N1njaSquirrel

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

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Soy Milk is such crap! It is the new Chocolate Milk. Maybe since I've changed to a controller with Rebirth, or because they've rebalanced it, Chocolate Milk is OK for me now.

 

I beat The Purist with Gumpy Brim. This time, for real guys, I actually picked up all of the Guppy items. I forgot the Hair Ball last time, which now counts towards becoming Guppy. I have a theory about the Guppy pieces:

 

I think that the more Guppy items you have the more flies you can have at once, and the greater the chance flies will spawn. In instances where I had more than three Guppy pieces the files were coming like crazy, and this run I had more than ever. Every time I picked up a new guppy piece I'm pretty sure my fly count went up. A couple of times I had Guppy Knife with only three Guppy pieces, and I was getting almost no flies :(. But maybe that's just because of the knife. In this run I also bought the item that increases the size of your Flies and Spiders. 

post-9858-0-16299700-1415649462_thumb.jpg

 

Guppy's Tail or The Left Hand?

 

While I was carrying the Left Hand there were no gold chests, only red ones.

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Soy Milk is such crap! It is the new Chocolate Milk. Maybe since I've changed to a controller with Rebirth, or because they've rebalanced it, Chocolate Milk is OK for me now.

 

I beat The Purist with Gumpy Brim. This time, for real guys, I actually picked up all of the Guppy items. I forgot the Hair Ball last time, which now counts towards becoming Guppy. I have a theory about the Guppy pieces:

 

I think that the more Guppy items you have the more flies you can have at once, and the greater the chance flies will spawn. In instances where I had more than three Guppy pieces the files were coming like crazy, and this run I had more than ever. Every time I picked up a new guppy piece I'm pretty sure my fly count went up. A couple of times I had Guppy Knife with only three Guppy pieces, and I was getting almost no flies :(. But maybe that's just because of the knife. In this run I also bought the item that increases the size of your Flies and Spiders. 

attachicon.gif2014-11-10_00001.jpg

 

Guppy's Tail or The Left Hand?

 

While I was carrying the Left Hand there were no gold chests, only red ones.

 

I think it's Brimstone that appears to cause that crazy fly spam with Guppy. Twice now I've gotten Guppy with a Brimstone attack (once with the Demon Baby and once in a Challenge where I couldn't fire at all as part of the Challenge, but my wife's co-op baby could). In both cases, the flies were INSANE. The couple of other times I've been Guppy without any Brimstone attack, I did not have near as many flies. I've got a couple of similar screenshots that I meant to upload, but they're currently on my gaming rig and I'm on my work computer right now.

As for your second spoiler:

The Left Hand makes all chest drops come Red Chests

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As for your second spoiler: 

RE: Guppys Tail & Left Hand

if i have my mechanics correct left hand makes gold & reg chests turn red.  Guppy's tail makes pick-ups turn into chests.  The synergy is all drops become red chests

 

i got another challenge down yesterday, next i want to do is "Head Injury", but the tear pattern to start off is wild.  i am enjoying a slow-burn challenge &/or 1 good run or 2-3 quick deaths at each play session. this way i can keep a balance between other endless habits (spelunks, diablo, dotes) and still get to bed before work

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I've tried Head Trauma a few times now in co-op, and the hardest thing about that is being able to see enemy tears. With two people firing, the screen is just full all the time.

I got through the Cursed! challenge, which I honestly though would be harder than it was. Things got really hairy in the third level, but then I found a heart filled Super Secret Room to fill me up and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way. I'm trying to break myself from backtracking through every level to speed up my playthroughs, and having every door be a cursed spikey door is a good way to make me always go forward.

Sometimes I think my favorite runs are actually the ones where I have items I'm not a big fan of, where I'm just squeaking by floor to floor. I got Monstro's Lung last night, a chargeable attack that shoots out a bunch of red tears like Monstro's attack. My charge was so slow it was a bit of a slog clearing rooms even though the attack is powerful. I thought about restarting a couple of times because of how slow it was going. But I just kept plugging along, and then on the Depths 2, got Chocolate Milk! Which turned it into an auto-win attack for almost every room.

I still haven't gotten access to any of the new stuff past Sheol/Cathedral, but I think I must be close. I'm avoiding any of the forums for Rebirth, as I don't want any of the new stuff spoiled, and I've already seen the names of a couple of things and don't want to learn anymore about them.

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Soundtrack is unlocked on the Steam version if you bought it.  Listening to it on it's own today made me like it more than I did while playing.

 

It seems the Rebirth soundtrack matches the subject matter/story of the game while the original soundtrack (Danny B) matches the gameplay more.

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So is this a good jumping-on point for people who didn't play the original version, or is it just made to be uber difficult to appease long-time fans?

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I never played the original, but since getting this on Vita with PS+ I gave it a go. It's pretty fun for a pure beginner, though I watched a bunch of Patrick Klepek's playthroughs earlier this year, so I was familiar with a lot of the concepts and mechanics despite not having actually played it before. Still, it felt good.

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I believe one of the stated goals of the remake was to have a difficulty curve that is friendlier to new players than the original. More difficult room and enemy types are unlocked over time rather than being dumped on you all at once as soon as you install the expansion.

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After 28 hours, which is probably the most I've gamed in a week since I was 12, I reached:

 

The Dark Room! Previously I unlocked the Negative, a kind of anti-Polaroid, and carrying that past Satan brought me there. I popped an Emperor card almost after seeing a couple of rooms because I am a wuss. Scared Dingle-less, I face-tanked the boss with my Guppy Knife and soon it was all over. Now the Angels have been unleashed? What the fuck does that mean?  :o

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So is this a good jumping-on point for people who didn't play the original version, or is it just made to be uber difficult to appease long-time fans?

 

I'd say this is the definitive version to play, and that it's not going to be any harder than trying original BoI.  Plus this version just runs so much smoother and has baked in controller support, both of which help elevate it over the original a ton. 

 

 

After 28 hours, which is probably the most I've gamed in a week since I was 12, I reached:

 

The Dark Room! Previously I unlocked the Negative, a kind of anti-Polaroid, and carrying that past Satan brought me there. I popped an Emperor card almost after seeing a couple of rooms because I am a wuss. Scared Dingle-less, I face-tanked the boss with my Guppy Knife and soon it was all over. Now the Angels have been unleashed? What the fuck does that mean?  :o

 

I opened that spoiler, and then immediately closed it.  :)  Not quite there yet, though I did get through the...

 

Chest for the first time tonight.  Got there once with Lazarus and never even made it to the boss, just got slaughtered like 3 rooms in (I was lucky to get past Isaac).  Got back on the next run with Magdeline and just torched the place, cleared out every room for fun. 

 

Has anyone managed to beat the "solar system" challenge? I've gotten close a couple times, but man, it's a tough one.

 

Finally got it done tonight!  Though I got kinda lucky and cheesed it.  Got one of the new runes, the one that makes you invincible for like 10 seconds, then immediately found a Vera run that let me double the invincibility run.  I had the Tarot deck that lets you hold two cards, so I was able to take both runes in and just sit on top of the Heart for 20+ seconds without worrying about damage and letting my flies wreak havoc. 

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So, as far as anyone knows, Rebirth's biggest secret got revealed in less than a week (Ed and company thought it would take weeks or months).  I had seen mention of this, but avoided it as I didn't want to get spoiled.  But this morning I read some things about it and realized that it's impossible to ever discover this stuff on your own, the scale of the puzzle is just too big and takes hundreds or thousands of players working together to solve it.  It took finding a rare trinket, dying in a specific way, getting a clue, and then accumulating dozens of those clues to reveal the solution.  My spoiler doesn't reveal any of the new late game material, just specifically one thing that was unlocked by solving this puzzle.

The puzzle unlocks a new character, the Lost. The Lost can fly, starts with no health (not even soul hearts), can't get any type of health, but can buy Devil Room items for free. The way the puzzle was supposed to work is that you had to find a rare trinket called the Missing Poster, then die in a Sacrifice Room, which would reveal a jigsaw puzzle piece on your Diary Entry. There are dozens of the puzzle pieces, and once assembled, they show 4 unique Diary Pages detailing characters dying on specific levels against specific enemies. This is a clue that you've supposed to die with those characters in those ways. You have to:

As Isaac, die to a mulliboom in the Basement/Cellar.
As Maggie, die to one of your own bombs in the Caves/Catacombs.
As Judas, get killed by Mom's Foot in the Depths/Necropolis.
As Azazel, get killed by Satan's first form (after beating the Fallen that spawns first) in Sheol.

These deaths have to be in order, have to occur in a single play through and can't have any other deaths or victories in between them. You can use seeds for everyone EXCEPT Azazel to make it easer.



Ed and Nicalis were disappointed it got solved as quickly as it did, and particularly that dataminers came in and did the last of the work on it. But from what I've read, the people working on solving it legitimately were already like 75 percent of the way there and it was likely to just be a few more days before they had it. Seems like the devs in this case vastly underestimated what a community does when it gets its teeth into a secret.

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I'll join the voices in stating that the curve is much gentler in Rebirth.  In the original I played a solid 8 hours and only got to Mom once and died almost immediately.

 

Last night after playing the game for an hour and half in total I beat Mom for the first time!  I finally understand the hook of the game.  Very excited to dig further.

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Ed and Nicalis were disappointed it got solved as quickly as it did, and particularly that dataminers came in and did the last of the work on it. But from what I've read, the people working on solving it legitimately were already like 75 percent of the way there and it was likely to just be a few more days before they had it. Seems like the devs in this case vastly underestimated what a community does when it gets its teeth into a secret.

Dang. I really feel for them. I love this kind of thing when it's legitimately solved. I don't think they'd be as upset if it had been. They'd have just been like "wow we underestimated the voracity of our fans", rather than "god fucking damnit fucking data fucking miners". At least I'd like to think as much.

 

I mean you can definitely argue (and I would) that they should've expected dataminers to dig in once the secret was known to exist. But it still sucks.

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Thanks for posting that Bjorn, I was going to make a similar post but I didn't want to spoiler myself on the whole thing. I'm glad to hear that it was some Fez-level of thing that I'm not interested in doing necessarily. The upside to Ed and Nicalis's disappointment ( :oldman:  :oldman: ) is that they more or less announced that they are working on an expansion.  :earl:

I'm glad to hear that you're hooked, ariskany_evan. I was thinking about doing a as brief-as-possible guide for the first two floors for new players, here's a go at it:
 

Before I begin I'd like to say that The Binding of Isaac presents you with series of obstacles and any solution you find to those obstacles is valid. To keep this brief I've outlined the two most common goals in the early game and the most common ways to achieve those goals, nothing more. 

 

You want a couple of non-obvious things on the first floor: a blue heart (also called a soul heart), and bit of money. All you need are a couple of bombs.

 
Soul Heart: How do I get it?
You can obtain blue hearts by blowing up tinted rocks. They are rocks that are slightly off-color and have an 'X' etched into them.
 
Isaac found a tinted rock. Maybe there's a soul heart inside!
post-9858-0-60328000-1415822403_thumb.jpg
 
 
Well, keys are cool too I guess :(
post-9858-0-96181000-1415822395_thumb.jpg
 
Soul Heart: Why do I want it?
The soul or black heart is used as a shield for the next floor. If you can get through Basement 2 without taking any red heart damage (some exceptions apply) you are 100% guaranteed a Devil Deal room. Devil Deal rooms let you trade heart containers for some of the best items in the game. The best defense in Isaac is an overwhelming offense!
 
Money: How do I get rich?
You can obtain money in a lot of different ways, but the old-school way is to shoot all the poop, extinguish all of the fires, and find your secret room. There is a regular secret room on each floor: look on your map for a space that is adjacent to three or more rooms, that is your best bet. The can also appear next to just two rooms. 
 
Looking at his mini map, Isaac thinks he knows where the secret room is...
post-9858-0-50465700-1415822279_thumb.jpg
 
Whoohoo! 
post-9858-0-11606400-1415822262_thumb.jpg
 
Money: Now I'm going to buy everything!
Stop! The money is for Arcades. If you enter a floor with more than five cents then there is a chance that an Arcade will appear. It will let you trade red heart health for even more money and gamble that money for the essentials, keys and bombs. Using the Blood Donation machine does not count as red heart damage for the purposes of getting a Devil Deal room. You're going to give those heart containers to the Devil anyway, might as well empty them first and get some cash.
 
If all goes well you have a powerful Devil Deal item, lots of bombs and keys, and maybe some money left over. I'll leave the rest to you!

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I mean you can definitely argue (and I would) that they should've expected dataminers to dig in once the secret was known to exist. But it still sucks.

 

They expected it, apparently there's a txt file in the install directory that says, "Please don't datamine, and if you do, don't share it online. We think this is cool and would like to see it play out." They just hoped that people would respect their wishes for at least a couple of weeks.

 

Thanks for posting that Bjorn, I was going to make a similar post but I didn't want to spoiler myself on the whole thing.

 

I was the same way, and this morning I just posted to r/bindingofisaac asking if it was worth holding out on avoiding the info. A couple of people replied describing the scale of the puzzle, at which point I realized avoiding it was silly.

Good starting guide! A couple of things I would add are:

Secret Rooms: These are even easier to find once you understand that they have to be accessible from each room they border. So if a room has a chasm, a bunch of rocks or any other obstacle that prevents you from going right to where the door should be, then there can't be a secret room on the other side. You can (I think) always walk right up to the wall where a secret door is hidden. There is a known, rare glitch where the First Floor secret room is unavailable, so if the most obvious spot doesn't have the room, don't worry about wasting your meager collection of bombs on less likely spots.

When bombing X rocks or secret doors, always position your bomb to destroy as many rocks/mushrooms/skulls as possible. Secrets are galore in the game, and there's no reason not to give yourself a chance at finding something if you are already using a bomb.

I'd argue that there are a few, high priority store items that trump saving money for arcades (my personal philosophy). The most important is the Starter Deck (passive item that lets you hold 2 cards and changes all pill drops to cards). I don't know that there is a common item that has done more to save a run for me than this item, especially once you start unlocking Runes, which count as cards.  I've had a couple of challenges that I only got done thanks to being able to carry two cards.

If you get a key or two on the first floor, save one key for the second floor. This is when keys are most rare, and you really want to get into the treasure room on the second floor, unless you're crazy flush with cash, then the store might be worth it.

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It appears that the fortune teller machine gives out special game seeds every once in a while. I haven't tried them out yet, but I've encountered:

 

B00B T00B

PACI FISM

BL00 00DY

 

From what I understand, any character that can be mistaken for another (O vs 0, etc.) is always a number and gets automatically converted to one if you type it in.

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They expected it, apparently there's a txt file in the install directory that says, "Please don't datamine, and if you do, don't share it online. We think this is cool and would like to see it play out." They just hoped that people would respect their wishes for at least a couple of weeks.

 

For what it's worth, the .txt file can be found in the file (steam install location)/common/Binding of Isaac Rebirth/resources/packed/readme.txt

 

The text follows:

 

You might wonder how you can open those .a files. Currently there are no

tools available, and there is a reason to it.

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth has a lot of content that is unlocked as you

progress. It also contains some secrets.

We felt that having a folder with all the spritesheets, cutscene videos,

data files and whatnot would be too tempting for people to ignore.

Finding out things while playing the game, either alone, with friends,

or as part of an online community can be a very rewarding experience. We

don't want to take that away from you.

In case you like reverse engineering and absolutely want to take this

beautiful game apart, we would ask you a few things.

 - Don't release any secrets you find to the internet.

 - Don't publish information on how to open the game's data files.

 - Don't give away the unpacked resources.

The least you can do is wait until the game has been released for a

couple of months, so you don't accidentally spoil it for others.

If you have any questions, write to [email protected].

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This is why the best mysteries in video games are those that can never be solved, such as, "Is half-breed Priscilla the love child of Princess Gwynevere and Seath the Scaleless?"  or "Will Clementine retain her humanity despite the evils of a zombie apocolypse?" or "THE PRESIDENT HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY NINJAS. ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO RESCUE THE PRESIDENT?"

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And what does Gordon Freeman whisper to his crowbar at night, when no one is listening?


I did something I didn't think I'd ever be able to pull off tonight! I beat the Chest with ???! I tried a bunch of ??? runs in original BoI and just never got anywhere. I've tried around a dozen times in Rebirth, but most ended within the first floor or two, with me giving up after a couple of early hits or a crappy first treasure room. But tonight I got Daddy Longlegs first, then picked up a Dead Cat, which let me sacrifice my life a couple of times to get Devil Room items, including Brimstone. Between Daddy and Brim, it was pretty smooth sailing from that point on.  Especially when I got the Wafer in my last Treasure room, so that later levels weren't as scary for my health. 
 

 

After 28 hours, which is probably the most I've gamed in a week since I was 12, I reached:

 

The Dark Room! Previously I unlocked the Negative, a kind of anti-Polaroid, and carrying that past Satan brought me there. I popped an Emperor card almost after seeing a couple of rooms because I am a wuss. Scared Dingle-less, I face-tanked the boss with my Guppy Knife and soon it was all over. Now the Angels have been unleashed? What the fuck does that mean?  :o

 

Umm, so I got there tonight too, and...

 

Didn't get any message about the Angels being unleashed?  What's the about?  I got the Golden God Achievement and unlocked a Mystery Bag.  I was playing as Eden.  What character were you playing?

 

I got lucky as hell.  I squeeked by Satan with only 5 health left, and managed to explore about a half dozen rooms, lost a few health, but also picked up a couple of Balls of Steel pills.  It wasn't looking good though.  I was at best staying even on health.  Then I picked up the Rune that lets you reroll an item.  I backtracked to a Deck of Tarot Cards I had passed by, rerolled it and got a Music Box.  With  my 99 coins I was able to get through a few more rooms, found the boss room with 70ish coins left, and just spammed the hell out of the music box.  Ran out of money when he had a sliver of health left, but I was able to finish him off with one heart left on myself.  Fucking intense!

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I finished that place with Maggie first, and again last night with Lazarus with Quad Knife Guppy. This time

I didn't find any Angels, but there was a gigantic golden door that I couldn't open. *cue ominous music*

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I finished that place with Maggie first, and again last night with Lazarus with Quad Knife Guppy. This time

I didn't find any Angels, but there was a gigantic golden door that I couldn't open. *cue ominous music*

 

Weird, I'll have to see if I get that same message with a different character. The other thing you found there...

Yeah! The Golden Door showed up for me when I got back to the Chest after beating it once, and it was already present in the Dark Room the first time I got there (probably because I had beat the Chest). I have no idea how to open it.

So I got curious about some character item unlocks (wondering about a couple of specific items), and looked at a guide for what characters unlock what items. And I saw a couple of symbols for goals I didn't recognize. In general, each character unlocks an item for beating each major/plot boss. You have to beat the Heart on Hard mode to get its unlocks though (no other bosses are required to fight on Hard as near as I can tell). And if you've noticed that there's a clock on the level transition screen, that's a 20 minute timer to reach the Mom fight. Achieve that and something happens.

 

So I guess I'm going to start trying Hard Mode and speedrunning now.  Which works out pretty well, I'm almost out of Challenges, and I usually mix in a Challenge for every couple of regular attempts.  I've got 6 challenges left, and 2 of those are still locked. 

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Just had an absurdly powerful run and unlocked Blue Baby. Cricket's Body + sacred heart + blood clot + mom's eye + pill bottle + tear bombs are the salient points I think. The biggest danger was being blinded by my tears spraying everywhere, which is pretty much how I took most of my damage.

post-26188-0-74160300-1415906495_thumb.jpg

Bombs in particular were terrifying: Homing bombs which released a spray of homing tears which each split into four more homing tears

post-26188-0-16771600-1415906496_thumb.jpg

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Oh wow! I had totally forgotten about that mysterious late game message but today I accidentally stumbled in to finding the Ending 16, and now I realize what that was about.  A very very vague hint:

The change in the game is not something that happens now automatically, you have to do something.

More direct hint:

Accurate message would be: You now can release the angels.

How I found about it:

I had the Leo (breaks all obstacles) and happened to touch the faceless angel in an angel room, I was already excited by that suprise boss fight and got really excited when I saw what the reward was!

Straight up Ending 16 spoiler:

So you get the key to the mysterious door in Chest/Dark Room, and beyond the door: Mega Satan! I had accidentally seen the name in a comment below a Steam patch note but that was more of a fun teaser than a spoiler. And it certainly lived up to its name! I doubt I could have survived it if I hadn't bought the Stop Watch earlier (it slows all of the enemies and their projectiles for the rest of the game).


The speedrunning surprise is cool, but with all the randomness, trying to be succesful with it can be sometimes frustrating.

Also, a crazy powerful synergy I found: Blank Card + Chaos Card...

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I finished that place with Maggie first, and again last night with Lazarus with Quad Knife Guppy. This time

I didn't find any Angels, but there was a gigantic golden door that I couldn't open. *cue ominous music*

About that place again...

I checked my Achievements, and I have one for Angels: They are waiting. So I definitely unlocked it. Either I was dumb and missed it, or I got multiple achievements and it didn't show. Kinda bummed I didn't get to see it when it happened...

 

The speedrunning surprise is cool, but with all the randomness, trying to be succesful with it can be sometimes frustrating.

Also, a crazy powerful synergy I found: Blank Card + Chaos Card...

 

Blank Card is a crazy item in the first place, I've only gotten it a couple of times, but totally broke those runs open. I haven't got the Chaos Card at all yet.

So I decided to try a speedrun during my lunch break today, just took Azazel, figuring she would be the easiest/fastest to try with (my wife insists Zazzle is a she, so that's what I'm going with). I easily made it to Mom with bunches of time to spare. That was cool/not cool in equal measures. The whole run was crazy, I ended up going all the way to the Chest and finishing in around 35 minutes. I picked up a Brimstone Baby, some damage upgrades, 3 guppy items, fear shot and anti-grav tears, which has a cool interaction with Zazzle's mini-Brimstone. Then, in the first room of the Chest, I got the Ludovich Technique (I think that's it's name). It lets you guide your shots. Holy crap is that an interesting synergy with her mini-brim (and I'm assuming regular Brim). I should have got a screenshot when I was tearing up the Chest, but I didn't think to do it until everything was dead. You can see the synergy between Brim and Ludo in that shot if you want (final room of the Chest, no boss present if you're worried about spoilers) I actually got the achievement for completing The Chest without taking any damage thanks to that. So that was a really crazy and unexpected first attempt at a speedrun.

Now I'm sure the next 20 attempts will awful.

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