Questline — the Moon · three parts · needs Standing Slightly Closer finished

The Hollow Moon

The Moon is hollow. He always knew. He wanted to see your face

A three-part story questline that turns the Hat Man from a recurring background figure into the centre of the game's strangest sustained narrative. It only opens up once Standing Slightly Closer is finished, plays out as a genuine horror sequence played completely straight, and then reveals — deliberately, in front of the player — that the horror was a joke he was in on the entire time.

Part one: The Hollow Moon Question

Meet the Hat Man at the Moon's crater. Getting there is gated behind three separate skill requirements, one per errand below and each for a stated reason: Mining 25 (the star metal is cut, not bought), Attack 30 (the grave dust is fought for), and Magic 20 (the third errand touches the Void). For a stretch only the Mining gate actually worked — the check that enforces requirements could only hold one skill at a time, so the other two were part of the approved design but had nowhere to be stored, and nothing said so. All three now gate the quest together, and the panel shows exactly which ones you've already cleared.

He sends the player on three fetch tasks, each explicitly explained rather than left arbitrary:

12 skeletons, for the grave dust that settles afterward — "not bones, bones forget immediately... the dust does not."
3 Star Metal, mined from the crater itself, because "a thing that has arrived from elsewhere can be persuaded to point back at it."
1 Void Shard, "absence with an edge on it" from somewhere always described as down.

All three go into his hat without it ever looking fuller. "An ear," he explains — something that remembers, something from elsewhere, and something that isn't there, combined so it "can hear a place that is not supposed to be there." The quest pays 4,000 cash, 2 Star Metal, and 4,000 Mining XP, and ends with him inviting the player to drill down and find out what the ear was built to hear.

Part two: The Hollow

Requires a Lamp carried in the bag — genuinely required, not just claimed in dialogue, matching the same "the requirement is real" discipline Standing Slightly Closer used for its hat and night-time gate. Drilling down into the crater with a lit lamp finds a lightless cavern where sound doesn't carry, and something enormous is watching before the player can see any of it — a field of open eyes at different heights along a wall the lamp keeps losing.

The wall is carved with three deep marks, and the puzzle underneath them is exactly the three errands from part one, read back in the order they were originally asked: grave dust, star metal, the Void, in that order. A player who said the pattern out loud to the Hat Man on the surface gets it recognized immediately; anyone else works it out one step slower from the carvings themselves. Solving it opens the floor — not violently, "more like a held breath let out" — and drops the player through.

Part three: You Should Have Seen Your Face

What's actually underneath the Hollow is a lit, inhabited undercity — terraces, towers, a road older than the player's species, and people who wave. The Hat Man is standing there waiting, visibly delighted, and admits outright that he let the horror sequence play out on purpose: "The Moon is hollow, my child. That is simply how it is. It is not a horror. It is a NEIGHBOURHOOD." The errands were real — the ear genuinely had to be built — but the fear was staged entirely for his own amusement. He fades out at the end of the conversation, "already going transparent at the edges," inviting the player back without explaining how.

Two inhabitants, and they don't agree with each other

The undercity's own people are The Warden of the Ring and The Long Quiet — deliberately two rather than one, so the city reads as a real civilisation rather than a single voice standing in for a whole society. They don't share an opinion of the Hat Man: the Warden considers him a nuisance who's been sneaking visitors in without permission for centuries, while the Long Quiet — three heads on one body, each turning at a slightly different speed — finds the whole thing funny. Neither of them bothers explaining the city to a visitor, on purpose; the writing treats "old" as meaning they've seen this exact scene play out before, not that they owe an outsider a tour. Physically neither reads as a threat: the Warden is tall, slow, lit from within, with a halo on a staff and no eyes at all, while the Long Quiet is shorter and wider — alien by how they're actually built, not just by a different paint job on an ordinary figure.

The undercity and the dark cavern above it are kept as two genuinely separate rosters — the Warden and the Long Quiet only ever appear below, the Watcher and the rest of the cavern's cast only ever appear above — specifically so the Watcher, the one figure the story treats as belonging to the false, staged horror, can never end up standing in the real city underneath it.

A six-flag hidden score, never shown on screen

The ending's payout is decided by a hidden score tallied silently across all three quests — asking what happened to the people the Hollow "kept," reading the wall properly, and four other specific choice flags. None of it is a visible morality meter; the player never sees a number. Four out of six flags is the pass threshold — a deliberately forgiving bar, chosen so one bad-mood reply mid-questline doesn't wreck an otherwise-attentive playthrough, while an inattentive one still reads as inattentive.

Passing (4+ of 6): 9,000 cash, 2 Void Shards, 6,000 Magic XP.
Falling short: 3,000 cash, 1 Void Shard, 2,000 Magic XP, and a noticeably colder final line from the Hat Man — he shows the player the city and stops talking, rather than inviting them back warmly.

Version history

The Hollow Moon Question added, opening the questline with the three-errand setup for the ear.
The Hollow added as its own separate quest line rather than more beats bolted onto the first — the game's dialogue engine gates an entire questline to one location at a time, and the surface crater and the dark cavern beneath it are different locations, so splitting them was cheaper than teaching the engine to gate half a questline.
You Should Have Seen Your Face added, moving the reveal into the undercity itself rather than leaving it in the dark cavern where it was first written — the same location-gating rule that split part two out required the reveal to live in its own line once the undercity existed as a real place to stand in.
The Attack and Magic skill gates finally built. All three requirements were part of the approved design from the start, but the quest's own requirement check could only ever hold one skill at a time, so Attack 30 and Magic 20 had nowhere to be stored and silently never applied — a data-shape limit, not a decision to leave them out. Widened to hold all three at once, closing the Hollow Moon audit's last remaining open item.
Fixed the Hat Man, the Knight, the Cat Man and the Watcher saying absolutely nothing when their requirements weren't met yet. A locked speaker correctly refused to advance the conversation but gave no reason at all — no message, no hint — which read exactly like a broken character rather than a quest with unmet requirements, and was reported as the whole questline "not working or making any sense." Every locked line now explains what's still needed in plain language, like "come back after dark" or "STANDING SLIGHTLY CLOSER comes first." The same fix closed an unrelated gap directly underneath it: nothing had ever stopped ordinary monsters, boss-tier included, from spawning inside the hidden area beneath the Hollow — an oversight in the same class as an existing rule that already protects the Dream from random spawns, just never extended here.

Trivia

Two lines in part three quietly acknowledge the exact way the player played part two — putting the lamp out on purpose, or fumbling the mark order before solving it — proving the game tracked those specific actions rather than just whether the puzzle was eventually solved.
This questline and The Original (the Cat Man's hat heist, also set on the Moon) both revolve around the same Hat Man, but are separate quest lines with no shared requirements between them.
The Hat Man references the player's own answer from Standing Slightly Closer directly in part one's dialogue — what he says at the crater differs depending on whether the player accepted or declined his apprenticeship offer.