Myst III: Exile Hints

What should I do at the controls past that locked door?

  • 1 of 9: First, you may want to take a look at the video player that's just past the door.  It contains a message to Atrus from your attacker, whose name is Saavedro, in case you haven't seen it before.
  • 2 of 9: From there, head all the way down the path until you reach a circular room. Look in the center of that room.
  • 3 of 9: The cylinder in the center of the room has 5 openings you can look through. (For real fans of the series: you may notice that these openings are numbered 1 through 5 in the numbering system from Riven, starting at the entrance with 1 -- which looks like the Roman numeral III -- and going counter-clockwise.)
  • 4 of 9: Each of the openings has what looks like some kind of circuit board broken up in three sections and buttons to either side to rotate those sections.
  • 5 of 9: Your goal is to connect the circuits in each of these windows from top to bottom, so that there are no dead-end paths anywhere on any circuit.
  • 6 of 9: It helps if you start with the top or bottom and then try to connect the middle later.  Make sure that you connect to *all* the contacts at the top and bottom.
  • 7 of 9: The controls at each of the windows all rotate the same circuits, so you don't have to solve each window separately.  The circuits at some windows, however, will tend to be easier to connect than at others -- you want to work with the ones that are hardest to connect (i.e., the ones that have contacts that aren't spaced evenly around the center).
  • 8 of 9: The same general steps will let you solve this puzzle, but the actual solutions are randomly selected and vary from game to game.  However, the hints below should tell you exactly how to figure out the puzzle on your own. (There are 20 possible positions on each band, by the way.)
  • 9 of 9: When you've set all of the bands correctly, the circuit should light up and can no longer be rotated.