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OrbRoom

The orb room suggests that there may be a relationship with Aberoth and its solar system. There are eight orbs, representing the common realms, that rotate around a central light. There is also a shadow orb, not representing a common realm.

Beginning of Time[]

The beginning of time in Aberoth is April 15th 1972 at 02:00 am UTC. The significance of this date is not known. Every instance of time on this page is represented as the number of in-game seconds that have elapsed since this date. These times can be calculated from Unix Time by subtracting the constant 72151200 (Beginning of time as a UNIX Timestamp) and multiplying the result by 10 to scale it up to in-game time.

Movement[]

The movement of the orbs is based on the movement of the planets of the real solar system. However, instead of viewing a planets position around the sun, the angles of the orbs are based on the angle that the planets have relative to Earth. In Aberoth, all planets orbit the Sun counterclockwise at a constant speed, however, since the Earth orbits the Sun as well, their angles relative to earth change at varying speeds and can even go in reverse.

Model[]

The movement of an orb is specified by two properties of it's corresponding planet in the solar system. The first property is the planets distance from the sun (radius ) and the second is it's orbital period . The values of these properties can be found in the table below. Note that the orbital periods of the planets are given in (in-game) days while the timestamps on this page are given in seconds. That means that the orbital periods have to be converted to seconds as well before they can be used for calculations. To do that, we simply multiply them by 86400, which is the number of seconds in one day. To calculate the angle of the orb, it is easiest to first determine the distance of it's planet from Earth in the and directions. For that, we take the distance of the planet from the sun and subtract the distance of Earth from the Sun from it:

where , the duration of one year, and is the number of in-game seconds since the beginning of time. From these offsets we can compute the final angle of the orb. There are several ways to do that, one of them is the the following:

Realm Orbs[]

Orb Counterpart Radius (*) Orbital Period (**) In-game Radius
Orb white White Sun 0.0 0.0 days 16 pixels
Orb black Black Mercury 0.3871 87.9691 24 pixels
Orb green Green Venus 0.7233 224.701 days 32 pixels
Orb red Red Mars 1.542 686.969 days 40 pixels
Orb purple Purple Jupiter 5.2044 4332.82 days 48 pixels
Orb yellow Yellow Saturn 9.5826 10755.7 days 56 pixels
Orb cyan Cyan Uranus 19.2184 30685.18 days 64 pixels
Orb blue Blue Neptune 30.1104 60194.0 days 72 pixels

(*) The radii are given in terms of Astronomical Units (AU), of which one 1 AU is equal to the distance of Earth from the Sun.

(**) These values may differ slightly from the in-game values, but should be accurate enough to give a good estimate of the orbs position.

Ephemeris

(Click to enlarge) Movement plot of the realm orbs over two weeks starting on March 26th 2018. The angles are taken modulo 180 degrees to make it easier to identify alignments: Every time lines intersect, those orbs will be aligned. The sudden drops on the left are not part of the plot and are a rendering error caused by the orb passing 180° or 360°

Shadow Orb[]

The Shadow Orb is based on the Moon. Since the Moon does not directly orbit the Sun, the shadow orb's movement is different from the realm orbs in that it actually rotates at a constant speed. The angle of the shadow orb can be calculated the following way:

where , the duration of one lunar month.

Orb Counterpart Orbital Period In-game Radius
Orb shadow Shadow Moon 27.32166 days 8 pixels

Effecting on Scrolls[]

Orb interrupt-0

The glow of the black and yellow orbs is interrupted by the shadow orb moving in front of the blue orb

There are three phenomena that can occur in the orb room:

  1. Alignment (Glow): When two or more realm orbs have the same angle, or if their angles differ by 180°, they are considered aligned and will glow.
  2. Alignment (Dim): When one or more realm orbs are aligned with the shadow orb, they will go dim. Scrolls will stay dark for 20-25 minutes (average 22)
  3. Interrupts: Interrupts occur in the rare case when a glow alignment and a dim alignment are happening simultaneously. In this case, every realm orb that is part of any of the alignments will go dim, resulting in a large number of dim orbs at once.

It is important to note that the orbs are floating, which means that you have to align the shadows cast by the orbs with the bottom of the central candle to test alignment. It is a mistake to test alignment by checking if the orbs themselves are in line with any part of the candle.

Assuming this is correct and based on initial data, it would suggest that White, Black and Green are the most likely scrolls to glow with others since the traverse their rotation the quickest. It would also suggest that when they align, each glow would last for a shorter duration. Since blue, cyan and yellow move at such a slow rate, one could assume that these scrolls glowing together would be rather rare, but would last for a very long time.

Orb-interrupt2

A massive interrupt taking place at around midnight UTC on June 14. 2017

Trivia[]

  • The earliest and probably also biggest documented interrupt was caught by Aberoth player Skillet in one of his blog posts.
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