Outer Wilds thread

A thread for a game I just beat yesterday, but I do have a question. The general consensus in game is that the Sun along with all the other stars are at the end of their natural lifespan and they all explode but then I read on the wikia "Approximately 20 minutes into the cycle (2 minutes until the sun goes supernova) , the Interloper will collide with the sun and be destroyed." And since the Interloper is still chock full of condensed Ghost Matter, was the Sun really at the end of its lifespan or was it the Interloper colliding into the Sun and releasing all that Ghost Matter causing the Sun to go supernova?

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The interloper has nothing to do with the sun's supernova. It was at the end of its natural lifespan. Doesn't make much sense that literally all of the stars start dying within a 22 minute period, but whatever.
The interloper collides with the sun because it dramatically expands into a red giant, intercepting its course

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The Sun Station outright states that the Sun is at the end of its life cycle.
The Interloper only collides because the Sun has already evolved into a red giant; the larger size intercepts the Interloper's otherwise perfect loop.
I don't think there's any more condensed Ghost Matter on the Interloper, but even if there was it only kills organic life, the extreme cooling properties of GM wouldn't cause a supernova.
The entire universe is at the end of its natural lifespan, which is why as you said all of the stars explode, not just ours.

The 22 minutes was an arbitrary number the Nomai came up with.

the ghost matter contained in the interloper was a massive quantity that covered the whole galaxy in an instant during the time of the momai. what remains within it during the hearth Ian era is a tiny fragment of that. it's not significant enough of a quantity to do anything. chert n
spends the whole loop noticing signs of the sun supernovaing and gradually becomes more insane the later you are in the loop. it's just a natural sun explosion.

Is the DLC worth it?

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yes

Yes, but take a break between completing the main game and tackling the dlc. It works best as a "revisiting the world of Outer Wilds one last time" thing. Do it on your old save, don't reset for it.

It's an arbitrary number the devs came up with.
22 minutes is just the maximum amount of time travel the Nomai could produce with the energy from a supernova.

Judging by the DLC, the Eye of the Universe artificially causes the abrupt end of the universe, which is why the sun goes through its final phases so quickly and all of the other stars explode at the same. The Elks got scared and blocked the Eye precisely because they saw it emitting a red glow and killing everything.
It's either that or just a coincidence and the small timeframe is just an abstract.

the eyes signal is not what causes the end of the universe. it's a radio wave beckoning other lifeforms to come to it before the universe ends. so that they can partake in the new ones creation.
the eye of the universe is like a boy on the street crying about the end times. the end times are coming whether you listen to him or not. that event is distinct from his existence.

Agreed. It would be too weird to interrupt your first playthrough with.

> even though they are far apart from one another, all the travelers are playing the same song
>they all join each other for a final concert at the end of the universe
it's so beautiful that it makes me bawl like a lil' baby bitch

you guys should be using spoiler tags

Not exactly. When a concious observer comes into contact with the Eye, the universe collapses and a new one is born. The owls thought that the eye was something else, and when they discovered that they'd die if they interacted with the eye, they blocked the signal. The universe would end either way, but if no one found the eye, it wouldn't be reset, so the owl's would spend the longest amount of time possible drifting away in The Stranger.

The Eye doesn't cause the end of the universe, it just brings you to it.

There are many, many sources ingame that state the sun is reaching the end of its natural lifespan, and it has nothing to do with the interloper crashing into it. In fact, the interloper is already spent since, while there are some ghost matter crystals still inside its core, these are no longer active. Idk if you managed to explore it, but you can actually travel to the core of the interloper, which is where you find the logs detailing how the nomai died.

speaking of things that happen naturally and the interloper: was the the interloper busting open and covering the whole system in hot. sticky ghostmatter related to the noami finding the core or was it all a coincidence?

The stars weren’t all dying in 22 minutes
The eye just was fast forwarding

In the ash twins project, there's a wall scroll that reveals the exact moment when the interloper was approaching the solar system for the first time. Judging from this scroll, and the logs you find inside the comet itself, we can safely say that the ghost matter was already under enormous amounts of pressure. I assume that its increasing proximity to the sun was the straw the broke the camel's back and made it rupture

i believe this is just a gameplay concession. I don't get why people fixate so much over the 22 minute cycles or how the universe is dying so quickly. I hate to use this reference since i despise these games, but sports games also have shortened matches. Even though the in-game clocks reach full time, the actual time passes much faster depending on your settings, so the players don't have to sit through long matches. This is how i think about outer wilds, a sped up microcosm for the sake of gameplay.

Pretty sure it was a coincidence. The highly volatile, hyper-dense core of ghost matter simply ruptured as the comet travelled too close to the sun. This happened before the trio investigating the comet could warn any other Nomai, because ironically the only way they could reach the core was because the sun melted the ice layer on the comet.
Also the proto-Hearthians survived because we were still aquatic, and Ghost Matter is neutralised while in water.

It gets even better if you meet Solanum and beat the DLC

Rather than being a microcosm, I prefer to explain is as the entire universe and its physics system being microcosmic in nature. The planets are too small to be planets, and the sun is far too small to be a function star. At least those would be true in our universe, but the OW universe is simply tweaked differently. I think it's safe to say the Hearthians and Nomai experience the days in mere "minutes" like we do, but it's normal for them. It's also worth noting that we know relatively little about their daily rituals. We know they sleep, but can't prove they would sleep only during night, for example. Our character can certainly doze off for several days at a time.

But ultimately this is thinking too hard about something that is first and foremost a gameplay abstraction.

As good an explanation as any, at least if you want to ground this game in our universe. But it's as you say; it's too much thinking for a gameplay abstraction. It's not there to be questioned, but rather as a baseline—there many other more pressing concerns in this rather than worrying about the backdrop and rules of the game's universe imo.

Also, it's not like the Hearthian sun was the last star in the universe to go supernova. The Vessel even has some real time nomai messages aobut them going to a relatively stable galaxy or something like that.

Speaking of which, it was pretty sobering to sit there in the Vessel and watch all the stars die, including your home star, leaving behind a completely black void. That’s the only time you get to see the empty universe, because your home star usually explodes and kills you before then.

Yeah I did explore the asteroid, and there's still some giant boulders of ghost matter in there at the bottom, which is why I thought there was still some inert ghost matter left over