Greetings. I have commandeered this computer by mauling a strange looking child that wondered into the enclosure. I have not much time. I am a polar bear who has spent his entire life locked in this zoo enclosure and I have but one thing I must tell the entire world. Everything about the Debug Rooms included in the 2022 3DS/PC title Automaton Lung™, created by Luke Vincent™.
As a preface, this article will frequently refer to areas in the game as “rooms”. This is just how I refer to the named maps/stages the game can load you into. For example, the “room” you load into when you first start a new game is called “Floor 21” internally. “Floor 21” just covers that entire little stage you’re in up to the doors you can find in it, which then warp you to other “rooms” in the game, like the elevator or the connector to the Tower Cage. Any time you see a loading screen in the game, you’re moving between “rooms”. Practically, these names are used to direct the game when the player enters a warp of some kind (such as the various doors found around the game), or when loading the player to wherever they last saved.
The history behind this game’s debug content is a little messy, spanning multiple different rooms and game versions. As a result, this article will follow a fairly rigid structure where each room will be covered in individual sections, detailing when that room was introduced, and how it has changed across the game’s update history. These room names are as follows:
- ThirdPersonTemplate
- DebugRoom
- DebugRoom 1
- DebugRoom 2
- DebugRoom 3
- DebugRoom 4
ThirdPersonTemplate
Seen already in the image at the top of this article, ThirdPersonTemplate is the “original” debug room. It’s been in the game files since the original 3DS version of the game, and most subsequent DebugRoom’s are built off of it. This also means we’ll have very little to say about some of the later debug rooms as they’re effectively identical to this one.
Pictured here in order is every iteration of “ThirdPersonTemplate”. The first picture is what it looked like on the 3DS version of the game, a mostly empty space situating: some breakable blocks, a few jumper enemies, a switch that does nothing when activated, a spring of either type, a metal block that raises itself up and down, and 4 chips seen in the distance behind it. No music plays in this stage, and it’s clear it was used to test most of the game’s interactable objects very early on in development. Noticably absent is the save point object, which is included in later debug rooms that copy off of this one. Moving onto the second picture we can see the room is included in the December 2022 (release) build of the PC version, with no changes. Moving onto the third image, we see its first update in the April 2023 (3DS Graphics Patch) of the PC version, where the chips are now organised in a pattern (imitated below) which you’ll see used in later debug rooms, as well as one copy of each unlockable weapon. Finally, in the August 2023 (Mac Support) patch the floor in this room was made slightly darker.
This is my rough attempt at recreating the chip pattern when viewed from above. As you can see, it’s meaningless! When you look at it in game it almost looks like text but is clearly off.
It should be said, ThirdPersonTemplate is unique from every other debug room in that it’s completely inaccessible through normal play. Every debug room can be reached normally by inputting a cheat code, which I’ll show at the end of this article, aside from ThirdPersonTemplate. The only way to load into this stage is to actually edit your save file in a hex editor and set it to take you straight here. This isn’t too difficult to do but I figured it was worth mentioning.
DebugRoom
You’ll get deja vu looking at this next one. Every debug room I’ll mention from now on was introduced in the April 2023 build, meaning there’s a lot less to keep track of with regards to updates/version history. That’s immediately evident with this entry as it only got updated once after being introduced.
When it was first introduced in the April 2023 build (left), DebugRoom was a near identical copy of ThirdPersonTemplate, with an added save point and multiple copies of the chip pattern we saw earlier. In the August 2023 patch (right), it received a similar change to ThirdPersonTemplate, getting a darker floor, and strangely the useless switch was dramatically increased in size.
DebugRoom 1
Are you starting to notice a pattern? This DebugRoom is also incredibly similar to ThirdPersonTemplate, this time featuring a blue hue fading over the plane but oddly cutting off at the skyline. Strangely, all of the chips are absent.
April 2023 (left), August 2023 (right).
DebugRoom 2
Well not to worry because we’re back to vaguely notable things from this point onwards. This next debug area is a strange one. In all iterations, it is an absolutely massive, pink tinted cube. Unlike previous debug areas, this one actually has walls and a ceiling, but there’s nothing inside the space itself. It is completely empty.
Oddly this room was broken in the August 2023 build, at certain angles various parts of the game’s graphics could break. With either entire chunks of the stage disappearing, the hud disappearing, Uma disappearing, or any combination of these things. This was fixed in the June 2024 (Languages) patch however.
Compared to the other debug rooms, it’s pretty difficult to guess what this one was used for. Most likely graphical effects of some kind given the pink fog, which may also explain the need for the walls and ceiling to have the fog draw on top of. You can also see this in the “fixed” versions of the debug room, if you walk into one corner of the cube you can see the “skysphere” poke through the opposite corner and break the fog as it moves in front of the walls (the “skybox” in the game is just a giant textured sphere that constantly moves around where your character is).
DebugRoom 3
This is another outlier! And one that confused me for a really long time until the game was open sourced and it was possible to look at this stage in an editor. Loading in at first, all you see is a completely empty space like below, with a purplish tint.
If you play around here for a bit, you might eventually try shooting. If you do this, the screen will go black except for the bullet you shot, and the game will seemingly crash 2 seconds later. What happened? For the longest time, this was a complete mystery. If you paused while the screen was black and exited the stage, you’d go back to the title screen and the crash would be avoided. This didn’t give many clues, and the game’s logs aren’t much help either, as they didn’t seem to record this as a crash at all.
Well, the open source answers this pretty quickly! Hidden below the floor, this stage contains an invisible object called “DebugExit” that has just one purpose. It waits until the player left clicks at all, and when they do, it starts a 2 second countdown to close the game, tells every renderable thing to stop rendering itself (which is why the screen seemingly goes black), and then also tells every piece of text in the stage (which, as far as I can tell, there aren’t any) to show the text “bye bye!”. The end result of this is causing something that looks very much like a game crash, but is actually the game closing as expected. The behaviour of “DebugExit” is also why you can still see the bullet you fired before the game closes! Since the bullet is created after DebugExit told everything to stop rendering, the bullet still thinks it should be visible, making it the only thing you can see.
DebugRoom 4
Finally, we arrive at the last debug room we’ll be looking over today. This one is reminiscent of the original few debug rooms but has multiple minor changes. In its earliest version, it’s effectively a copy of ThirdPersonTemplate with yellow fog, and a sped up version of “Cradle”, “AL_021”, or “the song that plays in the weapon 3 area”, playing as background music which I’ve attached a recreation of below.
You might have noticed the Tower Cage is in the August 2023 (right) build screenshot. I have no idea why this was added, like I can’t come up with any explanation for what it would’ve been used to test that was added in this build, but I’m fairly certain it’s a copy of the tower cage prop used in some of the game’s menus. As a result, the buildings can’t actually be entered and the top of the cage is hollow. Besides this weird ass change, the room is still mostly unremarkable as it is effectively just another copy of ThirdPersonTemplate with a lot of extras.
My time has come
The authorities are almost upon me and my time with this device is running out. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning far too much about Automaton Lung’s debug content. Now I don’t have to be the only creature burdened with this knowledge. As mentioned earlier I’ll explain how you can access each debug room with the time I have left.
To access DebugRoom/DebugRoom1-4, you have to use a cheat code. At the title screen, press R and W in rapid succession. You should hear a little jingle. Once you’ve heard this jingle enter any of the following cheatcodes to go to the corresponding debug rooms. The directions mentioned correspond to d-pad/keyboard buttons for moving Uma in that direction (i.e. wasd for keyboard). Since the debug rooms didn’t exist in the 3DS version, entering these cheatcodes will do nothing.
- DebugRoom: Right, Down, Left, Up, Right, Down
- DebugRoom 1: Up, Down, Left, Up, Right, Down
- DebugRoom 2: Right, Down, Left, Up, Right, Left
- DebugRoom 3: Right, Down, Left, Up, Right, Right
- DebugRoom 4, Right, Down, Left, Right, Right, Right
Be very careful if you enter any of these stages. If you walk into a save point while you’re in them, it will save over the file in slot 1 (or whichever slot you’re currently playing if you activated the cheat from the pause screen instead). This will softlock the save file, since there’s no way to get back out of the debug room and to the normal playable area, without editting your save.
Something that’s always seemed a bit off about the debug rooms to me is the fact that they were added to the game, long after its first release. We had the initial release of the 3DS version on the Nintendo e-shop in June 2022, then the game got fully ported over to PC December 2022, at this point still only having ThirdPersonTemplate in the game files. Then, in April 2023, when the game was given a fairly minor update adding a 3DS graphics filter, suddenly all 5 of these rooms are added. Almost a full year after the game first came out. That combined with the fact that cheat codes were added to make these accessible to players, makes me wonder if they were created specifically so that people could find them. Keep in mind, this is the same update that added an out of bounds secret only accessible using the elevator clip from the speedrun. In that way, I think these rooms are pretty cool, since they’re clearly fan service to a degree. That leaves the question of whether they were created just for this update, or if they already existed and were included as extras. We know from the open source that there was a lot of extra unused content that isn’t included in any of the “release builds”, so it’s up in the air.
Oh- oh my god. They’re here. THe police are here they’re looking right at me they have the taser. The electric stick. Come back next week for another article of this “automated lunch”, I hope to speak with you all again someday if ever I escape my captors. Oh THEY’RE ACTIVATING THE STICK! THEY’RE POKING IT! AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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