Undertale's first patch claims to fix bugs, but fans found hidden content

Toby Fox launched the first update for his indie hit Undertale yesterday, and data miners have already made some notable discoveries within version 1.001. Although the designer has previously said updates to the game would only fix bugs, Undertale superfans have found that the patch adds new dialogue and secrets to unravel.

The full rundown of added and updated content is available on the Underminers subreddit — that's the dedicated community of Undertale excavators who have dug deep into the title since its release last fall. Included in the update are some minor changes, like stat changes for bosses and other non-playable characters.

As promised, certain glitches have been amended as well, including those that affected the game's "pacifist" ending. Other changes: An especially difficult puzzle has been made a bit easier to solve; Fox himself tweeted that blue attacks have been slightly altered in color to help the colorblind see them better.

But what's really interesting are the additional lines of dialogue to be found from both talking to characters and interacting with objects. Undertale fans are most excited about those that seem to suggest that a character previously only speculated upon is indeed canonical.

Gaster is thought by Undertale fans to be the long-lost brother of resident skeleton sidekicks Papyrus and Sans. (Kotaku offers an in-depth explanation of this character's origins.) An especially rare tweak available in the patched version of Undertale apparently grants access to what fans think is the character.

You'll have to luck out to have the requisite stats to actually meet Gaster, but it's easier to encounter the dialogue that fans think confirms his existence and background. Possible hints to the character's backstory are revealed through newly updated dialogue in certain areas.

Fox responded to the data mining of his game on Twitter. When asked whether the efforts of the Underminers resulted in the lack of overt new content in this version of Undertale, he denied those claims.

The only reason I tried to get people not to datamine is so fans could experience things before they were found in the code...

— toby's Fox (@FwugRadiation) January 20, 2016

Ultimately, though, Fox has come around to how some fans choose to explore Undertale, extending and expanding the indie RPG's experiences as fully as possible.

Anyway, I have no problem with that kind of stuff now. After all, game hacking leads to things like fan translations, which are great.

— toby's Fox (@FwugRadiation) January 20, 2016

Undertale has become the cult favorite of fans — including some here at Polygon — since it launched on Windows PC last September. Its most ardent devotees helped rocket it to the finals of GameFAQs' Best Game Ever contest; it went on to win the title.