Hey hey, fellow readers!

In Girls of the Tower, there’s this elusive item that’s been teasing me on the collection screen, the bottle of magic spring.

The ever so elusive Bottle of Magic Spring

Now, you may be wondering, how do you get it? I don’t know. No one seems to do. So I decided to take a peek under the hood, to try to get maybe some hints. Browsing through the game’s files, it seems the game is made in Unity.

This is a good thing for my goal, because Unity is a well-understood engine with strong tooling around it. I decided to use Asset Studio for this.

And …

Loading the game data in Asset Studio

I’m in! It was surprisingly straightforward. It’s really fun to look through the game’s assets, but let’s remember we are here to look for our relic. Maybe we can look through some more … interesting aspects in another post.

And here is our first hint!

I recognize this asset! It’s one of the items in the game, Amelia’s Contract. That means that all items are marked as SacredObject_Number, so if we search for SacredObject, we should be able to narrow down to a more relevant list to us.

And here is our item!

And it looks like we were correct! Here is our item, SacredObject_119.

We now know what to look for. If we scroll down our SacredObject list, something immediately pops out.

It seems we have some text files over here!

I believe the information we are looking for is somewhere here. SacredObjectCfg is the biggest one of all of those, so it will probably contain all pertinent information for us. This editor is a little unwieldy, so let’s export this text asset and take a better look.

Ah, much better...

It’s much better to look in a text editor! We can see here our item, 119, and we can infer some information based on knowledge of the game. I know that Amelia’s Contract is a multiple phase item, where buying the first one unlocks the second one. Annd that explains why it has join conditions and exit conditions. Our item, however, is particularly interesting, for several reasons :

1. Because it doesn’t have any special conditions whatsoever.
2. It’s part of item pool (Group_Type) 999, which looks like a special pool.
3. It’s always available, always visible, but its weight (I assume chance to show up?) is quite low.

If we look at the other items in pool 999, and we cross-reference them with the graphical assets, they’re… the starting items.

Wait, you’re telling me that this elusive item is supposed to be a START OF THE RUN item?

Unlike the other starting items you can pick from, there are two things of note in particular : one of them is the weight which is lower compared to everything else, and second is that it doesn’t have a function. Everything else does, but this one doesn’t. And since function numbers increment, this one gets skipped, so it’s not like someone forgot to write it in.

Conclusion

So, what can we infer from this information?

I think that this is an unfinished item. It was probably meant to be cut from the final release, but, for whatever reason, they must have forgotten about it, making obtaining the achievement for collecting all the items impossible.

In that case …

We do a little save editing.

I’m just going to help myself, by making a small addition to my save file.

Hope this was an enjoyable read for you, as it was a fun exploration for me.

See you next time!