Players Uncover New Secrets Buried In Undertale’s First Big Update

Players Uncover New Secrets Buried In Undertale’s First Big Update

Undertale just got its first update (yes, after being out for months), and at first glance it doesn’t seem like much. Players, however, have begun picking it apart like hungry vultures, and they have already found some interesting stuff.

For a while now, Undertale creator Toby Fox has been adamant that any updates to the role-playing sensation will probably be in the name of tweaks/bugfixes — not significant helpings of new content. And yet, it appears that he decided to sprinkle a few scraps throughout the game’s first update — some of which hint at the possibility of more in the future.

(Warning: BIG Undertale spoilers ahead.)

By now plenty of people have finished Undertale, but only a select few have pushed beneath the game’s surface — picked over its bones — in an attempt to uncover the true nature of its world. These dataminers have been rewarded with a breadcrumb trail that seems to point to a character named Gaster, who many speculate is somehow related to bad joke skeleton bros Sans and Papyrus. He is, many believe, trapped outside the bounds of space and time due to an experiment gone wrong. Despite this, there are still traces of him scattered through the game’s world and code in the form of grey NPCs, hidden rooms and things of the like.

It’s believed that he has an especially strong connection to Sans — that the machine in Sans’ secret workshop might be the invention that turned Gaster into a spray of paste across the lens of the game’s reality. This (finally) brings us to the biggest discovery in the recent update: new dialogue in Sans’ lab. Here it is, courtesy of kiwikiwi591:

Speculation says the three people in the picture are Sans, Papyrus and Gaster, and the picture says “don’t forget” because it’s the only way Sans can remember Gaster after he Houdini-ed out of existence. Other speculation is similar, only instead of Papyrus, some think one of the figures is Alphys — science pals instead of skeleton bros, basically.

There are more big changes associated with Gaster as well. A sound file commonly associated with him is different now — arguably creepier. Perhaps most significant of all, dataminers have found that the “fun” values in the game files associated with Gaster’s appearance have changed. Before, you had to tamper with your files to find the character people believe to be Gaster or evidence associated with him. Now there’s apparently an extremely slight chance that his room will appear at a specific point in the game sans tampering. So basically, if all of this is true/intentional, Gaster (or whoever this character is) is canon now. Perhaps it was always intended to be that way, or perhaps this is Fox’s way of throwing a bone to an extremely specific, tirelessly ardent part of Undertale‘s fandom.

There are other, less (under) earth-shaking changes in the patch as well. These include minor dialogue tweaks/additions, stat changes for some characters, a change that makes the game’s notorious piano puzzle a bit more accessible, and a super meta reward for said piano puzzle. Basically, if you solve it, you gain access to a room with a couple dogs in it. One of them now offers new dialogue that references Fox’s longtime hints that he’ll add a battle against the dog to the game… someday… maybe… or not. Here’s that in video form, and here are some screenshots, courtesy of HylianAngel:

The implication of all this is that seems to be that Fox wants to add some new stuff — the fight against the dog, at the very least — but he’s got fixes and things of the like to polish up first, and that’s gonna take a while. Or maybe he’ll just never get around to it. We’ll see.

Right now, people are still in the process of uncovering tweaks and changes, so the full breadth of this patch remains to be seen. It’s certainly got Undertale fans poking, prodding and talking, though. And when this community gets going, well… probably expect to hear more in the coming days. And weeks. And maybe months.


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