The great Nier: Automata church mystery has been solved

For the past few days, the Nier community has on absolute tenterhooks over a mysterious church in Nier: Automata's Copied City. Posted to Reddit by a user named sadfutago, people have spent hours pouring over just what the hell this bizarre, undiscovered area was. Was this the final final secret? A mod? A bored Yoko Taro deciding to rope us all into an ARG?

Well, after several videos being drip-fed to us over the past week, it was finally revealed in a grand livestream that the hidden area was in fact a mod. While it may seem anti-climatic to some, it's actually a huge leap in modding capabilities for Automata. Until now, map editing of this level has been near-impossible in the game, which was such a big reason why people were confused in the first place.

Turns out there are three people behind sadfutago and the secret room mod: DevolasRevenge, Woeful_Wolf and RaiderB. In a statement thanking the community, they wrote: "We have been loving all the discussions and theories—it has been an amazing journey. It has been inspiring to see the community come together after so many years, it has made all the hard work well worth it. We hope everyone had a good time, we certainly did."

Map designer DevolasRevenge continued: "It was never meant to blow up this big, but just to confuse a few people on Twitter lol," while Woeful_Wolf added, "when I started this I never thought we would ever get this far; I simply wanted to fix the lunar tear model!" RaiderB said "it's been an honour working on this and to be part of this crew. I've had lots of fun and am excited to see where this goes in the future."

The mod will be made publicly available, with the team already beginning to release the Blender addons and scripting tools used to achieve the feat. The statement finished up by saying "keep an eye out for more," including a mod from RaiderB.

Seeing the community band together and crack the case has been a joy to witness over the last few days, especially as a huge Nier fan myself. When I was looking through the subreddit a few days ago, I saw someone say "there's no scenario where the answer isn't exciting," and they were right. It's been a damn good week to be a Nier fan, and I'm excited to see what else these crafty modders have up their sleeves.