Aaron’s Spoilerific Verde Station Guide!

Overview

If you’re the sort of completionist who wants a walkthrough even for a game as open-ended as Verde Station, this is the guide for you! Or if you just want to know how to get the achievements.

Barebones spoiler-free walkthrough

Verde Station does a good job of telling you how to play the game, and where to go to move forward. But in case you get lost, here’s a spoiler-free summary of the bare minimum you have to do to reach the game’s ending. There is only one possible ending to this game, so no need to dig around to find the “good” ending.

You awake in a bedroom, with an alarm on the wall buzzing. Turn off the alarm, then go to the big console on the wall. Enter your name, and take the personality quiz. (Your answers to the quiz will have no effect on the game.)

From here, gameplay consists of going from room to room in Verde Station and running system checks. Quarters, Greenhouse, Lounge, Kitchen, Greenhouse, Quarters. In each room, just go to the console and run the System Check if the console says it’s required. In the Quarters you’ll also need to do a Mental Check.

Eventually, you’ll find that your path to the next room on this loop is blocked, and a door that was closed before is now open. Go through that door, and you’ll enter the endgame.

On your third visit to the Kitchen, the console will crash and the door to the Greenhouse will be locked. But, the door to Food Storage (previously locked) will now open. At the back of Food Storage you’ll find another doorway that leads down to a room with a locked emergency exit. Down a hallway from there is the station’s Control Room. Run a “Full Station System Check” there, and the console will tell you the station needs to be rebooted. So, choose the “reboot station” command on the menu. The console crashes, as does the station’s view of space.

Go back down the hallway, and out the emergency exit. Go down the stairs, and to the airlock in the corner of the floor.

In the airlock room, you’ll see a keypad. But what’s the combination? Well, on the wall to the right of the keypad, you’ll notice that a series of numbers are written on the tiles, each struck through. Apparently your character has been trying all the combinations by process of elimination. Follow the ascending numbers around, towards the door, and then along the other wall. The last number on the wall is also struck through. The combination is one number higher (apparently when your character discovered the right combination, they were too excited to write it down). Specifically, it’s 0452.

Go out the airlock. The end.

Achievements

Three achievements are accomplished by actions in the game:

“Beat” the game Reach the ending of the game.
You’re not supposed to be here Did you notice the keypad in the Greenhouse? Up on the walkway up the stairs. Use the same combination there that you used on the airlock. (It’s the same combination every game: 0452.)
Nice Catch On your third visit to the kitchen (when the console has crashed) a few seconds after the console is triggered by your presence, the food dispenser will dispense a bottle of food goo, which will fall to the floor and smash. To get this achievement, you have to catch the jar before it hits the floor. The timing is tricky, but fortunately one of the game’s invisible checkpoints is right before you enter the kitchen. So if you miss the bottle, just quit the game, relaunch, “Resume from Checkpoint”, and try again.

All the other achievements are found by running commands in the Administrator Terminal on the game start screen. You know, the console you see when you first start the game, that lets you start “Start New Game” and “Resume from Checkpoint”. To get the achievements you need to run “Administrator Terminal” and run the commands there.

9 of them are commands that you’ll find lying around in the game, and the achievement names are pretty strong clues. If you haven’t found that many administrator terminal commands, check out the administrator terminal commands section of this guide for where to find them.

C:VS400Steam>dirMAIN dir.cmd- In DOS the “dir” command lists the contents of a directory.
Burn it down HCF.cmd- This stands for Halt and Catch Fire[en.wikipedia.org]
Start Fresh reboot.cmd
Everyone needs a little help.cmd
User Preference You have to run three commands for this: AmberOS.cmd, BlueOS.cmd, and GreenOS.cmd
Know Thyself <yourname>.cmd. For instance if you entered your name as “Aaron”, you would run “Aaron.cmd”.

Two of the others are commands made of two words entered in CamelCase, with “.cmd” on the end. For instance, if I thought the phrase I needed was “ugly cat”, I would enter “UglyCat.cmd”. Once you know this bit of formatting, guessing the actual phrases from the achievement names is not that hard.

Holy Cheater GodMode.cmd
Barry Allen TheFlash.cmd – Barry Allen was one of the secret identities for the Flash.

And the last one is another starting screen administrator terminal command (ending in “.cmd”). Apparently it’s a reference to the game “The Stanley Parable”.

8888888888888888 8888888888888888.cmd- That’s sixteen 8’s.

Administrator Terminal commands

Here is where you can find all the Administrator Terminal commands in the game:

Launching the administrator terminal (1 command)
An inbox message on your first visit to the Lounge (1 command)
When you visit the Greenhouse for the 4th time, there’s an armchair on the glass floor. There’s a notebook there, with 4 commands written on it (and a few more crossed out)
On your third visit to Quarters, after you run the crazy Mental Check, the console will flash a few messages and then go dark. One of these messages is a command.
In the station admin room, there’s a note taped to one of the consoles with three more commands on it.

And here’s a full list of the commands and what they do:

help.cmd or info.cmd Provides basic information about how to use the administrator terminal.
SysAdmin.cmd Shows you messages from your friend Jeff, the station’s offsite system administrator. It’s a different message each time you enter a new room, and these messages are one of the main ways the game’s story is communicated, so you should run this command every chance you get. This includes running it in your first visit to the Greenhouse, before it would have been possible to have learned it on your first runthrough.
dir.cmd Shows a broken directory listing.
reboot.cmd Causes the terminal to reboot. This has no lasting effect.
HCF.cmd Causes the terminal to noisily crash and reboot. It takes longer and is more dramatic than reset.cmd, but it also has no lasting effect
<yourname>.cmd For instance if you entered your name as “Aaron”, this command would be “Aaron.cmd”. This command gets flashed when the bedroom console crashes after the Mental Check has gone crazy. As if to confirm your paranoia, this command displays a report about you, by the people in the company who are watching you! Usually the report is the same, but it changes in some rooms, so I recommend running this every time you visit a console, just like SysAdmin.cmd.
BlueOS.cmd Changes the console’s text color to blue.
AmberOS.cmd Changes the console’s text color to amber.
GreenOS.cmd Changes the console’s text color to green.

There are three more commands that will only work in the start screen console, which are Easter eggs that will grant you achievements. Check out the achievements section for those.

Floppy disks

On your first visit to the lounge, you’ll notice what appears to be a classic 3.5″ floppy disk, sitting on a footstool by the console. There are, in fact, several of these scattered around throughout the station. To use them, pick them up and, while carrying them, bump into the lower right corner of the lounge console’s keyboard. Once you hit the right spot, the disk will automatically come out of your hand and pop into the console. Run the “Load Disk” command in the terminal to read the text on the disk.

I’m aware of 7 floppy disks:

1st visit to the lounge, on the footstool by the terminal.
1st visit to the lounge, in a crate by the head of the makeshift bed under the stairs
1st visit to the lounge, a green disk hidden behind a teardrop-shaped sculpture on the big bookshelf on the ground floor.
2nd visit to your quarters, a black disk on your bedside table by the alarm. (You’ll need to carry it through the arboretum back to the lounge. The arboretum hasn’t changed any on this visit, so you can just walk through without pausing to look around.)
3rd visit to the lounge, the nose of the smiley face on the floor
3rd visit to the lounge, by a crate under the stairs
3rd visit to the lounge, on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf on the balcony (thanks to TempusMori for pointing this out)

I would not be surprised to learn that there are more disks lying around! If you find more, feel free to share their locations in the comments section.

The meaning of the disks

The disks contain a series of interconnected first-person accounts of the events happening on a spaceship traveling at sublight speeds from Earth to a new colony world. Most of the people on the ship are kept in hibernation much of the time, but even so, they’ve spent a long time awake on the ship and have formed a society of sorts, with corruption and criminals. They encounter people from Earth who “lap” them with superior technology that allows them to travel faster. They eventually reach their colony world.

The secret of the disks

So, what do the disks mean? Why are they hidden around? Do they have something to do with the station being a simulation? Are you a mind-wiped criminal or soldier from the colony ship? Or are you a dead killer in some kind of hell meant to remind you of the colony ship and the atrocities you committed there?

On your third visit to the lounge, the SysAdmin.cmd message describes how your friend left you “a new data storage format” under the stairs, wtih a reader on the lounge terminal. This is obviously the floppy disk drive and its disks. He goes on to say that he has loaded them with short stories by his favorite author, Cameron Lowe.

So the disks aren’t revealing any hidden truth. They’re just science fiction. This is one of many excellent bits of paranoia in the game.

What’s really going on in Verde Station?

So, you’ve played the game through, but you’re still not entirely sure what happened? Well, here’s my interpretation of what’s going on in this game. In a nutshell, you (the POV character) volunteered to test out a new space station design. But due to the prolonged isolation you became delusional, convinced the station was some kind of simulation, and tried to escape out the airlock. Of course, you were actually in a space station, so you were sucked out into space and died.

Under this interpretation, the game’s POV character is the video game equivalent of an unreliable narrator. So, the things you see in the game should not be taken completely at face value. It’s a mix of actual events, delusions, amnesia, and missing time, meant to simulate the POV character’s confused mental state.

Most prominently, the scenes of the game are non-chronological. As you make your rounds, you’re seeing the rooms of the station at different points of time, sometimes shortly after your mission started, and sometimes a year later. This is hinted at by the way things in the station change, such as the trees dying from lack of water. It’s also hidden in plain sight on the terminals, which display the date in the upper corner in MDYYYY format (e.g. 2 June 2053 is 622053). (Thanks danklima for pointing this out to me!) Going by the terminal dates, the events of the game take place partly on the first day of your mission, 2 June 2053, and partly one year later on the last day of your mission, 2-3 June 2054.

Also non-reliable is that some of the output on the terminals seems to be a hallucination by the POV character. The Mental Check on the 3rd visit to the quarters is the most noticeable, but other terminals also have output that seems to be the product of delusion, like the way every option on the terminal says “System Check” in some way on the 3rd visit to the Greenhouse terminal.

So, why did you go crazy? Nothing particularly special, just prolonged isolation with little external stimulation. Prisoners in solitary confinement often suffer psychiatric effects including (according to Wikipedia[en.wikipedia.org]) “cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, obsessive thoughts, paranoia, and psychosis”. You’re not a prisoner, but you’re facing effectively the same thing: prolonged isolation in an enclosed, unnatural space, with little stimulation or variety.

Due to problems with the station’s beta testing, you had no video files to watch, and only one song to listen to. Your food was replaced with identical featureless food liquid every day. You can’t communicate with people outside, even through email. The terminals ask you for system checks and to report issues, but they appear to just store the logs or ignore them, rather than putting you in immediate contact with tech support. This just furthers the feeling of isolation. Your character tries all kinds of things to pass the time with the supplies available. Book dominoes. Sticky note art. Naming the trees.. “Camping out” under the stairs in the lounge. Moving an armchair into the greenhouse to watch the stars. Leaving an obsessive amount of sticky notes around with messages for themselves.

After months of isolation you get increasingly delusional and eventually have periods of missing time and amnesia. You come across things you did yourself and suspect they were done by someone else who’s stalking you.

And in your delusions you forget one very important fact about Verde Station. As one of the SysAdmin.cmd messages reveals, it’s a space station design that was adapted from a design for an underground colony. The station as a whole is a big hollow cube filled with atmosphere, and its interior surface is lined with display screens to simulate expansive views in order to help fight claustrophobia. As you discover when you get to the Control Room, it can show outer space (as it does through most of the game), a nebula, a mountain lake, etc. The rooms and hallways you spend most of the game in, are just a freestanding building enclosed within that larger cube, and the stars you see out the windows are just the cube’s interior screens, with actual outer space hidden behind that.

Forgetting this in your delusions, you think the stars out the windows of your living space are real, and that your living space building is a space station floating by itself in space. When glitches in the cube’s display begin appearing, you develop a paranoid belief that you’re in some kind of simulation, and by going out the airlock you can escape. Finding the science fiction stories on the disks hidden throughout the station by your friend Jeff the sysadmin, only adds to this suspicion of unreality.

At the same time, the station begins experiencing actual technical malfunctions. Eventually these are severe enough that they lead you to the Control Room, and then to the airlock, where you flush yourself out into space.

Meanwhile, your friend Jeff, the station’s system administrator, was concerned about how poorly designed the station was, and your deteriorating mental checks, and tried to communicate to you through the SysAdmin.cmd backdoor. But this hidden, one-way communication channel was not enough to keep you grounded and sane. Jeff pushes for a recovery mission to come get you ahead of schedule (although they still don’t arrive until the last day of your mission). But by a tragic twist of fate, they arrive minutes too late to prevent you from going out the airlock.

Random nifty things

Verde Station is full of great little details. Here are a few of my favorites:

In the bathroom off of the Quarters, where there should be toilet paper there is instead an extensible tray of what look like seashells. This is a reference to the movie “Demolition Man”, which depicts a future where toilet paper has been replaced with a (never explained) system of seashells.
For a space-faring future society, the computer technology in Verde Station is really retro. Their terminals apparently run DOS, and floppy disks are experimental new technology!
The terminals seem to show the day’s date in the upper-right corner, in MDYYYY format (i.e. June 2, 2053 is 622053), presumably the month and day of the month are being printed without leading zeroes. This is an unusual date display format because it’s ambiguous: For instance Jan 23, 2053 and Dec 3, 2053 would both be 1232053. In-story, this can be explained as another sign of the shoddy design of the station. But I suspect the real reason for it is because it helps to make the dates less noticeable to the player, so the non-chronological nature of things won’t be too obvious.
On your first visit to the lounge, if you go up the stairs and look out the window at the stars, there is a single red pixel visible, an apparent flaw in the display screens. It’s also visible in the Kitchen, if you lower the table (by walking up to it).
You can kill all the trees in the Greenhouse! If you turn a tree’s water valve off, it will be dead on your fourth visit to the Greenhouse (when the terminal crashes).
The dead trees have their name struck out on their sticky note, and the word “Angel” written on them. This perhaps explains your poem about the dead angels in the first lounge visit.
When you go down the stairs from Food Storage, you see that the “waste disposal chute” in the kitchen just leads to a trash bin one floor down.
The space station greenhouse full of trees, and the isolated station keeper devoted to them, is reminiscent of the 1972 science fiction film “Silent Running”.
The isolated space station keeper going increasingly crazy, is also reminiscent of the 2009 science fiction film “Moon”.