Our The Message from Deep Space guide covers the formatting rules, the signal meanings, and the transmissions that stop most players. The game is set in 1973, after a meteorite crashes off the coast of Alaska and begins broadcasting radio waves. You play as the Translator on a team assembled by the American Space Agency: Dr. Bautista runs the computers, Dr. Collins handles linguistics, Dr. Akers covers astronomy, and Dr. Doppler leads the mission. The game rarely holds your hand, so you will face math, geometry, chemistry, and eventually grammar problems.
We gathered these solutions from community discussions and reviewed every technical note against the official patch notes up to version 1.2.1, the current build. Most rejected answers come from incorrect formatting rather than wrong puzzle logic.
What You Will Read:
Important: How to Read the Answers Below
The game does not accept signal numbers as text. When we write Signal -14, that means the term you saved in your own dictionary for that signal. If you named -14 “START”, you type START. Never type the dash, the number, or another player’s label.
The same goes for full answer strings. Something written as -14 -27 -3 -27 -3 -28 -15 is a pattern, not text to paste into the console. Swap each signal for your own term, then apply your formatting settings.
Formatting and Compiler Errors Explained
A Compiler Error usually means you have the right idea, but the wrong structure. The aliens require precise syntax for every answer.
When you write a sequence or an equation, you must mark the boundaries of your statement. You must include Signal -14 at the start of your answer. You must also include Signal -15 at the end of your answer. If you forget these boundaries, the game will reject your solution. How you space your signals matters greatly. If the compiler throws an error, you should try adding a newline at Signal -2. You should avoid putting a newline at Signal -3.
Signal -12 submits your answer for most of the game. Pay attention to how the transmission writes it. If the message reads [-12] [-4] X, format your response exactly the way X appears in the transmission.
Before you look anything up, check the Ideas panel. Your colleagues write hints for specific transmissions, and they appear after a few failed submissions or after enough time has passed. Since patch 1.2.0, dictionary entries also show the transmission where each signal first appeared, which makes tracing a word back to its source much faster. Whitespace is trimmed from your input, so a stray tab will not cause a compiler error on its own.
Transmission Walkthroughs and Hints
You will find the game heavily relies on math and logic early on. We broke down the hardest transmissions in the game below. We provide hints to guide you, as the aliens require very specific answers.
Early Game Puzzles
- Transmission 16: You might feel confused if you think Signal -2 is a Fibonacci function. It acts as a separator. You can derive the meaning of Signal -5 by looking at what goes before and after it in existing examples.
- Transmission 30: This puzzle asks you to find what follows logically in the sequence. You do not need to do a math operation here. The output ends at Signal -2 (AND), which is intentional.
- Transmission 61 (Group 8): You need to continue the sequence pairs. The correct answer is “4 -3 7”. If the compiler throws an error, try adding a newline at Signal -2, and avoid putting a newline at Signal -3. You can also add a space next to Signal -13.
Geometry Puzzles (Where the Full Game Begins)
- Transmission 75: This puzzle introduces point coordinates. Every Signal -15 is paired with a Signal -14 with a number in the middle. You should think about how multiple numbers are used together in math.
- Transmission 86: This transmission intentionally breaks a pattern. It does not use Signal -20. You should look around the newly added References menu for a hint.
- Transmission 87: This puzzle plays off Transmission 86 and shares structure with Transmission 85. Check the word you’ve defined for Signal -20, and compare the formula here to the one from Transmission 86, the connection between them is the key.
- Transmission 89: You might enter more information than the compiler wants. You need to adjust the way you format the answer.
- Transmission 106: By this point you also have the word ‘object,’ covering points, lines, shapes, and numbers alike. The new word this transmission asks for is Signal -23, community consensus lands on ‘amount,’ though some players initially read it as ‘missing’ (the missing piece from a group). If ‘amount’ doesn’t click, try thinking of it as the count of objects in a pattern.
Formatting Traps and Logic Statements
A few of the entries below (110, 124, 126, 136, 137) reflect one player’s close reading of the puzzle design rather than a confirmed answer, so treat them as interpretive guidance.
- Transmission 110: You might notice the aliens simplified the area formula to use PI instead of TAU.
- Transmission 115: You must represent a fraction. The game gives you an example of how to represent 1/3 using Signal -25. You do not need to round the number.
- Transmission 116: The game wants the answer formatted exactly as (x0, x1).
- Transmission 120: The top of the message tells you exactly what X0 and X1 are. You must include Signal -14 at the start and Signal -15 at the end.
- Transmission 124: The “NOT” operator acts as a prefix boolean logic operand here. It means the “opposite of”.
- Transmission 126: You will notice the logic operands are infix here, even though the arithmetic operands were postfix previously.
- Transmission 136: The game uses a logical inclusive-OR to specify answer options.
- Transmission 137: You cannot apply the logical AND to “TRUE” and “Statement 2” to form another equality with “Statement 1”.
- Transmission 139: You should not overcomplicate this puzzle. Signal -31 is not XOR. Signal -36 acts like “thus”. The exact formatted answer you need is: -14 -27 -3 -27 -3 -28 -15.
- Transmission 145: You need to look at the relationship from Transmission 144, which was greater than or equal to. This is just a formatting issue.
- Transmission 147: You must compare two different shapes. Shape 0 is not larger or smaller than Shape 1. This means they have the exact same area or circumference, and they share the same “frequency -22”. The “NOT” operator acts as a postfix here.
Advanced Translations and Chemistry
- Transmission 154 & 155: This is not a bug. Bautista’s converter starts translating Base-8 into Base-10 behind the scenes, and nothing on screen tells you. An answer of “5 1 2” is not accepted when the expected answer is “512” in Base-10.
- Transmission 157: You need to move or displace the points. You can plot the points visually to see how they relate to the previous points.
- Transmission 175: The answer is not the number of individual oscillations. You must count the number of something that the game references multiple times. The final answer is 1.
- Transmission 179: You must return something to the Aliens. Half of the message describes facts, and the other half is a request. You need to reverse the sequence given to you. The answer translates to: “Receiver/earth/humans” “move” the “meteorite” to “Aliens”.
- Transmission 180: You need to compare the formula of @-18#0 versus @-18#1. The puzzle requires you to copy the logic directly.
- Transmission 181: Same cause. 6.2 is the Base-8 reading, so the game rejects it. Written in Base-10, the answer is 6.25. Both of these trace back to the Collins and Bautista conversations about digit counts and the base conversion update, so this is designed behaviour rather than an error.
- Transmission 183: You are not calculating a circumference. The shape is a circle, and the radius is 1. It does not have a perimeter, but it still has a measurable edge.
- Transmission 227: You compare the “size” of beryllium and oxygen, and the game accepts Be < O. By atomic radius that is backwards, since beryllium is the larger atom. The working community theory is that “size” means atomic weight here (Be ≈ 9.01 against O ≈ 16.00), but the developer never confirmed it. Treat it as a best guess if a similar comparison trips you up later.
- Transmission 235: This is a comparison, not a formula. You are still inside the compound group, so look at how the previous transmissions in the group set up the relationship before you answer.
- Transmission 278: The answer is 2. This one sits at the end of the time group, so you are working with the alien time units you just defined rather than a new concept. Players who get stuck here usually have the logic right and still get rejected, which points to formatting. Strip your answer down to the bare number and check your boundary signals against the nearby transmissions.
- Transmission 239: You must provide the balanced equation. The correct format is 4 Fe + 3 O2 -> 2 Fe2O3. You cannot use “Fe4”.
- Transmission 278: The answer here is short, and players who get stuck usually understand the message but still get rejected, which points to formatting rather than logic. Check your boundary signals and spacing against nearby transmissions.
Note: Transmissions 233, 234, and 239 were all revised for technical accuracy in patch 1.1.0. If your build shows different values than the ones above, trust the text on your screen.
Signal Meanings and Definitions
You will define many words in your dictionary as you play. Some of these signals change their meaning slightly depending on the context.
If you look closely at older sequences, Signal -2 appears after every number. This signal acts as a separator or an “AND” statement, not a math function. You can derive the meaning of Signal -5 by looking at surrounding examples in the text.
The aliens use their vocabulary in flexible ways. Signal -40 translates roughly to “MAKE”, but it has two different meanings. In early puzzles, it means “constitute”, as in parts making a whole. When you reach later puzzles, the definition stretches to mean “produce” or “create”.
When you reach the geometry section, you get a new word for Signal -23. You can define this as an “amount” or a “missing” object. It relates to a group of objects where one is missing from the pattern.
Early in the game, Bautista builds a converter for the numbers. You will spend a lot of time working in Base-8. Collins is the one who pushes for proper decimal rounding, and the change lands around Transmission 115. After that the game starts converting to Base-10 with no on-screen indicator, which is where most of the confusion begins. Some outgoing transmissions do not convert back to Base-8 properly. If you see rounded numbers, check which base the game expects.
The aliens use Base-8 for a reason. The team theorises it comes from having eight limbs, the same way human Base-10 comes from ten fingers. That theory turns out to be correct.
Troubleshooting and Performance
The game runs uncapped by default and will push a high-end card harder than a puzzle game should. Open the settings menu and set a framerate limit, the options are 30, 48, 60, 144 and uncapped. Capping it is the fix. There is no need to drop the graphics settings to Low.
If a signal you have already encountered is missing from your dictionary, open the global dictionary settings and press the validate button. Newer builds run this check automatically on load, but older save files may still need it once.
The current build is 1.2.1. Most of the launch issues the community reported, including the broken chemistry transmission at 237, were closed in the first three weeks. If a puzzle looks unsolvable, confirm the game is up to date before assuming you misread it.
Useful Tools and Community Resources
Some transmissions are faster to solve with outside help, and a few community projects have become standard reading for anyone working through the back half of the game.
Deep Space Communication Relay: Load your dictionary file into this browser tool and it lets you write and read messages in the alien language, including sending them to other players. The developer highlighted it in the 1.2.0 patch notes.
Harmonica’s All Message Solutions guide: A complete solution list covering groups 1 to 150 and every message up to 977, plus a full dictionary interpretation. It spoils the entire story, so treat it as a last resort.
