Crystal and Battery Bulb puzzles
Crystals in We Were Here Tomorrow are goop from Rift Zero: a mineral that expands, contracts and changes structure on contact, shaped into temporary structures through controlled crystallisation. The Battery Bulb is the other half of the system — a cultivated plant you grow in Sector 5.
Two things in We Were Here Tomorrow look alike and get searched for alike: the crystal puzzles built on the Rift mineral the facility calls goop, and the Battery Bulb you cultivate in the Temporal Research Centre. They are the same system seen from two ends — a material that changes shape on contact, and a plant that stores what comes out of it.
Pairs with: Puzzle mechanics · Sector 5 · Temporal Research Centre
What the crystal actually is
The facility's own research notes, published before launch, describe minerals recovered from Rift Zero, including one that "can expand, contract, and alter its structure when in contact with one of the earlier found organisms". The researchers named it goop. Later documents show the plan to turn it into a functional tool "capable of forming temporary structures through controlled crystallisation".
Everything you meet in a crystal puzzle follows from those three words: temporary, controlled, crystallisation.
- Temporary means nothing you build with goop is permanent. If a structure collapses, it was the wrong structure or the wrong contact — not a bad roll.
- Controlled means the game is deterministic. The same input on the same surface gives the same crystal.
- Crystallisation means the mechanism is a phase change, not a switch. You are changing the state of a material, and state changes need conditions, not brute force.
The two halves of the system
| System | What you do | Achievement that marks it |
|---|---|---|
| Goop crystals | grow temporary structures, bridges and platforms | Goop Gun uses: Goop Lookin', You're Chatty for a Statue |
| Battery Bulb | cultivate a plant that stores charge | All Grown Up — cultivated a Battery Bulb (0.6%) |
The Goop Gun half of the system is used constantly, from the moment you pick the tool up. The Battery Bulb is a single, late, optional-looking task in Sector 5 — and at 0.6% completion it is the rarest thing most players will never see.
The Battery Bulb: cultivation, not construction
All Grown Up is the only achievement in the game whose wording is agricultural. That is deliberate: the Rift-derived plants were Norček's second research programme, alongside the minerals, and the notes describe organisms being "selected for controlled cultivation and experimentation". The Battery Bulb is that programme, in your hands.
Treat it like a plant, not a machine:
- Set the conditions first. Whatever the room offers — light, contact, containment — has to be right before anything grows. Changing conditions after it starts is how it dies.
- Watch it, do not touch it. The grower's job is to read the state out loud to the partner who controls the conditions.
- If it dies, restart from conditions. Not from the plant. The plant is the output, not the input.
- Expect it to take time. It is the slowest single action in the campaign, which is why so few players have it.
How to solve a crystal puzzle without a walkthrough
This is the method, and it works on every crystal configuration we have seen described in the achievement list:
- Read the whole crystal state out loud. Every facet, every edge, whether it is expanded or contracted. Your partner is holding the other half.
- Change exactly one thing. One shot, one contact, one surface. Then look again before the second change.
- Report expansion and contraction separately. "It grew towards me" and "it shrank away from me" are different results and point at different next steps.
- Use the Goop Gun as a probe, not a solution. Firing it at a surface tells you whether that surface is reactive. That is information, even when nothing is built.
- Reset before you theorise. If two changes produced nothing, break the structure and start from the original state. A crystal puzzle that has been fiddled with for ten minutes is in a state nobody can describe.
The three misreads that cost the most time
- Treating size as progress. A bigger crystal is not a more correct crystal. The puzzle cares about shape and contact, not volume.
- Describing colour instead of geometry. Crystal colour shifts with the room lighting; your partner's screen is lit differently. Say "three facets, one pointing at the door".
- Assuming it is one puzzle. Crystal rooms often hold a smaller secondary structure — a step, a platform, a plug — that exists to be used, not solved.
Where this connects
The crystal system is introduced before you have a name for it and finished in the Temporal Research Centre, so the two pages that matter most are Sector 5 · Temporal Research Centre and Puzzle mechanics. If you are stuck on the tool rather than the crystal, the prototype and its two tools explains what each gun does and how to test it in a minute.
