The Lunar Base

Story mode. Written for a first playthrough and kept free of spoilers — it will not tell you what happens here, only what the game is asking of you.

A quiet place with a view.

Nothing here attacks you. No random encounters, no boss, no shop, no chests, no magazines. That sounds relaxing and it is exactly why people leave with nothing.

There are four things here, all of them easy to walk past, and none of them has a second chance — nobody returns to this place.

Play cards before you talk to anyone

Two people here hold cards worth having, and one source warns that one of them stops playing once you have had a proper conversation with her. Another source describes talking to her afterwards with no trouble at all.

Obeying the stricter version costs you nothing. So: walk in, find both card players, beat both, and only then start advancing anything.

A warning about the rules here

Every card rule in the game is running at the same time. Open, Sudden Death, Random, Same, Plus, Same Wall and Elemental — all of them, together. Three sources confirm it.

That is the hardest card environment in the game, and Random in particular means you do not choose your own hand.

Two guides suggest the same workaround: start matches and quit out of them repeatedly until the game randomly abolishes a rule, then play the matches you actually care about. Nothing can be mixed in here, because the set is already complete — so this only ever improves.

Two draw points, both invisible

There is one near a doorway in the living quarters and one beside the left-hand escape pod. Both are hidden — five sources say so — which means you need the hidden-item ability equipped and you need to walk slowly.

Six sources agree on both spells and roughly where they are, which by this guide’s standards is remarkable agreement, so trust it.

Lead with your highest-Magic character before you take either.

Before you leave

• Take the suit from the locker in the upper right of the hall. You cannot continue without it, but five separate guides mention it, which tells you how many people walk past.
• There are two save points — one outside the medical bay, one by the escape pods. Use the second. What comes next has no shops in it.
• One source says there is a scene on the control-panel monitor worth watching before you board. Nobody else mentions it. It costs one button press.

Game Notes

An area with nothing in it, which is the most dangerous kind.

Every instinct this game has trained into you by now is about threat. You walk into a new place, something jumps you, you deal with it, you look around afterwards. The looking-around happens because the fighting stopped and told you the room was over.

Here there is no fighting at all, so there is no signal. Nothing tells you the room is over. You just walk through, following the story, and the story is genuinely gripping at this point — and behind you are two invisible draw points and two card players.

I think this is the most missable area in the game on a first playthrough, and it is missable specifically because it is peaceful. The game has spent forty hours teaching you that danger means content. Then it puts content somewhere with no danger in it and says nothing.

Completionist mode. Full spoilers, in play order, with every permanent loss called out before you reach it. 5 entries below are marked where our sources disagree with each other — we have not picked a winner for you.

Spoilers from here.

What is actually here

Almost nothing, and that is the point.

No enemies. No boss. No random encounters. No chests, magazines or key items beyond the plot-required space suit. Two sources state the absence explicitly and no other source contradicts it.

Everything obtainable here is two hidden draw points and two card games, in a location no source describes as revisitable.

The four-to-four split on the cards

The Alexander card comes from the man in the control room; the Laguna card from the woman upstairs. Everyone agrees on that. Whether missing them is permanent is a dead heat:

“One-off area, lose it forever” — 4 sources: a location database that marks both cards and both draw points as permanent misses; a wiki stating the base cannot be revisited; a draw-point database tagging the location unrevisitable; and a walkthrough that frames the Alexander card as requiring the win here.

“Recoverable from the card club on the final disc” — 4 sources: a rare-card page saying explicitly that a missed Alexander must be taken from the card club at the end of the final disc and the same for Laguna; a missables page listing Triple Triad cards as recoverable from the club aboard the airship; a walkthrough telling the reader not to worry about losing these matches provided the club quest is done; and a wiki stating club members play rare cards the player does not currently hold, whether missed, lost or refined away.

The reading that satisfies both

The cards are missable here, and recoverable only if the card-club quest was finished in time. Every source above is consistent with that sentence and none contradicts it. The two camps are describing the same situation from opposite ends — one assumes you did the club quest, the other assumes you did not.

This matters because of a specific failure mode this project has hit before. On the Fishermans Horizon page we found a missables guide sending a player who lost the Siren card to a recovery route that does not exist — and a wrong recovery route is worse than no recovery route, because it tells someone they are fine when they are not.

Same shape here. A player who reads “recoverable from the card club” and has not done the club quest will walk past both cards believing there is a second chance.

And the fallback’s own deadline is disputed three ways

All three are inside the same stretch. None of them is far enough apart to matter if you do the quest early, which is the practical advice: finish the card club before you leave the Gardens behind.

The rule environment

Every rule in the game runs here simultaneously — Open, Sudden Death, Random, Same, Plus, Same Wall and Elemental. Three sources agree.

One wiki adds the useful structural note: rules can still be randomly abolished here but nothing can be mixed in, because the set is already complete. So playing and quitting repeatedly is a one-way ratchet — it can only ever improve your position.

Two sources recommend exactly that before committing to the matches that matter. One rates Plus the worse of the two hazards.

Play both opponents before advancing any conversation. One source states the woman refuses to play once you have spoken to her properly; another describes talking to her after winning both cards and gives no such warning. Obeying the stricter reading costs nothing.

Refinement value, agreed across five sources: the Alexander card yields three Moon Curtains (the route to Auto-Shell); the Laguna card yields a hundred Heroes.

The draw points

Six sources agree on both spells and their rough locations — the best draw-point agreement anywhere in this batch, which after Esthar’s five-mutually-exclusive-locations mess is worth stating.

• Meteor, by the door of the upstairs room in the living quarters
• Meltdown, inside or beside the left-hand escape pod

Both are hidden. Five sources describe them as unmarked, so bring the hidden-item ability and walk slowly. Lead with your highest-Magic character.

One source says the Meltdown point refills and one says it does not — which, in a location nobody revisits, changes nothing whatsoever.

Everything else

The space suit is in the locker at the upper right of the hall. It is required to continue, so forgetting it stalls progress rather than losing content — but five sources mention it, which is a reasonable proxy for how many people walk past.

Two save points, outside the medical bay door and outside the escape pods. Use the second one: what follows has no shops in it.

One source alone reports a scene on the control-panel monitor before boarding the escape pod. Nobody else mentions it. Flagged rather than dropped — an optional scene in an unrevisitable area is exactly the sort of thing that goes unrecorded.

The card queen may be here or on her way. Two sources report she visits the palace back in the city and then typically relocates to the launch site; one source recommends deliberately moving her to this base before the endgame. Her movements drive rule spread, and a rule that has spread into a region you care about is hard to undo.

Game Notes

The most missable place in the game is the one with nothing in it.

Forty hours of this game have trained a specific reflex: arriving somewhere means being attacked, and the fight ending means the room is finished and it is now time to look around. That reflex is doing most of the work of exploration, and nobody notices because it is invisible and it is right almost everywhere.

Here it is wrong. Nothing attacks you, so nothing tells you the room is over, so you keep walking — and the story at this exact moment is the most propulsive it has been all game, which is not an accident either.

Behind you: two invisible draw points and two rare cards, one of which may or may not be recoverable depending on something you did or did not do several discs ago.

There is a design lesson in there about what signals players actually use, and it is not the one about hiding things well. These four things are not hidden well. The draw points are hidden, but the card players are standing in plain sight in a room you walk through. What hides them is the absence of the interruption that normally tells you to stop and look.