#nomai structure

[cinnabeat]

oh wow ok when the sun explodes and you are on the night side of the planet it gets pitch black! terrifying

[outersyourwilds]

Outertober Day 24 - Time || Day 25 - Decay

@outer-wilds-inktober

Screenshot study/redraw for these prompts!

My thoughts going into this was that throughout the game, everything in the game continues on regardless of whether what happens impedes your progress.

Time and decay just go hand in hand really, nomai structures crumbling, corpses rot and whither away. Everything decays and the universe moves on anyway. And Brittle Hollow felt like the embodiment of these ideas

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Outertober Day 16 - Simulation || Day 26 - Pattern

Also forgot to share this on day 16 but while we're here, I also combined days 16 and 26! Wrote about Pris ::)

[wdba]

I feel like I need to get the brainworms out and talk about the contrasts and how much cooler the Owlks make the Nomai look (cause Nomai the gentle alien folks my beloved)

Okay, I've recently finished watching SovietWomble and an Astrophysicist's playthrough of the DLC and they both made couple points that I did not realize: SovietWomble noticed that the Owlks were living in on a single planet they frequently remind themselves of, while the Nomai were... Nomaidic and have no reservations about having to settle on two planets they crashlanded on.

Their technology, too! The Astrophysicist noticed the Owlks made use of solar sails to propel the Stranger away from the growing sun, while the Nomai made use of warp technology to go anywhere. The Stranger relies on centrifuge-based artificial gravity. The Nomai treats artificial gravity almost like an afterthought that they made tiles that allow you to walk on walls and ceilings (not to mention the gravity cannons they use to launch ships). The Owlks have light-based projection slides that you manually turn to view the images. The Nomai have 3D projections that allow you to walk in them???

And everything about the Owlks seemed hedonistic and excessive, too; they had wine and board games. Theaters, music halls, art galleries, painting and photographs, and what appears to be a restaurant? A viewing room for the solar system and its eventual supernova death?? Billboards that seem to point out that This Is A Tourist Spot??? Our beloved Nomai only had the basics, and those structures focused a lot on knowledge: a forge, an observatory, a museum, a school. Their greatest projects, the Sun Station, Ash Twin Project, and the Orbital Probe Cannon were just functional and minimalistic enough that all three of them pales in comparison to the grandiose that is the Stranger ringworld.

Which is getting to the point why I made this post: their dam. It almost feels like a monument to how excessive they were, second to the Stranger itself.

We eventually find out that the Owlks stripped their homeworld bare, turning it into a wasteland just to build the Stranger. And yet they have a dam, which isn't even implied to generate electricity! It's seems to be there for the simple purpose of holding back water, which they appear to have a surplus of. We accidentally harvested too much water from our homeworld and turned it barren, oops! The Nomai (beloved, gentle, caring, wise) took great care to leave ore for the Hearthians in the distant future where they evolve and discover space travel. Nomai!!! Best!!!

It feels to me that the Owlks represent the entertainment side of curiosity while the Nomai, the scientific. Which makes us wonder why they came to the Eye at all; were they like the Nomai wanting to study the Eye? Or were they there to gawk at its rarity, much like how they were going to treat a local sun going supernova as Yet Another Amusement?

[bludermaus]

Digitalized version of a doodle I made at work 2 weeks ago

The Nomai are surprisingly fun to render! Their facial structure is so intricate~! To be honest… they are prime territory for OC creation!

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💎 To see the HD version, get your hands on the Photoshop file or just support me: https://www.patreon.com/bludermaus 💎

[heroinetales]

Finally got to the core of Giant's Deep and riding inside a giant jellyfish was pretty cool. I almost died though get shocked a few times, but I did get the coordinates for the Eye of the Universe!

Also reading the projection stones for the Orbital Probe Cannon has been hilarious. I just love how some Nomai are like "The structural integrity of the cannon won't be compromised when firing the probe right?" and some others are "I am speed!" Yeah that over enthusiasm is why the cannon keeps breaking at the start of the time loop

[isaac--r]

So, here are my thoughts on my little meow meows from the dlc (yes, I'm talking about the owls):

The first word that comes to my mind is ''victims''. These people are victims of the Eye, and of the game itself; the first one is easily explained by that one slide reel, which really broke my heart, in which one of those owls scans the Eye and then falls to the ground in horror after getting a nightmarish vision of what's to come. Just the expression on their face, man. I know I'm still pretty early in the dlc, but so far they present as people who just wanted to protect themselves, or take (very understandable) revenge. I'd say the former.

The second point sounds a bit strange, but it's the best way I can put it: they are "victims" of the game (this is not me saying the game did a bad thing, I think it's brilliant actually), in the sense that everything is made to give them a bad rep. The game itself warns you about being scary, and it's obvious that they're the ones you should fear, gigantic deer-owls with glowing eyes, intruding in our solar system with an eerie invisible ship filled with some dark and frightening mysteries.

But I find them sympathetic in every possible way. First, let's look at their stuff. Second only to Timber Hearth, the Stranger is the most welcoming place in the game. The only danger comes from the structures breaking; as a place itself, it's harmless (unless you're dumb enough to swim in rapids). It's way more friendly than Brittle Hollow and its horrifying annoying black hole, or the Ember Twin, which has the worst death in the game. Now, I'm not blaming this on the Nomai, they did what they could with what they had. But the owl people put a lot of effort into making their spaceship a perfect replica of nature, and they're the only ones to do that in the game. As for the contents and structures of the ship, you'll see a lot of personality - and art - there. Decorated houses, rugs and carpets with pretty geometrical patterns, custom furniture, and gorgeous paintings, not to mention the little stylized stuff, like the sun-shaped rotating plates on the doors. Then there's the decorations in the houses, and now we get to look at the owls as people. Their houses have individual and family portraits in them, which shows that they treasure family bonds, and in the slide reels, you can see that they are a pretty tight-knit community (barring that one portrait which is vandalized, which I'm sure will be relevant soon). You see them working together, sharing discoveries, and in that one very sad scene, comforting each other. To me, they are like the Nomai; an alien species of engineers/artists, who have a penchant for discovery, families, bonds, and an interest in the Eye. Oh, and a bunch of corpses lying around too.

But, unlike the nomai, they are presented as scary. Which definitely works, I am personally playing with a heart rate of 500 bpms, but they are only scary according to our horror clichés (and fear of the dark), and if you forget what they are: owls. Of course their eyes glow in the dark, they're owls. Of course it's dark as hell in their world, they're owls, nocturnal people. (I won't comment on the corpse-rooms yet because I'm not that far in the game.) And yeah, green fire is eerie, but all of their light-based tech is green. And having finally gotten the first jumpscare, I'll say... they're chill. Sure, it was terrifying, and for a second there I thought that bird was getting some slow-mo momentum to go for my fucking throat carnivorous style, but all they did was take a huge breath to... blow out my light. That's it. They just kicked me out of there.

So most of the things we find scary about them can just be explained by "they just live in the dark, man". They're just chill birds, who got betrayed by the one thing they worshipped, and are doing... something about it, not sure what yet. Sure, they're stupid huge and their eyes glow, but that's no reason to assume the worst in them. Or even fear them.

I'll wait till the sun comes back up to play though.

[targaros]

A theory of Outer Wilds

Long. Also spoilery; please play the game and DLC.

To start, let's get some ambiance shall we?

It's completely optional but I think it adds a bit to the experience.

Let us start with the "original" species, the one that the base game shows us; the Nomai.

They represent a logical side, a technological species. This is apparent in the festival where they share their technological advancements; but do not be fooled. The fact that it is called a "festival" is likely a vestigial remnant of a past of less rigourous technological advancements or a word used to curve us from the first statement in this paragraph: They are a technological species.

The reason the Nomai we know are stranded in the Outer Wilds system is caused only by their desire to understand and measure The Eye, as Solanum says: "[Identify and Explain] are the two tenets of Nomai philosophy; to seek out and to understand is our way of living."

And even though Solanum says "philosophy", and even that they had a religion worshiping the eye and did pilgrimages to it through the quantum moon, it is still rooted in a logical side, unlike with the inhabitants of the Stranger.

The inhabitants are emotional, the antethesis of the Nomai, rather than being attracted to it because of its age, they simply find it interesting. Their technology is based on feeling; their fire technology that can share memories, their keeping of visual reels rather than writing (though they do appear to have some sort of writing system, it appears scarcely), the fact that they "forbid" the archives, instead of destroying them, still feeling attached to them enough to keep them, even if out of reach.

Even the architecture reflects this: the Nomai use monolithic and largely unadorned structures in stone while the Inhabitants (apart from the outside of the Stranger, probably due to resistance and air sealing) use wood and earth, which they ripped from their planet to reach the Eye: A completely irrational, emotional response.

And this could be taken as paths for Humanity to make, and it's downfalls.

In conclusion: the Nomai and the Inhabitants, the two sides of a coin that was attracted to the Eye.

And the Hearthians? No clue, honestly. This took me a lot to think through, though I could definitely find something about them eventually.

[nightssideblogofshame]

super exciting to see some outer wilds liveblogging! i relive playing the game for the first time whenever i see it

wanted to let you know that all the hearthians use they/them!

hope u have a nice day and a great time with the game!

Ooo good to know, dunno if i'd've caught up on it just going around, been a bit to busy looking at the info about quantum nonsense and hanging cities to pay close attention to sentence structure lol

Gonna be kinda sporadic, probably just like occasional long rant posts or short things i notice that fucking gut me (like the songs overlapping), i got classes and stuff so im just posting as i play

Thanks for the ask tho! As a treat I'll say that the dark bramble is increasingly looking alive and malevolent, or like, at the very least invasive as all hell, considering ive found its seeds on 2 of the 3 planets ive been to so far and it apparently ate the vessel?? Which is just a whole other can of worms what the fuck, going through brittle hollow and realising the nomai texts im reading are covering multiple generations and the ogs in their survival camp were running? From something? But also looking for the eye, which i get the feeling aint as big and important as the nomai seem to think it was just based on how pointless their searching has seemed to end up, like i do not think its worth a religion probably it feels very shaggy dog story to me rn, but yeah they had a living ship? Ship was alive? Either that or some fun linguistics stuff with "lethal" being used the same way we would use critical in that context

But yeah finding dark bramble seeds about the place is increasingly ominous and im dead certain theres one hidden somewhere on brittle hollow i just havent found yet since that seems to be the pattern

[diaoedia]

[OUTER WILDS - 4]

Made some advancement this session, and experience new way to die. So I am getting better at landing on the Ember Twin, found a traveler (forgot his name), used the Space Canon, found some underground structures, maybe a clue to enter the Sunless City I am not sure.

So the sand on these planet move around, but due to this 22 minutes limit so the sand will be moving from Ash to Ember. So next time i need to be quick to explore these cave. The straightforward path to Sunless City has been block by cactus. Cave is the way.

Talking to the guy on Ember help me realize that, and he talked about a lot of stars going supernova, and near the end of the loop he realize the sun is about to go boom and got into a crisis.

I also have a quick walk on Dark Bramble to go inside the core after finding it seed on my planet. It was all dark and foggy, then I got killed by the angler fish which was spooky. But Feldspar is in it, how to find him in this place?

In one loop I forgot the suit and died instantly, that was funny. Looping ability makes people desensitized to death.

The Brittle Hollow, because I went to it soon so the integrity still good and I managed to find the Quantum Temple (maybe), but I cannot reach the part where they will teach me how to access the Quantum Moon. I also found another traveler and explore a bit of the Hanging City.

Saw some bones of the Nomai people too, it was sad reading their stories and how these circumstances is so dire.

There are still some things else I found but not remember to put it here. And a lot of weird stuff I don't know how to describe or how to use it. I hope that soon I will understand more like how to use those circle and moving thing? And those plates? Or can I use the space shuttle for something?...

[suiginmigasuto87]

"Friendly Neighborhood Jump-Scare." During my play-through of Outer Wilds. I kept seeing the Strangers. But they were always out of reach. I really wanted to run up to one. Simply because my interaction with the Nomai was so damn good. So my expectations were clouded a bit. And I really didn't care. XD

So, while my friend @Ponyartistbrainiac was watching me. I finally saw a clear path to one of these bois. I ran, and I popped out of the trees, basically yelling "FRIEND!". After which, the creature visibly spazzed out. Like the A.I. wasn't computing. And he started to dart away from me. And it looked as if the alien was about to run off. But he gathered himself. Grabbed me, and held me there as he took a long look at me. Like as if he was trying to figure wtf he was looking at. Then snuffed the flame out. According @ponyartistbrainiac, that reaction wasn't normal. They normally grab the player, then snuff the flame out. With a smaller pausing time.

So I thought I'd draw the interaction. And try to capture the initial "freak-out" of this boi. XD I had to redraw this boi several times over. So I could get his head structure down. If I couldn't figure out the structure enough to make it decent. Then I couldn't mess with it.

[viola-canadensis]

Just finished base game of outer wilds. I enjoyed a lot i can see why so many people love it. I especially liked the music its very nice also the graphics are cute. Also the story is great but thats like the whole thing so idk if its important to mention

Spoilers below and also i havent played the dlc yet so nobody spoil

Cw death and thalassophobia

The fucking angler fish oh my god and i fucking love horror movies and sometimes i like horror games but im so afraid of the ocean and the things in it you cant do this to me and giants deep too i understand that the only things there are the jellyfish and theyre fucking precious and i love them but its still so scary fuck me

Anyway i also really like that you have to explore and find out the story yourself but also that the game is usually somewhat clear about where to go next and i never really felt too stuck cause i get way too overwhelmed when theres not enough structure

I also like how when you translate the nomai stuff you obviously learn major story stuff but you also learn about the relationships between all of them and it makes it much more impactful when you find their dead bodies everywhere

Theres a lot of very cool reveals in the story with and theres really intense moments and stuff but i think my favourite parts of the game were just messing around and flying directly into the sun and the time i flew really far out and realized that the music everyone plays lines up to make one song. I usually prefer to think about the things in my life that are important to me and i dont really care about crazy huge cosmic stuff that i cant comprehend and i really like that after going through a whole bunch of crazy shit the end of the game is spent listening to music with your friends. Also the music they play together makes me cry

Yee anyway good game hope i didnt say anything stupid

[merrydock]

Older Than the Universe—Chapter 3: Departure Part 2

Better late than never! Chapter 3 is out now! Read it on AO3 here.

As a little bonus for those interested, I thought I'd talk about my interpretation of Nomai language on this post:

One of the main challenges I faced when creating the Nomai 'flashbacks' is the way their conversations are structured; I wouldn't say that Nomai conversations happen linearly or during the same instance in time. Many seem to occur over a few hours to days, and many of the more collaborative scroll walls probably involve concurrent writings. This is...pretty hard to write.

So, for the purposes of Older Than the Universe, I decided to treat the scroll walls like a group chat where everyone can either send text or voice memos that are automatically transcribed. Staffs can connect to the walls to set a recording, play messages, and so on. Handwriting can be uploaded by individuals and used by the staffs—hence why children have messy writing compared to the adults. Users can also type out replies (as we see).

This isn't the best interpretation, but it's the one that worked best for the story. Not all conversations were easy to make linear—hopefully I've done a good enough job!

I also tried to differentiate Nomaian and Hearthian communication in terms of some subtle body language in the flashbacks. It was fun, but challenging to remember all the little rules I made for myself. This becomes more apparent in future chapters, so see if you spot any differences!

[fates-theysband]

the voice acting mod is doing a lot to endear me to some of the "bit" nomai characters. between ramie just barely restraining herself from being like "IN YOUR FACE, PYE!" when the high energy lab confirmed her hypothesis and privet saying "we won't be able to read the probe's data if the PROBE. TRACKING. MODULE. is destroyed!" when mallow asked if it really mattered if the orbital probe cannon had its structural integrity "slightly compromised" on launch it's just a really good way to call attention to really good moments.

[chainsmokingspacepenguin]

Week 33 of being in other spaces

I actually have an answer to the mystery I added last week! (The mystery being of the missing Year 99 Expedition: before the expedition, the Birds were capable of regular space travel, but something happened and ever since then, outer space itself became corrosive, grounding the birds to the atmosphere and travelling exclusively to other planets through planetary junctions like bridges of water that form when planets get close enough) I still need puzzles for Part 2 of the game (Onyx Glacier, Titan's Tempests), but I have a few new POI on Onyx Glacier in mind. Also, I was missing something (obvious in hindsight) from my narrative design. I didn't have multiple conceptual starting points for my story, as in (using examples from Outer Wilds because I'm still obsessed with it), not physical locations like exploring Ember Twin first vs exploring Giant's Deep first, but ideas like quantum objects or a signal the Nomai were searching for. If you lay out the ideas in a graph, it would look like a ball where the nodes at the edge are starting points, and as you get closer to the center, the number of shared edges gets denser, and lots of crisscrossing of ideas start happening. I think that structure is what I was searching for in this sci-fi mystery archeology game I am crafting.

[archetypal-archivist]

A story in which you eat your fears. Not in a literal way, but in the way of eating to bring yourself comfort. Life is awful and harsh but at least you have food, you know?

A story in which Hatchling gets so miserable and sad that eventually, in a fit of desperation to eat something other than sugar they just... Start shoving stuff into their face. First it's a ship crash that left them stranded on the Ash twin so they hide out in the Timber Hearth tower (Marl's creepy tree room) and out of boredom and misery and longing for home, they start eating pine nuts off the trees. Or rather, a pine cone falls from a tree and bounces off their unhelmeted head and it's the last straw on their misery cake so they have a sobbing breakdown and in a fit of pique, eat the seeds the pinecone was structured to protect.

Only, the taste reminds them so much of home that they end up sobbing even harder, collecting up even more nuts to eat. It takes a while for them to eat anything else, but it is the start of it all.

Next is a bit of Feldspar's jellyfish out of morbid, no more fucks to give curiosity. Then it's a bite of Gabbro's awful charred mallows. Then some of Riebeck's rations, a bit of Ember twin's cacti, some of Esker's weird moon soup.

Over time, it becomes a way to bring comfort and challenge and wonder to the Hatchling's journey again. Can they make something that tastes good from Feldspar's jelly? What about bringing Riebeck some preserved pots and pans from the Hanging city to ask about what the Nomai cooked with them? Gabbro gets dragged into it too, semi-against their will as Hatchling loves the time honored tradition of "Oh this is awful, try some!" They mock-begrudgingly keep trying things though because Hatchling keeps bribing them with new hallucinogenics and relaxants.

As Hatchling travels around eating weird things, they start getting closer to Porphy and Gossan by extension as they go to the former for advice regarding cooking and the latter often has opinions. It's a nice point of grounding and through Porphy's wonder and Gossan's outrage at their unsafe habits, they get dragged into some semblance of being mentally healthy.

Hatchling's last challenge before they pull the core is trying to make sap wine actually tasty.

The structure of the story would start with a good name as each chapter title and a general "recipe" that you may or may not be able to make at home as a "summary" of what the chapter is about. Each food is thematically appropriate.

being alive is great because there are so many different vegetables you can sauté. but then there are also the horrors

[isaac--r]

NOOOOOOOO I DIDN'T WANT TO SEE THEM CRY ON A SLIDE REEL AGAIN!!

Okay so it kinda looks like they decided to go to sleep because they were homesick, so they created a way to simulate their home land in the dream realm. This, I'm pretty sure, is completely unrelated to their plans with the vault, and whatever they were cooking for the Eye.

Something tells me this was supposed to be a Regular Naps thing, and not a Let's Go to Sleep Forever thing (it kinda reminds me of the Mima room in Aniara). By all means, they should have been there, awake and rafting and painting and playing and whatnot in the Stranger by the time we got to them, but something went wrong, and they didn't wake up, and since they weren't there to tend to the ship, the structures decayed and the dam eventually broke.

What killed them though, I'm unsure. Maybe they died of hunger or dehydration in their sleep (likely), or maybe they actually got killed by the Eye somehow, in the way they feared (less likely).

One of them is missing though! And sure enough, it's One Antler Owlie, the mysterious bird who is DEFINITELY awake and 100% stalking me in broad daylight. And won't. Even. Talk. To me. Baby I'm right here!

Unless :) Owlie is in a Certain Place :) (they most definitely are, I just like the idea that they're too shy to approach me)

So to recap, chronologically speaking (from those four exposition slide reels): 1) the Eye sends them a signal, and they somehow manage to build a ship as big as the whole MOON they live in, to get closer to the Eye. They start worshipping it too. Seems like the Stranger wasn't cloaked at first, so for all we know these birds have been there longer than the Nomai (since neither they nor we ever saw the Stranger). 2) they scan the Eye and see a vision of it killing them. They get angry and destroy their Eye temple, and cloak the Stranger (and get it closer to the sun? unclear). They also do something else, but that information got burned. 3) they watch pictures of home and just cry. and I fucking cry with them, man. They make themselves a nice Go Home VR system for when they get homesick. One Antler Owlie is among them. 4) WHO FUCKING KNOWS THIS ENTIRE REEL IS BURNED. All I know is it ends with some owls packing a box that could contain, oh, say, a body slightly taller than ours into a giant vault and then lowering the whole thing underwater.

Also they won't let me hang out with them in the dream world. Guess they don't like sea creatures (lucky for me, they don't seem to like seafood either).

I am having SO MUCH FUN