The much-anticipated remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is here, and much like the Gamecube original, the game is bursting with puzzles, secrets, and some quirky mechanics that new players may find slightly perplexing. Don’t worry though, we’re here to cut The Thousand-Year Door’s more confusing aspects down to size.
In between most Paper Mario TTYD chapters, you’ll play through short vignettes with Princess Peach. These are usually fairly straightforward, but the one between Chapters 5 and 6 actually contains a fairly tricky puzzle that may frustrate folks who don’t see it coming. Don’t worry though, we’ve got you covered…
Note: The following guide contains minor Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door SPOILERS.
After completing Chapter 5, you’ll once again find yourself in the pink shoes of Princess Peach. The computer TEC will ask her to retrieve a Data Disk from Sir Grodus’ office, and in order to do so, you’ll need to mix up a potion that will make you invisible.
Exit the elevator that takes you to the second floor, then head left until you get to the one open room, in which you’ll find the potion mixing puzzle. First, you need to put the four color of potions in the right order. You’ll find a number of clues around the room, most notably, “Do not put the Red potion on the far right,” “Place two potions between the Red and Green potions,” and “Place the Yellow potion between the Blue potion and the Green potion.”
Using those three clues, you can determine the right order – (from left to right) Red, Blue, Yellow, Green.
Now push the button on the left. A beaker will now move down the conveyor belt. Push the buttons below the four potions to pour them in as the beaker stops above them.
Okay, now the part that will likely throw a lot of people off. The game will ask you to heat the combination of potions for 30 seconds. Press the button to star the heating, then again to stop it. There’s no special “trick” to this, you actually have to time it. If you have a watch or timer you can use, that will work, but if you don’t, I’ve found timing it using the sound of the siren going off during the heating works best. With every “weeoo” of the siren and rotation of the yellow light, count – this is actually slightly faster than a second, so you’ll have to count to around 40 before shutting off the heat. It will still work if you go slightly longer than 30 seconds, but you can’t go any less.
If you’ve done everything right, the potion will turn green. If you’ve messed something up, it will be an orange-ish color and you’ll have to repeat the process again.
Once you drink the green potion, you’ll turn invisible and can head to Grodus’ office and grab the Disk (it’s on the shelf behind his desk).
And there you go – one of the trickier Peach sections of the game, solved!
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is available now on Nintendo Switch. You can check out all of Wccftech’s Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door guides here.
