Aztec Sun Stone Artifact — Where It Hides in Huatulco
The third Huatulco artifact and the one runners lose most — a carved sun disc buried in the box-and-pressure-plate room, easy to swim straight past on your way to the Shark Tooth bait.
▶ TL;DR
The Aztec Sun Stone is artifact three of four in Huatulco, sitting in the dense middle stretch of MrLeLedg's 100% walkthrough — chapter 'Artifact (Aztec sun stone)' at the 3:39 mark. It drops in immediately after the Rubber Ball (3:19) and immediately before the Shark Tooth bait (3:44), so the pickup window is tiny: barely five seconds on tape. Whisper of the House calls it the Huatulco artifact most likely to be missed, because it's gated behind the box-on-plate door. Center the crate, wait for the door, then sweep the opened room before you push on.
◇ Step-by-step pickup
Pick up the Rubber Ball first, then keep your hook in the same pocket.
The Sun Stone lives in the same middle stretch as the Rubber Ball, which the walkthrough grabs at 3:19. The trap is that the ball feels like the prize for this section, so players bank it and swim on. Don't — the Sun Stone is sitting just past it, only seconds away on the tape.
Find the crate and the matching pressure plate.
This artifact is gated behind a box puzzle, not a clear swim. Locate the loose crate and the red plate it pairs with. Huatulco reuses similar green-stone rooms, so confirm you're looking at the plate this section actually wants before you start shoving the box around.
Center the box fully on the plate.
Push the crate so it covers the plate, not just clips an edge. A box that only touches the plate's rim is the usual reason the door 'won't open' — the puzzle isn't bugged, the weight just isn't fully registered yet. Line it up dead-center and hold position.
Wait for the door, then look into the opened room.
Once the plate is loaded, the door slides and a new pocket opens up. This is the room the Sun Stone is in. Give it a beat — the camera at 3:39 in the walkthrough shows the stone the moment the way clears, so don't retract before the room has actually finished opening.
Sweep the opened room and hook the Sun Stone.
Drop the hook into the freshly opened pocket and touch the artifact-tagged pickup. There's no fight and no scaling — contact banks it. MrLeLedg catches the whole grab between 3:39 and 3:44, which is why this is a five-second window rather than a leisurely search.
Retract and continue to the Shark Tooth bait.
With the stone secured, pull back and push on. The very next thing the walkthrough collects is the Shark Tooth bait at 3:44, so the Sun Stone room is the hinge between the ball and the bait. Your last Huatulco artifact, the Coffee Cup, waits later in the route.
◐ Walkthrough Keyframes
✦ Tips
- Treat the Rubber Ball and the Sun Stone as a pair, not a single stop. They sit seconds apart in the same middle pocket, and banking the ball is exactly the moment people forget the stone is still there.
- Watch the door, not the box. Once the crate is centered the plate does the rest — the tell that you've solved it is the door sliding open, after which the artifact pocket is fully reachable.
- Keep a running 0/4 artifact tally in your head. This is number three; if your count says you only have two banked before the Shark Tooth bait, the Sun Stone is the one you skipped.
⚠ Warnings
- Don't confuse the Sun Stone room with the Rubber Ball pocket and assume one grab cleared both. They're adjacent but separate pickups — this is precisely how the Sun Stone becomes the most-missed Huatulco artifact.
- If the door stays shut, your box is almost certainly half-on the plate. Re-center it so it fully covers the plate rather than nudging an edge, and the door will open.
- The pickup window is roughly five seconds on tape. If you barrel straight toward the Shark Tooth bait at 3:44 without sweeping the opened room first, you blow past the stone entirely.
⌕ Common Questions
I grabbed the Rubber Ball but my Huatulco Secrets stamp still isn't filling — what did I miss?
I pushed the box onto the plate but the door won't open.
Does the Aztec Sun Stone sell for anything?
★ What you get
- Completion
- Counts toward the Huatulco 100% Secrets achievement.
- Endgame impact
- The third of four Huatulco artifacts that, together, complete the Stage 2 Secrets set.
- Sells for
- The Aztec Sun Stone cannot be sold. Artifacts exist for lore and 100% completion only.
✎ What Players Are Asking
Real questions from Steam Community discussions, archived as they appeared.
“Of Huatulco's four artifacts, the Aztec Sun Stone is the one runners miss most — it's tucked behind the box-on-plate door in the middle route, so people grab the Rubber Ball and swim straight on without sweeping the room the box opens.”
Why this matters: Why this matters: it pins down exactly where 100% runs leak in Huatulco. The Sun Stone isn't hard to reach, it's easy to forget, because the box puzzle and the adjacent Rubber Ball both pull attention away from the room the plate actually opens.
⌬ Related Secrets
Why the game called this artifact a Aztec Sun Stone
The Aztec Sun Stone — in Spanish the Piedra del Sol — is a colossal post-classic Mexica monument carved from olivine basalt: about 3.6 m (12 ft) across, roughly 98 cm (39 in) thick, and weighing some 24,590 kg, near 54,210 lb. It was cut between about 1502 and 1520 during the reign of Moctezuma II. Despite its everyday nickname, the 'Aztec calendar,' scholars don't think it ever functioned as a working calendar; it reads instead as a ceremonial monument, very likely a sacrificial altar or basin. Its carving does encode cyclical time and the cosmological world-ages, and the central face is usually identified as the sun deity Tonatiuh ringed by the symbols of the eras that came before. Spanish colonists buried it after the conquest; it was rediscovered on December 17, 1790 in Mexico City's Zócalo and now sits in the National Museum of Anthropology there.