Where are the giant stone torches, and where is the hole?

Steps

1. Open your journal and read the objective in full rather than the one-line summary. It names the landmark and the destination in the same sentence.
2. Open the map. This is the step players skip. The torches are drawn on it as markers, and the co-op session in the sources below goes from “have you opened the map yet” to “okay, those are the giant torches” in thirteen seconds.
3. Line yourself up with the marker chain rather than hunting for a torch in front of you. The one player who says a torch is unmistakable says so while standing at it — two minutes after another player at the start point said he could not see one at all.
4. Head for the tower. Two channels record an NPC giving the destination in one clause: the beacons lead to the hole in the tower.
5. Expect to drop in, not to walk in. Every recording that reaches the hole describes a crevasse or a ravine and a fall, and one player spends two minutes working out whether he can survive the landing.
6. Do not take a route from any recording, including the ones cited here. Every one of them predates Update 7, which rebuilt what happens once you are inside.

What the objective actually says

Three channels recording on three different days transcribe the same journal entry, and one of them reads it out word for word: “This pulling feeling won’t stop. You have to find what is calling you here. Follow the giant stone torches to the hole.” The quest carries the game’s own title, which is a reasonable way to tell that it is the main one.

The instruction arrives before the journal does. In the opening scene the departing NPC delivers his speech and walks off, and the next line on screen is “Follow the giant stone torches.” A second channel, recording three days later on a later build, transcribes the same departure speech identically, which is how this page knows the line is scripted rather than a streamer paraphrasing.

That is the whole of the game’s written direction. It names a landmark and a destination, and it does not say which way to walk, how far, or that the landmark is something you are meant to look at on the map rather than through the character’s eyes.

Why nobody can see a torch

The clearest recording of the problem is a launch-day session that reads the objective, walks out of the start area and says: “Giant stone torches to the hole. I don’t see a single giant stone torch.” He then goes to the village instead and the objective sits untouched for the rest of the two hours.

The clearest recording of the answer is a two-player session on the same build. One player asks the other whether he has opened the map; five seconds later he says “okay, those are the giant torches” and then “so, we need to go back the way we came”. Two minutes after that, standing at one, he says “now that’s obvious — that’s a giant torch.”

Both things are true at once, and that is the actual shape of this problem. The torches are unmissable when you are at one and invisible when you are not, so the map is doing the work the landmark appears to promise. No source states a spacing, a render distance or a marker type, so this page describes what players do rather than what the game is doing.

What the hole is

Two channels, recording three days apart, transcribe an NPC giving directions that open with the same clause: “Follow the beacons that lead to the hole in the tower.” That is the destination stated in game text rather than inferred by a player.

A third channel records a different NPC explaining why the route ends at a hole rather than a door: the tower’s “doors have been sealed for a thousand lifetimes, as all the mad seekers before you’ve discovered. The only way in — that is where all the lunatics end up. They follow the great torches to that damnable crevasse and hurl themselves in.” A fourth channel transcribes the same closing sentence about where the lunatics end up, which is why that speech is treated here as scripted.

A fifth channel, read on 24 August 2026, transcribes the whole speech again and carries it one clause further than the others: the lunatics hurl themselves in “in search of the lantern that haunts their dreams.” That closing phrase is the game stating the main quest’s motive in the same breath as its destination, and it is the reason this page treats the hole as the objective rather than an obstacle on the way to one. The same recording also has the NPC open by naming the tower rather than calling it the tower; the name is machine-captioned only, so this page does not print it.

The game is consistent about what happens to people who go in. A child in town, recorded by three separate channels in three separate sessions, answers a question about his parents with: “Sleeping down the hole along with everyone else who has ever entered it. Their graves are shallower than that of the other boy, and their bones have been scattered and gnashed.” A merchant offering side work puts it more plainly still — hunt in the woods instead of “hunting for salvation down in the hole”, because “the only wage of your current pursuit is death.”

One recording asks the town’s self-described law who tends the flames, and gets the only answer in this repository to that question: “They tend themselves. Their light is eternal and undying, just as the saint is. They have burned since ancient times, longer than records have been kept. They are beacons of our grand lighthouse. The strangers who come and go are a fleet of moths drawn to the primordial flame.” That is one recording, made on a pre-Update-6 build, and it is marked single-source here and on that NPC’s own page. It is included because it is the only place the torches are explained rather than used as a waypoint — they are not lit by anyone, they predate record-keeping, and the island they stand on is described as a lighthouse whose light is what brings strangers to it.

None of that is a difficulty rating. It is the game telling you, in four different mouths, that the hole is the main quest and not a detour.

Requirements / limits

• No route is published here. Every recording cited was made between 17 and 20 August 2026, and Update 7 on 21 August 2026 states that the introduction to the tower is now a proper dungeon crawl.
• The map behaviour is from launch-build sessions on 17 August 2026, and the map has been changed twice since. Update 6 says NerveLabs added points of interest and clarified quest directions; Update 7 adds many new POIs and says quests now correctly mark areas on the map in a TES3-style way. Neither mentions the giant stone torches by name, and nothing in this repository confirms the torch markers still look the same.
• The tower is named in dialogue by three separate transcripts. This page does not print that name, because no creator-written source in this repository spells it and machine captions cannot establish a spelling.
• Nothing here states what the drop costs. Players describe a fall; no source records fall damage, a required skill, or a safe landing spot.
• The one post-Update-6 session cited reaches the hole and goes in, so the destination is current as of 20 August 2026. What is inside it on the current build is not.

Common mistakes

• Searching for the torches on foot. Two players lost time to this and one of them abandoned the objective entirely; the map answers it immediately.
• Treating the first opening in the ground as the hole. The post-Update-6 session enters what he calls a “pesky frog dungeon”, then a ravine he announces as “a fake hole”, before reaching the real one — which he identifies by seeing several torches at once rather than one.
• Expecting a door. The tower is sealed in dialogue and the hole is a crevasse; going in means going down.
• Reading the journal’s summary line instead of the entry. The word “hole” is in the full text and it is the only thing in the objective that names where you are going.
• Taking a launch-week walkthrough past the entrance. The entrance is where the recordings stop being useful, because Update 7 rebuilt what is behind it.

Still unverified

• What does the Saint call the hole instead?Not verifiedOne recording catches him correcting the player — “but it does not call the hole, it calls the …” — and the caption cuts off mid-sentence. No other source records the line.
• Is the drop into the hole survivable without preparation?Not verifiedPlayers describe a fall and one spends two minutes judging it. No source records fall damage, a required skill or a marked landing point.
• How far apart are the torches, and do they render at distance?Not verifiedThe page reports that players cannot see them from the start point and can see them at close range. Neither the spacing nor the reason is stated anywhere.
• Do the map markers still appear on the current build?Not verifiedThe map behaviour comes from launch-build sessions on 17 August 2026. Update 6 added points of interest and Update 7 added many more along with TES3-style area marking for quests, so the map has changed twice since; neither changelog names the giant stone torches, and no later recording read here shows the map.
• What does the rebuilt Update 7 tower introduction do once you are inside?Not verifiedNo recording made after 21 August 2026 has been read here. This is the single thing that would extend this page furthest.