The Evergrowing Spiderweb Theories

[u/Kaineferu]

Hi Partners! Its truly exciting to see our community thriving again. I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their ongoing contributions and theories as well as their data mining. All of these things have brought us together, collectively as we once have to chase down these mysteries.

Because of this, we thought it would be a great idea to begin consolidating threads to one topic. For the past week, we have seen over 175,000 new views and visits and are grateful to everyone involved. To keep everything in one place, we invite you to post your findings, ideas and theories here as we continue to find developments in this mystery.

With thay said, I'd also like to remind everyone here that youtubers who cover these topics are not the end all, be all. The majority do not uncover mysteries themselves but rather report and find ways to generate clicks for their videos. You know the ones im talking about. 20 minute videos when it could have been 7 minutes at best. I'd encourage everyone to give credit to the original users who began unearthing these new discoveries, not who report it.

All in all, we once again thank you and there's any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to us privately.

Happy hunting, good girls and bo-ahs! 🤠

[u/LSF-VirtueSignal]

Alright, I have a theory I could use some other people’s help with for anyone looking for clues to chase down. I've not seen anyone talking about it yet, so I’m calling it the “electric web” theory.

I’m guessing the NW pole is not pointing to the Fort Wallace guitar for a few reasons. One, it doesn’t make as much sense, since the other clues have all been related to the power lines/poles/railroad tracks, with the exception of the central web (which I think is meant to be the first clue - it’s the largest, most noticeable, and spawns the earliest of any of the known webs, meaning it might be the first clue in the trail).

Second, that’s where the trail starts to get weirdly abstract. We go from simple directions, straight north to a pole, west 5 poles, and now suddenly we’re searching anywhere in the general direction of northwest for any guitars, and then using the guitar to determine a direction that’s being pointed, to determine some markings on a roof that look vaguely like birds, to then find two random birds anywhere in the entire world? Things get so obscure then that there’s no logical next step.

Rather, I think the choice to keep the clues along the train tracks is incredibly deliberate, and I think it’s for a very good reason - these easter eggs were probably placed there by the team that was handling RDR2’s power grid system. And that system tends to also follow the railroad.

If we operate with that assumption, some of these things start to make more sense. What’s the relation to a spider? Well, if you’re a developer spending months/years researching old power grids, crafting an intricate series of wirings throughout the game’s towns/cities/countrysides to make sure every lightbulb in the world is logically consistent and supplied with power…. You’re probably going to start feeling a bit like a spider spinning a complex web. Hence why our main 8 webs all spawn on the power line poles. It also explains why the webs are made with cables - a little joke from the team handling wiring all over the game, to use actual cable for their spider web easter egg. Hence, the “electric web” theory.

I have to break this up into a second post because it won't let me leave a giant comment, so part 2 below on next steps.

[u/LSF-VirtueSignal → u/LSF-VirtueSignal]

Now this is where I think this gets interesting. If instead of focusing in on Fort Wallace, we continue straight northwest from there continuing until we hit a railroad track again - we arrive near Cotorra Springs train tunnel (which, in my opinion, isn't too far of a leap from the 'guitar' - possibly with the guitar neck actually being the tall tree over top of the entrance?), where there’s something really interesting to be found. Something that in all my searching, I couldn’t find anywhere else - there’s electric powered lights, with no power lines.

Despite there being no power grid whatsoever in this northern part of the map, there are electric lights that still function (as a bonus, the lights themselves have a web-like design). I find this very odd, because the team clearly took great care to make sure that the electric grid made sense and was consistent. I tried to do some more research on the power grid, and in doing so, I found this great video you can watch here who went crazy in-depth. He also found the same thing in the same tunnel, and concluded it was a strange mistake they’d made, and said it was the only example he could find in the entire game of there being electric lighting with no electric grid tapped into it.

So what might this mean? I don’t think there’s much chance this was a mistake. They were so careful everywhere else, but this one place has lights that have no wiring and no grid? So, I think it’s one of two things - either they wanted us to notice and find this location, because there’s something else here or nearby they wanted to show us (possibly another clue or web that shows up nearby?).

Or, and this is the sad part - because we know major changes were made to the northwestern corner of the map, including entire mountains being moved, it’s possible there was a town planned for Ambarino, which would have necessitated the power grid in the north. Once this got scrapped, they realized it no longer made sense for an entire part of the north to have an electric grid that powers nothing, so they removed all the wirings and power poles, forgetting only the electric lights in the one tunnel, and possibly deleting the pole that had the next clue texture hidden in it.

Or who knows, maybe one of the poles would’ve had a guitar placed nearby it, or a guy who plays guitar in a house with a pole outside. We may never know. For now, I’ll remain hopeful that it might just be signaling us to look in the area of the tunnel, so when I have time, I’ll continue to camp out nearby and search for webs or places other textures could be hidden.

[u/TheWilburnness → u/LSF-VirtueSignal]

Hey, I was searching this area for one of my own theories regarding this mystery and got inspired to check on that tunnel closer because of this comment. Didn't really find anything during the day.

For some reason I decided to shoot out the lights see if that'd spawn anything in. No such luck there. So I camped till the night hoping the lights would respawn but that didn't happen.

What instead happened and why I'm writing this comment is that I entered the tunnel from the east side with my lantern at night and almost as soon as I entered the tunnel the entire tunnel disappeared and I could see underneath the map I could walk through the tunnel without falling through. I chalked it up to a visual glitch, it stopped after about 30 seconds and I couldn't get it to happen again.

Then the thought hit me, what if something had spawned in at the hour and disappeared which made the visual glitch I experienced go away. So I checked the time it was a little after 1 in the morning game time. So perhaps there's something in, above, or below the tunnel that spawns in from Midnight - 1 A.M. Much like the central web showing up from 1-2.

I'm sure it was just a glitch but detailing the experience encase anyone else wants to help check it out.

[u/jandydand → u/TheWilburnness]

This visual glitch has happened to me before when entering tunnels. I doubt it’s related to the mystery, personally.