Side Quests

The Side Quests (shown as the "Branch" tab in the quest log) are twelve small optional stories told by survivors, knights and monsters met along the route. None of them has a timer or a fail screen. They are driven by invisible quest flags that dialogs, item pickups, cutscenes and boss kills switch on, and a handful of them disappear for good if you move past their area first. Eleven of the twelve count toward the achievement Witness.

Overview#

The log lists them in the order of their QuestSort value: River of Memories has sort 0 so it is always first, then the base-game lines 101 to 111 in chapter order. Unfinished lines are listed above finished ones, and finished ones turn grey.

Inside the log every line has one header entry (log type 3) with no text of its own, and one or two step entries (type 4) that carry the description. A header is shown as soon as its first step is, so you never see a line that is "empty".

Quest log mechanics#

• Step visibility. A step shows up only when every flag in its ShowQuestId list is complete. A step turns grey when every flag in its CompleteQuestId list is complete. Later steps list all earlier flags in their own ShowQuestId, so a step cannot appear before its predecessor.
• Banner. Starting a step triggers a hidden action ("show message task") that flashes the step's name as a sub-plot banner. If the step it points at is already finished, the game silently moves on to the step's NextQuestId instead.
• Dialog options. Many dialog choices carry a "read" flag (ReadQuestId). After you have read an option it is drawn in grey, and the cursor jumps to the next unread option, so you can exhaust an NPC by always picking the white lines.
• Text. The descriptions are written from Terrence's point of view. They do not change if you play with another hero.

Hidden mechanics#

• Everything is a flag. The game has 3,272 quest flags (table StoryQuest). Only 36 of them matter for the side quests; the rest are boss kills, doors, cutscenes and dialog states. Flags are never "failed", they are only set or cleared, so a line that seems stuck usually just has an NPC that has been hidden by a later flag (for example "Holy Father defeated").
• Quit-saves forget some flags. Each flag has ExitGameNotSave. When you save and quit (not at a bonfire), only flags with the value 0 are written to disk. Cutscene-trigger flags such as the mother's labour scene (flag 25023) have the value 1 and are simply forgotten, so the scene can replay after a reload. Normal saves keep everything.
• New Game Plus wipes the slate. Starting a new journey clears every quest flag except those with NotReset = 1. None of the flags used by the twelve side quests has NotReset, so every line can be done again. A copy of the old flags is kept in the save as "history", but no code that was checked reads it. All the quest items used here are flagged GamePlusRemove, so they are removed from the bag on the new journey (rules: New Game Plus#What carries over and what is removed).
• Achievement counting is per flag. Witness counts each flag at most once, so a line that can be finished in two ways (see Mother and Daughter) still adds only one.

• Resting finishes stories. Whenever you rest at an altar (a "save point" save), the game checks table StorySave: for every row of that altar whose "show" flags are done and "hide" flag is not, it completes the row's flag. Four side quests use this to change the world the next time you rest:

  After you finish	Rest at (altars of that chapter)	Flag set	Visible result
  The Woman Looking for Her Child (15007)	Heggem altars 3-5	14001	The old woman's model (1017) is removed and a dog-model enemy (1003) is placed instead (inferred replacement)
  Mother and Daughter: puppet delivered (25028)	Adamina altars 2-4	24001	The girl's later scene (monster 2048) can appear once the Holy Father is dead
  Headless Knight: ring handed in (35009)	Exilium altars 1-3	34001	The knight figure 3072 is destroyed and 3061 is placed
  Hunger (75035)	Karst Cave altars 1-5	74001	The cocoon vanishes, a Little Giant appears and 2 Shriveled Holy Fruit can be picked up

  The altar numbers are the SaveId values of the rows (which altar is which was not checked). Saving by quitting does not count, only resting at an altar.

• Missable lines. Several NPCs are hidden by a boss-kill flag. The herb woman and the girl at her mother's bedside in Adamina vanish when the Holy Father dies, and Drake in Katib vanishes after the boss introduction cutscene (a flag the developers commented as "used to delete the hourglass and the NPC"). Finish a line before you beat the area boss.
• Dialog-only branches. Several lines let you decline first (the woman in Heggem, the herb woman, Bravo). Declining sets a "refused" flag that makes the NPC repeat a short plea, and you can accept later from the dialog list.

Witness: "Finish all the Tales"#

Witness (id 12009, needs 11) is raised by one hidden flag per line, each with a "record id" so repeats cannot count twice. It counts on every difficulty (leastUnlockDiff 1). The hub NPCs#The 11 Tales lists the same flags by chapter and by the NPC who ends each one.

River of Memories has no Witness flag. It ends in its own achievement, The River Shall Flow (id 40006), which has leastUnlockDiff 2: it cannot be earned on Casual (the same "Normal only" rule that Achievements describes).

A second achievement, War and Destiny (id 10017, needs 3, leastUnlockDiff 1), is raised by three of the same flags: 95031 (Patrick), 95042 (Vincent) and 95061 (Eleanor). Its text names exactly those three people. Vincent and Eleanor are father and daughter, so Old Man and the Candle and Die or Become the Sendril are really one story told in two chapters.

Related log tabs#

The other two tabs of the log use the same system. The Main tab holds the chapter headers and the objective chain (63 goals in the data, including the DLC chapter), and the Document tab lists 114 diary pages and notes by the order you found them. See Chapters and Documents.

Sources#

• controller/controllerstorymode.lua:8811-8880 (CompleteQuestEach: conditions, item and achievement actions), :9235-9236 (action 19 = show message task), :9445-9462 (ShowMessageTask), :6290-6310 (RecordAchievement), :94-141 (action and condition type names).
• controller/controllermodebase.lua:429-495 (show, hide and complete checks).
• ui/controller/playerinfoctrl.lua:5985-6040, :6380-6440 (branch list sorting and filtering), ui/controller/dialogctrl.lua:470-490 (read flags greyed).
• structdata/ms_uiquest.lua:1-100 (log types), structdata/fs_savestory.lua:205-216, :2117-2176 (flag storage, quit-save, new-journey reset), structdata/fs_savestory.lua AddAchievementValue (record ids).
• Tables UIQuest (rows with QuestType 3 and 4, ids 20101-21202), StoryQuest (ids 12002-95183 listed on the individual pages), Achievement ids 12009 (Max 11, leastUnlockDiff 1), 10017 (Max 3, 1) and 40006 (Max 1, 2), StorySave ids 1-9 and 14-18 (the four rest rules), StoryMonster story 2 row 85 (= monster 2048), ItemData ids 10001-10064.