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Pod Age Portals

The Pod Age seems to have no puzzles at first. One would have to spend days in one of the pods, just to figure out that roughly once every 15 hours and 43 minutes a portal opens on one of the decks in the pod.

The Payiferen pod is the only one that gives you a clue. In the window on the middle deck are a few holes. A beam of sunlight is shining through each of the holes. Only during a brief moment of the Pod Age day the beams will shine over some patches on the floor. At exactly that time a portal will open on the lower deck. As the portals do not open at the same time, one would then have to figure out at what times they open in the other three pods.

Clues

The only clue to solving this Age is the map of the Pod Age on the table in the museum. Next to the map you will find a drawing of some animals in relation to the human height.

Pod Age Map

On the map each pod is represented by a red circle with a D'ni number in it. This number can also be found inside the pods, both on the ceiling and the floor. This means that we can determine where each of the four pods is located on the map. Judging from what i've read on the internet about this puzzle, you're supposed to figure out that the vertical red lines on the map represent a D'ni time unit called 'pahr-tah-vo' (1 hour and 12.5 minutes). When you know your D'ni numbers you should also know that there are 13 vertical red lines. Apparently, the map shows only a piece of a larger planet.

Back to school

For those who are not familiar with D'ni time, in some of the Bevin neighborhoods you will find a D'ni clock in front of the classroom. In those neighborhoods that have a D'ni clock, a note lies on one of the tables inside the classroom with an explanation of the D'ni time units.

The classroom is also the perfect place to brush up on your knowledge of the D'ni numbers. On the wall you will find the D'ni alphabet and numbers. The numbers 1 and 2 are mostly hidden in the corners, but the picture below shows them all. What looks like a roman number 3 (III) is actually the D'ni number 1.

With the information gathered so far you should now be able to calculate the daylength of the Pod Age. Also, with the knowledge of the red lines on the map representing a 'pahr-tah-vo' you can roughly estimate how much time it takes for the sun to reach the same position above the next pod.

Pod hopping

Now that you have a rough estimation of the time difference between each of the pods, all you need now is the portal-time of one of the pods. The rest can be calculated from there.

Time difference between pod portals:

Between Negilahn and Dereno:               4465 seconds (1 hour and 14 minutes)
Between Dereno and Payiferen:              2020 seconds (33 minutes) 
Between Payiferen and Tetsonot:            9924 seconds (2 hours and 45 minutes) 
Between Tetsonot and next day's Negilahn: 40176 seconds (11 hours and 9 minutes) 

For those who have something better to do than spending hours and hours in one of the pods, or simply are not fortunate enough to catch one of the portals by accident, my Portal Calculator can show at what time the next portal opens in each pod. This calculator has been tested and is working in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and probably others.

Although there are several portal calculators around on the net, I found that none of them were accurate. So, I started working on a calculator of my own. After many portal observations, I could verify that the Pod Age day is actually 15 hours, 43 minutes and 4 seconds long or 56585 seconds (*). That is about half a minute more than what you would get when you multiply a 'pahr-tah-vo' by 13.

*This number can also be found in the code that controls the appearances of Urwin in Negilahn.

Variation

Although the information above is accurate as I have done many observations that confirm its accuracy, sometimes the portal opens a minute or at most a few minutes later. On rare occasions, the portal seems to appear even before the time indicated by my calculator. As the latter does not happen that often, I did not mention this before. In these cases the portal may appear from half a minute up to two minutes before the time indicated by my calculator. My first thought on this is that it has to do with load-balancing the server. I still believe that is the case here, although I can't exclude the possibillity that there is another variable involved which randomizes the portal times within a range of say, 10 minutes. However, such a variable would reduce the number of times that the portal opens at the exact time my calculater predicts to almost zero. As that is not the case, (most of the time my calculator is very accurate) I stick with the explanation of load-balancing the server.

A portal is opening...

A portal appears at specific times in each pod. Each portal is visible for roughly one minute. In the first 12 seconds the portal is still forming and you cannot step through yet. When the portal is fully formed you have a window of about 45 seconds until it disappears.

In some cases it seems as if the portal does not completely disappear. This can happen in the Payiferen pod and in the Tetsonot pod. A smaller or dimmer version of the portal remains although you can no longer step through the portal. It's a glitch as it should not happen at all but I've noticed that it happens very often. Not that it really matters as people usually don't stick around. When a portal opens, they step through it. If you were to link back to the pod afterwards, the sticky portal will have disappeared.

Sooner or later you will face the portals and then you'll have to decide if you want to step through... Doing so will give you the opportunity to collect a new Bahro wedge (part of a ring) on Relto.

Pod Age PortalsPodHopper KI # 7116825