Chemistry and the ship's tic-tac-toe
The chemistry room wants specific liquids in the glass jug and tracks them as separate pickups; the ship puzzle is tic-tac-toe where barrels stand in for marks, so read the barrel positions as cells rather than as a code.
Two rooms in Escape Academy 2 generate steady help requests and neither has a published solution: the chemistry room where reagents must be combined, and the ship where a tic-tac-toe board has to be read through a set of barrels. What follows is what the reports establish, what the game is evidently asking for, and the safe retry order.
There is no step-by-step here, because no verified sequence exists in public. Where a page like this invents one, it wastes your evening.
The chemistry room
The report is short: a player picked up both chemicals, placed them, and the game still shows one missing. That is the whole complaint, and there is a follow-up that narrows it - the player confirms they are on Steam Deck, which matters because the same class of "the game did not register a pickup" bug shows up elsewhere in the build.
| Reported symptom | Likely mechanism | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| Placed both reagents, one still marked missing | Pickup not registered to quest state | Reload the room from the menu, re-collect both |
| Same, on Steam Deck | Not platform-specific per the reply chain | Same reload; then verify game files |
| Reagent visible but not collectable | Interaction collider not reset | Leave the room and re-enter so the area re-streams |
The second row is worth being careful about. The reporter mentions Steam Deck and the reply does not attribute the bug to the platform - which is the right reading. The launch hotfix of 6 November fixed two quest bugs of exactly this shape: "Memory Leak" could permanently delete the brain and drain chemicals from the world if you saved and exited mid-quest, and "Rest in Paint" could delete stencils and paints the same way.
The ship's tic-tac-toe
The ship puzzle is better documented than the chemistry one, because a player described exactly where the difficulty sits: they had used the hint, they understood where the pieces were supposed to go, and they had no idea how the barrels correspond to the tic-tac-toe board.
That sentence is the whole puzzle. The hint tells you the pattern. The barrels encode the board.
| Piece of the puzzle | What the report establishes |
|---|---|
| The board | A standard tic-tac-toe grid, nine cells |
| The pieces | Barrels, placed around the ship |
| The hint | Describes the pattern to reproduce, not the barrel mapping |
| The missing link | Which barrel corresponds to which cell |
The reply on that thread gives five progressively larger hints rather than an answer, all behind spoiler tags. That structure tells you the intended solving path is incremental: read hint one, try again, read hint two.
How to approach the barrel mapping
Three approaches, in the order that costs least:
- Count before you map. Nine cells, some number of barrels. If the counts do not match, the barrels are not one-to-one with cells, and the mapping is positional or symbol-based rather than literal.
- Look at the ship as a grid. Ships in this game are built on a plan, and the room you are in has a shape. If the barrels sit in a recognisable arrangement when viewed from the deck or from above, that arrangement is the board.
- Use the hint ladder. Five hints exist. Reading one at a time and testing between them is faster than reading all five and trying to hold the whole thing in your head.
What both puzzles have in common
Neither is a logic problem. Both are state-tracking problems: the chemistry room tracks which reagents you have registered, and the ship tracks which barrel you have touched in which order.
| Problem class | Symptom | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| State not registered | The game says you are missing something you are holding | Reload the room, re-collect |
| State registered out of order | A sequence refuses to complete | Reset the mechanism, redo in order |
| State lost to a save bug | Quest items gone from the world | Update to v1.0.20261105.001 or later |
That is also why the puzzles feel unfair on first contact. The game's feedback for "wrong" and "not registered" is identical - nothing happens - and the two need different responses.
Next: the clocktower and ball maze for the two blockers that are not state bugs, or the chapter 2 walkthrough for the room order around both.
The third chemistry complaint nobody filed
There is a variant of the chemistry stall that does not get its own thread because it looks like a solved puzzle: the jug reads a colour you did not pour, and you assume you poured wrong rather than that the game lost an ingredient.
The first-chamber colour puzzle reported on day two is the same shape - a player needed honey, ink, oil and wine, and the jug showed green, dark blue, purple and green. Green twice, and no green among the ingredients. That thread has no reply, which is what an unreproduced report looks like.
For any mixture puzzle in this build, treat a repeated or impossible colour as a lost ingredient rather than a wrong pour:
- Reset the mechanism and pour again, slowly, one ingredient at a time.
- If the same colour repeats, leave the room and re-enter so the container rebuilds.
- If it repeats a third time, it is worth the ticket - copy the logs first.
The cost of guessing wrong here is real. Every mixture puzzle in the game holds partial state between attempts, so a half-emptied jug that you keep topping up will never read correctly no matter how right your recipe is.