u/Cherry-Dev

Why I think the Noita Eye Messages could encode an image rather than normal text.

I have been looking at the Eye Messages as possible image data, and I think the idea makes more sense than it initially sounds. Basically I ran into yet amother video on it right after I was working on a file converter for work.

Each accepted "character" is a trigram of three eyes. Every eye has five possible directions, so a trigram can naturally represent three base-5 values:

"5 x 5 x 5 = 125 possible combinations"

That is suspiciously suitabe for image data. The three eyes could represent three separate channels, similar to RGB, with five brightness levels per channel. That would produce a 125-color image format without needing any additional symbols.

Only 83 of the 125 possible trigrams are actually used, but that does not necessarily disprove the idea. The missing combinations could come from:

- A restricted palette

- An encrypted or permuted palette

- Reserved control symbols

- Invalid combinations

- Compression or state-dependent encoding

There is also a very natural image width hidden in the physical layout. Two rows of eyes contain 78 individual eyes, which becomes exactly:

"78 / 3 = 26 trigrams"

So the messages can be arranged as strips that are exactly 26 encoded units wide.

The nine messages could potentially be nine separate strips or tiles. Since there are nine of them, arranging them as a 3x3 grid is an obvious experiment. Their East and West locations may even help determine orientation, mirroring, or tile placement.

The repeated openings could also make sense in an image-oriented format. Every message has a different first trigram, followed by two identical trigrams. Several groups then share much longer opening sequences.

That could represent something like:

"[tile ID] [shared header] [palette/state data] [payload]"

In other words, the repeated material might not be repeated prose. It coud be metadata, initialization data, a palette, dimensions, compression settings, or the initial state of a decoder.

Another reason the image theory remains plausible is that encrypted image data should look random. Directly turning the trigram values into grayscale or RGB produces noise, but that only disproves the simplest interpretation:

"trigram = final pixel"

It does not disprove possibilities such as:

- The symbols use a shuffled palette

- Each message stores a separate bit plane

- The three eye positions are separate channels

- Alternating triangles must be mirrored or read differently

- The messages must be transposed before rendering

- The nine messages form tiles with unknown ordering

- The ciphertext must be decrypted before it becomes image data

- The eye directions encode movement, differences, or run lengths instead of absolute pixels

The complete dataset contains 1,036 trigrams. If each trigram represented one pixel, that is enough for a small image. If the 83 symbols function similarly to Base85, it could instead represent roughly 828 bytes of binary data, also enough for a very small compressed image or custom graphic.

I tested some direct possibilities already. The streams do not simply decode into recognizable PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, WebP, ZIP, or other standard file headers. Direct grayscale and RGB renders also have approximately random neighbour correlation.

So I am not suggesting that the eyes directly contain a normal PNG file.

The more realstic hypothesis is that they contain an encrypted, transposed, tiled, palette-based, or custom image representation.

But the reasons why I'm not givving ip:

1. Three five-state eyes naturally form a three-channel 125-value symbol.

2. The physical layout naturally divides into 26 encoded units per row.

3. There are nine messages, which naturally allows a 3x3 tile arrangement.

4. Their repeated beginnings resemble shared headers or decoder initialization.

5. Their randomness is compatible with encrypted image data.

6. The eye glyphs are inherently visual, so a visual payload would be thematically appropriate.

The biggest problem is that almost any random data can be made to look vaguely image-like after enough transformations. A serious test would need to search possible layouts automatically and score them using neighbour correlation, edge continuation between tiles, compressibility, connected components, and consistency across all nine messages.

I'm sorry if I sound weird, if I'm schizo or anything of this sorr, it's literally 5 am and I've been up for like 2 days already because I'm extremely sick lol. I'm out because I feel like I'm finally able to fall asleep.