Well @DarthTrethon
The entire existence in NMS is under that umbrella of: “simply no possible way that can conceptually work in any capacity.”
Isn’t it?
Everything from lightspeed travel to plants that grow from minerals without seed or DNA. Fuel from asteroids? Hand held devices that can form geology? It’s all unrealistic. Sci-fi fantasy at its best.
It’s a make-believe universe with twisted lore, that hints at answers, that in turn often end up sprouting more questions than confirmations.
The stories that make up the lore seem to alter with each era (large update).
There seems to be a common theme of a dark history leading to a peaceful existence, patroled by guardian sentinels.
The Abyss is just as likely just a refference to the virtual endlessness of space, as it is a reference to an alternate existance or something sinister. The family of glass seems just as plausibly a euphemism for the world beyond the TV screen as it is for a second universe below the visible one of NMS.
The new lore suggests the sentinels are also carriers of echos to their final destination; the pall-bearers of those who fail and die and are ‘filed’. The tie-in of greek mythology and the connections in Waking Titan are as often as not just as vague as they are absolute. It’s supposed to confound us and leave us aching for the truth.
With so much left open to interpretation, almost any idea that has been put forward in this thread, holds some validity.
One thing that I’m still very curious about is the refference to “not drinking the water”. That quote seems very precise yet there has never been a clarification to the refference.
I’m very interested to see others interpretations of what the lore, the world of glass and all the other weirdness means to them.
The problem with all that is the real isn’t in the future…the real is in the here and now…and now digital characters can’t exist in the real. That’s the major problem with the 4th wall…once you cross it all notions of fictional technology and everything else that could or might theoretically exist in the future or alternate universes or whatever all goes out of the window. None of that is relevant in the here and now.
The ARG played with a lot of those concepts in trying to mix reality with the fictional universe of NMS and all of that was scrapped…nothing of Waking Titan ended up remaining in any way relevant to NMS.
But then time itself (here and now) is in itself subject to change in a fictional universe… it can even be reversed.
From the point of view of something fictional, breaching the boundary into the world of glass is just as plausible as anything else.
But then it’s not the real world…then it would be another distorted and corrupted simulation…which makes it a moot point…it’s not and can’t be the real world.
But then it’s making matters worse…we don’t really have any remote hints about the nature of the place. We have no idea how the traveler got there. He believes it’s another universe but we don’t really know much else. We do know that the game is also capable of generating negative numbered galaxies that can only be accessed via modding the game…I’d sooner suspect that HG might plan to do something with that than to believe that they want to allude to a fictional real world.
I’ve read the lore of the base computer a dozen times over…there is absolutely NOTHING to hint at anything to do with any “real” world. Very little is concrete there and nothing about the world of glass is concrete at all…zero.
You can draw some parallels between the nanite infected First Spawn that owned 100 Korvax slaves and the established lore about how the Korvax used nanites to alter the nature of the Gek and possibly get a hint about the time when all this happened but not much else.
I hope you’re not talking about the Rogue Data entries because a) that’s from the perspective of the Atlas, NOT the creators, get your facts straight, and b) there is exactly ZERO correlation between that and the world of glass and family of glass…NOTHING.
What we do know about the world of glass is that it is where the sentinels go to store the echoes of the dead…and this is referring to dead beings created by the simulation…not real or higher beings. So surely this means it HAS to also be a simulation created by the Atlas. That would make the family of glass some kind of caretakers…except this is the equivalent of NMS’s afterlife…the land of the dead where no living being can go and stay alive and no living being returns from.
Exact quote: “We see the Sentinels swarm across the void, warping in and out of this dimension at the will of some unknown force, depositing the echoes of the dead within the archives.”
More references to the world of glass found in traveler graves(the ones that give glyphs):
" There is a world beneath all of this, a world of – zzktt – glass – kkttzztt…
Those I killed – zzrtktt – Vy’keen, Gek, Korvax, united in freedom and – zzrttktt –
They did not die, not – zzktt – Even now, I see their faces. They – zzkttt – smile. We make them smile…"
and
“The creature attempted to escape – zzktt – fell into a world beneath all worlds – kkttzztt…
A realm of glass where nothing lived, where – zzrtktt – everything that had ever been or would be could be catalogued, stored, and - zzrttktt – accumulated…
The Sentinels, they had found – zzktt – the answer to their struggle – zzkttt – their directive, to save life whatever the cost…
They could – kzkzkzt - use the glass to preserve those they had to – kzkzzkkt -… nothing would ever truly die again…”
All of that matches up with the lore from the base computer quests.
And one mention of the world of glass from the Boundary Failures by Telamon:
“Iteration #2394829084924924924H
Scenario: Death
Analysis: It arrived in the night, beneath the stars… It seems certain now that the sub-routine has judged my presence anomalous, a threat to the stability of reality. It is correct. But I will survive, I know that now. I saw the secret. I saw a place beneath reality, a place I should not have seen…I saw a world of glass.”
Interesting this new lore comes with the new grey /sepia biomes. They really have an afterlife apocalyptic colouring.
This doesn’t quite confirm that the archives are in the other dimension but it certainly confirms the sentinels are the carriers of the echos and that they cross the dimensions to do so. It just doesn’t quite mention where the archives are.
You may have noticed that sentinels now spawn up out of the ground rather than from the side ‘off camera’. Perhaps this them appearing from the other dimension?
I think the World of Glass is a crystal data storage system, as seen in the link below:
When the Atlas started freaking out about it’s impending death, the Sentinels (its anti-virus bot agents) started capturing and preserving data on the back-up glass storage so that it might be saved if the Atlas shut down. The evidence for this can be found in the Grave lore, the end of which talks about the Sentinels finding the World of Glass and then killing Travelers to preserve them there “the Sentinels have saved us, the Sentinels have damned us”
Data saved in the WOG is “dead”, it cannot be active in the running simulation anymore.
Yep…that is very consistent with the lore of the purpose of the glass worlds…places used to store echoes of dead. Though I don’t think they exclusively killed and preserved travelers. In fact the travelers were likely the only beings they might not be able to preserve echoes of as a lot of travelers are not actual beings that live and do anything in the NMS universe themselves but are mere bodies controlled by beings from other dimensions…the players.