Details you may have missed in Outer Wilds

Hello everyone! Outer Wilds is such an expansive game that some of the details get overlooked. But so much love and care was put into just about every corner of the game. So I figure itd be cool to put together a little compilation of a bunch of them for everyone! Hope you guys enjoy!
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[StewartStewart]

11:10 Honestly, it's probably just so you can see the symbol from space.

[danielchin]

Programmer: wakes up at midnigh: "I need to make super nova ignite marshmolow"

[lexerphthisi]

My favorite little tidbit: in the first loop, while talking about the memory statues, Hal mentions that your ship’s computer was built from the same kind of stone taken from another statue. Thereby explaining why your ship’s log maintains information even after the time loop.

It’s such a cool little detail that they didn’t need to explain, but did.

[evangelionmann]

another fun (sad) bit about seeing the universe explode from the eye, while watching, you can point your signal scope at your system, and listen to the music from the explorers there. as the star explodes, you can hear the music fade out one by one as each planet dissappears.

[TheScrombler]

Another little detail I noticed is at the start of every loop you look up at giant’s deep and blink a little, but if you were to wake up with the quantum moon orbiting giant’s deep it actually disappears when you blink

[TheLizardWizard_thend]

If you damage the deep space beacon (raming it with your ship for example) you'll find that you're no longer able to use the map until the next loop.

[lm]

One of my favorite details is the fact that the probe cannon found the eye after 9, 318, 054 firings, and the number of the current launch actually goes up with each loop that passes.
Considering each loop is 22 minutes long, that means we were in the time loop for 389 years, 276 days, 21 hours, and 48 minutes before we were linked to the statue.

[ebirahdeep]

When you make it to the Eye, if you shoot your probe out into the smoke, you won't be able to recall it

It will however show up billions of years later after the games credits

[ignaciotamba]

That last star to blow up, the one that took a little longer, that must be where the rest of the Nomay are, since they claimed to have found the most stable star, the one that would last the longest. It's kind of sad to see it blow up like the others did

[kinrah]

One thing I liked as soon as I discovered it was that, as opposed to 'saving' Brittle Hollow by knocking away the meteors, you can actually *hurry it up* by crashing your ship into the planet. It does a little bit of integrity loss each time, and with enough solid collisions, you can pretty much make any piece fall on your schedule.

[bbborbo]

one of my favorite details in the game was how, in the nomai mines on timber hearth, the nomai remarked how they mined so much metal that if they needed any metal it would likely prevent any future civilizations from exploring advanced metallurgy. and then, if you take a look at the architecture/constructions of the hearthnians, you can actually tell that they use very little metal if at all, and instead use mostly wood even in the spacecraft you pilot - which reflects how the nomai consumed so much of timber hearth's metals!

[tbotalpha]

One little thing I only just noticed: Hearthians have 4 eyes, which shows in the player's vision. When the player opens their eyes at the start of each loop, the screen fades in with two separate lines, as the player-character opens both sets of eyes. And when they get injured, a white haze appears across the screen, in the same double-line pattern.

[Umbra]

The Hearthians ancestors being underwater creatures is probably also what saved their lives at the time of the ghost matter extinction event, as ghost matter is ineffective under water

[RpTheHotrod]

Another detail, despite being in a timeloop, every time you wake up, you'll notice that the orbital probe cannon will be firing in a different direction. This is because it received data from the last loop and "checked off" that probe trajectory as complete and now will be attempting a new trajectory not previously attempted.

[najwan]

i don't know if everyone already realized this (because i certainly didn't), but the texts that appear when you put in projection stones can appear in either blue and orange. this color-coding signify which texts are _written_ by the sender and which texts are _received_ by the sender respectively. the nomai use these messaging boards to communicate with each other remotely, so that's probably why it's the way that it is. i thought that was a neat touch.

[MurderWho]

So fun thing, if you pop a scout high enough in the quantum moon's atmosphere, most notably on the quantum shrine just above the cloud cover, you can track it after leaving the moon!

You can then make the moon disappear from the galaxy by looking at the entire galaxy in the map, panning the map to leave the QM off the map, and repeat if necessary until you force it to the 6th location.


Where the scout will be. You can fly to the scout and . . . see the lights of the quantum shrine floating beneath the shrine!

You can land on the moon there, but it all it does is game exception -> instadeath, presumably from the QM trying to load itself up and getting nothing.

Still fun to know that the QM's 6th location has a physical, and even reachable, location in game :)

[pretzelbomb]

I have a simple theory for the different suits colors.

Nomai are likely entirely space-faring, meaning any dyes they use would likely be entirely synthetic from mined asteroids or desolate planets. The group that landed on Brittle Hollow found a mineral-rich world (the crystals) and thus were able to continue making their suits as normal. The ones on Ember Twin, however, had no such luck and so were forced to use natural dyes: the native cacti!

[flamesword]

Two more little details:
1.There's a nomai on hollow lantern that appears as the lava drains
2. The devs updated the ash twin project to open when powered. If you go there during the nova and jump in the black hole you can find a copy of yourself from the previous loop in the ash twin

[thomasmaddox]

My favorite detail is the fact that the Nomai orb controls are pretty awkward for us to use in game, but for the Nomai themselves it would actually be very ergonomic because they could use their third eye to manipulate the controls while also looking at / doing something else

[vincenturquhart]

One really cool detail is the artificial gravity in the ash twin project. When I saw the togglable artificial gravity option I initially assume it was a gravity wall like every other gravity wall in the game, however on closer inspection you see that there is no blue glow like other gravity walls because the gravity is actually just the Centrifugal force which is created by the spinning of the platform you are on and when you turn the gravity off the platform just stops spinning.