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= Undertale update! Don't name yourself Kris... =

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So, there was a new update released for Undertale yesterday (the 29th of August). And it's a pretty big one, adding a whole bunch of new lore and story to the game. You might have noticed people going a little crazy when it first dropped, a couple of people doing 10-hour streams to discover all the secrets in real time and whatnot. And a lot more people who were simply totally and utterly confused about what other people were tweeting about out of context. And who can blame them, when all the Undertale updates we've been getting recently only brought relatively minor changes compared with the complete bombshell we got this time? Good times. This update has gotten many nicknames in the day and a half it's been out, including the "True Update", "Omega Update (Undertale, not Homestuck)" "{{caps|Core}} update", "Hopes and Dreams update" (given how well it fulfilled all of ours), and "Tundra Eel update" (you'll have to read all the way to the bottom for context on that one).

To see any of the things that are about to be described below, you will need to have Undertale version 1.036. On desktop, you want to look for the "data.win" file and open it in a hex editor, while on Steam, you should be able to find the version number under "Properties". This is the version that released shortly after all the datamining warnings were replaced with the string "{{caps|He is}}". (No, I don't know what "he is" or what "he is" doing either. Yet another of those conundrums only Toby would know the answer to.)

So, with that, this post will be digging into the "True Update" or "Tundra Eel update" in depth to cover everything that's been found in it — or at least, everything that's been found so far. With everything that's happened, it's vaguely possible Toby could come back after this with another teeny little "Sans' picture" update just to mess with us. He's always pulling that kind of thing, so you never know.

The first thing that's important to note is you can't see any part of this update on a normal playthrough. You will need to edit your save file by opening it in a text editor in order for the new story to actually be unlocked. There are a few different edits you can make to ultimately get to the same place. I will go through each one of them in what I think is the likely order they are supposed to happen in.

One way is to begin is to open file0 and change your position to room 272, "room_water_redacted". There are some subtle changes to this room in version 1.036. You aren't prevented from entering it through the "dogcheck" screen. The game checks if room 272 was the first room it loaded on startup, and only if it is, you're now allowed to enter it. The room looks pretty much the same as it ever did, with the mysterious covered object. But this time after you talk to it, another dialog box pops up after a few seconds with the string "wrongnumber=666666666666666666666666666666666" filling it infinitely and spilling all over the screen. It seems to stop doing this after exactly 6 seconds, freeing you up to go south to the sound test room. From here, it is perfectly fine if the game crashes. As soon as you talk to "redacted", your current undertale.ini will be modified with the new variable value <code>wrongnumber="6666666.000000"</code>.

Another way to begin is to edit undertale.ini to change your <code>fun</code> value to any number between 2 and 39, or simply change nothing and boot up the game if you got an appropriate value normally. This will lead to you encountering the wrong number song in Snowdin. In version 1.036, this event is slightly different, and instead of stopping Frisk with the text "(Ring, ring...)" it plays a particular phone keypad tone seven times, a brief ringing, and then shows the dialogue box asking for "G—". If you were playing the game for the first time, you might not notice anything was strange. But if you listen closely to the keypad sound, you will notice it is playing the number "666-6666". If you then go into undertale.ini, you will find a line which says <code>wrongnumber="0.000000"</code>. You should then change this to <code>wrongnumber="6666666.000000"</code>. (If you mistakenly input the number as <code>wrongnumber="666666.000000"</code>, don't worry, as that will work just as well.)

Once you have the wrong number, the second step is to start a new game, and name the fallen human "Kris". You will not see any feedback on the name screen, as if nothing is different. But when you actually get into the Ruins... well, you might not be prepared for what happens next. There are certain reasons that you've been seeing memes going around telling you "don't name yourself Kris" or taking the caption "when you name yourself Kris" and putting some blown-away expression or picture of utter horror next to it.

(Note: you can safely change <code>wrongnumber</code> or your player name at any time before you get just a bit past the final door of the Ruins and first run into Sans; the game only checks for what these two variables are set to currently. You cannot run into Sans. The first moment you talk to Sans without having <code>wrongnumber</code> set, the game will add a flag to file0 indicating that you are not playing the True Update. So if you want to play it, make sure you've set your player name to "Kris" and <code>wrongnumber</code> to <code>"6666666.000000"</code> at some time before Sans makes it onto your screen.)

As to why you have to name yourself the name "Kris" in particular... nobody really knows as of right now. This was only found by datamining the game. There are already a few different theories going around, such as that Kris is one of the many dead humans that fell into the Underground before Frisk, perhaps some ninth human that was erased from existence and became a Goner, or that Kris somehow represents Frisk's "true identity" that they once were and then forgot. As to the actual reasoning behind each of these theories, we will have to get into the meat of the update to even begin to cover any of that. Who knows, maybe Frisk actually could be Kris. My favorite out-there theory is that Kris is some kind of metaphorical representation of the act of playing the game, such that when you suspend your disbelief and enter the world of Undertale it's somehow reflected in the metaphor of this unknown Kris person entering the Underground and turning into Frisk. <ref name="kris"/>

Also... I don't know where else to include it in this post, but people in a reddit thread messing around with every possible anagram of various characters and concepts within Undertale accidentally discovered a website called "[https://web.archive.org/web/20170710113250/http://www.deltarune.com/ deltarune.com]". Right now, this site only contains a very low contrast image concealing the text "{{caps|Three heroes appeared to banish the Angels heaven}}". Could this be a second game? Or have people simply mistaken some other random game website for one made by Toby? Toby has not said anything about it for the moment, so for now it's up to you to decide. <ref name="suzy"/>

All right. So, you may be wondering, what exactly could happen when I name myself a random name and put a suspicious phone number in my configuration file that is so crazy this post had to go burying the lede under another repeat of old news about the anagrams thread and deltarune.com? Well. Here we go. If you've started a new game, and you head away from the golden flower patch into the gateway, there will be something much worse than Flowey in there this time. Toriel is nowhere to be seen at any point in this room. And on that little patch of grass in the spotlight, there is a Memoryhead. That melting brain-and-spinal cord thing with six skeleton faces. It's not rendered as that little crawling debatably-cute True Lab sprite. Oh, {{em|no}}. Memoryhead is now fully rendered onto the map with its own unique sprite, subtly oozing and glitching out of reality and everything. If you try to talk to it, you only get a dialogue box full of a bunch of weird modem noises. But if you open your menu you'll see that Frisk mysteriously has a phone. If you select "{{caps|Cell}}", you will get a dialogue box saying "{{caps|Thank you for calling. But nobody came.}}", and the Memoryhead will simply slide off the screen.

During the time the Memoryhead is on screen the whole menu is broken, actually. If you select "{{caps|Item}}", Frisk will receive a Bad Memory. If you select "{{caps|Stat}}", you will simply get check information about the Memoryhead. This is how the overworld menu works every time you meet up with the Memoryhead within the story. This thing will show up every time Flowey would. Even the time you're thinking of, assuming something else about the True Update hasn't radically changed it.

So. The Ruins.

As already covered, Toriel is totally missing. She will not be guiding you through the Ruins, and you will not see things like the chalk arrows she left pointing to the wall switch. Many things about the Ruins look normal. You can do the puzzle. There is a dummy. You can run into Froggits.

When you encounter the dummy, you can either Spare it or run as the intended option. If you use the "Talk" action, you will get the message "<nowiki>*</nowiki> The line is busy." and a modem noise, while the check description says "<nowiki>*</nowiki> An empty vessel." The dummy is gray. It has apparently become some sort of Goner, although it's anybody's guess exactly how dummies can be Goners anyway. (Perhaps all dummies would be Goners if they had been unused placeholder sprites — you know, dummy pictures. Maybe that's the pun.) There is one new action. You can "Customize" the dummy. If you try this, you will get the message "<nowiki>*</nowiki> Connection failed.", but when you Spare the dummy after doing this it will turn back to its color form on the map. This has no particular effect on the rest of the game. It seems to just be some sort of tutorial introducing you to the themes of everything else that will happen in the True Update.

The spike puzzle is left for you to do yourself, which is nice. The empty winding hallway is just a hallway, although when you get to the end of it, you {{em|will}} receive a phone call. The message you get has no portrait and says:
"<nowiki>*</nowiki> Frisk? ...Hello? I'm not mad at you. It{{TTS|tts= (bunch of static)|▗░▚▙▒}} to feel bad."
"<nowiki>*</nowiki> You{{TTS|tts= (interrupted by static)|▚▒▚▙▒▞▓}} back. Are you okay?"
At the "glitched" parts of the dialogue box, the audio changes to an interference noise, that annoying little "bee-beebeebeep-beebeebeep" you get when a radio picks up something else. The character talking between the interference has some unknown new typer sound with a bit of a clattering feel to it, like Papyrus but more high-pitched. This is apparently a new character we haven't seen before. It is unclear if this is a call from the Memoryhead to Frisk, a call that Kris would have gotten at one time, or what's going on. The box says "Frisk" even though the name you put in is "Kris"; it will always say "Frisk" even if you change your name to something else after starting the True Update. Some people think this character is a skeleton based on the sound of the voice, and the new characters that will appear just a little later. <ref name="sk"/>

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== Footnotes ==

<references>
<ref name="kris">One question that's worth asking amidst all this is: If "Kris" is not just a passing reference to something in the extended Undertale lore, and is actually meant to be read as the name of Chara, how does this interact with the fact that Chara {{em|is}} the character we play as? Did Kris die? Why is this important for us to know? Why can we name Kris something else once they die? Is Kris a representation of us anyway? Is the metanarrative of Undertale supposed to be that we are Kris, but we died and ended up in the Underground able to control Frisk? Is Undertale our afterlife? Did we die and become forgotten and become replaced by the world of Undertale including a new protagonist and everything as Kris' punishment for a choice they made? Is Kris an Undertale character who is effectively playing Undertale? Does Kris embody the idea that if we momentarily imagine Undertale was real and it was the place you go when you die, you only end up inside Undertale as your afterlife if you are a certain kind of person who is then the kind of person that Undertale as a game is aimed at? The more I think about "Kris" the more this little easter egg drives me mad.</ref>

<ref name="suzy">Another popular theory that's been going around is that Kris is going to be one of the main characters of "Deltarune", along with the mysterious "Suzy". But that's just like. Really? There are always those theories that feel like they're doing nothing more than picking up the tiny scraps we've been given and desperately trying to fit them into the puzzle. We have no idea that Suzy has anything to do with the "three heroes". And who would the third main character be? Asriel? Goner Kid? That funny hunched over bird? Now, I have heard some people toss out "Chara" because of the strange way they hang over the narrative, and I have to agree, Chara is really weird. But I've also seen some interesting arguments that Chara and Kris might be the same person. So I don't know. Maybe Chara will be returning in Delta Rune, either as Kris or as that mysterious third person. Maybe Chara and Asriel will be starring in Deltarune together, but Suzy will have nothing to do with it? I don't know if we can have any idea at this point.</ref>

<ref name="sk">The phone call character has definitely left a wide number of people confused as to who they could be and what person they are actually talking to. It's become fairly popular for people to draw them as a skeleton child, usually a girl with some kind of striped shirt and either a pink scarf or a red skirt. Nobody can agree on her name. Some people are adamant it's a font, and some people think it will be a game engine reference or a totally normal name. You've got your "Arials" and your "Suzys" and your "Delphis" or "Gimels". You've also got some people insisting this character is something other than a skeleton, because "this couldn't possibly have happened before the monster-human war" and they don't think Kris could have known anything but humans. Of course, the people who think the caller really is talking to Frisk cast doubt on the idea Frisk has never been friends with monsters before. It all comes down to the question of whether monsters were truly eliminated from the surface and when exactly Kris would have fallen in relative to Chara and the war.<br />
A few people think the caller could somehow be the true identity of Gaster that got distorted into Gaster when entering the Underground, reasoning that because Memoryhead is connected to phones and Frisk has apparently been confirmed to have Gaster's phone number, Gaster may be trying to come back to life through the phone or something. And as crazy as that sounds? It's not impossible. All the doubt we've been thrown into over who Kris is and whether they are some kind of representation of the player or former identity of Frisk does open up the possibility Gaster isn't actually who we've been told he is either. Did Frisk walk away from their old friend Gimel who then died for unrelated reasons and is now haunting their phone and corrupting the Underground with Gaster lore? Nobody knows.<br />
The character's typer sound is only named "txtgoaway", which doesn't really give much of a clue on who it could be. All we really know is that an unknown character called Frisk or Kris once, and we were or are supposed to meet Suzy.</ref>

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