Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
joric edited this page Oct 16, 2026 · 889 revisions

Welcome to the ootss wiki! Also see Maps, Stalker 2, Supraworld, SupraTools, Subnautica, and Sokoban wikis.

The map was updated to Order of the Sinking Star release build (click to expand)
  • 2026-10-10 Updated to release version (8 Oct 2026), 920 levels
  • 2026-06-22 Updated to Demo Phase 2 (20 Jun 2026), 105 levels
  • 2026-06-20 Initial version, Demo Phase 1 (15 Jun 2026), 75 levels

Track game updates here: https://steamdb.info/app/499170/patchnotes/

Video

Gallery

Press Escape or click on the image in the marker popup to toggle image gallery (swiper lib). Select map image in the gallery, click on it (or press Enter) and it brings you to location. You can also reverse search image by pasting it with Ctrl+V in the map.

Development

Levels

I used my own numbering back then and it was way off, so I thought I'd rather use map names from the game engine.


YouTube video with arbitrary numbering. Courtesy of YouTube, https://youtu.be/lOzOaELzQ_Q

I don't know any cheats or console commands to load the levels. The names are just to identify the levels properly. The general idea for the map was to use the original naming. Wasn't worth it, names are kind of random and don match the order.

Launch game, launch Sysinternals Process Monitor. Add filters Process Name - is - sinking_star.exe, Operation - is - CreateFile, Path - contains - levels. Load the level in the game, you will see all the file names the game reads.

The release version doesn't read from levels anymore but you can filter on .history.

  • 10 Oct. 2026: I started adding release levels to heroes3 area, see compactor_v2, etc. Level screenshots are webp with quality 70, saved with vips webpsave <src.png> <dest.webp> --Q 70 --vips-progress. Sliced tileset is from #9.

Upd. you can load level by name with https://github.com/qiekn/ootss-cmd, study the tool, it's fantastic. Put my markers.json geojson to data/marker.json ("marker.json", singular, not a typo, v0.3 specific), and use switch command, e.g. switch heroes1_1 and it opens the level. You can also quickly peek up level name with show level command and use show position command to get coordinates.

Also see Custom Levels, Save Format, Progression Rules.

Capture

A new tool, ootss-cmd supports map capture, that's how the release map was made. See scripts in scripts/capture. Run console command, e.g. capture start C:\Temp\Capture\plan.json to save chunks to plan directory. Use stitch_map.py to combine tiles into a map (you can also feed it to vips for very high-resolution maps). Capture resolution depends on z and crop_world_size (tile size in game units), with z=16 and crop_world_size 4, the output map is about 8192x8192 pixels. You must be in the play mode, (not in the overview mode) to start capture. Zoom 20 is roughly equal to play mode, zoom 32 is local map, zoom 64 is overview. Don't forget to unfog before and fog after. The overworld size is 190,156 with offset -24,-2.

Also see Map Capture.

Original plan.json (click to expand) 
{
  "version": 3,
  "run_id": 133890000000000000,
  "scene": "overworld",
  "xmin": -40,
  "ymin": -20,
  "xmax": 180,
  "ymax": 170,
  "z": 80,
  "ground": 0,
  "overlap": 0.3,
  "crop_world_size": 9,
  "settle_ms": 200,
  "center_first": true,
  "center_x": 80,
  "center_y": 69,
  "freeze_time": true,
  "require_map_view": true
}
Old method with 16k virtual display (click to expand)

On the 1920x1080 overhead screenshot the grid size is precisely 10 pixels with map center at 860,740 but the resolution is low. Download Universal Virtual Display Driver. Unpack to C:\IddSampleDriver. Edit option.txt, add 16384, 9216, 30. Do not install .inf from explorer, use Device Manager - Action - Add legacy hardware - Display Drivers - Have disk. Set virtual display resolution to 16384x9216, run the game, open map, press Win+Shift+Right to move the game to Virtual Display, press PrnScr, paste image into editor. I tried to capture at 8192x8192 but apparently the game doesn't like square geometry (cuts the map). Meshes are broken, because the map draws in lowest LOD. Local maps (Q) can't be used because of perspective projection.

Regions

Used the same tech as in Subnautica 2 (raster map traced with rasterio and cleaned up with mapshaper). Regions appear to be slightly off in the demo, e.g. heroes2_10 entry point does not belong to any region at all. These are real in-game regions that you can track by observing how region labels appear and disappear as you walk.

Real regions use Markers with script_name="local_area", targeting an Area_Pin, see https://github.com/xPaw/order-of-the-sinking-cost/issues/1

Grid

Added grid and new overworld overlay image in 3840x2160 from the YouTube trailer to the map. Seems kind of aligned to fog of war (especially on the demo overworld map). I couldn't really find a good fit for the grid. Fog of war seems a bit off, and the cell size is weird (my version is 19x13 units), so I am pretty sceptical about this. Many regions on the map simply don't fit this grid. People already tried to align the game map to the grid, the grid size varies but still doesn't fit: https://redd.it/1ualmcn

According to this video with internal ootss editor there is a grid still https://youtu.be/Kl9RqnZXWCI it looks like 19x13 cells.

Save Format

Game save is in C:\Users\user\Saved Games\Order of the Sinking Star\default\Status.sokoban_status. It's a binary format, it contains all names of currently opened levels, can be used for tracking the items. Example script to read .status tables:

Also see Save Format.

Secrets

The 069,104 plaque implies that you are the 069,105th person to enter (it's an old Zork-related joke, see #1).

Shortly after start, in the introductory world there's a plaque with number 069,104. Looks like location on the map.

The cage in the center of the map is at 80,69 and Y grows up (you can search for player coordinates in memory)

After centering the overworld map at 80,69, the point at 69,104 is to the left of heroes region, nothing fancy there.

In the introductory world (pick up a map item above the level exit to zoom out), 069,104 is in the credits hall.

Characters

It's always the same keybinds, reserved for the future when characters start to crossover.

Key Class Name Subtitle ID Comment
1 Warrior Valens warrior Fighter in the Puzzlescript code
2 Thief Tif thief A girl kleptomaniac
3 Wizard Isidore wizard Wiki says Isidore is a male name
4 Cleric ? priestess Subtitle id "priestess", so a girl
5 Bard ? bard Also a girl, why not bardess then
6 Druid ? druid Can turn everything into stone and back
9 Trader ? trader, trader_clone_1 Mirror guy, shares 9 shortcut with a clone

Some levels (e.g. heroes1_19_jail) change the character swap order on C, Thief is selected second after Wizard, though it would be Warrior on other levels. Probably depends on character's location (heroes1_19_jail is the only affected level so far).

Solutions

All levels (except promesst) have text solutions recorded in RLE format (see data/solutions.txt). There are a few solution players:

AutoHotkey solution player sends keystrokes with 150 ms interval by default, so record carefully, use single keypresses.

Prototypes

From: https://x.com/banteg/status/2067583047491289256

The four main Order of the Sinking Star sections/sub-games map pretty directly to earlier free puzzle games - more than "inspired by," really: they were licensed/expanded and then smashed together.

Sinking Star section Original inspiration / starting point Designer Core idea
North: The Hearty Heroes of Hauling Heroes of Sokoban I–III Jonah Ostroff Sokoban, but with RPG-party classes: warrior pushes, thief pulls, wizard swaps, etc.
East: The Mirror Isles Mirror Isles Alan Hazelden / Draknek Move mirrors, swap with reflections, eventually duplicate yourself.
South: Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes Alan Hazelden / Draknek Stones skip across water; lily pads/rivers create chain-reaction routing puzzles.
West: The Promise Promesst / Promesst series Sean Barrett Gems and colored beams grant abilities like smashing boulders, phasing through walls, opening barriers.

Also see: https://www.reddit.com/r/OrderOfTheSinkingStar/comments/1pnfkl3/who_we_know_has_helped_design_ootss/

Rules are about the same, many levels are new, some are flipped or copied almost verbatim, water levels seem original.

"Corrypt" and "Game Title" by Michael Brough ("promesst" is an anagram of "smestorp"): https://www.smestorp.com

For the Puzzlescript games, you may click the "hack" link to open Puzzlescript editor. Promesst is not made in Puzzlescript, but there is an open-source remake by @szymor: https://github.com/szymor/promesst

Also see post by draknek here: https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7k2s

PuzzleScript

There are a lot of PuzzleScript forks besides the original PuzzleScript by Increpare.

My PuzzleScript port has all levels from the demo, except "The Promise" which was written in C++. Some demo levels are taken from the prototypes and mirrored or flipped, but most are completely new. It features an updated rule set to match the solutions and uses xxuurruuii's fork for keybinding and 3D support (use RMB to rotate).

  • Most PuzzleScript engines only support one "fire" button (X, C, and Space all do the same thing) and no other keybindings at all. Picking action from context breaks existing solutions. It's possible to use action modifiers - fire, left/right to select, fire to confirm, and emulate X/C in the solution player (example: test.pz). You could also use @xxuurruuii's fork. It's pretty easy, you bound object creation like actionkey c CharacterSwap and then do [ CharacterSwap MirrorGuy ] [ SMirrorGuy] -> [ SMirrorGuy] [ MirrorGuy ]. You would need an UMD wrapper for the player (see #16). Upd. it's actually easier to use global API from play.html. Working version: https://joric.github.io/ootss/play.html
  • Some levels calculate the length of secondary reflection wrong. Commit 133469cd and a few following commits supposed to fix this but there was an issue with reflective crates so I had too roll it back. Finally fixed in 0e19f375.
  • Levels with Bard and crates in water introduce a new mechanics. Nothing fancy, just a lot of new rules.
  • Inverted doors. Currently solved with a few extra states and an initialization code.
  • Sublevel or "basement" doors. Vanilla PuzzleScript allows one symbol per cell, so that would exhaust the entire symbol budget. Solved with a "seed" object that "digs" holes in a cross shape. The level geometry allows this so far.
  • Some levels (one_fire_v2) allowed dragons to make a move on character switch, failing the solution, it was fixed also.

Solvers

Sokoban solvers are all about heuristics, fixed rules and meta-moves, it's hard to make a solver that's both fast and universal.

Puzzlescript Plus solver works with any rules, can even solve some mirror isles, but it's quite slow (chokes on the 3rd level).


The first Mirror Isles map (it's flipped, I had to flip it back) the solution is "drdrx llxll llllu", and it works.

Community Maps:

Shout Outs

References

Clone this wiki locally