Question about spirit box

[BrendyBear]

I've seen how a spirit box can be turned on and thrown on the ground and it will still give responses. I've read that it has an auto question feature that asks every 10 seconds. Does this work when no players are nearby? For example, could you setup a sound sensor next to the spirit box and hear responses to the auto questions from the truck?

[Cool Cereal]

Will not work. According to the wiki, the automatic ping only activates when voice chat is used around the spirit box.

[Maya-Neko]

You need to be within the range of the spirit box and within the investigation area to get it working (so no, asking from outside the main door doesn't work^^), be it you asking questions or the auto response (for the automatic response you need to hold the PTT button and not have any sentence detected)

Also keep in mind, that the lights of the room you're in needs to be switched off, not the room lights of the spirit box.

And if they've not changed it with the item rework, then the ghost will answer in relation to your position and not the spirit boxes position, so using 2 spirit boxes at the same time doesn't do anything in terms of area covered.

[Captain Oveur]

A lot of this ^ doesn’t seem right to me. I’m 90% certain that the automatic ping works without PTT because it was intended for people without mics. Someone without a mic still using PTT sounds counterintuitive. I also thought that you had to be on top of the ghost with the T1 box because, well, you’re usually holding it when you use it.

I’ll do a test tonight, but if you wanna try it yourself, here’s what I plan to do. Imma go into the tutorial and speedrun to the spirit box portion. Take both and identify the correct room. Toss one box to the ghost room floor and carry the other outside of the ghost room (have both turned on). Scream questions from the non-ghost-room and see if the box on the floor responds. Then stand in one corner of the ghost room while the floor ghost box is in the opposite corner and see if there’s a difference.

I’ll also be running a few contracts to try to finish gathering the cursed possessions, so if I get a ghost with spirit box evidence, I’ll try it during an actual contract too just to be extra sure.

[Maya-Neko]

Originally posted by Captain Oveur:

A lot of this ^ doesn’t seem right to me. I’m 90% certain that the automatic ping works without PTT because it was intended for people without mics. Someone without a mic still using PTT sounds counterintuitive. I also thought that you had to be on top of the ghost with the T1 box because, well, you’re usually holding it when you use it.

I've tested it and holding PTT makes it auto try every 10 seconds, while it never does it, when i'm not holding PTT. Though the 10 seconds are on a continuous loop, so you might get the auto try earlier, if you press PTT coincidentally at the right moment.

Obviously, if you've no mic connected, then you can also just switch it to open mic, so that it works continuously without pressing PTT.

Also no need to go into the tutorial. Just make a custom game with friendly ghost and go into any house to test it. Makes it also easier to test non-hunting behavior without the potential to die^^

Originally posted by Captain Oveur:

I’ll do a test tonight, but if you wanna try it yourself, here’s what I plan to do. Imma go into the tutorial and speedrun to the spirit box portion. Take both and identify the correct room. Toss one box to the ghost room floor and carry the other outside of the ghost room (have both turned on). Scream questions from the non-ghost-room and see if the box on the floor responds. Then stand in one corner of the ghost room while the floor ghost box is in the opposite corner and see if there’s a difference.

The things i've mentioned all got tested by Insym once and they should still behave the same. Though feel free to test it yourself and maybe we're learning something new^^

[Captain Oveur]

I considered using the tutorial because I know 100% that the spirit box will work when I reach that point. The issue is that it’s a super small room and the interaction rate is nearly 100% too. I’ll probably just not do the tutorial thing and go straight to using friendly ghosts. I just hope it doesn’t take an hour and a half to finally get a ghost with spirit box evidence.

If you can point me to the Insym video, I’ll take a look at it. Either way, it won’t hurt to experiment.

[Maya-Neko]

The spirit box will always give feedback, be it the ghost talking or just a light lighting up to tell you, that nothing has answered, so there's not really a need to have a ghost with this evidence to test the overall functionality. Obviously if you want to do further testing that's something different^^

As for the Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaaCkQZMXKo

At 9:45 you can see it in action. He plays against a Deo, asks about its position and gets the breath (thus it needs to be within 1 m of whatever it checks against) and it stepped in salt far away from the spirit box.

So with that in mind, holding a spirit box in the hand and one on the floor doesn't really matter matter that much (though i've never really checked, if both boxes might individually check for a response, which might be worth using for T1 spirit box), but you can throw one on the floor and take other items (like flashlight, smudge and lighter), while still using the spirit box and even running around to have a higher chance of finding the ghost

[Captain Oveur]

I think the boxes check independently. When I did my initial tests, both would consistently trigger at the same time, but every now and then, I’d get a response on one but not the other.

I’ll watch that video very soon and see his methods to see if I can come up with something to try that he didn’t think of.

[EDIT]
I watched it. I’m satisfied enough with his science to accept the results…but it was also an older version of the game. My earlier tests kinda line up with the results still, but I didn’t test in a way to say for sure. I’ll give it a quick, shallow test tonight for the purpose of verifying the data is still valid, but I’m still curious about the automatic ping thing. I’m going to let that be the focus of my tests instead.

[Captain Oveur]

So. I ended up with a Poltergeist and it refused to give me the spirit box evidence. I also had trouble getting the automatic ping thing to work.

I'll edit this message when I get success.

[BrendyBear]

Thanks for the responses. I tried testing too, and got a Poltergeist on my first test, but I was unable to get the spirit boxes to auto ping questions. Or the ghost simply never answered an auto pinged question, even when I was in the room with it with the lights off. I had 2 spirit boxes going too.

Spirit box is my least favourite evidence. I just got a Phantom wrong because I guessed Banshee. I couldn't see any orbs, but it's room was a basement storage area with shelves everywhere so I figured I just couldn't see it due to those. I tried a T2 spirit box constantly in it's room with the lights off for several minutes (even popped sanity pills to keep going without being hunted) and never got any response from it, even though I could see it on DOTS near me and also setting off the motion sensors. I was using the text choices and seeing the spirit box confirm a question was asked. I guess it just didn't want to talk. I had all the evidence enabled, so it wasn't a hidden evidence.

[Captain Oveur]

Pretty much same here with my Pulty. I loaded the amateur preset and turned on friendly ghosts before starting. I spammed the ghost room (foyer) and I spammed its location when it did ghost events. The spirit box (T1) acted a little funky too. I would ask a series of questions quickly and it acted like it was queuing them up because the red light would flash multiple times. Then sometimes, I’d start asking a question but it’d give me the red light after only the first word or two was spoken.

I forget what my second ghost ended up being.

I decided to play a normal game and went with amateur settings. Ghost was a mimic. I didn’t wanna risk losing items/money while trying to do spirit box tests, but I did get the spirit box evidence rather quickly. I think my second question got the response. I also asked the Ouija board to play hide and seek and it started counting down.

This makes me think that the random people yelling “[evidence] doesn’t work” aren’t completely wrong. It’s more like certain evidence on certain ghosts don’t work

[Maya-Neko]

If you want to test stuff, rather use T3 spirit box, as that has a way higher chance of telling you the current position of the ghost. T1 is just very unreliable due to the lower interaction chance and the lower range.

And the reason why people can't seem to make it work is mostly about them not adapting to the new circumstances. Previously, the ghost needed to be within 3m OR within the same room to be able to give a resonse and the response rate was relatively high (like something about 1:3 i would say), making it possible to get a ghost within like 2-5 questions. Now though the T1 spirit box has a lower interaction rate and you actually need to stand within the 3m to get it counted. So people who still only ask those 2-5 questions (maybe even just standing still and directly crossing away the evidence) have now a relatively high chance of missing the evidence, since for T1 it is now better to ask like 10 questions while running around and maybe repeat it 1-2 times more often later on, especially when you get it to step into salt or motion sensors.

[Captain Oveur]

I don’t have T3 unlocked yet. Don’t even have T2.

My five questions I cycle through are:
Are you here
Are you close
Are you friendly
How old are you
Where are you

I go through that list about five times while running around every time I try spirit box.