Secrets of the Secret Library

This is one of the articles that was submitted to the contest and won 6th place. It was written by Acolyte Storm

Secrets of the Secret Library

By Acolyte Storm

Ah, the Secret library. A nostalgic hunting ground that has had thousands of players spend countless hours hunting. While it has long since lost its title as the best hunting ground in Tibia, it still gets hunted on a daily basis by teams of many levels. Yet, the library is enormous, and the popular hunted areas often completely skip by certain parts. It’s completely possible to hunt years in the Library without even seeing half of it.

Add to the fact that solo exploration is still extremely dangerous, even at high levels, and it makes me wonder if there’s more to the Library than meets the eye.

So let’s dig into some Secrets of the Secret Library!

Access quest

In the final part of the Museum portion of the access quest, you go into a room with a bunch of Lava Golems. It’s a hectic fight, as there are many creatures that hit fairly hard. The goal is to step over some tiles to the north to read an inscription. When you do, what appears to be MANY random letters pop up. Most players miss this as the letters are orange, and there’s a lot of fire attacks happening.

For the immediate next part of the quest, we talk to Gareth, who helpfully decodes this random garbage. He says the following:

Gareth says the ‘Tibianus Cipher’ was used to decrypt this. We never hear of this again, or get any more details. It looks like a throwaway line to just explain how Gareth was able to translate this.

However… The Tibianus Cipher is real.

If we manually enter all that letter vomit (No copying and pasting Orange text ). It is:

rdmqswdmtpstaampisirdsdmlmuprmveqerr

deqsxajuqevsnjtaswejjqktqdrdsephjelilsqqt

libtasrdsrpurd

It looks like everyone has just trusted Gareth’s word, because I couldn’t find any references to people trying to manually translate this

Doing some substitution, we get the following:

Technically, as there is no G,J,K,Q,Y, or Z in the plain text, the corresponding cipher text could match any of the cipher text unused characters Z, Y, G, O, F or C (Represented by my red ticks in the above picture)

It’s a substitution cipher, and the Cipher text starts with THAIS mapping to ABCDE! It’s also possible that the unused cipher text G could map to Y, in which case the beginning of the Cipher Text key would be THAIS BY DE (or the joke being THAIS made BY DE (DE representing .de domains, for Germany).

It’s a direct match to what Gareth says! This proves with absolute certainty that the Tibianus Cipher is a real thing, and may have other applications in other parts of Tibia when we get too brief of a Cipher text to apply proper substitution solving methods. Can you think of any other instances of jumbled up letters that seemingly have no translation? If so, try to apply the Tibianus Cipher!

Entrance to the Secret Library

Near the end of the access question, Dedoras tells us how to access the secret library:

He’s completely correct. Upon using the Scythe, your character is teleported to the entrance to the Secret Library, and you see Orange Text in the corner showing that you said “Chamek Athra Thull Zathroth”

Dedoras never tells us what this phrase actually means or even what language it is. However lore lovers instantly recognize this as Demon language, seen in a couple of interesting places in Tibia.

For example, Demon’s love yelling ‘Chamek ath Uthul Arak’

We also know from this book (https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Spectres_Were_Everywhere_(Book))

That the famous phrase means ‘Sacrifice your blood’. The priest in the book refers to this as an ancient language of an extinct race. Interesting that the builders of the library would know this language…

So what does it mean? Both phrases share the word ‘Chamek’ which means either ‘blood’ or ‘sacrifice’, and have other words that are very close ‘Ath’ vs ‘Athra’ and ‘Uthul’ vs ‘Thull’. While the translation of Demon language could be its own huge article, I speculate that this means ‘Sacrifice <something> to Zathroth’. What and where would we sacrifice?

Now let’s do a quick tour of areas of interest

Ice Library

As we enter the Library, we first encounter the Ice Section. There is a bridge over the Great hall, allowing us to see below. Immediately we see 3 signs. They are the only 3 versions of these in the entire library, yet none of them say anything. Why do they exist, and is there a way to make them give useful information?

Head Southwest, we pass by a number of fire-shooting Metal Eyes, and make it to a grand auditorium. This is the primary area for Tibians looking to hunt in Ice Library. At the bottom floor, we see the entrance to the final boss fight (Scourge of Oblivion), with a sort of office directly to the north of it

In this office is a couple interesting things. There is a Magic Sphere just lying on the table, directly below that is a Yalaharian Inkwell. This is not a normal inkwell, and when it is attempted to be used, you get an Orange Text message of ‘You decide not to touch that’.

This is an interesting choice as there are several regular inkwells in the library. There is a Yalahari character in the final fight, https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Devourer_of_Secrets. This inkwell hints that this is his office. Additionally, there are 3 books in the various desks and bookshelves in this room, one of them being titled “The Mysteries of Yal’Rath Thah”, which is a very Yalaharian sounding name. None of the other mini-bosses in this fight have references throughout the Library, perhaps indicating that there is more to him than meets the eye. We’ll talk more on him in the boss section.

Heading East, we encounter the Great hall. A large Fireplace burns below a giant picture of Zathroth fighting Tsula

Very few people go here, as it’s not a spot in any common hunting path. There are 2 things of note. On the floor, slightly south-east of the above picture, there is an inscription which cannot be read. If you click it, it says the following:

There are a few of these throughout the Library, but they are quite rare. Is it possible to ‘read’ these in some way?

As to the actual fireplace, there is a secret switch to turn it off. If you click the Metal Eye to the right, all of the flames disappear

Behind it is a soot covered section of wall, and if you inspect it you see:

If you use any melee weapon on it, you can break this wall

You can now get behind the fireplace, and there’s a secret short cut to this door:

Note that this door cannot be initially opened from the other side, it will be locked to you until you open it from the fireplace’s side.

It’s interesting to note that this was directly hinted at in the Summer 2018 update announcement.

You can see the background character directly pressing something to the right of the fireplace (which we of course determined was the Metal Eye)

Going through the shortcut door, and then heading south, you will see signs on the wall. Each sign has 1 letter, and they go from A-Z (and an additional 27th sign for 0-9). While a video would be more suited to seeing the exact position of each number, the concept of a particular letter indicated a location of interest is possible.

Going up 1 floor, we encounter the most interesting place in the library. We encounter a creature called the Librarian

The Librarian will have its own section in the next article, there is a TON to say about it.

There are also 3 alcoves which we see our first Ostentatious Bookstands. Each alcove contains a Bookstand

The bookstands will also get their own section, and are extremely fascinating

Heading directly south, we see a statue of boots, along with a ladder up to a section of the Earth Library

This is the only instance of this particular statue in the entire Library, and seems to be obviously walking to the East, directly towards that ladder. We’ll examine this more in the Earth Library section

Continuing with this floor, if we head south we encounter 2 ‘bathrooms’ which are guarded by several very dangerous biting books.

These rooms are small, and have a table, a bathtub, and a weird wooden square that might be a trapdoor or toilet. None of them can interacted with in any way that I could find, and the bathtub cannot be filled with water (or ink ). Interestingly, 1 room has a natural comb spawn, and the other room has a natural handheld mirror spawn. Unfortunately, they are not in the below screenshots as people had already taken them on the test server, but the left room has the comb, and the right has the mirror.

Books do not need bathtubs. Books do not need combs. Who were these rooms for? While they don’t have anything to suggest that they’re currently occupied (like fresh food), is it possible that someone is living here? With how small and humble they are, it likely would not be someone prestigious.

Fire Library

Let’s move on to the Fire Library. Heading SW, we counter some narrow corridors, and hit the fire sections of book shelves for the Fire Section. We see similar burnt walls that we encounter behind the Great Fireplace, but none of them appear destructible

Directly south of this, we hit the Fire Antechamber. There are 2 inscription tiles here

If we open the door to the east there’s a few nooks and crannys…. And this:

A locked door with a passage behind it. There is no known way to open this door, and it’s difficult to tell where it goes. It is of course possible that it could just be a cruel trick, and not go anywhere. But this doesn’t seem likely as they introduce the concept of opening these locked doors via the one in Ice Library.

Slightly south of this is a room shaped like an Arrow

At the very tip of this arrow is an Ostentatious Bookstand

If we head west from here, then go south we encounter our second locked door

Like the other door, this clearly leads further south, with no known way to unlock it.

If we now head north, we run into many different small rooms with maps and paintings, and tons of strong creatures. We pass by one of the rare Magic Spheres on the ground

We then get to a small couch

There’s another rare inscription tile directly next to us here. It functions the exact same as the others (which is to say, we can’t read it). Even more interesting, directly to our north is a balcony and what is clearly a lower level. You can see that I threw a Thunderstorm rune down there, and when I attempt to move it, I get the ‘First go downstairs’ message.

What is this lower level? If we try to check on the map, it is completely unexplored

We can clearly see something is there, but no one has ever got in range to map it. Might it be just a few SQM for decoration? Maybe, but if we zoom out more, we see it’s extremely close to the 2 weird bathrooms from Ice Library

If there IS some way to go down those weird trapdoor-looking SQMs in these bathrooms, we are guaranteed that there is something below them.

In the floor immediately below this, we see 3 Magic Spheres

As well as another Ostentatious Bookstand

Energy Library

Let’s start in the most recognizable place in all Energy Library: The famous Safe-Spot:

If you’ve ever hunted Energy, or watched a streamer, you’ve seen this spot. You’re completely safe from monsters here and it’s a central location to gather your team. Yet the absolutely most visited location only has a single piece of decoration: a head of odd. This is not a unique statue, there are several other exact copies of it throughout library, but what’s strange about it is that you can’t really tell what it is. All other statues are easily identifiable, like a hand holding a quill. So what is this holding? To me, it looks like it’s holding a Magic Sphere. This is further reinforced by this room:

This room has a number of individual squares that can be levitated down in. Several of the individual SQMs have hand of odds, and one just has a Magic Sphere. Is there some way to ‘grab’ the loose Magic Spheres we find throughout the library?

Additionally, the name ‘hand of odd’ is… well, odd. We know by the fact that ‘odd’ is not capitalized that it is not a name. However, the grammar on it is strange, and thus the meaning is ambiguous. The word ‘odd’ can mean a few different things. It can mean something along the lines of strange or weird, or it can be used numerically to mean the opposite of ‘even’ (such as numbers 1,3,5 etc) or it can mean separated from something it would normally be paired with (this definition seems to fit the most, as it’s a single hand without a mate, but it is not at all a common way of saying this in English.

What exactly does CIP mean with its name, especially given how prominently it’s featured? Is it a numerical hint that an answer may be odd? Is that too much of a stretch? Maybe we’ll get some clues later on.

Moving on, directly south of this quite clearly a face in the map:

Want to guess what its eyes are? Metal Eyes

Want to guess what its nose is? An Ostentatious Bookstand

This is the only Ostentatious Bookstand in Energy Library.

Let’s look at this cute little guy’s fingers, are they pointing to something?

Would you look at that? He’s pointing to both locked in Fire Library! The top finger even has an extra red pixel on the map to help clarify the direction

I know what you’re saying, ‘Ok Acolyte, that’s just a coincidence, he could be pointing to areas directly by those doors’

Well, let’s take a look at his OTHER hand.

Huh, I wonder what that top finger is pointing at?

It’s a locked door, with a Metal Eye on it, and a staircase behind that door!

Come on CIP, this has to be intentional.

Directly to the west of this door is another view to an area we cannot map (just like the one in fire library). Again, I can throw a rune downstairs to it, but there’s no way to know if there’s additional stuff we cannot see.

To be fair, there is precedent in Energy library for things to be visible from a floor above, and only be a few SQM in reality when we go down to see them. But, there’s also precedent for the opposite.

To continue this floor, we have one more locked door. It’s a unique situation in that it doesn’t appear to go anywhere. There’s nothing obviously behind it, so it’s harder to speculate on what, if anything, this door is for.

We also find the only roped off Magic Sphere. Why is this one roped off when the rest are just lying around the library? Is it an ‘exhibit’ or is it roped off for safety?

Another interesting ‘art’ piece appears to be another face

Again, the eyes are Metal Eyes, the nose is a torch, the hand of odds are hands, and the cool ink fountain is a mouth. Can this mouth tell us something? We haven’t found a way to interact with any fountain like this in the Library.

One last thing on this floor is a room that connects Fire and Energy Library.

This room is filled with the 10 books that were written for the 2018 Tibia.com contest. Several are lengthy and interesting to read, but it’s unlikely they have important clues as they were written but players well before the Secret Library came out. (Contest details here: https://www.tibia.com/news/?subtopic=newsarchive&id=4447) Note that this contest was announced Janurary 30 2018, and CIP said “Their stories will be transcribed to books that are going to be exhibited with the upcoming summer update in a Tibian library.” This confirms CIP was directly working on the Secret Library 6 months before it came out, and this line had a lot more meaning than any player reading it at the time knew.

Let’s head out of Energy and go to Earth Library

Earth Library

Earth library is the most rarely visited section of the entire library. Infact, other than a few… uh… dedicated biting book hunters (they’re cheaters, lure on them), it wouldn’t be surprising to have many servers go weeks without a single player coming over here.

If we head directly east of Ice Library, we come to Earth’s largest room. If we then go north, we find this room:

The sign on the wall says (Ja)cket to (Ju)ngle, and you can see that the jungle has burst right out of the shelves!

The standout plant here is the ‘Fairy Queen’. It is directly described in a book from Port Hope:

As the Secret Library is about as far away from its natural habitat as possible, does this mean that specialists are regularly caring for this plant? If so, there must be an important reason.

There’s not much else of note in this room, so let’s move west

We then get to this room, its sign says:

And yes, the desert is also bursting out of the shelves. Here we have several SQMs of diggable sand, though I hit each spot about 10 times with a shovel, and did not get any results.

There are 2 rooms to the west of this that have nothing remarkable, but are useful for trapping creatures in to explore in a safer manner.

Heading east, we get to this room

There’s not much of note here, but it completes the various biomes we would expect to see.

Right next to this room is our first interesting room. It’s directly above the Ice Library’s Boot’s statue.

Right up this ladder is an unmovable Toolbox, and a hole in the floor. You can levitate up in the spot with the stools in the above picture. Judging by the also unmovable wood pieces down here, it seems as though someone is trying to fix the hole in the floor. There is also the only natural food spawn in the entire Library, a single banana peel is directly by the hole. This shows that someone is eating in here, and may have slipped on the peel down the hole. This area is particularly relevant for the Librarian, which we’ll discuss later.

South of here we cross a majestic Ink pool, and room of beautiful black stone (I don’t have a screen shot, I’m sorry )

Then we get to this room

There’s a unique bookcase here, that does not have a single other occurrence in all of the library

Every other bookcase has something on the bottom, usually some form of stone. This is the only one, out of hundreds of others, that does not. It has… nothing. Just blackness. Is this intentional? Is there a hidden, dark and spooky passage behind it? Can we open it in some way? Or is it just a map bug?

I reported it (and requested several others do as well), as it’s no fun to chase down map bugs while thinking they’re hints. While CIP likely won’t say anything about it, let’s hope that if it stays the way it is, it’s intentional!

This concludes our brief tour of the physical aspects of the Library, now let’s look deeper at items of interest!

Secrets of the Secret Library part 2

Now that we’ve looked at interesting areas of the library, let’s look at some interesting mechanics!

Ostentatious Bookstands

This is one of the few inter-actable objects in the library. They can be ‘activated’. When clicked, they light up, their runes glow purple, and the Eye on the book glows yellow. They only stay activated for 10 seconds, and then turn off again

This seems to obviously demonstrate that they function as a switch of some kind. Its significance is further hinted at as they get a hand drawn picture in a Tibia.com article about the Library:

This is further evidenced by the fact that these Bookstands, instead of levers, are used to go into each of the library bosses. In the following picture, a team has just gone into this boss, and I stayed outside to see if the Bookstand actually lit up. It does, and then turns off after a few seconds, exactly like the other Bookstands

A theory that I’ve wanted to test for a long time is activating every Bookstand in Library at the same time. This had some substantial difficulties. First is the number of Bookstands. There are:

• 3 in Ice Library
• 2 in Fire Library
• 1 in Energy Library

Additionally, each boss room has 1

• Lokathmor
• Mazzinor
• Ghulosh
• Gorzindel
• Scourge of Oblivion (And 3 additional in his actual fight, though these cannot be activated except right when you enter the room)

This means that in order to activate all these stands at once, you would need 6 people if you ignore the boss ‘levers’, or 11 people if you truly want them all. This is best case, with people who can solo run to these spots and live. In reality, you likely would need a few more to help with clearing, and then to run around the Library actually looking for changes.

I have tried for months to get a team on my server to do this, without luck. It turns out, it’s hard to get 10+ mid-high levels to explore mysteries. Fortunately, the Test Server was the perfect chance to try this! We successfully activated all non-boss Bookstands at the same time!

And nothing happened.

This was a disappointment, though admittedly, we only had myself to run all throughout the entire Library looking for changes for about 30 minutes. It’s very possible I could have missed something considering how hard I had to rush to explore before people had to leave.

I checked the obvious things, the locked doors were still locked, no obvious map changes, no obvious new creatures. I did not get a chance to attempt to interact with everything I would have liked to.

We also did not have enough people to also activate the boss Bookstands. These present a greater exploration challenge, because each person can only go into the boss room once per day. Meaning you get 10 seconds to explore, and then have to use another person’s boss cooldown to try again. The logistics of this are a nightmare, and I’m sure you can understand why I wasn’t able to organize this

During the final boss fight, we see 3 Ostentatious Bookstands, though these function differently.

All 3 are active when you first enter the room, but then the side ones turn off for the rest of the fight and are not clickable. You can see bolts of arcing energy over them that prevent them from being able to be clicked

The middle Bookstand looks different, it’s the same sprite, but without the 5 pillars around it. It’s still named the same thing: Ostentatious Bookstand. When you come into the room, for the first 30 seconds, it does nothing.

But then this happens:

It creates Orange Text that “THE MASTERBOOK HAS FILLED UP WITH THE WRATH OF THE LIBRARY!”

TibiaWiki, which I love, says the following:

However, this is incorrect. This message is completely independent of the actual boss spawning.

You know what this message really means? This:

A Magic Sphere spawns on top of the middle Bookstand. It can now be clicked, and is an extremely powerful weapon.

That’s right, this Bookstand is not just decoration. It actually can help in the fight, and this isn’t mentioned anywhere that I can find on Google.

When clicked, it fires what appears to be a beam of Holy effect several squares in a row to its north

Note that it skips the square directly north of it, meaning that the player who clicked the Bookstand cannot be hit by it. If we have a second player stand in its path, it does not damage the player.

But it’s a different story for the unlucky invaders of the Library…

KABOOM! It does a TON of damage, and the type of damage it does is Drown damage.

As you can see, when you use it the Magic Sphere disappears, but will come back in about 30 seconds, and you will again see this Orange Text:

This establishes the fact that the book in the middle of the room is indeed the Masterbook.

This means that this weapon can be reloaded and fired multiple times throughout the boss fight. It’s quite hard to aim though, as monsters must be standing in a perfect line to hit them.

Nearly everyone who fights this boss puts him in this corner the moment he spawns. It’s smart, as he does an extremely lethal death damage beam in a cross shape from himself. This position ensure it only ever hits the main EK, who can be ready with Stoneskin Amulets:

(Above Screenshot from Tibiawiki)

The unfortunate thing about this is this guarantees that the Scourge of Oblivious will NEVER be in position to be hit by the Masterbook. And believe me, it’s very tough to convince a team to allow him to roam in the middle of the room to test this out

Luckily, I have been able to hit him exactly once with this. It did about 6000 drown damage to him, and no other major effects. However, this boss has 3 ‘states’. A green color in which he takes damage and should be attacked, a red color where he has a large damage reflect, and a blue color during which he shoots his lethal beam (though he also has a damage reflect in this phase).

When I hit him, he was in green phase, and thus took normal damage. So what would happen if you hit him with 6000 drown damage while he is in a damage reflecting stage?

I don’t know, but I want to find out. Could such a damage reflection cause either the Masterbook or its Magic Sphere to overload and shatter? There is precedence for this in a different Library boss, Ghulosh, who shoots a beam that also does 6000 Drown damage, but is injured by damage reflection. Ghulosh also has this Orange Text right as he transitions into the state that does that beam:

It is Wrath that fills the Masterbook and Wrath that fills Ghulosh. Coincidence? Or intended hint that damage reflection can affect both?

This establishes that Magic Spheres have extreme power when used properly with a Bookstand and do a damage type that we cannot normally do. I wonder if this could be used to damage a certain invincible creature?

But first, let’s examine some other things on the Scourge fight

When we first enter the room, we see a locked door leading to an unreachable passage. There’s a second locked door at the north of the room, also leading to a passage

The Masterbook is perfectly in line with these passages, almost as if attack was designed to shoot down them.

There are two demon portals in the room, which is how lore-wise the invaders are getting in.

If we try to step in these portals, it teleports us 2 SQMs south. It’s interesting that it does anything at all, CIP could have just made them unable to be stepped in. Is it possible that there’s a way to reverse them and go find out where these demons are coming from?

The third miniboss in the fight is called The Devourer of Secrets. He looks exactly like a Yalaharian

We also have reason to think that the office right outside the teleported to the boss room belongs to him, by virtue of the Yalaharian artifacts and books we see there. If that’s the case, and factoring in his name, then perhaps that room should be more closely examined for Secrets. Note that there’s a blood stained cabinet in there, and books do not bleed red blood. What happened by this cabinet? We also see a loose Magic Sphere on his main desk, was he studying it?

During the fight, 4 immobile books spawn that are called “The Book of Secrets”. Both the miniboss and summons attempt to kill them. They can also be targeted by players (I’m sure you’ve had someone accidentally kill one before). If they do die, The Devourer gets a huge damage reduction. If multiple die, he becomes even stronger to the point where you may not be able to kill him before running out of time and being kicked from the boss room.

A theory I have been unable to test on him is to bring him to very low black hp, then kill all 4 books, then kill him.

Finally, let’s look at what happens at the end of the fight. When you kill the Scourge, you get the following Orange Text:

The NPC Cerebrir (who’s name in Latin means ‘brain’) is the one saying this.

He proceeds to tell us that this fight was just a distraction and that someone stole extremely valuable knowledge about the Godbreaker, and he’s very worried Variphor could learn about it. Please read his whole transcript here: https://tibia.fandom.com/wiki/Cerebrir/Transcripts

He is convinced that someone betrayed the Library, and that no one could have gotten in without outside help.

Who is this traitor, and why would he risk betraying Zathroth?

Unfortunately, our time in the room is limited, so trying keywords with Cerebrir is difficult. It’s possible he may have more to say.

He uses a very interesting skin, that is directly referenced on the Tibia website.

Yet there is no boss with that skin. Cerebrir is just an NPC, certainly not a boss. None of the other bosses in Library have that skin either. So where is this boss? Well, let me introduce you to…

The Libarian

Perhaps the most interesting creature in all of the Library, we meet The Librarian in the Ice section here:

You may remember this picture from before, as this has THREE Ostentatious Bookstands in each of these alcoves. The Librarian spawns right next to them

Speaking of spawning, the Librarian spawns here:

Yet as soon as it spawns, it walks all the way here to here

This is very unusual behavior for a monster in Tibia. Most monsters stay very close to their spawn point, and will return to it if brought away. The Librarian does not have this behavior

Instead, it likes to travel back and forth about 8 SQM between where I’m standing and where it currently is in the above screen shot. There are not random N,E,S,W movements like Tibian creatures. It’s as if the Librarian map clicks to a very specific spot, and will walk around you, or other creatures, to get there.

So is the Librarian a creature or an NPC? It’s definitely a creature, it shows up on the battlelist when NPCs are hidden, and it’s attackable.

It’s immune to all damage that we can do though; including Life-drain damage as summoned Ghouls can prove.

Moving him without an EK is very difficult. If you attempt to push him by blocking his path, he will move around you and try to get back to his preferred spot. Fortunately, he respects an EK’s Exeta Res, meaning that when you Exeta him, he will follow you for 8 seconds.

Because of his movement behavior is different than any other creature in Tibia, we considered maybe he has other different qualities about him. For example, normal creatures cannot go up levitate spots, even with parcels, can he? It turns out there is a natural spawn of 3 stools that can be stacked to allow places to go up a certain shelf:

But, despite our efforts, he would not walk to the higher floor. He also would not walk up a staircase:

It despawns like any other creature if pulled too far from its spawn point, though it respawns again in a few minutes (which is how you can find the exact spawn point). He despawns roughly right here

This limits the places that we can pull him to. For example, he cannot be pulled to the west-most Ostentatious bookstand. He can be pulled into both ‘bathrooms’ without despawning. This presents an interesting idea. This allows us to trap him in there by closing the door, and keep him locked up

Then we thought about the Walking Boots statue directly to the East of him. There is the only rope hole in all of Library. Maybe the Boots are hinting to walk in this direction, and rope him up. Then we could take him to the room with the weird bookcase in Earth Library!

But… that also didn’t work on either the rope spot, or the ladder spot.

We felt majorly disappointed. Doing these tests is much harder and more time consuming than it appears. And despite the fact that our logic seems to make sense, we were unsuccessful. A sad truth is that it’s quite hard to get people to risk their characters, waste their stamina, and spend their time without success. Being a mystery hunter requires you to have a borderline insane resistance to disappointment.

So we stopped Exeta-ing him, and he immediately started walking back to his favorite stop. We glumly walked with him, as several members of our team wanted to go to sleep, as it was very late on the last day of the test server.

But… then he did something strange.

Do you see something weird with this picture?

On the way back to his happy-place, he took a detour, and touched one of the Ostentatious Bookstands. No Exeta Res, a path was completely open, and yet he went out of his way to touch this bookstand, and did one of his spell effects the moment he reached it.

And then he did the same thing to the second one.

No one Exeta Res’d him, yet he walked directly to the Bookstand and used another spell effect. We thought maybe this was just a weird pathing fluke. So we brought him far east again, and let him go.

He did the exact same thing. It turns out this behavior is almost perfectly reproducible; however you must manually bring him east. We spectated him for a good 10 minutes in his normal pathing area without inferring, and he didn’t go to the Bookstands at all.

We then did it again, and paid more attention to what exactly he did when he touched the Bookstands. Normally, he has multiple spell animations that he uses seemingly at random. He has a multi-square green sparkle, a ZZZ animation on himself, both a yellow and purple mini explosion on himself, and perhaps more. In terms of actual affects, we know that he can heal other creatures around him, and make players drunk (Always wear a dwarven ring on a real server, or face the 10+ Squid Wardens protecting him while drunk…).

Each time he touched the Bookstand, he used a yellow or purple mini-explosion on himself. The Bookstands did not light up as if being activated, but it was clear that he was doing something to them.

Try it yourself and see. I’ll definitely capture a video next time I go.

He does not go to the west-most Bookstand. We tried activating it after he did his two, with no success.

He’s clearly doing SOMETHING, and it’s clearly a completely non-normal, obviously programmed behavior that was very intentionally implemented by CIP.

There’s many other questions though. Are we supposed to stop him from doing it (by locking him in the bathroom?) Is he telling us that the Bookstands should be activated in a sequential order, rather than all at once? If that’s true, that would drastically cut down on the number of people needed to accomplish this, but what could the order be? Are there any numerical hints anywhere in the Library?

Maybe

I’ve seen this Orange Text a million times while hunting Energy Library. I always thought it was simply meant as a joke or a way to show how smart these knowledge elementals are. A fluff line with no real meaning. Yet it’s fascinating in a way, the number he says is 1.299.223. The majority of numbers are between 1-3, with the only outliers being a pair of 9’s. If CIP was just randomly choosing numbers, what are they odds that the majority of the numbers could correspond to the 3 Ostentatious Bookstands right by the Libarian.

If we assume the East Bookstand is #1, then the Librarian follows the beginning of this pattern, as he hits #1 then #2

If so, which stand is represented by the 9’s? It’s less complicated of a problem than it seems though, we should test 1,2,<any>,<push the same one again>,2,2,3. In only 3 attempts, we can try all the remaining Bookstands in the Library. In only 6 attempts, we can test reversing the order of the original 3.

Sadly, as we realized many of these things, the test server came to a close.

In Closing

There’s much, much more to say about the Library, but this article is already a little bit long (If you stayed awake, grats to you ). There’s so many things to try, and unfortunately, are very hard to test on live servers. But don’t worry, we’ll be back next test server, and would love some extra people to speed up these tests, or offer ideas of their own. Who knows, maybe we’ll find our own piece of the Godbreaker Knowledge! I’ll definitely feel smarter next time: