Words in the skywhat the first stars looked like

“Words in the sky” is a pure game-lore ending. It corresponds to no real discovery. The one sentence tied to reality is this: real constellations are just stars that humans connected because they lie in similar directions, even though they may be very far apart. So when "words" appear in the night sky, in reality it is the human eye looking for patterns.

This page first explains how to unlock the ending, then covers that one piece of real science, and finally lists real research from the era of the first stars, because this ending triggers at the “First stars” event. A reminder: that research is related background, not the basis of the ending itself.

How to unlock it

• Hint: When the first star lights up, look up and check the sky at that moment.
• Condition: Witness the main-line event “First stars” under 5 different sky events.
• Reward: The eye in the background starfield is now connected by lines.
• Mechanic: Sky events in the game rotate every 4 hours, and all players see the same sky.

This type of ending belongs to the Sky category. Because the condition requires 5 different sky events, you need to go through the “First stars” event several times at different times of day.

Real science: constellations are drawn by people

Real constellations are just stars that humans connected because they lie in similar directions, even though they may be at very different distances. Seen from Earth, two stars can look close together while one is actually near and the other far, with no relation to each other. So the so-called "words in the sky" are, in reality, a product of our eyes and imagination. The stars are not passing on a message.

The "words" in the game are game lore: the dozen or so fixed stars in the background join up into an eye. That is fiction.

Real research from the era of the first stars

The ending triggers at the “First stars” event, so research related to that era is listed here. It covers why stars shine, dark matter, black holes and gravitational waves. It has nothing to do with the "words", but it does relate to the moment the first star lit up.

• What powers the stars: Hans Bethe worked out that stars shine through nuclear fusion, solving the puzzle of how the Sun can burn for billions of years (Bethe, Physical Review, 1939).
• The Chandrasekhar limit: White dwarfs have a maximum mass of about 1.4 solar masses. Beyond it, a star is bound to collapse further (Chandrasekhar, The Astrophysical Journal, 1931).
• The first proposal of dark matter: Zwicky found that galaxies in the Coma Cluster moved too fast and proposed the existence of "dark matter". The idea was ignored for decades (Zwicky, Helvetica Physica Acta, 1933).
• Invisible mass: The outer parts of the Andromeda Galaxy rotate too fast, so a large amount of unseen matter must supply the gravity (Rubin and Ford, The Astrophysical Journal, 1970).
• The Bullet Cluster: After two galaxy clusters collided, the gas stayed in the middle while the center of gravity moved to the two sides. The dark matter had been "flung out" (Clowe et al., The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2006).
• The shadow of a black hole: Radio telescopes around the world formed an Earth-sized "virtual telescope" and imaged the shadow of the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 (Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2019).
• Gravitational waves: Two black holes merged 1.3 billion years ago, and humanity finally heard the ripples in spacetime (Abbott et al., LIGO and Virgo, Physical Review Letters, 2016).
• Giant black hole in the early universe: When the universe was less than 700 million years old, a black hole of 800 million solar masses already existed. How it grew so fast is still a mystery (Bañados et al., Nature, 2018).
• The Galactic center: Tracking the orbits of stars near the galactic center for over a decade showed a black hole of about 4 million solar masses hiding there, work that earned the 2020 Nobel Prize (Ghez et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2008).
• The last chapter of the universe: The fate of the universe trillions of years from now and beyond: stars burn out, protons may decay, and black holes eventually evaporate (Adams and Laughlin, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1997). This item connects to the ending because the unlock condition requires witnessing the end of the universe.

Want to read the originals? Search these titles

• Bethe (1939): "Energy production in stars"
• Chandrasekhar (1931): "The maximum mass of ideal white dwarfs"
• Zwicky (1933): "Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln", roughly "The redshift of extragalactic nebulae"
• Clowe et al. (2006): "A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter"
• Bañados et al. (2018): "An 800-million-solar-mass black hole in a significantly neutral Universe at a redshift of 7.5"