Island Tower

The **Island Tower** is a building on the Stranger that is located in the Cinder Isles.

## Description

### Features

The Island Tower is a tower that sits atop one of the Cinder Isles. The tower has a hidden doorway that goes down into the building. This doorway can be opened by removing the two lanterns from the front of the painting with the ringed planet in the sky.

This leads to a lower room that contains a green firepit and the corpses of the Stranger's inhabitants. Dozing off, meditating, or dying while holding an Artifact at the green fire in this room connects the Protagonist to the Starlit Cove area of the simulation.

The upper floors of the tower can only be reached from a cave at the base of the tower's island. This cave leads to an entrance into the tower. The room leading up to the Symbol Room can be accessed from this entrance, which also contains a slide reel showing how the Stranger's inhabitants entered the green firepit rooms.

The roof of the tower contains antennas and images of all buildings with connections to the simulation. Once the simulation connection building in the River Lowlands gets flooded, its respective antenna on the tower will no longer be active.

### Symbol Room

The Symbol Room is a secret room that can be accessed from the upper floor of the tower, making it necessary to use the tower's cave entrance. The doorway into the Symbol Room can only be opened by turning off the two lamps on either side of the painting inside the Island Tower. This can be done by entering the Starlit Cove and lighting up the boathouse next to the tower. It is then possible to go into the simulation's version of the room leading up to the Symbol Room. Extinguishing the candles here will turn off the lights in the real world.

* The room leading to the symbol room
* The mirrored Starlit Cove room

The room itself has five wooden containers, each with a sequence of symbols inside. Two of the sequences are still intact, containing sequences to enter the Abandoned Temple and the Eye signal blocker control room in the Reservoir. However, the three containers marked with glowing vault seals all have their sequences burned.

* Symbol Room with wooden containers
* Opened containers in the Symbol Room

### Dam

The Stranger's sails activate around seven minutes into the loop to move the spacecraft away from the impending supernova. Due to the strain this puts on the Stranger, the dam starts breaking down. 13 minutes into the loop, the dam eventually bursts. The Cinder Isles, including the Island Tower, are hit 30 seconds later. The tower's island is high enough not to get flooded, but the tower itself gets tilted sideways by the impact of the wave.

Seven minutes after being hit by the flood wave and 20.5 minutes into the loop, the Island Tower falls down completely. This severs the connection of the Stranger's inhabitants to the simulation as the flames of their artifacts are extinguished by the water. It is also no longer possible to access the simulation in this room. If the Protagonist is connected to the simulation here, they get woken up as the water floods the room.

* The Island Tower fallen down
* The extinguished artifacts of the inhabitants

## History

The Island Tower was built by the inhabitants of the Stranger after they started constructing a simulation modeled after their home moon. Its main purpose was to provide a place to connect to the simulation. The inhabitants also kept their symbol sequences in the secret Symbol Room. The Prisoner and all other inhabitants went to sleep at the tower to enter the simulation.

However, the Prisoner woke up after some time to disable the Eye signal blocker which prevented the signal of the Eye of the Universe from being broadcast. The other inhabitants quickly caught them and locked them in the Sealed Vault. They initially stored the symbol sequences to open the Sealed Vault inside the Symbol Room, but burned these sequences at some later point. The Stranger's inhabitants then went to sleep inside the Island Tower, never to wake up again. Nevertheless, they remained connected to the simulation even after their bodies' deaths.