Destiny 2’s Corridors of Time Puzzle is a Literal Jigsaw Puzzle, But the Community Must Find the Pieces

Since the weekly reset on Tuesday morning, Destiny 2 players have been busy trying to figure out the game’s latest mystery. What started out relatively simple soon became one of the biggest community puzzles Destiny players have ever seen; a literal jigsaw puzzle that requires the community to come together and source their individual pieces. Let’s start at the beginning.

On Tuesday morning, players noticed two things, particularly surprising because nothing was scheduled on the Season roadmap. The first was a new quest from Osiris asking players to explore the Corridors of Time. We’ve already rescued Saint-14 from death, but apparently these halls hold more secrets. When players entered, they found all doorways open (unlike the Saint-14 quests that had guided paths) and quickly got lost. The second thing people noticed was a set of symbols now appearing on each of the four Osiris obelisks. These symbols began to change at the top of the hour, every hour.

People quickly put together that the symbols were a map or combination showing what order you had to progress through the doorways in the Corridors of Time. Finishing a seven-symbol sequence brought players to a new room with a tomb in the middle (image at the top of the page) and unlocked pages in a new lore book chronicling Osiris and Saint-14’s friendship. There’s a lot of speculation about whose tomb is in the middle of the Timelost Vault, but common consensus right now is that it is our own Guardian’s. Attempting to approach the tomb will phase the player out of the room.

By holding square and collecting the lore page, a set of symbols was revealed under the transparent floor in the Timelost Vault. People realized that there were 19 lore pages that would take 19 hours to collect (with each combination rotating out each hour), and that the symbols below formed a map by piecing together each different image based on which sequence of symbols on its side matched up. Here’s an image of what those codes looked like:

The edge codes were how players mapped the connecting pieces. Notice the open “wall” on the right side of the main symbol? These walls and openings created a maze when the image was complete, and once solved, that series of symbols on the maze became a new Corridors of Time combination. Here’s what the solved map looks like:

Here are all of the solved codes for the 19 pieces of lore:

#1: Plus, Snake, Clover, Hex, Snake, Plus, Diamond

#2: Clover, Clover, Hea, Hex, Plus, Diamond, Snake

#3: Plus, Clover, Diamond, Diamond, Snake, Diamond, Diamond

#4: Diamond, Clover, Plus, Hex, Clover, Hex, Clover

#5: Diamond, Plus, Snake, Hex, Hex, Diamond, Plus

#6: Diamond, Hex, Snake, Hex, Clover, Clover, Plus

#7: Diamond, Plus, Clover, Hex, Snake, Hex, Snake

#8: Clover, Plus, Clover, Hex, Clover, Diamond, Snake

#9: Clover, Clover, Clover, Snake, Diamond, Hex, Diamond

#10: Plus, Hex, Clover, Hex, Plus, Diamond, Hex

#11: Snake, Hex, Snake, Hex, Diamond, Hex, Snake

#12: Hex, Snake, Plus, Hex, Snake, Hex, Plus

#13: Clover, Plus, Clover, Diamond, Snake, Snake, Hex

#14: Hex, Diamond, Snake, Plus, Hex, Plus, Plus

#15: Clover, Hex, Plus, Diamond, Plus, Snake, Diamond

#16: Snake, Hex, Hex, Hex, Plus, Diamond, Diamond

#17: Clover, Diamond, Hex, Clover, Plus, Diamond, Plus

#18: Diamond, Plus, Plus, Clover, Snake, Plus, Diamond

#19: Hex, Plus, Plus, Diamond, Hex, Snake, Snake

Emblem: Diamond, Clover, Snake, Plus, Hex, Hex, Plus, Hex, Diamond, Clover, Snake

Following this new emblem code through the Corridors of Time led players to a slightly different room and rewarded them with an emblem, but the mystery wasn’t over yet. Upon receiving the emblem, a similar puzzle piece was revealed underneath the floor for this room, one not matching the map above.

The community quickly figured out that players were seeing hundreds of unique codes—or puzzle pieces. While some of them were duplicates, it became clear that this puzzle would require pulling the community together to piece together this massive jigsaw puzzle. Leaders of the Destiny community have been spearheading the charge for nearly two days now, with massive spreadsheets, data entry, and formulas to put it all together. Someone even coded a system that would auto-connect matching pieces once the data had been entered, effectively automating the process of putting the jigsaw puzzle together. However, the community still has to find all the pieces.

As of a few hours ago today, this is just about where things are at:

Update 1/17/20 8:15 AM Pacific:

The puzzle is really coming along, but still far from complete.

Each one of those small hexagons is a piece of the puzzle. This image is laid out with the pieces that have been confirmed as connecting. Some of the pieces have symbols in them while others remain blank. While some expected this latest puzzle to create another maze, similar to the original 19-piece emblem puzzle, others are getting skeptical and thinking this might turn into something else. It’s clear that the result will be a very long sequence of symbols that need to be entered into the Corridors of Time though, based on one of the Bungie Community Manager’s tweets.

“This will take time to put together, let alone execute.” At the end of all of this, the community will still need to take that knowledge back into the game and do… something. Right now that something is unclear, but if there’s one thing the Destiny community can all get behind, it’s a good puzzle.

This isn’t the first time Bungie has created a puzzle that required the efforts of the wider community to solve. Back in Destiny 1, the path to get the Outbreak Prime (precursor to Destiny 2’s Outbreak Perfected) required a massive cohesive effort from the community, sourcing various images to put together the solution.

When all of this is finished, players still aren’t sure what they’ll get. Best guesses right now say it’s a weapon, but Bungie has been changing up the formula on content delivery this year, and Season of Dawn, in particular, has really altered the way players interact with the story directly. This huge puzzle could be the next major step in pushing the story forward. At least, we expect to learn a little bit more about whose tomb we’ve been visiting over and over and how we might go about preventing our own untimely demise.