#undertale datamining

[juliendesclefs]

A question to Undertale dataminers

I could find that the damage calculation for the protagonist taking an an attack is the one in the picture...

But it could be replaced by

damage=round(atk+max((HP/10)-1 ; 0)-(Def/5))

because HP are never 100 or higher.

But in debug mode, you can set your HP to 999.

So, if we go by the formula in the picture, the HP mod is 8.

If we go for mine, the HP mod would be 98.A dramatic difference in damage.

My question is the following:

Do damage stay "mostly normal" (aka the HP mod stays 8) or go near 100 in debug mode (when you set your HP to 999)?

Thanks for your answers!

[If you are curious about why I ask, it's because I want to write a fanfic in Undertale where the battle mechanics are fully present like in the game, so, I'd like to use the true formulas for damage calculation with the characters I will use (who have far much more than 100 HP)]

[departmentstorespookii]

me @ kris when people try to theorize who the knight is in deltarune when we've only seen roughly 28% of the whole story so far

[vexwerewolf]

Undertale lore is hilarious because there'll be impossibly deep secrets about certain characters you can more or less only learn by datamining, but also the first major character is called "Toriel" because she gives you the tutorial.

[obscuretobyfox]

hi i hope this is okay to ask but with people talking about the whole Friend Inside Me thing and Toby i am very confused, do i understand correctly that there's an account with that name and that's what people are talking about when they say it's not Toby? I am not on twitter and i saw the discussion and i originally thought that the tumblr account that has Friend Inside Me audios is fake bc of it. Did Toby actually make those audios? Is it his real tumblr? i am scared lost and confused

This ask is 8 months old (oops..) but I'll try and answer your question the best I can! In 2019, Toby Fox posted a pair of edits of the song "You've Got A Friend In Me" from Toy Story, the second of which being called "Friend Inside Me" (You can find the posts here.)

For whatever reason, in 2023 people rediscovered this, and began creating shitposts related to it, which I assume started as a joke, but later on (for whatever reason) people began speculating that the song could actually be teasing some sort of Deltarune concept, as these both released after Deltarune Chapter 1. Furthermore, a Twitter account was started that posted many cryptic images of Woody from Toy Story among other things.

This Twitter account was started likely as a joke, just to play along with the meme, but due to it's cryptic nature many people began considering that this could be Toby Fox teasing something about Deltarune (Spoiler: It's not!) This continued to what I consider to be an unacceptable level, with people datamining the tweets of this account and Toby Fox's account, attempting to see if they were coming from the same location. To answer your question, @fwugradiation is Toby Fox, nothing else is him. He has stated on several occasions that Undertale/Deltarune news will only be released through official sources, and nothing else should be considered related to Deltarune.

I hope this answers your question! Thank you for writing in <3 Furthermore, I hope this post doesn't come off too condescending or angry! I don't blame a majority of Deltarune fans for theorizing on this stuff, due to the lengthy wait times between official content. There's no harm in making a theory, just make sure to check where your info is sourced from!

[hazardace2]

IS there more evidence for the Susie theory I keep calling "Blood Theory"?

(My thoughts were all over the place for this so bear w/ me. I wanted it to be a thorough theory/essay post but it's more like a collection of thoughts sorry)

spoilers for the new chapters under the cut

So first things first, we need to establish where this comes from.

During chapter 2's release some dataminers found this unused animation where she BLEEDS.

this on its own wasn't enough for people to question it, as the two running theories for it being scrapped were that it was

1. the blood on her sprite was a continuity issue; as monsters dust, which is why it ended up unused

2. monsters actually bleed in deltarune since it's in a different universe from undertale.

Both of these are WRONG now that I've finished chapter 4.

The second floor in the library has a new interaction with a book on monster funerals, it is exactly the same as the book from undertale's library on the same subject; this one was not written for a school project though.

Throughout chapter 4 we interact with Gerson in the dark world, and Susie treats him like any other lightner, despite the fact that he's a shopkeeper and magically disappears and reappears around her several times in the chapter.

When Susie finds his hammer covered in his dust in the light world, she realizes he's dead and became a darkner. But take a look at her dialogue for just a second.

How come she refers to monsters in the 3rd person when she could have included herself, and she initially doesn't understand why somebody would keep the dust of a loved one. Why? Ralsei refers to her as "the monster" in the original prophecy, and obviously she isn't a human. She doesn't look like anything other than a monster, and she doesn't have a human soul - that's why she asks Kris at the end of chapter 4.

While she does seem confused about a lot of things surrounding monsters and their culture (commenting on gingerbread monsters after asking toriel what they were for example) but this is probably due to her homelife.

She's lived in multiple towns and if King is supposed to mirror her own father, than he certainly isn't going to care enough to spend time with her and show her gingerbread monster cutters or even get her cool monster costumes, etc. So of course she's going to have trouble relating to other monsters.

The first time Susie is ever shown proper love and care is in the dark world! (yes dw i did not forget about toriel and the bench, but it's not relevant for my next point) Chapter 3 focuses on the importance of Darkners as objects, contrasted with how they feel. This obviously impacts Susie since these worlds and these people are so near and dear to her, and it shouldn't matter whether or not they're "real" they're alive.

In chapter 4 once Gerson finds his study, there's a plaque above his fireplace that describes a mythical axe. On my first playthrough I went out of my way to find this axe for Susie, I had no clue it would unlock the secret boss. I do think that this is important information for Susie and her character arc (which I'll come back to this)

Gerson and Susie get so incredibly close this chapter. It is such an unlikely and yet incredibly sweet friendship.

After defeating Jackenstein in the dark zone, Ralsei tries to heal him multiple times, which doesn't work. Susie, having already been told that she doesn't need to heal from Ralsei, walks away. Gerson is the one who encourages her to heal him. Gerson encourages her to grow and improve her magic from Chapter 2!

Speaking of Susie's magic ability; in my old post I went over her odd magic abilities. In the alternate ending for chapter 1, Susie can learn pacify BY HERSELF to use on the king. In chapter 2 Ralsei teaches Susie to heal. And in chapter 4 Gerson's fight helps her healing incrase dramatically.

Susie's magic use has intrigued me for the longest time, especially since she has all these other oddities; her room in the dark world for one.

Unlike Kris' room, Susie's (I'm assuming that's her room) in the light world does not match the dark world other than her bed being mirrored (which is also true for Kris). She gets a brand new fridge, her window is shaped differently, and she gets a dresser and lamp. Meanwhile her room in the light world is completely empty.

Susie has this carpet with the ACT symbol on it, which relates to not only her magic use, but it almost foreshadows Susie learning how to ACT?????? from the MAGIC MENU????????? in chapter 2.

Susie's room is also littered with all these crowns. Despite Ralsei telling her that she's supposed to wear ribbons, Susie has never been feminine? The only reason I'd assume they'd be there is for that reason. Susie DOES refer to herself as a king on a few occasions in ch 2 though, such as during the trash scene and in tasque interactions.

Going back to the prophecy in ch 4. This looks nothing like Susie.

Especially compared to her drawing from the legend Ralsei tells; The statue based off this illustration is even compared to Susie directly. While the silhouette looks nothing like Susie (even wielding a sword???) the story beats match hers, like finding love and supposedly whatever happens at the end of the prophecy.

What this figure does kind of look like is a princess! And seeing as this whole chapter is focused on stories and prophecies, I think this kind of checks out.

Why and how would she be a princess though? - if this is even really her in those images. She's literally a regular monster not only in deltarune but in undertale too. The only mention of her and her family in UT is that they live in the same city as clam girl - who just so happens to be a goner. Hell she has a couple of other odd connections to Gaster and the overall idea of darkworlds.

In chapter 2 if you enter the diner to talk to Catti about Noelle she'll say "She is the light, but lately she strays too far into the darkness" and then she clarifies she's speaking about Susie. While we know she dislikes Susie and is jealous of Noelle's romantic interest in her, this still really intrigues me just based on wording alone.

There's only a few activities that are available after sealing the fountain in ch 4, and one of them is sitting by the lake with Susie. After a certain period of time passing she'll ask Kris if they can hear anything; which we can't. She says it sounds like somebody is playing music on the other side - something Onionsan mentions in the earlier chapters.

Water imagery is absolutely associated w/ gaster and the dark worlds. From the gonermaker background using an ocean image + the fountains using that same image texture, it's no wonder the lake has dark world associations too.

What was interesting was that another character seemed to have alluded to this song earlier in ch 4. Gerson. Before his battle with Susie begins he tells her "Can you hear it? Can you hear its song, singing from the deep...?" this immediately reminded me of the song of the sea.

Going back to my first point about their close relationship; Gerson tasks Susie with writing a letter to his son, because he knows he's deceased, even though he never says it outright. He's unique in the sense that the dust of a lightner can be mixed with an object for them to come back as darkners. Mind you, when Susie creates a dark world his suits of armor (objects → full darkners) are seperate entities from him.

I dissected how blood is supposed to work in deltarune so I'd assume instead of dusting (he's already made of dust) Gerson probably bleeds in the dark world, despite having the full appearance of a lightner.

Say that upon shattering glass, one of our hereos starts to bleed.

Even though it shouldn't be possible for them to bleed. Let's just say that they can and not elaborate any further.

Let's also say maybe somehow, someway, somebody found a way to have a child who was both a lightner and darkner.

Let's also look at how interesting it is, that they share the same attack. Those who are created from both the light, and the dark :)

[deltarunedebby]

undertale mini fun fact:

the xbox version of undertale contains a message congratulating hackers for figuring out a way to bypass the xboxs security measures and datamine the game!

[legitimatesatanspawn]

Something I still love to point out to Undertale fans because of how funny it is to me:

When dataminers dragged out the true stats for all the monsters you encountered to casual view, we saw how different AT and DF tended to be from Checks.

Asgore for example presents 3500 HP and 80 AT 80 DF. Toriel presents 480 HP and 80 AT 80 DF. Asgore's actually 10 AT -30 DF, Toriel's actually 6 AT 1 DF. It makes sense. Asgore is guilty and tired and on some level hopes that only ONE of you will leave that fight. Toriel doesn't really want to hurt you, and her heart is breaking with the fear of what may come next.

Flowey is "Sir Not Appearing in this Database". We know he has some stats but he's an event encounter so he's not beaten "normally" and the attacks he does cause are like event flags. And yes we also have Amalgamates, the Lost Souls, and even test data floating around in that same database. (Although not Cut Enemies but some do have their own existing stats like RG-01 and RG-02 matching RG-03 and RG-04.)

Gaster... also has stats. Technically. There is a character named Gaster in the monster encounter stat database, so I assume its him much in the same way we all assume that character in the Waterfall Gray Room by messing around with the FUN value is him. All this in spite of being retroactively removed (and actually never existed at all outside of meta fun and possibly in Deltarune's plot). Which meta-wise is impressive on his part. The man is erased from existence but still has stats!

Gaster's HP is 666666 which is a nightmare in itself. Outside of Amalgamates and boss encounters, most Monsters don't even breach 999 HP. He's so full of HoPe that I have no idea what to do with that fact.

Gaster's AT and DF are 66666. Most Monsters are in single digits for AT, only Mettaton and Undyne have more and generally top out at 12 AT. DF? Similar, but some Amalgamates and all Lost Souls get higher with 999 DF and other Amalgamates are 9999 DF, Box Mettaton is 999 DF but EX is 1 DF and Genoroute's Mettaton Neo is -40000 DF.

God help you try to kill such an enemy. Stat wise he is more obscenely difficult than any Encounter in the game.

And if you do somehow pull it off? Which people have in other games with bosses not meant to be defeated. The bastard has NEGATIVE exp and gold drops. Meaning that if you do somehow beat him, Gaster SWIPES your "hard won" EXP and money at 6666 each. You'll lose a fair chunk of levels and EXP and with how Encounters work, you'll never get it back completely even if you wipe out every other encounter you meet.

This? Is why I love the concept of Gaster as an Encounter. Because he is NOT MEANT to be beaten and if you do somehow spark an Encounter with him, he's clearly going along with it a matter of revenge/vengeance/petty dickery.

[deltaruminations]

Why I Think A Pre-Shatter Gaster Will Probably Appear In-Universe In Deltarune At Some Point, From A Storytelling Perspective

nearly all of gaster’s presence in undertale amounts to teasers for deltarune. the facts stated there are most likely canon and may be relevant to deltarune’s narrative, but aren't story-critical to undertale. the FUN events are, by their nature, highly inaccessible and were designed from the ground up to only be understood through community research and discussion. an individual, blind player doing a handful of runs (ex. a neutral, then true pacifist, then no mercy run) will never see more than a tiny fraction of these events on their own, and that's if they're lucky. the events they're most likely to see are innocuous-seeming phone calls that have very little to say about gaster himself. some of them are only available on certain console versions. ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN isn't even accessible in-game at all – as far as I'm aware, the only way to access it is through SAVE manipulation. almost everyone who goes into deltarune already knowing about gaster only knows about him because they were told about him.

this is all extremely cool for meta-storytelling and building hype for a companion game, but it isn't a great way to convey necessary information to a general audience. it's created an edge case (which, funnily enough, is actually the theoretical default case) where a player can play Undertale through to an ending, think “wow, what a great game!” and then immediately jump into deltarune without stopping to look up all the Undertale secrets or theories whatever, because why would they? most players are here, first and foremost, to play the actual games. deltarune is made for people who have played undertale, but it's not necessarily expecting them to be actively engaged in its fandom or to know every detail of it inside and out. deep knowledge can be played to and rewarded here and there, but toby can't necessarily hinge significant portions of the overall narrative on information that the vast majority of players won't receive in-game – or, rather, he Can, but doing so significantly limits how approachable, universal, and timeless that story can be. keep in mind that many players will only ever play on console, and won't have the option to easily datamine even if it occurred to them to try. this “edge case” will only become more common in the years after deltarune’s full release, when new, blind players will be able to experience both games in full, back-to-back, without needing to fill time between games or chapters with speculation and discussion. and what happens over time when research and discussion is lost to digital decay?

all of this is to say: we've passed the point of gaster existing as only a cool teaser. gaster is now a real character in a narrative that seems to revolve around him. all players, regardless of the information they have going in to the game, will interact with him at least once in the gonermaker – he's Main Story Content now. at some point, deltarune needs to start conveying information about him in-game, in a way that's accessible to all players, in order for that story to be effective.

and the issue i see with back-loading all of that information into a Big Reveal in the last couple of hours of the game is that, sure, it might be rewarding for dedicated fans who have known to wonder about gaster and have been at it for years, but for newer and more casual players, it's potentially going to mean very little. they don't have any reason to care about this “undertale character” who had no presence in undertale and wasn't important to its story – who is, for all intents and purposes, a new, retroactively created “undertale character” who's really only relevant to deltarune’s story, who never even appeared in either world, and was barely even hinted at until the last few hours of the story. to them, it's a contextless lore drop – oh, cool, the person behind everything is… this guy I've never heard of until now, even though he's supposedly from that other game i played. they're suddenly getting a bunch of answers to questions they never had to begin with, and it's not like there’s anything in-game actively encouraging them to go out and read up on the meta. flowey gives strong hints toward True Pacifist. he doesn't say, hey, go online and look for a bunch of fan-generated ephemera about this secret character before you play the other game. btw it's all disorganized, decentralized, and rife with confusion, fanon, and misinformation. any given player will potentially be missing out on a lot of satisfaction because they didn't know they had to do homework to get it. and it's possible that “wanting answers about Gaster” is, itself, a significant driving force encouraging the player to dig beneath the surface of the narrative – casual players need that motivation as well. you get what i mean lol

what deltarune needs to do is get even a blind, casual player up to speed and asking the same basic questions about gaster that dedicated, long-time fans have been asking, and it needs to do it in-game and in the main story, and it needs to do it well before those questions start being answered. it isn't strictly necessary that they know upfront that he was the Royal Scientist who built the CORE and so on – that can be explained later – but on the baseline, they need to understand that there's a guy who's missing from undertale, and that he’s connected to weird things in deltarune, especially that freaky voice in chapter 1. i think these things comprise the essential “concept” of the gaster mystery as far as deltarune's surface narrative is concerned.

AND SO… this is a big part of why i think the Little Brother Thing makes sense. i think toby built that subplot into the game in some part so he could properly introduce the basic concept of gaster to everyone, in a way that's accessible to everyone and fits within the natural flow of the main story. any player, assuming they did play Undertale, will know who sans and papyrus are. they'll be excited to talk to sans and excited to see his brother. if deltarune suddenly takes this opportunity to present a Third Brother, that leads to a question that should be very obvious to any player who's familiar with undertale: who the fuck is this guy? there are only two skeletons in undertale, sans and papyrus, so where the hell was this wingdings asshole? they never even mentioned him. what happened to him? if Little Brother happens in chapter 4 or 5, then that's ample time to seed curiosity about these things.

and if players actually meet “wingdings” and have an opportunity to see his speech patterns, personality, behavior, etc. then they might be able to start connecting the dots between him and the mysterious voice, or tree man, or any number of things, which also helps to fill in the gaps between what they know and what the superfans know. after all, superfans have known for a long time that the Voice is gaster, based on the typer value and speech quirks compared to spr_mysteryman’s stats and ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN, all information that was datamined. if a casual player can look at in-game information alone and say “oh, this guy speaks like that freaky voice from before” then it's only fair. the mystery isn't really whether the Voice IS the missing skeleton, but Why he's the missing skeleton, how that happened, and what it means.

this isn't even getting into all of the reasons why i think it's potentially valuable for gaster to have an in-universe history with deltarune and personal stakes in it. if nothing else, i think toby is telegraphing the Little Brother Thing as a way to finally establish “gaster” (in some form) as an actual, tangible, extremely important character in a story for a general audience, and not simply high-concept fanservice for dedicated loreheads. we have groundwork laid suggesting that the skeletons are from deltarune's world, and that deltarune is something of a “prequel” from the skeletons’ perspective. if we're already seeing the skeletons in their past, then why wouldn't toby take this opportunity to show us something about gaster, who is almost certainly the most important skeleton in deltarune’s story? if gaster is “shattered across time and space,” and has timefuckery baked into the very concept of him, why wouldn't toby leverage that when telling his backstory? again, I do imagine that some amount of exposition will need to be “flashback-y” and/or “magicant-y” – anything that happened in a different narrative universe, for instance – but if some amount of that information can be conveyed naturally over the course of the story, rather than flashbacked or monologued, then why not just do it? this just feels like basic storytelling hygiene to me idk. sorry

[carlyraejepsans]

i feel like uty improves on things undertale did but it doesnt have the same strong foundation as the original. like all the qol tweaks and secret shit and meta flowey are all super impressive but as a whole i agree i didnt find it cohesive or consistent

eh, sorry but i don't really think UTY "improves" much of... anything from Undertale? you can make an argument for the visuals, which are more detailed and certainly better animated, but i would argue right back that undertale's rougher, retro, "kinda ugly" graphics are a deliberate design choice on Toby's part that he stuck to for a reason. not to mention, even in their ugliness, the original main cast managed to display more variety in shape language and size than the entire UTY one, which seemed unable to break past the "tall, skinny, anime proportioned humanoid" figure for anyone beyond the occasional side NPC (which, credit where it is due, DID have some really creative designs).

the secret shit is part of my critiques, actually! while conceptually cool, i don't think they appropriately distributed their story and lore at all. i feel like if we got to the end of the pacifist run and were wholly confused as to why dalv was even a character in the story, the whole "human attack" backstory was... not delivered properly. now, there's no problem with having secret lore, gaster is right there. but if you DO have it then it shouldn't be... yknow... tied to the main backstory conflict that literally set the story in motion? lol? it felt like a game with dataminers in mind, rather than players. which was unavoidably detrimental to its storytelling.

the bullet patterns and attack designs were very visually creative but what they improved from the original in their cleverness they tanked with their execution. WAYYY too unfair, counting too much on memorization and giving you no time to accustom yourself to the mechanics (shout-out to the gun tutorial that... didn't teach us how to shoot. at all. we figured it out on our own in the axis fight LMFAO)

the meta flowey stuff was a fun idea that only really delivered in the neutral run and didn't amount to enough anywhere else to justify his presence in the game imo. like, i lost my shit during his fight too, don't get me wrong, i like when fan stories let him be a little FREAK. but everything else was just so... wasted? i almost didn't see the neutral ending at all because the way pacifist handled flowey disappointed me so much.

uhhhhh running was a good addition and the music fucked hard. can't say anything against those two, nossir. not sure it'd go so far as to call them improvements tho, just nice touches

[raiseupyourbat]

So so fucked up knowing we were meant to get chapter 2 alongside of the rest of the game and would've played chapter 3 immediately afterwards if Toby followed his original release plan. And that the sword route's existence and it being like that is probably because it was supposed to be instructions to find the weird route, rather than it being something that was only expected to be found by experimentation and datamining (though ofc those methods would've still been the entry point for many people, especially since it was found like the day after release).

And then ofc there's things like the dialogue in chapter 4 about dragon blazers having an evil route, or Toby seemingly outright providing us with a guide in the silence sweepstakes on which chapters have weird routes... Unlike the case with undertale, this game isn't hiding away its alternate path like it doesn't exist AT ALL.

[pempempemto]

i was kind of wondering something just today im. not sure if its a coincidence or something

allegedly- chara’s symbolic number is usually 9, to my knowledge.

which yeah stands for completion the end of a cycle because- player allegory thing

but then gaster’s so called symbolic number is 6, to my knowledge

IF im correct his datamined stats were all in sixes(sorry the picture is blurry i cant. find good pictures)

also intentional or not his name has six letters

and that if you set your fun value to 66 there’s a ten percent chance of getting the mystery man room(and he’s commonly assumed to be gaster)

six im not as sure what it means- the stuff i’ve seen on it usually ties it to love

copying this from what i typed on discord i found that uhh

“six is the highest number on a dice, a number of luck???? and also the sixth sense. people call it a. perfect number apparently huh. six is tthe card of the lovers, which reverse mmmmaybe symbolises seperation or temptation? does it mean something just wondering how all that might tie to gaster”

there’s those- some stuff i found might be misinformation but I can’t be too sure- do tell if i get anything wrong

and then take it another step and there’s the fact that gaster’s number and chara’s number- if you take either number and flip them upside down they look the same- in certain fonts. like if you took 6 and flipped that upside down, you’d get 9. its easier to see in that tumblr default font.

if i’m not wrong, this applies to the aster font as well. and the undertale font

and another small but probably insignificant similarity that they both smile?? and they can have those. creepy black eye things

i think the tl dr of all that is that chara and gaster’s symbolic numbers parallel each other in some kind of way, and with how sometimes they’re depicted being in the afterlife(????) together i just- wondered if it was something intentional or not. or if that small fact means anything.

[moonfang256]

I know I said I was going to put the Deltarune stuff on hold for a while, but...

There's something crazy I just discovered due to one of the many theories I heard on YouTube and it got me thinking a lot.

Do you remember the last tape from the true lab in Undertale?

In this last one there are some abnormal things like the sound in the background, and it’s not possible that Asriel could have made this recording, not when his best friend was dying. This brings us to something creepy, since the only place where this type of recording could have been made it’s inside a laboratory, with cameras in different positions.

What I'm getting at is:

Gaster was probably there when this event happened, as he was the owner of the lab back then. It’s likely the Dreemurr family brought Chara to the true lab because they were hoping Gaster could do something to heal them, since they didn't know much about humans. Chara was Gaster's first human patient, and Gaster already knew about the brothers plan, because he watched the secret tapes they left during his research.

During that time, Gaster could have talked with Chara about this and proposed a deal, something like:

“Give me information about your kind and samples of your body and soul for my experiments, in exchange of speeding your plan by making your death faster with my stuff”

Chara saw this was the best thing, so they accepted, not knowing the kind of darkness that would be unleashed later. In the end, the tragedy of Asriel and Chara happened, Gaster didn’t stop them, some human kids fell and he continued experimenting in secret, behind the kings' backs. Things continued like this, until Gaster’s curiosity and obsession got out of hand and fell into his creation, breaking into thousands of pieces throughout space and time.

Now, we don't know at what point Gaster realized his entire world was part of a game, but he most likely did some datamining and watched Flowey's numerous playthroughs to figure it out. This pretty much destroyed him in many ways, I don't know to what extent, but something tells me what he was before died there a long time ago. All that's left in him is madness, and now the players are taking part in probably his last experiment, one with an uncertain ending and purpose.

--------

Another thing I want to point out is: Gaster seems to target pacifist/mischievous/vulnerable subjects to make deals and promises with, then he grants them powers and in some cases shows them the truth. This leads to some of them becoming mad and causing havoc.

Now I’ll proceed to mention all the subjects that are known so far:

The confirmed ones: Player – Jevil – Spamton – The next secret bosses.

Unsure/ Probably are: Kris – Ralsei – Sans (Undertale) – Papyrus (Undertale)

Probably the next: Susie – Noelle

It seems we’re involved in something very dark, a situation beyond the player's control, but there's still hope. Whatever Kris and Ralsei are planning together in secret may be the key to solve this (that is if you continue along the normal-pacifist route).

This is all just theory, but let's see what the future holds for us.

[oh-pretty-blob]

so basing on your blog - you're a chaotic person, interesting for sure, would like to get to know more about you haha

Why thank you.

I hear this sometimes (its peer reviewed at this point)

To be honest I don't even know what to say about myself? So some things from top of my head:

I'm 24 (few months short of 25)

I use any pronouns in English (pronouns are pain in the ass in the Polish so I just go by feminine or whatever people use toward me) and by that I literally mean any. Like AG tier on smogon (anything goes). So feel free to use anything toward me (neo-pronouns included)

I speak mostly Silesian (or at least mix of Silesian and Polish) and people say they can more or less assume how emotional I am by how much Silesian I use (and even if I speak somewhat pure Polish people can pinpoint that I'm Silesian just by hearing me)

I learned how to script because I've got hyperfixation on Undertale and datamining

I have holo full-art Volo card (sadly not an alt art 😢) that I carry 24/7 in my phone case (it's in the sleeve don't worry).

[justalittlestarguy]

Small Collection of Deltarune Musings

I see people constantly posting their Deltarune theories online so I decided to post mine in a corner of the internet.

Toby Fox & Deltarune's Origins

I feel like people when theorizing about Deltarune largely overlook how Deltarune came to be... it's enormously important to the timeline of events. We have to remember that Toby doesn't really compromise on ideas - I think it's a safe to assume that Deltarune of the past is largely still what Deltarune of now is.

Let's go over the facts real quick.

The idea for Deltarune came to Toby Fox in a dream he had in 2011 while he was at college. In the dream, he saw the ending to a video game and was determined to create it. Fox was also inspired by a collection of playing card designs posted on Tumblr by artist Kanotynes. Development of the game started in 2012, although it was abandoned before Fox created the first room.

(Source: Wikipedia page on Deltarune, cites a Nintendo article on Ch. 1)

We have to remember that Deltarune is the original. This is my core problem with people theorizing about Deltarune in the context of Undertale. While as an audience that is all we are privy to regarding Toby's world, we have to remember that Undertale came from Deltarune, not the other way around. If anything would refer to Undertale, that's either Toby messing with his audience or means something different in this context.

Deltarune is an AU to Undertale in one sense, but in many others, it's a prequel. I am in the full belief that Deltarune's events are before Undertale could ever happen. If Undertale and Deltarune were in the same universe, Undertale would 100% happen after it, but I don't think Toby was lying when he said that the events are largely unrelated.

In fact, I don't think Toby has ever once lied about his details about Deltarune. "They are connected in a sense" and "they are not in the same universe" can both be true at once. Toby is not even necessarily lying by omission, but moreso that as an audience we could not realistically grasp the timeline from a meta perspective. The only real outlier is "Deltarune is meant to be played by fans of Undertale" as expressly retroactive, and I think this is because Undertale fans will get something new out of his characters.

I think that the timeline largely explains a lot of factors that people theorize about and can't quite get to the bottom of, including...

W. D. Gaster

People talk about the fact that Gaster's fingerprints are all over Deltarune's narrative, and Andrew Cunningham went over all of Gaster's leitmotivic theories very well, better than I ever could. Like most Deltarune theorycrafting videos though, I got stuck on one line from the video, when talking about April 2012 (the song).

For April 2012... I don't know man. Even if Toby Fox crawled out from under my bed and handed me a ratified document professing that the quote here was 100% intentional, what would that really tell us beyond the fact that Gaster's theme has existed since at least 11 years ago? It would be interesting, sure, but not particularly insightful.

My liege Cunningham I must respectfully disagree. I believe that April 2012, if a real Gaster quote, actually tells us a lot about Gaster and why he's all over Deltarune. In terms of concrete information about plot details, the answer is small, but definitive. After all, Gaster escaping his confinement as "merely unused content that people love fan speculation over" would be quite interesting itself. We assume that he will show up, but aside from ANOTHER HIM, there's very little reason for him to.

...By the way, has anyone ever wondered why Gaster went unused in the first place?

I think people just think about it at the surface level. Gaster is unused, or died before the events of Undertale (or worse). He's got NPCs that refer to him in very vague ways, and he's a particularly hidden trinket of lore. When Toby anticipated people datamining the game, he didn't really hide his existence there all that much as some other things.

But if we remember that Deltarune was the original idea, that Undertale later springboarded off of, then I think that makes Gaster a lot more interesting. I don't think Gaster was EVER meant to be a part of Undertale's story in a major way. He's a Deltarune character that snuck his way into Undertale as an easter egg.

I do have a small shred of evidence to support this as well, with another character that gets explicitly mentioned in Undertale in a small capacity... Rudy, Noelle's father. ...At least in the alarm clock dialogue.

Rudy, similarly to Gaster, seemingly dies before the events of Undertale could ever take place, but still existed there. Largely, many of the characters are still the same or have counterparts in Undertale. Gaster being Ultra Hidden still had a presence there, and I think some of people's musings on connections to other characters have merit, but for the wrong reasons. (Being related to the skelebros with another font and Sans' machine are interesting notes, especially given that we haven't actually seen Papyrus in Deltarune yet...)

Chara & Deltarune's Release Schedule

I similarly think that Deltarune being a meta-prequel makes people talking about Chara also make sense. The idea of Chara and Kris being largely separate characters makes sense in a traditional story, and we largely lack evidence for it aside from a tease in Chapter 1. However, let's consider a new meta-detail: Deltarune's intentional release schedule.

When we played through Deltarune (known at the time as SURVEY_PROGRAM), we were left with two big twists. The first... the scene at the end where Kris seems to form a Chara-like grin with a knife, and throws our red heart into the birdcage. This is an obvious tease on Toby's part. There was little subtlety here, but it gave a lot of questions. The second is that THIS IS CHAPTER 1, not a demo.

Fast forward to the height of COVID, and Toby decides on a whim to release Chapter 2. This was...expressly NOT planned. Deltarune was meant to be in our hands in any close-to-complete form with the release of CHAPTER FIVE. So we are effectively given a peer into foreshadowing that wasn't even meant to be seen by us until we could continue further.

This is important because there are a few elements that Chapter 2 starts delivering upon but doesn't entirely go through with:

Kris as a "[Heart] on a [Chain]"

Anything involving the "Weird" route, straight up didn't exist in Ch. 1

A couple more Gaster-y details than Chapter 1

Spamton seemingly hints at the next few bosses

("WE DON'T NEED [Easels] OR [CRTs]"... seemingly implying our Ch. 3 Dark Crystal holder is a TV, and our Ch. 4 Dark Crystal holder is an easel [art related?])

("WE DON'T NEED ANY [Man, Woman, or Child] AT HALF PRICE" ...could mean a lot more, but seemingly refers to Chapter 5 in some way like the others, as he goes on about Mike afterwards.)

So what does all this mean for the Chara "reveal" at the end of Chapter 1? We were supposed to see it from the start, unlike Chapter 2, so where does that leave us?

Toby is intentionally setting an expectation.

I think Kris and Chara are related in more ways, but more explicitly, I think Kris' story is more pivotal to Undertale than one may think. We have to remember a few details about Chara.

1) Before Chara became everyone's favorite diagetic narrator, Chara was a kid who lived in a monster family. No more, no less. There's no reason to think Chara was insane before effectively escaping the narrative.

2) Chara still had a fascination with a few things in common with Kris. Knives and chocolate being a couple of them, and Asriel rounding it out. Asriel is Kris' big sibling, except a bit more literal this time compared to Chara.

3) Kris and Chara (as well as Frisk) are all intentionally non-binary or potentially agender altogether. Kris goes by they/them, and both Chara and Frisk never have explicit genders either, though that can be argued to be for other purposes such as character immersion (any/all).

4) Chara is a similarly deeply troubled individual as Kris, suffering from mental conditions that Toriel and Asgore are not very good at helping them get through. This leads to disastrous consequences when Chara takes their own life in Undertale.

So what does this mean for Kris?

I think many people assumed correctly when saying that Kris is Chara, but I believe it's more accurate to say that Kris IS Chara in Undertale, but with a new role.

Kris, Chara, and CONTROL.

We all understand at this point that Kris has a troubled relationship with autonomy, given that the player guides their actions during the plot of Deltarune. But if Kris is related to Chara, then we can ask a question - what do the two have in common?

Well for one thing, they both exercise a desire for control.

In a similar vein to Cunningham's video, I once watched a video talking about [Hyperlink Blocked] that was quite interesting, and I thought there was one theory as to what it was that doesn't get enough attention. (at around 50:50, I'm going to use some select quotes here)

Control Theory [...] Kris and Spamton both want control, and it makes sense that Spamton would offer this to Kris as a reward. [...] However, the one noticeable weak spot in this theory is in Snowgrave. You could argue that Kris is taking control of their life, but they are really not. If anything, they are robbing Noelle of her control, which isn't the same thing.

The line in question substituting Hyperlink Blocked in this context is:

"NO, I GET IT! IT'S YOU AND THAT [Hochi Mama]! YOU'VE BEEN [Making], HAVEN'T YOU! YOU'VE BEEN MAKING [Control]!! AND NOW THAT YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SUPPLY, YOU DON'T NEED ME!!!"

I respect Jabu's actual theory a lot on this one. [LOVE] in the context of Undertale makes a lot of sense and fills just about every quota. However, that's in the context of Undertale's terminology. We can't limit ourselves to just that. I don't think [LOVE] gets extra brownie points for just tying into Undertale, expressly for the reasons I've stated before. Deltarune's ideas came before Undertale's, and while some concepts are linked, they are not all the same. (See: the concept of a human SOUL and Determination not lining up either.)

Jabu has a point about Control, but only from a healthy mindset point of view. We have to consider the mindset and shoes of someone who lacks control.

Take... a controlling mother. One who lacks control over a lot of aspects of her life for one reason or another, and demands perfection from herself. One coping mechanism, no matter how wrong, is trying to seize the control over her sons. It's a way she can exercise having control over something in her life. It gives her room to have agency, even at the expense of her sons' agency. She could force her son to go to college, because she can't imagine any other path for him, and she never GAVE him a choice.

...Anyways.

This anecdotal example isn't just for shits and giggles. I really do want people to look in the shoes of someone who is deeply troubled by a lack of control and examine the Weird route with that in mind. Many people troubled by this go on to become manipulative people, or exercising their agency by using someone else's. In the weird route, Kris manipulating Noelle becomes his coping mechanism, and you enable their behavior with your actions.

So what does this mean for the normal route? Obviously it's at least a bit more healthy, and as a result I do expect (and look forward to) Kris butting heads with the player, not just as a way of coping or fighting back, but to wrestle control of the narrative for their own at some point. I don't think Kris becomes a villain in this context, but I do expect them to become an antagonist if the player is considered the protagonist.

All this lines up well for Kris, but then what is Chara? We know that Chara works through the player for the [Genocide] route in Undertale (its own "Weird" route) and that by the end Chara has taken full control away from the player. This is a Chara that never had the opportunity that Kris had to turn things around. This is a Chara fundamentally broken by their lack of control, and abuses it every chance they get once they do obtain it. And to top it all off, you hand it right to them at the end. They even exercise their control over the narrative with the creepy extra scene if you perform a Pacifist route on the same file as a Genocide route was previously completed.

...hey, isn't that similar to Kris' actions and Susie's actions that the player never has direct control over? Weird. Even expressly against the player's wishes too? Interesting.

Conclusion / TL;DR

The summation of my theorycrafting is built on the knowledge that Deltarune came first, and that Undertale builds off of this info, not the other way around. Many people theorycraft assuming the inverse relationship due to Undertale releasing first, but no one seems to ever step into the developer's shoes.

I believe this:

Kris and Chara ARE expressly related and not just for surface level observations - they both tell us something about **control**

Gaster is a Deltarune character that Toby knew would be important, but got scrapped for Undertale so it can tell its own story. He was left unused in Undertale because he was never meant to be an important part of it.

A lot of Chapter 2's foreshadowing is expressly information we are *not supposed to have* due to Deltarune's intended release schedule and for that reason is very volatile.

Deltarune is a meta-prequel to Undertale. Deltarune's ideas not only came first, but are the original, and if anything Undertale is a spiritual successor to what Deltarune will eventually become. As fucked up as that timing sounds.

Anyway like and subscribe for more stupidity

[oujibaka]

I haven't been poasting about it because I am a bashful creature by nature but I've been really really really into deltarune after replaying it (like, thrice over at this point) in anticipation of the next chapters releasing and I literally cannot stop thinking about how crazy it was that undertale had shreds of a character that only existed in super rare random events only reasonably accessible via save editing and datamining that drove people fucking insane with speculation for YEARS and then deltarune dropped and the first thing that happens is someone who types exactly like that character minus the wingdings surveying you while a fancied up arrangement of the four note gaster jingle titled "another him" (og gaster theme is called just "him" in tha files) plays. And we still don't know shit about the guy. Craziest thing to ever happen.

[spiddermen]

ok so an hour ago someone noticed that the fangamer website was hosting these two images

and we were talking about it in the undertale datamining discord like oh winter 2024 newsletter is soon huh thats exciting

but just a few minutes ago it changed to... this...??

like the url is the same it just leads to a different image. that says binter 2024

thanks fangamer.