Whoever designed the facility in Signalis really likes keycards. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hospital area of the game. The surgery room is locked with not one, not two, but five keycards. Each one is marked after one of five classic elements. Searching around the hospital floors will net you fire, water, air, and gold keys, but earth is nowhere to be found. Try as you might, you will never obtain the earth key, as it is inaccessible. However, what you will find is a blank key. It’s not going to work in its empty state, but if you follow a process, you can make a mock earth key that works just as well as the real one.

The blank key

The blank key can be found after you complete the water pump puzzle and can descend to the hospital’s flooded lower level. Once you drop down, go south in the flooded hallway. When you reach the end, take the door to the right. Inside, you’ll find some pistol ammunition and the blank key.

The real earth key

You’re not quite ready to slot the blank key in the surgery room door yet. First, you need to write the unlock code on it, but before you do that, you need to find out what that code is. To locate the code, you need to find the original keycard, which may sound redundant, but the keycard is lodged in a chunk of something and locked behind glass.

You’ll find it in the X-Ray room. There’s a machine that lets you view five objects, including a revolver that it keeps tantalizingly out of reach. The only item that is really important is item D. Bring this up on screen, then toggle the image mode to X-Ray. You’ll see that lodged into the chunk of whatever is a keycard, and if you rotate it just right, you’ll see a 5×3 grid of dots with some of them connected. Note down this pattern.

The card writer

To actually create the needed card, you’ll need to make use of the card print system. This is located in a back room directly east then north of the elevator. Slot the blank key, then we can move on to the last part of this puzzle.

You’ll be presented with a familiar 5×3 grid on the screen. Choose Define Pattern, and you’ll be asked to choose a starting node. You only have eight moves, so it’s suggested that you choose the very top-left node. You’ll then connect the dots right, down, right, up, down, down, right, up. Then you can print the card.

Once the blank key is written, you can take it to the surgery room door and slot it in the bottom-left slot. You’ll need the other four keys before it will let you in. For more on the survival-horror game, check out our Signalis review.