Necropolis Tomb

The **Necropolis Tomb** is a location in *Torment: Tides of Numenera*.

## Background

These hexagonal tombs are countless and contain memorials to folk long gone as well as interesting loot to be had. You navigate them by interacting with the console in the Necropolis Entrance.

## Points of interest

* 1254 leads you to the Endless Gate Entrance.
* 1535 is Phoenix's tomb.
* 2413 is the tomb of Choi's father, Ronos Cai'sul.
* 3431 is the First Castoff's Tomb (On the Builder's Trail).
* 3543 is the target of a tomb, Callistege wants to visit. Within is an ancient instrument you can tune using  Intellect (Quick Fingers, Perception). Callistege will then play it and create an image you can interpret with  Intellect (Lore: Machinery).
* 4135 (found on the dead Memorialist) leads you to a Necropolis Tomb containing the Floral Merecaster (Najma's tomb).
* 4221 is Choi Cai'sul's tomb (for the Severed Child quest).
* 5143 has Oddwald the Sane, who provides feedback; here you can steal the Electrostatic Merecaster.
* Hiro can appear in any tomb and give the Circulating Merecaster.
* Silver and its Philiactery can appear in any tomb.

## How to navigate in the Necropolis

While the game art and narrative suggest there are thousands of tombs in the Necropolis, the gameplay limits access to 625 cells. The in-game Necropolis console operates on an inverted coordinate system in quinary (base 5, without 0, so 1-5). Each tomb is represented by a vertical and a horizontal coordinate, arranged in an offset, hexagonal table. The first two digits represent the vertical position (Y), the second two the horizontal (X). For example, the code 1254, that takes you to the Endless Gate Entrance, takes you to a tomb located at position 12-54 (row 2, column 24 in decimal system).

The player can input a set of four digits or choose directly to go to one of the six adjacent cells, clockwise: top-left, top, top-right, bottom-right, bottom and bottom-left. Top and bottom work simply by going up or down a row, e.g. 1111 to 5511 (up; Y-1) or 1211 (down; Y+1). The other possibilities are a little more complicated to map and can even mislead the player. Depending on the position of the hexagon, and because it is an offset table, the result won't be the same. Either the coordinate of the hexagon is "upwards" (Y-1 for the top hexagons) or "downwards" (Y+1 for the bottom hexagons).

To demonstrate this, and considering everything we know (quinary, inverted coordinates YX, and offset hexagon table), some examples, verified in-game (clockwise reading from top-right):

* Upward hexagon (same Y value for top hexagons): Y-1 X-1; Y-1 X; Y-1 X+1; Y X+1; Y+1 X; Y X-1
	+ 1111: 5555; 5511; 5512; 1112; 1211; 1155
	+ 5555: 5454; 5455; 5411; 5511; 1155; 5554
		- Here we can see that it is possible to reach manually cell 5555 from cell 1111, but not the other way!
* Downward hexagon (same Y value for bottom hexagons): Y X-1; Y-1 X; Y X+1; Y+1 X+1; Y+1 X; Y+1 X-1
	+ 1112: 1111; 5512; 1113; 1213; 1212; 1211

## Behind the scenes

The tombs share the same map, with different items (cenotaphs/tombstones) placed inside them. Unique tombs have their own maps. Each map shows a few gravestone-like items with backer names from the Kickstarter campaign. Some of the higher level backers even got to write an epitaph.

The Necropolis was designed to be tricky to understand.

A simpler design could have used an hexagonal diagonal set, for example:

* Y X-1; Y-1 X; Y-1 X+1; Y X+1; Y+1 X; Y+1 X-1
	+ 1111: 1155; 5511; 5512; 1112; 1211; 1255