shy surge]

Trying to figure out why you labeled that column as M... Is it because it's the only column that has M when you go through them alphabetically like this?

I'm still not sure what's wrong with the original orders we came up with that started on the left side of each row though

[hushed star]

M for mountain

[shy surge]

🤔

[raw kelp]

M is hilariously overused in all of this btw. Mushrooms, Masters, Master of Masters, Mountain, Magick and variants, Map if you include this doc. There's a small inner rune image that fits in the center of the Disc that is just 8 M's in a radial pattern.

[shy surge]

I think that one might be unused

[raw kelp]

Practically, I should mention: the M is originally because the only place all rings line up exactly on the Magick Disc -- the eyes and the inner and outer rune rings -- is on the right side. It's 3 open eyes with an M on the top and bottom.

When mapping to the Holy Mountains, I chose the Mountain as a starting index because of the M. This choice was softly validated because the irregularity in the 17 eye ring was no longer an irregular pattern when it flowed into the next array line.

[shy surge]

I agree it should start there, but I think the irregularity also went away in the other order we looked at before

Like for example this order

- - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 
- - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -
- 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0
- - 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 - -
- 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 - -

Looks like this one starts at the top though

I think the main problem with interpreting these as a map or an order to go through the game though is there doesn't seem to be any kind of feedback on whether you've done it correctly. Like we had been trying previously to disable portals where the closed eyes were, and that seems equally plausible, but again no confirmation of whether you did it right

[raw kelp]

This is the biggest issue, yes. I don't think we're meant to use this map in a vacuum, but I do think the relationship to Holy Mountains is intentional and a map in this ballpark is a good candidate.

From a game design perspective, the Normal mode is functionally structured to support it, it has a great challenge curve, and everything needed was out in 1.0. By contrast, open/closed portals is less likely to me, as there's a likelihood of worms outright preventing you from progress.

But I wouldn't rule anything out, I just think we need more context if there's something here. This is just a nice dangling carrot for figuring out that context.

[shy surge]

Well, there's a perk to prevent worm digging... But yeah, I think the other issue with checking the active state of portals is that they wouldn't all be loaded at the same time.

I do think this binary sequence could be relevant as a key for the eyes somehow, or as a part of the mechanism -- I'm sure you've seen the earthquake gears thing I worked on, that ties these things together pretty closely while creating a cipher that shows most of the properties we see in the eyes.

[raw kelp]

The what what what

link me

[raw kelp]

Something that has bothered my interest in binary btw:

The biome-specific mapping constraints can produce ASCII letters, but constrains the possible range because the 6th and 7th columns (in binary, rows in the table) will always be only on or off. If I recall, Magic or Magick would all fit in that constrained range (if this isn't in the version in the doc, I'll go find the specific transformation that makes this possible). So I kind of... just want that to be the result, but can't justify any reason to position the letters that way? lol

[shy surge]

#1227365285791666176 message

I think the repeating patterns are simple enough that it wasn't meant to be ascii... Also not a multiple of 7 or 8 bits

[raw kelp]

Read downward as columns instead, and (in your example) invert the 1s and 0s:

- - 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -
- 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0
- - 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 - -
- 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 - 
0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 - - ```

I can't easily copy the table over, but the mapping by biome produces 11????1 which means everything lands in the ascii range, if read vertically downward. And it's entirely plausible that we're allowed to move the rings left and right to realign (album cover art shows exactly this, for example).

Interestingly, that this is only 7 bits, and we have a Mana effect that provides a whole extra row of eyes, also suggests there's an 8 bit data structure available to us.

[shy surge]

What ascii text would it be? That's not very many letters if it was meant to be read that way...

[raw kelp]

I agree, it's not many letters. In my case, I haven't been exploring using ASCII from binary as an actual source of any substantial amount of text. I consider the eye rings to be likely separate from that, maybe related in some way such as providing the functional structure (the 17 eye ring can easily map to BDMAGICK_EFHJLNOP, for example).

Where ascii could be useful is if it confirmed a correct configuration to the holy mountain alignments. It's more "huh, that would be neat if magic was literally spelled out, I wonder if it's used as confirmation that we did something right", though the implication of that is "maybe I didn't do something right" and nothing that inspires any sort of confidence lol.

[sudden kayak]

i dont see the attempted runs in this chat, but did anyone try just setting up a tp chain to "follow" the map, like hit them in order in x time, likely under a minute so that you have to setup some goldberg machine?

[hardy estuary]

How can you tell which portals are the ones we're supposed to be going through i keep re reading the document but I'm not understanding how we found that specific portals need to be taken

[shrewd sand]

I just count from the right, which is part of the problem, if you dip a toe into the holy mountain area or accidentally fall into the wrong portal it possibly invalidates the whole run.

On this note, I may try to complete the run again, I haven't made an attempt in a while, last time I did I ventured up to the Altar in order to see if anything changed, which possibly invalidated it.

[unique sinew]

Hello all! I am a Noita noob/pleb, however I am a student in Cybersecurity who has quickly gained an interest in Noita's eye messages. While I'm still catching up, I'm happy to see a group of people have also made similar observations about the eyes relationship to the Holy Mountain portals.

From what I've read of this document so far it seems to be the most solid interpretation. The eye glyphs seem to be closely tied into the game world and Noita itself has likely been designed with them as a "rooted feature" of sorts due to the eye glyphs being present since release.

Something else I've noticed is that eye imagery is very present throughout the map, primarily abstractly, though I'm sure many have already noticed that.

[steel plaza]

happy to see this still alive hehe

[simple thunder]

Sorry i did not read through all of that, but lately i was thinking about this theory too. But instead of the portals i think of the basins that may have to be filled with a specific liquid or not. We often have pre filled basins. Maybe its possible to map them out.

I didn't have time to check any of that yet. But that's what's been on my mind for a couple of weeks and i will give it some more thoughts when i have more time...

[spiral orbit]

Is it possible that one must “close” the eyes that aren’t listed in the path by destroying all eyes except the provided “open” eyes, and just doing the loop in the same fashion otherwise?

I understand that it would be mechanically much harder to accomplish, but Noita is a game of knowledge formulating power for the player.

[shy surge]

The pre-filled basins are completely random, we have checked the code for that

[shy surge]

I've tried destroying the liquid in the eyes according to a few different orders, which didn't seem to do anything, but I haven't tried going through the portals in a specific order after that... It feels to me like there are too many ways to do that though

[spiral orbit]

To me it seems that one would simply ensure the dismantling of every portal that isn't a portal they'd use on one of the provided routes in the document up until they complete the loop fully.

Correct me if I am misplaced somehow in such, or are you saying to me that you have already done that fully?

[shy surge]

I have done that, with a couple different interpretations of which portals should be on or off, but I'm not sure what is supposed to happen if you do it correctly

[spiral orbit]

Unfortunately I don't think anyone is sure of such.

[raw kelp]

I need to find some time to refresh myself on this, it's been a number of months - also btw @spiral orbit I love the comments from what I've seen catching up. 😅

I had this brief idea early this year that the wall messages might contain recipes. It wasn't related to the holy mountain portals at the time. The basic idea was that a number of special words on the wall messages start to sound like materials -- Dimensions = Diamonds, Money = Honey, Time = Slime, that kind of thing.

Circling back, tonight I found that the most frequently-repeated word in the wall messages, "You," appears 61 times. Same as holy mountain portals. (funnily, if you expand it to include your/youve/youre you get 83, and 83 comes up w/ punctuation as well)

If I have time (not sure I do), I would take another look at the wall messages and see if they can cleanly map to portals in some way that provides testable data, and if so, also sanity check whether the materials from words could be a thing too (the fill-basins-with-specifical-material idea).

[astral pelican]

Buried eye

[raw kelp]

I'm taking another look at this in light of three findings with the Master Transformations:

1. Independent of anything in this document, each biome in the main progression can be tied to a specific god, and that god is concretely tied to a Master transformation. It's been a while since I looked at the Magick Disc in depth but I realized that the biome map lines up exactly with the interpretation in this document.

2. The Master transformation is plainly shown for two of these. As follows:

The Master of Teleportation, which was determined to be a top-to-bottom transformation, is directly shown in the movement of a pyramid layer to the lowest layer of the main path biomes (Temple of the Art). This also may have flipped over rather than translated down, evidened by the darker walls and the use of "statue_back" instead of the "statue" used in the pyramid.

The Master of Polymorphing, which was determined to be mirror symmetry or an equivalent rotation, has a direct match in the Hourglass chamber, which flips where it appears during runs.

The third transformation is also present and accounted for:

The Master of Blinding, which was determined to be a 90 or 180 degree turn, is present in the form of the Munkki statues, which represent Tuoni, a Kalevala god of darkness and the dead. These statues show the turn we would expect.

The reason I separate that from the other two:

I've been taking a quick look back at the initial binary interpretation, since the entire thing is already in the ascii range.

One of the challenges with the original interpretation is that the Jungle and Vault (the final transformation) will always align 1s and 0s, such that half the alphabet could never be produced (technically not a big deal for the word magick, iirc).

I know that applying this kind of transformation can break the row patterning, and I'm hoping to find that when applied to a logical pivot point, a simple transformation will produce a clear word. Ideally "Magick" or "Wand", since both would be unmistakable validation in the few letters available.

But it would require picking a pivot point correctly. I notice that the staff is held along the outside of a ring, so I may test against the statue spawn radius (there's a defined ring they can spawn iirc). Fungal Cavern spots as well ofc.

Here's hopin'. So many places to test these transformations once they're on lock, but I'm sanity checking against places that might offer a confirmation of this rule first. 🤞

[raw kelp]

I can get MAGICK without an insane amount of complication, but it feels absolutely dirty how I did it. So I need to either figure out something more sensible or find something else to test this on, lol.

The dirty in this case was treating the snow/poly layers sort of literally like an hourglass shape - the bits on the top row flip sides and go down to the bottom, but the bits already at the bottom don't change.

[drifting veldt]

Wasn't 83 relevant to eyes too or am I mistaken?

[drifting veldt]

Yeah I just looked back, 83 is relevant to eyes

Seems like a pretty important connection

[grim raven]

can the HM map be done without casting a wand or picking anything up like at all?

like, can the path be done by purely walking without "tampering" with the world?

[glass plinth]

im not certain it could be because you would have to find some way around the collapsed holy mountain the second time through once you get past the snowy depths no?

oh also one thing i think is worth noting is that the symbol at the center of the magick circle resembles the symbol on the work
it doesn't match it 1 to 1 but it would reinforce the idea that its a map leading to something and not just a symbol they like

[grim raven]

yes, I know, that's one of the reasons why I'm asking

it's just vertically mirrored

[spiral orbit]

IIRC no flags exist for picking up and throwing a tablet.

You could just tablet dig your way through the collapsed HM.

[steel plaza]

what about the lake hut

or anvil for that matter

bring the treasure here too

[spiral orbit]

I stand corrected.

[hardy estuary]

any more trials on this?

[hidden crescent]

.

[hardy estuary]

?

[hidden crescent]

.. i ask the same question.

that is all

[shy surge]

What do you expect to happen? I've done a few runs going through the portals in different orders, and deactivating certain portals, according to guesses like this, but it's not like any message is going to pop up when you do it

[hardy estuary]

not to sure just was trying to see if he was doing anything with it still running his theories