Alan Wake 2‘s Night Springs DLC is a collection of relatively linear story episodes – but there is one particularly difficult puzzle in Jesse Faden’s North Star chapter. In this tale, Faden enters the Coffee World amusement park, and must discover the mysterious force behind a coffee that can reshape minds.
Most of the early puzzles in the adventure are telegraphed and easily solved, but in the lead up to the climax, you’ll need to use some logic and mathematics to work out the optimal roasting temperature for Dark Triangle’s coffee blend. This is a required puzzle, and must be completed to advance into the coffee cult’s headquarters.
The solution can be found within the Roasting Bar, where you’ll also be required to input the correct number. If you don’t want to solve the puzzle for yourself, you can skip these paragraphs for the exact three-digit code – but read on if you’d like to work it out step-by-step.
Analyse the Dark Triangle posters for clues
The first step to working out the optimal roasting temperature for the Dark Triangle coffee blend is to analyse the posters next to the coffee roaster – everything you need is in these posters.
The first one says “More That A Sum Of Its Parts’ accompanied by a triangle logo. Text below this also features the word “angle” in red. You will need some basic maths knowledge to solve this clue – but essentially, what it means is the optimal roasting temperature is more than 180 degrees, referencing the angles of a triangle.
Read: Alan Wake 2 is GamesHub’s Game of the Year 2023
The second poster says “The Secret Is In The Roast” and reads: “The first digit of our optimal roasting temperature is half of the second, and the third digit is one less than the one before.” There’s many ways to interpret this clue – but this does immediately tell you the first digit can only be 2, 3 or 4 as it’s half the second number (and the number must be above 180). The second digit can only be 4, 6, or 8 as it needs to be halved evenly. The last digit is dependent on the second digit solution.
The final poster is the kicker: it confirms the optimal roasting number is below 500 degrees, and also highlights the words “prime” and “number.”
So, your major clues are: the temperature is between 180 and 500 degrees, it’s a prime number, and the numbers have a set interrelation. With this clue, you can cross off the potential combinations 243, 365, and you end up with…. 487 – the correct solution to the optimal roasting temperature puzzle.
Planet X-13 is key
There is also another, quicker way to solve the Alan Wake 2: Night Springs coffee roasting puzzle – and you’ll kick yourself for not realising it. The final poster is all you really need to solve the puzzle. It clearly refers to Planet X-13, and refers to 500 as the number of light years between Earth and Planet X-13. This is a maths puzzle in disguise.
If we assume the number 500 is X, then X-13 is 487. Simple, right?
Once you have the solution, head to the coffee roaster, input the number, and you’ll gain the ability to enter the code at the Dark Triangle headquarters.
