Your journey through the Steppe will include various encounters with people suffering from the plague, among other things. If you thought things couldn’t be any worse for some of these people, then you’re mistaken.
You’ll very quickly, into the journey, be allowed to loot crates for other items by focusing on them with the Q key. However, there will oftentimes be other items that also illuminate when you focus on them, like other random items and, more often than not, clocks.
The clocks are all empty when you go to loot them, so what are the clocks for in Pathologic 3?
Where Can You Find Clocks?
As you travel through the Steppe in Pathologic 3 and enter homes and buildings, you’ll likely come across the random grandfather clock. While they might seem inconspicuous at times, press the Q key to reveal that they can be looted.
Sometimes, smaller clocks will also be illuminated by the Q key, but they cannot be looted. You can only open the tall clocks.
I recommend using the Concentrate feature as often as possible. It doesn’t waste anything, and you’re able to see everything you can interact with in the Steppe. More importantly, it’ll let you easily pick up where the nearest clock is.
When Can You Start Using the Clocks?
You can use them from the moment you first encounter one, but you won’t be able to use their full potential until after you’ve spoken to Eva Yan on the second floor of Stillwater after completing Day 5 the first time.
What Do You Do With the Clocks?
Well, you can put things inside them. Before being given a real explanation for what they’re for, I would use the random ones I’d find as a bank for my extra items.
However, there’s so much more you can do with them after unlocking time travel, which is done after completing everything you can the first time you end Day 5. After that, you’ll start making way more use of them.
You can place items from your inventory into the clocks, which have 12 spaces, and transport them through time whenever you travel. That way, no matter what day it is, you can go back into the clock you stored things in and get them back.
Something else you can do with these clocks is use them to time-travel. When you press and hold the E key, you can loot the clock for items, but if you just tap the E key after unlocking the feature, you’ll be led to a window of all the days you can travel to.
You’ll need to make sure you have enough Amalgam by smashing every single mirror you come across before traveling to another day. Otherwise, you won’t be able to travel and permadie. If that happens, then everything you’ve placed in the clocks will have been for naught.
Of course, you can always try reloading an autosave to go back to a point in the last day you experienced. However, if you had placed anything in clocks after that particular point you go back to, then they’re lost for good.
