Knights commonly wait by an elevator for a desired level to appear, but the information on the wiki about how the levels rotate is pretty sketchy. The theory presented there seems to be that the levels move in the direction of the arrows at random intervals, normally causing them to appear in sequence but at uncertain times, but the connecting line also sometimes moves at random and messes up the sequence.

I began to suspect things were more systematic than that when I played a single gate several times, and found myself always waiting for prolonged periods at the same level. I noticed on my first trip that I waited over 30 minutes for the level to change twice, mentally griped about it, and moved on. When it seemed unusually long on successive trips, I started to pay closer attention, and recorded two more occasions where I waited over 30 minutes (though I didn't record exact times). That hardly seems like a coincidence.

Recently, I was playing the current Emerald Sun gate, and as my party was approaching the elevator to leave depth 15, we missed the depth 16 arena (one of three possible levels at that depth) by mere seconds. The party grudgingly decided to wait for it to cycle back...and I was pleasantly surprised when it did so in under 4 minutes.

Working on my theory that the times are consistent for a given elevator, I paused on a later run and used a stopwatch to time the level changes. I timed 5 level changes, and all five of them took exactly 1:45 (plus or minus a second).

When I was watching the gate map during my latest experiment, I noticed the levels for my depth rotating one way, and the levels for the next depth rotating the other way. The connecting line always started at my current level, and occasionally changed which level it was pointing to...but the destination changes, while regular, didn't occur at the same time as either floor's rotation--any time one of the floors moved, the line also moved, but always to point to the SAME destination.

I now believe the level rotations are much more systematic than the wiki currently suggests. In fact, let me propose the obvious: what if the clockworks actually ARE modeled as giant rotating gears stacked on top of each other?

Imagine you're standing on a giant spinning disc, next to a whole that drops down onto another giant spinning disc. The disc below you is divided into pie slices--in this case, into thirds. Each pie slice corresponds to a different level. When you jump down the hole, you get the level for the pie slice you land on.

If the two discs are rotating in different directions--like floors 15 and 16 in the current Emerald Sun gate--then the levels change based on the sum of their rotational speeds, and the levels probably change quickly. If the floors rotate in the same direction--as in the case where I waited 30 minutes--the levels change based on the DIFFERENCE in their speeds, and you'll likely be waiting a while.

If this theory is correct:

1. At a given depth in a given gate, the time between two level changes is a constant.
2. The time for two floors rotating in opposite directions should tend to be shorter than the time for two floors rotating in the same direction (but won't necessarily always be shorter, depending on the range of speeds for individual floors).
3. We should be able to measure a consistent time for a full rotation of a given floor (all levels back to their starting positions) by looking at the gate map, even without entering the gate.
4. Based on those measurements, we should be able to predict how long it will take for a level to change while waiting at any elevator in that gate.

I timed a full cycle of floor 15 on Emerald Sun at approximately 6 minutes (need to see if that's reproducible). Floor 16 rotates...slowly. It didn't move even one level position while I was timing floor 15. If my theory is correct, then in order to produce the observed times, floor 16 would need to complete a full rotation in roughly 41-42 minutes. Not willing to stare at it for that long at the moment.

Anyone want to volunteer to help collect data to verify? Timing the floor rotation speeds doesn't even require you to spend energy, you can just look at the gate map from the arcade.