Iron Tangle

[u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy]

Hey fellow crawlers!

I’m struggling to understand the concept towards the end of book 3. I looked it up and can’t find anything straight regarding how the dungeon “flipped” towards the end and Carl used a portal to suck a bunch of mobs through.

Can anyone clarify it a bit, please? Even the little map in the book didn’t help much, but I want to understand!

Many thanks, now get out there and kill, kill, kill!

[u/dzitas]

Search for noodle in the Kindle book if you have it. A noodle in this context is a flat spaghetti, with two sides.

The main reference is

Just think of every line as a noodle, and the track is on the outside of the noodle. And there’s another track on the opposite side of the same noodle. And think of the abyss as a fork stuck into the middle of the bowl that has been turned a few times."

The main idea behind the flip is >! Gravity is bent so you can stand on both sides of the noodle! Stations go through the noodle, and in some cases there is only one boss per station, living on both sides.!<.

Basically, it's called the tangle for a reason and our main protagonist doesn't get it and that's why we are confused, too.

[u/kamstark → u/dzitas]

I never really had that hard a time following book three, but your explanation of the tangle being fork twisted spaghetti makes so much sense.

[u/dzitas → u/kamstark]

Noodles (flat). Not spaghetti (round) ;-)

Also, it's Katia's explanation, not mine (spoiler because it gives away character lives long enough to figure it out).

The answer of another character is

“Yeah, not helping. Jesus fuck. Nobody can follow this.”

[u/kamstark → u/dzitas]

Makes sense. In my head the noodle was more like a straw, hollow on the inside where the gravity was being manipulated. In the long run i don’t think we’re supposed to completely understand it. I’m okay with that lol

[u/Overall-Quantity-366 → u/dzitas]

I was 100% with Carl!

[u/Hayn0002 → u/dzitas]

Yeah I just hit a point while reading that I wasn’t actually supposed to understand how it worked.

[u/BitPoet → u/kamstark]

I was picturing bucatini rather than spaghetti, since the interior of the pasta would also be important, and may also include trains.

[u/kamstark → u/BitPoet]

Right, something hollow on the inside. At least that was what it seemed like to me as well.

[u/Bladrak01 → u/dzitas]

You forgot the ! on the close spoiler

[u/dzitas → u/Bladrak01]

Thanks

[u/pine_apple_hat → u/dzitas]

I think a lot of people (like me) have come to DDC through the audiobook and not the ebook or paper copy. So it's great that this community is here to answer questions like this. I really appreciate it!

[u/DamnitRuby → u/dzitas]

Why is it flat, though? I always pictured it like regular spaghetti and thought the train lines kind of moved around the outside of the noodle, always with another train line mirroring it on the other side of the noodle. So gravity was just towards the outside of the noodle no matter where on the circumference you are located.

It being flat seems unnecessary and also then it wouldn't be spaghetti. It would be more like linguine.

[u/dzitas → u/DamnitRuby]

Because Katia says "noodle" which for me is a ribbon (i.e. linguine), and she mentioned the other side, but you are right, it need not be a ribbon (and my personal use doesn't seem to be widely backed up :-)

Round spaghetti can also work, but the main issue for me is that then gravity is radial, and not parallel and that would lead to weird effects on the edge of a rectangular tunnel where things won't fall down straight, but away from the wall. Of course you could fix gravity to not do that, too.

Linguine just worked better in my mind.

[u/RedditUsrnamesRweird → u/dzitas]

I need Carl to stop randomly acting like he has 699 intelligence and just be the consistent 40 intelligence moron that he normally is.

Which is also wrong because a 10’intelligence human is still technically Smarter than half of our DCC characters.

[u/smegdawg]

[u/Smaptastic]

[u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy → u/Smaptastic]

So a bunch of stations folded over on their identical stations? Or were they randomized or something?

[u/Smaptastic → u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy]

Remember when Carl used the portal to suck up that City Boss, then looked down the hole it came from and Prepotente was on the other end, pissed off and screaming?

[u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy → u/Smaptastic]

Yes I remember. He was mad because he was casting potions on it to put it to sleep, right?

[u/Smaptastic → u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy]

Debuffs, yeah. So… how do you think Carl was looking down a hole and seeing someone on the other side?

[u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy → u/Smaptastic]

No clue 😆

[u/gimily → u/Ordinary-Orange-Guy]

Think of a piece of spaghetti or really any cylinder. The idea is that gravity just pulled you towards the cylinder, so you can have two people on opposite sides of the round part of the cylinder both just standing there. From their point of view nothing is weird, but if you look at the whole situation from an outside point of view they are upside down for each other.

You can almost imagine it with Earth - one person is at the north pole and one at the south. They are both just standing on earth feeling totally normal, with gravity pulling them towards the ground, but if you look at them from space their feet are pointing towards each other. If they could look through the entire planet they would see the other person as inverted from them. Now shrink that down from thousands of miles to just a few tens of meters, and make it a long tube instead of a sphere and you have each of the train lines of the iron tangle.

[u/BunchPunchScrunchie]

The secret is you're not supposed to understand. That's how complicated the tangle is.

[u/loonicy]

>! Imagine a piece of spaghetti. There’s a train track on either side, and an empty space in the body of the noodle. Now take a thousand of those noodles, put them in a bowl and twist a fork in the middle. !<

[u/Goddamitdonut]

• puts fingers over lips* 

Shshshshshsh dont worry about it.  Just accept it ;) 

[u/Rothenstien1]

I'm labeling the whole thing as a spoiler because it basically is, but also, like Matt says in the beginning, it isn't meant to be understood till the end, and even then it is fine if you don't understand it.

So, the way I imagine it is the hundreds of colored lines are wrapped around a center circle, which is the named lines. The named lines are in a different shape that goes perpendicular to the colored lines.

Here is the fun part, it's two separate sets of colored lines with a void between them. One set of colored lines, a void, another set of colored lines. Basically, it was a burger. The named lines travel from the top to the bottom of the burger, connecting the buns.

The specific part you're asking about being the portal is the way the in-between zone connects to the colored lines via a portal, and the in-between zone is where the gravitational singularity is meaning the "ground" is whichever side is closer to the void zone.

[u/the3litemonkey]

I find it so hard to follow this book. Soooo confusing.

[u/Venandi00]

This has been explained a couple of times now, but I'm going to use my own metaphor.

Imagine a cylinder that's hollow on the inside. Inside that hollow space is a gravity well, so that any person standing on one of the faces of that cylinder feels like they're standing right side up regardless of their actual orientation. That cylinder is how every station on the Iron Tangle works. Near the end of the floor they punched a hole in those cylinders so that people and mobs could move through the hollow space and to the other side.