Welcome to the backrooms.
As reported by IGNOliver Nikolic, who goes by Barut on Discord, has cracked the code to Remnant 2’s super-secret archetype—one that required datamining to find.
Let’s start at the beginning. Remnant 2 is a game that features “secrets within secrets”, thanks to a procedurally-generated gameplay loop that slaps a limited number of handcrafted sections together in radically different orders. While sections will be familiar, no two playthroughs are the same, which is a huge smokescreen to throw up in front of secret-hunters.
Knowing that datamining—the act of trawling through game files for secrets—would inevitably crack things wide open, Gunfire Games decided to roll with it. The Archon, a super-secret archetype, would require datamining to uncover, as revealed by principal designer Ben Cureton July 28.
“We knew we couldn’t stop datamining,” Cureton wrote, “so we leaned into it and created an entire Archetype that could be shared with the community once revealed by those with the ability to see between worlds.”
This kicked the Remnant 2 community into overdrive. Like sharks smelling blood in the water, they zeroed-in on a door in the Labyrinth zone—which canonically takes place “between worlds”. While that might’ve been an easy hint to pull from Cureton’s tweet, the rest of the hunt was far from straightforward.
A summary by the channel Asura on Youtube details the hunt’s short history step by step, one which led to an invite-only discord named the “The Cult of the Door”. In their video, Asura explains: “Within days a comprehensive list of things that had been tried had been formed … using an all-seeing eye item, getting all possible status effects at [once], exploring every inch of the labyrinth … they tried everything.”
It just wouldn’t open. But while they toiled, Barut—a man with no coding experience, fed by a diet of raw determination, grit, and a concerning amount of energy drinks—set to work on a solution. Barut spoke to IGN: “It kept being a stronger and stronger obsession to solve it—I would go out and a thought would cross my mind, ‘What if?’ so I said to myself, ‘Okay’, grabbed 15 Red Bulls and got to it.”
(Image credit: Gearbox)
In this case, Barut literally drank enough caffeine to see into other worlds, reportedly averaging about four hours of sleep a night until he discovered the truth less than a week later. To make up for his lack of coding knowledge, Barut used ChatGPT to create a script looking for items, traits, and archetypes labelled as “corrupted”, and discovered a perfect fit—there were exactly enough “corrupted” items to complete a loadout. What would happen if you were to try to open the door with every single one equipped?
These items are a pain to get, though—one of them, Leto’s Amulet, is obtained by eating dirt 100 times by trying to roll way past your equipment weight limit. Another, the Void Heart, forces you to wait 12 real-time hours in a specific location (though you can just set the clock forward on your PC).
Besides—Barut was seen as a loose cannon maverick with a penchant for pie-in-the-sky theories. “We kinda ignore Barut [half] of the time since he’s kinda nonsense”, one player wrote. Was it really worth putting in all that work towards another crackpot plan?
Still, the cult put it to the test in the name of science, and it worked. The door gave way to a zone called “The Backrooms”—a reference to a creepypasta where clipping out of reality puts you in an endless labyrinth full of horrible creatures. Within players found a Strange Box, the material needed to craft the Archon archetype, and the hunt came to an end.
Needless to say, the tone soon changed: “Barut is a god.”
That’s not to say he was single-handedly responsible for the discovery, though. A shout-out from Reddit user Principle_Alive credits user McCoy with putting the idea through its paces. You can find a full list of credits below.
Comment from r/remnantgame
The archetype, which focuses around mod power generation, is pretty good—a nice compliment to any build that uses weapon mods. What’s far cooler, however, is the community-wide scavenger hunt it took to make this happen.
It’s a world-spanning goose chase through space and time that’s completely in-keeping with the “secrets within secrets” promised by Remnant 2’s sprawling procedural multiverse. It’s also proof that you don’t need coding experience or digital know-how to make your mark on gaming history: sometimes, determination is enough.
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