Shows the location of all steam valves, and how to operate them to get access to the control room.
序章
The Steam Tunnels puzzle which gives access to the Control Room really isn’t a particularly hard one. But such puzzles are rather unusual for The Long Dark. また, the tunnel area has a large enough size that it’s easy to lose track of where all the valves are, whether they’re open or closed, and how the puzzle fits together.
If you want to solve the puzzle yourself, here are a few general hints:
- Some of the valves are hidden in dark areas of the tunnels. Explore the Steam Tunnels completely with a good light source to make sure you don’t overlook anything. There’s also some other items lying around that may turn out to be important.
- The handles of closed valves are always at a 45° angle, the handles of open valves are always horizontal. The angles of the handle and the pipe are not related to each other.
- The valves are binary (either open or closed, nothing in-between). But the steam pressure is analog: Sometimes the pressure is more than zero, but less than the maximum. In these cases, you may need to redirect more steam into this section of the pipe by opening or closing additional valves.
- If a pipe is hot and red, but the valve it leads to is still frozen and blue, this probably means that the pressure isn’t quite high enough.
- Steam coming out of a valve is generally harmless to you. But steam coming out of pipes (not next to a valve) is very hot and will make you lose health rapidly if you walk into it. This can happen in the area around valves D2 and D3 (see the map below).
Note that as of October 2021, one of the most common causes of problems in the Steam Tunnels appears to be a bug that prevents the opening of certain doors or valves, even though the pipes are already hot and ice should have thawed. In these cases, it may help to just quick-save the game and reload that save from the main menu. If this doesn’t help, you may have to replay from a checkpoint or earlier save. Setting the valves again should hopefully be easy using this guide.
明らかに, this guide contains spoilers for the Steam Tunnels puzzle. それはあります ない contain story spoilers.
Steam Tunnels Map
This is a rough sketch of the Steam Tunnels, with all valve locations marked in red. The valves are numbered roughly in the order they need to be manipulated. See below for a detailed walkthrough.
Opening Doors 1 と 2
ドア 1 is the access door to the Steam Tunnels. This is the first iced door you meet. バルブ あ is right next to it, and it’s already hot, so you can open the valve right away. This will thaw the door. Open it and enter.
You’ll see door 2 straight ahead, also covered in ice. それを開くには, you have to put in a fair bit more work. Enter the Steam Tunnels, head off to the far right and operate the following valves in this order:
- 近い B1
- 開ける B2 — thaws B3 & B4
- 開ける B3
- 近い B4
- 開ける B5 — thaws B6
- 開ける B6
- 近い B3
- 開ける B4 —thaws B7
See the following screenshots for reference (left before, right after the steps above).
Once all the pipes in this hallway are red and toasty, go back a few steps to the big panel and open valve B7. This will heat up one of the three pipes along with the ceiling (and thaw valve C1). To open door 2, you’ll need to get all three of these overhead pipes hot. Head back past the main hall towards the control room to proceed.
Note that these overhead pipes leak hot steam. Don’t burn yourself!
In the hallway in front of the control room, operate the following valves in this order:
- 開ける C1 — thaws C2 & C3
- 近い C2
- 開ける C3 — thaws C4
- 近い C4 — thaws C5
- 開ける C5 — thaws C7
- 近い C7 — thaws C6
- 開ける C6
- 開ける C7 — thaws C8
- 開ける C8 — thaws C9
- 開ける C9 — thaws D1
See the following screenshots for reference (left before, right after the steps above).
これを完了したら, head back to the other side. You’ll see that two out of the three overhead pipes are now hot. Note that the second pipe is also leaking steam. You should either sprint through it and take some damage or crawl underneath the escaping steam.
- 開ける D1 — warms third pipe, thaws D2
- 開ける D2 — thaws door 2
Now you can finally open door 2 and head through to the area on the other side.
Opening Door 3: コントロールルーム
Once you go through door 2, you’ll reach a slightly larger hall with what maybe looks like some kind of large steam boiler. On this boiler is valve D3. You’ll see hot steam escaping on its side, so you’ll need to close D3 in order to redirect steam into the pipe leading out of the boiler. (This thaws D4.)
Turning to the left, you’ll see several tunnels leading out of this hall:
初め, follow the tunnel towards valve D4. This tunnel actually forms a loop and gets back into this hall from the other side. Once you reach valve D4, you’ll see that there is steam escaping here, あまりにも, so you need to close D4 in order to redirect steam where you need it to go. (This thaws D5.)
次, follow the tunnel from the boiler hall towards valve D5. This tunnel can only be entered while crouching and it’s in a bit of a dark corner, so it may be easy to miss. Re-check the map and the screenshot if you can’t seem to find it.
Valve D5 is located at the back door to the control room. You can’t get in this way because the door is secured with a locked chain. 幸運, あなただけが必要です open D5 to finally get hot steam all the way to valve D6 next to the front door to the control room.
ついに, ただ open D6 to thaw door 3, which gives you access to the control room.
Great work! Thanks so much. The bug was causing me grief, but after that your instructions made up for lost time. ありがとう!
yeah genius what if C1 i still frozen (after B7 opened) – that exactly on You picture …
Thank you for this! It helped so much and I did run into the bug where the control room door still showed as locked even after everything was done so I had to restart from a save but it made everything frustrating because I didn’t know if I had finished the puzzle or not. This game definitely lacks communication. Haha! But overall addicting.
This Wintermute section is a total p.o.s.