Gaster's Entry Number 17

What is Entry Number Seventeen?

Entry Number Seventeen is a short message hidden inside Undertale, the 2015 game by Toby Fox. It is written in the Wingdings font, and once translated it reads entirely in capital letters. Its title, “Entry Number Seventeen”, suggests a page from a numbered set of notes, and fans connect it to W. D. Gaster, the Royal Scientist who, according to the game’s lore, vanished and was “shattered across time and space”.

The entry cannot be found by playing normally. It sits in a hidden room that the game’s files call room_gaster, and players only reach it by modifying the game files. That secrecy is a large part of why it became one of the best known Undertale mysteries.

It opens with the line “DARK DARKER YET DARKER”, which looks like this in Wingdings: 👎︎✌︎☼︎😐︎ 👎︎✌︎☼︎😐︎☜︎☼︎ ✡︎☜︎❄︎ 👎︎✌︎☼︎😐︎☜︎☼︎.

Why fans care about it

• The missing log. The main story contains a numbered series of logs with one entry missing, and Entry Number Seventeen reads like the lost page.
• Gaster’s voice. Wingdings is the font Gaster speaks in, and his name itself is widely read as a pun on “Wing Ding”, in the same way Sans and Papyrus are named after the fonts Comic Sans and Papyrus.
• The themes. Without giving the whole text away: it describes growing darkness and shadows, instrument readings and an experiment the writer finds interesting, and it ends by asking two unnamed listeners for their opinion. Many fans read those two as Sans and Papyrus.
• Deltarune. Toby Fox’s follow up game does not show Gaster directly, but it contains allusions to him, including musical references to his theme and dialogue that echoes Entry Number Seventeen.

Other places Gaster appears in Undertale

Gaster never appears in a normal playthrough. Players have pieced him together from a few rare sources:

• The “fun” value. Undertale stores a random number called fun when a new game starts. Certain values unlock rare events, some of them tied to Gaster.
• Gaster Followers. Grey characters who appear only with specific fun values and talk about a scientist who fell into his own creation.
• The Mystery Man. A hidden sprite that fans generally use to picture Gaster, although its connection to him has never been officially confirmed.

How to decode Entry Number Seventeen yourself

1. Copy the Wingdings text from a screenshot transcription or a fan wiki.
2. Paste it into the Gaster translator. It detects Wingdings and switches to decoding automatically.
3. If you only have a picture, use the symbol keyboard on the Gaster translator page: click each symbol you see and the English appears as you go.
4. Read the result in capitals, exactly as it appears in the game.

The capital letter Wingdings alphabet

Gaster’s text uses capital letters only. Keep this table open while you decode.