Ever wanted to write stuff in Arthur's / John's Journal?... Well, this mod let's you write and draw in the journal, so you can save your adventures! it also add's readable books, so you can read something, write your adventures, then sleep.. Great for immersion or an immersive gameplay!

So i just published my first mod for RDR2, which includes a total functional Journal, where you can write and draw your adventures... it also comes with a Custom Book system, to read books while you are out there camping...

The mod is called "Write Your Journey - Immersion Mod" on NexusMods.

Player Context: Playing as Arthur | Low Honor | Chapter 2 |

Last completed mission: Spines of America

Observations

The Wapiti tribe in the game is historically and culturally modeled after real-life indigenous peoples of North America, drawing heavily from Great Plains and northern woodlands nations (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho).

That cultural framing carries directly into how the game treats sacred space. In real indigenous cosmology, cardinal directions carry deep spiritual weight, the West, as the direction of the setting sun, is tied to the spirit world and the resting place of ancestors. At the Native Burial Site, the skull is oriented to face West (not a coincidence), mirroring that tradition. Weather and storms are governed by the Thunderbirds (Wakinyan in Lakota tradition) [feathers everywhere], sacred beings who control wind, lightning, and rain through the beat of their wings and the flash of their eyes.

In real indigenous tradition, disturbing a sacred site, through violence, slaughter, or desecration, was believed to invite the spirits wrath in the form of storms and retribution [exactly like the game does].

The Witching Hour, Wolves, and Weather Triggers

Between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM, a wolf pack frequently spawns near the site (not always, idk why yet). Killing them triggers a spike in weather activity.

The Rituals of the Wapiti and Atmospheric Response

Burning the site with the skull as we all know starts a rainstorm. I've done some more testing and it shows more precise behavior underneath that:

• Standing directly inside the circle with a hat stops rain over no more than 2 minutes, accompanied by a shift in color grading and the ambient storm audio cutting out.
• Igniting all four wooden posts (topped with human and animal skulls) simultaneously forces rain to start within two minutes.
• Standing on the animal-skull posts for roughly 30 seconds produces the same result, but with lighter, softer rain.
• Killing animals inside the sacred boundary actively drains honor, consistent with the gane punishing desecration of the site.

This becomes especially interesting once you layer it against the feather mechanics below.

The Feathers, Puzzles, and Audio Cues

Feathers hang from the trees surrounding the site, acting as interactive nodes tied to wind and sky spirits. If you shoot them in order, one specifical triggers red sparks on impact [only happens one time in your save]. Certain feathers act as switches capable of stopping an active rainstorm overtime when shot [still cant figure out which ones].

Disrespecting the site breaks the system: destroying all the feathers rapidly with dynamite makes them vanish entirely, with a long respawn cooldown, this is a clear penalty for brute-forcing the puzzle. Shooting them individually, one at a time, causes them to respawn almost immediately instead [almost as if the game is telling you, you did it in the wrong order]. During that slower, methodical destruction, a low rumbling "oom" sound occasionally echoes from the nearby bushes [DLIB_Attack also can be heard], closely matching an audio file named `CREATURE_GROWL_FOREST_DARK` in the game's files. This growl behaves like a progress cue for what looks like an unsolved sequential puzzle, similar in spirit to the Strange Statues puzzle.

There are also feathers on the skull-topped posts. Shooting these doesn't appear to do anything on its own, but they may still be part of the correct puzzle order.

The Game Files and What They Say

Pulling the decompiled script (discoverable_indian_burial.c) confirms and extends several of the above findings:

The profanation state is a persistent flag, not a one-off scripted event. The script runs a state machine (idle → sunny → fog → thunderstorm → cleared) driven by `FIRE::GET_CLOSEST_FIRE_POS` checking whether an active fire sits inside the site's defined volume. Once that flag flips, the resulting weather state is written to the save and persists indefinitely, [Nothing explains why the game remembers whether the site was ever burned or not better than this flag being needed for a puzzle],

The altar lightning strike is hardcoded also, A function (internally `func_56`) fires a scripted lightning VFX at a fixed coordinate near the altar, exactly 5 seconds after fire is detected inside the site's volume. It isn't tied to any specific animal, item, or NPC, the trigger condition is purely "is there a fire burning inside this volume?" regardless of what's near it.

No Native American Ring, wolf ped, or NPC spawn logic appears anywhere in this script.

This can be like the Statues Puzzle, the answer is outside the scripts.

Why This May Be Like the Strange Statues Puzzle

Strange Statues took the community a long time to crack because the clue and the answer live in two separate, non-script systems: a static cave painting (an art asset, not code) provides the clue, while each statue's correct finger-count is almost certainly stored as metadata on that individual object's placement data, not as a `switch` statement in any script file.

Searching the wider decompiled script repository for "statue" turns up hundreds of unrelated files, but only because of a shared, copy-pasted lookup table used across nearly every discoverable point of interest in the game, generic reward/dispatch boilerplate, not actual puzzle logic.

The real Statues Puzzle logic isn't in any `.c` file at all.

"Feathers or Skulls" does not appear anywhere in the native burial script. That absence is the most important finding of the whole investigation, because it tells us that there might be solutions outside the scripts...

The same pattern likely applies here. The feather puzzle's real logic, which feather is "correct," what order matters, why the skullpost feathers don't activate weather but still seem to "count", is most likely encoded as perobject metadata (a sequence ID or puzzle group tag on each feather prop), read at runtime by some generic, unrelated sounding shared script, rather than hardcoded inside `discoverable_indian_burial.c` itself.

That would explain why the growl audio cue exists as a feedback signal, while the actual sequence logic is invisible to a script-level search.

In short because im overexplaining: this isn't a dead end, it's the same wall we hit with the Strange Statues. That puzzle only got solved when someone found the external, clue by exploration, not by reading code, because it seems like the answer was never in the code to begin with.

The Burial puzzle likely needs the same approach: a real ingame clue (a carving, symbol, ledger page, or directional marker somewhere near the site, etc) that hasn't been connected yet, combined with empirical logging, which feather, in what order, growl or no growl, to reverse engineer the pattern the way the community eventually did for the statues.

[This is merely theorical but can this be connected with the 2 birds in the roof?, i mean we are dealing with the Spirit of Wakinyan, a bird...]

[THIS PART OF THE CONTEXT IT'S THANKS TO

C0d3M3chan1c Findings]

The Wapiti 2 AM Fire Gap

This section from c0d3mechanic findings can be connected directly with the wolf packs and rains at 2AM happening there

If you are truly invested, go read C0d3M3chan1c Findings and search for this section, he explains it better than i could

Fort Riggs Grave, Hidden Background Trigger

Found in short_update.c, a script that runs continuously in the background:

At (-1589.7, -973.3, 71.4), an invisible 16×28×32.5m volume named "fortriggsgrave" constantly checks for gunfire or explosions.

If detected: an honor penalty with a 60-second cooldown.

No script, journal entry, or notification, only a silent punishment.

This shows Rockstar implements hidden sacred-site mechanics that players would never otherwise know about [weird].

The Discovery System

The 15 discovery scripts share a global state system:

Global_40.f_8863[]: a global array indexed by discovery hash, tracking the state of each discoverable.

func_11(hash, bit): checks a discoverable's state by passing its hash.

func_32(hash, bit): sets a discoverable element's state.

This is a standard architecture: shared utility functions that take a hash, so the same code serves all 15 scripts. Technically, any script could read another discoverable's state by passing a different hash, but no script ever does. Every call to func_11 only ever uses the current discoverable's own hash. Each discoverable is self-contained [meaning that they have their own logic outside].

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This has been my discoveries and investigation on the Native Burial Site recently, hope this can bring some new clues or make someone clever connect the dots we are missing and let us know the answer!