How to start Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye guide

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye is a huge new slab of galaxy to explore. But, as Chris Plante noted in our review, it’s “so comically hidden that players could complete the entirety of Outer Wilds without knowing they’d missed the entirety of its expansion.” It’s true: Outer Wilds offers only the barest of hints on how to find the entrance to Echoes of the Eye’s new area.

But, finding it is worth it (I mean, you paid for it, right?). And in this Echoes of the Eye guide, we’ll help you do just that.

Starting Echoes of the Eye

Whether you’re beginning the game for the first time or returning to an old save, you can start Echoes of the Eye right away.

Timber Hearth Museum

Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

Head to the museum on Timber Hearth where you will find a new exhibit (helpfully labeled “NEW EXHIBIT”) in the main room. Reading the accompanying placard in front of the exhibit will inform you that there is a Radio Tower on Timber Hearth, which was built to receive signals from a Deep Space Satellite, and that it contains the first pictures taken of the entire solar system. Those pictures are important so next we need to head for the Radio Tower.

Timber Hearth Radio Tower

Grid View

• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

You can find this structure to the northwest of the village, on a grassy plain near some trees. If you’re having trouble spotting it, look for smoke rising up from a crater nearby. There’s also a camp by the tower where you can roast some marshmallows and find an inessential note from Hornfels about the satellite.

Head inside the tower to find the pictures you’re looking for. (You can see them in the gallery above.) There’s one on each wall — one at 40 degrees, one at 137 degrees, one at 248 degrees, and one at 350 degrees.

On the barrel in the middle of the tower, find a voice recorder that provides some important information. Hornfels, witnessing the images for the first time, notices something off about one of the pictures. They conclude that they will need to send Gabbro to inspect the satellite to see if there’s anything wrong.

Deep Space Satellite

From here, there are some extra steps that you can take or skip as you see fit:

• Gabbro is on an island on Giant’s Deep, and you can ask them about the satellite, but they don’t have any useful information.
• You can also fly out to the satellite (which is tiny, and which won’t display a name, but which you can find by studying its vertical orbit that rotates at a perpendicular to the rest of the galaxy.) If you take the time to fly out to it, you’ll discover a voice recording from Gabbro where they conclude that there is nothing wrong with the satellite.

Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

So, we’re back where we started, analyzing the photos in the Radio Tower and searching for whatever stood out to Hornfels. The detail you’re looking for is in the 40 degree photo, where there is an unidentified, dark circle crossing in front of the Sun. That’s your portal to Echoes of the Eye’s new area. To reach it, you’ll need to go to the position from which that photo was taken.

Fly to the Deep Space Satellite

Grid View

• The Deep Space Satellite on your map Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• The landing pad Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• The flashlight lock Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
• Mark this on your HUD, and you can fly straight there (after you’ve found it). Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon

You don’t actually need to calculate where, precisely, the 40 degree point is on the satellite’s orbit. Instead, at the beginning of a loop, …

1. Take off from Timber Hearth and lock on to the satellite. It isn’t labeled, but if you check your map, you can see it. It’s a small red dot rotating along the vertical orbit.
2. Once you’ve locked on (which you can do from the Ship Log), fly to it, and match velocity to follow along. Be careful not to hit it with your ship, as this seems to knock it off the necessary orbit.
3. Soon, you should see the black circle appear in front of the Sun. Fly to it, and you’ll be sucked into a portal which will transport you to a dark area where a greenish light emits from a landing pad.
4. Fly in, get out of your ship, and move into the next room where you’ll see a door locked by beams crossing in front of it.
5. Shine your flashlight on the device in the center of the room, which will begin to rotate and cause the beams to move.
6. Turn your flashlight off when there are no beams obstructing the door and it will open, revealing the interior of The Stranger, the location where the rest of Echoes of the Eye takes place.

Now that you have discovered this location, you don’t need to redo this process in each subsequent run. Simply select The Stranger on your Ship Log in Rumors Mode, and mark it on your HUD. From there, you can lock on and autopilot to the portal.