Does the five-minute timer reset?
Also searched as: 5 minute timer reset / does the timer reset / timer duration / does it pause / letting go / does leaving the room reset it
The short answer
Short answer: yes - leaving early and re-pressing reset the timer; release-in-place is not established by the six sources audited here. Leaving the five-minute waiting room before the timer reaches 00:00 resets the puzzle and restarts the countdown (GameRant), and pressing a start control again resets it to 05:00 (bigwalk-wiki). Whether releasing a button while staying inside resets it is unestablished, death and disconnect are untouched by the audited sources, and this rests on community and editorial sourcing rather than developer documentation. Sample size so far is N=0; the protocol below is the plan to test it.
- Players
- 2 players plus one external stopwatch
- Time
- at least 40 minutes for the full protocol (the 5 baseline runs alone are 25 minutes of countdown)
- Location
- Listed under Yellow Tower by VGTimes; room near the Blue Balloon (3590, 2020 — community coordinates)
- Reward
- - (an audit page, unlocks nothing)
Find 3590, 2020 in the coordinate finder
Evidence status (2026-09-29)
Status: source audit plus a reproducible test plan — no original in-game trials have been completed yet (N=0).
Documented by the checked sources:
The timer is five minutes and counts down to zero — ‘the timer counts down from five minutes’ (Aftermath); ‘wait for the countdown to reach zero’ (VGTimes).
Leaving the room before it ends resets the puzzle and restarts the countdown (GameRant — quoted in the answer above).
Pressing a start control again resets the countdown to 05:00 (bigwalk-wiki).
VGTimes lists the room in its Yellow Tower section, at the Blue Balloon coordinates (3590, 2020).
Open (not documented by any checked source):
Releasing a button while staying inside — no checked source describes it. Guide wording on holding differs: The GameSlayer says ‘hold until five minutes’, while VGTimes and bigwalk-wiki describe activating the controls and then waiting — ‘hold’ may be literal or may just mean staying in the room, so step 2 below is designed to test release behavior before either reading is treated as definitive.
Death, disconnect, pause menu — none of the six sources checked documents them.
Five-minute timer — the walkthrough page — explains how to solve the puzzle; this page explains how to verify what the timer actually does. The protocol below tests the open questions, and results will be labeled by build, platform, date, and sample size. One confusion source handled first: the ‘30-minute waiting room’ in the bigwalktips note appears to be a separate waiting mechanic (the two phrases sit next to each other in that passage, so the distinction is provisional until confirmed against the current guide) — this page covers only the five-minute timer room in the yellow tower.
Before you start
- 2 players (one per start button)
- One external stopwatch (a phone is fine)
- Continuous video of the timer face, with build and platform visible where possible — screenshots alone cannot show what happened between frames
- A place to log readings: video timestamps plus a simple table
Step-by-step 3 steps
- 1
Baseline: five runs of the full countdown
Both players press their buttons in the same second and the external stopwatch starts at that moment. Let the countdown run to 00:00 undisturbed. Record the stopwatch reading the instant the door opens, plus the face readings at start and end; the checked guides describe a 05:00 → 00:00 countdown, so any different behavior should be recorded rather than discarded. At least 5 runs, logged every time.
Faster: If two readings differ by more than 2 seconds, keep every run and note the gap — check for shaky hands before you blame the game; do not discard runs.
- 2
Release test: what happens when you let go
Run one trial at each of 1:00, 3:00, and 4:45: player A lets go first, record the timer face immediately; then player B lets go alone, record again. Note which of four outcomes you see — keeps counting (what bigwalk-wiki’s press-then-wait wording implies), reset to 05:00, frozen reading, or partial rollback. This is the one core question on this page that none of the six audited sources explicitly settles: until this protocol has been run, no version of the release answer should be treated as fact.
Faster: Both players releasing at once is a separate row — it is not the same as leaving early: leaving has a source (GameRant), releasing in place has none, so do not record them together. The 4:45 trial is the most expensive and the most valuable: it also records what you lose when you fail with only 15 seconds left.
- 3
Interference: death, disconnect, pause menu
Test each one: a death, a drop and reconnect (run host and client separately), the pause menu open for 10 seconds, and leaving the room and coming back. Record the timer before and after every case. GameRant says leaving early resets the puzzle — verify that on your build and capture the moment. For death, disconnect and the pause menu the six audited sources are completely silent — silence is not "it never pauses", it means no audited source has answered it.
Faster: Keep 'disconnect' and 'leaving the room' as separate rows: how the connection drops, and how it recovers, each need their own reading.
Where it goes wrong
These are the places players actually get stuck most often. Working through them in order usually finds the cause.
Other Yellow tower puzzles
After finishing: - (a verification page, unlocks nothing)
Where this solution came from
Verification status (2026-09-29): source audit expanded to six sources; in-game sample size still N=0, results to be filled in after the first test run.
Sources checked (each linked, with type): (1) The GameSlayer (community guide) — two buttons on the back wall, a large timer opposite, hold until five minutes; (2) the bigwalktips 100% page (community guide) — the ‘start the wait first, clear other puzzles during it’ planning advice, whose same passage contains the phrase ‘30-minute waiting room’; (2b) bigwalk.tips (community guide site — the bigwalktips / bigwalk.tips note referenced above); (3) GameRant (editorial walkthrough) — ‘if you do leave, the puzzle will be reset, and you'll need to press the switches again and start the five-minute countdown timer again’; (4) Aftermath (editorial) — ‘you're locked in the room while the timer counts down from five minutes’; (5) VGTimes (community walkthrough) — ‘wait for the countdown to reach zero’, placing the room in the Yellow Tower section at the Blue Balloon coordinates (3590, 2020); (6) bigwalk-wiki (community wiki) — ‘Pressing a start control again resets the countdown to five minutes’.
Audit scope: these conclusions cover only the six sources linked above, reviewed on 2026-09-29 — not a claim about every guide that exists, and not a substitute for game behavior itself.
Audit conclusions: (a) the direction is a countdown — four sources agree; an earlier draft of this page called direction unknown and was corrected on 2026-09-29. (b) Leaving the room early resetting the puzzle is documented by GameRant. (c) The sentence ‘letting go resets the timer to zero’ still has no matching wording in any checked source; when it first appeared in our own Five-minute timer copy it carried no citation either — that page's FAQ was corrected on 2026-09-29 to point here. (d) Guide wording on holding differs: The GameSlayer says hold until five minutes; VGTimes and bigwalk-wiki describe activating the controls and then waiting (‘stop touching the controls’). ‘Hold’ may be literal or shorthand for staying in the room — step 2 is designed to test which.
Measurement method (to be executed): retail build; platform, game version and date recorded at first test; N≥5 full readings plus 3 release trials plus 4 interference cases (host and client disconnects tested separately); external stopwatch read against the in-game timer; continuous video rather than screenshots alone. The protocol documents this build on this platform — cross-platform, host/client and determinism claims need additional runs. Raw readings and video attached as they are captured.
Withheld arithmetic: an earlier version of this page carried a ‘wait-cost’ table (80% / 40% / 10% / 5% lost). It was removed because every figure presupposes the reset behavior that is still unverified — the page will not compute costs before it knows the mechanic.
Puzzles in this game are not assigned in a fixed order: each tower needs a set number of gourds and has more challenges around it than that, so you choose which ones to clear, in any order. That is why two guides list different puzzle line-ups for the same tower — neither is wrong. Unless a coordinate is credited to a named source it is a community measurement, and later versions can shift it; once you are in the area, trust the landmark over the number.