The Azure Moon Labyrinth is the kind of puzzle that makes you feel clever when you solve it and absolutely furious when you realize how long the answer was sitting in plain sight. Hidden beneath The Witchwoods in Crimson Desert,Pearl Abyss's open-world action RPG set in the world of Pywel, this ancient ruin is part of the Thread in the Forest challenge series, and its solution requires more legwork than most players expect.
Finding the entrance in Phoniel Ranch
The labyrinth does not announce itself. While exploring The Witchwoods, a mysterious energy appears as a question mark on the map near the Witch's House. That marker points you toward the entrance, but the dungeon itself is underground.
To get in, you need to find a small wooden booth in the Phoniel Ranch area, just northeast of the Witch's House. The booth sits between two destroyed wagons and contains a ladder that drops you below the surface. Easy to miss, easy to walk past.
Once underground, the path forward involves navigating flamethrowers on the walls and floor traps. The most reliable approach is clinging to the left wall and climbing along it to the next platform. Players with upgraded Axiom Force and a decent food stockpile can also tank the damage and leap across directly. At the end of the gauntlet, a lever beside a closed door opens the way into the puzzle room.
What the puzzle actually asks you to do
The room contains eight buttons, each marked with a different symbol. The task is to press the five correct ones, in any order, to unlock a door on the south side of the room.
Here's the thing: the only hint available is a map painted on the wall outside the puzzle room. That map shows a village with five red X marks on it. The catch is that the map is difficult to read in isolation, and the village it depicts is not somewhere you can reach without completing a specific quest first.
The map points to Pororin Village, located east of the House of Healing. Accessing Pororin Village requires completing the "Trembling Woods" mission, one of the Pororin Forest Guardian faction quests. Players who have not done that quest will hit a wall before they even understand what they're looking at.
The wall map holding the answer
The exact solution, no detour required
For players who have already done the faction questline and just need the answer, here is the button combination:
- Western wall (left to right): press the first, third, and fourth buttons
- Eastern wall: press the middle two buttons
Order does not matter. Hit all five and the gate opens.
What you get for clearing it
Two rewards come from completing the Azure Moon Labyrinth. The first is an abyss cresset found just past the south door, which unlocks a fast-travel station in the area. The second, the Memory of Tide, lands directly in your inventory. Using it reveals the locations of eight caves in the Alfonso State region of Hernand.
The Memory of Tide reward is the more valuable of the two for players deep into exploration. Eight cave locations in a single region is a meaningful chunk of map content, making the detour through Pororin Village worth the time investment.
Crimson Desert is packed with puzzles structured exactly like this one, where the solution exists somewhere else in the world entirely. For players working through the rest of the game's ancient ruins and Thread in the Forest challenges, browse more guides to stay ahead of the next roadblock. Make sure to check out more:
