Although you may not even know of its existence in the early days, the Orchard is one of your most important ols in The new puzzle game has made waves for its unique approach to the roguelike formula: in each room, you find further clues towards solving different elements of each and every puzzle. Solving many of them basically requires you to take careful notes, because daily room resets often mean you won't have all the clues you need exactly when you need them.

The Orchard is one such puzzle. You'll need to unlock and understand the secrets to two separate rooms before you can open the Orchard Gate. While the ultimate solution is a little simpler, drafting all these rooms and knowing exactly what to look for in each one will require a lot of patience and a little bit of luck. In case you want to plan ahead, or skip a step or two, here's everything you need to unlock the Orchard Gate in Blue Prince.

Orchard Gate Location

Where To Find The Orchard Gate

You'll find the Orchard Gate east of the mansion proper, close to your campsite. Leaving the mansion via the main entrance, follow the Private Drive to the left, taking a right at the fork to avoid the wrought-iron gate. Turn right towards the campsite, then go left past your tent to find a white picket fence surrounding a dense huddle of apple trees. You've found the Orchard.

Note that there's a small, gray padlock on the white picket fence, your sole barrier to entry. The padlock uses a four-digit combination, which you'll have to crack in order to get inside.

How To Unlock The Orchard Gate

Drafting The Utility Closet

The first two things you'll need to unlock the Orchard Gate are a Utility Closet and a Dark Room. You'll have to draft both of these rooms during the same day in order to get the clues you'll need. Now, this guide is structured to give you a slow trickle of information. You could just skip to the end, read the Orchard Gate combination, and skip ahead, but Blue Prince is better when you figure things out on your own. I'd recommend thinking carefully about each of the clues provided here to see if they're enough to solve the puzzle before moving on.

Now, let's take a look at the Utility Closet. This is a dead-end room that I believe can be drafted anywhere in the mansion. The Utility Closet contains a single feature: a fuse box that can be used to divert power to different rooms in the mansion. It connects to several other puzzles, including opening the West Gate and a puzzle in the breaker box itself, but we won't have to engage with any of those here. All you have to do is flip the Dark Room switch to "on."

Finding A Magnifying Glass

In addition to the two rooms listed above, you'll also need a magnifying glass to read some of the finer details of the Orchard puzzle. Unfortunately, there's no surefire way to guarantee you'll find one. Magnifying glasses commonly spawn in the Archive, the Nook, the Observatory, and the Security Room, but you may find them anywhere in the mansion if you're lucky. You may also be able to buy one from the Commissary, or trade for one at the Trading Post.

If you find a magnifying glass one day, but aren't able to draft the rooms you need to complete this puzzle, you may also smuggle it in the following day by placing it in a Coat Check. But again, there's no guarantee that this blueprint will spawn, so there's a lot of luck involved in making sure you get

Lighting Up The Dark Room & Finding The Combination

The Dark Room is ordinarily a bit of a hazard in Blue Prince, because you can't see any of your blueprint options when drafting connections to this room. However, the idea here is to turn on the lights in the Dark Room so you can look at one of the photos inside, deducing the combination from the details within.

However, with the fusebox in the Utility Closet switched to divert power to the Dark Room, the lights will be on, and you'll be able to see everything inside - including a variety of photos, one of which contains an important clue to the Orchard Gate puzzle. Feel free to look around a bit, but what we really want is the photo of the Orchard on the table to your left as you enter the Dark Room.

Pick up the photo, and use your magnifying glass to look at it. Specifically, use it to zoom in on the large tree at the forefront of the image, to the left of the gate. You'll see the numbers "11-28" carved into the tree trunk - someone's anniversary, perhaps? Whatever the case, you now have your combination. Return to the Orchard Gate and dial "1128" into the combination lock, and voilà: it opens.

For unlocking the Orchard, you'll receive a permanent buff: 20 additional steps at the start of each day, no further input required. This can be immensely helpful when it comes to unlocking more rooms and proceeding towards the Antechamber in Blue Prince, so you should make unlocking the Orchard an early priority.