Almost 400 Black and Gold Nuclei are scattered across the Vera map in Tower of Fantasy, and getting your hands on some of them takes a little more puzzle-solving than you might expect. Even some of the Black Nuclei, usually the easier of the two to acquire, have an extra bit of brain-teasing, including the new Ruin Stone puzzles.
The Ruin Stones aren’t the hardest of the new puzzles in Vera, but they are very particular about how you solve them and require a bit of camera work and knowledge of perspective to activate correctly. We’ll cover how to do just that in this guide.
Solving Ruin Stone Puzzles
The first thing to keep in mind about the Ruin Stones is while the method for solving these puzzles is the same each time, the solution itself will change. Here’s the methodology.
- Step one: Identify which side of the stones has the two halves of a symbol on it.
- Step two: Align your character and camera so that the two halves come together perfectly to create the complete symbol.
That’s all there is to it, and it seems simple on paper, but in practice, it’s a bit trickier. Ruin Stone puzzles are all about your ability to judge perspective. In the example puzzle shown above, I had to stand some distance in front of the smaller stone, then pan my camera down even with the ground, and then align the two symbol halves, so they gave off a golden glow.
You don’t need to align everything perfectly, just nearly so. The closer you get to the proper alignment, the brighter the glow will be.
One of the best practices for solving a Ruin Stone puzzle is to start by standing a few meters ahead of the front symbol stone and see how close you can get to solving the stones.
Fiddle with your camera first and get the two halves as close to connected as possible, then start moving your character. Make larger adjustments first to get a handle on how the symbol comes together, then make smaller and smaller movements of both camera and character.
The instant you see the symbols start to glow, make only tiny changes to your character and camera’s positions, and the glow should appear in due time. If you’re having trouble getting the solution, you might need to reset yourself. Try a different starting position and camera angle, and start the process over again.
Without covering every Ruin Stone puzzle in Tower of Fantasy, that’s how you get the Nuclei from these little brain teasers. Check out our other guides on Vera, the Artificial Island, and the base game in our Tower of Fantasy guides hub.
