I solved the entire Quantum Moon puzzle extremely early, having only learned the first rule, I didn’t even get to visit all the planets yet.
I haven’t seen any stories similar to mine here, so I thought it would be interesting to share. It happened a while ago, so my memory is a bit hazy, but I still remember my general thought process and timeline of events. Here is what happened:
At this point it’s still really early in my playthrough, I haven't even visited Brittle Hollow, The Twins, or Giant’s Deep yet. I was still exploring each planet for the first time and decided I will try visiting Giant’s Deep for the first time.
I visited Giant's Deep, did some exploring, landed on the north pole, and learned the 1st quantum rule. I already tried landing on the Quantum Moon many times, and I knew this would allow me to explore the Quantum Moon so I went there next.
After doing some moon exploring. I noted that the Quantum Moon had areas that were blocked off to the north with mountains that I couldn’t reach. I tried leaving the moon and coming back by landing on the north pole to see what is past the mountains (similar to reaching the north pole on Giant’s Deep), but this didn’t work. I figured I had to somehow use the ship or shrine on the moon to teleport.
I remember playing around with the shrine for a while. For example, one thing I tried was putting my scout in the shrine without taking a photo, teleporting the shrine, then taking a picture with the scout to look out the door in the shrine’s new location.
Eventually I had the eureka moment. The light switch in the shrine was a big hint to me, I realized being in pitch black darkness is probably considered not observing the shrine, so I entered the shrine, turned out the lights and my flashlight, and the shrine teleported. I had just figured out the 2nd quantum rule.
Although, I thought the shrine itself would teleport to another location on the same moon. I didn't expect the shrine to stay in place while the entire Quantum Moon moved to a different planet. Cool!
I started exploring all the different versions of the Quantum Moon using the shrine. I noticed that the mountains on all the moons are blocking passage to the north except on Giant's Deep moon, so I tried putting the shrine far north on Giant's Deep moon and changing locations, then I can explore what’s beyond the mountains on the other moons.
Then I had to do the same thing again to see into Giant's Deep's storm and Dark Bramble's vines from the north pole. When I got to the north pole I thought there would be something, but there was no payoff. Just an empty north pole.
I could’ve solved it right here in record time, but unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to try opening the door in the 6th location, so I left the north pole and explored all the different moons again, until a while later when I went to the north pole again, and tried opening the door to the 6th location and it worked. I had just solved the Quantum Moon.
This 3rd rule part took me a long time to solve, but even in retrospect the puzzle didn’t seem unfair to me. I realized the game is blocking my path north, so I correctly thought that getting to the north pole is the goal of the puzzle, but then when I got to the north pole and saw there is no payoff, it should’ve hinted to me that perhaps the payoff is unblocking the door to the 6th location.
The full Quantum Moon puzzle took a while to solve, needing multiple loops. But it never seemed “unfair” or like I needed to come back later with more information, even without knowing the 2nd and 3rd rules. It was really fun experimenting and exploring on the moon. Looking back, I feel like the environment and shrine were intelligently designed to nudge me in the right direction. It almost feels like I was reverse-engineering the quantum rules using only the environment as my guide.
And now for the implications of solving this too early:
I can understand if you think this would ruin the game for me, but the information dump was so large, and I had no context to understand what was being said. I barely scratched the surface of the story at the time; I didn’t even realize this was a “piece together the story” game yet. Silly me didn’t even make the connection that Solanum was a Nomai, and that the Nomai created all the structures and writings I had been finding across the solar system. My two big takeaways were the information about the Eye, and that I kept on seeing Solanum’s face when I died, so I assumed she must be connected to my death somehow.
I imagine a normal playthrough would be something like “Wow I found an alive Nomai, this is so amazing”, but in my playthrough I didn’t know how Solanum connected to the world outside of the Quantum Moon, I thought the information provided was not explanations to the story, but instead cryptic clues that I would need to apply to future quantum puzzles. I incorrectly thought that this was just the first breakthrough in what would be many Quantum puzzles.
One last thing I find kind of funny: When I eventually found the 2nd and 3rd quantum rules much later in my playthrough, I still didn't realize finding all 3 rules is the intended solution. I remember thinking: "There are multiple ways to solve this puzzle, that’s so cool. You can either experiment with the Quantum Moon itself to figure it out on your own, or you can learn the rules by reading Nomai writings on other planets, or do a mix of both." I didn’t realize until I finished the game and read discussions and playthroughs online that what I’d done was not the intended way of solving the Quantum Moon.
