How this guide is built: Blue Prince wipes and re-drafts its floor plan every single day, so no two players ever walk the same path and a literal “do this, then this” walkthrough is impossible — even IGN says so outright. A flat answers-dump also spoils the one thing the game is actually about: discovery. So this guide does two things instead. First, it teaches the systems that never change — how the daily draft and its economy work, what carries between days versus what resets, and the order of the objectives that lead to the credits. Second, it draws the single most useful line in the whole game: which puzzles are randomised (where you must learn the rule, because the answer is different every time) and which are fixed for every player (where the answer is a constant you can learn once). We give the fixed constants, teach the random rules, wall off the late-game spoilers behind clear warnings, and point you to a video for the visual routes. Facts are cross-checked across IGN’s Blue Prince wiki, the official Steam page (app 1569580) and a widely-used community answer guide.
What is Blue Prince?
Blue Prince is a $17.99 first-person puzzle-adventure from developer Dogubomb and publisher Raw Fury, released on 10 April 2025 to a 92 Metacritic and a small mountain of “game of the year” talk. You’ve inherited the Mount Holly estate from your great-uncle, on one condition: find the fabled Room 46. The catch is that the mansion only has 45 rooms — and every morning its layout is erased.
Each day you enter through the front door and draft the house room by room, like dealing yourself a roguelike deck of floorplans, until you run out of steps and the day ends. The next day everything resets… almost. A thin but crucial layer of progress is permanent, and learning exactly which layer that is — plus how to read the estate’s many notes, ciphers and contraptions — is how you slowly bend a random house toward the answer. It is part deck-builder, part escape room, part detective novel.
Why there’s no “step 1, step 2” route — and what to learn instead
Open any door and the game offers you three random rooms to place. Tomorrow that same door might offer three completely different rooms. Because of that, the things worth knowing aren’t a sequence of moves; they’re a handful of durable ideas:
- The draft economy — what each room colour gives you and how to spend a day.
- Permanent vs temporary — the mental model that turns a frustrating reset into steady progress.
- The objective chain — the fixed order of major goals from front door to credits, even though the path to each is improvised.
- Fixed vs random puzzles — which solutions you can memorise once, and which you must solve fresh each time using a rule.
Get those four things and you can handle whatever house the game deals you. The rest of this guide is built around them.
How a day works: the draft
When you open a door you choose one of three room blueprints to build on the other side. Rooms have exits in fixed directions, so part of the puzzle is whether a room’s doors even point where you want to go. Steps are your daily resource: walking and (often) drafting costs them, and when they hit zero, the day ends and the house resets. Press Tab at any time to see the floor Blueprint — the grid of where you’ve placed everything.
Room colour signals the reward you’ll tend to find:
- Purple rooms → Steps (more time in the day — your most precious currency).
- Green rooms → Gems (used to draft “special” floorplans).
- Gold rooms → Coins (spent at shops, shrines and machines).
- Orange rooms → Keys (open locked doors so you can keep drafting).
- Red rooms → “Vexation” (rooms with a downside — useful, but they bite).
There is no single “best” deck. Some players chase gems to draft special rooms; others stack purple rooms to lengthen the day. Both work. What matters is matching your drafting to the puzzles you’re currently trying to crack.
Three drafting habits that pay off immediately
- Open the early, cheap doors first to bank resources. It costs you a few steps, but you end the day richer in keys, gems and coins — and a little wiser about each room — which makes every later run easier.
- Leave north-facing doors for last. The Antechamber sits at the back (north) of the estate, so keep your northward momentum alive and resolve side branches first.
- Use dead-end rooms to plug awkward gaps. A room like the Closet has no useful exits, so place it where you don’t want to continue — it spends a slot without blocking your path forward.
The single most important idea: permanent vs temporary
Newcomers bounce off Blue Prince because the daily reset feels like losing everything. It isn’t. A specific set of accomplishments is permanent and quietly compounds run after run. Internalise this table and the game stops feeling random and starts feeling like progress.
| Carries over between days (permanent) | Resets every morning (temporary) |
|---|---|
| A drained Fountain or drained Reservoir stays drained — the Pump Room state you leave behind persists. | The floor plan — every room you drafted is gone; you build again from the front door. |
| Opened Basement doors stay open once unlocked (though you must re-fetch the Basement Key itself). | Your steps, keys, gems and coins reset to your starting allowance. |
| Outdoor gates and upgrades: the West Gate (Outer Rooms), the Orchard (+20 steps every day), the Gem Mine (+2 gems each run), and similar. | Most items in your pockets (a Silver Key, a special key) are lost at day’s end. |
| Switches and contraptions you’ve flipped — the Breaker Box state, levers pulled in fixed underground areas. | The contents of the house’s drafted rooms (coins on a table, keys in a drawer) respawn fresh. |
| Permanent blueprints you add to your draft pool, and puzzle knowledge (safe codes never change). | Where the random items are seeded — the Broken Lever, special keys and tools hide in different rooms each day. |
The one bridge across the reset is the Coat Check / Coat Room: it lets you store a single item and pick it up on a later run. That’s how you carry, say, a hard-won special key into tomorrow when you couldn’t reach its destination today. Plan around that one slot constantly.
Tools you’ll rely on
A few items recur so often they’re worth recognising on sight:
- Magnifying Glass — reveals fine detail: the date carved into a tree in a photo, microscopic cipher text, hidden notes. Many “impossible” puzzles are simply waiting for it.
- Shovel — digs up buried items at dig spots (microchips, keys).
- Sledgehammer / Power Hammer — breaks the cracked walls hiding levers and microchips. The Power Hammer is crafted in the Workshop (Sledge + Battery + Broken Lever).
- Silver Key / special keys — open the locked doors guarding the Great Hall, the Secret Garden, the Vault and more. They’re seeded randomly, so the Billiard Room, Music Room and Locksmith are your best odds.
- Burning Glass / Self-Igniting Torch — light candles and scorch certain puzzle surfaces. The Burning Glass is crafted from a Magnifying Glass + Metal Detector; the Torch is bought in the Armory after the Chess Puzzle.
The critical path to the credits
This is the fixed order of major goals. The route to each is improvised, but the sequence below never changes — it’s the spine the whole game hangs on. (Nothing here spoils a puzzle’s solution; it’s the roadmap.)
- Reach the Antechamber at the back of the house.
- Open the Antechamber by pulling one of its three sealed-door levers.
- Collect the Basement Key the Antechamber gives you.
- Open both Basement doors (under the Foundation and under the Fountain).
- Solve the underground platform puzzle to reach the Inner Sanctum and pull the North lever.
- Enter Room 46 → credits roll. (The game keeps going afterward.)
Step 1 & 2 — reaching and opening the Antechamber
Build toward the north while banking resources, and don’t be discouraged if it takes several days; sometimes the draw simply won’t cooperate. When you arrive, all three Antechamber doors are sealed. Each is opened by a lever in a different room:
- South door — the Greenhouse lever. The Greenhouse has a broken wall device; reattach a Broken Lever (a random item — check the Security Room and Spare Room, or store one in the Coat Check) and pull it.
- East door — the Great Hall lever. The Great Hall (often behind a Silver-Key door) has several locked doors; the lever hides behind one of them. Bring keys, a Lockpicking Set, or draft the Foyer to unlock every hallway door at once.
- West door — the Secret Garden lever. Use the Secret Garden Key on a locked door on the far-left or far-right column of the house, then turn the fountain’s weather-vane valves until all three signs point at the statuette to reveal the lever.
You only need one of the three to get inside the first time. Entering gives you the Basement Key and a note: “to rise, one must descend.” Later, to mitigate bad luck, the architect built a redundant lever for every door (in the Mechanarium, the Weight Room, the Secret Garden’s east vane, and the Throne Room) so you’re never hard-locked by RNG.
Step 4 — opening both Basement doors
There are two Basement entrances and you need both:
- Under the Foundation: the Foundation is a permanent room with a dead elevator. Draft a room whose door faces the Foundation’s back wall to reveal a lever; pull it and the elevator activates.
- Under the Fountain: use the Pump Room to drain the Fountain (see the playbook below). Once drained, stairs to the Basement open at the Fountain — and your tossed-in coins are sitting there waiting.
Once opened, both doors stay open forever; you just re-grab the Basement Key from the Antechamber when you need it.
Step 5 & 6 — the underground and Room 46
Below the house is a rotating-platform / gear puzzle that you approach from several angles (the Fountain side, the Foundation side, and the Reservoir). You’ll shift a minecart out of the way, rearrange movable crates to reach the Reservoir, then twist the gears to line the platform up with the tunnel to the Inner Sanctum. There you’ll find eight locked doors and one lever — pull it to open Room 46. Walk into Room 46 and the day ends to credits. This is the “ending,” but it’s really the gateway to the game’s second half.
The fixed-vs-random puzzle playbook
This is the heart of the guide and the reason an answers-dump misleads more than it helps. Blue Prince has two kinds of puzzle, and they want opposite things from you.
Random puzzles — learn the rule, not the answer
These regenerate every time, often getting harder as you solve them. Memorising one solution is worthless; the rule is everything.
- Billiard Room dartboard. A note in the Nook explains it: read the rings inside-out, and the colours are operations — Blue = add, Orange = subtract, Pink = multiply, Purple = divide. So a board marked 15 then 6 in orange is 15 − 6 = 9. As you progress, bullseye symbols add steps: a square means “square it,” a diamond means “reverse the digits” (41 → 14), tilde lines mean “round,” and so on. One anchor never changes: the final answer is always between 1 and 20 (even if the maths goes negative or decimal mid-way). Solving these rewards keys — including the Silver Key, Keycard, Secret Garden Key and Prismatic Key.
- Parlor Room boxes. Three boxes carry statements; one hides a prize. The fixed rules (printed on the desk by the Wind-Up Key) are: at least one box shows only true statements, at least one shows only false statements, and only one box contains the prize. The trick most people miss: you’re not hunting the box that’s “telling the truth,” you’re deducing which box the statements point to. Work it as a logic grid each time.
Fixed puzzles — constants you can learn once
These are identical for every player and every save, so it’s fair to treat them as reference. They’re fixed because each is anchored to unchanging in-world facts (a date, the periodic table, a chessboard).
The safes are all dates. Once you spot that pattern, the codes stop being arbitrary. Each safe’s clue encodes a calendar date entered as month-then-day:
- Office — March 3 → 0303. (A switch in the desk drawer reveals the safe; this is the one code that genuinely needs its leading zeros.)
- Boudoir — Christmas Day → 1225.
- Study — December 8 → 1208 (the chess piece sits on D8).
- Drawing Room — April 15 → 0415 (pull the left candlestick to reveal it).
- Drafting Room — November 8 → 1108 (needs the Magnifying Glass; the tiny model safe holds no gem).
- Orchard padlock — November 28 → 1128 (the date is carved on a tree in the Dark Room photo, read under the Magnifying Glass).
- Red Door — MAY8 (power the red box in the Boiler Room first, then cross the gear puzzle to the hidden hallway).
- Shelter time-safe — not a constant: you compute the current date (day one in the mansion is November 7; a Library book confirms it) and set the matching time.
Other fixed solutions worth knowing when you’re stuck (not before — try them yourself first):
- Breaker Box. A note in the Mail Room asks you to turn all six lights purple; doing so unlocks the “white” state, and entering the code from the Office email then opens the Gem Mine (a permanent +2 gems per run). The same box also toggles the Gymnasium’s step penalty off, powers the Garage, and relights the Dark Room.
- Clock Tower. Enter at 1:30 PM to start the puzzle; the eight clocks, left to right, read 5:00, 5:08, 5:57, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 8:05, 9:00.
- Laboratory. Transcribe the periodic-table hint into element letters, then push 9, then 3.
- Chess Puzzle. The piece you need maps to room types, not specific tiles: King = Office / Throne Room; Queen = Study / Her Ladyship’s Chamber; Knight = Observatory / Security; Rook = Vault / Conservatory / Nook / Clock Tower; Bishop = Chapel / Rumpus Room / Attic; Pawn = many common rooms. King and Queen are the rare ones, so only commit when you can place an Office/Throne and a Study/Chamber.
- Pump Room mapping. Pump 1 → Aquarium / Greenhouse; Pump 2 → Fountain / Reservoir; Pump 4 → Kitchen / Pool. To drain the Fountain, select it on the control board, pump its water into the tanks, redirect that water elsewhere, then pump again — the state you leave persists, so you can take as many runs as you need.
The cipher language of Mount Holly
Mount Holly’s deeper puzzles reuse the same handful of devices. Once you recognise them, the endgame stops feeling arbitrary:
- Dates as codes. Almost every numeric lock is a date. Watch for the “gait/gate” pun in clues — counting “small gaits” (gates) on a calendar or in portraits gives you a day or a count.
- Roman numerals. Clues like CIX (109) or the Wine Cellar’s MCCXII are split and read in pieces (M / CC / XI / II = 1000 / 200 / 11 / 2).
- The Numeric Core. A note in the underground archive teaches it: split a number into four parts and reduce them to a single small number using +, −, × and ÷ (the first operation must be addition). The “Family Core” is then the sum of those digits. This one method unlocks the Coat of Arms and the deposit-box cipher.
- The Sacred Hour & the stars. “The Sacred Hour” is 1:30 PM. The Castle Cipher also asks you to act on a day when the Southern Cross constellation is visible in the Observatory (days 5, 9, 13, 16, 25…), arriving with an empty inventory.
- Anagrams. Several book titles in A New Clue are anagrams of real Library books (e.g. “Draft the Sixes” → “The Fixed Stars”).
After Room 46: the second game (spoilers)
Spoiler warning: everything below only appears after the credits, and it’s the part most worth discovering yourself. We’ll lay out the structure and the loop — not the final cracked answers, several of which are deliberately hidden in-game and still debated by the community. Treat this as a map, not a key.
The endgame is a web of interlocking quests rather than a line. The major threads:
- The 8 Red Letters. Red envelopes scattered around the estate, each numbered, each pointing at a safe whose code is a date (the codes above are these letters’ payoffs). One letter is famously hard to pin down — sources disagree on which number is the elusive one, and the community trail eventually points to the Orchard’s shed. Expect this thread to outlast the others.
- The Sanctum: 8 keys + 8 sigils. A riddle in Room 46 names eight Sanctum Keys hidden across the estate (the Vault, Clock Tower, Reservoir, Throne, Music Room, Mechanarium, Safehouse, and the free one in Room 46). Behind the eight Sanctum doors are eight Sigil puzzles — each defined by its motes, ray style/number and border — which you build to match.
- Eight Realms in Eight Months. Solving the sigils yields eight postcards; reading them puts Herbert’s travels in chronological order and lets you pin the eight realms on the Room 46 map.
- The Castle Cipher, the Coat of Arms and the Throne. Late ciphers that draw on the Numeric Core, Roman numerals, the chessboard’s “castling” move, the Mora Jai boxes and the Southern Cross days — all building toward reclaiming the Throne and the deepest secrets of Reddington and the Sinclair family.
The healthy way to play this stretch: keep a notebook, screenshot every note, and pull on one thread at a time. The game wants you to cross-reference a children’s book against a metro map against a sundial — and the satisfaction of that click is exactly what a dumped answer would rob you of.
A spoiler-light starter plan
If you want direction without spoiling the puzzles, aim for these in roughly this order over your first several days:
- Bank resources and meet the rooms. Open cheap doors, hoard keys and gems, and read every note — the game is teaching you constantly.
- Chase permanent upgrades first. The Orchard (+20 steps/day) and the Gem Mine (+2 gems/run) make everything afterward easier; they’re worth a few “wasted” days.
- Learn the dartboard and parlor rules so those rooms become reliable key and gem income rather than obstacles.
- Find the Pump Room (draft the Pool to make it appear) and drain the Fountain — permanent, and a Basement entrance.
- Push north to the Antechamber and open any one door. From there, follow the critical-path chain above.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a straight step-by-step walkthrough for Blue Prince?
No — and any page that promises one is misleading. The mansion’s floor plan is re-drafted every day, so your path is improvised each run. What’s fixed is the order of objectives (Antechamber → Basement → Room 46) and the solutions to the non-random puzzles. Learn the systems and the constants, and you can clear any layout.
How many rooms are there, and what is Room 46?
The house has 45 draftable rooms. Room 46 is the “impossible” extra room you’re tasked to find — reaching it rolls the credits, but it’s really the doorway to the game’s much larger second half.
Do the safe codes change between players or saves?
No. The safe codes are fixed for everyone because each encodes an unchanging in-world date (Office 0303, Boudoir 1225, Study 1208, Drawing Room 0415, Drafting Room 1108, Orchard 1128, Red Door MAY8). The Shelter’s time-safe is the exception — you compute it from the current in-game date.
Can I permanently lose progress?
The daily reset wipes your layout, steps and pocket items, but it never undoes a permanent unlock — drained water, opened basement doors, gates, the Gem Mine, flipped switches and added blueprints all persist. Use the Coat Check to carry one important item into the next day.
Why can’t I get back to a room I found yesterday?
Because rooms are drafted fresh each day, you can’t guarantee a specific room will appear. Improve your odds by drafting the rooms that feed it (for example, the Pump Room only appears after you’ve drafted the Pool), and bank steps so a long run is possible when the draw is good.
I’ve found seven red letters but not the eighth — is it a bug?
No. The final red letter is the most elusive in the game and even experienced players struggle with it; guides disagree on which number is the hold-out, and the community trail eventually leads to the Orchard’s shed. It’s meant to be the last thread you close.
Sources: IGN’s Blue Prince wiki walkthrough and puzzle guides; the official Steam store page and appdetails API (developer Dogubomb, publisher Raw Fury, released 10 April 2025, $17.99, 92 Metacritic) plus the nine official screenshots; and a widely-used community answer guide on the Steam Community. Fixed solutions (safe codes, breaker sequence, clock-tower clocks, chess room types, pump mapping) were cross-checked between IGN and the community guide; deliberately hidden or community-contested late-game answers are summarised as method, not reproduced.