Where Entry Number 17 comes from
Undertale is a 2015 role-playing game by Toby Fox. Its files contain rooms that normal play never visits, and one of them, Room 264, has the internal name room_gaster. The Undertale wiki describes it as a black screen with shaking white text in a pixel Wingdings font, while a glitchy, robotic track plays. When the message ends, the screen goes dark and the game closes.
You cannot walk into this room. The wiki's W. D. Gaster page says it is only reachable through save file editing or debug mode, and Wikipedia adds that players modify the game to get there. The text calls itself entry number seventeen. Wikipedia explains that the title points to a missing entry in a series of logs from the main story, and the wiki identifies those as the numbered lab entries in the True Lab, where number seventeen never turns up.
Fans credit the entry to W. D. Gaster, the former Royal Scientist who is only hinted at in the game. The link is a guess, not a fact from the game. The wiki notes that older versions of the files held a different entry 17 written in the style of Alphys, so the Gaster version may be a deliberate red herring.
Decoding one line by hand
The entry is written in capital letters, and Wingdings swaps each capital for its own picture. Decoding is a letter-for-letter lookup, so you can do it with nothing more than a chart. Here is the second line of the entry, worked symbol by symbol.
- 👎︎D
- ✌︎A
- ☼︎R
- 😐︎K
- 👎︎D
- ✌︎A
- ☼︎R
- 😐︎K
- ☜︎E
- ☼︎R
- ✡︎Y
- ☜︎E
- ❄︎T
- 👎︎D
- ✌︎A
- ☼︎R
- 😐︎K
- ☜︎E
- ☼︎R
- Split the line at the spaces. You get four groups of 4, 6, 3 and 6 symbols, so you are looking for four words of those lengths.
- Look up the first group. The thumbs down (👎︎) is D, the victory hand (✌︎) is A, the sun with rays (☼︎) is R and the neutral face (😐︎) is K. That spells DARK.
- Spot the repeats. The second and fourth groups start with the same four symbols, so they also start with DARK. Each ends with a pointing hand (☜︎), which is E, and the sun again for R: DARKER.
- Decode the short group. The six-pointed star (✡︎) is Y, the pointing hand is E again, and the snowflake (❄︎) is T: YET.
Put together, the line reads DARK DARKER YET DARKER. Repeated symbols always mean repeated letters, so once you know a few, whole words fall into place. The Wingdings alphabet lists every capital letter if you want to try another line yourself.
One catch: the thumbs down and the neutral face are color emoji by default, so phones may show D and K in color. They still decode the same way.
What the entry is about
The message is short, and it reads like a lab note. In plain words: the writer says the dark is spreading and getting deeper, shadows are growing sharper, and the light readings have fallen below zero. They then say the next experiment looks very interesting, and they close by asking two unnamed people what they think of it.
The wiki has the full translated text of Entry Number 17, along with fan theories about who the two listeners might be. The game never says which experiment the entry means or who it is addressed to.
Reading it with the translator
The translator above is already set to capital letters, the way the entry is written. To read symbols, press the arrows between the two boxes to switch direction, then paste symbols from any copy of the text and the English appears. You can also go the other way: type a sentence in English to see how it would look in the same style.
For messages of your own in the Gaster style, the Gaster translator gives you the same capital-letter output with copy and image options. If you need lowercase symbols, or want to read Wingdings that did not come from Undertale, use the Wingdings translator, which keeps your capitals and lowercase exactly as typed.
Fan page note
This is an unofficial fan page. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Undertale or Toby Fox, and it uses no artwork from the game. The single line quoted above is shown only to explain how the decoding works.