Rubber Ball Artifact — Where It Hides in Huatulco
Huatulco's second artifact — a solid play-ball waiting at the head of the dense middle cleanup chain, picked up just past the west pressure-plate door and the message in a bottle.
▶ TL;DR
The Rubber Ball is the second of Huatulco's four artifacts, and it kicks off the cramped middle route where the collectables bunch up. You reach it after the west pressure-plate door and the Red Switch shortcut, with a message in a bottle floating by at 3:13 right before it. MrLeLedg's 100% walkthrough catches the grab in the chapter 'Artifact (Rubber ball)' at 3:19, a tight twenty-second window. It is collection-only, so the moment your hook touches it the pickup banks toward the Huatulco Secrets stamp. Stay on this descent — the Aztec Sun Stone is the very next artifact, with the Shark Tooth bait close behind.
◇ Step-by-step pickup
Open Huatulco and clear the early section first.
If you are starting fresh, work through the opening pickups and the Quetzalcoatl Statue before chasing the middle chain. The Rubber Ball lives deeper in the route, so there is no point diving for it until the early pressure-plate doors are behind you.
Solve the west pressure plate and take the Red Switch shortcut.
The mid-route pocket opens off the west plate rather than the straight-south one that gated the first artifact. The Red Switch is a shortcut that drops you into this section faster — once it is flipped, you do not have to retrace the whole early puzzle each run.
Pass the message in a bottle at 3:13.
A message in a bottle floats by just before the artifact. It is a separate collectable — grab it if you want the messages stamp, but do not mistake it for the Rubber Ball. The ball is six seconds further along the descent.
Drop into the middle artifact pocket.
This is the cramped section frames 1 and 2 above are showing. The collectables bunch up tightly here, so read the icons carefully — you want the artifact-tagged pickup, not a money chest or the bottle you just passed.
Touch the Rubber Ball with the hook to bank it.
There is no enemy and no scaling minigame. Lower the hook onto the artifact icon and the pickup registers. MrLeLedg catches the grab at 3:19, with the chapter window running to about 3:39 — roughly twenty seconds of footage.
Keep descending — do not retract yet.
The Aztec Sun Stone is the very next artifact in this same chain, at 3:39, with the Shark Tooth bait close behind. Banking the ball and then surfacing wastes the position; ride the descent straight into the Sun Stone instead.
◐ Walkthrough Keyframes
✦ Tips
- Treat the Rubber Ball, Aztec Sun Stone and Shark Tooth bait as one cleanup pass. They sit in a single tight chain on the same descent, so collecting them back-to-back is far faster than three separate dives.
- Use the 3:13 message in a bottle as your range marker. When you see the bottle, the Rubber Ball icon is the next pickup down — that is your cue to slow the hook and aim.
- The pickup window here is short — about twenty seconds in the walkthrough — so know which icon is the artifact before you arrive rather than hunting for it while the hook drifts.
⚠ Warnings
- Don't confuse the message in a bottle at 3:13 with the artifact. They are adjacent in the route but count toward different stamps; the bottle is not the Rubber Ball.
- The middle pocket is cramped and the icons cluster, so it is easy to snag a money chest or the wrong collectable. Confirm the icon is artifact-tagged before you commit the hook.
- Retracting to the surface right after the ball costs you the chain. The Sun Stone is seconds away on the same descent — pull up too early and you will have to re-run the west plate to come back for it.
⌕ Common Questions
I grabbed the message in a bottle but the artifact counter didn't move — where's the Rubber Ball?
Do I have to re-solve the whole puzzle every time I want the middle artifacts?
Is the Rubber Ball worth any money?
★ What you get
- Completion
- Counts toward the Huatulco 100% Secrets achievement.
- Endgame impact
- One of the four Huatulco artifacts that, together, complete the Stage 2 Secrets set.
- Sells for
- The Rubber Ball 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.
“Huatulco's collectables are split across three separate route sections, and the middle one bunches several pickups together — the messages, the Rubber Ball and the Sun Stone all sit close on one descent.”
Why this matters: Why this matters: the middle chain is exactly where players lose track of what they have grabbed. Knowing the Rubber Ball shares a descent with the bottle and the Sun Stone is what stops you from surfacing one artifact short.
⌬ Related Secrets
Why the game called this artifact a Rubber Ball
Of all the Huatulco artifacts, the Rubber Ball might be the most historically apt — rubber was a Mesoamerican invention, and it literally comes from here. It points to the Mesoamerican ballgame, known in Aztec Nahuatl as ōllamaliztli (from ōlli, 'rubber,' plus ōllama, 'to play ball'), played on a court called the tlachtli. People in the region were playing some form of it from at least 1650 BCE. The balls were not inflated; they were solid spheres of natural rubber, made by blending latex tapped from the Castilla elastica tree with juice from morning-glory vines to cure it. The oldest rubber balls known anywhere on Earth come from the El Manatí sacrificial bog, dated to roughly 1700–1600 BC. A typical ball ran about ten to twelve inches across and weighed three to six pounds — heavy enough to bruise badly. The game was far more than sport: it carried deep ritual weight, bound up with warfare, fertility and cosmic struggle, and some matches reportedly ended in human sacrifice. Dropping a plain rubber ball into a drowned Oaxacan ruin is, quietly, one of the truest artifacts in the world.