Remnant 2 devs revealed a secret class only datamining could uncover, only for a guy with no coding experience to find it in less than a week with AI and 15 cans of Red Bull

02.08.2023 - 16:23 / pcgamer.com / Class / Ai

As reported by IGNOliver Nikolic, who goes by Barut on Discord, has cracked the code to Remnant 2's super-secret archetype—one that required datamining to find. 

Let's start at the beginning. Remnant 2 is a game that features «secrets within secrets», thanks to a procedurally-generated gameplay loop that slaps a limited number of handcrafted sections together in radically different orders. While sections will be familiar, no two playthroughs are the same, which is a huge smokescreen to throw up in front of secret-hunters.

Knowing that datamining—the act of trawling through game files for secrets—would inevitably crack things wide open, Gunfire Games decided to roll with it. The Archon, a super-secret archetype, would require datamining to uncover, as revealed by principal designer Ben Cureton July 28.

«We knew we couldn't stop datamining,» Cureton wrote, «so we leaned into it and created an entire Archetype that could be shared with the community once revealed by those with the ability to see between worlds.»

This kicked the Remnant 2 community into overdrive. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, they zeroed-in on a door in the Labyrinth zone—which canonically takes place «between worlds». While that might've been an easy hint to pull from Cureton's tweet, the rest of the hunt was far from straightforward.

A summary by the channel Asura on Youtube details the hunt's short history step by step, one which led to an invite-only discord named the «The Cult of the Door». In their video, Asura explains: «Within days a comprehensive list of things that had been tried had been formed … using an all-seeing eye item, getting all possible status effects at [once], exploring every inch of the labyrinth … they tried everything.»

It just wouldn't open. But while they toiled, Barut—a man with no coding experience, fed by a diet of raw determination, grit, and a concerning amount of energy drinks—set to work on a solution. Barut spoke to IGN: «It kept being a stronger and stronger obsession to solve it—I would go out and a thought would cross my mind, ‘What if?’ so I said to myself, ‘Okay’, grabbed 15 Red Bulls and got to it.»

In this case, Barut literally drank enough caffeine to see into other worlds, reportedly averaging about four hours of sleep a night until he discovered the truth less than a week later. To make up for his lack of coding knowledge, Barut used ChatGPT to create a script looking for items, traits, and archetypes labelled as «corrupted», and discovered a perfect fit—there were exactly enough «corrupted» items to complete a loadout. What would happen if you were to try to open the door with every single one equipped?

These items are a pain to get, though—one of them, Leto's Amulet, is obtained