It’s time for another Torment Tip! Er, that is to say, I ran across another logic puzzle that isn’t solved by leveraging your character skills and figured I may as well share my solution. Originally I had hedged my tipping bets by parenthesizing the “Tips” in the title, but even though I can now officially say I’m giving multiple tips, the brackets are gonna stay.

Anyways, this particular puzzle is much simpler than the Silver Sphere, so I’ll skip breaking things down into multiple stages. I recommend trying to figure it out yourself, but if you can’t, you can find the solution (and the reasoning) right here.

The Tome of Singing Thorns

This tome is a quest item that you can find in a pile of refuse at the Buried Crossroads. It’s involved in a quest called Borrowed and Lost, and all you really need to do with it is turn it in to the quest-giver. But if you examine the item in your quest inventory, you can actually Use it to unlock some welcome rewards...

Upon examination, you will find yourself able to touch symbols associated with the Tides present in the game. The actual nature of them as Tides isn’t important for this puzzle; rather, the sounds they produce on touch, and more importantly the colors of the symbols, are key to solving this mystery.

By further examining an inscription on the tome, you are presented with the following clue:

“Symptoms - Cyanosis, Haemophilia, Spontaneous bruising, Jaundice, Argyria.”

“See her as she was. You do not deserve to forget what you lost.”

At first glance, this seems like complete nonsense, but what it’s actually telling you is the order in which you touch the colored symbols:

Cyanosis - bluish discoloration of skin

Haemophilia - impaired ability to produce blood clots

Spontaneous bruising - purplish skin hue due to pooling blood

Jaundice - yellowish pigmentation of the skin

Argyria - discoloration of the skin due to silver exposure

If you put that all together, the solution is obvious:

BLUE, RED, INDIGO, GOLD, SILVER

As you touch the symbols in that order, the resulting sounds will harmonize before transforming the tome in dramatic fashion. Your reward?

Permanent +1 to Intellect Pool!

But wait, there’s more! Thankfully, unlike the Silver Sphere, all you have to do this time is repeat the original order. This time you get a couple XP and some more exposition. But hey, better than nothing, right?

Once you’ve performed this solution twice, there’s nothing to be done with the Tome of Singing Thorns besides handing it in to complete the quest, Borrowed and Lost.

Torment: Tides of Numenéra has me utterly enthralled. I had intended to do something resembling actual work today but instead found myself gabbing away with the wacky denizens of Sagus Cliffs all damn day. I’m still bracing myself for some form of disappointment, but so far this game is everything I could possibly want.

So rather than go silent on Day 2 of “Me Trying Not To Be a Lazy Bastard”, I figured I’d share some tips on a puzzle I ran across relatively early on. 

One thing I really can’t recommend enough though: DO NOT LOOK AT GUIDES FOR THIS GAME! 

Not for your first run-through anyways. It’s just so much fun uncovering these mysteries on your own, consequences be damned, and it feels so much more in keeping with the Torment series’ themes of self-discovery and bewilderment. That being said, if you find yourself legitimately struggling with something, there’s no shame in seeking help; just don’t go out of your way to spoil the “best path” or something like that.

Anyways, on to one of my Torment Tips! Well, this may be the only tip I end up giving, so... Torment Tip(s), yeah.

THE SILVER SPHERE

Early on you should come across a location known as the Order of Truth. You may even end up here as part of the main story path you choose. During the course of your exploration of this building, you will likely run across a mysterious interactible pyramid object that contains a Silver Sphere. Now, clearly this is a Numenéra, and that means you gots to mess with it, but unlike everything you’ve probably encountered up until this point, this puzzle can’t be solved by simply throwing Effort at it.

There’s also nothing that I found in the game world that hinted at this puzzle’s solution, forcing me to come up with the solution somewhat more organically. What follows is a breakdown of this (admittedly simple) puzzle, in 3 parts:

A Quick Reference

Puzzle Logic

Solution

As for the reward waiting for you at the end, that’s for you to find out (SPOILER ALERT: it’s ok).

Silver Sphere Option Reference

This puzzle will require selecting from a specific series of directions in order, based on whether you are removing or returning the sphere to its home. This might be tricky to remember as you’re doing it (I wrote it out in Notepad++ while playing), and isn’t going to automatically give away the puzzle’s solution, so I present it here for easy reference. How you access these options is up to you:

REMOVE Front: Deep Violet Left: Lurid Red Right: Dull Orange Back: Brilliant Blue Bottom: Shining Yellow

RETURN Front: Bright Orange Left: Deep Violet Right: Blazing Orange Back: Cool Green Bottom: Indigo

Silver Sphere Puzzle Logic

Basically, you want to find some way of removing the Silver Sphere from its “prison”, but every time you try to do so, it magically returns home. Depending on which side of the pyramid you extricate and restore the sphere through, the sphere will change color.

This being Torment, there are some opportunities to flex your stat pools a bit to get some help, one being required for completion, and the other necessary to understand how the puzzle works.

By examining the base of the pyramid, you can attempt to decipher the meaning of the strange writing on the device. Upon success, you uncover the following inscription:

“The crimson dawn greets the seeker. The violet dusk sees the search’s end.”

This is key to figuring out the solution, but as far as I can tell it isn’t required if you’ve just looked it up elsewhere (naughty, naughty). Normally, playing with the sphere allows you to pass it through 4 different openings, but there is a fifth “bottom” access point that is only available once you’ve examined the pyramid’s frame more closely and passed the Perception check there.

Once you have access to the bottom and understand the puzzle’s clue, you can solve this puzzle by playing with the color or the sphere.

Based on the inscription, it’s clear that the sphere needs to start out crimson (or red) and end as violet, but simply removing the sphere from the left side and returning it via the left side doesn’t do anything special. So what needs to be done inbetween?

Silver Sphere Solution

Think rainbows!

Or, more accurately, think back to elementary school and learning the order of rainbow colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, aka ROYGBIV!

Armed with that knowledge, solving the puzzle is a snap... or you could just follow the following instructions:

LEFT, RIGHT, BOTTOM, BACK, BACK, BOTTOM, FRONT

Bam! Enjoy your new item!

Extra-Super-Special Solution

What’s that? Don’t fancy your reward? Well don’t worry, cause there’s still one more, even better solution to this puzzle! I’ll give you time to figure it out..

..

....

........

Got it? No?

Basically, on top of following the colors of the rainbow, you want to use every color option keeping in mind the intensity of the colors coming from the sphere, like so:

Remove (→) Return (←)

Lurid Red           → Left

Bright Orange    ← Front

Dull Orange       → Right

Blazing Orange  ← Right

Shining Yellow    → Bottom

Cool Green        ← Back

Brilliant Blue       → Back

Indigo                 ← Bottom

Deep Violet         → Front

Deep Violet         ← Left

Once you’ve returned the sphere for the final time, it turns into yet another item. In other words, if you want both items, be sure to save this solution for last!

To be honest, while I knew what I was doing for the previous solution, this one was stumbled on completely by accident, just seeing why there were multiples of some colors. I’m not sure why the Orange options work Bright/Dull/Blazing and not Blazing/Dull/Bright, but that’s just how it is.

Anyways, hope you’ve enjoyed this little tip for Torment: Tides of Numenéra and that you’re enjoying the game as much as I am. I don’t know if I’ll be making anymore of these Torment Tip(s) seeing as I’m playing the game blind and it ultimately depends on whether I can actually figure things out on my own and whether I consider these solutions “obvious” or not.