Silver Palace game modes

Silver Palace has more to do between cases than its trailers let on. This page covers every side mode in the Dichotomy beta build in one place: what each one is, where you find it, and what it pays. Where a mode already has a full guide on the site, this page gives the short version and links you there.

Everything below comes from the build's own screens: the game's text, its achievements and tutorials, and gameplay footage from testers. Where a frame comes from a tester's video, the caption credits them.

Quick answer

Royal Equestrian Tournament

The tournament is the horse race, and it is the easiest money in the build. You sign up by speaking to the attendant standing at a course start, who offers "Take part in the Royal Equestrian Tournament". The race itself is two laps through closed-off city streets against three named riders, with a live leaderboard, a lap timer, Boost and Drift.

The tournament attendant at the North Church Quarter course start. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from DoroNyan on YouTube.

There are three courses in this build, and the select screen lists each with its tags and a high score:

• Four Crowns Street, Finance Quarter Course. "City road / Fast-paced / Multiple hairpin turns."
• North Church Quarter, Dayfair Way Course. "City road / Multiple narrow roads / Multiple obstacles." It starts under the obelisk, skirts the Cathedral of Illumination and finishes inside the cemetery, and the course text warns you to time your leaps.
• UMI Branch Quarter, Four Crowns Street Course. The third route, also two laps.

The Finance Quarter course card. The rewards preview on the right pays by placing, and every row reads Rewards Claimed after a single first-place finish. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from DoroNyan on YouTube.

Each course pays 400, 300 and 200 Reactor Crystals for first, second and third. In the footage one first-place finish marks all three rows as claimed, which points to a win collecting the whole column. That would make it 900 crystals per course and 2,700 for the set, for maybe ten minutes of riding. Two achievements sit on top: Dark Horse for entering once, and Expert Equestrian for completing every course in High Peers.

The Silverium Pegasus guide covers the mount itself, and the minigames guide puts the tournament next to chess, cards and the forensic sequences.

Thought Experiment

Thought Experiment is the one-time combat climb, and the mode most likely to tell you your team is not ready. It unlocks after Act II, Scene II: The Constabulary, and you open it from Agenda > Challenge.

Ongoing Project, with rooms 4 to 6 cleared and 7 onward locked. Stars feed the Depth Rewards counter in the corner.

Its Ongoing Project runs ten rooms. Rooms 1 to 5 take one team. From room 6 you need a second Partner Team, and both have to clear their own half. Each room awards up to three stars for time left, 30 in all, and stars climb a Depth Rewards ladder. A full clear comes to roughly 4,000 Reactor Crystals and pays once. Elementa's own survey for the Dichotomy beta asked testers to clear Ongoing Project 7, which is a fair read on where the difficulty bites.

The Thought Experiment guide covers team building, the two-team rooms and the reward ladder in full.

Hilbert's Hotel

Hilbert's Hotel is the weekly mode, and the one you will run most. You open it from the Agenda, on the Simulation tab. Its in-game title is "Gilbert's Infinize: Hilbert's Hotel". Inside a run you pick doors room by room, take Random Events and choices, and draft Catalysts: temporary run buffs you can level, Reshape and Reform as you go.

The Hilbert's Hotel title card.

Clears pay three things. Weekly Merits climb a Weekly Earnings ladder worth 900 Reactor Crystals a week. Membership Stamps unlock the Membership Privileges tree, the mode's permanent upgrades. Cognito Sand buys from the hotel's own store. A Noble Crystal Ornament from the hotel buys Epiphanies.

Start with the Hilbert's Hotel guide. Before a run, skim the 166 Catalysts and the 26 Mementos, because a few of each do far less than their rarity suggests.

Coffeehouse

The Coffeehouse is a timed service behind a café counter. Its intro card sets it up plainly: "Ginkgo is stretched a little thin as a mountain of orders builds up. If only she had a coffee-connoisseur Detective to help her out, then she might be able to keep up with customers." Customers queue down the left of the screen, each showing their order, and you build each drink in steps against a countdown.

Step 1 of an order: pick the beans by flavour (Fruity, Liquor-Flavoured, Woody) and the cup size. Customer orders wait on the left.

Step 1 is the beans, chosen by flavour, and the cup: Small, Medium or Large. Step 2 is the base ingredients, and later steps finish the drink. Some stations are Special Steps, which the tutorial describes as "specified actions within a limited time. Pass these to increase order revenue." Fire control on the siphon is the one you will see most.

The Standard Service list. Each stage has three revenue targets, and the later stages stay locked until you clear the ones above.

Standard Service is a ladder of seven stages: Beginner's Guide; Small, Medium, or Large?; A Marriage of Coffee and Milk; Sweetness in Bitterness; Bold Experimentation; A Mild Challenge; and Theory & Practice. Each stage has three revenue targets, for example "Reach 850 Revenue", "Reach 850 Revenue within 45s" and "Complete over 4 orders in a row". Each target you hit fills one of the stage's three marks. Peak Service is a second tab next to it.

The service itself costs nothing. The end screen offers Skip or Claim Rewards, and claiming the revenue reward spends 30 Free Time. One three-mark run in the footage paid 4,500 Antique Coins. That makes the Coffeehouse part of City Affairs, which comes next.

On the café itself, the Voicepipe Café on Morgue Street is the city's coffee landmark, but no screen in the build names it as the Coffeehouse's venue. Read the Morgue Street guide for the café.

Case Affairs and City Affairs

City Affairs is the hub most of the downtime hangs off, drawn as a chessboard with four nodes: Case Affairs at the top, the Intel Zone and the Relations Network either side, and the Info Exchanger in the corner. A Popularity level sits at the foot of the board.

The City Affairs hub. The counter in the top right is Free Time, here at 25 of 240.

It runs on Free Time, a stamina bar that caps at 240. When it runs dry, the replenish prompt offers a Time Itinerary for 60 Free Time or 2,950 Reactor Crystals. At 2,950 crystals, more than eight Revelations, never pay crystals for it. The prompt's own timers give the refill rate: 30 Free Time in just under three hours, about one every six minutes.

The replenish prompt, with the next point and a full refill counted down below.

The two earning nodes are Case Affairs and the Intel Zone. Both pay Antique Coins, which the game describes as old coins collectors still chase, traded "for treasures seldom seen on the market". The Intel Zone has a gate of its own: building one takes paperwork, a Citizens' Letter of Support, a Trading License, Partnership Signatures and an Aristocratic Letter of Introduction, because "it's impossible to build an Intel Zone without sufficient public support". It ties into the property side of the city, which the Property Investment guide covers.

The coins go to the Info Exchange, a shop with Materials, Gift and Scarlet Gambit tabs. In the build it stocked Reactor Crystals in three batches, story Motives, Ounces and upgrade materials on a few-day restock. The Relations Network node is on the board but shows no activity in any footage we found.

The Info Exchange. Three Reactor Crystal batches lead the Materials tab.

Scarlet Gambit

Scarlet Gambit is a poker game played across a table from Red Rose, and the deepest of the side modes. You build hands from an eight-card draw with a limited number of Plays and Discards. The score bar multiplies Chips by Integrity, the way a roguelike deckbuilder does.

A Scarlet Gambit round. Confidants are counted top left, and Discard and Play each show how many uses are left.

Its extra layer is Confidants, which you encounter in Table Service. Each one changes the rules: Clemency lets Flushes and Straights form from four cards, The Deal costs a card of hand size for three extra discards, and Ensemble makes every card a Face card. You unlock them with Scarlet Invitations, sold on the Scarlet Gambit tab of the Info Exchange, so City Affairs coins feed straight into the card game.

The Scarlet Gambit breakdown goes through Lagers, Wax Seals, Insider Info and the difficulty stakes one at a time.

Open-world activities

Every district carries a checklist of small jobs, and the map counts them per area: Borough Blitz, Mini Enigma, Lost Package and Casual Commissions, each with a done-out-of-total figure under the district's Exploration percentage.

A Mini Enigma on the map. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from Farli's VODs on YouTube.

Ten activity families have a pair of achievements in High Peers. Four of them also have a tutorial that says how they play:

• Feline Breakout. Catch a runaway cat. "Cats will be scared and run away if you get too close." Follow its paw prints until it tires, then walk up and catch it.
• Grid Shutdown. Use Silver-Kinesis to carry an Electrified Core onto the right base, which drops an electric fence around a chest.
• Corrupting Tide. Touch a Blasphemous Spike and enemies pour out of the shadows. Defeat as many as you can before the timer runs out.
• Ruins Restoration. "Find the scattered site shards to restore the historic site to its former glory."

The other six are named by their achievements and nothing more: Hot Off the Press, Wallborne Maze, Lighting Recalibration, Streetscape Recreation, Kidnappers, and the Royal Equestrian Tournament above.

A few more turn up on the map and in the tutorials without an achievement attached:

• Challenger's Lockbox, one of the Mini Enigmas: "An enigmatic noble placed a safe here and challenged all to try and crack his lock." The passcode is solved below.
• Lost Package. Self-delivering parcels that keep getting lost in High Peers' winding streets. You catch them and hand them in, and a craftable Package Locator points you at the nearest one.
• Suspicious Activity. The Danger Radar flashes when hidden enemies are close. Observe passers-by, see through a disguise and expose the enemy to start a fight.
• Infiltration. Stealth past guards. Their detection zones fill an Alert meter, faster the closer you are, and hiding spots keep you out of sight.

The Feline Breakout tutorial card. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from Oii on YouTube.

Most families pay 10 Reactor Crystals for your first completion and 20 for finishing every one in High Peers. Unlocking every Cognito Pin, Liftway, Circuitway and Strandean Flowway has achievements of its own. None of it is hard. All of it adds up, and it gets you around the districts you would otherwise only cross on a horse. The Incidents guide explains how these trigger and how Exploration Progress is counted, and Commissions covers the job board.

Challenger's Lockbox passcode: 2026

The Challenger's Lockbox in the Meadow, Morgue Street, opens with 2026. Its map card asks you to "collect nearby clues to uncover the safe's passcode", and the clue is a Number-Covered Note nearby.

The Number-Covered Note. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from Farli's VODs on YouTube.

The ∞ sign means "write the sum, then the difference". 23 + 7 = 30 and 23 − 7 = 16, so 3016. 26 + 15 = 41 and 26 − 15 = 11, so 4111. 53 + 52 = 105 and 53 − 52 = 1, so 1051. The last line, 104 + 98 = 202 and 104 − 98 = 6, gives 2026.

On the safe, W and S rotate the selected dial and A and D swap between the four dials. Set them to 2, 0, 2, 6 and the door opens.

Dials at 2026, and the safe's payout. Source: Dichotomy beta footage from Farli's VODs on YouTube.

The safe paid 150 Reactor Crystals, 10,000 Ounces, three upgrade books and 50 EXP. The map counts ten Mini Enigmas in the Meadow alone, and this is the only Challenger's Lockbox anyone has put on video so far. If you find one with a different note, try the same sum-then-difference rule first.

Which mode to play first

Race the tournament's three courses once, the day it opens. Nothing else in the build pays this well for this little effort. Then climb Thought Experiment as far as your team allows, because its crystals pay out once and its rooms show you what to build next. Hilbert's Hotel goes on your weekly list from then on.

Treat City Affairs as the thing you spend Free Time on rather than a goal. The Coffeehouse is the pleasant way to turn Free Time into Antique Coins, and the Info Exchange's crystal batches are the reason to bother. Scarlet Gambit is the mode to lose an evening to once your dailies are done.

Frequently asked questions

What game modes are in Silver Palace?

Outside the story, the Dichotomy beta build has the Royal Equestrian Tournament (horse races), Thought Experiment (a combat climb), Hilbert's Hotel (a weekly room crawl), the Coffeehouse (a timed coffee-making service), Scarlet Gambit (a poker game against Red Rose), the City Affairs hub that ties several of them together, and a set of open-world activities scattered across each district.

Is there horse racing in Silver Palace?

Yes. The Royal Equestrian Tournament has three courses in the Dichotomy beta build: the Finance Quarter on Four Crowns Street, the North Church Quarter on Dayfair Way, and the UMI Branch Quarter on Four Crowns Street. Each is a two-lap race against three named riders. Placing third, second and first pays 200, 300 and 400 Reactor Crystals on each course, claimed once.

Is there a coffee minigame in Silver Palace?

Yes. The Coffeehouse puts you behind the counter to help Ginkgo through a rush of orders. You match each customer's order by choosing beans, a cup size and the ingredients, against a clock. Standard Service is a ladder of seven named stages with three objectives each, and Peak Service is a second tab beside it.

What is Free Time in Silver Palace?

Free Time is the stamina that City Affairs runs on. It caps at 240, refills over time, and can be topped up by 60 with a Time Itinerary or with 2,950 Reactor Crystals. Playing a Coffeehouse service is free; claiming its revenue reward costs 30 Free Time.

What do Antique Coins do in Silver Palace?

Antique Coins come from Case Affairs and the Intel Zone, the two earning nodes of the City Affairs hub, and the Coffeehouse pays its revenue in them. You spend them at the Info Exchange, which sells Reactor Crystals, upgrade materials, gifts and Scarlet Gambit cards.

What is the Challenger's Lockbox passcode in Silver Palace?

2026, for the Challenger's Lockbox in the Meadow, Morgue Street. The Number-Covered Note beside it reads 23 ∞ 7 = 3016, 26 ∞ 15 = 4111 and 53 ∞ 52 = 1051. Each answer is the sum followed by the difference. For 104 ∞ 98 that is 202 then 6, so 2026. The safe paid 150 Reactor Crystals, 10,000 Ounces and three upgrade books.

Which Silver Palace mode should I play first?

Thought Experiment, for its one-time crystal payout and because it tells you whether your team is ready. Then Hilbert's Hotel every week. The tournament's nine first-clear rewards are the easiest crystals in the build, so race each course once early on.